Obama v. the US intelligence community

President Obama today:

But what's clear is, is that they have not said yes to an agreement that Russia, China, Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States all said was a good deal and that the director of the IAEA said was the right thing to do and that Iran should accept.

That indicates to us that despite their posturing that their nuclear power is only for -- for civilian use, that they in fact continue to pursue a course that would lead to weaponization. And that is not acceptable to the international community, not just to the United States.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee:

“Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that bring it closer to being able to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

Enriching uranium to 20 percent is far from the 97-99 percent enrichment necessary to build nuclear weapons, as the Associated Press conceded when it withdrew an article that conflated Iran's enrichment for medical research with a weapons program. And it's far from clear that enriching uranium to 20 percent, which some experts doubt Iran is even technically capable of doing or sustaining, "would lead to weaponization." In fact, it's so unclear that even the normally reliable U.S. intelligence community -- reliably alarmist, that is -- acknowledges it has no evidence Iran is developing nukes, or whether it will even "eventually decide" to do so. Iran's announcement it plans to increase its uranium enrichment level has no impact on that assessment of its technical capability and political will, or lack thereof, to build nuclear weapons.

But the president and officials in his administration continue to suggest otherwise, exaggerating the claims of their own intelligence officials as they make the case for more economic sanctions against Iran -- sanctions that will inevitably impact poor Iranians more than the elites. If Obama spoke in a faux-Texas drawl, perhaps there would be more outrage about that.

'Murtha's personal efforts on behalf of the Afghan Resistance'

Washington is mourning the passing of Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha today, with everyone from President Obama on down issuing somber remarks praising his long legislative career. Notably, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who in the '80s headed the CIA when the Reagan administration was funneling arms and money to the Afghan mujahideen (folks who later would join the Taliban, and some guy named Osama bin Laden) as they fought the Evil Empire -- the other one -- dedicates much of his statement to praising "Murtha's personal efforts on behalf of the Afghan resistance fighting the Soviets - efforts that helped bring about the end of the Cold War."

And helped bring about 9/11. But it would be uncouth, I understand, to say so at a time like this. And why not take the opportunity of a man's passing to try and further embed a convenient mythical narrative in the national psyche?

The seen and the unseen

The Chamber of Commerce's Mark Espers is bemoaning the fact that some people may get high-quality sports merchandise from unlicensed vendors at a fraction of the inflated prices of official league-sponsored gear.

That those foolish enough to buy sports jerseys can now do so without first taking out a loan is a tragedy, we are told:

NFL licensed merchandise—such as men’s jerseys—can sell for anywhere from $80 on up.  Thus, a price tag of half that much for a seemingly flawless replication seems like a steal for any fan—which is exactly what it is. Each year, as counterfeit vendors make their way to the playoff games to hawk NFL merchandise, the problem of fakes not only gets worse, it gets more sophisticated. Counterfeit jerseys, caps, and other paraphernalia are often mixed in with the real ones, and even the merchant may not know they're selling a fake. A closer look at some merchandise and the subtle discrepancies should become clear: the color is off, the stitching is sloppy, or sometimes players’ names are misspelled.

That counterfeiters are getting "more sophisticated" to the point that even merchant's can't tell the difference suggests they are improving quality. And if the NFL wasn't using the state to forbid any unlicensed dealers from selling clothing with a team's logo, more respectable merchants would be in the business with even better quality control.

Counterfeiting costs U.S. businesses hundreds of millions in lost sales each year.  Indeed, the Customs and Border Protection service last year seized 14,841 shipments of counterfeit goods with a domestic value of $260.7 million---and this is only the stuff they caught!  All of this counterfeiting leads to job losses ranging from the workers who make the products, to those that package, market, distribute, and sell them.  The NFL and its franchises are surely affected as well, especially given the League’s popularity with the American people. 

Counterfeiting may cost jobs for companies involved in selling official merchandise, but there's no evidence it affects overall employment -- to the contrary, more counterfeiters are certainly employed, and somebody is making the t-shirts they sell. And just because less money may be going to rich NFL owners -- royalties making up much of the price of NFL merchandise -- that doesn't mean there's less money in the economy overall. Saving $60 bucks on a Saints jersey means $60 bucks can be spent elsewhere, like on an overpriced beer or hot dog. Indeed, intellectual property boosts the costs of many consumer goods, diverting resources to padding the pockets of already-rich executives that could have been put to more productive uses.

And in today’s Internet era, sales of counterfeit goods are not just happening on street corners, back alley stores, or outside stadiums, it is occurring in increasingly higher numbers online, and in ways that fool consumers into thinking these goods are the real thing.

So counterfeit gear is indistinguishable from its much more expensive competition? Sounds like consumers win. Remember, though, the chamber represents businesses.

Intellectual property theft—through counterfeiting—is NOT a victimless crime. Not only do these crimes eat away at our economy with job losses, but those involved in these crimes are often directly linked to organized crime in one way or another.

Name something a crime and it should come as no surprise that it is criminals that engage in it. Prohibition beget bootleggers, just as intellectual property laws beget "counterfeiters", whose only crime is making affordable merchandise without paying a state-enforced stipend to some already wealthy copyright-holder; that some counterfeiter uses the Miami Dolphins logo does not preclude the creator or "owner" of that design to use it themselves.

