The Strident Centrist Blog

I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.

These are the words of Daniel Ellsberg in a speech he gave a week ago today that is extensively excerpted in Consortium News. Ellsberg has articulated a view that has been at the edge of my consciousness now for several years, but which had implications so troubling that I didn’t want to accept it. That is that one of the two major parties in this country has come under the control of elements who intend to subvert the foundations of our Constitutional system. In short, that party has become a subversive organization that is far more dangerous than any of those that was included on the infamous Attorney General’s lists of the McCarthy witch hunt era in the 1950s.

My father was a life-long Republican for whom politics was purely a matter of the guys in the white hats versus the ones with black hats. Any favorable mention of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman or Hubert Humphrey soon had him red in the face. He proudly told me several times that there was only one occasion on which he did not vote for the GOP candidate for whatever office was in play: when he was 21 in 1912 he voted for Teddy Roosevelt on the Bull Moose ticket.

One of my most compelling memories of Dad took place a week to the day before I was drafted into the Army in 1963. The evening before the event in question, I had arrived at my parents home in southern Minnesota to store my things and so forth. The next day we were having lunch while listening to the noon time radio news from Minneapolis when the program was interrupted with a bulletin that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. We immediately went into the living room and turned on the TV to watch the live coverage. Twenty or so minutes later, when Walter Cronkite finally confirmed that the President was dead, Dad immediately stood up, got the American flag out of the closet, and went out front and hung it up at half-mast. When he came in he said quietly, “I may be a Republican but I’m an American first!”. That said to me that for him, much as he detested the various policy positions and personalities of the Democratic Party, it was unthinkable to him that the members and office holders of that party did not genuinely both think and act like they had the protection and defense of the Constitution at heart.

Daniel Ellsberg clearly believes that while the members and office-holders of today’s Republican Party may think they are acting in the best interests of the nation, their actions bespeak an intent to undermine the checks, balances and freedoms that our founders wisely regarded as necessary to prevent a descent into tyranny. I generally agree with Ellsberg that the evidence that has emerged over the past decade or two indicates that this has been the hidden agenda some leading Republicans since the downfall of the Nixon administration, most notably Richard Cheney, and that unless the movement is stopped in its tracks before the end of the George W. Bush administration it will probably be too late.

A scattering of prominent people across the political spectrum do “get it.” On the right there is Ron Paul, the Libertarian entry in the GOP Prez sweepstakes whom the party apparatus is trying to suppress. There are also prominent figures from the Reagan administration including Bruce Fein of Justice and Paul Craig Roberts of Treasury. One other denizen of the political right deserves mention, and that of all people is Bob Barr, former Congresscritter from Georgia and a leader of the movement to impeach President Clinton.

John Dean of Watergate fame also “gets it” and has written extensively about the threat from his perch at findlaw.com. His recent three-part piece on the authoritarian tendencies in his former party can be found here (I), here (II) and here (III). This series is based on his 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience, and draws heavily on the findings of Robert Altemeyer’s life work studying authoritarians. In addition to his many professional publications, Altemeyer has recently written (at Dean’s suggestion) a book-length overview of his work and findings for the general public. A self-published dead-tree version is available for about $10.00, as is a free, down-loadable PDF edition. Both are available here.
What’s so depressing is that so few of the leading people in the Democratic Party seem to get it. Aside from some of the more junior “net-roots” members of the House of Representatives, about the only more senior people in Congress who come to mind are Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Senator Russ Feingold. The leaders of the party in both houses seem to be among the most clueless.

Here’s more from Ellsberg’s very important speech: (more…)

William Lind suggests that the recent improvement in the situation in Anbar Province of Iraq, while probably not a result of the “Surge”, nevertheless may present an opportunity:

As is widely known, the key to turning the situation in Anbar around was a decision by the local Sunni clans and tribes to turn against aI-Qaeda. We did not make that happen, although we did make it possible, not by what we did but what we stopped doing, i.e., brutalizing the local population. Once U.S. forces in Anbar adopted a policy of de-escalation, the sheiks had the option of putting al-Qaeda instead of us at the top of their enemies list. De-escalation was, to use a favorite military term, the enabler.

As is also widely recognized, al-Qaeda itself then provided the motivator by its treatment of local Sunnis. . . .

