It's an unusually good day for Molly Ivins in heaven.

Her latter-day bête noire, Texas Governor Rick "Bighair" Perry, did something really, really good.

Gov. Rick Perry, longtime head of the nation's busiest death penalty state, spared an inmate Thursday hours before he was to have been executed for being a killer's getaway driver.

Perry issued the commutation order on a parole board's rare recommendation about seven hours before Kenneth Foster was to have been put to death — the narrowest gap by which he has halted an execution in his more than eight years in office.

Thursday's vote marked only the second time since Texas resumed carrying out executions in 1982 that the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles endorsed stopping an execution with so little time remaining.

. . .

Death penalty opponents had launched a public-relations campaign to save Foster because they objected to Texas's so-called law of parties, a unique statute in which each participant of a capital crime is held equally responsible. In any other state, the person who actually killed another person might be eligible for execution, but the driver or other participants might not be.

I found out about the pending execution and the move to stop it yesterday, and I didn't even bother to link to the story - pleading for leniency in Texas generally just sets you up for heartbreak and frustration. But here we are!

Brave show from Governor Perry.

The GAO report.

Okay, it looks like there's nothing surprising.

Actually, that's a phrase with more degrees of meaning than you might think. This report comes to considerably different conclusions than the NIE on Iraq, but then the NIE on Iraq came out of an executive branch that was (and is) desperate to validate every little thing it's ever done - and in this case did so by pretending that the state of affairs in our distant protectorate is only a moderate disaster. The GAO, on the other hand, is a congressional organization; if you're so inclined, you can say that bends its credibility in another direction, but I think it's pretty hard to deny that its report is more consistent than the NIE with what we've been seeing elsewhere.

Anyway:

Iraq has failed to meet all but three of 18 congressionally mandated benchmarks for political and military progress, according to a draft of a Government Accountability Office report. The document questions whether some aspects of a more positive assessment by the White House last month adequately reflected the range of views the GAO found within the administration.

The strikingly negative GAO draft, which will be delivered to Congress in final form on Tuesday, comes as the White House prepares to deliver its own new benchmark report in the second week of September, along with congressional testimony from Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. They are expected to describe significant security improvements and offer at least some promise for political reconciliation in Iraq.

The draft provides a stark assessment of the tactical effects of the current U.S.-led counteroffensive to secure Baghdad. "While the Baghdad security plan was intended to reduce sectarian violence, U.S. agencies differ on whether such violence has been reduced," it states. While there have been fewer attacks against U.S. forces, it notes, the number of attacks against Iraqi civilians remains unchanged. It also finds that "the capabilities of Iraqi security forces have not improved."

"Overall," the report concludes, "key legislation has not been passed, violence remains high, and it is unclear whether the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion in reconstruction funds," as promised. While it makes no policy recommendations, the draft suggests that future administration assessments "would be more useful" if they backed up their judgments with more details and "provided data on broader measures of violence from all relevant U.S. agencies."

That last bit is pretty damn close to a verbal bitch slap, if translated from Stateliness to English: George W. Bush, you stop sayin' shit you can't back up!

Good advice, and so likely to be ignored it's hilarious!

The other thing to note is that the report was leaked to the Post before its official release because some unnamed government official was convinced it would otherwise be falsely redacted into a ray of sunshine. The response from the White House boils down to "Petraeus! Crocker!" which, okay, is also nothing surprising. But do let's remember that the general and the ambassador, whose relative credibility the administration hopes to hide behind, are going to be delivering a report scripted by the administration; it's not like there's going to be any more reason to trust it than to trust the NIE.

Wednesday afternoon roundup.

Blogging may or may not be light for the next few days, depending on which way the wind blows. Don't worry, though - it's not that I don't love you!

Anyway, the stuff that's on my radar at the moment:

1) Over in Pakistan, it looks like Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto may be cutting a deal whereby he extends his anti-democratic powers a bit longer and she gets her husband back into the big-time corruption game; insofar as it might lead to some continuing degree of stability, nobody on our side of the Pacific seems inclined to complain too loudly. [I'm not saying I have any better solutions, here.] But will the sudden return of Nawaz Sharif throw everything into confusion? It's like a soap opera, only with nukes!

2) It's two years after Katrina, and New Orleans is still bleeding. If you want details, I'd recommend having Steve Benen break your heart.

3) So, Iraq. Turns out we might be even less welcome there in a few months.

In May 2003, just weeks after the overthrow of Iraq’s government, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483 recognized “the Authority” — which was to say “the occupying powers under unified command” — as Iraq’s effective legal government.

In October 2003, it took a further step and mandated that the United States-led multinational force establish security and stability in Iraq. While noting that this mandate would expire within a year, the council expressed its “readiness to consider on that occasion any future need for the continuation of the multinational force, taking into account the views of an internationally recognized, representative government of Iraq.”

In June 2004, Security Council Resolution 1546 stipulated that “by 30 June 2004, the occupation will end and the Coalition Provisional Authority will cease to exist, and that Iraq will reassert its full sovereignty.” Subsequently, as sovereign Iraq has moved by stages through elections and complex deliberations to the formation of its current government, the United Nations has renewed the mandate for the multinational force at the request of successive Iraqi prime ministers — Ibrahim al-Jaafari in 2005 and Nuri Kamal al-Maliki last year.

The current mandate expires at the end of December. Will it be renewed? In June, the Iraqi Parliament passed a bill requiring that the next renewal should not be made without its advice and consent. Mr. Maliki has not signed the bill and could conceivably veto it. However, given the worsening of his relations with Washington, it seems increasingly likely he will give it his signature and, come December, do as it instructs.

The Iraqi Parliament, for its part, has already passed a nonbinding resolution calling for a timetable for a withdrawal of foreign forces. If it voted in December not to seek a renewal of the mandate, the American troops deployed in Iraq would be there illegally.

Would this legal difference make a material difference? The Bush administration is of course unlikely to give too much heed to any Security Council resolution. But the expiration of the mandate may matter greatly to the Iraqis, even to the point of becoming the signal for a general uprising of Shiites against foreign forces.

So, y'know the way our discourse over the past week or so has been revisiting the subject of engineering a soft coup and getting rid of Maliki? Well, it might behoove us to recall that the Iraqi government - elected, as you may recall, by honest-to-God Iraqis with purple fingers - can, in fact, fuck us over pretty seriously if backed into a corner.

4) On the up-side, Qntal is turning out to be awesome!

The president wants to make me vomit!

Do you know how hard it is to type with your head between your knees?

The United States demanded Tuesday that Iran end any support for extremists in Iraq "at once" and raised the specter of a "nuclear holocaust" in the Middle East if Tehran gets atomic weapons.

US President George W. Bush branded the Islamic Republic "the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism," citing its backing of Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Shiite fighters killing US troops in Iraq.

"And Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust," he told the American Legion veterans group.

"Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere, and the United States is rallying friends and allies to isolate Iran's regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late," he said.

Bush, whose speech was billed a defense of US efforts in Iraq, said Tehran must starve Shiite fighters in Iraq of weapons, equipment and training whether or not Iran's leaders know about such operations and have given their blessing.

See that? It's Iran's fault even if the Iranian government doesn't know what's going on!

I feel like I should be mentioning all the explosives we failed to secure at the start of the war, or all the U.S. weaponry that's gone missing, or that special way we have of arming Sunni insurgents against al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and hoping they won't turn around and use those weapons against the Shi'ites or, say, us, or even some allusion to the superior volume of craziness coming out of Saudi Arabia, but every time I start to try the bile goes right up to the back of my throat and, oh, God, here it comes again!

I remember when blogging was at least occasionally about happy things. About comic books and Japanese cartoons and the uncontrollable sexiness of archaeology. Now, man, every post is following some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Is it because I'm a born again political grind? Is it because my hard-cultivated dorkishness is behind me?

No. It's because the president of Wonderland can't stop lying and wants to blow up the planet!

That's it. I can't take any more.

Have a picture of a kitten on a pony.





EDIT: I do not endorse dressing up kittens and putting them on ponies. It is, in fact, an offense against all that is good and decent, and I never, ever would have posted this photo had I not snapped like a cheap banjo.

That will be all.

I guess nobody did anything wrong at Abu Ghraib, then!

Whew!

A military jury acquitted an Army officer on Tuesday of charges that he failed to properly train and supervise enlisted soldiers involved in detainee interrogations in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where prisoners were subjected to brutal treatment.

