Politics in the animal world.

It's pretty rare, but a couple of times between any two blue moons the little white cat will make a noise. I could probably accurately call it a moan - it's a vowelish sound coming from somewhere in his chest - but I'm afraid that doesn't quite get across how unearthly it is. It carries through every room in the house, and it sounds like pain. What it means, though, is that there's another cat in the backyard.

Little white cat and little multicolored cat have a screened-in porch where they can loiter and breathe unprocessed air, but that's as close as they ever get to come to the world of ticks, fleas, and fast-moving cars. Still, it seems to be a feline assumption that anything they see they control, and so whenever some neighbor's cat comes idling in from the front yard to scale a fence in the back, it is a transgression. It is an act of unbearable provocation.

And, honestly, I can't object to that; I'd be kind of annoyed if people started using my yard as a thoroughfare, after all. The problem that little white cat's wailing signifies - the reason we all come running when we hear it - isn't ideological. It's that, after a few seconds pass without real satisfaction of the claw and tooth school coming to him, he just lurches around and starts tearing the hell out of little multicolored cat. He can't distinguish who's intruding in his space from the one with whom he has to live, and if human beings don't jump in to break them up quickly then suddenly there's a land war eight inches off the ground in the living room.

There was a while there when I honestly think that neighbor's cat just came to watch the show.

I mention all that because the noise in the Middle East is pushing it back into the forefront of my mind.

Israel stepped up its confrontation on Wednesday with Palestinian militants over the capture of an Israeli soldier, battering northern Gazan towns with artillery and sending warplanes over the house of the Syrian president, who is influential with the Palestinian leader believed to have ordered the kidnapping.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah early on Thursday, Israeli forces detained 8 ministers of the 24-member Hamas-led cabinet and 20 lawmakers, including Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaer and Labor Minister Mohammed Barghouti, The Associated Press reported, citing security officials.

The crisis seemed to be tipping toward escalation as Israeli tanks hunkered down inside southern Gaza at the airport on Wednesday after warplanes had knocked out half of Gaza's electricity and pounded sonic booms over houses.

. . .

On Thursday, an Israeli warplane fired a missile in Gaza City that an Israel spokeswoman said hit a soccer field near the pro-Hamas Islamic University. Reuters reported that the missile hit inside the university.

. . .

The choice, Israeli officials said, was the soldier's unconditional release or an escalation that could widen the conflict regionally: Haim Ramon, Israel's justice minister, raised the possibility of a strike in Syria to kill Khaled Meshal, the exiled political leader of Hamas; the men who hold the Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19, are believed to be following his orders.

"We won't hesitate to carry out extreme action to bring Gilad back to his family," Mr. Olmert said of the soldier, who was captured Sunday in an attack near Gaza led by Hamas.

From the New York Times.

I don't know if you've seen pictures of Corporal Shalit; he looks like he should be in high school, and there's no way to reconcile that happily with the position he's in. The Israelis didn't start this fight, and I'd say they're entitled to all kinds of radical action to get this kid back. My only requirement, were I an Israeli citizen, would be that those radical actions do more good than harm.

I really don't see how that can apply to blowing up soccer fields and doing low fly-bys over civilian housing. That really is the stuff of collective punishment, and it's being conducted on a scale that won't even have the Machiavellian virtue of generating more fear than hate. They should at the very least be out there swearing right and left that they'll personally pay to have bridges rebuilt and electricity back in Gaza as soon as is humanly possible, just to minimize the impression that they don't give a crap about the state of Palestinian hospitals and Palestinian schools. That impression is the fuel for asymmetrical warfare, and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out. [How do I know? Because Palestinian kidnappers aren't geniuses, and yet they're broadening the experiment - that's not because they're unsatisfied with the results.]

Israel is the dominant military power in the region (apart from us, I suppose); its military can scare the crap out of Bashar al-Assad without looking buzzing Syrian territory and looking like bullies to the rest of the Arab world. They can target their enemies much more precisely than this - and if they can't, they should be beating their intelligence services like a drum. But I think they can.

In fact, I think what's going on is almost reflexive; Prime Minister Olmert's government's first thought is that stanching the bleeding means demonstrating that Israel takes no shit from anybody, and that means hitting everyone unsympathetic in reach. We will not be victims, right? If you sit down and think about it, though, it's really hard to imagine any Israeli textbook fifty years from now pointing at this as a point of positive change; any transformative energy it has is almost purely negative. Behold the anecdotal evidence:

For many Palestinians in Gaza, the refusal to back down seemed a collective effort to highlight their own sense of grievance. The economy has broken down under an embargo of Western aid since Hamas took power in January. The Palestinians contend they remain under siege, even after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza last year, with their borders often closed and encircled by Israeli warplanes and ships.

. . .

"There is support for this because I am not safe when I walk on the street," said Mustafa Raghib, the director of Gaza's largest flour mill, forced to shut for several hours after the electricity was cut. "Give me a good life and I will not support actions like this."

There's an awful lot about this action that seems very unconsidered to me - hence, you'll have inferred, the cat metaphor.

Only nobody's hearing the sound and running to cut in.

That said, here's hoping Gilad Shalit gets home safely soon. If anybody can get the job done, I'm pretty sure it's the Israeli army.

My government sucks.

House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records.

The resolution is expected to condemn the leak and publication of classified documents, said one Republican aide with knowledge of the impending legislation.

From the Hill. It is, perhaps, worth noting that the outed program in question was already public knowledge.

Terrorist groups would have had to be fairly credulous not to suspect that they would be subject to scrutiny if they moved money around through international wire transfers. In fact, a United Nations group set up to monitor Al Qaeda and the Taliban after Sept. 11 recommended in 2002 that other countries should follow the United States' lead in monitoring suspicious transactions handled by Swift. The report is public and available on the United Nations Web site.

Wait, y'know what? Just go right to Glenn Greenwald's blog - I see he's already written something way more comprehensive than I had in mind, at least on the matter of how reckless and unsubstantiated all this crap is.

For my own part, all I can add is: I want my tax money back. These sons of bitches are paying themselves good government dollars to intimidate a free press and position themselves for worse, and I've had just about enough. This is neither a moral nor an effective government, and I'm appalled to be subsidizing it.

NGH!

What's going on in Iraq, again?

Word in the New York Times is that some Sunni insurgent groups are trying to start talks with the Iraqi government after Prime Minister Maliki's overture over the weekend. Does this reflect wider Sunni acceptance? Hard to say - the real carrots from the earlier draft proposal, amnesty programs and a reconsideration of de-Baathification, didn't make it into the final cut (quite possibly because the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, pushed the authors into releasing a version that would less inflame American public - and political class - opinion), and . . . well, it was certainly noticed. I'd say there's more room to be hopeful than there was - and I'm grateful for that - but with Shi'ite groups still running unpoliced (or, worse, as police) and, say, threatening ethnic cleansing in Basra (according to Juan Cole's reading of an Arabic language Al-Zaman article), it's hard to get all the way to optimistic. I find myself stuck somewhere around "gloomy," actually.

