Tom Watson

A Blogging Soldier's Farewell

Blogger Andy Olmsted, an American Army Major who blogged from Iraq, was killed in action yesterday and posts his own eulogy at Obsidian Wings, where he blogged regularly under the name G'kar. Everybody with a soul should read the entire post and the comments, but here's an excerpt:

What I don't want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I'm dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren't going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.) I had a pretty good life, as I noted above. Sure, all things being equal I would have preferred to have more time, but I have no business complaining with all the good fortune I've enjoyed in my life. So if you're up for that, put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980-1984), grab a Coke and have a drink with me. If you have it, throw 'Freedom Isn't Free' from the Team America soundtrack in; if you can't laugh at that song, I think you need to lighten up a little. I'm dead, but if you're reading this, you're not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

Andy requested no political statements, no use of his death to damn the war or the President. And so silence at this keyboard in his memory.

UPDATE: You can read about the circumstances of his death from his family, the family members of a captain who also died, and current and former comrades in arms in the comments secton of Andy's final post.

War Is Hell (Until It Gets Boring)

Pity the neocons. Their war against Islamofacism just drags on and on, the Bush Administration resembles the New York Jets running out the clock in the fourth quarter of yet another blow-out at the dreary Meadowlands, and the reports out of Iraq just don't hold the same manly drama they once did. So many have moved on.

Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz brings his must...bomb...Iran...now mantra to the campaign of Rudy Giuliani, who proclaims that "civilization itself" is in danger from Islamic fascists. Paul Wolfowitz grew bored with warfare early, ran the World Bank into the wall, and is hiding out at the American Enterprise Institute. Richard Perle apologized and disappeared into the think tanks. And talk about move on - Karl Rove is advising Democrats.

But one famed neocon - the best writer of the bunch - has really let his snarling, gung-ho, kill 'em before they kill us war vision slip away, in favor of...cosmetic waxing?!

Yes, Christopher Hitchens, the reformed liberal who became knee-shakingly fearful for western civilization after 9/11, has spent two full issues of Vanity Fair engrossed (le mot juste) in extreme personal grooming. While the fighting men he urged on (and mourned, I must say) continued to go door to door in the worst neighborhoods in the world, Hitch had an appointment at the studio of "the renowned 'J Sisters,' the seven girls from Brazil who have pioneered the waxing technique that bears their country’s name." What followed?

The male version of the wax is officially called a sunga, which is the name for the Brazilian boys’ bikini. I regret to inform you that the colloquial term for the business is “sack, back, and crack.”

I wonder. With the neocons otherwise occupied as the war drags on, what next for Rumsfeld?

UPDATE: It's always so wonderful when they turn on themselves, isn't it? And this guy is touting the leading Democrat!

My Hometown

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair and say son take a good look around this is your hometown

I grew up in Yonkers, New York and by the 1960s, the city had seen better days. My father worked for The Herald Statesman, the daily paper and commuted every day on the bus to the paper down near the river. When we visited the office or ventured downtown, I was always struck with the steep rise of the hills of the city, rising high over the Hudson. You'd come over the rise and find yourself staring from the backseat of the wagon at these long, strange vistas of mostly empty industrial buildings, run-down three-story houses and the Palisades across the river. In college, I got a a job as a sportswriter working for the same paper as my dad, who toiled in the layout department of what was by this time a chain of newspapers under the Gannett corporate seal. They combined it all into one countywide paper a few years ago, The Journal News, and it was there I read about the death of Army Staff Sgt. Courtney Hollinsworth from my hometown.

Hollinsworth joined the Army at 17 with a required signature from his mother, and was assigned to the 4th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, based in Fort Riley, Kansas. He died this week in an attack in Baghdad by insurgents using grenades and an improvised explosive device, according to the Defense Department. A career NCO, he was an experienced 26 years old, nine years of service contributed to his nation for low pay and long days and nights.

Last night, Hollinsworth's commander in chief proved yet again just how unworthy he is of that title - how much less of a man he is than Courtney Hollinsworth of Yonkers, New York was.

He sat before the cameras and claimed that a principle he dubbed the “return on success” mandated that U.S. soldiers remain in the hopeless Iraqi meat-grinder - to be released only if and when they "succeed" in pacifying a massive civil insurrection, the sectarian tribal struggle that he alone ignited four long, long years ago. And then the President pledged something that is not in his diminishing power to deliver - an enduring American military presence in Iraq. “The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home,” he promised. Win or die.

Bush's strategy is to run out the clock and dump Iraq on his Democratic successor, to make permanent the greatest American mistake of our generation, our grand national failing of the 9/11 challenge. It's the only card he has left to play, but I think he'll be called on it nonetheless. This will always be Bush's war, Bush's horror, Bush's terror and residents of Crawford and Greenwich and Kennebunkport will feel the local disgrace of having raised such a man and sent him to lead for some time.

The President's supporters are limited now to the few, the proud, the foolish. Consider House Republican Minority Leader, John Boehner who said this week that the war was an "investment" and - as Lance Mannion put it - "that all the dead soldiers and Marines, all the wounded, crippled, maimed, and broken men and women coming back home from Iraq are a 'small price' to pay to achieve whatever goal the war supporters decide this week has been the goal of the war all along."

Of course, the President's supporters also include the entire Republican Presidential field, not one of whom has repudiated the failed and immoral Iraq policy. They're all for the war and the Bush vision of endless occupation, from Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani (who infamously blamed the troops and not the President for the Iraq mess) to John McCain and Mitt "Double Gitmo" Romney. None of them, in my view, can be an American commander in chief. None are worthy of Sgt. Hollinsworth.

Courtney Hollinsworth joined the Army right out of Saunders Trades and Technical High School, a big sprawling box of a school on Palmer Avenue just across the muni golf course a few blocks from where I grew up. He'd done two tours, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq,  but "some of the people from his platoon were called back up and he felt obligated to be with them so he reenlisted for a second tour," his aunt told the Daily News.

In Yonkers, his family heard from Sgt. Hollinsworth about three weeks ago.  "He was down. He said a couple of guys in his unit were killed," his mother said. "And he said that the insurgents had gotten stronger - that they had gotten a lot stronger than before - and there was more violence than the first time around."

His grandmother opposes the war, but naturally supported her grandson. "I'm always on the computer e-mailing senators about it - Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid," she said. And his mother believes the country got lost following President Bush.

"So many lives have been lost - not just U.S. lives but the lives of children over there. You get to the point where you don't want these guys to have died in vain. No, I don't support the war, but I definitely support the soldiers. My prayers are with them."

According to the paper my Dad I both worked for, the Yonkers cops are expected to form up on the eastern end of the George Washington Bridge when the hearse bearing Sgt. Hollinsworth's body crosses the Hudson this weekend. They'll ride as an honor guard north up the Henry Hudson Parkway through Van Cortlandt Park and take the local streets up and over the big hills and down to North Broadway and the funeral home. Then they'll bury a son of Yonkers, New York who wanted nothing more than to be a soldier and serve his country.

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back to your hometown

Comma Day

"...I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma ..."

-- President George Bush, 24 September 2006

Scene and Heard

A special "wheels coming off" edition of this little occasional link-fest today, apropos of the vehicle of state screeching along down Pennsylvania Avenue on sparking rims.