Again, in itself this is nothing new. Where we may begin to perceive something new, a potential seam in Islamic 4GW operations, is in al-Qaeda’s response to its own blunder. It has refused to change course. (more…)

You may recall the news item of a few weeks ago in which it was revealed that a B-52 flew from the Air Force base at Minot, ND, with six nuclear-armed cruise missles under wing, to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. The Air Force insists it was all a mistake, a judgment seconded by a lengthy piece the other day in the Washington Post. Larry Johnson, the former CIA and State Department official who blogs at No Quarter, was skeptical from the beginning, and now has a more lengthy piece, with extensive input from an old friend who is a former B-52 pilot, up at TPM Cafe. The WaPo piece did nothing to ease their skepticism regarding the ‘mistake’ spin. Here’s an excerpt Johnson quotes from his source: (more…)

Sidney Blumenthal, writing at Salon, finds that Robert Draper’s recent biography of George W. Bush is quite revealing of the inner dynamics of the Bush family, it’s circle of close political associates, and its adversaries within the wider GOP, even as major aspects of the Bush 43 era are not addressed by Draper at all:

The elder Bush assumed that the Bush family trust and its trustees — James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Prince Bandar — would take the erstwhile wastrel and guide him on the path of wisdom. In this conception, the country was not entrusted to the younger Bush’s care so much as Bush was entrusted to the care of the trustees. He was the beneficiary of the trust. But to the surprise of those trustees, he slipped the bonds of the trust and cut off the family trustees. They knew he was ill-prepared and ignorant, but they never expected him to be assertive. They wrongly assumed that Cheney would act for them as a trustee.

Cheney had worked with and for them for decades and seemed to agree with them, if not on every detail then on the more important matter of attitude, particularly the question of who should govern. The elder Bush had helped arrange for Cheney to become the CEO of Halliburton, making him a very rich man at last. But Bush, Baker, Scowcroft et al. didn’t realize that Cheney’s apparent concurrence was to advance himself and his views, which were not theirs. When absolute power was conferred on him, the habits of deference lapsed, no longer necessary. (”Thank you for the privilege of serving today.”) Cheney was always more Rumsfeld oriented than Bush oriented. The elder Bush knew that Rumsfeld despised him and that Cheney was close to Rumsfeld, just as he knew his son’s grievous limitations. But the obvious didn’t occur to him — that Cheney would seize control of the lax son for his own purposes. The elder Bush committed a monumental error, empowering a regent to the prince who would betray the father. The myopia of the old WASP aristocracy allowed him to see Cheney as a member of his club. Cheney, for his part, was extremely convincing in playing possum. The elder Bush has many reasons for self-reproach, but perhaps none greater than being outsmarted by a courtier he thought was his trustee.

And then there’s this:

Bush grasps at the straws of his own disinformation as he casts himself deeper into the abyss. The more profound and compounded his blunders, and the more he redoubles his certainty in ultimate victory, the greater his indifference to failure. He has entered a phase of decadent perversity, where he accelerates his errors to vindicate his folly. As the sands of time run down, he has decided that no matter what he does, history will finally judge him as heroic.

The greater the chaos, the more he reinforces and rigidifies his views. The more havoc he wreaks, the more he insists he is succeeding. His intensified struggle for self-control is matched by his increased denial of responsibility. Hence Petraeus.

There are contrary views of Bush’s likely standing in history, probably beginning with his father’s. It’s got to be galling for GHWB to realize that his historical reputation, which could have been better but could also have been a lot worse based on his four year presidency, will now be completely overshadowed by the fact of his siring one of the two most incompetent and destructive presidents in our history. And it’s a close race between Bush 43 and Buchanan for “top honors”.

There are many other interesting tidbits in Blumenthal’s piece, including the fact that Laura Bush’s nickname for Karl Rove was “Pig Pen”.

The ever-thorough emptywheel at The Next Hurrah finds some gems in the filing documents of Dan Rather’s suit against his former employer. From the legal documents:

In late April 2004, Mr. Rather, as Correspondant, and Mary Mapes, a veteran producer, broke a news story of national importance on 60 Minutes II–the abuse by American military personnel of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison. The story, which included photographs of the abusive treatment of prisoners, consumer American news media for many months.

Despite the story’s importance, and because of the obvious negative impact the story would have on the Bush administration with which Viacom and CBS wished to curry favor, CBS management attempted to bury it. As a general rule, senior executives of CBS News do not take a hands-on role in the editing and vetting of a story. However, CBS News President Andrew Heyward and Senior Vice President Betsy West were involved intimately in the editing and vetting process of the Abu Ghraib story. However, for weeks, they refused to grant permission to air the story, continuously insisting that it lacked sufficient substantiation. As Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes provided each requested verification, Mr. Heyward and Ms. West continued to “raise the goalposts,” insisting on additional substantiation.

