After the Future

When the Best Lack All Conviction

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
--From Yeats, "The Second Coming"

I'm going to be posting here less frequently.  With the events of the past week, it has become clear to me that we have crossed a line, and that evil forces are snowballing  now in a way that make blogs like this a  futile indulgence.  It's something that diverts too much of my time and energy from doing other things that are more productive. 

Call this an over-reaction if you will, but if you think so, you're probably among the people who thought it was a good idea to go into Iraq. You probably think this torture bill has some merit.  After all the moderate Republican heroes McCain and Graham signed off on it, didn't they? Lieberman voted for it.  It can't be all bad.

Well from my perspective, you didn't get it then, and you're not getting it now.  Sorry if that sounds condescending, but that's the way it is.  Every time I've been accused of over-reacting, it's only a matter of time before things get worse.  And I see this as enabled by the confusion of decent moderates who fit Yeats' description of the "best" above. I don't accuse you of bad will, just of not being convinced yet, of lacking conviction, about the evil we face.  The mental template with which you organize the world is simply inadequate to comprehend the enormity of what confronts us here. There's no kind way to say it.

Anyway, it's beyond arguing now.  Because either you get it or you don't.  The time for sounding alarms is over; it' now time to do whatever we can to put out the fire. And that's why there's no point really in writing anymore about all of this.  I could be wrong, but I'm looking for some evidence to give me hope, and then we have weeks like this last one in which this crippled, discredited embarrassment of a president is still able to impose his perverse will.  There's something else at work here, and it's really, really bad.

I still hold some hope that the momentum can be slowed by taking away the GOP's congressional majority.  But if we've learned anything in the last couple of years, it's how overmatched the Democrats are by the money and ruthless cunning of the right wing. I'm not without hope that some kind of robust leadership may yet emerge to effectively confront this menace, but it's not likely to come from the elected officials of either party.

I don't know what to do.   But that's why I need the time to figure things out rather than to keep blathering on here.

Torture is Legal Now

"This is wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American," said Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee's top Democrat. He said it was intended to choke off access to Guantanamo to "ensure that the Bush-Cheney administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power."  Quoted in WaPo

Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh said that "the image of Congress rushing to strip jurisdiction from the courts in response to a politically created emergency is really quite shocking, and it's not clear that most of the members understand what they've done."  Quoted in WaPo

An hour's debate and a 65-34 vote.  Twelve Democrats join the Republicans--Lieberman, of course, was one of them.  Olympia Snow was absent; Chafee voted No with the Dems. Speaker Denny Hastert said that the Dems wanted to coddle terrorists.  Oh Lord, that sure explains it. 

I was speaking to my German nextdoor neighbors about it, and they said it feels to them  like 1933.  It starts with little things, they said. They've been here from Berlin for a little over a year, and they say they've been amazed at how complacent the Americans are, how unaware.  The Berlin Wall, he said, was not taken down by the government, but by the people.  Where are the people in this country?  They're out shopping or involved in their fantasy football league, I guess. She asked me in all seriousness if I have an exit strategy.  Alarmist, snarky Europeans reacting with a typical anti-American sneer?  Maybe, but I don't think so.  They're not like that, really.  They're just really concerned.

Right now, I'm too down about all this to know what to think, and I haven't the heart to write any  more about it.  Let Stephen Colbert point to the Kafkaesque quality of the world into which we have now moved.  Check out his bit here.

We're in Trouble

Yes, the NY Times gets it. But it's not telling the whole truth.

The truth is that the United States government is presently holding, torturing, and even murdering countless numbers of people who have no chance in hell of obtaining a lawyer, let alone anything resembling a trial. The government is doing this under the direct orders of George W. Bush. There is no law, no bill, and no legislature who can stop him. If Congress were to pass a law unequivocably banning torture and send it to him, he'd use it for toilet paper. If the Supreme Court were to rule against Bush in the harshest and bluntest language, he'd yawn.

The truth is that there is a rogue presidency and there has been, since January, 2001 (earlier, if you count the stolen election). Certainly, everyone in Washington knows it, but no one dares to admit it. The bill legalizing torture merely enables Congress to pretend they still have some influence over an executive that from day one was governing, not as if they had a mandate, but as if Bush was a dictator. If, for some miracle, the bill didn't pass, every congress-critter knows Bush would keep on torturing.

Better to vote to pass and preserve the appearance of a working American government, the thinking goes. For the very thought that the US government is seriously broken - that the Executive is beyond the control of anyone and everyone in the world - is such a truly awesome and terrifying thought that it can never be publicly acknowledged. If ever it is, if the American crisis gets outed and Congress and the Supremes openly assert that the Executive has run completely amok and is beyond control, the world consequences are staggering. It is the stuff of doomsday novels.

And this brings up the dilemma of a post Nov. 7 world. Apparently, one if not both houses of Congress may be controlled by Democrats. Now what? You think Bush is gonna get impeached? Put on trial for war crimes? Forget it. You think they're gonna repeal the pro-torture law they're about to pass? You can almost certainly forget that, too. Remember: it is crucial to maintain the illusion that Congress still has some say, as it was in November of 2002 about the Bush/Iraq war.

