War Czar Doug Lute

Phillip Carter writes:

INTEL DUMP: Doug Lute: dream the impossible dream: The Washington Post (and others) report that the White House has tapped Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute to be its "war czar." In that position, Lt. Gen. Lute will be responsible for quarterbacking the "interagency process" — a Byzantine system of communication, coordination and policymaking which, in theory, is supposed to produce coherent national security strategy execution. According to the Post:

In the newly created position, Lute will coordinate often disjointed military and civilian operations and manage the Washington side of the same troop increase he resisted before Bush announced the plan in January. Bush hopes an empowered aide working in the White House and answering directly to him will be able to cut through bureaucracy that has hindered efforts in Iraq.

The selection capped a difficult recruitment process for the White House, as its initial candidates rejected the job. At least five retired four-star generals approached by the White House or intermediaries refused to be considered. Lute, a three-star general now serving as chief operations officer on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in effect will jump over many superiors as he moves to the West Wing and assumes authority to deal directly with Cabinet secretaries and top commanders.

"General Lute is a tremendously accomplished military leader who understands war and government and knows how to get things done," Bush said in a statement.

In choosing Lute, Bush picked a key internal voice of dissent during the administration review that led to the troop increase. Reflecting the views of other members of the Joint Chiefs, Lute argued that a short-term "surge" would do little good and that any sustained increase in forces had to be matched by equal emphasis on political and economic steps, according to officials informed about the deliberations.

Lute believed the situation in Iraq reflected the same mistakes as the ineffective and disorganized response to Hurricane Katrina, according to a source familiar with the debate. Like others at the Pentagon, he also was aggravated because civilian agencies, in his view, had not done nearly enough to help stabilize Iraq. And he was outspoken about the increasing strains on the U.S. military, officials said.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said Lute raised his concerns during talks before his selection. "He had the same skepticism a lot of us had," Hadley said. "That's one of the reasons we designed the strategy the way we did." By joining the White House, Hadley said, Lute can ensure that economic and political elements of the plan are implemented. "In some sense, he's part of the cure for the problems he was concerned about."

Until Bush decided this spring to create the position, the highest-ranking White House official working exclusively on Iraq and Afghanistan was a deputy national security adviser reporting to Hadley. Lute, by contrast, will have the rank of assistant to the president, just as Hadley does, and report directly to Bush, while also holding the title of deputy national security adviser.

Okay, I'm still scratching my head over this one. None of my thoughts are new on this, but I thought I'd air them anyway:

1) Isn't this guy [Bush] supposed to be the "war czar"? If he can't make the interagency process work by knocking a few heads and firing a few cabinet officers, who can?

2) What's going to happen the first time that Lt. Gen. Lute doesn't get his way? Imagine a hypothetical where Gen. David Petraeus asks for more Justice Department personnel to promote the rule of law , and Al Gonzales tells him to go swimming in the Tigris. What's a 3-star general to do? Will the White House back Lute and tell Al to cough up the people? Or will Lute get steamrolled? Assuming the latter happens, will he suck it up and soldier on, resign quietly, or resign noisily?

3) How are the other agencies going to react to having yet another general in charge of policy? Maybe about as well as State reacted to having Jay Garner appointed as the head of ORHA during the early stages of the war? I understand that the military is the main effort right now in Iraq. I also understand that's a deeply flawed organizational paradigm, because counterinsurgency is a political endeavor, and it may make a lot more sense to put a political animal (someone like Robert "Blowtorch Bob" Komer) in charge. (What? You've never heard of Blowtorch Bob? Read this! And this!)

4) How broken is the U.S. national security apparatus that we need a "czar" to run it? Is the NSC that f---ed up that it needs a 3-star with some juice in the Pentagon to make things work? (This is a rhetorical question; the only possible answer is yes.) Or are the agencies that stubborn? (Again, yes.) Where and how did the National Security Act and Goldwater-Nichols Act run aground that we've come to this? (Long story.) Could it be that we have the greatest military in the world, capped by the most ineffective and bloated bureaucracy ever created?

Good luck Lt. Gen Lute — you've got a tough fight in front of you.

And Adam W:

Someone needs to tell President Bush that if you're sitting in the Cabinet Room and you don't see a President, then it's you. Regarding your second point, I recall that a major criticism of the brief Jay Garner era was that, as a lower-ranking military man, he couldn't plausibly exert any sway over higher-ranking officials below him on the org chart. I don't see how this situation is much different.

John McWhorter Claims He Is Real...

One more reason not to read the New Republic is that you run into people like John McWhorter. Here he asserts that he is "real." In my experience, people who feel they have to assert their reality are the fakest of all. And so it proves with McWhorter:

Open University: August Wilson's... Radio Golf... with the message that to the extent that black people assimilate to white culture, they are losing their true "selves."... I think I understand where Wilson was coming from. He grew up in the days of Jim Crow, when a black identity was not something to be chosen, nurtured and custom-fitted the way it is now.... [I]t is really unclear to me that black Americans will be the only humans in history to never heal. I don't see the logic in it.

