Empire Notes

February 7, 9:00 pm EST. Naomi Klein's latest column for The Nation, about democracy in Iraq, is superb. It hits all the right notes. The last paragraph:

Washington's hold on Baghdad is growing weaker by the day, while the pro-democracy forces inside the country grow stronger. Genuine democracy could come to Iraq, not because Bush's war was right, but because it has been proven so desperately wrong.

This brilliant administration gave the contract for Iraq's new state television to Science Applications International Corporation, a corporation without media experience but with plenty of experience feeding at the Pentagon's trough (here's a blistering denunciation of that effort, by a former producer, published in Television Week -- when Television Week criticizes the occupation, you know something's up). How better to follow it up than by giving the contract for creating "democracy" in Iraq to the Research Triangle Institute, a private nonprofit known, Klein says, for its drug research?

February 7, 1:05 pm EST. Bild, Germany's best-selling newspaper, has just accused the RAF of ignoring Auschwitz in its massive bombing campaigns of World War 2. The occasion was the release of numerous RAF photos of Auschwitz by Keele University's Aerial Reconnaissance Archive. Some of the pictures show mass funeral pyres. The paper wrote (in the London Daily Telegraph's translation)

"It's certain that the British collators [of the pictures] knew of the existence of the concentration camps at that time. Why therefore were the extermination camps not destroyed after the reconnaissance planes of the Britons and Americans photographed them in such detail? At the very least, the railway tracks on which the Jews were transported into the extermination camp?"

The paper was earlier known for bringing attention to the saturation bombing of German cities by British and Americans as a war crime.

The fact that British and Americans knew about the Holocaust (earliest reports in 1941 and conclusive beyond a doubt knowledge about death camps by 1943 at the latest) has long been known. It's interesting that the charges are being resuscitated now in the violent aftermath of a war that was justified in the United States more often by reference to World War 2 than it was by reference to any facts about Iraq in 2003.

February 6, 2:08 pm EST. Lots of attention being paid to recent drops in Bush's poll numbers, especially a Gallup poll showing his job approval at 49%. But also check out these Gallup poll results on attitudes toward the war and related issues.

Conducted on January 29-February 1, the poll found Americans evenly split, at 49% apiece, on whether the war was "worth it." 48% think the war was justified, and another 23% say it would be if WMD were found; 25% say it wasn't justified no matter what.

Unfortunately, after eight months of cascading revelations about lies, only 43% think the administration deliberately misled us and 54% say they didn't. Perhaps most disturbing, 74% think it certain or likely that Iraq had ties with al-Qaeda, 71% that it had biological or chemical weapons before the war, and 70% that it was trying to develop a nuclear program. Major cognitive dissonance.

February 6, 2:08 am EST. Yesterday, speaking at Georgetown University, CIA Director George Tenet supposedly made a vigorous defense of CIA intelligence-gathering on WMD and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that was produced in order to stampede Congress into agreeing to the war.

There's a declassified excerpt from the NIE on the Web. Some interesting lines:

Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW [chemical or biological weapon] against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war.

Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge. Such attacks -- more likely with biological than with chemical agents -- probably would be carried out by special forces or intelligence operatives.

...

Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al-Qaeda -- with worldwide reach and extensive terrorist infrastructure, and already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States -- could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct.

In such circumstances, he might decide that the extreme step of assisting the Islamist terrorists in conducting a CBW attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.

Now, this doesn't involve any facts, just supposition, but the reasoning is clear. If Saddam had chemical or biological weapons, the only scenario in which he would use them would be a war for "regime change" -- and such an attack might push him to work with al-Qaeda as well.

So, first, Iraq was not and would not be a threat if the United States didn't attack it. Second, if Iraq had any CB weapons or links with al-Qaeda, then attacking it would be too dangerous. In other words, as I mentioned earlier the United States could only go to war with Iraq because it knew Iraq didn't have WMD and didn't have links with al-Qaeda.

February 5, 7:10 am EST. I'm heading out to Connecticut today and will be speaking tonight at a Town Hall meeting on the War on Iraq and U.S. Foreign Policy in the West Hartford Town Hall (50 South Main Street West Hartford) at 7:00 pm EST. Subject to Internet availability, I will keep updating.