If, for some reason, Congress does decide to move against Bush in some substantive way, there will be hell to pay. Those of us who well remember Watergate remember that while it was genuinely thrilling to have Nixon caught, disgraced, and removed, it was also a time of extreme tension. Would Nixon tough the impeachment trial out, causing the country incalculable harm? It looked for quite a long time that he would. About Bush, there is no doubt.

Since the day after the 2000 election, Bush and his goons have been playing chicken with the very structure of the United States Government, double-daring anyone to try and stop them. If Congress does try - and I'm not talking little things like wrecking Social Security, that'll happen and a dictator can afford to let things like that wait a while, I'm talking atomic bang bang and thumbscrews - he will force the private Constitutional crisis into the open. And there is no guarantee that Bush will lose.

And that is the truth. The Congress has been given an awful choice: Vote to approve torture and the suspension of habeas or show the world that yes, you really do have no genuine power to check Bush.  --Tristero at Hullabaloo

If you don't think this describes our situation and the enormity of what we are currently going through, give me a good solid argument why it's an exaggeration.  If it is an accurate description, why is there such complacency about it? 

What we are seeing happening here is profoundly significant, and most Americans are yawning, turning over, and it's back to sleep.  Sorry if that sounds condescending, but we are in the midst of the most significant and frightening shifts in our history, and it's as if we're having the experience, but missing the meaning.  The long-term consequences are truly horrifying.  We're going to wake up five years hence, know what it means then, and it will be too late.

It's not possible to be too alarmist about this.  Prove me wrong. Allay my fears.  Calm me down.  Because we are in big, big trouble, and so is the rest of the world, if things go down in Washington the way they look as though they will.

Update:  Read this LA Times piece by Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman as well.  Key line:

"What is worse, if the federal courts support the president's initial detention decision, ordinary Americans would be required to defend themselves before a military tribunal without the constitutional guarantees provided in criminal trials."

If Congress doesn't stand up to the administration now, who will be able to stand up to him in the future?  What's to prevent the arbitrary arrest of anyone--including journalists and bloggers--whose opinions are deemed seditious or a security threat?  Why does anybody think it's going to stop here?  Why should it?

The Paranoid Style

We didn't come this far because we're made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever.

And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves. So it goes with most great nation-states, which--feeling guilty about their savage pasts--eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.  Paul Harvey, 5/23/05 Commentary

Yes.  That Paul Harvey.  His honesty is refreshing.  It shows the American wolf without its sheep's clothing.  It's something that the predators on the American right wing are usually too savvy to display so openly.  I was reminded of this quote when I was watching Pat Buchanan's interview on "The Daily Show" the other night.  Buchanan was there to discuss his book about how the Mexicans, through a process of reverse Manifest Destiny, are getting back what they believe should never have been taken from them.  As the Americans in the early 19th Century just moved in and eventually told the Mexican locals that this land was no longer theirs, so now the Mexicans are in the process of returning the favor in the American southwest. 

It was interesting that toward the end of the interview, Buchanan, in I guess what he thought was a joke, talked about the liberal immigration policy of the American Indian, with the implication that America's fate vis a vis the Mexicans will be the same as that of the Indians vis a vis the Americans.  And then it struck me that the key to understanding the sickness at the heart of the right-wing soul is a form of repressed guilt that has curdled into paranoia.

Right wingers believe that others will behave as badly toward them as they have behaved.  Isn't that really the subtext of the Harvey quote?  For people like Harvey and Buchanan the difference between sugar-coated, over-civilized Liberals and right-wing Conservatives is that the Liberals feel remorse and allow the guilt to get the better of them.  Conservatives understand that the real world is eat or be eaten, and that we have to get our hands dirty, but we do it to survive.  In other words, right-wing conservative thought is soaked through with hormones screaming fight or flight, with right-wingers being the fighters and the Liberals being the flighters, appeasers who can't be trusted to defend the homeland. The right winger sees admission of guilt as a weakness, as a dog offering its throat--something for candy asses, something effeminate.

It's important to understand that when you are in a survival mode, survival is the only goal, and all moral restraints are suspended.  Morality is for the comfortable. Every atrocity is justified if it means we survive, if we get to eat another day.  The Conservatives of which I speak, though, are not really the manly men they present themselves to be.  They are like nervous squirrels.  They have anxious eyes darting hither and thither looking at everyone as a potential predator waiting for its chance to pounce and bite. 

Such Conservatives believe that Liberals don't understand the real world--that they are sissies, which is at the heart Rove's branding strategy for the Democrats. It's why it was so important that the GOP swiftboat Kerry, McCain, and Murtha, all political opponents with strong military resumes that subvert the effeminate typology. The key to GOP appeal is their self-branding as the tough guys who will do the dirty work that the pansy, faint-at-the-sight-of blood Democrats don't have the stomach for.  We live in an ugly world where everybody hates us and is out to get us.  You need a big Daddy to keep you safe.