Even after obtaining nearly a dozen, now notorious, photographs, which made it impossible to deny the accuracy of the story, Mr. Heyward and Ms. West continued to delay the story for an additional three weeks. This delay was, in part, occasioned by acceding to pressures brought to bear by government officials urging CBS to drop the story or at least delay it. As a part of that pressure, Mr. Rather received a personal telephone call from General Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urging him to delay the story.

Only after it became apparent that, due to the delay, sources were talking to other news organizations and that CBS would be “scooped,” Mr. Heyward and Ms. West approved the airing of the story for April 28, 2004. Even then, CBS imposed the unusual restrictions that the story would be aired only once, that it would not be preceded by on-air promotion, and that it would not be reference on the CBS Evening News. (Emphases presumably by ew)

As ew points out following that extensive excerpt:

Sad thing is, you could effectively replace “CBS,” “Dan Rather and Mary Mapes,” “Mr. Heyward and Ms. West” and “General Myers” with the words “NYT,” “James Risen and Eric Lichtblau,” “Pinch Sulzberger and Bill Keller,” and “Dick Cheney,” and it’d all make perfect sense. .And let’s not forget how the NYT refused to publish the NSA story until Risen threatened to scoop his own paper, and the NYT buried the most alarming parts of the news in the black news hole of a Saturday Christmas Eve. Rather’s complaint paints a picture of a media outlet that willfully allows itself to be the Administration’s propaganda tool–but that’s clearly not unique to CBS.

According to a piece in Science Daily, I haven’t been doing my part to promote human longevity:

It turns out that older men chasing younger women contributes to human longevity and the survival of the species, according to new findings by researchers at Stanford and the University of California-Santa Barbara.

My wife tells me she’s like to have a word with the authors.

Sounds like the relationship between General David Patraeus and his nominal superior, CENTCOM Commander Admiral William Fallon, got off to a rather testy start last March:

In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus’s superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be “an ass-kissing little chickenshit” and added, “I hate people like that”, the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

Many think that Petraeus is nothing more than an administration sycophant, and if there’s any truth to this piece from Inter Press News Service (h/t to Truthout) Fallon is apparently among them. But Pat Lang, a man with a subtle mind and deep military experience in the Middle East isn’t ready to join the crowd. My sense of his writing of late is that Lang believes that Petraeus’ s seeming sycophancy is part of his plan to nudge Bush-Cheney toward withdrawal and at the same minimize as much as possible any more damage beyond that which has already been done to US interests by this fiasco. He also has some pungent things to say about the risks to the Democrats in this affair.

The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin, writing at the Nieman Watchdog site, suggests to other reporters where they should look for a broader perspective on the tune being sung by the neocon “Attack Iran” chorus. Some of what they might hear goes like this:

The general consensus within the foreign policy community is that an attack on Iran would more likely rally the Iranian people behind their radical leaders than it would lead to regime change. It would more likely encourage the Iranians (and others) to accelerate their development of a nuclear deterrent, rather than abandon it. It would more likely set off waves of terrorist attacks in Iraq, Israel and the U.S. than it would strike a blow against terror. And it would make the U.S. even more of a pariah nation on the international stage — particularly among Muslims — than it is now. . . I’ve read remarkably few stories in the traditional media exploring the possible downsides of an attack on Iran.

To quote Brad DeLong’s frequent refrain, “Impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney.  Impeach them now!”

The Badger has some acerbic things to say about the quality of the debates in Washington regarding Iraq. He is especially annoyed at the Democrats, and I agree with him:

The two sides in the Washington hearings clashed over interpretation of statistics relating to dead bodies: how many, location, and manner of death. And naturally, the more this kind of discussion continued, the more the distinction between the war party and the anti-war party blurred and finally melted away. It was the equivalent of analyzing 9/11 by breaking out the victims by manner of death, race, social class, and so on, as if the issue was the social structure of the World Trade Center, and it had never been hit by aircraft. The fact is that in the discussions about Iraq, maintenance of that level of discussion is taken for granted. That is the insult and the vulgarity of it.

. . .

I think what’s happened is that the “progressives”, by tying themselves to the Democratic Party with all of its Washington-system baggage, have made sure that policy debate and discussion never goes beyond the system of partisan calculations. But the dynamics of those calculations ensure that it is in moral terms a race to the bottom. Policy aims can’t be critiqued (perhaps because of the unpatriotic war-crimes implications, or perhaps just because it’s better for Democrats not to talk about aims, so as not to have to propose their own, and expose themselves to criticism); in the absence of saying anything about policy aims, the debate is reduced to discussion of implementation techniques; and as far as that goes, the Democrats can’t be seen as soft on national-security; so the differences become more and more minute; until finally the only way they have of discussing Iraq is in terms of the distribution of the dead bodies, such as we are seeing now.