After much wrangling, Bush has finally agreed to allow the 9/11 commission to extend its deadline until July. It was scheduled to terminate on May 27, but, primarily because of extreme obstructionism (do read that article, from the Wall Street Journal in July -- it's amazing) by the administration, was unable to complete its investigation by then.

The incredibly feeble rationale the administration gave for not wanting to extend the deadline was that they wanted it to finish its work as soon as possible. But, check out this lovely quote from the Post:

Privately, White House aides feared that delaying the commission's final report would result in a potentially damaging assessment of the administration's handling of pre-attack intelligence in the heat of a presidential campaign.

Doesn't that just about say it all?

February 5, 7:00 am EST. Here's an interesting piece from the GOP -- Why Liberals Fear the Pledge of Allegiance. Don't worry, it's not about the pledge of allegiance. It's about the "fact" that liberals want us to think that the United States is a democracy when, actually, as the author and the pledge point out, it is a republic. What's interesting is that is argues that this is intrinsically better than direct democracy, and not just a necessary compromise between the principles of democracy and the difficulty of consultation within a large polity. The reason it's a better form? Because it's what the Founding Fathers wanted. This is not some rightwing fringe group arguing against the principle of maximal consultation and participation by citizens -- it's the website of the Republican Party.

February 4, 9:30 am EST. Here's an excellent analysis of the new military budget by Fred Kaplan. He's a very mainstream, middle of the road guy, but this is a bit too much for him to swallow. The $420.7 billion suggested allocation (the real military budget includes that for the Defense Department as well as a big chunk of the Department of Energy's budget) in itself is, as he says, equivalent (when adjusted for inflation) to the budget in 1968, when there were half a million troops fighting a very hot war in Vietnam and when the "Cold War" was also at its height. And, amazingly, that number doesn't include the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; the administration left them out so that it could lie about the deficit this year. When you factor that in, the budget is, inflation-adjusted, the largest since 1952 and the second largest postwar budget.

He goes on to detail a lot of the fat in the budget, like almost $8 billion for a new class of submarines and new ships for a navy that is challenged by none and never has to fight. This is obviously a straightforward corporate boondoggle of the kind that all administrations have been fond of but this one has raised to an art form.

The allocation for "missile defense" has been increased from $9.6 billion to $10.7 billion. This, however, is not just a boondoggle; expect more from me about the real point behind "missile defense" shortly.

And, oh yeah, although Bush is content to jack the deficit up to unheard-of heights, he is also using the "opportunity" of the deficit to trim the real fat -- rural development assistance, housing aid for the elderly and Native Americans, ... Just two weeks after promising to create a new "Jobs for the 21st century" program, he is cutting federal funding for vocational training and adult education by one-third, from $2.1 billion to $1.4 billion. This and much more is detailed by Jonathan Weisman in the Washington Post. All of this is squeezing blood from a stone; his "deficit-reduction-related program activities" all concentrate on the meager 17% of the budget that comprises non-military discretionary spending. This approach is even being criticized by the (Republican) chair of the House Appropriations Committee.

February 3, 4:55 pm EST. At the same time that most forces in the democratic polities of the United States and the United Kingdom are stampeding to let their heads of state off the hook for going to war on false pretenses, lawmakers in Iran are taking real risks to stand up for democracy.

It all started when the Guardians Council, the body of Islamic jurists that must certify candidates for political office and can set aside decisions of the elected government if it judges them contrary to Islamic law, disqualified over 3600 of the roughly 8000 candidates for the February 20 parliamentary elections. Of those 3600, 80 are currently members of Iranian Majlis and they include President Khatami's brother Reza, a leader of the liberals. Protests, combined with partial concessions (reinstatement of some candidates) have now snowballed to the point that one-third of the members of the Majlis have resigned and Reza Khatami's party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front, has decided to boycott the upcoming elections.