The curious thing about paranoia is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Paranoids, in assuming that people are out to get them, act in aggressive ways to preempt the attack they "know" is coming and in doing so provoke others to fight back. The paranoid then sees the defensive response of the enemy as proof of his aggressive intentions. It's a perfect system. It's their very paranoia that creates the conditions that reinforce their paranoia.

We saw it shaping our relationship with the Soviets during the Cold War. How many people remember, for instance, that the Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba during the Kennedy administration was in response to our placing missiles in Turkey? Most Americans saw it then and remember it now as a blatant act of aggression by the evil, godless communists; the Soviets saw it as redressing a strategic power imbalance.  How many Americans remember that the Russians backed down from Cuba when we backed down from Turkey?  Kennedy had to fight the right-wingers who pushed for a military confrontation, for what Bush these days is calling a "defining moment". Saner minds, thanks be to God, prevailed in that crisis.  Do you think that the mindset of the current administration has even the remotest capablilty to negotiate sanely with Iran? Prove me wrong, but I don't see it.

The right-winger lives in a mental world in which it is either eat or be eaten, in which the strong dominate the weak, and so we better stay strong because our candy asses are gonna get ate by the hungry wetbacks or ragheads or gooks. The idea of the the rule of law or negotiating for mutual self-interest is for girly, naive chumps.  And so he justifies his aggression as always motivated by the need to defend himself. He attacks first because he knows that the enemy is capable of acting just as badly as he is capable of, and he proves it by acting badly. If we Americans act badly, does it not follow that non-Americans will act even worse?  A no brainer for the right-wing brain.

Right wingers believe that we live in a dangerous world in which everybody is either weak and beneath our respect or if strong out to get us. Why?  Because we stand for everything that is good and true and our enemies hate everything that is good and true. It is impossible for them to grasp the idea that the hatred their enemies feel toward them is directly proportional to their bad behavior toward them, behavior they justified in the paranoid belief that they had to defend themselves from their evil intentions. 

What's really rather remarkable to me as I read around the net, especially in the blogs oF conservatives or those who are leaning that way is the ignorance or blindness to our bad behavior in the past. They look at everything in a historical vacuum. As badly as deep down they know we have acted, our actions are nevertheless always above reproach, and the actions of others are always by definition worse.  These others hate us for no reason; it's just this abstract, ungrounded hatred, an effect without a cause. People who point out that American bad behavior is a significant cause for the effect are looked upon as un-patriotic or as America bashers. 

I look at myself as someone who demands that America live up to its highest ideals. And that starts with our refusal to give in to our basest instincts and fears.  The right-wingers see themselves as tough and brave. I see them as small and scared. I see them as having to compensate for their sense of weakness and inadequacy by building up this excessively powerful military for which there seems to be no limit.  For them there is no limit to the evil intentions of those who would do us harm, so how can we put a limit on the means we need to protect ourself?  I see the most powerful antidote to the hatred people feel toward us to be in the adoption of a confident, magnanimous, prudent approach to the world.  An approach that models and interior strength and easy confidence that every sane human being longs for and seeks to emulate.  Instead we're slowly becoming a fear-obsessed nightmare everyone will want to escape.

There is no sanity or proportionality or prudence in the right-wing imagination of the dangers we face.  They are frightened, little people who have no real confidence in what truly has made America great. People like Buchanan and Harvey have no confidence that Mexicans want to be Americans more than they want to be Mexicans. They have no confidence that these Mexicans would resist the idea of a tin-pot banana republic annexing the southwest just as strongly as their Anglo fellow citizens because that's what they fled, and that's why they came here in the first place. 

But then again if America stays the course with the kind of people we have in power now, it probably won't make any practical difference who rules in the southwest.  What the right wingers are doing in their paranoia is turning this country exactly into a place that will be no different from all the places they fear want to do us harm.   

Torture & the American Soul

Other countries, of course, practice torture in violation of international law. As has now been clear for a while, we have been in their company for some years. The latest twist, however, is that we now won't show any shame about it. Rather than simply violating the laws to which we have agreed to adhere, we're repudiating them, simply denying that the standard by which civilized nations operate apply to us.

The problems here will be widespread. One of the strengths of democracies on the international scene is precisely that it's much harder for liberal states to violate agreements. Dictatorships can say one thing and do another with ease. Democracies feature free presses, free speech, the rule of law, independent judiciaries, legislative oversight, and other measures to ensure that laws and treaties are followed. This is, to the conservative mind, a weakness. In their view, cheating is a good thing, and America's historical difficulty in cheating constitutes a problem. They're dead wrong. Cooperation is a good thing -- the best ticket to prosperity, security, and international peace. Democracies can cooperate with other countries -- and especially with other democracies -- more credibly and effectively, and that's one of the reasons the world's democratic block is so much stronger and more prosperous than the rest of the world.

But the rule of law is now off the table as far as Bush is concerned. What's more, insofar as national-security policy is at issue, the United States increasingly doesn't look like much of a democracy. As the congressional Republicans march in lockstep behind the White House's torture agenda, they don't even know what that agenda's composed of. The Boston Globe reported Saturday that 90 percent of members of Congress don't know “which interrogation techniques have been used in the past, and none of them know which ones would be permissible under proposed changes to the War Crimes Act. Which is just to say that, in practice, absolutely everything would be permitted, since the only people capable of overseeing the interrogation program haven't done it, won't do it, and have no intention of doing it in the future.