I, for one, feel thoroughly "real."... Yes, my wife is white. However, she sure looks real to me.... I do not accept that the life I lead is unreal, inauthentic, or broken.... Life isn't perfect, but we're making it. We're getting over, and in the process, getting over it. Wilson doesn't want us to get over it.... That might float some people's boats, but I am more interested in feeling whole right here and now. History is important--but not so much...

John McWhorter claims he is real. I say that he is fake. Here is one example: John McWhorter defending former Senator George Allen:

Similar insincerity is evident in the reaction to Allen and the macaca episode . . . . Imagine for a moment that Allen actually knew that a "macaque" is a kind of monkey, or that in French the term is sometimes used as an insult for North Africans (Allen denied having known about either). Who, then, believes that Allen would use the slur against an opposition campaigner aiming a camera straight at him? The facts of the case would suggest that Allen just made up something silly on the spot...

I say this is fake. John McWhorter was saying something he doesn't believe--that George Allen was smart enough not to behave stupidly--because no other African-American was defending George Allen. McWhorter hoped to make himself a rare and valuable commodity in the event that Allen were to have survived his close encounter with the macaques: the only prominent African-American to have taken Allen's side. A little racial arbitrage here. But behaving like this doesn't make McWhorter "real."

Here is another example:

[T]he diversity fetish leads to excusing other cultures for destructive behaviors we would condemn in our own... (witness the tendency to designate Osama Bin Laden a "madman," implying that this sane, calculating person is not responsible for his actions, whereas Dick Cheney is afforded no such exemption from sincere, visceral contempt)...

Nobody I know (and I know many) who calls Osama bin Laden a "madman" is excusing him--they are, rather, saying that we should have long since put enough resources into the search to find him and shoot him down like a dog. Nobody I know (and I know many) who calls Dick Cheney a "madman" is exempting him from contempt--indeed, their contempt is roughly double that of those who do not call Cheney a "madman." A little neoconservative arbitrage here: McWhorter is declaring his allegiance to Cheney and asserting that his opponents (the followers of the "diversity fetish") are in some ways pledging allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Once again: fake. Behaving like this makes McWhorter less real than ever.

Rising Hegemon: And as the Sun rises in the East

Attaturk writes:

Rising Hegemon: And as the Sun rises in the East: The Right-Wing discovers that a French President will primarily look after the interests of ... France! Their idiotic, simplistic notions of foreign relations never fail to shock and guffaw. Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing reformer who becomes French President on Wednesday, upset both the United States and his opponents yesterday by offering the job of Foreign Minister to a Socialist veteran with anti-American credentials. Hubert Védrine, 59 — a former senior aide to the late President Mitterrand — who served as Foreign Minister from 1997 to 2002, was considering the proposal yesterday. The prospect of Mr Védrine running foreign policy has infuriated the beleaguered Socialists and amazed the diplomatic world because he is the architect of a doctrine for containing what he called the abusive “steamroller” of American power. His views on “the hyperpower” — the term that he coined in the 1990s — would appear to conflict with Mr Sarkozy’s pro-Atlantic views.

Look, Sarkozy has the advantage of becoming President four-years past the stupidity of "Freedom Fries" and various other idiocies. Like 'em or hate 'em one is hard-pressed to deny that on reflection, no matter the personal interests involved as they were on both sides, ultimately, the French were right and Bush and his supporters were wrong about Iraq.

Sarkozy saying he would like to mend fences with the United States over this silly game of mutual sarcasm equaling his suddenly ignoring overwhelming French opposition to U.S. foreign policy and militarism is a game only a Bush syncophant could fall for, and the usual suspects did hook, line, and sinker. The Bushophiles are just as moronic as ever. French conservatism is intermixed with French Nationalism, from DeGaulle to Chirac to Sarkozy they have typically been in favor of a check on American expansion and ambition. Fools as always.

Matthew Yglesias Does Not Have Any Respect for Paul bremer

Nope. No respect. Not strange, not new, not old, not familiar:

Matthew Yglesias: Strange New Respect: Jim Henley and Scott Lemieux are feeling it for Paul Bremer after reading his Washington Post self-defense article. Personally, my sympathy for Bremer goes down whenever he publishes anything. I think Bremer has essentially been turned into a scapegoat for very broad intellectual errors and policy mistakes that affected a wide swathe of the American elite from 2002-2005. Rather than acknowledge that this is what happened; that certain stupendously wrong ideas gained widespread adherence in the two years after 9/11, there's been an enormous willingness to believe that, hey, no, everything's fine, it's just that Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld are really dumb.