. . .

Colonel Jordan, 51, was the only officer to stand trial on charges related to the detainee-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, which led to prolonged investigations and charges against several soldiers.

Colonel Jordan’s acquittal on most charges means that no officers have been found criminally responsible for the abuses at the prison.

Actually, that's selective quoting. The fact is, Colonel Jordan was found guilty of a lesser charge, and could face up to five years in jail.

Wait for it . . .

He disobeyed a direct order not to talk about the case.

Seriously, I don't know whether Jordan contributed to the abuses or not - and, for all my snark, I don't think he should get pounded on by the military judiciary just to prove a point. The article quoted above suggests that the prosecution didn't make much of a case, and, if so, the system did what it should.

Still, the optics here are obviously terrible: Abu Ghraib was probably the single most prominent disgrace the U.S. military has suffered since Vietnam, and until individuals are held responsible, it's on the whole institution.

If the subject wasn't Iraq, I'd probably move on to the larger question of justice here, but . . . well, the whole damn place is an ongoing crime. "Justice" generally amounts to imposing a sense of (ideally fair) resolution, and that's way beyond us now.

Turkish update.

An observant Muslim with a background in Islamic politics was voted in on Tuesday as president, breaking an 84-year grip on power by the secular establishment and ushering a new religious middle class from Turkey’s heartland into the center of the staunchly secular state.

Lawmakers approved Abdullah Gul, a 56-year-old economist, with 339 votes, far above the simple majority required in the 550-member Parliament. Two candidates shared another 83 votes. The main party of the secular establishment boycotted the balloting.

The selection of Mr. Gul ended four months of political standoff that began when Turkey’s secular establishment and military, vehemently opposed to his candidacy, blocked it in May, forcing a national election last month.

But Mr. Gul’s party, Justice and Development, refused to back down, and his success was a rare occasion in Turkish history in which a party prevailed against the military.

There was no immediate statement from the military, which has ousted four elected governments since 1960. But its unspoken reaction was frosty: No military commander attended Mr. Gul’s inaugural ceremony, a highly unusual departure from protocol, considering that he is now the commander in chief.

Here's hoping it all works out - it's a win for democracy, in a sense, but American politics have taught me to be wary of religion-on-the-sleeve sorts who can appoint judges.

The New York Times badly misses the point.

Okay, so, in their "analysis" piece on Gonzales's departure, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and her editors give us this:

Even so, Mr. Bartlett said, the administration goes into its final 17 months “clear-eyed” about the likelihood that Democrats will continue to press oversight inquiries in an effort to keep knocking Mr. Bush back on his heels.

Republicans have long warned that if Mr. Gonzales quit, it would only embolden the Democrats, and that was the case on Monday as Democrats celebrated what they saw as a victory and another indication of the changed balance of power in Washington.

Yeah, some of that was paraphrasing Dan Bartlett, but some of it pretty strongly embraced his point in the author's own voice. The point? That Gonzales was taken down by the Democrats just because it benefited them politically. There's no mention of the politicization of Justice, there's no reference to the attorney firings or the assault on John Ashcroft or the flood of misleading testimony to Congress - the narrative is that poor Fredo went down because that's just the way power politics in Washington work.

And, hey! If you look really closely, you may note that the people directly quoted in the article are . . . hm . . . retired Bushie Dan Bartlett, retired Bushie Ari Fleischer, Republican senator John Sununu, and (to be fair) Southern Methodist University political scientist Calvin C. Jillson.

Did nobody at the Times see a problem with that? Really?

The latest from Iraq.

Maliki, under serious pressure, has . . . well, basically, he's hammered together a press conference's worth of good news.

Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, and fellow leaders in the country have reached consensus on key areas of national reconciliation, under mounting US pressure to demonstrate political progress on the eve of a key report to Congress on the Baghdad security "surge".

The Shia prime minister appeared on television flanked by Jalal Talabani, the country's Kurdish president, and the Sunni vice-president, Tareq al-Hashemi, to announce a deal on easing restrictions on former members of the Ba'ath party joining the civil service and military.

Easing de-Ba'athification laws passed after the 2003 US invasion has long been seen as a vital step if disenchanted Sunnis, who formed the backbone of Saddam Hussein's regime and, since its fall, of the insurgency, are to be persuaded to take part in Iraqi political life.

Agreement was also reported on holding provincial elections and releasing detainees held without charge across the country, two more of the "benchmarks" set by the Bush administration for political movement it hopes will stave off mounting congressional demands for a withdrawal from Iraq.

It was not immediately clear how, or when, these moves would be implemented and how far they would go to reversing the almost total Sunni boycott of the cabinet - the centre of Mr Maliki's difficulties.

As to that last point, let's just say early responses are guarded.

Sunni politicians applauded goals set down in an agreement hammered out by the country's top leaders under intense American pressure but expressed doubt Monday that the U.S.-backed prime minister would actually see them through.

. . .

Some key Sunni figures dismissed the agreement as a stalling tactic by al-Maliki to ease pressure from Washington.

"Our position is that this meeting represents a new phase of procrastination and does not honestly aim at solving the problems quickly," said Khalaf al-Ilyan, a leader of the Sunni bloc, the Iraqi Accordance Front. "I think that no real or practical solution will come out of this."

Another Front leader, Adnan al-Dulaimi, said the accord included "good decisions that would serve the whole Iraqi people."

"But we doubt that they will be implemented," he said. "All our experience with al-Maliki indicates that this is another new set of delaying measures. They give you a glimmer of hope, but at the end of the day you get nothing but promises."

That's the problem in Iraq today: the cynicism!

*cough*

Of course, even if it all comes to pass, what we're talking about here is a desperate effort from the current governing coalition to connect with the people who actually have been participating in the political process for years - relative moderates who became alienated; the insurgency and the multi-faceted civil war and all the rest are a whole other scene. When George Bush offers this as proof we're winning . . . well, I'd take it with a grain of salt until you get proof the Iraqis aren't getting massacred.

"It's morning in America, Paul."

Alberto Gonzales has resigned. [The Reaganesque quote isn't just a Wall-brand piece of whimsy, by the way. See here.]

My response to this is more complicated than I might have expected. Gonzales' departure is a necessary precondition to improvement, true, but it's not like Bush and Cheney won't be out to install another supine hack. Even if they don't try for a recess appointment, I don't have great faith in the congressional vetting process while Team Bush has the "Terror! Terror! 9/11! Security! Terror!" card to fall back on. So: experience-based pessimism on the house-cleaning front. In fact, I feel like I'm waiting to be kicked.

On the other hand, while most of my focus has been on how awful an A.G. Gonzales has been on the basis of his total support for the crass subversion of Justice's mandate toward political (and, to my mind, quasi-criminal) ends, it's worth remembering that he's awful on a more personal level as well. This is not a man who should have the power to expedite death sentences, for one thing, and now he won't.

Plus, his paycheck isn't coming out of our tax dollars anymore. That can't help but make you smile!

Very good, if true.

Iran appears not to have significantly expanded its uranium enrichment program this summer, a development that has many experts wondering whether the threat of sanctions finally has had an impact on the Iranian government.

Experts won't know for sure if Iran has paused its program until a report this week from a team of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, who were in Iran last week for the third round of inspections this summer. A public debate on the report is scheduled for the IAEA's Sept. 10 meeting.

But after five years of frustration at a lack of Iranian cooperation, those who closely follow Iran's nuclear program believe that Iran's resumption of IAEA inspections coupled with the apparent halt in expansion may signal that the Islamic Republic is willing to compromise.

Not for the first time: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wasn't elected because the Iranians wanted a raging theo-fascist; he was elected because he ran on a platform of economic populism when the Iranian people were really materially dissatisfied. But, of course, things have gotten worse with him in office (see: shortage, gasoline), and could well continue to do so. The rules of the Iranian pseudo-democracy make him and his regime vulnerable to targeted sanctions in a way that almost no other bad actor in international politics is, and so - to a lesser extent, granted - is the theocratic establishment behind/beside him.

Pragmatism: still occasionally cool.

Anyway, the article quoted above is here, and, hey, kudos to McClatchy for putting it together.

Want to know more about the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps?

Particularly the way it's spread its tendrils across the length and breadth of the Iranian economy? My friends, you're in luck!

Success, part two.