Consequently, the United States now presents itself as what amounts to the globe's largest and most powerful rogue state -- a nuclear-armed superpower capable of projecting military force to the furthest corners of the earth, acting utterly without legal or moral constraint whenever the president proclaims it necessary. The idea that striking such a posture on the world stage will serve our long-term interests is daft. American power has, for decades, rested crucially on the sense that the United States can be trusted and relied upon, on the belief that we use our power primarily to defend the community of liberal states and the liberal rules by which they conduct themselves rather than to undermine them.  --Matt Yglesias at  The American Prospect.

I fear that someday the world will look back to the passage of this bill as the decisive moment when we Americans will have finally lost "America".  It was so easy to let go, wasn't it?  I guess we didn't really care that much about it to begin with.

Regarding Yglesias's comment that we've been torturing for years, if you need some background, read here.  The point is that we've taken a new step with the Bush administration in that we are legalizing it.  It's almost as if the administration wants us to accept the idea that this is acceptable, and that we should just get used to the idea that torture is what we do now.

Splinter in Eye Syndrome

I haven't commented on the pope's Regensburg University speech.  I have never liked the guy, and was profoundly disappointed when he was elected pope.  I'm a Catholic, so I try to avoid saying negative things about him lest they sound gratuitous.  Nevertheless, he represents everything that I find distasteful and absurd in official Catholicism.  And so I'm aware that anything I say about the man is colored by my negative bias toward him. 

This probably labels me in most people's minds as a "liberal" Catholic,  which I'm not.  My theology, like his, is pretty conservative.  I actually share with the pope, and inclination toward the Platonic Bonaventuran stream rather than to the the Aristotelian/Thomist. And I consider myself to be orthodox in everything that really matters, which puts me at odds with most Catholics and Protestants who think of themselves as "liberals".  My main differences with him lie with his ecclesiology, his imagination of the relationship of the church and the world. Ecclesiology is where the rubber hits the road.

My dislike for him began in the 1980s when he was the heavy who tried to quash the Brazilian bishops initiatives to organize the poor to get some measure of social justice through the church-based movement best known as Liberation Theology. The story is well-told in Penny Lernoux's 1989 book, People of God. It's not a pretty picture, and it unfortunately confirms many people's worst stereotypes of the bizarre world of right-wing Catholicism. 

I thought then, as I think now, this guy is either clueless or just a bad guy. His remarks about "violent" Islam several days ago and his subsequent surprise at the Muslim reaction would suggest that cluelessness is probably the better explanation.  It comes from his idealized vision of the Church, which he  believes is the incarnate mystical presence of Christ on earth.  I believe on its best days it is, and one of its best days was that period in the 80s when bishops in Brazil stood up to Ratzinger. What is true and good in the Church finds a way of surviving and even thriving despite the efforts of people like him down through the centuries.  And it's most often found on the periphery rather than in the center.

The pope's remarks about Islam were an unwelcome reminder of how people like him are the cause of the bad days.  Here's this German pope calling Muslims violent, as if they have a problem from which his religion has been historically immune.  It's facetious.  How can he expect to have any credibility on the matter unless he first confess his own church's  culpability? 

He's not an ignoramus like GWB--he is, indeed, very learned and unlike GWB is capable of doing nuance, but from what I've observed he shares with him the same mode of habitation in a bubble which he controls and into which he wants to suck up the world rather than to live in the world as it is with all its brokenness and messiness.  The gospels depict the Pharisees as the bubble people of their time and Jesus as the one who was willing to dive into the mess.  Jesus called the bubbles the Pharisees lived in "whited sepulchers."

Anyway, I was reading Juan Cole this morning, and I think he has it right:

But in my view, this sensitivity [of Muslims to papal put-downs] is a feature of postcolonialism. Muslims were colonized by Western powers, often for centuries, and all that period they were told that their religion was inferior and barbaric. They are independent now, though often they have gained independence only a couple of generations (less if you consider neocolonialism). As independent, they are finally liberated to protest when Westerners put them down.

There is an analogy to African-Americans, who suffered hundreds of years of slavery and then a century of Jim Crow. They are understandably sensitive about white people putting them down, and every time one uses the "n" word, you can expect a strong reaction. In the remarks the pope quoted about Muhammad, he essentially did the equivalent of using the "n" word for Muslims. It is no mystery that people are protesting.

This issue is not going to go away until the Pope comes out and clarifies and apologizes. All he has to do is quote Vatican II on Islam, which is still Catholic doctrine last I knew, and the whole issue would blow over.

Cole goes on to quote Nostra Aetate from the Documents of the Second Vatican Council which talks with profound respect and love for Islam.  The Second Vatican Council is the Church on one of its best days.

The point is that Islam has good and bad days, too.  Right now it's having a bad day. it's pretty grumpy, and when you're in a bad mood the last thing as a kettle you want to hear is a smug pot calling you black.  The Christian West hasn't a moral leg to stand on here.  It has, like Islam, repeatedly failed to live up to the highest religious ideals to which both traditions point. This history of the West is mostly a history of failure in that respect. 