And since we're on the subject of organized crime, how again were mobsters pushed out of the booze business? Alcohol was legalized. There's probably a lesson there.

First, the feverish conclusion:

Counterfeiting is a serious global problem that costs tens of thousands of American jobs each year, and eats away at our economic growth and vibrancy.  The only way to fight back is through stringent enforcement and consumer awareness.  So as we watch the game on Sunday, there will be a lot of activity going on behind the scenes that you’ll never see on instant replay. The cracking down on counterfeiting is just one step in stopping this illegal activity. Increased vigilance from law enforcement all the way to Congress and the White House is needed if we are to deal a serious blow to this detriment to our economy. And lastly, if you’re at the game this weekend or online in the coming weeks, and the price of that NFL cap or jersey seems too good to be true, it’s probably a fake; please don’t buy it, somebody’s job may depend on it.

Intellectual property laws safeguard our nation's "vibrancy"? Tell that to any hip-hop artist trying to clear a sample, or someone trying to use an NFL logo in a way that may not appeal to the near-dead white dudes that make up the league's leadership.

For those that don't speak chamber, Esper's basically saying: keep doing the same thing, U.S. government -- blustery rhetoric coupled with heavy-handed enforcement -- just do it harder. And you, Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, forgo that good deal and additional cash you could have spent (or saved? Nah, this is America) elsewhere, and give more of your money to the filthy rich members of the Chamber of Commerce. Or a puppy gets it.

Journalism, as practiced on Meet The Press

This past week Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair confirmed that the Obama administration is targeting U.S. citizens for assassination abroad, assuming the right to execute an American in a foreign country without giving him or her so much as a military tribunal. Mr. Blair also upheld the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, reaffirming that the U.S. intelligence community has no evidence Iran's leaders have made the decision to build nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, increasingly less covert but still officially denied U.S. wars continued to expand, with three American soldiers killed in northwest Pakistan.

With that in mind, here is the entirety of David Gregory's questions for Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan on today's Meet the Press:

MR. GREGORY: We're up against a very difficult threat, as was underlined during testimony in front of the Intelligence Committee this week. This is a portion of that question.

[(Videotape, February 2, 2010)

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CA): What is the likelihood of another terrorist attempted attack on the U.S. homeland in the next three to six months, high or low? Director Blair:

MR. DENNIS BLAIR: An attempted attack, the priority is certain, I would say.]

MR. GREGORY: First off, what can you say about the intelligence that's behind such a specific warning like that?

MR. GREGORY: And how do you win against a threat like this, when CIA Director Panetta was saying that al-Qaeda is adapting its methods in ways that are oftentimes very difficult to detect?

MR. GREGORY: Any credible threats against the Super Bowl today?

MR. GREGORY: What, what kinds of attacks is al-Qaeda now interested in pulling off?

MR. GREGORY: How worried are you about sleeper cells in the United States trying to pull off lower level, you know, what in the terrorist world they may call a single rather than a home run, whether it's attacking a shopping mall or this kind of attack?

Gregory then presumably broke for a word from NBC's sponsors: Depends and Lockheed-Martin.

The bipartisan attachment to flag lapel pins

Christian fundamentalist support for the modern nation-state of Israel is kinda funny: on the one hand, fundamentalists are some of the most fervent defenders of Israel's "right to exist" (and right to occasionally bomb and invade its neighbors), while on the other, most of them believe all of Israel's inhabitants will ultimately need to die or convert to Christianity before the righteous few can experience the glorious second coming of Jesus Christ, our lord and savior, hallelujah, amen. There's a bit of a tension there.

Be that as it may, that religiously derived support carries merrily on today, with Sarah Palin -- whose name I promise to do my best never to type again -- opportunistically proclaiming her devotion to Israel in her remarks at the Tea Party convention. Commenting on her speech, Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes that despite appearing at a hyper-nationalist right-wing event, there has been no conservative outcry over Palin donning a flag lapel pin of another country, Israel, during her speech. As Greenwald writes:

Is there any other nation in the world where a leading politician can appear in public -- without controversy -- wearing the flag of a foreign country? It was a huge scandal on the Right when immigration reform marchers waved Mexican (along with American) flags in order to display cultural solidarity with Mexican immigrants who were being demonized and living in wretched conditions, as non-persons, in the U.S.; isn't it obviously more significant when someone who recently wanted to be Vice President and is now the leader of this Fox-News-sponsored political movement appears at events in the U.S. wearing an Israeli flag melded to an American flag, as though the two nations are joined as one entity? Why should an American political leader be wearing an Israeli flag?

Sarah Palin of course isn't the first U.S. politician to proudly boast of her support for Israel by way of tacky patriotic accessories. Nevada Democrat Shelley Berkley wore an Israeli/US flag lapel pin just off the floor of the House of Representatives during a 2007 interview with me regarding, coincidentally, the role of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in defeating a measure that would have declared Congress' opposition to a war with Iran:

At the time, AIPAC lobbied heavily against one provision initially included in the Democratic war funding bill that would have barred the president from launching an attack on Iran without the explicit consent of Congress. Asked why the measure was removed, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) told one of my colleagues at the time that "our friends at AIPAC" had bombarded members of Congress with phone calls expressing opposition to measure. That opposition was due to the belief, as Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) told the Associated Press, that the measure "would take away perhaps the most important negotiating tool that the U.S. has when it comes to Iran."