As for hopes of American troop withdrawals by the end of the year? Well, I can see the Republicans wanting to tease up their prospects in the fall elections, but it has been observed that we've danced this dance before, and it didn't end well.

Meanwhile, it looks like the administration is getting one big wish delivered: the "market liberalization" plan that did so much to kill indigenous Iraqi business is apparently on the verge of being adopted for real by the new regime. I'm sure we're all delighted to learn that Americans and Iraqis alike have died to ensure the possibility of foreigners winning 100% ownership of Iraqi enterprises, untaxed profit transfers, and forty year leases! W00t!

Today in the spin cycle: how to keep stains from spreading.

President Bush on Monday condemned as "disgraceful" the disclosure last week by The New York Times and other newspapers of a secret program to investigate and track terrorists that relies on a vast international database that includes Americans' banking transactions.

. . .

"Congress was briefed," Mr. Bush said. "And what we did was fully authorized under the law. And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America."

[Link, care of the New York Times.]

First of all, I don't think there's a whole lot of question that by any reasonable standard that's flatly untrue. There was never any question that the US and its allies were going to be going after terrorist groups through their finances - it's standard operating procedure, and it was publicly re-emphasized within the context of the modern campaign against al-Qaeda in September and October of 2001. The specific approach used is only newsworthy insofar as it's casting a wider net than most non-terrorists might have expected - leading those of us who talk about patterns of abuse from this administration to nod our heads sagely and add another (admittedly, probably legal) footnote to the master list.

Now, I'm sure the president and his coterie really are concerned that their decision-making options become more limited as public knowledge of their serial abuses expands - but, if pushed, I'd guess that this latest frenzy is just a bit of stagecraft; the current program isn't really in any jeopardy, after all, and a little bit of aggression changes the subject from their own misdeeds to speculation about the guys who annoyed them. That's a PR win right there.

Beyond that: with the president and the vice president yapping about "disgraceful" behavior, and with Congressional allies like Peter King (R - NY) murmuring darkly about prosecutions at the Times, they may be trying to clear some space in the public consciousness for the idea of a real crackdown on investigative media. It'll make future backroom threats (when the next real atrocity is about to break) seem all the more forceful, and - honestly - there's anywhere from thirty to sixty percent of the American public that only needs to have the meme of the "treasonous reporter" pounded for a few months before becoming receptive to the idea of expanding the interpretation of the current Espionage Act, or even launching something more on the line of an Official Secrets Act, as both legitimate and American.

When, of course, it's not and it's not. But I bet the Bush team would love it.

Anyway, I'm kind of sick of hearing the president accuse better Americans than himself of hurting the country. Can somebody change the subject, please?

The Long Wall's long-ass quote of the day!

The president wants to stay in Iraq for at least three more years. It's not that he won't set a date to withdraw. He doesn't even have a plan that gets to the point where the US could end the occupation. In practice he wants to stay in Iraq forever. What Repubicans are voting for is More of the Same, More of the Same failed policy.

Let's work through a bit of this. If the president had a plan for success he would say, 'I plan to get X, Y and Z done and then we're going to bring American troops back home. I expect those three things will be accomplished by the middle of 2007.' Or maybe he'd say 2008 or the beginning of 2009.

But he doesn't say any of those things. When he says we're staying in Iraq as long as he's in the White House he makes clear that he doesn't have any plan other than staying in Iraq. Other than staying there indefinitiely or basically forever. Isn't it possible his 'plan' could work and have us out in 2008? Obviously, he's discounted that possibility because, again, he has no plan.

For my part, I'd rather put more troops into Iraq than leave the status quo, as long as there was a clear plan for bringing the war and occupation to a satisfactory conclusion. The thing is that the status quo is morally indefensible because it just means continue to burn through men and money for a failed policy because President Bush isn't capable of admitting his policies have failed.

He's like an owner of a business that's slowly going under. He doesn't know how to save the situation. So he won't get more money or resources to fix the business. That's throwing good money after bad. And he won't just liquidate and save what he can, because then he'd have to come to grips with the fact that he's failed. So his policy is denial and slow failure. Here of course the analogy to President Bush is rather precise since he only has to hold out until 2009 when he can give the problem to someone else, just as he did in his past life with other businesses he drove into the ground.

But for the country that's not acceptable. We don't have a policy except for slow burn and denial. And the president's ego isn't enough to ask men and women to die for. We need an actual plan. And the president doesn't have one.

This passage has been embraced with all gratitude for its directness. Thank you, Josh Marshall.


UPDATE: Terrifying child prodigy Matt Yglesias chimes in with a qualification: the president's refusing to talk about withdrawing troops, he notes, because the president actively wants to stay there for a good long while.

Oddnesses.

Laura Rozen points to a couple of interesting new developments tonight. Neither is hugely significant in and of itself - one amounts to a public reading of tea leaves, while the other is an op-ed piece from a couple of Clintonites. I'm startled by what it says, but I don't suppose it's seriously going to influence administration thinking. Still, collectively they hit me right at my conventional wisdom, so I hope you'll bear with me while I give `em a look.

The "tea leaves" piece is, at least, upbeat - Gareth Porter, writing for the IPS, argues that the March 16 US National Security Strategy actually signals a retreat from even the idea of military adventurism in Iran in response to their nuclear program.

The NSS takes pains to reduce the significance of Iran's obtaining a nuclear capability. "As important as are these nuclear issues," it says, "the United States has broader concerns regarding Iran. The Iranian regime sponsors terrorism; threatens Israel; seeks to thwart Middle East peace; disrupts democracy in Iraq; and denies the aspirations of its people for freedom."

Then the NSS states, "The nuclear issue and our other concerns can ultimately be resolved only if the Iranian regime makes the strategic decision to change these policies, open up its political system, and afford freedom to its people. This is the ultimate goal of U.S. policy."

This carefully worded statement thus explicitly makes regime change -- not stopping Iran's progress toward a nuclear capability -- the goal of U.S. policy toward Iran.

National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, speaking at the U.S. Institute of Peace the same day the NSS was released, invoked the document's formulation on Iran policy and suggested that implementation would be guided by whether any particular action would contribute to broader political changes in Iran.

. . .

The implications of the NSS and Hadley's remarks for the military option are clear: if the goal of the policy is to achieve internal political change in Iran, which is assumed to lead to a change in nuclear policy, then there is no need for the administration to contemplate an attack on Iran. And if a military attack on Iran might impede progress on political change, the logic of the formulation is that the military option should be avoided.

I can certainly understand the desire to embrace the optimism - and, indeed, the sense I have now is that bombing the hell out of Iran is considerably less likely in the near term than it seemed a month or two ago. Still, I feel a certain obligation to note that Seymour Hersh indirectly addressed this as far back as early 2005, if not before, and in so doing highlighted the major flaw in expecting the Bush administration to follow a course of action simply because it would seem to logically follow from their own premises.