• Bob Geiger (he of the in-depth Senate coverage) reports on something I must've missed in the newspapers: Senator Jim Webb's proposal for a new GI Bill of sorts for returning war veterans. Says Geiger: "Webb did more for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan on his first day in the Senate than the man he ousted, George Felix Allen, did in the entire previous Congress." And be sure to read Bob's personal postscript about his own post-service education.
• Lance Mannion is en fuego with his takedown of warmonger and faux liberale Joe "Anonymous" Klein today: "I know he's just another Cliff Clavin of the Washington Punditocracy, fancying himself an expert on any and every subject that comes up, endlessly spouting off, happy to substitute opinion and conjecture for actual knowledge and asserting unreliable and even nonexistent experts to back him up, and retreating into bluster, paranoia, and hysteria when anyone challenges him on the facts, and I ought to ignore him." Smack.
• Says Chervokas: "Before the November elections Dick Cheney told ABC News that no matter what the outcome of the vote it would be full speed ahead in Iraq.Turns out he wasn't kidding." And he believes Congress will shut him down. Hope so.
• Steve Gilliard continues to believe - as he has for more than a year now - that Bush cannot survive in office; that his presidency must fall. He hasn't said it in a while - perhaps he's as weary as I became - but he's back on it today: "...in the end, I think America has had enough. Sending the Guard back is an insane political mistake. Two tours for part-time solders? ... I think Bush will lose the country, and eventually leave in disgrace because his plan will fail. It will fail badly and bloodily and he will be exposed as the weak little man he is and we will not have long to wait."
• Jim Wolcott quotes Steve and compares Bush with Richard Nixon, the last (and only) man drummed out of office by his own party. But he finds a key difference: "Bush will not enjoy a lion-in-winter third act. For better or worse, Nixon was his own man, a stark lesson in the possibilities and limits of self-reliance. Bush, who has always relied upon others to bail him out of jams, is not his own man. If he were, he wouldn't let Cheney secretly run the show."
• And while Cheney and Rice plot war on Iran and Syria, the Republicans peal off. The voluble Chris Bowers has the language from 12 - count 'em, 12 - members of the minority in the Senate who have had enough.

Yellow Surge Suit

Flew into Washington early this morning on the first real cold day of the year. At dawn, the pink light over the Whitestone Bridge looking eastward on Long Island was stunningly beautiful; and sipping my steaming coffee in the shuttle terminal, the pink grew into a warmer read and then lifted and disappeared into the blue of day, as the jetliners rolled in. Picked up the cab at National (note: you can usually tell the political party of the shuttle pilots by whether they say "National" or "Reagan") and we immediately hit traffic.

"Funeral," said the driver as he tapped the steering wheel in an impatient rhythm. "Arlington." Indeed, a long line of car with lights on. so we actually looped around toward the cemetery, around the Pentagon, and slipped below the Lee Mansion onto Memorial Bridge.

And there was the funeral cortege coming over the bridge - military, flags flying from the hearse and the limousines and the SUVs all in line. No way of knowing if it was for some old general or some young sergeant, body flown home recently from Iraq.

I watched them pass as we drove toward the Lincoln Memorial. Big day in Washington: the President to announce his famed "surge." Twenty-thousand fresh troops - well, not so fresh really; back for more tours. All for a troop level that is actually less than the number of American soldiers in Iraq last year. All for a shameful political cover story - a hail mary pass with young American lives.

It was so cold, and fresh and clear in Washington today. The city looked like shiny gem in limestone and gold leaf, as it sometimes does. Maybe, as it always does when a constitutional crisis beckons - because that's what is clearly happening - the legislative branch is on a collision course with an imperial presidency run off the rails.

And complete fools like Michael Ladeen write things like this in ole Billy Buckley's rag:

We’ve got lots of soldiers sitting on megabases all over Iraq. They should be out and about, some of them embedded, others just moving around, tracking the terrorists, hunting them down. I don’t know how many guys and gals are sitting in air-conditioned quarters and drinking designer coffee, but it’s a substantial number. Enough of that.

What a lying, shameful shank of cowardly column gristle.

When Johnny Comes Marching Home

I never suffer from writer's block. This may be because it doesn't exist. Writer's block is simply the refusal to write poorly, the inability to give in and just spew the trash. A crutch, no more. So it never gets in my way. A far more insidious condition has, however, paralyzed this humble journal over the past week or so - the malady (rare in these parts) known as "nothin' t'say."

By rights, I should be cranking out more top music lists, jotting a few more post-hanging thoughts, ripping into the failed Administration anew. At the very least, I should be cheering the historic rise of Nancy Pelosi to the Speaker's chair and the iconic transfer of power from the wheels that slip to the wheels that grip.

But I can't.

Somewhere between the mistletoe and the ball-drop, the movement mojo fled these pages. It was great to win the election, incredible to be a tiny part of the netroots, and wonderful to see the electorate finally repudiate an illegitimate movement. But the grins on the faces of the newly-sworn, and the high-fives in grand chambers of the republic left me cold, I must admit. (Though I did get a kick out of the classic in-your-face that Rep. Keith Ellison delivered with ol' Tom Jefferson's prized Koran. Sweet.)

Blame the New York Times for the mirthless mildew herein; the editors on 43rd Street had to go and run one of their big "faces of the dead" packages to mark the New Year. The 3,000th death coinciding with Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve and all the lost souls in Times Square, keyed by the pages of young, hopeful faces just shook the blogging life right out of me.

Then I went to the NYT's Website and really got lost, body and soul. Some interactive genius has created the saddest, most effective digital monument to this war's cost that I've yet beheld: an ever-changing photo map of tiny squares, each one linking to the life of a dead soldier and the whole forming the bitmapped face of life sacrificed too early and in vain. Behind that are personal stories, some recording into audio files by comrades still living. I've been clicking and reading and and listening and getting sadder by the day.

And there's nothing, really, to say.

What's the point of writing yet again about the uselessness of this adventure, its cost in lives and limbs and burned skin and terrorized, battered psyches? Of picking out another failed Bush Administration policy, another anti-American invasion of civil liberties, another poor decision? For what? This keyboard can't bring them back. Their families must go on living without them forever, knowing that their lives were cast away in adventurous frivolity by a bunch of think-tankers and oilmen. Who can say our young men and women are "defending democracy" now, as the shouts of "Moktada! Moktada!" still echo in the American-built death chamber?

We can oppose this phony "surge" on our blogs all we want, but we're still throwing away our own young for a lost and immoral cause - day in and day out, more die needlessly. They die now to protect the ego of the President; they die now because a few old men with names like Cheney and Lieberman and McCain believe that America can't sustain another defeat like Vietnam. Not on their brave, Churchillian watch. No-sir.

Well, we can sustain a defeat. We cannot sustain the bleeding. We will not. This is clear.

Right now, I can't find the will to write about it, however. I need a break from the blogging ramparts. Maybe we all do. Hurling bytes back and forth while soldiers are dying on their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty in Iraq seems amoral, vacant, pointless. Possibly just for today, I'll admit. Or a week. Or a month.

