The Strident Centrist Blog

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army officer and currently a professor of history at Boston University, reflects on his culpability for the death of his son, who was killed in Iraq earlier this month.

. . . responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son’s death, my state’s senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son’s wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don’t blame me.

. . .

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life: I’ve been handed the check. It’s roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

. . .

In joining the Army, my son was following in his father’s footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier — brave and steadfast and irrepressible.

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

Steve Clemons has one of the most troubling posts up that I’ve seen in a long time. It begins:

Cheney Attempting to Constrain Bush’s Choices on Iran Conflict: Staff Engaged in Insubordination Against President Bush.

There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy.

On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney’s team and acolytes — who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy.

The Pentagon and the Intelligence establishment are providing support to add muscle and nuance to the diplomatic effort led by Condi Rice, her deputy John Negroponte, Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, and Legal Adviser John Bellinger. The support that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and CIA Director Michael Hayden are providing Rice’s efforts are a complete, 180 degree contrast to the dysfunction that characterized relations between these institutions before the recent reshuffle of top personnel.

. . .

The thinking on Cheney’s team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran’s nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles (i.e., not ballistic missiles).

This strategy would sidestep controversies over bomber aircraft and overflight rights over other Middle East nations and could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf — which just became significantly larger — as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war.

Isn’t it time for Congress to completely de-fund the rogue, shadow NSC that Cheney has been running out of the VP’s staff for the past six years? While they’re at it they should shut down his phones and Whitehouse network access and reduce the powers of the office, at least for the duration of this Vice Presidency, to the “pitcher of warm spit” that John Nance Garner said it was during his service in the office in FDR’s first two terms.

Two days ago I posted on the explosive testimony former Deputy Attorney General James Comey gave before the Senate Judiciary Committee that day. It was a bit difficult to get a full picture of what the fuss was all about, not only because at that time my information was constraints of Marcy Wheeler’s live blogging of the hearings, but also because the underlying issue that it was all about was, and remains, a closely held government secret. Today TPM Muckraker offers a summary and time line developed by one of its loyal readers of what led up to the confrontation in March of 2003. Although the central issue of the confrontation remains a secret, the TPMM piece does shed a lot of light on the situation.

In my previous post I’d closed with the question of whether the main stream media would pay much attention to Comey’s testimony. Well, they did and they didn’t. I saw nothing on the network evening news programs (although I didn’t see much of them that day), nor on the Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS. But there was a scathing editorial in, of all places, the Washington Post, which in the Phil Graham era has become something of a right wing pulpit.

Here’s the title of a piece on Science Daily: “Molecular Biologists Convert Protein Sequences Into Classical Music.” Apparently it’s not a joke, considering we’re now almost seven weeks past the Day of Spoofs. The research was done by an undergraduate student at UCLA who is also a pianist. From the article it’s not clear to me what the benefit is beyond pure intellectual curiosity and fun. Keep an eye on this come the time for the awarding of the Ig Nobel Prizes.

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified today before the Senate Judiciary Committee and his testimony was explosive. The hearing was streamed onto the internet, and was also live-blogged by Marcy Wheeler (aka Empty Wheel) on Firedoglake.com in three successive posts: First, Second and Third. Below is Wheeler’s summary, at the beginning of her third post, of the most juicy part, aptly described by a commenter as being right out of an episode of the Sopranos, wherein White House staffers, led by then-counsel to the President Gonsalez and chief of staff Andy Card, try to coerce a critically ill, drugged-up Attorney General John Ashcroft into signing off on illegal elements of the NSA’s domestic spying program:

Just to summarize for those who missed it. The bulk of Comey’s appearance was taken by Schumer, getting Comey to explain what happened on March 10, 2004. Office of Legal Counsel had told Comey there was no legal justification for parts of the NSA Domestic Spying Program. Comey briefed Ashcroft on it, and they agreed that they could not reauthorize the program in its current form. When Comey told that to Andrew Card, Card got pissed. That night, Comey got a call from his Chief of Staff, saying Mrs. Ashcroft had gotten a call at the hospital, saying Card and Gonzales were on their way over. Comey rushed to the hospital to try to prepare Ashcroft for what was about to occur. And then, in his drug induced state, Ashcroft refused to reauthorize the program, and said he wasn’t AG anyway, Comey was acting AG.