Interestingly, when I interviewed Berkley about the measure a few days later, she downplayed AIPAC's role in getting it removed, claiming to me that the group only instructed its members to lobby against the provision after the Democratic leadership had already removed it. Sensing that the move was generally unpopular with the Democratic base, she repeatedly tried to shift the conversation to the failures of the Bush administration, rather than her support for an aggressive stance toward Iran. Of course, her claim that AIPAC played no role in getting the Iran provision removed was cast in doubt not only by Cuellar's comments (an accout others, such as Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA), confirmed to me), but by the fact that Berkley was wearing an Israeli/U.S. flag lapel pin at the time of the interview (she will also be "making the case for Israel" at this week's AIPAC convention).

Stephen Walt sure is looking crazier every day, isn't he?

'Homicide bombers' and Sarah Palin

In her big speech at the media-saturated convention that purportedly represents the "Tea Party" movement, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin riffed on the meaning of words and the political manipulation of language, ridiculing the Obama administration for reportedly favoring the term "overseas contingency operation" to describe U.S. imperial adventures in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, over the more viscerally appealing "war".

"We can't spin our way out of this threat," she told the cheering crowd in Nashville, Tennessee. This being Sarah Palin, though, the observation that politicians manipulate language was of course immediately followed by spin and a garbled manipulation of the English language. "It's one thing to call a pay raise a job created or saved, it's quite another to call it a devastation that a homicide bomber can inflict a man-made disaster."

Putting aside the silly attack on a straw man, a "homicide bomber", for those not familiar with Fox News' reporting on the Mid-East, is the term favored by neoconservatives and popularized by the Bush administration for what the rest of us know as "suicide bombers" -- the latter a term the armchair marines at places like Commentary and The New Republic believe is far too forgiving, "bomber" not being sufficient enough to signal that they are the baddie, and "suicide" perhaps prompting too much empathy toward the terrorist as a misunderstood loner. But while useful for propagandists, "homicide bomber" actually conveys less information than the term its intended to replace; a news report that declares "Homicide bomber kills 10", for instance, would not impart the all-important information of whether the bomber died too.

But if we're trying to best express impotent but righteous moral and patriotic certitude in our stories and bravely worded blog posts, why even keep the word "bomber"? To say someone has bombed something is a value-neutral statement, after all -- it could be referring to a good bombing, like Hiroshima or Nagasaki, just as much as a bad one, like that Nigerian underwear guy -- leaving some news consumers confused as to where their sympathies should lie. That being the case, I, for one, propose that we call all those who blow themselves on the behalf of some group other than the U.S. military homicide murderers, just to emphasize that in this instance we mean to say killing is bad. "Breaking: Homicide Murderer Strikes Baghdad Market" leaves little doubt we're talking about some faceless foreigner perpetrating a heinous crime, not one of our boys or girls.

Moving along, the "Palin plan" for winning the war on terror:

"And when it comes to national security, as I ratchet down the message on national security, it's easy to just kind of sum it up by repeating Ronald Reagan when he talked about the Cold War. And we can apply this now to our war on terrorism. You know, bottom line, we win, they lose. We do all that we can to win."

To recap: the secret to winning the war on terror is doing all that we can to win. Now you know. Go out there and be a winner!

Snowed in

Zombie Reagan rises to fight the Democrats

If the following ad is to be believed, Danny Tarkanian, the Republican running against Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid, is summoning the corpse of conservative icon and former president Ronald Reagan so the latter can finish his ominously named "last campaign": the slaying of timid Senate Democrats. Does it work as an ad? I don't know. But there's no question it could make for quite possibly the best slasher horror film ever.

"Everybody run, Zombie Reagan's threatening to filibuster -- with chainsaws!"

Is Obama really eliminating fossil fuel subsidies?

The short answer: no, hell no, as I describe in a recent piece for my day job (expensive subscription required):

White House officials are claiming the Obama administration’s proposed 2011 budget eliminates subsidies for fossil fuels, saving taxpayers $40 billion over the next decade. But that projected savings is dwarfed by the amount the U.S. government spends protecting oil supplies and trade routes in the Persian Gulf, an estimated $27 billion-$138 billion annual subsidy to the oil industry that experts say increases global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

At the same time, the Obama administration is proposing more than $1 billion in new funding for fossil fuel research and development, including $668 million for the Department of Energy’s “Clean Coal Power Initiative,” which aims to develop and commercialize new environmental technologies for the coal industry—suggesting what constitutes a fossil fuel “subsidy” is more a political decision than a policy one.