Or maybe it's time to foresake the blogs. In favor of the streets.

Vengeance Is Mine (Sayeth the Decider)

So George W. Bush got his man. The American government handed over Bush's vengeance totem to a street gang of taunting thugs, who wrapped his neck in a thick hang-knot, taunted him over arcane differences in ancient Muslim politics, chanted the name of killer cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and dropped him to a brutish death from a cheap sheet-metal gallows. Black ski masks made the macabre scene look like something out of Spielberg's Munich; the cheap camera phone video gave the execution an air of casual brutality. And the sleeping President awakens in luxurious sheets and pronounces himself satisfied that justice has been served.

This is justice, American-style? A cheap, showy lynching in a concrete-block shack with guards in second-hand leather jackets and loose, open collars, chosen for their own particular stake in vengeance? This is what our President demands of our soldiers? That they hold a prisoner in secret American custody through a circus trial and virtually no appeal, acting on the orders of a weak and small-minded prime minister and deliver Saddam to his killers just 20 minutes before his death?

Listen. Don't shy away from the video, from the still photographs, from the corpse, from the accounts of the "witnesses." You owe that to the families of the nine American servicemen whose deaths were announced the very day of Saddam's long drop. Look at the tawdry, vengeful murder and mourn. Not for Saddam Hussein, a murderous tyrant who faced a tyrant's back-alley execution at the hands of a mob, as many have since the days of Robespierre. Mourn for your country, for your system of justice. Mourn for the bit of our own honor that swung from the rope in Iraq.

UPDATE: There are some wonderful, thoughtful posts out there on the Saddam hanging. Christy Hardin Smith's point of view as a former prosecutor and defense attorney is a must-read. Here's a taste (read it all):

As I read through the news articles on the Saddam hanging this morning, it was that lack of human compassion, even on any level, that struck me as somehow unseemly, as undignified and as uncivilized, barbaric even. That feeling of someone being thrown to the lions, no matter how deserving of punishment, while the masses look on and cheer at the tearing from limb to limb — the disgusting spectacle of bread and circuses, set to a theme song and a hasty graphics design on the 24-hour news networks.

And Josh Marshall's piece at TPM has been widely making the rounds, but here's the key  quote (hat tip to Jim Wolcott):

"This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur--phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us."

And Fareed Zakaria has it right in Newsweek:

The saga of Saddam's end—his capture, trial and execution—is a sad metaphor for America's occupation of Iraq. What might have gone right went so wrong.

The Real Day of Mourning

America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned. As I see it, the time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the Nation's wounds, and to restore its health and its optimistic self-confidence.
-- Gerald R. Ford, April 23, 1975

And so the old man's body will be brought along the wide boulevards and monuments, and the shadows of the caisson will flicker off the cold marble. A lone horse will be led riderless, boots turned backwards in the stirrups and the guns will fire their salute. This is how we mourn our dead commanders in chief.

The last time we did this, the war was young and the casualty count was low. And we were burying a President who according to common legend, lifted the nation's collective spirit in the post-Vietnam era,  the venerated creator of a national political movement that governed absolutely on that Washington DC day two years ago.

Just two years later, that movement is in ruins and disgrace; the Reagan revolution has been forever discredited; its formula of trading winked-at intolerance for tax-cutting power and wealth led to corruption and to the current White House disgrace. Two years ago, we buried the movement conservative, the great man who lifted the nation out of the malaise of a failed war. Two months ago, voters buried his movement. Now, we bury the moderate deal-maker who brought the troops home the last time America failed on a grand scale overseas.

Yet, the war drones on. The number rises always. The injured and maim return. And our disgraced President faces two more long years in office with no plan, no support, no movement, and no strength in his political parties. George W. Bush refuses the reality that Gerald Ford embraced, even after his neo-con wizards recanted their dishonorable spell in Vanity Fair and hung the sign of cowardice around their own, wrinkled necks.

And we do not mourn.

As a nation, we refuse to join together to mourn the nearly 3,000 American men and women who have died for the neo-cons' grand adventure, for George Bush's divinely-inspired dream.

The plastic flags no longer flutter from car windshields and the magnetic Support the Troops bumper ribbons are all mangled and soiled by exhaust fumes and road grime. There is no national sacrifice; in spirit, we are all the free-spending Bush twins, tossing back Cosmos and enjoying our freedom heedless of what a roadside bomb can do to a body.

Mission Accomplished has morphed into Stay the Course, which has become the New Way Forward. The Maoist Republican phrase-makers demand lockstep mind-marching by the legions even now, even as silly as it now seems, even with their party in splintered ruins, the "movement" now synonymous with humiliation.

So they'll wheel the old man through Washington one more time and our current President will stand at attention in a smart gray suit, purse his lips and scowl. The nation will mourn, he will decree.

Let us step forward instead to honor the sacrifice instead of the ritual. As we bury the man who ended the Vietnam War, let's make his funeral the National Day of Mourning our soldiers have not received.

Nearly, 3,000 dead and no national prayer service, no national day of remembrance, no national honors. Yet all the flags will be ordered to half mast and the bands will play their mournful tunes for a moderate, mediocre national leader. Where is our sense of scale, our sense of justice, our sense of duty?

George Bush is taking his time, being a deliberate Decider; he's closeted at Camp David sketching out the alternative course. Then he will return to  bury a Republican forebear who slashed his policies in a death-embargoed interview with the Power Jackal of the Washington Post.

Why not watch that long march, the line of Senators, the President with the hand over his heart and say a silent thanks for the young men and women who have died in this adventure?

Better yet, write about it. Blog about it. Use Ford's funeral dirge to play a nationwide recessional for the cost of this war. Don't mourn a 93-year-old who became President and enjoyed a quarter century of long drives and birdie putt. Mourn the young soldiers dying in Baghdad, in Anbar, in Diyala. Remember the 2990 as of today.

What better way to honor the politician who finally ordered the last generation of cannon fodder out of Southeast Asia - the one who admitted the lost cause?

UPDATE: Jim Wolcott gets off the best line on this: "A flag-draped coffin is acceptable viewing only if a dead president is inside." Indeed.

Ford's Theater

The political deal that brought Gerald Ford to the Oval Office was a good one, and cynically sure-handed: a pardon in exchange for the Presidency. That Ford only served two years before a Watergate-weary nation elected a born again reformer and sent the unelected chief executive into a golf-laden retirement was beside the point: the man from Michigan was a political deal-maker, hardly the bumbler Chevy Chase made him into on Saturday Night Live to great comedic advantage.

Indeed, the deal to get Nixon to San Clemente was the capstone on a legislative career built on something that many pundits believe is impossible these days - bipartisan compromise, which is, you must understand, the exact opposite of nonpartisan surrender.

Ford represented Grand Rapids in the House from 1949 till he became Vice President after Spiro Agnew's disgrace. Little remembered is that he gave up significant political power to serve Richard Nixon in his last year of power: Ford was the minority leader for a decade, and he opposed LBJ's Great Society programs in public, while cutting deals to approve them in private. He described himself as "a moderate in domestic affairs, an internationalist in foreign affairs, and a conservative in fiscal policy" - the kind of description that would fit any number of ambitious Democrats these days.