To wit:

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse” —like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

It's a lot like what we saw with Iran's rejected 2003 diplomatic overtures - there are people in this White House who have been way too inclined to exaggerate the fragility of the Iranian regime, and the damage that could be done to it through brute force. And, were that the dominant view, then attacks that might be imagined to inspire regime change would be really hard to rule out. Let's remember, Mr. Hersh's most recent big piece on the Bush administration in Iran - the one that touched on plans to use American tactical nuclear weaponry, among other things - came out after the NSS that reassures Mr. Porter.

There's reason to hope that Ms. Rice isn't playing that game, though. So let's.

The other startling piece is an op-ed in the Washington Post from Clinton secretary of defense William J. Perry and former assistant def. sec. Ashton Carter, calling for strikes on North Korea if the current missile tension continues to worsen.

Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil? We believe not. The Bush administration has unwisely ballyhooed the doctrine of "preemption," which all previous presidents have sustained as an option rather than a dogma. It has applied the doctrine to Iraq, where the intelligence pointed to a threat from weapons of mass destruction that was much smaller than the risk North Korea poses. (The actual threat from Saddam Hussein was, we now know, even smaller than believed at the time of the invasion.) But intervening before mortal threats to U.S. security can develop is surely a prudent policy.

Therefore, if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched. This could be accomplished, for example, by a cruise missile launched from a submarine carrying a high-explosive warhead. The blast would be similar to the one that killed terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. But the effect on the Taepodong would be devastating. The multi-story, thin-skinned missile filled with high-energy fuel is itself explosive -- the U.S. airstrike would puncture the missile and probably cause it to explode. The carefully engineered test bed for North Korea's nascent nuclear missile force would be destroyed, and its attempt to retrogress to Cold War threats thwarted. There would be no damage to North Korea outside the immediate vicinity of the missile gantry.

. . .

We should not conceal our determination to strike the Taepodong if North Korea refuses to drain the fuel out and take it back to the warehouse. When they learn of it, our South Korean allies will surely not support this ultimatum -- indeed they will vigorously oppose it. The United States should accordingly make clear to the North that the South will play no role in the attack, which can be carried out entirely with U.S. forces and without use of South Korean territory. South Korea has worked hard to counter North Korea's 50-year menacing of its own country, through both military defense and negotiations, and the United States has stood with the South throughout. South Koreans should understand that U.S. territory is now also being threatened, and we must respond. Japan is likely to welcome the action but will also not lend open support or assistance. China and Russia will be shocked that North Korea's recklessness and the failure of the six-party talks have brought things to such a pass, but they will not defend North Korea.

I think these gentlemen are being really optimistic in their assessment of international response to a pre-emptive attack on North Korean soil, given the diplomatic history of the Bush administration - but if we're facing a threat of the severity that the authors seem to believe, the response of the Russians and the Chinese shouldn't really be anywhere near the top of our list of worries.

For my own part, I'm still hoping that this can all be talked back (assuming the original intel was even correct) - it has the smell of one of Kim Jong-il's periodic cries for attention, rather than a calculated act of aggression, and it's hopefully very clear in Pyongyang that nobody anywhere is taking their side on it.

That said, the authors have better training and better contacts than I do, and Ms. Rozen (who clearly has a brain in her skull) speaks favorably - in a qualified kind of way - of Mr. Carter's judgement. I'll admit, I'm feeling a jot less complacent than I was two days ago.

[That said, I still think the Bush team's position - as articulated by everybody's favorite bull-in-china-shop, John Bolton - that direct engagement amounts to appeasement is just wildly stupid. It's like refusing to use a screwdriver so the nails won't think they've won.]

Nipping in the bud.

House Republican leaders today abruptly canceled a planned vote to renew the Voting Rights Act after a rank-and-file rebellion by lawmakers who say the civil rights measure unfairly singles out Southern states and promotes multi-lingual ballots.

Why, I never! Colored folk might actually vote, dammit!

Even for today's Republican Party, this is an embarrassment, and I gather Mr. Hastert and company will be leaning on their rebellious juniors pretty hard until the Act is renewed. Here's hoping they don't water it down in the process . . . .

This just in: the president is cranky!

President Bush said Iran on Wednesday was taking too long to say whether it will suspend nuclear work that could lead to the development of atomic weapons and warned North Korea not to test-fire a long-range missile.

It's not that either position is inherently unreasonable (though I'm more sympathetic to the "no missile" thing than to not letting the Iranians have a few weeks to debate an issue that's years away from being critical), but sounding petulant and demanding at a rare point where he can actually play up the support of his European peers isn't going to do anyone a whole lot of good - particularly when he's already planted firmly in a milieu that tends to emphasize his troubling history of pigheadedness, thuggery and idiocy.

President Bush began talks with leaders of the European Union here this morning, but his visit, aimed at expanding trade and spotlighting unity, was marked by protests and calls within Europe for United States to shut down its detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Hundreds of people marched through the streets of Vienna today carrying banners reading "World's No. 1 Terrorist," a reference to Mr. Bush, whose policies on Iraq remain hugely unpopular here.

. . .

Mr. Bush's image is plastered around Vienna on the cover of the Austrian news magazine Profil, under the headline "The Mad World of George Bush." On Tuesday, anticipating Mr. Bush's arrival, an Austrian commentator, Hans Rauscher, offered a brutal assessment of the president in the daily newspaper Der Standard.

"George W. Bush is probably the worst president of the past 100 years," Mr. Rauscher wrote. "The world has to suffer him until 2008."

Not the best setting for standing up and telling other countries how to behave. It slightly reduces his leverage with Iran and North Korea, and may even make the European trade negotiations more complicated than they have to be.

Ah, well. Not the worst mistake he's made in the last five years. Heck, depending on how he handles talks about Guantanamo, it may not even be the worst mistake he makes in his trip to Austria!

2008, indeed.

North Korean missile update.

Chris Nelson, whose wisdom once again comes care of Laura Rozen, speculates that everyone's favorite crazy dictator might just have shot himself in the foot with an intercontinental ballistic missile:

With no test so far, the N. Korean missile test story just won’t go away, and the interesting consensus now developing is that “this time, Kim Jong-il seems to have outsmarted himself”. That’s because it now seems certain that the whole controversy has put Chinese and S. Korean support for Pyongyang in a very difficult position, almost regardless of what finally happens...and the whole thing is adding up to a big boost for missile defense/hard liners in both Japan and the US.

And, in fact, Reuters reports that Kim Jong-il's people are trying to execute a little step-down from the latest provocation:

North Korea has asked for talks with the United States over its apparent preparations for a missile test, Yonhap news agency said on Wednesday, a sign Pyongyang might be ready to step back from a potential crisis.

A positive sign, though the Bush administration is - naturally - out to milk as much possible manliness out of a rare diplomatic win as it can.

U.S. ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer, however, said a venue for bilateral discussions with Washington already existed in six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear programs and urged the North to return to those stalemated negotiations.

Might be a smart move, might not. I'd be more comfortable with it if I thought that there was any serious chance at all that direct situational diplomatic contact had been diligently considered and rejected.

Still, in all this seems like good news.