The Washington Times: Fox News, if Fox News viewers could read

In my last post, I criticized The Washington Times' Eli Lake for what I alleged was inaccurate reporting, as a piece he wrote claimed that U.S. intelligence agencies were now claiming that Iran never halted work on its nuclear program in 2003, contrary to the official view conveyed in the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. Notably, Lake then wrote:

Differences among analysts now focus on whether the country's supreme leader has given or will soon give orders for full-scale production of nuclear weapons.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, on the other hand, delivering the 2010 Annual Threat Estimate to the Senate Intelligence Committee -- and representing the consensus view of all 16 intelligence agencies -- states: "We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons." That is, the differences among intelligence analysts don't focus on whether Iran's supreme leader "has given or will soon give orders for full-scale production of nuclear weapons," the debate remains whether Iran would ever decide to do so -- in violation of Ayatollah Khomeini's own fatwa against nukes; the debate is not over when Iran will begin building nukes, but if.

That isn't a contradiction to Lake, though. Responding to my post on Twitter, he wrote that "the threats testimony is not an NIE. And it is consistent with my earlier and newsweek's earlier scoop. #nicetry". While correct that the testimony is not an NIE, it's a rather pedantic point as there's zero chance the official intelligence estimate on Iran is going to directly contradict the testimony in the threat assessment delivered by the very same man. As to the glaring contradiction between his piece and the official view of the intelligence community, as stated by Dennis Blair, Lake declared "it's not a contradiction", which is, well, confounding.

Until you realize Lake's done this before, as in a ludicrous 2007 article he wrote for the now-defunct neconservative rag The New York Sun, "Iran Is Found To Be a Lair of Al Qaeda." As the Cato Institute's Justin Logan writes:

In that story, Lake published a claim purportedly leaked to him that the National Intelligence Estimate judged that one of two senior al Qaeda leadership councils “meets regularly in eastern Iran.” Lake wrote that “there is little disagreement that a branch of al Qaeda's leadership operates in Iran, [but] the intelligence community diverges on the extent to which the hosting of the senior leaders represents a policy of the regime in Tehran or the rogue actions of Iran’s Quds Force, the terrorist support units that report directly to Iran’s supreme leader.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Lake, the story was tersely refuted later that day by the National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats, Edward Gistaro. Asked at a National Press Club briefing whether the judgment Lake described was in the final draft report, Gistaro replied “No, it is not. I don’t think it was ever in the draft…. I read [the Sun article] this morning, and I thought, ‘I don’t know where this comes from.’” The transcript of the conference describes “laughter” in the briefing room after this revelation.

Seeing a pattern?

New Intel. report says Iran not develoing nukes

Just last week President Obama in his State of the Union claimed Iran was, along with North Korea, “violating international agreements in pursuit of nuclear weapons. . . . That's why the international community is more united, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is more isolated. And as Iran's leaders continue to ignore their obligations, there should be no doubt: They, too, will face growing consequences. That is a promise.”

In the the 2010 National Intelligence Estimate Annual Threat Assessment (pdf) -- representing the consensus view of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies -- Obama’s director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, calls him a liar. In a filing with the Senate Intelligence Committee, Blair declares that “Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that bring it closer to being able to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.”

In other words, the U.S. intelligence community, which has every incentive to play up the threat of a foreign enemy, is declaring it has no solid evidence Iran is actively building nuclear weapons, contrary to numerous statements from Obama, his secretary of state, his UN ambassador and his press secretary. Politicians distorting intelligence to suit their political needs, dear liberals, is not a partisan affair.

The actual text of the NIE also rather starkly contrasts with a “scoop” reported by the Washington Times’ Eli Lake two weeks ago:

U.S. intelligence agencies now suspect that Iran never halted work on its nuclear arms program in 2003, as stated in a national intelligence estimate made public three years ago, U.S. officials said.

Differences among analysts now focus on whether the country's supreme leader has given or will soon give orders for full-scale production of nuclear weapons.

I eagerly await the correction.

Lake's last big story? The purported “outing” a few months back of the strangely still a free man Trita Parsi, head of the National-Iranian American Council, as a foreign agent working for Tehran. With that record of reporting false but ideologically convenient fairy tales, you can see why Lake is one of the few reporters the Rev. Sun Myung Moon has decided to keep around.

Spencer Ackerman, meanwhile, a liberal reporter/blogger/punk rocker for The Washington Independent, has yet to retract comments he made last month praising Lake for supposedly knowing that the intelligence community's original claim Iran had halted development of a nuclear weapon seven years ago, contained in the 2007 NIE, "was bullshit from the beginning" and would soon be formally overturned. Remember, though, that Ackerman is the same reporter who backed the Iraq war as writer for The New Republic, once credulously wrote of "Obama's focus on progressive goals for the Middle East" -- such as preventing Iran from getting nukes (and expanding the war on terror to Yemen, presumably) -- and claimed his national security team represented an "emerging progressive foreign policy consensus", so we should probably cut him some slack. When it comes to analysis, however, he should probably stick to Fugazi.

(H/T Steve Hynd)

The making of a talking point

President Obama -- speaking to you, John Q. Public, live on YouTube this week -- made a curious claim:

I think it's important to understand that we are at war against a very specific group -- al Qaeda and its extremist allies that have metastasized around the globe, that would attack us, attack our allies, attack bases and embassies around the world, and most sadly, attack innocent people regardless of their backgrounds, regardless of their religions. Al Qaeda is probably the biggest killer of innocent Muslims of any entity out there.