Ford's Presidency began with one of the seminal political speeches of the last 50 years, clearly the moment he will best be remembered for; I remember listening to it by my Dad's old portable radio in our rental on Cape Cod that August. But in the end, his White House tenure was one of necessary and painful defeat - the pull-out in Vietnam, the comic Whip Inflation Now campaign, the Swine Flu epidemic, "Ford to City: Drop Dead," the Mayaguez incident, and the two weird assassination attempts.

He was at the center of what was popularly viewed as a failed institution in the 1970s just as we view it here in the 2000s. Gerald Ford made the deal, took the hits, and lit out for the links. Somebody had to. May as well have been a deal-maker from Michigan.

Where the Love Light Gleams

Christmas in Italy, 1943

In December of 1943, American marines invaded New Britain in the Solomon Islands. In Europe after the previous month's Tehran conference of the Big Three, the Allies began planning for a late spring invasion of France the following year, as GI's continued their bloody fight up the Italian peninsula. And the greatest war-time American Christmas song raced up the radio charts.

Walter Kern's haunting melody and Kim Gannon's melodramatic and emotional lyrics gave Bing Crosby the material he needed to create an instant classic - I'll Be Home for Christmas remains my favorite holiday song.

The tune earned Crosby his fifth gold record and became the most requested song at Christmas U.S.O. shows in both Europe and the Pacific. That year, of course, millions of Americans were in uniform, fighting a global struggle against totalitarianism and the nation was mobilized behind them. I'll Be Home for Christmas, beamed around the world on armed forces radio, acknowledged the sadness of separation, the presence of death, and the dim but still extant hope of peace.

We tend to romanticize World War Two in the United States as a time when we pulled together as a society, united in the fight for good, for democracy, for freedom. In these terrible days with young Americans dying for a cause most of us at home believe is either lost or not worth the sacrifice in the first place, it's comforting to look back to a time of accepted sacrifice - when songs like this one spoke in simple terms. But the Second World War was long, brutal and imperfect - victory wasn't total; triumph not universal. Millions of innocents died, and Americans claimed a share of those deaths. it was a horrific period in recorded human history.

I'm not a pacifist for two reasons: for one, some wars have to be fought to preserve civilization for those who come after the soldiers stop killing and dying. Then too, humans will always fight. The global struggle of the 1930s and 40s was long in the making, and we still live in the shadow of its gravestones and war memorials.  And while I'm  a student of history, I'm not  nostalgic for "better wars." But I will admit nostalgia for better reasons for war - my living memory knows none. Because I came from an Irish Catholic family, Christmas music was der Bingle and everybody else. And after White Christmas, I'll Be Home for Christmas was number two in the canon. So it fits my December, in memory and in what I'd like Christmas to be.

There's a fine simplicity to the song, and it's nostalgic and emotional. Despite its mid-war authorship, it doesn't light any patriotic fireworks or wave a flag. I've sung this for my children since they were little.

I'll be home for Christmas,
You can count on me.
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents under the tree.
Christmas Eve will find me,
Where the love light gleams.
I'll be home for Christmas,
If only in my dreams.
Christmas Eve will find me,
Where the love light gleams.
I'll be home for Christmas,
If only in my dreams.

This is my favorite December song - what's yours?

UPDATE: Ellen from Brooklyn wrote to correct my lyric transcription. She points out that the original Crosby side had "plan on me" rather than "count," and that the presents were "on" the tree, rather than under - both changes make the song that much more nostalgic to my ears. She also wishes me "Mele Kalikimaka{" which brings to mind my favorite Christmas movie - can you guess which one?

George Bush's Noose

So the line grows of Iraqis volunteering to hang Saddam Hussein. You may assume this will be a rare act in the new Iraq, a singular national death sentence, an extraordinary happening. You'd be wrong. The regime supported by American lives, by American blood, by American treasure is a massive machine of civil murder. In short, our billions tie the hangman's noose for hundreds of Iraqis convicted in courts reconstituted by American lawyers. On the jump of Kirk Semple's Hussein piece in the Times today:

The death penalty in Iraq, which applies to a range of crimes including terrorism and certain categories of murder, was suspended in 2003 by the American occupation authorities but reinstated in August 2004. Since then, 51 people — men and several women — have been hanged and about 170 are currently on death row awaiting execution or the outcome of their appeal, according to Hashim al-Shibli, Iraq’s justice minister.

Those are the official numbers. The high-ranking government official involved in the executions process said the actual number of hangings was far higher, though fewer than 100, because of three sets of hangings that took place between December 2005 and March 2006 and were never publicized.

Human rights groups have questioned the transparency of the criminal justice system in Iraq and the ability of defendants to get a fair trial.

Hangings. Paid for by Americans. By the dozens. This is the new democracy?  We're hanging one barbarian, while another sits in the justice ministry - presumably standing up while we stand down. Do the neocons approve of this:

Death is supposed to come instantly — a doctor is on hand to certify it — and the bodies are removed to a cooler where they are held before being handed over to the victims’ families. The entire process is recorded by a photographer and a video cameraman and the images are stored in a government archive.

But the hangings have not always gone smoothly.

Until the new gallows were built, the Iraqi government used an apparatus and an old rope left over from Mr. Hussein’s government, said the high-ranking government official. The rope had become so elastic that it would sometimes take as much as eight minutes to kill the convicted person.

On Sept. 6, the Iraqi authorities planned to hang 27 people. On the 13th hanging, according to an official who was there, the rope snapped and the convicted man plummeted 15 feet through the trap door onto the concrete floor. “God saved me!” the man cried. “God is great! I did not deserve this!” For an hour, he lay on the ground praying and shouting while prison guards and the executioner debated whether this constituted divine intervention and, if so, whether the man’s life should be spared. Once a new rope was rigged, however, the man was forced up the stairs once again and successfully hanged.

Time's special report two weeks ago detailed a surge in hangings by our partners in the new Iraq:

An adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says the government plans to execute "two or three more batches of 14 or 15 each" in the coming months...."From the Iraqi point of view," says al-Maliki's adviser, "they don't like to see a lot of people get killed every day and have a low number of executions."

Who built the Iraqi gallows? We did:

Hangings are conducted in secret, at a heavily fortified location in Baghdad built by an American contractor.

In short, one of the most horrible postscripts in this horrible war is the assembly line of hangings we've helped to create in Iraq. I guess it will make a nice exhibit in the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Research Center.

No Country for Old Men

In the language of the cinema, the ancients of the Iraq Study Group enter the tragedy at the critical moment, like eight wizened Dumbledores or Gandalfs, their metaphorical beards flowing below twinkling eyes that have seen all that needs to be seen, windows in minds that know all that needs to be known. We know these characters and their places well. We're culturally conditioned to believe in their intervention, their wisdom, their mighty spells.

But these be not wizards. The man they seek to save is more Malfoy and Gollum than Harry and Frodo. And the evil they oppose is much harder to define; there is no Voldemort to slay, no Mordor to defeat.There are no spells, no magic, no storybook endings. As James Baker knows all too well, there are only shifting sands and ever-shrinking opportunities to sift those sands in the nation's favor.