It is a fundamental human characteristic to see the evil in others that we refuse to see in ourselves.  That's not to say that there is no evil in the other, but that our main concern should be the evil in ourselves.  Whenever we think we're morally superior, we're almost always wrong.  It's a trap into which the soul falls unaware, and its nature is to cause him problems far worse than whatever moral deficiencies he sees in his neighbor.  It's the trap the Pharisees of the gospels fell into.  The harsh, prophetic, tough-love word must at times be spoken.  We all of us need a kick in the butt or a slap upside the head from time to time. But if we ever act toward the other with this idea that we are somehow superior, it just about always leads to delusional and destructive behaviors that will cause more problems than they solve. There is no more fundamental practical spiritual psychological truth in Christianity than that.

The admonition to love the enemy does not presuppose that the enemy is lovable or without culpability, but that there is no other means by which violent impasses can be broken except by an act of generosity and grace.  When you push, it's instinctive for those you push to push back.  The only way to break out of behaviors on the level of instinct is to introduce impulses that derive from a level that transcends instinct, which is grace.  When you act in a spirit of generosity, it's normal for people who have any kind of healthy soul life to respond in with gratitude and generosity

Such gestures, of course, are often not reciprocated.  Some people are so possessed by a spirit of hatred and violence that nothing can penetrate to their spiritual core, and prudence requires that we take the necessary steps to protect ourselves against them.  But that does not change the fundamental fact that most people, including most Muslims, do have a spiritual core that longs for peace and justice the same way most people have throughout history.  And most people will respond to gestures of understanding and generosity with reciprocal acts of understanding and generosity, because that is what the spirit in each of us longs most deeply for. Most people cannot help but respond to it when it is the real thing.

From this it follows that our strategy in the Middle East should be to isolate the extremists from the popular support they need to operate, and you don't do that by invading the Islamic heartland and building permanent bases there.  You push, they will push back.  It's the way of things, and it's not going to end.  Our basic model for bringing peace in the mideast is in most respects the same as the model we used for pacifying the American Indian.  By the logic of seeing splinters in the other's eye rather than the 2x4 in our own, we see Muslims as the aggressor just as we saw the American Indian. We were then as we are now outraged that they want to fight back.  The problem is that these Indians in the Middle East have nuclear tipped arrows, and they are not going to assimilate nor go willingly to the reservation.

If we were really interested in peace and stability in the Middle East, it would start with our owning our part in having created the problem.  Gestures of generosity and grace will be perceived as patronizing b.s. unless they are grounded in justice. It doesn't matter who started it.  We've all behaved badly, we have neither of us lived up to what our ideals call us to live up to, and we can't go forward until both sides admit culpability.  This is the message seeking genuine reconciliatiion that the pope should have been presenting.

It's obvious, but great powers don't operate like that because great powers live according to the logic of power rather than to the logic of grace.  I recognize that.  That was Niebuhr's point.  But if we cannot live by the logic of generosity and grace, then we should get off our moral high horse and realize we're no better than anyone else. We really don't have anything new to offer; we're just playing the power game the way it's been played from time immemorial. And we should also recognize that if we continue in the pattern of power and empire, we will go the way of power and empire.  Those who live by the sword die by it.

Torture: Slipping Down the Slippery Slope

Vladimir Bukowsky in a 12/05 WaPo article.  By way of Digby's "Unleashing the Beast":

Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a "ticking bomb" case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria's predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability" by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading" (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

I don't buy the abstract moral justifications for torture by the so-called moderates on the issue.  Whatever they may think it is in the abstract, it lets the dog off the leash, and this dog is indiscriminate about who it will attack.  This "compromise," as it is looking to be more of a cave in, (or was it just posturing  by McCain from the get-go?) if it is allowed to stand, lays the foundation for future horrors. About some things you just cannot compromise. These developments over the last few days have been nauseating.  What are we allowing ourselves to become?

Read the entire Digby piece.  The subject is just too depressing and upsetting for me to expand upon it here and now.

When We Leave Iraq . . .

. . . will we really be gone?  Tom Englehart:

While arguments spin endlessly here at home about the nature of withdrawal "timetables," and who's cutting and running from what, and how many troops we will or won't have in-country in 2007, 2008, or 2009, on the ground a process continues that makes mockery of the debate in Washington and in the country. While the "reconstruction" of Iraq has come to look ever more like the deconstruction of Iraq, the construction of an ever more permanent-looking American landscape in that country has proceeded apace and with reasonable efficiency.

First, we had those huge military bases that officials were careful never to label "permanent." (For a while, they were given the charming name of "enduring camps" by the Pentagon.) Just about no one in the mainstream bothered to write about them for a couple of years as quite literally billions of dollars were poured into them and they morphed into the size of American towns with their own bus routes, sports facilities, Pizza Huts, Subways, Burger Kings, and mini-golf courses. Huge as they now are, elaborate as they now are, they are still continually being upgraded. Now, it seems that on one of them we have $60 million worth of the first "permanent U.S. prison" in Iraq. Meanwhile, in the heart of Baghdad, the Bush administration is building what's probably the largest, best fortified "embassy" in the solar system with its own elaborate apartment complexes and entertainment facilities, meant for a staff of 3,500.