A week ago White House adviser Valerie Jarrett likewise told NBC's David Gregory that al Qaeda had "killed more Muslims than any other group" in the Middle East. It's important to understand, though, that the claim -- self-righteous and politically advantageous though it may be -- simply isn't true, as no terrorist can match the civilian killing power of a powerful state, much less the most well-armed and expansive empire in history. The U.S.-led embargo of Iraq during the 1990s alone killed several hundred thousand Muslims in Iraq, many of them children; the subsequent U.S. invasion in 2003 killed another couple hundred thousand -- perhaps a million -- more.

Al Qaeda would die for those numbers.

War is the force that gives them meaning

Ever since the first war there have probably been people like Fred and Kimberly Kagan, two of the staunchest advocates of imperial slaughter, diligently carving out on stone tablets all the noble reasons why Dear Leader needed to wipe out the Canaanites. So long as people continue to view power with awe and respect instead of disdain and disgust, there will always be a class of professional worshippers eagerly expounding on the virtues of state-sponsored mass killing, from the supposed links between a strong army and a superior culture -- Sparta of course fondly remembered for its wealth of philosophers and poets -- to the effectiveness of war as a promoter of peace (an argument most recently made by President Obama's Nobel speech writers). And those that join this class, however, are invariably creepy and banal, not exactly a winning combination.

A profile of the Kagans in Newsweek illustrates this point, showing our modern courtiers to be the, well, pathetic creatures that you already suspected they were:

The wonkish, heavy-set Frederick, who grew up reenacting battles with cardboard cutouts, earned a doctorate at Yale in Russian and Soviet military history, then spent 10 years at West Point teaching about wars. Along the way, he married Kimberly Kessler, a fellow Yalie with interests almost eerily like his. (She now heads a small Washington think tank called the Institute for the Study of War.) From the outset, Frederick Kagan, who'd long been dubious about the kind of high-tech warfare Rumsfeld championed, also felt the war in Iraq had been mismanaged, and, with the help of retired Gen. Jack Keane, convinced Bush this was so. Enter the surge. One of those most impressed was Gen. David Petraeus, now head of Central Command. Petraeus (the recipient of the 2010 Irving Kristol Award, who will deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI in May) calls Fred Kagan "brilliant," "exceedingly hardworking," and "a true student of history."

At his invitation, Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, an odd sight in flak jackets, have taken seven inspection tours of Iraq since April 2007. "They don't have kids, so this is their child," Petraeus said in a phone interview. Twice last year they went to Afghanistan, the second time as one sixth of a 12-member civilian team advising Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The group's findings buttressed McChrystal's request for 40,000 additional troops.

Possessing neither the physical ability nor courage to fight in the wars they attempt to provide intellectual justification for, and having few interests outside scholarship in the field of mass death and destruction, the Kagans live vicariously through armed conflict and the killing of others by others. Their personal lives so obviously lacking, they find meaning through murder. Say what you will about it, but war is not something that can't simply be ignored; it's something destined for the history books, and it may be many things but dull isn't one of them (the popular cultures of countries that perpetuate war -- *cough* Jersey Shore -- on the other hand . . .). Boring people who find peacetime unfulfilling, then, are attracted to the excitement and purpose they perceive as the prime qualities of war.

As former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges has written:

"The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in live. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble."

There's no reason to doubt that the Kagans view themselves as quite noble. But instead of fetishizing war and fucking over a bunch of poor foreigners to find meaning in life, couldn't the Kagans just go fuck themselves?

(via Michael Brendan Dougherty)

'Everyone votes for a dictator'

Patrick McGoohan takes on the electoral system:

An indictment of the liberal/conservative movement

Michael Brendan Dougherty, an editor with The American Conservative -- perhaps the only remaining publication on the right that happens to be interesting -- has penned a deservedly scathing letter to the conservative movement. An excerpt:

You may not know this. But all the smartest people on the Right are basically ashamed to be associated with you. Your “success” in building a set of near-permanent institutions, think-tanks, and magazines to promote your ideals in an uncontaminated environment leaves us with two choices:

1) Sell out to the movement. That is, we may occupy ourselves by explaining that whatever the GOP is promoting—whether it be torture, pre-emptive war, Mutually Assured Destruction, or supply-side economics—is an enduring Western value. If John Boehner is doing it, we're supposed to figure out why Edmund Burke would support it.

Or:

2) Sell out the movement. That is, pitch our articles to liberal audiences. Trash the movement (like I’m doing), and trade our actual conservative convictions for the ephemeral respect of our peers.

If one of us tries to walk a fine line between these two, we’ll be accused of either disloyalty by the hacks or of hackery by the principled and aloof. One way merits a secure gig in the movement's intellectual ghetto. The other may win a few of us a higher status but a more insecure job at a respected outlet.

This situation makes actual arguments difficult, since everyone assumes we are simply enacting long-term branding strategies, rather than stating our views honestly. You’ve made it impossible for us to have a conversation.