The seven old men and one old woman of the ISG released a bland, careful, unrushed document this week, primed for the Bush Administration to ignore, pshawing and harrumphing past its elders with the hurried arrogance of late-for-supper middle age. Yet that graybeards' report is soaked in kerosene. And there's Lee Hamilton in full Walter Brennan gleeful malice. Tie a rag to it, flick the lighter, and woosh! The Bush legacy is a visible, burning inferno.

These are the days of who-voted-for-what scorecards in anticipation of next year's presidential rodeo, and it doesn't matter. These are the days of impeachment boomlets, and it doesn't matter. These are the days of shifting and shiftless congressional allegiances, and it doesn't matter.

What matters to Americans boils down to two hard, cold facts laid out in cool, politburo fashion by the Baker group in both their classic one-volume edition and the myriad interview since it was published.

One, young Americans are caught in a deadly, ever-tightening vise with no clear mission and no hope for "victory," a concept President Bush clings to like my 12-year-old still clings to Santa Claus. Our troops are dying now for nothing. This is an obscenity.

Secondly, we've screwed up very badly. We hurt our own national interest. We made a bad region worse. And we created a legacy that will remain for generations.

Notice the plural. I mean "we," not in the royal fashion of course, but snugly within the concept of collective guilt. I opposed the war, publicly and with activism. But I didn't do enough. I went on with my life most days. I slept pretty well at night. Democrats didn't do enough. None of us in our representative republic stood up nearly enough to stop this national disaster. So yeah, we've earned the collective we - earned it well in the blood of others and profound moral cowardice.

What matters now is excising the cancer; that means pulling out. We shy away from timetables and you know, perhaps there are good tactical reasons for doing so - maybe it gets more people killed. Jason's been reading the ISG's report, with his sharp eye slightly between the lines as usual:

You won't read incendiary language in the report--no talk of civil war, ethnic cleansing, or even peace with honor, Jim Baker is a much too careful man for that. But you don't need to read between the lines to get the message, it's there on the surface: Iraq has gone past civil war to complete anarchy and the most optimistic odds on establishing a stable Iraq with a strong central government is 50-50, in other words no better than random.

There's not a Sunni/Shi'a war going on. Instead there are more than half a dozen heavily armed factions, some with more than 100,000 troops at their disposal, all with private, sectarian goals not national Iraqi ones.

Jason's in the midst of a series on the ISG and I recommend following the whole thing; when he gets an obsession like this, he digs deep. Far deeper than official Washington. The seniority of the ISG, their careful deliberation, and their full consensus recommendations bought them little. This nut graph from the Washington Post round-up caught DC is full policy stasis - which, at this crushing time, is a national immorality:

On the day after the congressionally chartered Iraq Study Group released its widely anticipated report, much of Washington maneuvered to pick out the parts they like and pick apart those they do not. The report's authors were greeted with skepticism on Capitol Hill, and Democratic leaders used the occasion to press Bush to change course without embracing the commission's particular recipe themselves.

But to me the most stunning story of the day came in the blue-wrapped Times - the same issue that led with Bush's crabby dismissal of the ISG's recommendations and sidebarred Condi Rice's I-know-better attitude towards James Baker and his golden oldies. Philip Shenon's piece is a stunner, a bit of living history that will belong at the top of the archives, about the days when the old commissars ventured to Baghdad. It's the perfect coda to this post. Here's a long, liberal quoting of it - please read the whole thing:

For some members of the Iraq Study Group, the turning point came during four days in Baghdad in September. They found the trip so harrowing, they said, that they wondered if they could afford to wait to speak out about the disaster in Iraq.

Like other visitors, they arrived on a C-130 transport plane that performed a plunging corkscrew maneuver to avoid insurgent fire while landing at Baghdad’s airport. Then they were bundled into flak jackets and helmets and rushed onto attack helicopters for the five-minute flight to the Green Zone, the military-controlled neighborhood that is sealed off from the city.

There, they were placed in fleet of armored Humvees, each with a medic seated in the back to offer first aid in the event of a rocket attack. The roar of the Humvees’ engines could not mask the sound of explosions from car bombs outside the Green Zone. The security measures had been routine for most of the American occupation, but they were still jarring to these first-time visitors to the war zone.

“You understand this is real — this is a state of siege,” said Edward P. Djerejian, the former American ambassador to Israel and Syria who helped draft the Iraq Study Group’s report, released Wednesday, which called for an overhaul of American policy in Iraq. “The trip to Baghdad really solidified that perception for all of us.”

Whatever their early differences over the American venture in Iraq, some of those serving on the 10-member bipartisan panel and its staff say the trip to Baghdad brought them to a common understanding of the catastrophic situation in Iraq and how much had gone wrong in American planning for the occupation.

They said the situation in Baghdad was so bleak — and in many ways, so much worse than they expected — that the four Democrats and three Republicans on the trip debated releasing an interim report as soon as they returned home. They worried that a final report released after the November elections, as planned, would be too late to have any hope of salvaging the situation.

UPDATE: Like me, Steve Gilliard sees the actual policy recommendations of the ISG as deeply flawed, but cuts them some slack for essentially taking Bush out:

I'm less critical of the ISG report than some, because it has the adults saying this isn't working. Now their solutions may suck, but they have finally broken the stranglehold of Bush's cheerleading on the discussion, actually isolating him. It was the Washington establishment saying end the war.

As Lindsay Beyerstein points out, "re-branding American troops as 'force protection' won't take them out of combat when they are targets and the entire country is a potential battlefield." And Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist, looks at it from a classic management POV: "...for some reason, our president isn't listening to his board right now."

UPDATE II: In comments, Tony asks why I think the report is flawed - basically, because the panel seems to believe (taking political cover, I think) that there actually is an Iraqi nationalist base that can control things there somehow, if only etc. I think that's rubbish. Further, the ISG also shifts the accepted, centrist compromise solution to Bush's madness quite a bit, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out  in his thoughtful post:

Americans are done with this war. They have given up on it and want it over with. But the B-H Report has somehow supplanted the views of the vast majority of American voters as the "mainstream position." The B-H Report single-handedly cancelled out the results of the last election by purporting to identify as the "center" a position which is squarely at odds with the emphatically anti-war views of the American public that is the real mainstream.

UPDATE III: Meteor Blades has a brilliant essay from the perspective of his Vietnam generation over at DailyKos. It's long and deep and focuses on the deaths of so many young Americans. Here's a bit:

What the Baker-Hamilton Commission has delivered is a fragment of truth together with yet another version of the apocryphal pottery barn rule, the message we've received for two-plus years from various parts of the political spectrum: "you break it, you own it." In short, we're told once again, the U.S. dares not make a "precipitous" or "premature" withdrawal or redeployment of American forces because this would worsen the situation.

Cry Me A River

There was the old man breaking down at the Governor's send-off in Florida, swimming awkwardly in a wave of emotion churned up from the bottom of the deep Bush ocean by the fast- nearing end of his favored son's political career.

George Bush's feelings for his son Jeb and his words about dignity and overcoming adversity were touching for any father, but I watched the tape with a heart hardened by the deaths of too many other sons and daughters, by the destruction of too may families, and by the cowardly abrogation of responsibility by George Herbert Walker Bush's other son.