If, for a moment, you stop listening to the arguments about, or even the news about, Iraq here at home and just concentrate on the ignored reality of those facts-on-the-ground, you're likely to assess our world somewhat differently. After all, those facts being made on the ground -- essentially policy-put-into-action without the trappings of debate, democracy, media coverage, or checks and balances of any sort -- are unlikely to be altered or halted in any foreseeable future by debate or opinion polls in our country. All that is likely to alter them is other facts on the ground -- a growing insurgency, the deaths of Americans and Iraqis in ever greater numbers, a region increasingly thrown into turmoil, and maybe, one of these days, a full-scale, in-the-streets reaction by the Shiites of Iraq to the occupation of their country by a foreign power intent on going nowhere anytime soon.

We're not leaving.  It was never our intention to. 

Radioactive Oil

It's amazing how one of the most obvious things about are involvement in the Middle East is rarely spoken about in the mainstream media--oil.  Even liberal commentators shy away from it.  I think in large part it has to do with the Michael Moore factor that has made it a radioactive subject.  "Blood for oil" has become a leftist cliche that makes it impossible for most people to take it seriously.  It's one of those things that we just don't want to think about.  It doesn't make us feel good like the idea of toppling dictators and spreading democracy  . 

It's just so obvious. But nobody wants to be dismissed as a Michael Moore conspiracy theorist.  So I was surprised this morning to see the liberal but sensible Cynthia Tucker from the Atlanta Journal Constitution address the issue squarely in her column today.  To save you the hassle of an AJC registration, I'll excerpt liberally here:

While several agendas converged to drive the war wagon to Baghdad, providing the United States access to Middle East oil reserves was always a critical factor. It's not just liberals -- Democrats, environmentalists, Hummer-haters -- who say so. So do candid conservatives.

In a book titled "The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War," Boston University professor and West Point grad Andrew Bacevich analyzed four military interventions of the Reagan era: "None of the four episodes can be fully understood except in relation to global reserves of fossil fuels and America's growing dependence on imported oil."

Kevin Phillips, a former Republican political strategist, is blunt in his latest book, "American Theocracy": "Oil abundance has always been part of what America fights for, as well as with." Most Americans don't want to concede that. Perhaps that's why Bush was able to con the voters into re-electing him: Americans wanted to believe that we went to Iraq to clean out a terrorist infrastructure and to establish a base camp for democracy in the Middle East. No matter that the facts didn't point in that direction; it was easier for us to believe that than to believe we went to secure U.S. access to Mideast oil reserves.

Yet history is clear on the point. The CIA intervened in Iran in the 1950s, clearing a path for the shah, because Iran had nationalized its oil fields, displeasing Anglo-American petroleum interests. Phillips notes that in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others in President Nixon's Cabinet "promoted, just short of openly, a plan for using U.S. airborne forces to seize the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi." And surely no one still thinks the United States would have driven Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991 had petroleum reserves not been at stake.

The current administration kept oil at the forefront of its planning after 9/11, too. In a speech last year, retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Colin Powell, revealed discussions about "mounting an operation to take the oil fields in the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship, and administer the oil and the revenues accordingly."

Bush and his Cabinet deserve their share of blame for failing to confront Americans with the consequences of our addiction to oil. But we've gone along with their deception. Until we admit the blood price we pay for petroleum, we'll never be able to construct a sane policy toward the Middle East.

Amen. The dots are there, but we don't want to connect them. I think that our involvement now in Iraq is a complex convergence of several agendas--Israel, neocon grandiosity, terrorism--and that no one factor completely explains it.  But one thing is for sure:  We wouldn't be there if it were not for all the oil there.  Maybe there's a case to be made for it, but it hasn't been made, and it therefore hasn't been debated in congress or in the media. 

But if we are to have a grownup political culture in this country, we have to face the facts about our oil dependency, and have a good argument about what it means and what we should do about it.  As it stands now the American electorate is being fed pablum and told to behave like good children, trust Daddy, and all shall be well.

More on this as we go along.

Soldiers with Sense

It's interesting how it's often the soldiers who are most acutely aware of the dangers of militarism.  It's the soldiers like Colin Powell who are standing up against Bush on this whole torture question.  Philosophically conservative but intellectually honest guys like Andrew Bacevich are immune to the grandiosity of the GOP (and Dem) civilian militarists.  Add James Webb to the list.  Here's a guy who is a former secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration who describes his rejection of  mindless militarism in an interesting profile of him in today's NYT:

As he is quick to remind his audiences, Mr. Webb spoke out against an invasion early on, arguing that containment had worked in the cold war and would work, again, against Saddam Hussein. American occupation forces in Iraq would “quickly become 50,000 terrorist targets,” he warned in an op-ed article in The Washington Post in September 2002. He went to see Mr. Allen to voice his concerns, and said Mr. Allen’s position, essentially, was “you’re asking me to be disloyal to my president.”