The trouble with trying to defend Bremer from this unfair position, however, is that every time he opens his mouth he's refusing to adopt the only really viable defense he has -- that he was the fall guy for a doomed enterprise. It's not that disbanding the Iraqi Army wasn't an error, it's just that having done things the other way 'round wouldn't have produced the desired unified, democratic, and yet willing to be used as a platform for US power-projection throughout the region Iraq that Bremer was supposed to produce. He wound up making pro-chaos decisions because the country had, as a matter of national policy, chosen to adopt unrealistic and incoherent -- yet strangely vague -- war aims. The only real blunder Bremer made was agreeing to take the job under those circumstances.

Why Is Bush So Dominant Over the Republican Party?

They should have revolted in May 2001--rather than follow along as Cheney established his dominance and cut the moorings connecting the White House to reality. But they didn't. Various voices discuss why:

I have puzzled for years on why Bush seems to exercise such control over the conservative movement and its institutions. Ronald Reagan didn't have anything close to the degree of support Bush has. I wish I could figure it out...

I blame 1994, and the message learned that division within a party carries the risk that 1/4 of your incumbents will lose their jobs. Like today--the most centrist 30 Democratic representatives think that they have a better chance of keeping their jobs in 2008 if Pelosi is perceived to be a success than if they cross the aisle and strike a deal to join a ruling House coalition led by Boehner and company, a ruling coalition with which they might well be in more ideological sympathy...

That's a factor, but there's a lot more to it. I'll figure it out someday.

The assessment in Ron Suskind’s 2004 article holds up pretty well, although it was mistaken about the civil war in the Republican Party...

If such a civil war had broken out, the Republican Party might still have a chance next year. I am truly baffled as to why so many Republicans seem determined to go down with the sinking ship. I can only conclude that there are Democratic candidates that are within the range of acceptability to those Republicans fed up with Bush—they would rather switch than fight...

These poll data are revealing: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18491981/site/newsweek...

Perhaps another factor I have written about is that the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Internet means that many Republicans need not ever be confronted by inconvenient facts or will always have a plausible explanation from Fred Barnes to explain them away. I really saw this last year when many Republicans were absolutely convinced that they were going to keep control of Congress, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Every single night I heard Barnes explain why the polls were wrong, but in fact they were spot-on accurate. To my knowledge, Fred has never explained why he was wrong about the polls being wrong. Yet now I am hearing the same thing—the polls showing a huge Democratic advantage next year are simply dismissed as biased or inaccurate or something...

Ezra Klein: Give Bigger Government a Chance

Ezra Klein writes:

Give bigger government a chance - Los Angeles Times: Conservatives talk a lot about government failure, but over the last few years, it's really we who have failed government, depriving it of the revenue, the conscientious management and the attention needed for it to succeed. Undercapitalize a pizza joint and your customers will taste the poor ingredients, become frustrated by the long waits and grow repulsed by the grimy environs. Staff it with your unmotivated drinking buddies and the service will falter, as will the quality of the product. It's no way to run a pizza place, and it's certainly no way to run a government.

But that's exactly what we've done. With Proposition 13 and the famous California tax revolt, and with presidents whose entire domestic programs amounted to mindless tax-cutting, and with Congresses that have been happy to pass cuts and stack deficits, we have systematically deprived the government of the revenues it needs to provide basic services, even as we've come to need it to do so much more. The Bush administration has only added to the problem. The president once said: "I was campaigning in Chicago, and somebody asked me, 'Is there ever any time where the budget might have to go into deficit?' I said only if we were at war or had a national emergency or were in recession. Little did I realize we'd get the trifecta." He's right. Not only have we spent more than $500 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan and untold more on homeland security measures, but we've created, in Medicare Part D, the most expensive new entitlement since President Johnson signed the Great Society into existence. We've also increased education spending through the No Child Left Behind Act. And during all this, tax cuts have robbed the Treasury of $200 billion in revenue; the need for a two-thirds majority in the Legislature impeded the flexibility of California to raise state taxes to compensate, while Proposition 13 continued to handicap our municipalities. All that money has to come from somewhere. And the "where" isn't the high-profile initiatives that the media is watching — the Medicares and Social Securities (although they may suffer too) — but from the smaller, less-noticed, but critically important programs and departments that millions rely on.

If Congress must constantly approve high-profile emergency expenditures that funnel hundreds of billions of dollars toward Iraq, and states cannot pick up the slack, there will have to be cuts in funding for police and schools and jails and Pell Grants and the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs and the nation's infrastructure and all the rest. So is it any surprise that law enforcement is extending a beggar's cup to Philip Morris, public colleges are becoming less affordable and UC law schools are shilling for corporate dollars? And that it's all happening even as the globalizing economy demands ever higher skills, as ill and traumatized Iraq war veterans are going without care, as roads and schools are crumbling and myriad other minor catastrophes are underway beneath the notice of the national media but well within the range where they harm ordinary Americans.