Two bad deaths in Iraq.

Since so much of the writing I do on the Wall is political, I generally try to keep comments about military deaths in Iraq just off the page - generalizing about the Army is all well and good, but I don't want to be co-opting the sacrifices of individuals.

So, when I come to the murders of Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, I'm going to keep my response as succinct and precise as possible to limit the danger of confusion. I'm very sorry for their families, and for what they themselves seem to have experienced before their end, and I hope to God that the vicious bastards responsible are hunted down before they can do anything like this again.

Peace to the dead.

And now some good news.

Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia and one of West Africa's most feared men, arrived in handcuffs in the Netherlands on Tuesday, and was immediately taken to the jail near The Hague where the former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, spent the last five years of his life.

Mr. Taylor, 58, will be tried in the Netherlands by a specially created outpost of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the United Nations-backed tribunal that has indicted him on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The long list of atrocities attributed to Mr. Taylor, a former warlord, includes running a rebel force that killed tens of thousands of civilians and hacked off the limbs of countless others.

A descendant of the returned slaves who founded Liberia, Mr. Taylor became notorious for his use and abuse of children who were pressed into his forces. The children were often brainwashed or drugged into killing their own parents or relatives, prosecutors have said.

Hopefully the last step before getting lost in a British prison for a very, very bad man. Check out the original Times article for a little more, or cut straight to Wikipedia's humble study in evil for the man's life story in a nutshell.

Follow-up.

Dan Froomkin, over at the Post, has a recap of responses to both Ron Suskind's book and tonight's Frontline - which I'm annoyed to have missed. It was titled "The Dark Side" and, yes, it covered Dick Cheney's involvement in our march to war in Iraq (again, he supplied the title quote himself - "We have to work the dark side, if you will. Spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world."); I gather it was rather thorough and not at all flattering.

And once again we get the impression that there are a lot of people in the CIA who are really pissed off at Team Bush.

I haven't read the book, but I've read the reviews.

Ordinarily, that wouldn't be enough to get me to blog, but Michiko Kakutani and Barton Gellman have offered up quotes and synopses of such appalling power I can't really help myself. I can only say that these reviews (as well as a third in the LA Times) are so much alike in detail and tone (which would be "horrified astonishment") that I feel justified in assuming that each implicitly supports the stories the others reproduce; if it turns out that they don't, in fact, do justice to the book, I'll apologize as soon as I hear.

Anyway, the book in question is Ron Suskind's new release, The One Percent Doctrine - the title is apparently derived from Vice President Cheney's assessment of the threshhold of risk required to bring down American armed forces, and it kicks off a grand study of the Bush administration's adventures in Mesopotamia. Unsurprisingly, it seems to be a very negative book - the facts aren't kind to this White House to begin with, and an awful lot of Mr. Suskind's sources (one infers) are disgruntled veterans of compromised, misused, and perverted intelligence agencies. There are axes a-grindin' even in the few quoted passages in the big papers - take, for example, this bit from the Times about our national Decider and his vice president.

This book augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set out in "The Price of Loyalty" and in a series of magazine articles on the president and key aides. In "The One Percent Doctrine," he writes that Mr. Cheney's nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation.

"Edgar." Puppets. Super.

Anyway, keep reading - it goes somewhere substantive.

During a November 2001 session with the president, Mr. Suskind recounts, a C.I.A. briefer realized that the Pentagon had not told Mr. Bush of the C.I.A.'s urgent concern that Osama bin Laden might escape from the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan (as he indeed later did) if United States reinforcements were not promptly sent in. And several months later, he says, attendees at a meeting between Mr. Bush and the Saudis discovered after the fact that an important packet laying out the Saudis' views about the Israeli-Palestinian situation had been diverted to the vice president's office and never reached the president.

Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush "plausible deniability" from Mr. Cheney's point of view, and that perfectly meshed with the commander in chief's own impatience with policy details. Suggesting that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr. Suskind writes: "Keeping certain knowledge from Bush — much of it shrouded, as well, by classification — meant that the president, whose each word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed. He could essentially be 'deniable' about his own statements."

"Whether Cheney's innovations were tailored to match Bush's inclinations, or vice versa, is almost immaterial," Mr. Suskind continues. "It was a firm fit. Under this strategic model, reading the entire N.I.E. would be problematic for Bush: it could hem in the president's rhetoric, a key weapon in the march to war. He would know too much."

Again, that came from Ms. Kakutani's review, and in a way it's representative of her focus. She's interested in how the White House acted . . .

Within the government, he goes on, there was frequent frustration with the White House's hermetic decision-making style. "Voicing desire for a more traditional, transparent policy process," he writes, "prompted accusations of disloyalty," and "issues argued, often vociferously, at the level of deputies and principals rarely seemed to go upstream in their fullest form to the president's desk, and if they did, it was often after Bush seemed to have already made up his mind based on what was so often cited as his 'instinct' or 'gut.'"

. . . and how (and why) George Tenet dragged in the CIA to help.

Mr. Gellman's review is nicely complementary - it offers some human examples of how the president's gut works.

One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind's gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war's major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002. Described as al-Qaeda's chief of operations even after U.S. and Pakistani forces kicked down his door in Faisalabad, the Saudi-born jihadist was the first al-Qaeda detainee to be shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here.

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be. CIA and FBI analysts, poring over a diary he kept for more than a decade, found entries "in the voice of three people: Hani 1, Hani 2, and Hani 3" -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego. All three recorded in numbing detail "what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said." Dan Coleman, then the FBI's top al-Qaeda analyst, told a senior bureau official, "This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."

Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics -- travel for wives and children and the like. That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.

. . .

"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

And there we are. Criminal and counterproductive in one ugly package.

I've ordered a copy of the book, and I might have more to say about it once it's arrived (at the moment, incidentally, I'm just starting Rory Stewart's excellent and deeply foolhardy The Places in Between), but for now I'll just say even these fragments constitute a very strong, very political rejoinder to the Republicans' current campaign of chutzpah on matters Iraqi. Regardless of whether you believe a near-term pullout of forces is the way to go, simply "staying the course" is deranged. "The course" was charted by willfully ignorant people who reflexively turn to torture and deceit when they're stymied, and it has infinitely more to do with protecting them than it does with solving any actual problems in Iraq.

It isn't cowardice to demand oversight.

A post in which the author incites alarm.

Seriously, it's been a while since I've blogged on the Pacific Rim, but something like this brings me back in a hurry.

Tensions over North Korea's missile program escalated sharply today as Japan, Australia and New Zealand joined Washington in warning the the communist state not test an intercontinental ballistic missile that experts say could reach parts of the United States.

The 115-foot Taepodong-2 missile stands ready to take off from Musudan-Ri, a remote village on the northeast coast of North Korea, after engineers apparently completed loading liquid fuel into its rocket boosters.

A successful test would provide the strongest indication yet that North Korea was developing the capacity to deliver chemical, biological or perhaps nuclear warheads to targets as far away as the continental United States.