Just to follow up on my last update on the hidden shadow of the surge, I bring you more joy from the AP wire.

This year's U.S. troop buildup has succeeded in bringing violence in Baghdad down from peak levels, but the death toll from sectarian attacks around the country is running nearly double the pace from a year ago.

Some of the recent bloodshed appears the result of militant fighters drifting into parts of northern Iraq, where they have fled after U.S.-led offensives. Baghdad, however, still accounts for slightly more than half of all war-related killings _ the same percentage as a year ago, according to figures compiled by The Associated Press.

The tallies and trends offer a sobering snapshot after an additional 30,000 U.S. troops began campaigns in February to regain control of the Baghdad area. It also highlights one of the major themes expected in next month's Iraq progress report to Congress: some military headway, but extremist factions are far from broken.

In street-level terms, it means life for average Iraqis appears to be even more perilous and unpredictable.

The AP tracking includes Iraqi civilians, government officials, police and security forces killed in attacks such as gunfights and bombings, which are frequently blamed on Sunni suicide strikes. It also includes execution-style killings _ largely the work of Shiite death squads.

The figures are considered a minimum based on AP reporting. The actual numbers are likely higher, as many killings go unreported or uncounted. Insurgent deaths are not a part of the Iraqi count.

Specific numbers follow in the actual article. They're not a lot of fun.

Now, it's worth noting that certain of the Bushies' familiar shills are out pushing a different story on Iraqi casualties, but given that (1) there's not a whole lot of credibility there to begin with, and (2) the story is basically "I've seen data that you can't see, and, trust me, it's great!" I don't see much cause for optimism. There's a bit more on the matter over here, if you're in the mood to feed your cynicism.

And the latest . . .

Three secularist ministers who were already boycotting meetings of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's cabinet will formally quit the government, their bloc said on Friday.

Mind you, these are members of Ayad Allawi's bloc, and since he seems to be agitating for Maliki's job . . . well, it's probably destabilization for profit, rather than just as a sign of despair.

Not that that makes things better for the Iraqi government, obviously.



EDIT: It's a few days old now, but Marc Lynch has a post up with a few thoughts on the formation of a different governing coalition. I'd somehow missed this, but Iraq's "majority" bloc has frayed to the point where it doesn't actually represent a parliamentary majority anymore, and apparently Sistani is hinting he may bail on them - which is to say, Allawi may really be getting all his ducks in a row.

More annoyance toward Hillary Clinton.

When I saw this . . .

"It's a horrible prospect to ask yourself, 'What if? What if?' But if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world," Clinton told supporters in Concord.

"So I think I'm the best of the Democrats to deal with that," she added.

. . . I got exasperated.

Then, quite naturally, I went looking to see if anyone else had said what I wanted to say, so I could spare myself some effort. Thankfully, Matt Yglesias is the answer. It's a short post, and it won't hurt you, but if you're absolutely determined to settle for a snarky soundbite, I'd go with, "I think the Democrat best positioned to deal with GOP political mobilization in a post-attack environment is going to be the one who isn't reflexively inclined to see failed Republican policies resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Americans as a political advantage for the Republicans."

But, really, it's not his only point. Go read the thing, dammit!

Anyway, yes, at this stage she's the last of the major Democratic candidates I trust to deal well with toughness huckstering. Particularly this week - IMHO, she's already given Bush way too much rhetorical ground with her "new tactics are working, they're just too late" speech. We're getting an increasing amount of nonsense from the commentariat about the Democrats being on the defensive in September because of all the good news coming from Iraq, and that's in no small part because the Democratic front runner is out there implying there's meaningfully good news coming from Iraq. [Not to knock the Sunni insurgents' turn against al-Qaeda in Iraq in Anbar, but it really isn't the same thing as the Sunni insurgents suddenly deciding to embrace the central Iraqi government.]

As for today's soundbite: well, once again, it's a concession she doesn't need to make. I think the overall message is supposed to be that she understands the way the political game is played and is therefore canny; I also think it's a dumb message. See, again, the words of Matt Yglesias.

Success.

The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves.

Despite some evidence that the troop buildup has improved security in certain areas, sectarian violence continues and American-led operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of additional troops arrived, the studies show.

The data track what are known as internally displaced Iraqis: those who have been driven from their neighborhoods and seek refuge elsewhere in the country rather than fleeing across the border. The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed areas in the center of Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north.

Though most displaced Iraqis say they would like to return, there is little prospect of their doing so. One Sunni Arab who had been driven out of the Baghdad neighborhood of southern Dora by Shiite snipers said she doubted that her family would ever return, buildup or no buildup.

“There is no way we would go back,” said the woman, 26, who gave her name only as Aswaidi. “It is a city of ghosts. The only people left there are terrorists.”

Statistics collected by one of the two humanitarian groups, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, indicate that the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000, since the buildup started in February.

Those figures are broadly consistent with data compiled independently by an office in the United Nations that specializes in tracking wide-scale dislocations. That office, the International Organization for Migration, found that in recent months the rate of displacement in Baghdad, where the buildup is focused, had increased by as much as a factor of 20, although part of that rise could have stemmed from improved monitoring of displaced Iraqis by the government in Baghdad, the capital.

Suddenly, we're getting a fair number of Democrats who are mumbling about the surge being a military success, albeit one that doesn't bring with it the desired political goals. By some metrics, I'm sure that's true.

On the other hand, the militias are usurping control of the Iraqi electrical grid and, again, it looks like at least six hundred thousand people have had to give up their homes since the start of the surge. And then there's the infrastructure in a broader sense. It seems like it would be kinda hard to make the case that things are getting vastly better for the Iraqi populace.

But, then, they probably won't be mentioned much in September's speeches.

I suggest Santa Claus!

Leading Democratic Party presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton, has urged the Iraqi parliament to get rid of embattled Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki saying he was not up to the job.

She was speaking after Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, hinted after a two-day visit to Iraq that Maliki should go.

Levin had "confirmed that the Iraqi government's failures have reinforced the widely held view that the Maliki government is non-functional and cannot produce a political settlement, because it is too beholden to religious and sectarian leaders," Clinton said in a statement.

"I share Senator Levin's hope that the Iraqi parliament will replace Prime Minister Maliki with a less divisive and more unifying figure when it returns in a few weeks."

Me, too! My idea's in the title line!

Seriously, it was bad enough when it was just Levin making these noises, but now it's becoming a meme. Among the Democrats, no less!

Again: Maliki's a survivor. He's taking the steps he's taking because, by and large, a majority of the Iraqi parliament supports them. Back at election time, the Iraqi people, who didn't feel safe, tended to vote for sectarian politicians who were then expected to look out for the interests and security of their home demographic - and so, surprise! Those politicians are now taking relatively non-communitarian positions.

Maliki may not be an inspirational figure, but he's not the main problem, and it doesn't require a PhD to see that - and so grumbling about the necessity of removing him just seems like an effort to create another empty benchmark. If he goes now, the chattering classes can all pretend that something positive has been accomplished for a few giddy weeks.

If somebody can give us some serious, defensible ideas for improving stability over there, I'd love to hear them. Genuinely.

But calling for governmental reboots in the hopes that Islamic Dawa, the Sadrists, and the Kurds will all suddenly agree on an Iraqi Nelson Mandela isn't in any way serious and defensible. It's either the product of panic or it's deeply cynical.

Bad show, Senator Clinton.



EDIT: Which certainly isn't to say the Maliki government is doing a good job. Just, again, that the problems aren't likely to be solved by a quick fix.

The most depressing quote of the day.

. . .

Man, I hope that's not overoptimistic.

Anyway, from the ever-insightful Glenn Greenwald:

Think about how amazing this is. McConnell clearly described that in 1978, we enacted a law prohibiting warrantless eavesdropping; the Bush administration broke that law repeatedly; and the telecommunications companies actively participated in that lawbreaking. And now -- as a matter of national security -- the Bush administration is demanding that Congress pass a new law declaring that telecom companies are immune from any and all consequences -- both civil and criminal -- in the event they are found to have violated the law. It is hard to imagine open contempt for the rule of law being expressed more explicitly than this.

What possible reason is there to protect anyone -- including telecom companies -- with a special law enacted to declare that they are relieved of all accountability for illegal behavior? And the premise of this argument is even more dangerous than the conclusion: it is all premised on the claim that these companies were only acting at the behest of George Bush, and therefore were entitled, even obligated, to do what they did. In other words, the President has the power to order private actors to break the law and when those orders are obeyed, the private actors are immune from the consequences of their lawbreaking, because they acted at the Leader's behest.