Such unhappy outcomes are not merely morally unsettling, they're often economically inefficient. Government spending can be more than necessary, it can be desirable. It can step in, for instance, when the market fails to deliver public goods that society desires but private entities haven't figured out how to fund. (It's useful having a national military, right?) And it can use its regulatory power to ensure that competition works to increase well-being rather than to simply amp up industry profits. UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong once wrote that "sometimes government failures are greater than the market failures for which they purport to compensate. Sometimes they are not." The trick is knowing which is which. But if, like the Bush administration, you are blithely unconcerned with running an efficient, effective government, funding its necessary elements, presenting honest choices to the American people between tax cuts and social investment and staffing the whole enterprise with skilled professionals, you never need make those judgments as you have neither the resources nor the personnel to effectively deploy the central organizing structure of modern societies. And that's a shame.

Libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke likes to say that "Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it." Over the last few years, that's been true. But government can work, and increasingly, Americans appear to be anticipating its return. A new Pew Research Center poll finds that public support for a societal safety net and for government protections is at its highest levels in more than a decade — which suggests that Americans don't think bake sales are the way to fund their schools or that Philip Morris is really who they want subsidizing law enforcement. And in recent elections, the once popular "Taxpayer's Bill of Rights" amendments that seemed so unstoppable a decade ago are being rejected and, in Colorado, repealed, as voters finally tire of paying the costs in broken infrastructure and insufficient public services.

When asked what type of political system Americans would have, Ben Franklin famously responded, "A republic, if you can keep it." Well, he also bequeathed us a government, if we can run it. And somehow, I don't think the Philip Morris police department is quite what he had in mind.

Thomas Barnett Hates Condi Rice

He writes, apropos of George Tenet's book:

While I don’t much care for tell-alls from people who didn’t do all when in office … (Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog): Where Tenet’s book is worth reading is exactly on everything except “slam dunk,” like the fact that no one every seemed to seriously discuss or argue through what comes after capturing and/or killing Saddam. And that Bremer kept the CIA in the dark on both disbanding the army and de-Baathing the government. Or that Rice basically abdicated her honest broker role in the NSC, a point nobody bothered to raise in her SECSTATE confirmation hearings (ah, but there’s so much to admire in her “grit and grace” that her stunning incompetency in her previous job need not have been examined. I mean, it’s not her fault the interagency process didn’t wo . . . wait a minute, it’s exactly her fault.). Or how “nobody wanted to give Bremer specific marching orders” and that “Rice felt she could not order changes.” Or how everyone fell in love with Chalabi and let him call way too many of the big shots by proxy.

The last bit provides a stunning example of Condi’s non-role:

“What the hell is going on with Chalabi?” the President asked me at a White House meeting that spring. “Is he working for you?” [Senior CIA officer] Rob Richer, who was with me at the meeting, piped up, “No, sir, I believe he is working for DOD.” All eyes shifted to Don Rumsfeld. “I’ll have to check what his status is,” Rumsfeld said. His Under Secretary for Intelligence, Steve Cambone, sat there mute. “I don’t think he ought to be working for us,” the President dryly observed.

A few weeks later the President again raised the issue. “What’s up with Chalabi?” he asked. Paul Wolfowitz said, “Chalabi has a relationship with DIA and is providing information that is saving American lives. CIA can confirm that.” The President turned to us. “I know of no such information, Mr. President,” Mr. Richer said. The President looked to Condi Rice and said, “I want Chalabi off the payroll.”

At a subsequent meeting, chaired by Rice, DIA confirmed that they were paying the [Iraqi National Congress] $350,000 a month for its services in Baghdad. We knew that the INC’s armed militia had seized tens of thousands of Saddam regime documents and was slowly doling them out to the U.S. government. Beyond that it was unclear to me what the Pentagon was getting for its money. Somehow the President’s direction to pull the plug on the arrangement continued to be ignored.

Paging Dr. Kissinger! Could Rice have been more of a doormat?

I don’t know what’s sadder: Bush having to figure this out on his own and then telling Rice to finally do something about it or Rice not being able to follow his direct order--or the American people having to wait for Tenet’s tell-all to find out.

Tenet was clearly, in the words of the Economist, a total “time server.”

Problem is, so is Rice.

Following Powell’s empty-suit performance prior, this has been the worst pair of SECSTATES in a row in my lifetime.

The cossacks work for the Czar, Tom.

Matthew Yglesias: Why We Should Withdraw from Iraq

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Matthew Yglesias: The Paradox:Benjamin R. "Randy" Mixon says he needs more troops in Diyala Province:

Mixon, speaking Friday by teleconference from Camp Speicher, outside Tikrit, to a Pentagon news conference, said that he did not have enough soldiers to provide security in Diyala. The local government is "nonfunctional" and the central government is "ineffective," he said. . . . Mixon was withering in his criticism of the Iraqi government, saying it was hamstrung by bureaucracy and compromised by corruption and sectarian discord, making it unable to assist U.S. forces in Diyala.