Because you’ve made yourself a prostitute for the GOP, a cynical and corrupt organization since Reconstruction, all of your young geniuses are tainted. People don’t respect their ideas, because they can’t assume they are genuinely held, rather than cynical ploys to keep Joe Palinsupporter in line.

And so, young conservatives hate themselves. They live in fear that if they do state their actual views, they’ll be forbidden from any meaningful work in the future outside the movement.

Notable is that Dougherty, a committed right-winger, could have written much the same if he were seeking to author an indictment of liberalism in the age of Obama, what with the serious, respectable types like Kevin Drum bemoaning anyone to the left of Genghis Khan who dares question Democratic orthodoxy -- and war-making -- when it's Nancy Pelosi and the Blue Team in power. Meek criticism of tactics and strategy, perhaps, but a comprehensive indictment of the Democratic Party? Good luck making a living writing for Counterpunch, asshole.

Whether one identifies politically as left or right -- whatever those terms mean when the embrace of the corporate warfare state is a fully bipartisan endeavor -- "the movement" always takes precedence over the principles that at one time or another animated it, as the likes of David Sirota and Jane Hamsher are no doubt learning. Power corrupts, and party politics corrupt absolutely.

We're number one (at killing Muslims)!

It just wouldn’t be Sunday if NBC’s Meet the Press wasn’t being used by some senior government official to make outrageously false but politically advantageous claims -- after all, as folks like former Vice President Dick Cheney realized, it does make an ideal platform for disseminating disinformation. As surprising as the sun rising in the East, host David Gregory this week continued the program’s longstanding role as a megaphone for power, permitting White House adviser Valerie Jarrett to make unchallenged this claim in response to a question regarding the release of a new purported recording from Osama bin Laden:

We have no independent confirmation that that is, in fact, his voice. But let's look at--the fact of the matter is, is that he's a murderer, he has attacked Americans. In fact, he's killed more Muslims than any other group in the region. And so the president is committed to going after al-Qaeda and all of their affiliates and bringing them to justice.

While that statement might work on the gut level (it just feels right, doesn't it?) and thus fly in the world of politics -- David Gregory sure as hell didn’t challenge it -- it is demonstrably, laughably (in a morbid sense) untrue. The group that has killed more Muslims in the Middle East than any other group in the region is, indisputably, the United States military; over the last few decades alone it has killed well over a quarter million Muslims. Indeed, as Stephen Walt pointed out last year at his Foreign Policy blog in response to a particularly inane Tom Friedman column, the most conservative estimate has the U.S. government killing 288,000 Muslims since 1983 -- a number that that's less than half some estimates of preventable deaths caused by U.S. sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s.

Still, assuming the most conservative estimate is true, “the United States has killed nearly 30 Muslims for every American” killed both by terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, says Walt. “The real ratio is probably much higher, and a reasonable upper bound for Muslim fatalities (based mostly on higher estimates of ‘excess deaths’ in Iraq due to the sanctions regime and the post-2003 occupation) is well over one million, equivalent to over 100 Muslim fatalities for every American lost.”

Even if one were to accept a broad, expansive definition of “al Qaeda,” comprising all the organizations from Somalia to Yemen that claim some sort of affiliation with or affinity for bin Laden, the group he heads -- assuming he’s still alive -- has killed at most perhaps 1/100th the Muslims the U.S. government has, which I guess says something for American productivity, if not morality. Bastards, no doubt, al Qaeda's killing power nevertheless still not approach the awe (and shock)-inspiring might of cluster bombs, Predator drones and half-trillion defense budgets.

When al Qaeda kills Muslims, though, they at least acknowledge it.

The opportunity cost of elections

During the 2008 campaign, tens of thousands of people turned out to volunteer on behalf of Barack Obama, staffing phone banks, raising funds and creating a network of likeminded individuals dedicated to a shared purpose (to a lesser extent, so did volunteers, as there were, for John McCain). But while a bedazzling amount of human and financial resources were displayed, no doubt, it’s not clear they were put to the best use, to put it mildly. Take your self-styled progressive who -- for whatever inexplicable reason -- thought the election of Obama would mark the advent of a brave new single-payer nation, the president abandoning his traditional role as commander in chief in favor of performing gay marriages in the White House Rose Garden. The fear -- and love -- of Sarah Palin can make people do all sorts of crazy things.

But what if those resources, instead of being dedicated to bringing one of two militaristic corporatists to power, were instead put to a better cause? What if, instead of relying on politicians as the middlemen, those who put so much time and effort in getting Obama elected in the hopes of achieving meaningful health care reform -- relying on politicians as the middle men, hoping they keep their lofty campaign promises -- had redirected those efforts to taking power into their own hands and bring affordable health care to their own communities? Given comparable resources to those put toward a frivolous and overhyped pursuit like an election, community groups could have instead begun the process of bringing affordable health care to their own neighborhoods, redirecting the misallocation of energy from empowering some politician toward a cause much more likely to bring tangible results.