These are deaths, remember, that Forty-One's other son wanted covered up, removed from public view so the coffins could be off-loaded in secrecy out at Andrews. These are the deaths, mind you, that the old man's other son has never publicly mourned - there have been no days of remembrance for the 2,800; no bullhorn moments in their memory. And still the bodies come home, and still the wounded arrived - broken and battered but always loyal.

The Decider despises human weakness in any form. Won't face up to it. Refuses to deny its existence. And in that denial, he appears weaker than any national leader in our lifetimes.

But the father can peer into the depths of this national tragedy and look down the ancient hallways of history and see the final resting place for his family's name - a name that will come to be used as a synonym for blind failure as Benedict Arnold's name is deployed as short-hand for treachery. After all, the former President is an experienced man, a man who works the avenues of power, who gets along. He knows abject failure when he sees it. He knows what his friends think.

That failure dooms the future for the brighter point of light in the Bush's night sky, and the 41st President feels it deeply. So he praises his boy's courage under political fire, and the massive weight of a sad, ruinous future washes over him and breaks him down.

As a father of sons, I can identify with that weight - with the requisite hopes and dreams and falls and stumbles that arrive with the coming of age, and the release from the all-powerful (or so we think) paternal grasp. But as an American who wonders how we escape from this horrendous quagmire, this national swamp of spirit and death and blood, I have another, colder, far less worthy reaction.

It's about time we saw a President named George Bush cry.

Cut and Run

Rather than face the endless hearings as a sitting (and incredibly vulnerable) Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumseld has chosen to resign his position. I predicted this in my 11:37 entry of the big liveblogging fest last night, loudly and obnoxiously (Chervokas said it gave him a vicious headache) proclaiming that Rummy would never allow himself to submit to a grilling by a panel run by Democrats. I was absolutely certain that the arrogance of the man - the main theme of Bob Woodwards knife-in-the-back Bush post-hagriography - would cause him to see this election as a referendum on one thing - Don Rumsfeld. So now CNN's doing a standup in front of Rummy's house and a woman is singing the song that winners use to mock the losers. If Rumseld hadn't sent 2,800 of our finest to die I might find it funny. But it's hard to sing this one in dirge-like fashion. na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na...hey hey hey....goodbye.

The Massive Cost of Our War

Linday Beyerstein has the best post on the morass and failure and historic American disgrace in Iraq that I've read in the last year. Read it now. She correctly tars the so-called war-bloggers of the right with the permanent stain of moral cowardice:

Cowards, all of them. They own this war, but they won't face up to the fact that their little adventure helped kill over half a million people.

Comma Karma

“I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is...my point is, there’s a strong will for democracy.”

There is no shame. No sense of moral failing. No real outrage. Not even the traditional blame directed toward the expendable incompetents around his Oval Office. There are no cover-ups, really. This has all played out before our tired old eyes, assisted by our compromised, unfaithful media.

There is no hiding from the truth, because there is no need. Falsehoods play better, and too many people simply don't care anyway. But so far, George Bush's comma in Iraqi history - to these tired eyes - follows one number and precedes three more.

It looks like this: 2,703.

Will: Kerry Was Right

In the category of unspoken words now uttered: There is virtually nothing I can disagree with in this George Will column in the Washington Post, excepting his uniformed crack about the blogosphere. A taste of realistic conservative thought on foreign policy and the so-called "war on terror" (as opposed to the wild-eyed sloganeering of fanatics):

F-16s are not useful tools against terrorism that issues from places such as Hamburg (where Mohamed Atta lived before dying in the North Tower of the World Trade Center) and High Wycombe, England.

The talking classes regurgitate the Rovian spin that the left is split, that we're eating our own, that we're enforcing an orthodoxy of weakness. But most of them miss the massive gap on the right, probably because most Republicans - being nominally in power - are loathe to attack the leadership directly. Not a problem here on the opposition side. But Will and others are slowly creating a more vocal GOP back bench, and it's getting louder and more vicious in its offensive against failed neo-conservatism. I mean really - George Will telling John Kerry he was right about terrorism and national defense is almost as jaw-dropping as Karl Rove backing a putative Democrat in Connecticut.

Joe Lieberman's War

IMG_1514.JPG, originally uploaded by matthewnstoller.

Let me get this straight. More than 2,500 American troops lay dead in a lost war for a country that never was and is now embroiled in a civil war to decide which fanatics keep which parts of which cities. A Democratic Senator leads the charge for that war, embraces a failed Republican President, defends its failure on FoxNews and elsewhere, provides political cover, wins the support of the Neo-Con press, and inspires the College Republicans to campaign for him.

But Ned Lamont's wrestling match with Joe Lieberman today in Connecticut is about an extremist wing of the party cleansing a "moderate" from its midst.

When it comes it U.S. foreign policy, Joe Lieberman is as moderate as William Kristol and Anne Coulter. He's a radical right-winger, hard-core extremist/interventionist neo-conservative - and if the likes of fraidy-cat Lanny Davis and formerly progressive publisher Martin Peretz don't like that vicious name-calling from this lefty blogger, too damned bad.

Today's vote in Connecticut is about the war.

It's not about the "wackadoo left" of the Democratic Party - not when more than two-tirds of the country believes it's time to bring the troops home. It is about clueless incumbency, about Meet the Press time instead of press the flesh time. But mainly it's about the killing fields in Iraq and the immoral, un-American policy that sent our troops there and holds them still in the gunsights of murderous thugs and religious killers.

To suggest otherwise is to pin a sign to one's own forehead with stenciled letters "Idiot Within" prominently displayed.

In today's vote, Ned Lamont's role is to carry the anger and betrayal of Connecticut voters to the polls. The rolls of the bloggers is the cheer him on. Joe Lieberman's role is to watch the end of his career.

The only role for our soldiers is to bleed.

UPDATE: William Kristol's column proves the point about Lieberman's true ideological positioning. Says the war-monger: What drives so many Democrats crazy about Lieberman is not simply his support for the Iraq war. It's that he's unashamedly pro-American. Glenn Greenwald nails it:

..."it isn't just Kristol. The most enthusiastic supporters of Lieberman are not "moderate" Democrats, but are instead the most extreme Bush "conservatives." It is the Sean Hannitys and Michelle Malkins and Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters and Fred Barnes who consider Lieberman their ideological soulmate and who are most supportive of his candidacy. Why is that? Isn't the obvious answer because the issues that are most important to the country are (a) the endless, limitless "Global War of Civilizations" and (b) the radically enhanced police powers which that "War" justifies at home? In those areas, Joe Lieberman is as pure and reliable ally as it gets for the most extreme elements on the neoconservative Right.

UPDATE II: You know by now that Lamont topped Lieberman 52-48 in heavier-than-expected turnout and that Senator Lieberman plans to continue his independent run, despite leading Democrats urging him not to. A few voices on the results.

Fred Wilson:

Marty Peretz, a well known and lifelong Democrat, wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday claiming that Lamont was a peace candidate and likened him to George McGovern.

But I really don't think the Connecticut Democrats are going to throw Joe Lieberman out over his unflinching support of the war. They are going to throw him out for his unflinching support of George Bush.