I have long thought that the Iranian electoral system and the American are oddly analogous. In Iran, there is an elected government, but to be elected you need to be approved by the clerics. Furthermore, the elected government can't do anything the clerics judge to be against Islamic law. In the United States, you can run for office, but you can't be elected to major offices without money from corporations and the rich, which means without having a platform that they approve of (some exceptions are starting to appear, like Green Matt Gonzalez, who almost got elected Mayor of San Francisco -- and, of course, the other potential exception is if you yourself are a billionaire). Once in office, any legislation that departs too far from the rules of the economic-political corporate-state nexus that is laughably called "free enterprise" is almost impossible to pass and implement, and is liable to be struck down by the Supreme Court, our Guardians Council. Imagine a third of Congress resigning in protest of corporate control of our political process.

February 3, 11:25 am EST. Just posted a long article, "Our True Intelligence Failure, or, Don't Throw Me in That Briar Patch,"

February 3, 7:50 am EST. A recent article by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball is an early attempt at doing some serious revisionism on the Bush administration and WMD. It's all about a recent (classified) Senate Intelligence Committee report that blasts the CIA and simultaneously attempts to exonerate the administration. It mentions Alan Foley, who was portrayed in an earlier New Republic article by Spencer Ackerman and Franklin Foer ("The Radical," December 1-8, 2003), as "bullied and intimidated" by the administration into signing off on the bogus claims about Iraq seeking uranium from Niger. Foley recently told Newsweek that he did think the claims had some merit and that he didn't feel pressured at all.

Expect future coverage to ignore several crucial facts:

1. The fact that Iraq's getting uranium from Niger was impossible due to the degree of monitoring the French have over the mines.

2. The fact that the only hard evidence was a crude forgery.

3. The fact that unenriched yellowcake uranium was useless to Iraq. Without enrichment facilities, which Iraq didn't have, and which could have been detected with Geiger counters (yes, the IAEA inspectors had Geiger ccounters), you can't do anything with naturally occurring uranium.

4. The fact that Iraq has uranium of its own.

And most importantly, the stunning similarity of Foley's testimony and presumably that of many others to come (you heard it here first) to the dramatic recantation of John DiIulio, another insider critic of the Bush administration. Paul O'Neill has also backtracked on some of his claims. With the Bushies playing for keeps on an issue that could still blow up in their faces, expect the screws to be turned behind the scenes on every relevant player.

February 2, 10:45 am EST. Yesterday's attacks on the headquarters of both main Kurdish parties, the KDP and the PUK, in Erbil, bring up again the question of the Iraqi resistance. The political point of such attacks is incredibly murky at best.

Some factions, at least, of the resistance are going on the notion that any Iraqi who is involved in any way with the occupation is a "collaborator" and deserves to be targeted just like the occupying forces. The most shockingly inhumane incident in this context was an attack on January 22 in Fallujah where gunmen opened fire on a van carrying nine poor women who made their living cleaning on a U.S. base; four were killed. I spoke with a wide cross-section of people when I was in Baghdad in early January, and I can't imagine any Iraqi I met supporting such an attack. Most Iraqis I talked to were in sympathy with the idea of armed resistance against the occupying forces (an internationally recognized right), but said things like the attacks on the U.N. humanitarian headquarters and on the Red Cross back in the fall were the work of "terrorists." Killing cleaning women is a step beyond even that. Many of these attacks, whoever is carrying them out, are losing the Iraqi resistance the support of the populace. The most common complaint is how many Iraqis the resistance is killing.
 
Targeting the KDP and PUK seems to make no sense. On the one hand, they are part of the Governing Council and are among the staunchest allies of the Americans. On the other hand, this kind of attack is hardly going to scare them (they saw far worse from Saddam on more than one occasion) and is only going to push them into a more active role in supporting the occupying forces. It's hard to see this as anything but a net loser for those attempting to end the occupation. They've openly declared war on the only indigenous force in Iraq that has a substantial number of armed men with military experience. "Peshmerga," by the way, the name that the Kurdish militia fighters give to themselves, means "those who face death."

February 2, 10:15 am EST. Thom Shanker reports in the New York Times that G.I.'s in Baghdad will pull back to a ring of bases around the city and leave internal policing to the Iraqi police (IP, as they are affectionately known in Iraq). Already, from 60 operating locations they have cut down to 26, with plans to decrease that to 8 (2 of them within the heavily fortified "green zone" where the Coalition Provisional Authority's main headquarters are and the other 6 on the outskirts of the city).

