Pierce That Turd
Charles Pierce always
delivers:
TIME OUT OF MIND.
So, just to take a clear stand against the rising tide of overt Young
Fogeyhood around these parts, I wear baseball caps, okay? My current one comes from Three Chimneys Farm in Kentucky. I wear them for comfort and for style, and because several centuries of Hibernian breeding left me with skin that is well-nigh translucent. I also wear them so that, when I read something like this, I have something handy I can throw across the room besides the obvious cursewords.
Who dealt this mess? I mean, a group of important someones at Time freaking Magazine need an essay on the lessons to be learned from TR's politics, and they all decide to hire a goon who should be kept away from elections for the same reasons we keep Charlie Manson away from the cutlery. And not only that, but a goon who spent a flat year hanging one of Time's own reporters out to dry. Karl Rove is not a historian. Karl Rove is not a political theorist. Karl Rove is not any combination of the two. He's a vandal and a thug who would tear the Time-Life Building down for a parking lot if he thought it would mean five points on the next Gallup Poll. [my emph]
"There can be great joy in politics," reads the piece.
Great joy in politics.
Karl Rove.
Holy mother of God.
--Charles P. Pierce
Praise be. I wrote
last year:
As Josh Marshall puts it: "I guess we needed more evidence that Karl Rove is the most despicable man on the American political scene today."
I couldn't agree more. I wonder if the American political scene has ever had anyone that will stoop as low as this man. I can't remember one. Lee Atwood comes to mind, but Karl has him beat by a mile. I also wonder how history will judge him as well. My guess is it won't be pretty.
I personally can't think of a more loathesome character, a vile, repugnant creature who knows fecses so well because he flings it and wallows in it constantly.
I'd go a little further today: Karl Rove is the worst thing to happen to American politics in over a century. He's got all the traits; divisive, cynical, treating the body politic as stupid cows, throwing red meat to and at Bush's right-wing base, and lowering the level of discourse to tabloid standards. The sad part is that this will become the new standard for the GOP. Smear, lie, and divide.
Karl is a an export from Texas (of course). He's a shit-filled toothpaste tube we all have to use every morning, and he until he leaves the White House on 1/21/09, we'll all have to suffer the taste. Maybe we'll still have a democracy left when he's gone, who knows.
Can You Say "Collective Punishment"?
Here's the definition from
Wikipedia:
Collective punishment is a term describing the punishment of a group of people for the crime of a few or even of one. It is contradictory to the modern concept of due process, where each individual receives separate treatment based on their individual circumstances — as they relate to the crime in question.
Hmm, let's see
here:
Palestinians filled up on basic supplies after warplanes knocked out electricity, raising the specter of a humanitarian crisis. The Hamas-led government's information ministry warned of "epidemics and health disasters" because of damaged water pipes to central Gaza.
[...]
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert threatened harsher action, though he said there was no plan to reoccupy Gaza. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas deplored the incursion as a "crime against humanity."
Harsher action? Does he imply that tanks, gunship helicopters, bombing from F-16's, and ground troops weren't enough? How much more harsh does it get against a population that is at best lightly armed? This all because of a Palestinian incursion into Isreali territory in which two Isreali soldiers were killed and one was kidnapped. It must be noted it was the kidnapping of
one soldier that triggered this response.
To be fair, I've been pretty selective about what I clipped from that AP article, so go read it for the balance they provide. Those two items just jumped out at me. That "Roadmap" sure is working, eh Condi?
I wonder how these tactics might work, say, in Iraq? Nevermind...
The End-Around
Via
Laura Rosen, here's an important
op-ed that appeared in the New York Times penned by Flynt Leverett (I'm posting the whole thing, it's that good):
AS the world watches the political maneuvering over restarting nuclear talks with Iran — this time with American participation — few are paying attention to a broader strategic competition that has started between the United States, Russia and China. Ultimately, this competition will decide not only the direction of Iran's nuclear activities but also its economic, political and military role in the Middle East and beyond. The outcome hinges on which countries will assume dominance in developing Iran's enormous oil and natural gas reserves.