That government officials like McConnell feel so comfortable openly admitting that the government broke the law, obtaining amendments to legalize that behavior after the fact, and then demanding immunity for the lawbreakers, demonstrates how severely the rule of law has been eroded over the last six years. It is not hyperbole to say that government lawbreaking has become formally legitimized.

Whoa.

Man, good luck to the Burmese on this one.

In a rare public demonstration in Myanmar, hundreds of people marched Wednesday in the country’s largest city to protest steep increases in fuel costs that have driven up the prices of transportation and commodities, according to witnesses and news reports.

The protesters in the commercial capital, Yangon, formerly Rangoon, dispersed after being confronted by a militant youth group organized by the government. Several were taken away in cars, The Associated Press reported.

That was a fairly amazing act of courage on the protesters' part - here's hoping the generals resist the urge to be thuggish just this once.

There are no dumb wars.

Yep, President Bush has announced that pulling out of Vietnam was really all about America stabbing itself and the world in the back - and, of course, that leaving Iraq would be even worse.

Mr. Bush accused the Congress of planning to “pull the rug out from under” American troops. He said the American pullout from Vietnam more than 32 years ago was to blame for millions of deaths in Cambodia and Vietnam, and for putting a dent in American credibility that lasts to this day.

“Then, as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence, and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Mr. Bush told an audience at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention here today. “The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.”

. . .

“The question now before us comes down to this,” he said. “Will today’s generation of Americans resist the deceptive allure of retreat, and do in the Middle East what veterans in this room did in Asia?”

. . .

“In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule, in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution,” Mr. Bush said. “In Vietnam, former allies of the United States, and government workers, and intellectuals, and businessmen, were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.”

Mr. Bush acknowledged the long debate over whether the United States military should ever have been in Vietnam in the first place: “Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’”

I don't even know where to begin.

The Cambodian claims seem completely nonsensical - there's a good start. Yes, the Khmer Rouge regime was one of the worst in the history of the world, but it was actually overthrown by the Communist Vietnamese. The war between Vietnam and Cambodia started literally the day after the fall of Saigon! In fact, as I understand it, there was a certain amount of support in America for the mass-murdering Cambodians in that conflict because they were backed by the relatively tolerable Chinese, while the Vietnamese had closer ties to the Soviet Union.

See, that was the Cold War. It was harder than people give it credit for these days.

Anyway, the main thing we'd done for Cambodia in the days before it fell to the Khmer Rouge was illegally bomb it. The last ruinous years of the Vietnam War did indeed have terrible effects next door, but I think it's fair to say that we were in no better position to fix them than anybody else - in fact, the Khmer Rouge probably never would have materialized at all had we not gone to Asia in first place. Call me crazy, but I'd say that by the mid-`70s we were not agents of stability in that part of the world.

As for "winning" in Vietnam itself - okay, I'm not a scholar of the period, so I can't say with absolute certainty that the U.S. armed forces had been structurally depleted by its deployments from `64 to `73. Still, based on the degradation of military readiness we've seen over the course of our time in Iraq, it seems remarkably likely that even our industrial-military complex was strained to its limits. Plus, of course, there was a much higher mortality rate among the military personnel than we see today.

But, fine, set all that aside: pretend we had infinitely deep resources. Pretend that American hostility to the war was just a failure of will rather than a rational appraisal of the situation, and that Gerald Ford could've turned the popular sentiment around if he'd just had the common sense to be George W. Bush, visionary. Pretend every single thing within America's borders was as the president would want it to have been.

In Vietnam, we'd still have been trying to prop up a corrupt, widely hated, fundamentally illegitimate regime. It's appropriate to judge Hồ Chí Minh's regime by its later excesses, sure, but let's not overlook the fact that it was largely the culmination of a genuine, organized nationalist movement - just one that happened to get suborned by the Communists while we sat back and quibbled over the proper boundaries of French imperialism. Nguyễn Văn Thiệu was never going to become a man of the people - the very best we could have reasonably hoped for if we'd extended the war (which, remember, had already resulted in a million and a half dead) and somehow "won" it would've been a pro-American strongman who did a lot of harm to his people in the short term and eventually democratized. Maybe it would've been better off by now than it actually turned out, but I sure as hell wouldn't count on it.

Meanwhile, geopolitically, the war was a bust. The Domino Theory didn't play out after South Vietnam fell - in fact, as far as I can tell, the Third Indochina War (Vietnam vs. China, following bad days for the Khmer Rouge) probably accelerated the disassociation between China and the USSR, which, y'know, was good for us.

And the damage done to American credibility? Come on now, George - isn't it part of the Republican Creed that Ronald Reagan undid all that in the `80s? Yes, the people who lived through the war and believed in it were traumatized by the way it all played out, but - though it might well amaze them - they don't represent global opinion.

So, in short: this is deranged. Bush apparently has to believe that the irreführender-geist of American omnipotence and righteousness in which he's so desperately fixated emanates throughout the American timeline; there were no wars which were not just wars, and there were no wars we couldn't have won. The extent to which war might exist as a strategic tool to achieve ends that, hey, we've pretty much otherwise achieved . . . well, it goes right by him.

By the way, one might suggest that if the president really wants to avoid repeating the tragedy of the boat people, one obvious step would be to toss Ellen Sauerbrey overboard and put someone with a mandate for real action in charge of the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

Ah, but I miss his point. Whatever the surge has done, it's utterly failed to clear the ground for national reconciliation in Iraq - the Sunnis have fled the government, and we're reduced to muttering darkly about replacing one Islamic Dawa Party prime minister with another Islamic Dawa Party prime minister. We don't seem to have any other next step, unless it's to do with threatening Iran - nothing but continuing to use the same blunt tools we've used all along. Bush can't admit that, though, because to him it would represent that darn failure of will - or, rather, it would mean admitting he was wrong. In his world, I guess that's pretty much the same thing.



LATE EDIT: Josh Marshall says a lot of the above better.

What Eric Martin says.

We already went through this about a year and a half ago when we decided that the sectarian dynamic in Iraq was mostly the fault of then-Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari (the head of the Islamist Dawa Party that was sharing power with other Shiite religious parties such as SCIRI, Fadhila and the Sadrists as part of the dominant UIA Shiite coalition).

So we pressured, connived and leaned on the Shiites, eventually compelling them to replace Dawa's number one guy (Jaafari) with...Dawa's number two guy (Nuri al-Maliki)! Because that was likely to change the agenda dramatically. It would be like impeaching Bush in the expectation that Cheney would restore sanity to the White House.

The larger point being that Maliki - like Jaafari - is not an aberration or an outlier. He is not a loose cannon, rogue element or unorthodox figure. Nuri al-Maliki is a predictable, unremarkable product of the sectarian, communal mindset that dominates Iraqi political life. He is not acting against the wishes of his colleagues, but in furtherance of them. I'd love to hear what Senator Levin has in mind in terms of parliamentary coalitions that would elect this new, less sectarian prime minister.

As an example of how meager the prospects are, there has been talk about a palace coup involving none other than Ibrahim Jaafari himself acting in a bid to oust his Dawa Party-mate Maliki. I doubt such a reset would achieve what Senator Levin wants though considering Jaafari's track record. Then, of course, is the serial discussion of the Ayad Allawi putsch - which is about as implausible as a new, less sectarian Jaafari. The problem with Allawi is, and has always been, that he is vastly more popular in American circles than Iraqi. Yet by some cruel twist of irony, it's the Iraqis who get to actually vote, what with their purple stained fingers and all.

The bottom line is that If you call on an Iraqi parliament comprised of the same elements to replace Maliki, it is unlikely that the replacement prime minister will be any less "sectarian" or more unifying. If a prime minister attempted to rule in such a manner, he would be promptly sacked. By his very electors.

From here, yo.

I'll just add that the American insistence that the Iraqi government should be reshuffled every time our political classes want some cover also has the effect of undermining what little legitimacy the Baghdad regime has. If this is a cunning plan to inspire them to push back and demonstrate independence, okay, but if it's just mouthing off . . . well, I hope it's being done with the awareness that this isn't a junior high school social studies project run amok. There are actual consequences to foot in mouth disease.