This is very clearly the long-term plan for the occupation of Iraq. At the same time, on the one hand, you can read about the "transfer of sovereignty" (I'll be writing more on this soon) by July 1 and about Rumsfeld's decision to increase total troop strength by 30,000 (partly through "stop-loss" orders that represent an involuntary extension of an initially voluntary servitude) in order to keep troop strength at above 100,000 in Iraq through 2006. As I mentioned in my January 23 entry, a "transfer of sovereignty" in which the express design is to create a government that will invite the United States to continue the occupation is a sham. The point, however, is this: a continued military presence in which American soldiers don't have to expose themselves to Iraqi attacks, but can retreat into the security and the artificial world of a new complex of bases that is springing up all over Iraq.

This is consonant with the role of the U.S. military in other bases around the world. Any overseas deployment has two primary motivations:

1. Saber-rattling against neighboring countries. This happens through ongoing military maneuvers and through making large-scale military action a more immediate threat, since the existence of  forward-based troops makes a full deployment easier and quicker.

2. Leverage over the government of the country where they're based. In the case of Japan, this leverage is so great that, even with 80% of the population opposed to the war and later opposed to or wary of sending Japanese forces to Iraq, Koizumi did it anyway. Japan has never seriously crossed the United States on military foreign policy.

What all of this  means is that the Bush administration has a plan to continue the occupation, with all of its negative effects for Iraqis and negative effects in terms of U.S. world domination, but in a way that addresses the main criticism people make, that it's costing too many American lives. A broader critique is necessary, but right now it's coming from very few places.

February 1, 10:00 pm EST. Just returned from a conference in Ann Arbor put on by the South Asian Awareness Network. The promised review of Perle and Frum's An End to Evil will come out shortly in the Los Angeles Daily Journal.

January 31, 1:45 pm EST. In yesterday's Guardian, you can read the following about the results of the Hutton inquiry:

Lord Hutton's decision to absolve the government from blame for the Iraq weapons dossier placed the spotlight yesterday on the accuracy of the intelligence provided to ministers.
Far from drawing a line under the controversy about the dossier, the Hutton report has switched the focus on to the reliability of intelligence, an issue also gathering steam in the US.

So we have no monopoly on obsfuscation on this side of the Atlantic. Now, the punditry tell us, the question of government lies is off the table and we can focus on what's supposedly the real issue: nonexistent intelligence failures. Remember David Kay's conclusion that the UNSCOM and IAEA inspections were an extremely powerful source of information about Iraq's WMD? Just put that together with the fact that inspectors were deliberately withdrawn at the instigation of the Clinton administration, which wanted to try a little regime change operation of its own -- the 1998 Desert Fox campaign (the regime change nature of that campaign is covered in Kenneth Pollack's book, The Threatening Storm, and in Full Spectrum Dominance as well). And the fact that it was predicted that Desert Fox would mean the inspections couldn't be resumed. It's hard to characterize a deliberate policy with predictable, and predicted results, as a "failure."

A fascinating expansion on the theme of intelligence failures in USA Today: Intelligence lapses corrupt policy of pre-emptive strikes. As the article correctly points out, a policy of "pre-emption" (an invalid use of the term, which historically applies to clear imminent threats, like an army massing on your borders) does not make sense if you can't depend on your intelligence services to figure out which countries are a threat and which aren't. Unfortunately, this doesn't address the actual point. Even if Saddam had WMD, he posed no threat to the United States. As even Perle and Frum admit in their execrable book, "An End to Evil," no Third World government is going to attack the United States directly. Given the certainty that any terrorist attack with WMD in the United States would lead to an instant war on Iraq, Iraq wasn't going to arm any terrorists to commit such attacks (and, of course, it was well known that Iraq had no link with al-Qaeda). The real problem with the "pre-emption doctrine" is that it helps governments that are bent on war and trying to manufacture excuses to go ahead.

January 30, 8:20 am EST. Remember the Exxon Valdez spill back in 1989? 11 million gallons spilled, 1000 miles of coastline damaged? Supposedly it was because of a drunken skipper, but the real culprit, according to Greg Palast, was a corporate decision not to fix the broken Raycas radar system because of its cost.