The program was “reauthorized” anyway, w/o DOJ’s blessing. For two weeks, according to Comey, it operated outside the rule of law (though one day after the hospital visit, Bush told Comey to “do what’s right,” so they started to put it in line with the law).

That night, Comey and a number of other DOJ staffers prepared their resignation, refusing to stay after they had been overridden.

Comey and Robert Mueller met one-on-one, in succession with Bush the following day, and Bush eventually agreed to fix the program.

One point Comey made. The biggest reason why Comey and Mueller were able to get Bush to change the program was because Bush was willing to meet with them privately. The unstated message here is that, so long as Cheney, Addington, Card, and Gonzales were able to mediate between DOJ and Bush, they were able to persuade him to keep the program on its illegal footing.

One more thing. Comey said that one of his staffers, Philben (sp), was denied a promotion because of his role in the hospital meeting.

This evening I’m going to eschew my usual practice of generally avoiding the network television news to see what if and to what extent these hearings are covered. I’m also going to keep an eye on the C-Span schedule to see if/when they will be broadcasting this hearing.

Paul Bremmer, of Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority fame, has an Op Ed in today’s Washington Post that attempts to trowel some lipstick on the pig that is his decision to disband the Iraqi Army in May, 2003, two months after the beginning of the invasion. That set Pat Lang off on the subject. He starts off by lumping Bremmer together with George Tenet and Tommy Franks as the “Axis of Ineptitude”. (Personally, I don’t think he cast his net wide enough; Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and especially Feith belong in this august inner circle as well. And, of course, we can’t forget Bush and Cheney.) Then he goes on to provide an explanation of why it was a mistake. In the second, he elevates what appears to originally have been a comment by one “Habbakuk” that asks what role Ahmed Chalabi and/or the Iranian Intelligence agencies might have played. Interesting stuff.

Juan Cole has put up a set of predictions he received from “a canny Vietnam veteran” regarding what we might expect to see in Iraq, and the consequent Decider’s responses, between now and the end of the year. They’re quite specific, so I’m going to make a note to myself to revisit the post in December to check out the guy’s batting average.

On Paul Wolfowitz futures, that is. There is an hilarious spoof memo up at Foreign Policy, purportedly a memo from Wolfie to his World Bank minions admonishing them that dealing in the Paul Wolfowitz futures available at various internet gambling sites. From the memo:

In that regard, I am writing to you with a stern warning. It has come to my attention that many of you are turning your internet browsers to TradeSports.com, where there is an active market in “Paul Wolfowitz resignation” contracts for 2007. (For those of you who don’t know, this is a website where you can take bets on a variety of political events.)

I hope you understand that any attempt by World Bank Staff to buy or sell these contracts will be considered insider trading in clear violation of my anti-corruption guidelines. Your knowledge of normal World Bank personnel procedures gives you a clear information advantage in predicting whether I will be forced to resign. You must not abuse it. Please note: the Bank’s prohibition on insider trading applies not only to immediate family but also to significant others (e.g., girlfriends).

H/T to Steve Clemons.

On its last page, The Atlantic publishes a regular feature called “Word Fugitives“, wherein readers submit a suggested need for a new term and readers offer their suggestions in response. Today I submitted my first such suggestion, quoted in full below:

As the publishing industry replaces the eyeballs and brains of flesh and blood humans with grammar and spell-checking computer programs, it’s common for a recently published book to contain several word selection errors that a carbon-based proofreader would probably have caught and corrected. But my encounter today with two such instances in a single sentence in Scott Ritter’s Target Iran: The Truth about the White House’s Plans for Regime Change drives home the need for a term for these mistakes. Here’s the offending sentence, which begins the second paragraph on page 81, with the original “misspellchecks” in italics followed by my inferred corrections in parentheses: “Romano Prodi did have considerably more leverage when it can (came) to Iran that (than) had been the case regarding Iraq.” Surely a collaboration of The Atlantic’s intelligent readers can improve on my humble suggestion.

PS: I was very nearly guilty of sending this off with a “misspellcheck” in that last sentence. Fortunately, I noticed that “surly” was missing an “e”.

I’ll keep you posted as to whether or not my submission gets published.