There's something wrong with George Bush. And the Washington Post.

This is from yesterday's paper; sorry I didn't get to it then.

By the time he arrived in Prague in June for a democracy conference, President Bush was frustrated. He had committed his presidency to working toward the goal of "ending tyranny in our world," yet the march of freedom seemed stalled. Just as aggravating was the sense that his own government was not committed to his vision.

As he sat down with opposition leaders from authoritarian societies around the world, he gave voice to his exasperation. "You're not the only dissident," Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. "I too am a dissident in Washington."

That, for the record, is the president of the United States telling a man who was thrown in jail for standing up to Hosni Mubarak that their experiences are roughly equivalent. Presiding over Washington bureaucracy? It's like never knowing if you'll get to see your family again!

Whatever. It's not like it's unheard of for this president to have failures of humility - and at least this one didn't get anybody killed.

Still, there's something surreal about the Post playing along with the man's martyr complex on the front page. Let's go back to that quote above and continue a little bit farther.

As he sat down with opposition leaders from authoritarian societies around the world, he gave voice to his exasperation. "You're not the only dissident," Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. "I too am a dissident in Washington. Bureaucracy in the United States does not help change. It seems that Mubarak succeeded in brainwashing them."

If he needed more evidence, he would soon get it. In his speech that day, Bush vowed to order U.S. ambassadors in unfree nations to meet with dissidents and boasted that he had created a fund to help embattled human rights defenders. But the State Department did not send out the cable directing ambassadors to sit down with dissidents until two months later. And to this day, not a nickel has been transferred to the fund he touted.

See, as written, that seems to suggest that Bush came marching home, gave orders, and was ignored by the people below him. Come see the apathy inherent in the system!

The thing is, this is the executive branch. It's Bush's own little fiefdom. You know the way Alberto Gonzales fired US Attorneys for failing to use their prosecutorial powers to benefit Republicans in close races? Well, Condoleezza Rice could do exactly the same thing to State Department employees who were resisting sending out cables. The president is in charge: if what the executive branch does doesn't reflect his will, then we would expect to see responses made. We didn't.

In fact, the article goes on to explore the extent to which America's failures in democracy-promotion have been due to an all too familiar combination of half-assed execution and expediency-driven compromise.

A random selection:

White House aides drafting a National Security Strategy in March 2006 included language decrying Russian backsliding on democracy. Senior Russia adviser Thomas E. Graham Jr. tried to soften it, an official said. The fight went all the way to Bush, who kept the wording.

Less than two months later, Vice President Cheney went to Lithuania to deliver the toughest U.S. indictment of Putin's leadership. But the next day, Cheney flew to oil-rich Kazakhstan and embraced its autocratic leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, with not a word of criticism. The juxtaposition made the talk of democracy look phony and provided ammunition to the Kremlin.

Another test came the same month. Bush was regularly meeting with dissidents from around the world, and he was set to host several Chinese religious rights activists. But Clark T. Randt Jr., a Bush friend serving as ambassador to China, "threw a fit," an official said, warning it would damage relations with Beijing. Bush aides compromised by moving the meeting from the Oval Office to the White House residence. (A spokeswoman said Randt was concerned that one particular invitee "was inappropriate.")

By fall, the compromises grew more serious. When tanks rolled through Bangkok in a military coup overthrowing Thailand's elected prime minister, Bush was at the United Nations delivering a speech on democracy. But Bush mustered no outrage on behalf of the ousted Thai leader and left town without seeing him, even though he was also at the United Nations. The National Security Council pushed for a stronger response, but the State Department and the office of the vice president resisted. "OVP has this little-girl crush on strongmen," said an official on the losing side.

In the end, Bush suspended $24 million in military aid only to watch China replace it. By May, the U.S. Navy was conducting exercises with the Thai military. And yesterday, the Thai military pushed through a new constitution limiting the role of elected officials once civilian rule is restored.

Now how much of that says President Dissident is taking an absolutist approach and being confounded by crafty underlings to you?

Look, diplomacy is all about picking one's fights, and maybe some of what Bush is grumbling about is probably ultimately defensible (though Laura Rozen might take issue with that). Not my point.

My point is that the man isn't a democratizing radical just because he says he is. When we let him define the kind of media coverage he gets . . . well, you get blather about his kinship to dissidents, which gives him way too much credit for courage and consistency.

[Unless you're talking about blocking the expansion of children's health coverage. By God, he's steadfast in that!]

It's not just me!

Dan Froomkin observes that the media echo chamber is gearing up for aggression against Iran (citing an article from the Post I'd somehow missed before). He even goes the extra mile and gives a few suggestions for spokespersons from the sane majority of the foreign policy community - and, yes, apparently it is a majority - who might be willing to go on camera and talk about why alienating the world, politically strengthening Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and killing a bunch of people could conceivably be a bad idea.

Of course, as Paul Pillar, "formerly the CIA’s top Middle East analysis and now a Georgetown University professor," notes: what really matters here isn't what turns up on television. It's how deluded Bush and Cheney are.

To quote Froomkin, "That’s a real concern: Pillar says he fears that one morning he’ll wake up to hear on the radio that U.S. warplanes are headed back from Iran."

Word.

And thanks to Kevin Drum for the link!

And thanks to Tylenol, just because!

They're hiding with the weapons of mass destruction!

For the first time, the U.S. military said on Sunday that Iranian soldiers are in Iraq training insurgents to attack American forces.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a top U.S. commander who is in charge of a large swath of Iraq south of Baghdad, believes there are about 50 members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps in his battlefield area, military spokeswoman Maj. Alayne Conway said.

Conway said that U.S.-led forces have not caught any of the Iranians, but she said military intelligence and recently discovered caches of weapons with Iranian markings on them indicate that the Iranians are there.

. . .

Spokeswoman Conway said that since April, the military has found 217 weapons in four provinces south of Baghdad that it suspects were supplied by Iran. She said the military has not caught any Iranians or Iraqis smuggling weapons across the Iran-Iraq border, but she believes it soon will.

"Just because we're not finding them doesn't mean they're not there," Conway said.

That last line is just too funny, in a bleak kind of way.

Anyway, as I keep on saying, it's not like I'd be totally shocked to find that elements of the Quds Force are offering off-the-books support of some kind or another to the Mahdi Army - bearing in mind that the Mahdi Army's political side is actually a key member of Iraq's current governing coalition. I could (and, in fact, do) wish it weren't so, but it is.

But, that said, the facts seem awfully light on the ground - and the people who want us to look past them and see Iranian acts of war are the same people who wanted us to see a case for invading Iraq in a bunch of trailers and poorly described aluminum tubes. So, basically, I'm not even going to bother starting up my "appropriate responses" speech here - there's nothing worth responding to.

You should be reading something else right now.

Specifically: this, an op-ed from seven soldiers who're winding up a fifteen month tour in Iraq - one of them was actually wounded (shot in the head, in fact) while the article was being composed. It's a piece that could do serious harm to their military careers, I should add, even though their ultimate goal isn't withdrawal. They're basically just calling for a realistic assessment of what's going on in Mesopotamia.

The closer you get to the Pentagon, the less popular that position is likely to be.

Anyway, my ordinary approach to this would be to toss us a selection of paragraphs from the main article. The problem in that is that the essay in question is just too good; it runs down the facts very efficiently, even gracefully, and I don't think I'd enjoy chopping it up and handing you scattered paragraphs - not without a lot more cold medicine in my system, anyway. Read the whole thing if you have the chance.

The Alberto Gonzales compilation.

No doubt inspired by the Village Voice's takedown of the great lies of Rudy Giuliani, Paul Kiel lists six demonstrable whoppers from our beloved attorney general. My only quibble is that it is, of course, premature to say they're the biggest and the worst - the hits haven't stopped comin', kids!

"Witnesses said the spire bell clanged horribly in the seconds before it tumbled down."

A day after a powerful earthquake devastated cities along Peru’s southern coast, government officials put the death toll at 437, with at least 17,000 people displaced and with wide areas without power, telephone service or road access on Thursday night.

At least 300 of the dead were in Pisco, a port city about 125 miles south of Lima, and more were thought to be buried in rubble, local officials said. Dozens were inside the San Clemente cathedral, which was full for Mass when the quake caused it to cave in around 6:40 p.m. on Wednesday.

More here, if you can bear it.