Remember how it was a model for corporate litigation because Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) paid up so promptly? Well, it turns out that Exxon didn't pay the $4 billion in punitive damages it was ordered to pay (they only had 14 years to do it, after all), and a judge has recently ordered that the punies be upped to $4.5 billion, with added interest of $2.25 billion. Perhaps in another 14 years they'll pay that -- or perhaps not.

In its defense, Exxon says it has "voluntarily" paid $300 million in damages. This is like a criminal being sentenced to 40 years in prison, escaping after three, and excusing himself by saying he voluntarily stayed three years. We should be fair, though. Some turn to crime because they can't make ends meet. Last year, for example, Exxon Mobil only raked in $21.5 billion in profit.

On the bright side, Exxon Mobil is now pumping oil from Chad. Because of concerns over how Third World governments use oil money, Chad's share of the oil revenues, 12.5% of the total, is being put in a special escrow account in London, where disbursements will be carefully audited by the World Bank. Exxon Mobil's share, a mere 87.5%, doesn't need to be regulated because we know how responsibly it uses its money.

January 29, 6:00 pm EST. Just as Floridians were happy to be relieved in their role as the butt of the nation's jokes when California elected Arnold Schwarzenegger, Americans can breathe a sigh of relief now. The British have just completed a formal inquiry, which has concluded that the BBC is responsible for Blair's lies -- or, to be more careful, the Hutton inquiry exonerates Blair from any blame over WMD lies and instead castigates the BBC for reporting those lies. This even though Blair's claim, repeated as gospel truth, that Iraq could launch its (nonexistent) biological and chemical weapons in 45 minutes has been repudiated by a representative of Iyad Allawi (head of the Iraqi National Accord and member of the Governing Council), who passed the claim on to the British government in the first place. The original source of the claim is now in hiding. Gavyn Davies, head of the BBC, resigned within hours of the report's release, and was followed shortly thereafter by Director General Greg Dyke. This is a spectacle even more absurd, and more disturbing, than George Tenet falling on his sword last summer because the Bush administration ignored the CIA's analysis.

January 29, 12:45 pm EST.Sorry to beat this horse again, but it just refuses to die. The standard story now is that "intelligence failures" are the key to the great vanishing WMD mystery. In today's Washington Post, Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank, reporting on David Kay's conclusions, say, "Still, even hawks who had backed the administration on Iraq said it is not credible for the administration to deny that there was an intelligence failure." If only Pincus could go back and re-read the excellent article he wrote with Barton Gellman back in August, "Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence." You don't have to read very far to figure out that intelligence failures were not exactly the problem.

Take the aluminum tubes as an example. Remember Colin Powell charging that they were not for artillery but for centrifuges to be used in uranium isotope separation?

"Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don't think so," Powell said in his speech. He said different batches "seized clandestinely before they reached Iraq" showed a "progression to higher and higher levels of specification, including in the latest batch an anodized coating on extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces. . . . Why would they continue refining the specification, go to all that trouble for something that, if it was a rocket, would soon be blown into shrapnel when it went off?

As Pincus and Gellman uncovered, the administration had been told unequivocally for the previous year that the tubes were for artillery. In fact, to use them for centrifuges, they would have to remove the anodized coating -- so Powell was taking evidence that they were for artillery and claiming it was evidence for the opposite.

Where's the "intelligence failure" in that -- aside possibly from Pincus's in ignoring his own work? Of course, I don't want to slam him -- he and Milbank have done some of the best reporting on the WMD issues, and I'm sure he realizes the inconsistencies in his reporting. Clearly, the decision has been made that it is uncouth to keep pointing out the obvious truth.

January 28, 9:55 pm EST.The 9/11 commission, which is investigating the 9/11 terror attacks, said today that it needs more time. It's set to terminate on May 27, but, partly because of systematic obstructionism from the Bush administration, it says it won't be able to finish its work by then and is asking for an extension until July. The Bush administration says no and House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office has said he will oppose any extension. Shouldn't the administration at least pretend to concern about a full investigation into the 9/11 attacks?