Mr. Webb, who had voted for Mr. Allen, said he left that meeting thinking, “Boy, did I make a mistake.” Mr. Allen has said he cast his vote for the war out of loyalty to the country, not the president.

The war is not an abstract issue for Mr. Webb. His son, Jimmy, 24, a lance corporal in the Marines, shipped out to Iraq this month. He wears his son’s old combat boots on the campaign trail, in tribute to him and “all the people sent into harm’s way.”

Mr. Webb tells his audiences that the idea came from his son, who noted that Mr. Allen always wore cowboy boots, though “there are no cowboys in Virginia.”

Again, sanity from the soldier, mindless flagwaving from the militarist civilian. To me the Virginia race typifies the dynamics of American politics now.  It's a politics on the one side of being skeptical about the conventional wisdom and thinking things through for yourself, of wanting to debate and compromise vs. a thoughtless loyalty that refuses debate and jams policies down the electorate's throat with fear tactics and lies.   

Some Republicans fit into the first category, but theirs is not dominant tenor of their party.  Nevertheless, give McCain, Warner, and Graham props for standing up to the president on torture last week (although memories of Graham as one of the  house managers in the Clinton impeachment idiocy continue to give him an icky quality that's hard to dispel). But the bigger question here is why are we even having this argument about torture? 

Why is it considered so noteworthy that these guys have stood up to the president on an issue that should be a no-brainer for every decent American?  The soldiers don't want it. Why is the president being taken seriously at all?  Is it that his real concern is his vulnerability for war crimes indictments which could very well be coming?  He says he just wants to clarify the language of Article 3 in the Geneva Conventions. Fine. Just make sure that waterboarding, dog attacks, sexual abuse, and starvation are on the list.  From Krugman:

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. According to an ABC News report from last fall, procedures used by C.I.A. interrogators have included forcing prisoners to “stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours”; the “cold cell,” in which prisoners are forced “to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees,” while being doused with cold water; and, of course, water boarding, in which “the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet,” then “cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him,” inducing “a terrifying fear of drowning.”

And bear in mind that the “few bad apples” excuse doesn’t apply; these were officially approved tactics — and Mr. Bush wants at least some of these tactics to remain in use.

He wants to continue this kind of thing? I'm sorry, but if this is common practice, it is pointless sadism, and it's a disgrace. Or is the real reason he wants a clearer definition so that then Gonzales will go to work to develop new torture techniques that are not on the list or technically evades the definition?  At this point it's simply not possible to be too cynical about the way these guys operate.

Does it not matter to these guys that people used to look at the U.S. as the country of laws and fair play and now we're looking like some Latin American police state?  Is it no longer possible for Americans to be perceived as tough but fair?  Fairness is not what the GOP represents anymore, and its policies on torture and rendition are an outrage that must at some point be formally repudiated.

Maybe conservatives think that if they're not guilty, they don't have anything to worry about.  But if we've learned anything about this administration, we've learned how stupendously hamfisted and incompetent it is. How persistently and magnificently it get things wrong.  What if you or someone you care about is mistakenly implicated in a crime?  It happens all the time. Do you want your fate to be determined by some Bush political appointee?

Update:  By the way, if you want  a pretty notorious example of how the police mess things up in this  guilty-till-proven innoncent environment since 9/11, read up on the Maher Arar case that involves in this case a Canadian citizen:

Arar, who then lived in Ottawa, was travelling back to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia in September 2002 when he was pulled off a plane in New York. Within days, he was sent to Syria, where he says government officials detained him, systematically tortured him and kept him in jail for a year.

Turns out he was innocent.  Check out The Walrus Said for latest details.  The RCMP plays a role in this, but it's mostly an American fiasco. 

Competents Need Not Apply

This WaPo story is a must read if you haven't seen it already.  It gives you some insight into how people were hired by the CPA to rebuild Iraqi society after the invasion.  If you've been paying attention you won't be surprised to read these stories, and you know that they are not extraordinary but typical because of the well-established administration m.o. that political loyalty and ideological purity trump talent and expertise.  An excerpt:

The hiring of Bremer's most senior advisers was settled upon at the highest levels of the White House and the Pentagon. Some, like Foley, were personally recruited by Bush. Others got their jobs because an influential Republican made a call on behalf of a friend or trusted colleague.

That's what happened with James K. Haveman Jr., who was selected to oversee the rehabilitation of Iraq's health care system.

Haveman, a 60-year-old social worker, was largely unknown among international health experts, but he had connections. He had been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense.

Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world. Before his stint in government, Haveman ran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.

Haveman replaced Frederick M. Burkle Jr., a physician with a master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and the University of California at Berkeley. Burkle taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues, and he was a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which sent him to Baghdad immediately after the war.

He had worked in Kosovo and Somalia and in northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. A USAID colleague called him the "single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government."

But a week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed he was being replaced. A senior official at USAID sent Burkle an e-mail saying the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job. Burkle had a wall of degrees, but he didn't have a picture with the president.

Read the rest and weep.  It follows that people who believe that government is bad make such a belief a self-fullfilling prophecy. 