The Badger is dead-on regarding the utter absence of any discussion of the policy aims. I also think he’s right in asserting that the progressives have tied themselves too closely to the Democratic Party’s Washington establishment. However, I’m less than impressed with his implication that the problem is largely the reality distortion field that exists inside the Beltway.

From the get-go I’ve believed that the fundamental goal of the hidden Bush-Cheney agenda is an outcome that leaves US-based oil majors with guaranteed control over the Iraqi oil reserves at the kinds of favorable rates that prevailed before the resource-owning countries started getting uppity. The issue of what kind of state(s) (unitary, federated, more than one, etc.) exist, what kind of governments (secular democratic, fascist dictatorship, theocratic etc.) it/they have are secondary issues at best. All of the Bush-Cheney administrations changes of “strategy” have been at this latter level. Through it all has been the focus on leaning on the Iraqi government of the day to pass an oil law, and on building the gigantic embassy compound and mega-military bases from which the strings on the puppets can be pulled and the terms of the oil law that was pushed down the throat(s) of the Iraqi government(s) can be enforced.

The problem with the inside-the-Beltway Democrats (including many but not all of their Congress Critters) is that they are dependent on the same cash teat of the petroleum cow that is a major source of nourishment for the GOP. That’s what at the bottom of their strategic and tactical indecision.

There are three (at least) basic questions about the Iraqagmire mess that need to be addressed. First, can the apparent basic Bush-Cheney goal of Iraqi oil control be achieved at all? The answer, I suggest, is almost certainly not. There might have been a chance if the administration had planned the occupation rationally and manned it adequately, but we know now there was a fantasy instead of a plan, and that the troop levels forced down the military’s throat by Rumsfeld & Co. was a central episode in the dream. Now the US military ground forces are broken, and with the chickens of the nation’s fiscal profligacy coming home to roost it’s unlikely that funds can be found to adequately ramp up the military outsource contractors at their $200K per person, or whatever it is. As for Senator Lindsey Graham’s (Cloud Nine, South Carolina) recent call for the restoration of the draft to add 2 million people to the forces, well, dream on.

The second and third questions are: if we do manage to get a favorable deal for our oil companies with whatever remains of Iraq, is that sustainable over the long term? And if so, at what cost? The answer to the first, I again suggest, is almost certainly not. As for the cost if we do manage to sustain it for a while, that will be ruinous, both in fiscal terms and in the decline of our overall national security.

A primary reason why a national oil law has been so slow in coming is that almost certainly likely that the terms being demanded by the administration are a virtual death sentence to any Iraqi politician who signs on to them. The neo-colonialist arrangement that I believe Bush-Cheney envision will be a thorn in the side not only of Iraqi nationalists, but to the Arab and even entire Muslim world as a whole.

Bismarck once said something to the effect that statesmanship consists of placing one’s ear to the ground to listen for the oncoming horse of history, figuring out which direction it’s headed, and when it comes by jumping on its back and hanging on for dear life. It’s time we recognize that the horse is not riding toward neocolonialism and figure out where it is going.

Final Note:  The history of this fiasco will not be fully known unless and until what took place in the deliberations and side conversations of Cheney’s energy task force of 2001 become public.

From ABC News comes this:

From September 3 to September 9, researchers say 69,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappeared, roughly the size of the Sunshine State.

Scientists say the rate of melting in 2007 has been unprecedented, and veteran ice researchers worry the Arctic is on track to be completely ice-free much earlier than previous research and climate models have suggested.

“If you had asked me a few years ago about how fast the Arctic would be ice free in summer, I would have said somewhere between about 2070 and the turn of the century,” said scientist Mark Serreze, polar ice expert at the NSIDC. “My view has changed. I think that an ice-free Arctic as early as 2030 is not unreasonable.”

Sea ice melt will likely reach the absolute minimum in the next few days as temperatures at the North Pole cool and refreezing begins.

From what I read there’s a lot of uncertainty as to what will happen if when the Arctic Ocean is mostly ice-free for much of a summer. Water in its liquid form absorbs much more solar energy than do snow and ice, which reflect much of it back into space. Here’s a post from RealClimate from early this year that addresses the issue. Perhaps we should be thinking of industrial civilization as a laboratory experiment.