January 28, 11:00 am EST.Here's an interesting tidbit in the Guardian, titled  "Abuses force America to end aid to Uzbekistan." Uzbekistan is, of course, part of the new American empire in Central Asia, and recipient of roughly $100 million annually in U.S. aid -- far more than it received before 9/11. The State Department has, however, refused to certify Uzbekistan as supporting human rights, supposedly because of minor problems like its practice of occasionally boiling Islamist prisoners in oil. When was the last time you heard of the the State Department mucking up something of strategic interest to the United States over the question of human rights? Congress has occasionally done this under huge pressure from grassroots activists, with Guatemala in 1977 and Indonesia in the 1990's (credit here goes largely to the East Timor Action Network), but to have it done by the executive branch?

Of course, as the Guardian article points out, the State Department was well aware of human rights abuses in 2002, when it certified Uzbekistan. So what's going on here? It certainly looks like another move in the interminable drama of State vs. Defense, realist vs. neocon, rather than a sudden access of concern for human rights. We should keep in mind, though, that although there are genuine differences of opinion about how to secure "U.S. strategic interests," both departments are working for the same longstanding policies of imperial control and domination. The administration has clearly been successful in using them as part of a "good cop, bad cop" game; the good cop is Baker going abroad to secure loan forgiveness for Iraq, Rice and Powell negotiating with Libya, etc.; the bad cop is Cheney, Rumsfeld and "new Europe," sidestepping the Security Council over Iraq, and so on. Termination of aid to Uzbekistan is likely a reasonable sacrifice right at the moment, when the country's immediate significance is not great and the empire is stretched thin anyway.

January 27, 10:00 pm EST. As I write, the results of the New Hampshire primary are a foregone conclusion -- Kerry beats Dean by about a dozen points, and he beats Edwards and Clark by about the same amount. Dean is definitely recovering, somewhat, from his Iowa problems and Kerry is definitely the frontrunner. The big dichotomy between Democratic voters is between those who vote based on the issues -- Dean is favored overy Kerry -- and those who vote on "electability" -- Kerry beats Dean by something like 3 to 1 in New Hampshire on this one. The results of Iowa and New Hampshire will likely reinforce this perception. One thing people are not reckoning with, however -- the primaries are a competition between Democrats, while the election will be run against George W. Bush, or, more accurately, Karl Rove. Anyone who weasels as much as Kerry on the question of the war will be eaten alive once Bush actually starts campaigning.

Kerry's victory speech made it clear what he's going to campaign on when it comes to foreign policy. He talked about the help of veterans, his "band of brothers." He talked about their experience "fighting for our country." Back when Kerry protested the Vietnam War he was pretty clear on the fact that he and his fellow soldiers had been fooled and lied to and that destroying Vietnam was not fighting for his country. It's still hard for me to believe that this man once made perhaps the best speech ever delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Had he learned the lesssons of 2000 and 2002, he would have put that speech right at the top of his website. If Dean has any sense, he'll realize that the way to come back is to emphasize David Kay and the fact that the Bush administration lied repeatedly -- so far, he's saying things like, "The White House has not been candid."

January 27, 7:20 pm EST. If you were the Bush administration, battling a perpetual international image problem, who would you send to the World Economic Forum at Davos and then on a European goodwill tour? Which of your fund of internationally experienced, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, reasonable-seeming people would you choose? Keep in mind that the mood in Davos last year was extremely critical of U.S. policies. Naturally, you would pick ... John Ashcroft ... and then follow him up with Dick Cheney. According to a new bio of Tony Blair, Cheney continually derided the British for their "multilateralism," saying to a British official in the summer of 2002, "Once we have victory in Baghdad, all the critics will look like fools." At the time, of course, the administration firmly denied that it was bent on war with Iraq. He's also continued to tell the same lies about WMD and al-Qaeda since the beginning.

January 26, 11:50 pm EST. Campaigning in New Hampshire today, Howard Dean criticized John Kerry:

Foreign policy expertise depends on patience and judgment," Dean said in Nashua. "I question Senator Kerry's judgment when he voted 'no' in 1991 and 'yes' [in 2002]. I think it should be the other way around.