Oxfam (Oxfam America, anyway) is accepting donations toward Peruvian relief efforts here.

From Abu Aardvark . . .

. . . more bad news.

Lost in the reporting of the unbelievable horrific terrorist attack in northern Iraq is a bit of a political bombshell. Al-Arabiya is reporting that the emergency political summit of Iraq's leaders has failed to produce even nominal political reconciliation. This is a devastating outcome for the Maliki government and for those Americans who hoped to have some political progress to show in the upcoming Crocker/Petraeus report. There's no other way to spin this: this summit was billed as the last chance, and it has failed.

The background is that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani had called an emergency political summit to deal with the political crisis sparked by the withdrawal of the Sunni al-Tawafuq Bloc and the suspension of participation by the members of Iyad Allawi's Iraq Bloc from Maliki's government. Much of the Iraqi and Arab press portrayed this as a last-chance effort to salvage the Maliki government, certainly before the Petraeus-Crocker report but probably for good. Talabani summoned Maliki (Dawa, in his capacity as Prime Minister), Massoud Barzani (in his capacity as head of the Kurdish region), Adel Abd a-Mahdi (SIIC, in his capacity as Vice President), and Tareq al-Hashemi (Iraqi Islamic Party/Tawafuq Bloc, in his capacity as Vice President). Hashemi, after much back and forth about the invitation, agreed to attend. Iyad Allawi's bloc was pointedly not invited, despite his public indications that he was quite available. Nor were the Sadrists.

I thought there was at least a chance that they would cobble something together out of desperation and find ways to lure the Sunni parties back in - if for no other reason than that, by the accounts I've seen, American officials on the sidelines were heavily pressuring them to come back with something. It probably wouldn't have resolved the underlying problems (government spokesman Ali Dabbagh made it clear in advance that no substantive issues would be discussed), but I thought they might well emerge with a face-saving compromise. They did not. Instead, Talabani announced the formation of a new four party coalition in support of the current government without any Sunni representation. What's left is a government stripped to its sectarian base - the two Kurdish parties and the two major Shia parties - and a world of political hurt.

There's more on the other side of the link - including a whole host of other links. Want to know more about Saudi unease? Likely future mistakes from Maliki and company? Quick analysis of the bad connotations of the word "majority?" Marc Lynch is your man.

Padilla.

One of the curious virtues of feeling like more than a tenth of a ton of blah is that it encourages brevity.

. . .

Okay, since that sentence doesn't read, "I'm sick, and I don't feel like writing much," it's not as convincing as it might be.

Whatever. I'm sick, and I don't feel like writing much, and in this particular case that's probably okay - there's not a whole lot to write. Jose Padilla was found guilty of everything with which he was charged. Abuse fatigue set in early on this one, so I haven't been following it as closely as I probably should've, but . . . hey, an abused terror suspect was convicted on a bunch of charges that were thrown out by an earlier judge and reinstituted by an appeals court whose jurisdiction includes Alabama and Georgia. The verdict may well be proper, but if it were the manifestation of irrational panic and misdirected faith in government authority it sure wouldn't look a whole lot different.

Adventures in categorization!

Okay, I'm starting to feel a certain edge of crappiness - apparently, seeing the Bourne Ultimatum invites disease - so I'm gonna keep this short and to the point. Wednesday's New York Times tells us . . .

The Bush administration is preparing to declare that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a foreign terrorist organization, senior administration officials said Tuesday.

If imposed, the declaration would signal a more confrontational turn in the administration’s approach to Iran and would be the first time that the United States has added the armed forces of any sovereign government to its list of terrorist organizations.

The Revolutionary Guard is thought to be the largest branch of Iran’s military. While the United States has long labeled Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism, a decision to single out the guard would amount to an aggressive new challenge from an American administration that has recently seemed conflicted over whether to take a harder line against Tehran over its nuclear program and what American officials have called its destabilizing role in Iraq.

. . .

A move toward putting the Revolutionary Guard on the foreign terrorist list would serve at least two purposes for Ms. Rice: to pacify, for a while, administration hawks who are pushing for possible military action, and to further press America’s allies to ratchet up sanctions against Iran in the Security Council.

See, I'm kinda wary of that. I'm not sure the other nations on the Security Council are going to be all that impressed by the Bush administration's exercises in labeling anymore - meanwhile, the only reason the Cheney-ites might be temporarily appeased by the terrorist designation is that it would make it all the easier to justify military action in a couple of months. Since I think military action is automatically unjustified because of its inability to accomplish its popular objectives (to say nothing of the inevitable loss of life and the inflammatory consequences to Iranian public opinion), I'd prefer it if the vice president's camp wasn't given any big PR gifts.

But, of course, the crazy train doesn't stop for me.

That said, it's not hard to imagine pro-Ahmadinejad factions within the Iranian military being in need of a good hard yank on the leash. So, if this is gonna happen, here's hoping it inspires the Chinese and the Russians to take a few steps to save us from ourselves.

. . .

I'm not saying it's realistic.

Rudy Giuliani: raving lunatic?

I haven't talked much about the Republican presidential field - in no small part because I have trouble taking any of the candidates seriously - but I guess there is a significant chance that Giuliani will be the candidate, and a smaller (but still terrifying!) possibility that he'll be next president, so I guess it behooves me to note that the guy is a foreign policy disaster waiting to happen. [He's also apparently a serial liar, but the consequences of that aren't necessarily as dramatic.]

The subject of the opinion burp to which that "disaster waiting to happen" line is linked is an essay Giuliani and his campaign have had published over at Foreign Affairs. In it, we learn that we're fighting an enemy that (a) includes al-Qaeda and Iran, and (b) is unified by "radical Islamic fascism, which uses the mask of religion to further totalitarian goals and aims to destroy the existing international system." [Never mind that Iran and al-Qaeda come from different currents of Islam and are actually ideologically antagonistic - and never mind that Iran, though profoundly fucked up, is a nation-state which tends to benefit from the existing international system.] We learn we gave up on Vietnam just as we were about to win. We learn that a missile defense system is absolutely essential to defeating the Terrorist Menace - because, of course, the nutters living in caves are aiming to replicate the military/technological footprint of the Soviet Union. [A case could be made for defending against North Korea, granted, but North Korea is never actually mentioned.] Diplomacy is good (which is a happy change, granted), but no one in Congress can ever take a position contrary to the president's, because that would weaken us. NATO should apparently become the Justice League - but the UN should be encouraged to dwindle into insignificance in favor of unnamed "other tools." Palestinians should shut up and accustom themselves to a stateless existence until Giuliani feels they can be trusted. Meanwhile, the U.S. should assemble a new military/civilian entity devoted entirely to nation-building.

I don't mean to suggest the piece is uniformly bad - I've got no problems with fortifying effective international institutions and setting up better nuclear screening systems at American borders - but the centerpiece is a generational struggle against an enemy that isn't even accurately defined. Meanwhile, for all the talk of realism, there's no discussion of the most significant constraints in play - not least our total lack of credibility on the international stage. Does he really think he's going to be able to intervene successfully in failing states, without vigorous international backing, through willpower alone? I mean, we've tried that. It doesn't work.

Particularly when, again, the people in charge of the government don't seem to know anything about the outside world.

I'm just sayin'.

The machinery of death gets an upgrade.

Say I give you an extended quote like this:

In June, former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Paul Charlton testified about the nonchalance with which Gonzales' Justice Department views executing U.S. citizens. Charlton's office had convicted Rios Rico on murder charges, but Charlton did not want to seek the death penalty. His reason: "If a government seeks to take another person's life it should do so on only the best of evidence." The government had not obtained the victim's body, and the Department had refused Charlton's request to cover the cost of exhuming it.

After the Department overruled Charlton, deciding to seek the death penalty, he asked to talk it over with the leadership. He spoke with Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and was subsequently told that McNulty had spent a "significant amount of time" with Gonzales on the issue -- as much as "5 to 10 minutes." When he asked to speak with Gonzales directly, he became an object of ridicule among Gonzales' senior staffers. After Charlton was fired, Department officials cited "insubordination" as one of the chief causes.

So that's how Gonzales has exercised his power over federal inmates.

What do you make of it? We're still in the Bush administration, so what is all that likely to signify?

Remember: our whole world is black humor!