What in economics is called an “opportunity cost” -- the inability to expend resources on one task after another is chosen -- is equally applicable to the field of politics: when activists band together on behalf of electing more and better politicians, they aren’t banding together to improve their own communities, clean up their own rivers, stop the next war. While one would hope connections made during election campaigns would persist afterwards, and that those involved in electing Obama would continue to work towards shared (though better) causes, the evidence suggests that a year after his inauguration much of that movement, insofar as it was, has disbanded. With the reality of power, much of the hopeful idealism -- or naivete -- of some during the campaign has evaporated; the organizing power of the Obama political machine severely hampered by the lack of enthusiasm for the president’s policies. With the collapse in peoples’ hope for change comes a commensurate curbing in the power of the groups that arose to support Obama, indicating that organizing power won't be around to help a neighbor during hard times.

My advice: next time around, instead of phone-banking for Obama, one should spend that time that would have spent trying to convince some Iowan the president really means it this time giving back to your own community -- you might actually see a few changes.

Dead foreigners: the price of healthcare reform?

To qualify as a respectable liberal, one must of course value the life of an American citizen over that of any foreigner. Oh, there’s the necessary uplifting rhetoric about promoting democracy and human rights abroad, the passionate arguments on behalf of the poor citizens of countries that inexplicably align with U.S. foreign policy objectives. But when it comes down to it, any good liberal will gladly take the technocratic thrill of a modest reduction in healthcare costs over the life of some poor bastard in Afghanistan.

Sound too harsh? Then perhaps you haven’t been reading Kevin Drum, a pundit who rose to fame as a liberal supporter of the Iraq war, demonstrating a reputation for foresight that has been impressing the blogosphere for years and landed him a gig with Mother Jones. In a recent post, he chides those perpetual adolescents that judge politicians by their policies, not their parties, and who fail to understand that we're all better off with a liberal committing war crimes than Sarah Palin. While noting -- correctly -- that those who supported Obama and honestly thought he would bring about fundamental change in policy only saw in the man what they wanted to see, Drum is concerned some of them have opened their eyes and might be feeling the temptation to leave Team Blue:

The striking thing to me, though, is how fast the left has turned on him. Conservatives gave Bush five or six years before they really turned on him, and even then they revolted more against the Republican establishment than against Bush himself. But the left? It took about ten months. And the depth of the revolt against Obama has been striking too. As near as I can tell, there's a small but significant minority who are so enraged that they'd be perfectly happy to see his presidency destroyed as a kind of warning to future Democrats. It's extraordinarily self-destructive behavior — and typically liberal, unfortunately. Just ask LBJ, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. And then ask them whether liberal revolt, in the end, strengthened liberalism or conservatism.

The striking thing to me is that Drum finds this opposition to Obama to be a bad thing, as if blind conservative support for Bush were something to admire and replicate, not something to abhor and repudiate. There is also some irony in his bemoaning the “liberal revolt” to LBJ on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, though it does clearly demonstrate the respectable liberal’s tolerance for mass murder -- hundreds of thousands of dead Vietnamese a necessary price for the Great Society back home; opposition to the purveyor of violence an act of myopic betrayal. In typical liberal fashion, though, Drum has plenty of rhetoric, in this case, “all sorts of complaints about Obama”:

He's been weaker on civil liberties than I'd like. His approach to bank regulation has been far too friendly to financial interests. I'm not thrilled with his escalation in Afghanistan. He hasn't moved as quickly on gay rights as I hoped. And he hasn't used the bully pulpit nearly as effectively as I think he's capable of. He could afford to attack obstructionism and conservative retrenchment far more directly than he has.

But that’s no reason “to turn on him,” opposition to the perpetuation of longstanding government policies reduced to a matter of personal support for some guy with a photogenic family. We must remember that the “national security community has tremendous influence; the financial lobby has a stranglehold; Obama told us explicitly during the campaign that he planned to escalate in Afghanistan”.

What our Exhibit A inadvertently illustrates, though, is that he too is one of those naive suckers who thought candidate Obama was the second coming (of Jesus or FDR, depending on one’s upbringing). The idea that Obama is in any way boxed in politically by Wall Street and the military-industrial complex implies a belief that his personal preference would be to oppose these interests’ agendas rather than promote them, which is not all that different from believing one of Santa’s elves shot JFK. Obama has show no inclination to impose those interests, with his actions -- and the tremendous amount the financial industry spent getting him elected -- in fact indicating quite the opposite.

However, despite failing to fulfill some of the lofty expectation of him, a corporatist healthcare reform bill, “the greatest piece of social legislation since Medicare” to the true believers, is reason enough to support the president, particularly if your career rests on steadfastly supporting the Democratic Party -- sometimes begrudgingly, sometimes with qualms, but always in the end. And hell, Obama told us he was going to needlessly kill a bunch of foreigners before he was elected, so can you really complain -- and aren't a few thousand dead people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia worth the extension of a few lives here at home (assuming the "reform" bill is implemented as its advocates presume)? This is what passes for respectable liberalism today; indeed, The Nation is running a perhaps even more offensively silly piece on how Obama is "stunningly similar" to MLK, by necessity refraining from comment on King's uncompromising (and inconvenient) call for an immediate end to the Vietnam war.