Finally, someone mentions the obvious fact. The arguments that the Democratic candidates are using against Gulf War 2 -- alienated our allies, no U.N. resolution, didn't share the cost, bogged us down in occupation, lied about WMD, and so on -- didn't apply for Gulf War 1. And yet, far more Democrats voted against the first one (47 Senators voted against the resolution on Gulf War 1 and 183 Representatives, as opposed to 23 and 133 for Gulf War 2). Dean is no paragon of intellectual consistency, and clearly accepted the bogus arguments about WMD, but he does seem more logical than the other candidates. His line about the guys in pickup trucks with Confederate flags is actually a pretty obvious point -- as long as the Democrats continue to allow the Republicans to use racism to get poor whites to vote for them, the Democrats are always going to have the deck stacked against them. But anyway, to criticize the Gulf War or to criticize this one in a meaningful way, deeper analysis of U.S. motives is necessary, as is recourse to ethical arguments, something that is just not happening here. Even Dennis Kucinich is not using his time on TV to criticize the occupation for what's being done to Iraqis.

January 26, 11:17 am EST. Recently finished David Frum and Richard Perle's book, An End to Evil. Will write more on it later, but a few thoughts. It's not quite as full of lies as I would have thought, because most of it is so vacuous -- they don't number the footnotes, my guess is, because they don't want to make it obvious how few there are and how little of any kind of scholarship, even jaundiced neoconservative scholarship, went into making the book. Despite the vacuity, though, there are some doozies:

On page 3, they tell us that U.S. intervention saved millions of Afghans from famine. That's an interesting reconstruction of history. In fact, within days of 9/11, the United States had demanded from Pakistan the "elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population" ("Pakistan Antiterror Support Avoids Vow of Military Aid," John Burns, NYT, September 16, 2001). The risk of famine was dramatically increased when aid shipments were halted in September due to U.S. demands and then could not resume until late November because of U.S. bombing. The Guardian is one of the few organizations that attempted to estimate the death toll due to cessation of aid -- they came up with a figure of roughly 20,000 (not an upper bound -- the upper estimate was 50,000).

Perle and Frum are also at pains to explain that the deaths due to the sanctions are entirely Saddam's fault, with no blame shared by the U.S. government, so on p. 21, they say, "On the very day that Iraq was liberated, $13 billion in oil-for-food funds sat unexpended in the program’s escrow account in Paris." When I saw this, it seemed very wrong, so I checked out the U.N. Office of the Iraq Program's April 5-11, 2003, weekly update. It says that there were $3.2 billion in funds unallocated and $10.3 billion of goods in the "production and delivery pipeline." Add them together and you get $13.5 billion, but, of course, the primary reason for delays in getting goods into Iraq was U.S. obstructionism in the so-called 661 Committee. So was the number $3.2 billion instead of $13 billion? Maybe just a typo? Here's the kicker: at the same time that $3.2 billion was unallocated, $6 billion worth of contracts were approved but unfunded, so for Frum and Perle's purposes the correct figure is not $13 billion but rather negative $2.8 billion.

January 25, 11:50 pm EST. David Kay said today on NPR that he doesn't think any WMD will be found in Iraq and that what happened was a "corrupted process" where Iraqi scientists tricked Saddam into thinking he was funding research into WMD and then used the money for other things. He also says that Iraq's nuclear program, so frequently touted by Dick Cheney, had not gotten along nearly as far as Iran's and Libya's, which, of course, have not gotten very far. He also admitted the obvious fact that UNSCOM on-the-ground inspections were very effective and the best way of gaining information on WMD -- so that the U.S. government's constant claims to have extra information were clearly lies. But the most interesting thing:

Asked whether President Bush owed the nation an explanation for the gap between his warnings and Kay's findings, Kay said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people." (Kay Asks Why U.S. Thought Iraq Had WMD, AP)

Since it was on radio, we may never know whether he said this with a straight face.

January 24, 7:19 pm EST. David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, which was the Bush administration's replacement for U.N. and IAEA weapons inspectors, has now resigned, and concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons before the war, and that they had probably all been eliminated in the early 90's. The New York Times article on it also quotes Jane Harman, senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, saying "It is increasingly clear that there has been a massive intelligence failure."