Unfortunately, by refusing to consider a "grand bargain" with Iran — that is, resolution of Washington's concerns about Tehran's weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism in return for American security guarantees, an end to sanctions and normalization of diplomatic relations — the Bush administration is courting failure in its nuclear diplomacy and paving the way for Russia and China to win the larger strategic contest.
Iran has the world's second-largest proven reserves of conventional crude oil, after Saudi Arabia, and the second-largest reserves of natural gas, after Russia. Its relatively low production levels make it one of the few states with the potential to greatly increase its exports of both oil and gas over the next two decades.
As the world economy during this period will rely increasingly on the Middle East and the former Soviet Union for its energy needs, Iran's putative status as a hydrocarbon superpower will take on ever greater strategic importance. Add in its location, its population of nearly 70 million (the largest in the Middle East) and its ambitions to regional leadership, and the significance of Iran's future international role is undeniable.
However, to expand its energy exports, Iran needs a great deal of capital and advanced technology from outside — at least $160 billion over the next quarter century according to the International Energy Agency. Washington of course does all it can to block exactly such investment — barring American energy companies from seeking business in Iran and threatening European and Japanese companies with fines and cutoffs of American components.
These measures — along with repressive Iranian policies that scare off foreign investors — have had an impact: since the Islamic Republic opened its oil and gas sectors to foreign energy companies in the early 1990's, it has attracted only $15 billion to $20 billion in European and Japanese investment. And as the nuclear issue has heated up, prospects for substantial increases in Western investment have virtually evaporated.
A senior Iranian diplomat told me this month that Iran can no longer "wait for the West," and Tehran is now looking for alternative investors. In recent years, China has emerged as a potential large-scale partner. But while China can provide capital, its state-owned energy companies are not much more technically capable right now than Iran's. It will be a decade at least before China can fill all Iran's technical gaps.
This is where Russia comes in. Although Russian energy companies could not offer quite the same level of expertise as Western firms in the complexities of managing Iran's older oil reservoirs, they could in the next several years help the Islamic Republic develop its newer oil finds and, more significantly, realize its huge potential as a gas exporter.
In fact, the two countries have already held talks on possible "coordination" of Iranian gas exports with Gazprom, Russia's state-owned gas and oil behemoth. Iranian officials have told me that their government does not think Gazprom would be the ideal partner, compared with Western companies, but it deems such a deal preferable to continued stagnation.
From a Russian perspective, such a deal would have many benefits. Many industry experts feel that within just a few years, the amounts of gas that Gazprom is contracted to provide may exceed what the company on its own can bring to market. It has been trying to close the gap by purchasing additional gas from Central Asian states that rely on Russian pipelines to export their oil and gas. But at the same time, the United States is trying to help those ex-Soviet states build oil and gas pipelines that are outside of Moscow's control — an effort the Kremlin interprets as a deliberate attempt to isolate and weaken Russia.
Russian officials and commentators have complained to me in recent weeks about a new "double standard" in American policy — one that criticizes the centralization of power in Russia but overlooks authoritarian abuses in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. The involvement of Russian energy companies in Iran would not only support Moscow's external energy strategy but would push back against perceived American efforts to undermine Russia's influence in Central Asia.
Together, Russia and Iran control almost half of the world's proven reserves of natural gas. If they coordinated their production and marketing decisions, these two countries could be twice as dominant in international gas markets as Saudi Arabia is in the global oil market.
And as China looks to deepen its own involvement in Iran, there would be opportunities for Chinese-Russian cooperation in developing Iranian resources, and collaborating against what both Beijing and Moscow see as excessive United States unilateralism in world affairs. By working together, Russia and China would further establish themselves as rising players in the Persian Gulf, where America has grown used to something like hegemonic status.
Against this backdrop, the Bush administration's approach to nuclear diplomacy with Iran is strategically shallow. The decision to encourage direct talks with Tehran generated many headlines but was really only a limited tactical adjustment to forestall an embarrassing collapse in coordination with America's key international partners.