Why, though, isn't the reason to take the troops out? After all, what's the point of throwing ever more American blood and manpower in support of a corrupt, ineffective government? And this is the essential problem. One could easily imagine a post-war situation where Iraq had a government that was not yet competent to run the country, but showed signs of rapid improvement such that if we kept supporting it for a while more, things might turn around. In the real world, though, we're into the fifth year of this business and instead of improving, things just change and get bad in different ways -- what's the point of responding to the failures of the Iraqi government but sending even more troops to fight?

Jim Henley: Just a Smack at Liberaltarianism

Unqualified Offerings writes:

Just a Smack at Liberaltarianism § Unqualified Offerings: I said at the time that the practical problem with Brink’s program is that there’s no serious constituency within the Democratic Party for the sort of entitlement restructuring that Brink made the linchpin of his original article. More generally, not just the Democratic Party but the country as a whole is trending “left” on economics, and has been since 2000. The southpaw candidates - Gore and Nader - pulled a majority of the popular vote that year, and while I would never argue that Nader’s votes “belonged” to Gore, the aggregate percentage shows where the country’s head was at economically. Were it not for a very famous incident involving airplanes I suspect we’d have seen Democratic pickups in 2002. If not for the fallacy of sunk costs, I suspect George W. Bush would have been a one-termer.

As it is, the Democrats can trace the moment of their revival as a viable political party to their uncompromising opposition to the President’s social-security proposals of 2005. That was their first political victory of the 21st Century and the fifty-millionth time the Donks have profited politically from “defending social security.” I say this not to pick on Brink, but just to clarify why libertarians can’t ground their hopes for liberal-libertarian concord in “entitlement reform.”

We’re entering an era where the public, according to all the polls, is looking for populist economic measures and the Democratic Party is going to give them some. Libertarians have the usual few unsatisfactory options. The first is to return to the bosom of the GOP and encourage them to thwart as much of the Democrats’ economic agenda as possible. In ordinary times I’d be all for this - sweet, sweet obstructionism. These are not ordinary times. Libertarians can’t in good conscience further the fortunes of the Banana Republican Party. Note that while Milton Friedman did meet briefly with Augusto Pinochet, he didn’t participate in Pinochet’s coup. The Caudillo Party needs to lose its fatally campy attraction to “swagger” before it can be trusted with so much as a seat on the student council in a rural middle school.

The second option is to continue to think long term, and continue to concentrate on saying the things we think are true, regardless of their present salability. (Gene Healy said this somewhere, I am certain, in response to Tyler Cowen back in March. I’m damned if I can find the right entry, though.) This is an entirely honorable course, and at least some libertarians ought to make it their main focus.

The third option is to try to coax the least damaging version of the populist measures coming down the pike, while trying to get “the left to be good on issues the left is supposed to be good on,” as Jesse Walker put it last year. That is, peace and civil liberties. I realize that the Democratic Party as a whole has done fvck-all for peace and civil liberties, but it contains constituencies that would like it to do more, and libertarians can swell that chorus. This means singing harmony with “dirty fucking hippies,” which will be hard for libertarians who are more anti-left than anti-state. But the hips, more than the self-styled contrarians who cluster around the New Republic and the Democratic Leadership Council, are the ones who really oppose preventive war, the unitary executive and the domestic security state.

As to the economic populism, the short answer is to prefer the simple to the complex. Treat safety-net measures with the least in social-engineering provisions as less bad than the alternatives. From and anarcho-capitalist perspective it’s all theft and coercion, and I’d never want anarcho-capitalists to stop making that point. But even anarcho-capitalists may decide that, given one’s choice of thievery, that some are less damaging than others. Now, the last aspect of this approach may be the most challenging, and call for the biggest break with habits of thought from the days when many libertarians thought of themselves as “small government conservatives.”

Every safety net entails moral hazard by lowering the price of imprudence. Welfare and unemployment insurance encourage a certain level of irresponsibility at the margins of the working world. Government pensions marginally discourage private retirement savings. National health insurance will breed incremental insouciance about diet and other personal habits. Plus, all social insurance eventually gets paid in taxes, either now or in eventual debt service, and ceteris paribus people would rather pay less in taxes than more. Politicians often try to control moral hazard by legislating against the “problem” behavior. Drug prohibition, twinkie taxes, workfare provisions, forced savings - all have been enacted or proposed to limit moral hazards stemming from safety-net programs, and not just by liberals. During the 1990s I got the impression that, having given up on eliminating welfare, Republicans had decided to settle for making it really annoying to be on welfare, based on the kinds of proposals they were submitting. Just within the last month we’ve seen calls for trans fat bans and other food prohibitions based on the logic that the health costs of such foods come out of the public treasury.