The fact is the Joe Lieberman got too close to a President who is disliked by close to 80% of the Democrat party. That's not "courage" as Marty puts it. That's political suicide and Joe Lieberman just committed it.

Jason Chervokas:

As the war in Iraq has fallen into ruin, together with the rest of the nation's Middle East policy, the disconnect between Hill leadership and the rank and file only has widened. The Democratic electorate has come to believe that the only way to change policy is to change the policy-makers--not only Republicans but also Democrats who seem unwilling to fight for the core concerns of party regulars. That's why so many Dems were upset when Sen. Chuck Schumer, who heads the party's senatorial campaign committee, ran a fresh faced, anti-war veteran like Paul Hackett out of the Senate race in Ohio in favor of Sherrod Brown, a party ladder-climber who served as Ohio Secretary of State before winning election to Congress. This morning, in the wake of the Lamont victory, does anyone believe that Brown has a better shot of unseating Mike DeWine than Hackett would have had?

What rank and file Dems have lacked until now are "viable" candidates to run against incumbents in party primaries. "Viable" in this context means the ability to fund one's own campaign, because that's what it takes to break through against someone entrenched in the party power structure.

In Lamont, northeastern Dems saw a perfect storm of anti-incumbent politics. Small state. Big money. And interestingly, the alternate organizing medium of the Internet, which allowed Lamont's forces to run a get-out-the-vote campaign that could compete with the traditional ones run by organized labor and party leaders.

Joe Gandelman:

But am I with you, Senator Lieberman? Will I join you? No. Not yet. And perhaps not at all in this campaign. Although I have admired you in the past, and although I am a big-tent Democrat who still thinks you have much to offer the Democratic Party, I'm uncomfortable with an independent candidacy against the winner of the Democratic primary and, regardless, like so many others in the party, I've been opposed to the positions you've taken in recent years on certain key issues like Iraq.

You speak eloquently for independent as opposed to partisan politics, but I'm just not sure you get it anymore. When the other side, Bush's side, is doing so much harm both to America and to the world beyond, it's imperative to take sides, to take the right side, to stand in opposition to the other side. It's possible to do that while avoiding extremism and while retaining diversity and difference on our side. Not all of us will agree on what to do, after all, but at least we can agree that something needs to be done to change the direction the country is taking -- a direction determined by Bush and the Republicans. Do you not see that they are brutally partisan themselves? Do you not see that they have used you at the expense of your own party? Do you not see that they are very much the problem?

Strangely enough, on this day of blog triumphalism - literally, the greatest palpable real-world "accomplishment" of the blogosphere thus far - fair bigger than a doctored Reuters photo or Dan Rather's career - the dean of blog rooters Jeff Jarvis is silent on the bloggers' big win in Connecticut. Heck even this guy says it's a big blogging deal.

Lance Mannion:

Delivering that speech on the Senate floor was symbolic. Lieberman was claiming a position beyond that of outraged citizen.  He was making a quasi-official attempt to shame Bill Clinton into resigning.

No doubt he didn't see it that way.  But that was its effect.  He gave bipartisan cover to the Republicans'  charade that what they were up to wasn't about the lowest of partisan politics.  They were trying to undo an election and Joe Lieberman stood up in the Senate and said that their motives were pure and just.

And that's been Lieberman's trademark ever since.

Tags: Joe+Lieberman Ned+Lamont Lieberman Lamont Lanny+Davis Peretz Senate Connecticut

A Fatal Detachment

Here in the hot summer of 2006, with every flat screen in town showing dayside images of screaming children and bombed-out buildings - as understaffed American television news crews move from Baghdad to Lebanon and Haifa by way of Cyprus - it is almost inconceivable to remember how worried supporters of Israel were over the impending Bush II presidency a mere six years ago. Back then, the hardliners recalled all too well the tough stance taken by the President's father his and his attack-terrier Secretary of State James Baker with the Israeli government. As this piece in a 2000 issue of New York magazine by Craig Horowitz worried aloud: "a lot of Jews are very worried about a Bush victory. Their most urgent and conspicuous concern is what U.S. policy toward Israel will look like if Bush becomes president. To put it plainly, they want to know if George Bush is good for the Jews."

Uh, that'd be a "no."

The images of destruction in southern Lebanon - the destruction of a fledgling Middle East democracy, for that matter - are horrific in almost direct proportion to the level of engagament of this President in the fortunes of our greatest friend in the region. As bad as his father was "for the Jews" by some measures (at least for those who equate Israel with Judaism, viewed as a united monolithic culture) his son has been worse. The simple fact is this: both Jim Baker's tough love act and Bill Clinton's frenzied personal diplomacy were both preferable to the sad, lamentable, tragic and mistaken military campaign undertaken by a weak and ill-prepared Israeli regime.

Fact is also, that our own sad, lamentable, tragic and mistaken military campaign undertaken by a weak and ill-prepared American regime in Iraq has emboldened any angry man with a gun in any religious faction throughout the Middle East, where these battles have raged for a thousand years. We were a better friend of Israel under Poppy and Bubba.

The Policy of Detachment (Except in Iraq) simply hasn't worked. And Israel's invasion and bombing campaign have done it a generation's worth of harm, alarming those (like myself) who would like to see its prosperty and security guaranteed. A wiser Presidential Friend of Israel would have lent a helping hand, shown something of an interest, been a big brother to the tiny Jewish state. Instead, we either ignored the larger problems, or rubber-stamped Israeli policy. As James Wolcott notes: "We did Israel no favors with such fraternal submissiveness ... Israel has been given so much slack, it may have hanged itself, at least as far as world opinion is concerned."

But why be an engaged super-power when it's time to hit the bike, grab a PB&J sandwich, and sneak upstairs to the residence for SportsNight? That stuff's for micro-managing twits like Daddy and his big, red-nosed buddy. Eugene Robinson, writing in the Post, pretty much nailed the fatal detachment while lamenting his choice of vacation weeks, newswise:

Just my luck. I go away on vacation and it happens to be the week when George W. Bush's strategic view of the current world situation is revealed: Russia big. China big, too. World leaders boring. Lady world leaders need neck rub. Terrorism bad. Elections good (when the right people get elected). Israel good. Time to go home yet?

Tags: Israel Bush Lebanon James+Baker

War Rationale

I came across this letter to the editor, written to the upstate New York Times Herald-Record newspaper. It's a response to a pro-war rant by a fellow named  Dominick Forte, the chairman of Cornwall N.Y. Conservative Party. Forte originally attacked columnist Beth Quinn, arguing that she "should drop her ideological bias long enough to admit that Bush is a great American, and because of his steadfast defense of our national security, will go down in history as one of our greatest and most beloved presidents." I think this letter-writer's answer rather neatly rebuts the foaming Forte:

To Dominick Forte, Cornwall Conservative Party chairman:

Iraq had no connection to 9/11. Please stop with that tired old lie. We did not invade Iraq to free her people from a despot. We invaded because of WMDs and some fairy-tale plans to use them in the U.S. No matter what rationales you come up with to whitewash gross incompetence, the WMDs were the reason we broke with tradition and struck first.