By continuing to reject a grand bargain with Tehran, the Bush administration has done nothing to increase the chances that Iran will accept meaningful long-term restraints on its nuclear activities. It has also done nothing to ensure that the United States wins the longer-term struggle for Iran. Such a grand bargain is precisely what is required, not only to forestall Iran's effective nuclearization in the next three to five years, but also to position the United States for continued leadership in the Middle East for the next decade and beyond.
Flynt Leverett, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, is director of the Project on the Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of Energy Security at the New America Foundation.
The New America Foundation rings a bell. Of course, that's the organization that Steve Clemons belongs to (his linky thing is up there on the right, the Washington Note). You know, the ones that make a lot of sense to a center-lefty like me.
While the U.S. is fiddling and losing in Iraq, guess what? That rest of the world is moving on. And, we're being out-maneuvered and ignored, mostly because we refuse to
engage with the rest of the world on the most basic of levels. For an administration obsessed with
American power, this gang sure knows how to show the rest of the world that America's influence is definitely on the wane.
[ed. comment] I have no dog in this fight. Americans have this attitude that if we need resources that we have no national control over, it's our right to take them when and where we choose. I say that if we can't produce the things we need, or barter for them fairly, we should do without. We could get a lot skinnier in the prcoess. A nation comprised of fat-asses and dummies; great. If we can't even figure out how to deal with the countries that border ours -- that would be Canada to the north and Mexico to the south for the geographically challenged -- we have no business telling anyone else how they should conduct their affairs. Baby steps folks, baby steps.
Cheney's Worldview
Today over at Dan Froomkin's
joint at the washingtonpost.com, he led us to some pretty insightful remarks regarding the Cheney administration's views on Iraq and American power. First, here's Dick (a.k.a. Big Time):
But King did ask what Cheney thought of a Democratic proposal for a timetable for withdrawal, and the vice president let loose:
"If we were to do that, it would be devastating from the standpoint of the global war on terror. It would affect what happens in Afghanistan. It would make it difficult for us to persuade the Iranians to give up their aspirations for nuclear weapons. It would threaten the stability of regimes like Musharraf in Pakistan and the Saudis in Saudi Arabia. It is -- absolutely the worst possible thing we could do at this point would be to validate and encourage the terrorists by doing exactly what they want us to do, which is to leave. . . .
"The fact of the matter is that we are in a global conflict. It's not just about Iraq. It's -- we've seen attacks around the world from New York and Washington, all the way around the Jakarta and Indonesia over the course of the last five years. Our strategy that we adopted after 9/11 of progressively going after the terrorists, going after states that sponsor terror, taking the fight to the enemy has been crucial in terms of our being able to defend the United States. I think one of the reasons we have not been struck again in five years -- and nobody can promise we won't -- but it's because we've taken the fight to them.
"And if Jack Murtha is successful in persuading the country that somehow we should withdraw now from Iraq, then you have to ask what happens to all of those people who've signed up with the United States, who are on our side in this fight against the radical extremist Islamic types of bin Laden and al Qaeda. What happens to the 12 million Iraqis who went to the polls last December and voted in spite of the assassins and the car bombers? What happens to the quarter of a million Iraqis who've gotten into the fight to take on the terrorists? The worst possible thing we could do is what the Democrats are suggesting. And no matter how you carve it, you can call it anything you want, but basically it is packing it in, going home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."
Now here's Dan:
I've written repeatedly about the White House's apparent lack of a realistic sense of what's going on in Iraq. (See, most recently, my May 24 column .)
Cheney's powerful disquisition to CNN offers an insight into why that might be. In Cheney's mind, the U.S. role in Iraq is fundamentally part of a global chess game -- not a troubled, bloody occupation. And in his mind it's still a war with extremist Islamic terrorists -- when instead, as is increasingly obvious, U.S. troops are largely fighting and dying in battles with Iraqis opposed to U.S. occupation, and a sectarian civil war is breaking out all around them.