How long are the Democrats going to continue with nonsense like this? Even before the massive revelations of the summer, it was clear that what was going on was not "intelligence failures" but massive deception. To take one example, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, defected to Jordan in 1995 and revealed a great deal about Iraq's weapons programs to U.N. inspectors. One of his revelations led to the seizure of huge numbers of documents. The Bush administration played up his case a lot, saying that inspections weren't enough, you need defectors. On March 3, 2003, however, Newsweek revealed that Hussein Kamel had also told inspectors that all weapons of mass destruction were destroyed and that this information had been covered up with the cooperation of UNSCOM, the Clinton administation, and the Bush administration (you can find the full text of that interview here). Whether Kamel was a liar or not, to use part of his testimony and cover up the rest is a pretty clear sign of dishonesty. Or how about the infamous "16 words" in the 2002 State of the Union speech? We know Iraq is seeking uranium from Africa? The continent? We can say that it's seeking uranium from one of over 50 countries, but we can't tell you which one? And, of course, these are just the tip of a mountainous iceberg of lies.

Actually, it's even worse. The Bush administration went to war on Iraq because they knew there was no significant WMD capability -- and, of course, made sure of that with the resumption of weapons inspections in November 2002. They weren't going to risk massive American casualties. They also had to know that Iraq had no links with al-Qaeda and wouldn't cooperate with it for any reason. Otherwise, in all the months of buildup, Iraq could not only have transferred WMD to al-Qaeda, it could have transferred huge amounts of money -- remember the story about Saddam pulling out about $1 billion in cash from Iraq's Central Bank three hours before the invasion started? What could al-Qaeda do with an extra billion or two (we know from all sources that money is a perpetual problem for al-Qaeda operations)?

Simple rule of thumb: Listen to what Dick Cheney says and believe the opposite.

January 23, 1:35 pm EST. Hot off the presses from the Washington Post (undoubtedly the major newspaper doing the best reporting on the occupation) -- "Immunity Pact for American Troops in Iraq Still Unsettled." Now, it is true that we already knew that the so-called "transfer of sovereignty" planned for the end of June 2004 was a sham. As Paul Bremer said when the plan was first put out in November, "Our presence here will change from an occupation to an invited presence." In other words, "transferring sovereignty" is about creating a government that will approve of the occupation and make it permanent -- which is not quite the same as creating a government that is independent.

But this adds insult to injury. Iraqi "independence" will involve a long-term presence of over 100,000 American soldiers who enjoy complete impunity and are not subject to prosecution by Iraqi authorities for crimes committed in Iraq. When the Western colonial powers, Britain, the United States, Germany, and France, imposed such a condition on China in the mid-19th century, it was called "extraterritoriality," and it was one of the most hated signs of colonial domination. In the dealings of the Ottoman Empire with Europe, similar concessions were part of the "Capitulations," which accumulated over several centuries. Abrogation of the Capitulations was one of the main reasons the Ottomans gave for entering World War 1 on the side of the Central Powers.

Note that this is a step beyond the phenomenal arrogance shown by U.S. demands that the strictures of the International Criminal Court not apply to Americans -- a demand that has manifested in dozens of bilateral immunity treaties. That says American soldiers are not subject to international law; this immunity pact, when agreed upon, will say that American soldiers are not subject to the law of the land they're in.

This is why Iraqis are wont to say that the Americans are merely "transferring power from the right pocket to the left pocket." It's hard to find an Iraqi on the streets of Baghdad who won't tell you that this particular transition plan is more about elections in the United States than those in Iraq. It's also hard to find one who doesn't know that, for all its talk about commitment to the rule of law, this administration clearly believes that the rule of law is only for other people.

January 21, 11:00 am EST. Returned from Iraq a week ago. I'll be writing more about the trip shortly. Recovered from jetlag just in time for the glorious pageantry of the State of the Union address. Did anyone else notice the insulting way that Adnan Pachachi was displayed as evidence of the great new partnership between Iraq and the United States? Much as Hamid Karzai was in the 2002 SOU address. Reminds me of Columbus bringing Native Americans to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. You can't see the chains in this modern re-enactment, but they're still there, no doubt about it.

Anyway, the difference between the reality of Iraq and the mythmongering of the SOU was a bit much to take. You can see my detailed comparison of Bush's claims with the truth here