I'll just note that the new involvement from Australia and New Zealand is significant in no small part because they actually maintain offical diplomatic contact with North Korea. I don't know that being able to send ambassadors running around is going to pull this one back from the brink, but I very much doubt it'll hurt.



UPDATE (4:15 AM): Okay, according to a long Chris Nelson quote hosted by Laura Rozen, there's a very good chance that our intelligence is crap and that the North Korean missile in question isn't the long ranger we think it is. Meanwhile, skies are cloudy in North Korea and an actual launch is looking less and less likely in the short term.

So much for incitement.

Foreign policy from the gut.

So, today the Washington Post tells us why we can trust that everything will turn out okay in Iraq.

President Bush flew to Baghdad last week to size up Iraq's new leader. "I have come not only to thank you," he told American troops gathered in the Green Zone on Tuesday, "but to look Prime Minister Maliki in the eyes -- to determine whether or not he is as dedicated to a free Iraq as you are."

The presidential determination? "I believe he is," Bush said.

The snap assessment recalled Bush's famous assertion that he had sensed Vladimir Putin's soul and showed how Bush often appears more comfortable with his gut-level assessment of foreign leaders than the one he gets from briefing papers prepared by his intelligence agencies.

The Putin parallel is just too damn easy - I won't take it any farther. As for Nouri al-Maliki: the guy's the only hope we've got, and God knows I want him to work out, but can we please, please get some evidence that the White House is willing to acknowledge that the immediate issue here isn't whether anyone is dedicated to "freedom," but rather whether the former deputy leader of the De-Baathification Commission and the Dawa head of the Shi'ite bloc that drafted the Sunni-rejected Iraqi constitution is really going to be capable of reducing sectarian tension? I'm not saying he can't - I'm just saying the answer probably has nothing to do with how willing the man is to look in our president's eye and laugh at his jokes.

I'd say President Bush is insulting our soldiers by pretending otherwise, but I'm terrified that he's not actually pretending.

Coincidentally enough, the Post has another look at the administration's intuitive approach to foreign policy - this time the response to the Iranian overture of 2003.

Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces three years ago, an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table -- including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.

But top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative. Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax with a cover letter certifying it as a genuine proposal supported by key power centers in Iran, former administration officials said.

. . .

The incident "strengthened the hands of those in Iran who believe the only way to compel the United States to talk or deal with Iran is not by sending peace offers but by being a nuisance," [Trita] Parsi said.

Great call, that.

To be fair, if the people who made it saw regime change in Iran as the next step, then this wasn't actually stupid - it was just insane. Either way, I'd say it's an argument against gut-level assessments.

Privacy: it's there for violatin'!

Your tax dollars at work: Congress attempted to kill the ill-conceived Terrorist Information Awareness program in 2003. But instead, the Rasputin-like program -- designed to somehow find terrorists from a sky-high pile of credit card bills, car rental receipts and travel records -- came back, bigger and stronger and arguably worse than ever, National Journal's Shane Harris reports today (article not available online -- yet, anyway).

How could a program designed to monitor the minute data of millions of innocent Americans be any worse? By stripping its privacy protections and abuse safeguards, and opening the database up to browsers all over the national security community.

Sorry to be reduced to quoting a snarky synopsis, but as the author (the increasingly essential Justin Rood) tells us, the original story isn't on-line yet.

The main point is this: the federal government took a program that was widely condemned and nominally killed for being too intrusive, and they developed it further in no small part by making it more intrusive. Thanks, guys!

Knocking.

Lyle Denniston sums up Hudson v. Michigan, starting with . . .

The Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling on Thursday in the Michigan "knock-and-announce" case raises significant new questions about how sturdy the "exclusionary rule" is as a remedy for constitutional violations by police -- especially, but not solely, Fourth Amendment violations. It also suggests -- perhaps more strongly -- new doubt about the continuing validity of the "knock-and-announce" rule. Those implications seem to emerge in some of the language used, and certainly between the lines, of the ruling in Hudson v. Michigan (04-1360). The three opinions in the case can be found here.

When the case was argued on May 18 (the second of two arguments in the case this Term), it seemed clear that a major Fourth Amendment ruling was in the making. The final opinions justify that impression.

The bare holding of the case is simple: if police have a warrant to search a home, and they enter in a way that violates their constitutional duty to knock first and announce themselves, the evidence turned up in the search can be used in a criminal prosecution.

And Radley Balko expands.

Denniston also rightly points out the almost mocking tone Scalia employs when discussing the reasons for the knock-and-announce rule. Just for review, those reasons would include the terror and fright associated with having once door beaten down in the middle of the night by armed, masked men; the unimaginable predicament a homeowner is unwillingly put in when he must decide if the intruders are cops or criminals, and whether to confront them or succumb to them; the injury and death that often transpires (to police, suspects, and bystanders) as a result; the right to assume one's home is his castle and place of asylum, and the idea that one should have the opportunity to answer police and avoid the fright and property destruction resulting from a forced entry; and the fact that the perilousness of the situation can lead to police themselves mistaking harmless gestures on the part of suspects as threatening or menacing, again resulting in unnecessary death and injury.

Scalia instead boils down the reasoning behind the knock-and-announce rule to, simply, "the right not to be intruded upon in one's nightclothes."

Justice Kennedy signed on to the ruling, but wrote an opinion designed to limit its ramifications (quite in vogue with the Court since they gave Mr. Bush the White House) - we'll see how that works out.


UPDATE (11:20 PM): The Times editorial page is chiming in.

The Supreme Court yesterday substantially diminished Americans' right to privacy in their own homes. The rule that police officers must "knock and announce" themselves before entering a private home is a venerable one, and a well-established part of Fourth Amendment law. But President Bush's two recent Supreme Court appointments have now provided the votes for a 5-4 decision eviscerating this rule.

This decision should offend anyone, liberal or conservative, who worries about the privacy rights of ordinary Americans.

The case arose out of the search of Booker T. Hudson's home in Detroit in 1998. The police announced themselves but did not knock, and after waiting a few seconds, entered his home and seized drugs and a gun. There is no dispute that the search violated the knock-and-announce rule.

The question in the case was what to do about it. Mr. Hudson wanted the evidence excluded at his trial. That is precisely what should have happened. Since 1914, the Supreme Court has held that, except in rare circumstances, evidence seized in violation of the Constitution cannot be used. The exclusionary rule has sometimes been criticized for allowing criminals to go free just because of police error. But as the court itself recognized in that 1914 case, if this type of evidence were admissible, the Fourth Amendment "might as well be stricken."

The court ruled yesterday that the evidence could be used against Mr. Hudson.

Gitmo roundup.

In today's papers, David Ignatius argues to shut the camps down . . .

When I hear U.S. officials describe the suicides of three Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last Saturday as "asymmetric warfare" and "a good PR move," I know it's time to close that camp -- not just because of what it's doing to the prisoners but because of how it is dehumanizing the American captors.

The American officials spoke of the dead prisoners as if they inhabited a different moral universe. That's what war does: People stop seeing their enemies as human beings and consign them to a different category. It was discomfiting to see this indifference stated so bluntly, and subsequent U.S. statements tactfully disavowed the initial ones.