Yep! Alberto Gonzales is about to receive expanded powers over death penalty cases in the states! Apparently, during the crafting of the update to the Patriot Act, some of the more bloodthirsty Republican congressmen inserted a provision that will transfer from the federal judiciary to the AG the authority to determine whether convicts on death row have received "adequate" representation, and should therefore be fast-tracked for the needle.

Let's flash back to the Texas days to see how seriously he takes this kind of responsibility, shall we? I only ask because I see a knife that needs twisting.

On the morning of May 6, 1997, Governor George W. Bush signed his name to a confidential three-page memorandum from his legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and placed a bold black check mark next to a single word: DENY. It was the twenty-ninth time a death-row inmate's plea for clemency had been denied in the twenty-eight months since Bush had been sworn in. In this case Bush's signature led, shortly after 6:00 P.M. on the very same day, to the execution of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old.

Washington's death was barely noted by the media, and the governor's office issued no statement about it. But the execution and the three-page memo that sealed Washington's fate—along with dozens of similar memoranda prepared for Bush—speak volumes about the way the clemency process was approached both by Bush and by Gonzales . . . .

During Bush's six years as governor 150 men and two women were executed in Texas—a record unmatched by any other governor in modern American history. Each time a person was sentenced to death, Bush received from his legal counsel a document summarizing the facts of the case, usually on the morning of the day scheduled for the execution, and was then briefed on those facts by his counsel; based on this information Bush allowed the execution to proceed in all cases but one. The first fifty-seven of these summaries were prepared by Gonzales, a Harvard-educated lawyer who went on to become the Texas secretary of state and a justice on the Texas supreme court.

. . .

Gonzales's summaries were Bush's primary source of information in deciding whether someone would live or die. Each is only three to seven pages long and generally consists of little more than a brief description of the crime, a paragraph or two on the defendant's personal background, and a condensed legal history. Although the summaries rarely make a recommendation for or against execution, many have a clear prosecutorial bias, and all seem to assume that if an appeals court rejected one or another of a defendant's claims, there is no conceivable rationale for the governor to revisit that claim. This assumption ignores one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes.

A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.

"Actual evidence of innocence." That's so quaint.

Anyway, friendly advice to the readers: try not to get yourselves falsely convicted of capital crimes.

Garbage in, garbage out.

And by "garbage" I mean torture.

That report also confirmed -- while excluding key details for diplomatic reasons -- that Arar's arrest was part of an awful feedback loop in which information extracted by torture from Syrian prisons implicating Arar reached both the American and Canadian security services, which then worked feverishly to detain him and send him to Syria for his own round of torture. The truth of his involvement with terrorism was simply taken for granted.

Well, I sure feel like the world's safer for democracy!

Mike Wieringo has died.

Comic book artist. Probably doesn't mean anything to anyone who's likely to read this, unless you're one of the lucky few who were forced to read my copies of the Flash a few years ago - in which case, hey, he's the guy the first drew Impulse.

Bet you miss him now.

I never met the man personally, but I've checked his blog three or four times a week now for years - I'd link to it, but it's down now. I assume fan traffic has crashed it, but maybe the server's just been pulled. All very sudden.

He apparently passed away sometime yesterday, of a heart attack. He was forty-four, and all his friends who've hit the Internet make a point of agreeing that he exercised regularly. You can't blame them - it's the easiest way to underline how unfair this is. I suppose second place would go to: he "had chest pains at some point during the day and called 911, but the responders did not make it in time."

But there, the effect is diluted. You can't really blame the paramedics - both because these things happen, and because Ringo seemed like a hell of a nice guy, and probably wouldn't have wanted you to. You end up reading it and thinking about forgiveness, which is appropriate, but not quite right for this stage of the grieving cycle.

If his blog were up, you could see . . . I don't know, what do you reduce a person to? Recurring suggestions that he didn't really understand how good an artist he was? A love of animals? A longstanding wish that joy and whimsy and uncomplicated kindness and, really, just the simple excitement that's in the medium's DNA would sneak past the grimacing specter of Frank Miller and come back to comics' forefront? [I'm singling Frank out. Once again, Ringo wouldn't have.] You'd see he was talented. You'd see he drew girl aerialists and tiger-men and cowboys and Harry Potter - things that are equally likely to make old farts and young kids smile.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, I did the sort of shit I usually do at the Wall. I put down the facts as I was discovering them, and I tried to plod my way up out of shock; when I read those posts now, it's like I was actively trying to be numb. Meanwhile, over on Ringo's blog, I was rambling on about a link to a charity that was going in to rescue pets. I know it's not a big thing, but it seemed like the Ringoverse was a better place to do it than here; the patron spirit was gentler.

So, right. What I said before: this isn't fair. He was only forty-four, and he exercised regularly, and he called the paramedics, and all the things he seemed to love and seemed to want to do would only have made the world better. This is just wildly wrong.

Now I'll never get to read the Saturn Kid.

Goodbye to Mike, and condolences to his family and friends.

It's the end of the world as we know it!

(And I feel fine . . .)

Karl Rove, President Bush's close friend and chief political strategist, plans to leave the White House at the end of August, joining a lengthening line of senior officials heading for the exits in the final 1 1/2 years of the administration.

Let the rumor-mongering begin!

The gutting of FISA (and the Fourth Amendment): a roundup.

From Steve Benen, over at TPM.

This public service message is brought to you by the mighty Pearl Jam!

Yes, I'm from Generation X. Yes, I bought Ten when it came out, and listened to "Once" until my brains seeped out my ears (though, no, I never actually knew what it was about). Yes, as Ezra Klein has observed, I am, like the rest of my peers, therefore very, very old.

Doesn't matter. Pearl Jam keeps winning my love anew over and over again - in this particular case, by musically dissing George Bush and then by calling AT&T out on its decision to censor the offending passage.

Aspects of censorship, consolidation, and preferential treatment of the internet are now being debated under the umbrella of "NetNeutrality." Check out The Future of Music or Save the Internet for more information on this issue.

Most telecommunications companies oppose "net neutrality" and argue that the public can trust them not to censor..

Even the ex-head of AT&T, CEO Edward Whitacre, whose company sponsored our troubled webcast, stated just last March that fears his company and other big network providers would block traffic on their networks are overblown..

"Any provider that blocks access to content is inviting customers to find another provider." (Marguerite Reardon, Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: March 21, 2006, 2:23 PM PST).

But what if there is only one provider from which to choose?

If a company that is controlling a webcast is cutting out bits of our performance -not based on laws, but on their own preferences and interpretations - fans have little choice but to watch the censored version.

What happened to us this weekend was a wake up call, and it's about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band.

Amen. And rawk.

An update on our next war.

President Bush charged Thursday that Iran continues to arm and train insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and he threatened action if that continues.

At a news conference Thursday, Bush said Iran had been warned of unspecified consequences if it continued its alleged support for anti-American forces in Iraq. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had conveyed the warning in meetings with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad, the president said.

Bush wasn't specific, and a State Department official refused to elaborate on the warning.

Behind the scenes, however, the president's top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran's support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy.

. . .

Cheney, who's long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran's complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.

Okay, we've all been waiting for this since Lt. Gen. Odierno started whispering in Michael Gordon's ear again - voices inside the administration are hoping to build some support for bombing; Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates are still arguing for . . . well, if not for sanity, then for temporarily sustainable levels of insanity.

Anyway, Bush went on to call for uprisings in Iran - which does nothing to make uprisings in Iran more likely ("Parviz! The American president who believes Iraq is becoming more stable is calling for a revolution! Now is the time!"), but probably does make life just a tad harder for Iranian pro-democracy groups. Ah, well.

The really bleak humor comes from anticipatory petulance directed toward Iraqi PM Maliki. I'm guessing the president felt burned by Hamid Karzai saying Iranian actions in Afghanistan have been, by and large, helpful, so he's warning the next naive foreign leader in line not to get all uppity.

Maliki is on a three-day visit to Tehran, during which he was photographed Wednesday hand in hand with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Unconfirmed media reports said Maliki had told Iranian officials they'd played a constructive role in the region.

Asked about that, Bush said he hadn't been briefed on the meeting. "Now if the signal is that Iran is constructive, I will have to have a heart-to-heart with my friend the prime minister, because I don't believe they are constructive. I don't think he in his heart of hearts thinks they're constructive either," he said.

Look out, heads of state! George Bush knows what you're thinking even better than you do!

. . .

Somewhere, in the distance, Vladimir Putin is giggling madly.