Traditionally the libertarian instinct, faced with an entitlement or social insurance program, has been to limit it somehow. And of course the libertarian instinct is also to reduce spending as much as possible, which moral hazard regulation does. I submit, though, that “social insurance plus moral hazard regulation” is the worst of both worlds from a libertarian perspective. The social insurance makes large claims on the public purse while the hazard regulation fills daily life with niggling restrictions. Therefore I think we libertarians should prefer more subsidized vice to more enforced virtue. The thing is, that will cost money. It will even in many cases be annoying. But a state that spends massive piles of money on social insurance is a less intrusive state than one that spends massive piles of money on social insurance while using that spending as an excuse to keep anyone from having fun.

The preceding is almost completely useless to Brink at the Obama vs. Hillary vs. Edwards vs. Richardson level. I’m a big picture guy! (For the duration of this already lengthy blog item anyway.) Nor does it offer libertarians much of a positive program for the pending populist moment. I’ll see what I can whip up for next time. BUT! I suspect Hillary Clinton is easily the worst of the Dem candidates by almost every criterion discussed above, little better than a Republican. Personally, I’m still hoping Richardson vaults into the first tier and believe he has time to do so.

A Tiny Revolution: Message: U.S. Government Still Mind-Numbingly Cynical

A Tiny Revolution:

A Tiny Revolution: Message: U.S. Government Still Mind-Numbingly Cynical: The Atlantic just published a 26,000,000-word long article about Condoleezza Rice. At one point it mentions U.S. attempts to push Palestinian society into civil war (sub. req.):

In the fall of 2005, as part of a new push for democracy in the Middle East, Rice insisted that legislative elections be held in the Palestinian territories.... To Rice’s surprise, the elections in January 2006 were won by Hamas...

Eager to reverse the results of the election, Rice decided on a new plan of action that resulted in fighting in the streets of Gaza between Hamas and Fatah gunmen. The plan, which she developed after speaking to President Bush, was to put pressure on the Hamas government by providing the Palestinian security forces loyal to Abbas with training, intelligence, and large shipments of supplies and new weapons, paid for by the United States and by Saudi Arabia. The hope was that Hamas, faced with a well-armed, well-trained force of Fatah fighters, might be cowed into moderating its positions or relinquishing the power it had won through elections. Alternatively, Hamas might be pressured into an escalating series of gun battles, in which case Abbas, as head of the Palestinian security forces, would have an excuse to crush Hamas by force...

Hamas won the clashes, which left more than 140 Palestinians dead, and the Hamas government remained in power.

A few pages later, the author describes following Rice on her recent trip to Jerusalem:

I find a copy of Friday’s State Department Rapid Response sheet lying on the ground. “Message: Americans do not want to see Palestinians killing Palestinians. Palestinians should be living in peace among themselves and with Israel,” the document instructs, quoting Rice.

And indeed, that's exactly what Rice said in a February interview with Al Arabiya.

Message: Condoleezza Rice Most Loathsomely Unctuous Human Being Imaginable

Spencer Ackerman on George Tenet

Spencer Ackerman writes:

George Tenet's Twisted Intel | The American Prospect:In his new memoir, the former CIA chief proves to be a master of non-apology apologies

Let's just leave "slam dunk" aside for a moment.

It's true that in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet goes to elaborate rhetorical lengths in denying that he had intended to characterize Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction as a dead certainty when he used that infamous phrase. And, like much else in the book, Tenet's focus on the "slam dunk" quote is actually sneaky -- he serves to obscure the real issue at hand while oscillating between contrition and a fiery, if dubious, defense of his tenure....

Tenet has always sought to ingratiate himself with his masters, whether Presidents Clinton and Bush or the GOP Congress, in order to protect himself and the CIA from criticism.... Tenet's own particular brand... involves the unctuous rhetorical tactic of conceding failure up front, only to hastily explain that, in fact, there were no real failures -- not on his part, not on his agency's part, and certainly not on President Bush's part. He's a master of the non-apology apology. Take the most important Iraq-related example of massive failure on his watch: the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The NIE, which assessed that Iraq had vast stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an ongoing nuclear weapons program, only exists because the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence requested it in September 2002, needing an authoritative intelligence judgment on the eve of the vote to authorize the war. In the book, Tenet concedes that he "didn't think one was necessary... I was wrong."...

Tenet places heavy emphasis on the "crash project" that the three-week NIE represented, and implies that weaknesses in the NIE are attributable to the time constraints faced by its chief author, National Intelligence Officer Bob Walpole.... Tenet should mention... the political constraints imposed by the Bush administration. The White House insisted... the war authorization occur before the November congressional elections, so as to enable the Republicans to use the war question as a political cudgel against the Democrats. But he mentions no such thing.....