. . . the US government is, instead, expelling awkward reporters . . .

Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, and Rick Thames, editor of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, said the decision to expel the Herald's Carol Rosenberg and the Observer's Michael Gordon, along with Carol Williams of the Los Angeles Times, was a clear denial of press access.

"My argument would always be that it is in the interest of the Department of Defense to be as transparent as possible," Fiedler told E&P Wednesday. "Given the controversy that has surrounded the detention facility since its inception, if the government has nothing to hide there, it ought to allow free and broad access to the news media there. Particularly given the suicides on Saturday."

Thames echoed that view in statement e-mailed to E&P today. "The Pentagon appears to have panicked when it discovered it couldn't manipulate a first-class reporter, so it shoved him and all other press out," the statement said. "Michael Gordon was invited by the commander to report on the base for six days, and he was doing that in a very professional manner. His stories helped the world understand the actual circumstances our soldiers faced in managing a very difficult situation. It's unfortunate that the military couldn't see the value of that."

The three reporters, who had been at the location since Saturday, were directed to depart, according to a Pentagon official, as part of a security increase following the suicides of three detainees on Saturday. Rosenberg and the other journalists were on a 10 a.m. military flight this morning, that landed in Miami, E&P has confirmed, by early afternoon.

. . . while the Afghan government is telling the press they'd at least like four dozen or so of their more demonstrably innocent citizens released.

An Afghan government delegation to Guantánamo Bay said today that about half of the 94 Afghans still being held there were not guilty of serious crimes and should be released.

The remainder, including several high-level members of the former Taliban government, should be tried in Afghan courts, said the leader of the delegation, Abdul Jabar Sabit, a legal adviser to the Interior Ministry.

"The delegation concluded that some of the detainees should not stay longer in prison on the basis of the allegations against them and they must be returned to their country," Mr. Sabit, a former prosecutor, said at a news briefing. "We want to assure our people that the detainees will return to the country."

Just for the record.

Can we get an endgame now?

As a new article in the New York Times helpfully reminds us, the Hamas government in Palestine is having some really bad days.

Palestinian civil servants stormed the parliament building in the West Bank on Wednesday demanding back pay and chanting "We are hungry!"

Fistfights broke out as protesters hurled plastic water bottles at legislators from Hamas, the militant group that controls parliament, forcing the speaker to flee the building.

It was the second violent protest this week at parliament, in Ramallah, and underscored growing pressure on the Hamas government on several fronts.

Much of the Western aid that had been used to run the Palestinian Authority has been withheld since Hamas took over the government after winning January elections. Many Muslim nations had pledged their support, but international banks, most tied to the American system, have refused to transfer money from other donors.

So on Wednesday, the Hamas foreign minister, Mahmoud Zahar, crossed over into Gaza from Egypt carrying what Palestinian officials said was $20 million in cash in his suitcases. He was returning from a long trip to Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, China, Pakistan, Iran and Egypt.

Hamas, responsible for many of the deadliest suicide attacks against Israel, has refused to renounce violence or recognize the Israeli state since it won control of parliament in January.

Though a substantial sum, the $20 million is a fraction of $120 million the Palestinian Authority needs each month just for the salaries of its 165,000 employees, most of whom have not been paid for four months. Its current budget would require an additional $45 million for all costs other than salaries.

A power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, the party it ousted from power, continues to worsen. About two dozen people have been killed in recent weeks in factional fighting, including a Hamas gunman in southern Gaza on Wednesday.

Now, I'm all for starving Hamas until they renounce violence and promise to govern responsibly, or get marched off the stage, but I do think it's important to have some kind of joint strategy with the Israelis to avert complete societal implosion in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian anarchy wouldn't do anyone any good (except for a certain breed of hardliner, anyway).

Just a thought.

Too little, too soon.

According to today's New York Times, the Bush administration is gearing up to use the rather happy death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as the launching pad for another Republican rah-rah show.

President Bush gathered top aides at Camp David here on Monday to calibrate the best way forward in Iraq during what the administration described as a critical juncture, following the death last week of the most-wanted terrorist in Iraq and the final formation of a unity government there.

The meeting was as much a media event as it was a high-level strategy session, devised to send a message that this is "an important break point for the Iraqi people and for our mission in Iraq from the standpoint of the American people," in the words of the White House counselor, Dan Bartlett.

It came as Republicans began a new effort to use last week's events to turn the war to their political advantage after months of anxiety, and to sharpen attacks against Democrats. On Monday night, the president's top political strategist, Karl Rove, told supporters in New Hampshire that if the Democrats had their way, Iraq would fall to terrorists and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not have been killed.

Just reflexively, I'll observe that these guys have no business labeling the Democrats as "soft on Zarqawi" given their own history . . .

But NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.

In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.

The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.

“Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution.

Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.

The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.

In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.

The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.

Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

. . . but, of course, the real problem here is that Mr. Zarqawi seems to've been nowhere near the real heart of the Iraqi insurgency. Just grabbing whatever's close at hand: the Times has another major Iraqi article up today, and the framing paragraphs read:

Politics, once seen as a solution to the problems of a society broken by years of brutal single-party rule, has paralyzed the heart of Iraq's south.

This once-quiet city of riverside promenades [Basra] was among the most receptive to the American invasion. Now, three years later, it is being pulled apart by Shiite political parties that want to control the region and its biggest prize, oil. But in today's Iraq, politics and power flow from the guns of militias, and negotiating has been a bloody process.

"We're into political porridge, that's what's changed," said Brig. James Everard, commander of the British forces in Basra. "It's mafia-type politics down here."

Police reports from the past five months read like war chronicles: Eight oil company employees murdered. Twenty caches of Russian rockets discovered, including a pile in the back of an ambulance. A tank of stolen oil found in a fake mosque. Shootouts reported between a politician's militia and the police, and between police officers.

Now, after two years of relative calm, Basra has a soaring murder rate (the 85 killings in May were nearly triple the number in January), a tattered oil industry and a terrified population.

"I cannot talk with you," said Sajid Saad Hassan, a professor at Basra University's agriculture college. "I haven't joined a party and no militia is protecting me."

We're not even talking Sunni-Shi'ite schisms here in the southern heartland, let alone foreign zealots; it's anarchy and warlordism, pure and simple. Add to that the ethnic and religious concerns of the wider country, and you get at the real problem: it's mostly internal, mostly diffuse, and mostly unrelated to a Jordanian nutjob with an evil kind of messiah complex.

Mr. Zarqawi's media prominence wasn't a function of his role in the war, remember. The Post ran a story in April that fleshed it all out.

The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

"The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey, who did not return phone calls seeking comment on his remarks.

Bluntly, there's not a lot of reason to think that this man's death will do the war effort as a whole any good. It might save some lives in the short term, and I'd never downplay the value of that, but it doesn't seriously address any root problems.