Germany attacked our allies England and France. It was not an unprovoked incursion against a peaceful nation to remove the despot Hitler.

France started the Vietnam War, we did not.

Clinton invaded Bosnia, and had our troops home within a year. That's called competence - something glaringly absent from this administration's prosecution of the war on terror.

Read the news and learn that the Taliban is making a strong comeback in Afghanistan.

Where's Osama?

Flashman in Persia

Confronted with the fearful cold reality of a career stuck in mid-middle management in middle life and in staid middle class, the British author George MacDonald Fraser (as he told the Times recently) resolved to write his way out of it. And so he did. This decision brought to life the adventurer Harry Flashman, a cowardly rake whose travels - in a best-selling series that banished all the middles from Fraser's life - parody everything grand and glorious about the late British Empire of Victoria's time. Flashman is amoral, cares nothing for Queen and colours, abuses women, is openly racist, and is not above blackmail and duplicity to bring him through his legions of scrapes alive.

One thing Harry Flashman is not, however, is delusional. He ridicules the true believers, the honorable, the pious, the self-deceivers.

I've dipped back into Flashman recently to look for Fraser's path in the wilderness, but I'm struck as well by the similarities of empire officialdom spread far and thin in ancient lands to our own adventurous leaders - particularly the naive piety of the west run up against ancient blood feuds and factional, tribal violence. The power of the Crown, fueled by the profit motive of the British East India Company, led the legions to the aged overland routes between Europe and Asia - to Persia, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

One particular episode in the first Flashman novel, told with a conspicuous lack of gauzy heroism and gallantry by a thoroughly modern humorist, smacked me upside the noodle upon the re-reading - coming as is did amidst images of President Bush walking with the strongman of Pakistan this week, along rows of colorfully-attired soldiers. This the tale of the First Afghan War, when the British invaded Afghanistan to curb growing Russian power - only to suffer one of the great military disasters of the Empire. In 1841 the Afghans rose against the British in Kabul, killing British agents and surrounding the British garrison.The garrison surrendered, and was offered safe conduct to return to India. However, the British force was harassed down the Kabul River gorge and massacred at the Gandamak pass before reaching the besieged garrison at Jalalabad. Thousands died. A single soldier - a doctor - survived.

These are the same routes and gorges and passes - thousands of square miles of mountains - that made lasting conquest impossible for a Russian army more than a century later, that provided cover and training ground for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda before September 11th, that hide his still-living being still over the border in Pakistan, and that claimed the life of Pat Tillman in an incident of friendly fire, sickenenly covered up by the true believers. The tribal fighters in those hills have never been successfully displaced by any grand empire - by Victoria's, or the sons of Stalin, or Geroge W. Bush. Even after our "successful" importation of democracy to Afghanistan after routing the Taliban, even as President Bush exchanges ceremonial gifts with Hamid Karzai, the country now supplies 90 percent of the world's opium and the hills and passes are controlled by warlords. It is a cliche, but one of the true ones, to say the people of those high passes measure time in centuries, not years, and that our "war on terror" is but a small event in the tribal history of the region.

Which brings me to Major-General William Elphinstone, true-life character in Fraser's first novel, the commander of the British in Afghanistan and all-too recognizable to critics of America's rule in Iraq: weak, indecisive, incompetent and most importantly, entirely blind to local reality, insensible to ancient blood oaths, and given to fatally under-estimating of the enemy's power and commitment.

That Americans would be greeted as liberators is Elphinstonian, the product of a sick, weak old man who - unfortunately for his nation - is placed in a crucial position of power at a terrible moment. It was Elphinstone who negotiated disastrously with the armed faction, Elphinstone who did not fortify his garrison, Elphinstone who believed the rosy scenarios of his toadies, and Elphinstone who finally ordered a fighting retreat to India - only to give himself and his staff up as hostages for the Army's safe passage. It turned out badly then. And Steve Gilliard wrote a scary scenario that bears too damned much resemblance to the retreat to Gandamak in 1842:

Three years ago, I said the worst case outcome for US troops would be a fighting withdrawal to Kuwait, Chosen Resevior II. For two and a half years, I was alone in predicting this. I am not alone any longer. Bush had devised Iraq politically to enshrine himeslf and the GOP as the vanguard of a new revolution in the Middle East, which would secure Israel's place in the region and end the worst dictatorships.

Only problem, the Middle East is a pandora's box and elections unleashed the Islamacists in their full fury.

[snip]

Iraq has gone horribly wrong and is about to end very ugly.

The US cannot stop the violence now, and every commander and soldier knows this. They admit it in polling. They don't have enough men or equipment and the men they do have are about to take a sharp decline in quality.

The scenes of evacuation from Iraq will make Saigon look like Spring Break. Thousands who worked with the US will be killed by all sides. Think Rwanda or Bosnia. Think piles of bodies, decapitated, shot. Abu Gharib will pale before the carnage.

And this is in an orderly evacuation with phased withdrawals.

In a full out flight, we will abandon our Iraqi allies wholesale. Iraqi units, already infiltrated, will turn on US forces and join the resistance en masse. US troops will abandon their equipment by the side of the road. Three years of war will catch up with them, and only the air cover of AC-130's will prevent massacres.

Harry Flashman, of course, would have found a safe way out while still reveling in false glory. Americans may have no such option. While we spend our time arguing stateside about the meaning of the term "civil war," the body count is going up. The troops who we support with magnetic yellow bumper stickers on our SUVs no longer support the war they're stuck in. The President inspects his allies in Kabul, and New Delhi, and Islamabad and we pretend they are "on our side" in the "war on terror." Exxon and Halliburton and Dubai Ports International take the place of the East India Company. Adn the grand delusion marches toward a narrow, mountain pass - confident and wrapped in glory.

The President and Mr. Miller

Bode Miller was the perfect candidate for the packaged American Hero, a good-lucking lad who played the rebel to perfection for the image-makers, and ran with the hype and the credit card ads to the 2006 Olympics. Miller was a portable symbol of American lone rangers, the guy who did it his way and reached for the gold. Except he didn't reach. He turned up hollow and empty and unwilling to sacrifice. He skiied off the course, and he skiied off the story-line.

Just as the Bridge to Nowhere is the perfect metaphor for rudderless national leader of the Republican Party, so the ski bum Bode Miller and his devil-may-care attitude toward spectacular failure on the world stage makes a fine stand-in for the President of the United States.

Compare the scorecards. Downhill, Combined, Super-G, Giant Slalom, Slalom ... 5th, Disqualified, Did Not Finish, 6th, Did Not Finish. Spygate, Iraq, Katrina, Torture, Port Security. Or pick your own issues, any issues. No medals, folks - just ignominy and embarrassment before the world. What Bode Miller is to Olympic triumph, George Bush is to Presidential history, flopping off the slick course of national politics like James Buchanan in Team USA spandex.

Of course, it's one thing to be an over-hyped, overweight slalom slacker hanging out till all hours in the bars of Turin, letting down your sponsors, your teammates, and your fans. To me, athletes never really let their countries down - that nationalistic stuff is just for T-shirt sales. The Olympic movement is about as idealistic as the Nike advertising budget. In the end, Bode Miller really disgraced no one but himself. His stupid little episode will