To the deans of the establishment left, the victims of U.S. wars and manless air strikes do not elicit the same sympathy they did for King, or for others with functioning consciences. Obama's escalation of the Afghanistan war, for instance, might be unfortunate, boneheaded even, but it's just another policy, and in Washington its impolite to allow a policy disagreement to get between friends -- and one typically doesn't call a friend a murderer. Something might appear morally wrong with accepting the escalated killing of poor people abroad in exchange for a hike in the minimum wage and a president who can articulate a coherent thought from time to time, but that's an opinion likely to confine one to the fringes of the political wilderness if expressed in polite company.

Intelligence-resistant columnists

Like most Americans, David Brooks has probably spent all of five minutes in the last decade thinking about Haiti. But like any good imperialist or New York Times columnist -- apologies if I repeat myself -- Brooks is not about to let his ignorance of the country and its people prevent him from drafting a sweeping assessment of Haitian society and the root cause of the nation’s crushing poverty and the widespread devastation wrought by the recent earthquake: Haitian society, of course. Being no Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin, but rather a respectable conservative who no doubt dutifully sends money to his local NPR affiliate come pledge week, Brooks is careful to assure his readers, by way of the obligatory referencing of some other banal establishment political thinker, that he is safely within the mainstream -- he’s just pointing out an uncomfortable truth, is all. While we’re “supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures,” Brooks writes -- and anyone who has ever heard variations of those words from a drunk bar stool pundit can predict what comes next -- some cultures are just “more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.”

Space constraints preventing any discussion of the redeeming values of the Haitian people, Brooks reduces their culture to four attributes he believes caused the Earth’s tectonic plates to shift: “the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile”; “high levels of social mistrust”; “Responsibility is often not internalized”; and “Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.”

Gliding past Haiti’s history of colonialism, economic exploitation and U.S. military occupation with the glib observation that other nations with superficially similar histories are doing okay today, Brooks concludes that it is the culture of Haiti at fault for what may be as many as 100,000 deaths. Since they have shown themselves incapable of improving their lot during the 3 1/2 minutes the U.S. has respected Haiti’s sovereignty in the last 100 years, it is now time to take up the white man’s burden “promote locally led paternalism,” he says, noting “the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism”, which apparently involves repeating corporate P.R. jargon until it means something:

It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.

Unbeknownst to the bespectacled armchair bombardier of the Times U.S. officials have already tried “intrusive paternalism” in Haiti -- during the two decades the U.S. occupied the country, an historical episode that, like U.S. support for the dictators who followed, Brooks never gets to mentioning. But as historian Hans Schmidt writes in his account of the 1915-1934 U.S. occupation of Haiti, undertaken to protect U.S. corporate interests by President Woodrow “sovereignty for white people” Wilson, American military officers themselves instituted a work program intended to goad the lazy, shiftless Haitian people into productivity. “This system, known as corvée, had its historical roots in the unpaid labor which French peasants owed their feudal lords and was strikingly similar to the corvée employed by the British occupation to dredge canals in Egypt in the 1880s and 1890s,” Schmidt notes. Those less prone to nuance might also refer to the system as slavery.

Besides violating the most basic human rights of those it was imposed upon, the system did achieve some successes, including “the construction of an impressive network of roads connecting major towns, with the greatest achievement being a 170-mile unpaved highway between Port-au-Prince and the northern center of Cap Haitien.” And indeed, the program was rigorous, with Admiral H. S. Knapp reporting to his higher-ups back in Washington that it “appears to be undeniable” that Haitians had been forced to work far from their homes and under armed guard, “marched to and from their work bound together.” Foreshadowing Brooks’ suggestion, the system also employed the talents of self-confident local leaders, who headed up some of the corvée labor groups and were known for having “practiced brutality on their charges,” which I guess shows the natives of Haiti are capable of quickly learning from their American betters. I’m guessing this probably isn’t the exact system our newly minted Haitian expert has in mind, though, but perhaps that’s only because he’s not aware of it.

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Other things Brooks neglects to mention in his column:

-- Hurricane Katrina, the fact that funding for New Orleans' levies were diverted to pay for occupying Iraq, and what that says about American society

-- The moral and philosophical case for why the very countries that have exploited and brutalized Haiti in the past should be empowered to fundamentally alter its society.

-- And why in particular a country like the U.S. that was the last of the major powers to renounce the notion that a man can own another man -- and which one angry Frenchman observed is a historical peculiarity for passing from barbarism to decadence without ever once knowing civilization -- is entitled to lecture anyone on culture.

From Heritage's lips to Obama's ear

The Heritage Foundation yesterday:

The U.S. government response should be bold and decisive. It must mobilize U.S. civilian and military capabilities for short-term rescue and relief and long-term recovery and reform. President Obama should tap high-level, bipartisan leadership. Clearly former President Clinton, who was already named as the U.N. envoy on Haiti, is a logical choice. President Obama should also reach out to a senior Republican figure, perhaps former President George W. Bush, to lead the bipartisan effort for the Republicans.

The news today:

President Obama has tapped George W. Bush, a prime target of Democratic criticism during the presidential campaign for his response to Hurricane Katrina, to help lead Haiti relief efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated the country two days ago.

Bush will join up with former President Bill Clinton, who is also the United Nations special envoy for Haiti.