Of course, the goal of the White House's latest pushback is to try to trick voters into believing in Republican competence as we approach the mid-term elections; reality only gets in the way. I personally suspect they're pimping this new narrative too early - voters are going to have four months and change to see whether or not the tenor of our Iraqi enterprise changes as a result of Mr. Zarqawi's death, and I don't think it will - but it's not like they have a record of success on which they can run instead.

Meanwhile, according to Josh Marshall, there's a complimentary hollow effort gearing up among the Representatives:

The House will gear up this week for what could be one of its most significant debates in several years, as the chamber spends much of Thursday considering a Republican-crafted resolution on Iraq.

While the debate will be designed to allow all sides to air their views of the war on the House floor, the resolution itself — which portrays the Iraq conflict as a front in the larger war on terrorism — is likely to inspire controversy, since its language largely reflects the views of House Republicans rather than Democrats.

. . .

According to a draft version that was obtained Friday and is still subject to change, the resolution will begin by “declaring that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.”

The resolution goes on to emphasize the importance of fighting terrorism and says that Saddam Hussein “constituted a threat against global peace and security.” The language also refers to Iraq and Afghanistan as two parts of the same fight.

Josh calls it "the creed." These guys can't govern, but at least they can pass statements congratulating themselves for being heroic and cool.

Our tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

Okay.

Yes, I saw the game. Sort of.

Actually, I watched the first fifteen minutes at normal speed, saw which way the wind was blowing, and plowed through the rest in fast forward, dropping back out of hyperspeed only to endure every goal we absorbed. I would've watched the goals we scored too, of course, only there weren't any.

Oddly, the more heartbreaking match was actually Japan-Australia. Yes, the Aussies were the underdogs - and, no, I've got nothing against them. The thing was, I'd heard the final score going in, but the progress of the game was such that, increasingly, I didn't believe what I'd heard. Maybe 3-1 was actually the number of yellow cards handed out! Suddenly, it was the Japanese, who scored early (albeit with the help of a dodgy call) and defended their lead with grace and skill, who were sticking it to destiny! They were the little guys, and with something like seven minutes left in the game, it seemed like they were going to pull it off!

And then Tim Cahill beat them like dirty, dirty rugs.

One of the best-played games I've seen so far, and the Aussies more than had their win coming - hell, from here on in, I'll happily root for them (except insofar as they go out to kick my guys' collective ass) - but, damn, my heart has to go out to Tokyo.

Thank you, Sebastian Mallaby.

Last month President Bush issued a rare apology. "Saying 'Bring it on,' kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal," he confessed. "I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted."

Well done, Mr. President, you've understood that bluster can backfire. Now how about sharing this insight with your ambassador to the United Nations?

John R. Bolton, the ambassador in question, has a rich history of losing friends and failing to influence people. He was notorious, even before arriving at the United Nations last year, for having said that 10 stories of the U.N. headquarters could be demolished without much loss; he had described the United States as the sun around which lesser nations rotate -- mere "asteroids," he'd branded them. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Senate refused to confirm Bolton as U.N. ambassador. "Arrogant," "bullying," and "the poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be," Sen. George Voinovich called him.

Bush sent Bolton anyway, bypassing the Senate by appointing him during a congressional recess. It soon turned out that dismissing foreign ambassadors as asteroid dwellers was merely a warm-up. As soon as Bolton got to New York, he blew up the preparatory negotiations for a gathering of heads of state, insisting that the other 190 members of the world body immediately agree to hundreds of changes in the summit document.

If Bolton had picked a fight on a worthwhile issue, this might have been justified. But one of the chief aims of his edits was to eliminate all mention of the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals, even though these targets for reducing child mortality and so on are inoffensive. After a week of Bolton-induced bureaucratic battles, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice weighed in, explaining that the administration actually had nothing against the development goals. When the summit convened, Bush himself had to declare during his speech that he supported the targets that his ambassador had repudiated.

Bolton's next triumph was to demand U.N. reform, or rather to pretend to do so. An effort to create a credible human rights council was underway, but Bolton skipped nearly all of the 30 or so negotiating sessions. Then, when the negotiators produced a blueprint for the new council, Bolton declared it unacceptable, leaving furious American allies to wonder why he hadn't weighed in earlier to secure a better outcome. "The job now is to get clarity on what the U.S. wants," the British ambassador said icily. But what Bolton really wanted was quite clear: to allow the negotiations to falter and then to condemn whatever they produced, throwing red meat to his U.N.-hating allies on the right of the Republican Party.

Next, Bolton blundered into U.N. management reform, an issue that may soon precipitate a crisis. The top U.N. officials, led by Secretary General Kofi Annan, had laid out a menu of radical changes, designed to eliminate useless conferences and reports and to move staff to departments that most needed them. Bolton added his own brand of bluster to this plan: If poor countries carried on resisting management reforms, rich countries would stop paying for the organization. The deadline for agreeing on reform is the end of this month, but no breakthrough is in sight. Officials are wondering what to do if U.N. checks start bouncing.

Not many reformers at the United Nations believe that the budget threat achieved anything. To the contrary, Bolton has so poisoned the atmosphere that the cause of management renewal is viewed by many developing countries as an American plot. And if Bolton carries through on his threat to cut off money for the United Nations, the United States will be more isolated than ever. Refusing to fund U.N. officials who are planning for a peacekeeping mission in Darfur is not a winning strategy.

Last week the U.N. deputy secretary general, a pro-American Briton named Mark Malloch Brown, went public with his Bolton frustrations. He pointed out that the United Nations serves many American objectives, from deploying peacekeepers to helping with Iraq's elections. Given this cooperation, the powers that be in Washington should stick up for the United Nations rather than threatening to blow it up. They should not be passive in the face of "unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping."

This merely stated the obvious. If you doubt that U.N.-bashing and stereotyping goes on, ask yourself what gallery Bolton is playing to -- or check out the latest cover of the National Rifle Association magazine, which features a wolf with U.N. logos in its eyeballs. But Malloch Brown's speech didn't seem obvious to Bolton. "This is the worst mistake by a senior U.N. official that I have seen," he thundered in response. "Even though the target of the speech was the United States, the victim, I fear, will be the United Nations."

Which would suit Bolton and his allies perfectly. But it should not suit Bush, at least not now that he's grasped that bluster can backfire. Arriving at the U.N. summit last September, a different Bush greeted the secretary general and gestured at Bolton; "has the place blown up since he's been here?" he demanded, teasingly. Well, it's now time for the new Bush to acknowledge that Bolton's tactics aren't funny. The United States needs an ambassador who can work with the United Nations. Right now, it doesn't have one.

Seconded.

The essay at hand was lifted whole from the Washington Post, by the way - once I got started appropriating worthy paragraphs, I just couldn't stop.

Coooooooooool.

New archaeo-astronomical geekery here, thanks to Wikipedia.

As an aside . . .

If I had been born not as the son of earnest Peace Corps veterans, but instead as the national soccer team of some small but ambitious state that was not the Netherlands, I think Arjen Robben would be the kid who ruined my childhood by repeatedly beating me up and stealing my lunch money.