[Tenet] bristles at the [Senate] panel's desire for an assessment of, in his characterization, "the effectiveness of planned U.S. covert and military actions in Iraq," This is a serious misrepresentation.... Graham, the Democratic chairman, requested... forecasts of what the Middle East would look like in the aftermath of an invasion of Iraq. Graham wanted the full committee to get a broader understanding of the implications of war.... Tenet, however, restricted the NIE to covering only WMD, and now disgraces himself further by implying that the committee attempted to meddle with war planning. There's an irony here: Later in the book Tenet trumpets the CIA's foresight in predicting the chaos of Iraq -- assessments that he stopped Congress from receiving when it counted....

It gets worse when he engages the famous issue of the aluminum tubes.... Nowhere in Tenet's new book can one find even a momentary contemplation of the idea that the NIE should have abandoned its conclusion about the Iraqi nuclear weapons program on account of the DOE's objection, rather than push that outlook to the margins as a dissenting view.... Tenet also gives an unsatisfactory explanation of how these dissents were scrubbed from the public version of the NIE.... In other words, the NIE was tragically misread and misrepresented -- off the hook he and the president go....

His inoculation of Bush from blame is all the more troubling because Tenet is absolutely right about a central claim in the book: The intelligence wasn't determinative of the war. The Bush administration opted to invade Iraq because of a mélange of strategic reasons, for which the public case about weapons of mass destruction was merely, in Paul Wolfowitz's words, "the one issue that everyone could agree on." The proper word for this is "deceit." It's true enough that Tenet had little hope of salvaging his reputation through his memoir, given the overwhelming disrepute in which nearly everyone, left and right, holds him. But he should have devoted much more introspection -- and apology -- to the way in which his faithful service led him to turn intelligence work into policy advocacy. It wouldn't have been very cheerleader-like. But the college basketball season has long since ended.

Francis Fukuyama: Beating an Orderly Retreat

Fukuyama:

Beating an orderly retreat - Los Angeles Times: GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, has promised to return to Washington in September to report on the outcome of his surge strategy. I hope he will say that sectarian killings, bombings and U.S. casualties are all down. But even if he does, I doubt he can offer a clear, plausible date by which the Iraqi army and police will be able to stand on their own without massive U.S. support. So regardless of what he concludes, we seem destined to enter the presidential election season with no credible date for a U.S. exit from Iraq. In more than four years of war, there have been countless turning points at which we were led to expect decisive political progress in Iraq: the capture of Saddam Hussein (December 2003); the turnover of sovereignty (June 2004); elections for the constituent assembly (January 2005); elections to ratify the constitution (August 2005); and elections for the Iraqi parliament (December 2005).

The surge was the last military card we had to play, and now our bluff will soon be called. In my view, there is only one condition under which we can withdraw from Iraq with our core interests fully protected and with a reasonable claim that our mission was accomplished, and that is when strong Iraqi military and police forces emerge that can operate independently of U.S. forces and prevent a takeover of the country by either Al Qaeda in Iraq, resurgent Baathists or Muqtada Sadr's Shiite militia.

Let's not kid ourselves. The situation today is in some ways much worse than the one faced by President Nixon in Vietnam 35 years ago. At that time, South Vietnam had an army with a paper strength of 1 million men that, despite its problems, was able hold on for three years after the U.S. withdrew its ground forces. The South Vietnamese army provided Henry Kissinger with his "decent interval" between the U.S. withdrawal and South Vietnam's collapse. (Indeed, Kissinger argues with some plausibility that the South Vietnamese military could have hung on indefinitely if Congress hadn't cut off funds for U.S. air support.) Nothing like that exists or will exist in Iraq for the politically meaningful future. As of November, the Pentagon claimed it had trained 322,000 Iraqi military and police, but it admitted that the actual number on hand was much lower because of desertions and attrition. Iraqi forces continue to suffer huge shortfalls in armor, weaponry, logistics and communications, and it is unclear how they would fare without American hand-holding. Serious training of Iraqi forces started late and never received adequate funding or top-level attention, despite the fact that Petraeus was at the helm of the training effort in recent years. The South Vietnamese army may have been nothing to write home about in 1972, but we are extremely unlikely to have an Iraqi equivalent by the end of 2007.

What all this means is that even if the surge, by September, is reducing violence in Iraq to some degree, it will not guarantee a "safe" exit strategy for U.S. forces. But here's the problem: Do we have any other choice than to withdraw? We could stick it out, and I suspect that we could avoid losing in Iraq for another five, 10 or 15 years, as long as we're willing to maintain high troop levels, continue to spend large amounts of money and suffer more casualties. But even the most conservative Republican candidates are unlikely to campaign on a platform of staying in Iraq indefinitely when the primary season starts next winter and the war enters its sixth year. This means that we will have to engage in a very different debate from the one we have been having up to now, a debate not about surging and not about withdrawing with our goals accomplished but about how to draw down our forces in a way that minimizes the costs that will inevitably accompany our loss of control.