When you view the U.S. military as merely a tool to expand American power, and as just a piece on a board game, these policies make sense. To Cheney, it seems, the military serves as just a placeholder in Iraq; a bullwork shoring up America's interests in the world. I tend to look at them as some of the best citizens we have in this country. People with famalies and homes. People that are being horribly misused, and stuck in the middle of a civil war. Dan also stears us to this bit from Salon, referring to a new book by Ron Suskind:
The One Precent Doctrine: (more from Dan)
In a review of Suskind's book in Salon, Gary Kamiya offers this context and perspective: "Many reasons have been advanced for why Bush decided to attack Iraq, a third-rate Arab dictatorship that posed no threat to the United States. Some have argued that Bush and Cheney, old oilmen, wanted to get their hands on Iraq's oil. Others have posited that the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon, [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith, and their offstage guru Richard Perle, were driven by their passionate attachment to Israel. Suskind does not address these arguments, and his own thesis does not rule them out as contributing causes. But he argues persuasively that the war, above all, was a 'global experiment in behaviorism': If the U.S. simply hit misbehaving actors in the face again and again, they would eventually change their behavior.
" 'The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.' This doctrine had been enunciated during the administration's first week by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had written a memo arguing that America must come up with strategies to 'dissuade nations abroad from challenging' America. Saddam was chosen simply because he was available, and the Wolfowitz-Feith wing was convinced he was an easy target.
"The choice to go to war, Suskind argues, was a 'default' -- a fallback, driven by the 'realization that the American mainland is indefensible.' America couldn't really do anything -- so Bush and Cheney decided they had to do something. And they decided to do this something, to attack Iraq, because after 9/11 Cheney embraced the radical doctrine found in the title of Suskind's book. 'If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response,' Suskind quotes Cheney as saying. And then Cheney went on to utter the lines that can be said to define the Bush presidency: 'It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It's about our response.' "
And if you subscribe to that theory -- that invading Iraq was fundamentally a way of delivering a message about U.S. power -- you can see why anything short of absolute victory would be so unpalatable.
Of course, there will be no "victory" in Iraq for the U.S. From here on out, as Josh Marshall puts it, it's just a slow burn off of lives, money, and materiel. This also makes clear why President Bush has stated that withdrawing troops from Iraq will be left to future presidents. Instead of bringing to a close a massive foreign policy blunder that he started, he's already told us that he'll leave it for someone else to clean up. This time it won't be his Daddy's benefactors; it'll be the entire nation. Thanks George.
Priorities
Dear Readers (there are so many of you),
My apologies for the lack of flavorful posts, but I just moved, and oddly enough, I now actually live in a town called Middletown. Sweet. Hopefully I'll have a more steady stream of Poo to fling your way as I get settled in.
I watched Press The Meat last Sunday, and something Sen. Joe Biden (D-MBNA) said actually got me thinking. Imagine that. When Pumpkinhead Tim Russert asked Joe about the uproar that was created when the Dept. of Homeland Security was planning on cutting funds to the two cities that were actually attacked on September, 11th, Joe responded by calling the amount of money we spend on defending ourselves against terrorism a joke. That's a view I happen to agree with, but what Joe failed to mention has now become the proverbial elephant in the room: Iraq.
If you look at the numbers, we're talking about
$711 million for terrorism prevention for the entire U.S. for one year. According to the
Congressional Budget Office, we're spending
$9 billion dollars for the Iraq War
per month. So, we're spending less than a billion a year to prevent against terrorist attacks here in the U.S., and over nine times that per month to create more terrorists overseas. This isn't a joke. These kinds of reckless policies will come back to haunt us for years to come. Except they're not reckless, they're insane.
Now for the fun part. Years from now, when blame for these policies is rightfully laid at the front step of a certain ranch in Crawford, TX., and at the feet of a former Congress that was completely controlled by Republicans, we Liberals, and the media for that matter, will be told it was all
our fault.
I've heard the Chowderheads on TV talking about Bush's legacy, and the above is just a tiny sliver. He's already lost the Iraq War, and he's already let us know he intends to let the next president clean up his mess. Now watch me hit this drive...