Okay, that's not fair. I'm not much up on my footie tactics, but even I had the sense that Serbia and Montenegro fielded a team that could've had a chance if it had opened up with a more aggressive game. The lack of scoring in the second half of the match actually seemed to imply a certain balance overall; these guys were in no way rendered unto bitchdom by the Dutch - all they did was lose honorably.

But, man, Mr. Robben does like the limelight.

My grudging return.

After all my bitching about taking a week off from blogging, I'm kind of distressed that it took hospital visits (not that I was myself hospitalized, I should stress) and disease to do it. All my plans to devote my blog-free vacation time to training to achieve my long-neglected dream of joining a traveling nude capoeira/modern dance troupe? Ruined.

But the news goes on. Most of the stuff I would've highlight will, unfortunately, remain neglected, but there are a couple of points that I'd like to revisit. First, the inestimable Juan Cole got shafted right in the career, and everyone responsible at Yale should be embarrassed for themselves. Alas, since I'm not in charge of their consciences, I don't expect much.

I'll strongly refer anyone who cares to Billmon's magisterial smackdown of the major players, and only add that I've read Professor Cole's blog off and on for many, many months now, and I've even had a short (and admittedly insubstantial) correspondence with the man, and so the following slur . . .

One university insider familiar with the case said that there may be several reasons why the tenure committee shot down Cole’s appointment.

. . .

Cole appears to lack in collegiality, as his penchant for combative blog entries and personal spats with detractors might make him an unnerving fixture on Yale.

. . . strikes me as a little bit offensive, as well as ludicrous. One is certainly entitled to disagree with the man's politics (calling him anti-Semitic for railing against the Likud is another matter altogether), but I've never known him to be anything less than civil to anyone who hadn't come out flailing first.

[I'll also note - just to twist something positive out of this mess - that his Global Americana Institute offers a vastly more constructive approach to winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world than anything I can attribute to his adversaries. For God's sake, yes: let them read Thomas Jefferson in Saudi Arabia. Let them read the American ideas that actually matter!]

Again, check out the Billmon piece. It's rude, but it's also fairly righteous.

Second, the Guantanamo suicides. Here's a charming quote, care of the BBC:

But earlier, the camp commander, Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair.

"They are smart. They are creative, they are committed," he said.

"They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

My initial response is, of course, to swear out loud at the lack of humanity in that, but for now let's stick to the purely pragmatic: the Brits could just as well have called Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent march on Dandi an act of asymmetrical warfare. I'm not saying the men responsible are morally comparable, but only that tactics that highlight the abuse of human dignity have a track record of success - because people around the world generally believe that abusing human dignity is bad - and the most effective way to address them isn't to bemoan the cynicism of the weaker party while taking away his toiletries. From that purely pragmatic perspective, we can see that that sort of thing only exacerbates the PR damage they've done; it says, yes, we really are brutal and uncaring.

Which brings me back away from pragmatism and toward being human. I'll just note that one of the three men who died was twenty-one years old; he was seventeen when he was captured, flown to a foreign country, thrown in a hole, and first started collecting experience to suggest that he could be kept in that place without any legal recourse, or even any unsupervised human contact, for the rest of his life. He was never charged with any crime.

I haven't seen the evidence, so there's only so much I can authoritatively say: maybe this really was necessary. Maybe he really was the single most dangerous seventeen year old alive, once upon a time, and maybe allowing him some hope of eventual release or some formal acknowledgement of his human rights would have led inevitably to the downfall of the American republic.

But now he's a dead kid behind big walls, and there's no one alive who can convince me that that's not a stupid waste, or that we're blameless, or even that our enemies are so removed from us in nature that they don't feel despair when we take them and seal them away.

Good God.

. . .

So, anyway. Great to be back!

The Kennedy article.

Here.

I was worried about a shitstorm yesterday. Now I'm outraged enough to want it.

So the next question is whether any other media outlets will take the story and see if it holds up.



UPDATE: I haven't read it yet, and I don't know that I expect to get around to it tonight, but in the interests of fairness I'll note that Farhad Manjoo has a lengthy rebuttal (or so I presume from the essay's title, "Was the 2004 election stolen? No.") up at Salon. I don't know how convincing it is, but it's there.

The shitstorm to come.

If this is to be believed, later today Rolling Stone will upload a new article from Robert Kennedy, Jr., alleging and detailing electoral fraud in Ohio in 2004 - apparently on a scale large enough to have cost John Kerry the presidential election. I have no idea how well such an allegation could be substantiated, but in the near term it almost doesn't matter; the White House pushback (or, rather, the pushback by the usual proxies) would almost certainly be rabid. "They stole the election!" is a very simple narrative, and it's one that could play into the growing public distrust with President Bush as a human being - I'm sure Karl Rove would see it as a grave political threat, whatever its legal connotations.

He'd probably also see it as an opportunity; it's always easy to make a Kennedy into a symbol of the Democratic establishment, after all. With a little bit of Swift-boating, maybe the public could come to believe that this is a vengeful prince in exile, making crazed, unfounded attacks on our nation's leader in a time of war. And maybe they might then buy that that's what all the bad press on George W. Bush amounts to - the work of reckless Democrats with a lust for political destruction! And don't you feel ashamed of yourself for doubting, America? the pundits would then demand.

As long as any actual investigations were suppressed, the story might even stick.

. . .

Argh.

We'll find out if the ball's rolling in just a few hours, I guess . . . .

Bringing the nineteenth century back to Alabama.

A devotee of wannabe theocrat Roy Moore is running for the job of chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, and he's bringing three friends along to grab other seats. Their platform? Well, basically, that judges in their great state should be allowed to kill kids even if the US Supreme Court says they can't.

In a debate with powerful echoes of the turbulent civil rights era, four Republicans running for Alabama's Supreme Court are making an argument legal scholars thought was settled in the 1800s: that state courts are not bound by
U.S. Supreme Court precedents.

The Constitution says federal law trumps state laws, and legal experts say there is general agreement that state courts must defer to the U.S. Supreme Court on matters of federal law.

Yet Justice Tom Parker, who is running for chief justice, argues that state judges should refuse to follow U.S. Supreme Court precedents they believe to be erroneous. Three other GOP candidates in Tuesday's primary have made nearly identical arguments.

"State supreme court judges should not follow obviously wrong decisions simply because they are `precedents,'" Parker wrote in a newspaper opinion piece in January that was prompted by a murder case that came before the Alabama high court.

. . .

The issue of the role of the U.S. Supreme Court has been boiling ever since Parker wrote the newspaper opinion piece criticizing his fellow justices in a murder case for following a decision by the high court that barred the execution of juvenile killers. Parker called the federal decision "blatant judicial tyranny."

Obviously, once the principle of total judicial independence is enshrined, Alabama could do all sorts of interesting things beyond wholesale slaughter of incarcerated teenagers - not just plonking the Ten Commandments back down in courthouses, but also punching holes in, say, civil rights law. When the law stops applying to you because you don't like it, the sky's pretty much the limit.