Tom Watson

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.