Learning the lessons of Katrina.

A decision by the Bush administration to rewrite in secret the nation's emergency response blueprint has angered state and local emergency officials, who worry that Washington is repeating a series of mistakes that contributed to its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina nearly two years ago.

State and local officials in charge of responding to disasters say that their input in shaping the National Response Plan was ignored in recent months by senior White House and Department of Homeland Security officials, despite calls by congressional investigators for a shared overhaul of disaster planning in the United States.

"In my 19 years in emergency management, I have never experienced a more polarized environment between state and federal government," said Albert Ashwood, Oklahoma's emergency management chief and president of a national association of state emergency managers.

. . .

Federal officials, Ashwood said, appear to be trying to create a legalistic document to shield themselves from responsibility for future disasters and to shift blame to states. "It seems that the Katrina federal legacy is one of minimizing exposure for the next event and ensuring future focus is centered on state and local preparedness," he said.

Okay, I probably shouldn't have included that last quote - it seems too consistent with Bush practice to ignore, but until the plan is officially released, I can't really consider it properly substantiated.

I guess.

Still, even if we dare to hope that the first thing the Bushies took away from the destruction of a major American city was not that they want to change the way the destruction of major American cities plays out on Op-Ed pages, the idea that they'd follow up Katrina by expanding the communications breadown between the federal government and local authorities is really kind of mind-boggling. I mean, one almost clings to the notion that they just cynically want to cover their own asses for comfort, because the most probable alternative is that they still have simply no idea what they're doing.

Josh Marshall recaps.

The Obama-Pakistan kerfluffle (as least, as it's playing out domestically):

I'm always interested to try to tease apart and find the meta-debates operating beneath the surface of campaign debates. As I wrote a few years ago in what I called the bitch-slap theory of GOP electoral politics, the whole swift-boat saga was less about the specifics of Kerry's injuries forty years ago than whether he could defend himself from the charges today. Someone who can't defend himself is weak; and if a guy can't defend himself he can't defend you.

That's what that whole song-and-dance was about.

So what is this back and forth about Obama and Pakistan about?

What this has boiled down to -- and this became even more clear after Tuesday night's labor-hosted debate, when Biden and Dodd acted as Hillary's proxies -- is Hillary, in league with the party's foreign policy establishment, trying to make Obama, implicitly or explicitly, concede an error, that he misspoke.

Precisely what he misspoke about is largely beside the point. The key is that they get him to concede that in the complex and serious world of foreign policy big-think, where words have consequences, he made an error. Of course, it's almost good enough if most observers decide that Obama screwed up. But once he concedes it himself, if he does, he stipulates from now through the end of the Democratic primary campaign that his inexperience in foreign policy is a basic premise of the campaign upon which the battle between him and Hillary will be waged. He can learn, improve, make progress, whatever, but his inexperience compared to Hillary will continue to be the reference point throughout.

But I think he's done a pretty good job so far refusing to get put in that box. And the truth is that I think Obama's actual words are so clearly unobjectionable that this is all Kabuki theater of a particularly strained and disingenuous sort. All Obama said was that if we have actionable intelligence about the whereabouts of high-value al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, and Pakistan won't act, we will act.

Clearly, no Republican can quibble with this. They're on the record for invading countries because they might become dangers to us at some point in the future. They're hardly in a position to disagree with Obama if he says we'll hunt down people who committed mass casualty terror attacks within our borders. And I'm not sure Democrats are in much of a position to do so either.

The unspoken truth here, I suspect, is that Obama has struck on the central folly of our post-9/11 counter-terrorism defense policy -- strike hard where they aren't and go easy where they are. I think everyone can see this. But Obama got there first. So they need to attack him for saying it.

Snapshot.

Life during Japanese rule sometimes verged on the surreal. One notoriously brutal hospital director had a 31-foot statue of himself built and forced patients to bow before it each morning. Another, remembered to this day for his kindness, treated the patients like his family so that after his death here, they pulled together their savings and built a cenotaph in his honor. After Korea’s liberation, the South Korean government tried to have the cenotaph demolished, but the residents hid it and brought it out in 1961. The 31-foot statue is long gone, but the cenotaph is still here.

From a piece on an island leper colony, about to be linked via bridge to the Korean mainland for the first time in its history.

Deadline fatigue.

From Paul Kiel:

Saying that he's waited long enough for the White House to comply, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) set a new deadline for documents related to the administration's warrantless wiretapping program today. August 20th is the date, and Leahy expects to receive documents concerning the legal basis for the program (in its variety of forms dating back to 2001), in addition to authorization documents.

Leahy had, at the request of White House counsel Fred Fielding, delayed a prior deadline. But now that an informal date suggested by the White House has come and gone, Leahy writes to Fielding that he's running out of patience:

Despite my patience and flexibility, you have rejected every proposal, produced none of the responsive documents, provided no basis for any claim of privilege and no accompanying log of withheld documents. I had been requesting this information for an extended time before issuing the subpoenas.

Included in that request are documents surrounding then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey's refusal to reauthorize the surveillance program. That refusal led to the March 10, 2004 showdown between Comey and Alberto Gonzales at John Ashcroft's hospital bed.

Leahy had pleaded urgency in seeking the documents last month, since the administration was seeking an overhaul of FISA. Now, of course, that time has passed. Still, such documents might affect debate of Democratic attempts to roll back last week's sweeping bill. That's assuming, of course, that the White House turns over any of these documents -- a gross assumption given the ongoing battles over the administration's claims of executive privilege.

Seems like a good time to add a point Dahlia Lithwick has eloquently made over at Slate - in giving the Bush administration (and, particularly, Alberto Gonzales) a big wet hickey of a FISA-vitiating law, Congress has collectively signaled that all the investigations underway and all the allegations made really aren't very serious. After all, when push came to shove, they bought right into the president's pathetic national security arguments.

When the familiar faces at the White House tell Senator Leahy to go eat his subpoenas, they're gonna have more leverage to do it than they should've had. Full stop.

Of course, that said, it's not like they seemed to be right on the verge of doing the right thing before Congress caved on FISA either.

Ledes we love to read.

A senior British commander in southern Afghanistan said in recent weeks that he had asked that American Special Forces leave his area of operations because the high level of civilian casualties they had caused was making it difficult to win over local people.

Winning hearts and minds.

And here we go again.

Michael Gordon, Judy Miller's old cohort, has a new story up on the use of explosively formed penetrators up at the Times - apparently, there was a spike in their use against U.S. forces in July, with considerable bloodshed as a result (in fact, one in three Americans killed in July died from wounds taken from EFPs).

The article's only obvious source is Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the Bush administration's number two man in Iraq, and his position - and, from the way the case is presented, we might assume Gordon's - is that this is part of an Iranian effort to weaken America's will before September, in the hopes of forcing us to pull out. If there's any evidence on hand to substantiate that hypothesis, however, it's not produced. Or even mentioned.

It's not just questionable journalism, of course; it's actually a look at old ground, tweaked with a few new statistics (albeit chilling ones) - Gordon and the Bush administration having been waving around the Iranian EFP story for months, and I make the same comments every time. My first response almost amounts to quibbling: it's not at all clear that these devices really are being disseminated by the Iranian government, per se. Ahmadinejad is a murderous thug, and I could imagine him sending some of his equally thuggish buddies from the Quds Force into Iraq with weapons and bad intentions for the Sadrists - but it's just as easy to imagine the things being built in-country. I'm afraid the administration doesn't have the credibility to convince me with suspicions alone anymore.

Again, though, that's the less important of my two recurring replies. The bigger one is that, whatever the appropriate policy repercussions of Iranians arming paramilitary groups associated with Iraq's government might be, they would not include acts of grotesque and immoral stupidity.

When the Bushies start waving their arms and accusing Iran of misdeeds, it's always reasonable to assume that somebody in Cheney's office is in the background arguing that this is the casus belli needed to start lobbing bombs over the border. That would cost a lot of innocent lives, strengthen the lunatics' hands in Iran, and just generally make the world a worse place to live - but, hey, that's the way the hardcore elements of this administration roll.

So, every time Michael Gordon comes trotting out with an uncritical repetition of some charges he's been handed by Bush officials, I walk back to the Wall and scrawl some variation of the obvious theme: we can't let them use this to trick us into another war. It wouldn't accomplish what they want us to think it would accomplish.

We pretty much all know the drill by now.