This is a difficult situation, but it is necessary. The questions we need to address include: How do we reconfigure our forces to provide advice, training and support, rather than engaging in combat? How we can withdraw safely without a serious Iraqi army to cover our retreat? How will we dismantle enormous bases like Camp Liberty or Camp Victory and protect the diminishing numbers of U.S. troops in the country? Do we trust the Iraqi military and police sufficiently to turn over our equipment to them? How do we protect the lives of those who collaborated with us? The images of South Vietnamese allies hanging to the skid pads of U.S. helicopters departing Saigon should be burned into our memories. And what if the weak Iraqi government we leave behind falls or other political crises occur when we have fewer U.S. troops to respond? Can we work with proxies, resources or arms supplies to shape outcomes?

As we draw down, the civil war is likely to intensify, and the focus of our efforts will have to shift to containing it within Iraq's borders. Preventing intervention by outside forces will become an even more urgent priority. On the other hand, it is not necessarily the case that the situation will spiral out of control. Although the situation is graver in some ways than Vietnam, in others it is better. Although we have no equivalent to a South Vietnamese army, the enemy has no equivalent of the North Vietnamese army. It is hard to see any of the small factions struggling for power in different parts of the country emerging as a dominant force throughout Iraq. The presence of U.S. forces has itself been a spur to terrorist recruitment, but as it becomes clear that we are on our way out, it will be easier for Iraqi nationalists to turn against the foreign jihadists (as they have already begun to do in Al Anbar province). An intensifying civil war will be a tragedy for Iraq, but it is not the worst outcome from a U.S. standpoint to have a number of bitterly anti-American groups duking it out among themselves. Civil wars eventually come to an end when one side wins (unlikely, in this case) or when the parties exhaust themselves and drop their maximalist aims.

Clark Hoyt to Be Public Editor of the New York Times

Xan writes:

This Could Be Good News | CorrenteWire: I saw this headline…Times Names Public Editor, and since I couldn’t click the mouse and raise that finger to the mouth at the same time I clicked first. Good move: "The New York Times today named its next public editor, Clark Hoyt, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor who oversaw the Knight Ridder newspaper chain’s coverage that questioned the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq war."

Hmm. Not to sound like a racetrack tout trying to pick a winner in the Derby but this dude’s bloodlines and recent workout times look good.... "His appointment as public editor takes effect May 14 and lasts two years. He will be the third person to hold the position since The Times created it in 2003, following Daniel Okrent and Byron Calame. Mr. Keller said he considered, but ultimately rejected, the idea of hiring someone from within The Times, or someone from a digital news operation."

Somebody better check local glue factories to see what might have become of those two. Meanwhile this kid sounds promising. Let’s see if he can go the distance on what’s still, like it not, the Churchill Downs of American dead-tree journalism.

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » Friday’s Mini-Report

The Carpetbagger Report watches the Jonathan Weisman special:

The Carpetbagger Report » Blog Archive » Friday’s Mini-Report: * A front-page WaPo report yesterday suggested Dems were poised to give in entirely on the president’s demands on war funding, but today, the caucuses appeared to be standing relatively firm: “Congressional Democrats have signaled they’re not ready to back down in their confrontation with President Bush on Iraq, spurring Republicans to accuse them of causing political gridlock.” The House and Senate passed funding bills for the war in Iraq; Bush vetoed it. Who’s responsible for the gridlock?

Profiles in Prescience: Michael Crowley

Apologetic.us reminds us of the prescient wisdom of Michael Crowley:

Profiles in Prescience: Michael Crowley | Apologetic.us: Michael Crowley, Follow the Leader: Can the Democrats survive Nancy Pelosi? The New Republic, November 25, 2002: It's no surprise that Pelosi is working so hard to dispel the notion that she's a liberal. Already, Republicans are painting her as a combination of Maxine Waters and Barbra Streisand. That's unfair: Pelosi isn't a wild-eyed ideologue; she's just a fairly typical member of the House Democratic caucus. And that's exactly the problem. The caucus was already to the left of most Democratic voters--and far to the left of the country as a whole--even before November 5. And now many of its members have decided that the lesson of last week's election disaster is that the party wasn't liberal enough. Pelosi may say her liberalism isn't her defining feature. But it's a big part of why she's about to get promoted. As Michigan Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan recently put it, "I don't think anybody's going to become the next minority leader of the Democrats that wants to go along with [George W.] Bush on the war." In other words, Pelosi was chosen in part because she's not expected to challenge the liberal instincts of the House Democratic caucus. Which is a pity. Because, unless someone saves the House Democrats from themselves, they could be looking at a long time in the minority...