Neocon Sincerity: Believing Your Own Propaganda

The reason I am and have been so angry at this administration is because I believe we had an astonishing chance to turn around the Arab-Muslim world with a serious effort to transform Iraq, and Bush didn't trust the American people enough to do it. I regard that as a betrayal of his 9/11 promise. And so we have the worst of all worlds: an ineffective intervention that weakens and divides us, while strengthening and emboldening the enemy. Why could he not have urged a major expansion of the military, a gas tax to pay for the war, and an intervention with enough troops and enough of the right kind to succeed? I expect Vietnam-crippled Democrats to do what the Bush administration has done. Instead, we got Vietnam-crippled Republicans.  --Andrew Sullivan

Both Rumsfeld and Cheney have wanted to be president. Both of them actually conducted short-lived presidential campaigns in their own time. In effect, the Bush presidency is, for each of them, their presidencies. And they believe, above all, in unaccountable, unfettered power, particularly for themselves. They’re abstract Straussians, people who engage in political philosophizing, like a few of the neo-cons. They use the neo-cons for their own purposes, and they may believe some of the things that the neo-cons come up with. The neo-cons have proved to be incredibly useful to Rumsfeld and Cheney for their purposes.  Sidney Blumenthal

I don't know.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I still find the combination of arrogance and  naivete in Sullivan's thinking astonishing.  Does he really still believe that such a grandiose project ever had a chance of success?  Does he still believe that the underlying dynamic that led us to invade Iraq had to do with this kind of naive neo-Wilsonian missionary zeal. I know that such a rationale has been continuously promoted by the neocons and parroted by the media, but do these neocons and fellow travelers like Sullivan really believe that Cheney and Rumsfeld are driven by the desire to  spread democracy and western values?  Intellectuals like Sullivan, and maybe even Wolfowitz,  are sincere, but they are being used.  (Bush is in a bizarre religious la-la land all his own.) They are front men for the powerful, and they give the powerful the patina of decency and idealism that obscures the deeper, bare-knuckled power agenda.

Do they all these idealistic neocons really believe their own propaganda?  Some do.  Sullivan is one of them.  But in my opinion guys like Bill Kristol know exactly what they're doing in this brutal power game. He is both front man and backroom manipulator. He understands the propaganda value of naifs like Sullivan to develop popular suppport, and he unlike Sullivan knows the difference between the real agenda and its idealistic justification.  Sullivan is almost as clueless as George Bush.  Maybe someday he'll figure it out and write a post about how shocked and disappointed he was to discover that these people he trusted could be so perfidious.

The problem remains that until they wake up, people like Sullivan will continue to have influence in shaping "moderate" conservative public opinion, and rather than repudiating the militarism that is at the heart of our national soul sickness, they will continue to promote military-first solutions in the future--but insist that we do it "right."   They'll argue to send 300K or 500K or a million troops rather than 150K. The cost?  Who cares?  Who can put a price tag on American security? Small-government conservatives like Sullivan never seem to have a problem with the out-of-control costs of warmaking, and they don't seem to realize how warmaking concentrates power in the executive in ways that undermine everything their restrained-government conservative principles supposedly stand for. 

Sullivan is bright, but he is not a thinker; he's a political chatterbox like Chris Matthews. He doesn't really understand the contradictions implicit in what he's saying. It's just so much palaver that reinforces his more enthusiastic readers in their media, conventional wisdom bubble world which disconnects them from the world as it is really works. And their doing so helps to nurture the militarism which has become this uncontrolled, invasive weed that is destroying everything wholesome growing the garden.  Nobody in the mainstream media wants to probe into the profoundly disproportionate influences civilian military interests have in driving American policy.

American militarism must be repudiated.  It's not the military per se that's the problem--most of the men and women in uniform seem to be pretty sensible.  It's in the mentality of the civilian leadership that the the problem lies--and guys like Cheney and Rumsfeld are exemplars of this sickness.  Why have so many decent, thoughtful Americans bought into this kind of mentality that enables the Rumsfelds and the Cheneys  to have so much influence?  Is it because 9/11 changed everything?  Well if that seems right to you, you're thinking with your adrenal glands, not your brain.

More on How Militarism Rots the American Soul

It is the Soldier not the reporter, who has given us Freedom of the press. It is the Soldier not the poet, who has given us Freedom of speech. It is the Soldier not the campus organizer, who has given us the Freedom to demonstrate. It is the Soldier not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial. It is the soldier, who salutes the Flag, who serves beneath the Flag and whose coffin is draped by the Flag, who allows the protester to burn the Flag.

Read Dennis Perrin to find out why the reality is quite the opposite.

Barbarians at the Gate

In short, bin Laden's campaign, however contemptible, and opposition to the U.S. ambitions in the Greater Middle East more generally, emerged at least in part as a response to prior U.S. policies and actions, in which lofty ideals and high moral purpose seldom figured.  The United States cannot be held culpable for the maladies that today find expression in violent Islamic radicalism.  But neither can the United States absolve itself of any and all responsibility for the conditions that have exacerbated those maladies.  After several decades of acting as the preeminent power in the Persian Gulf, America did not arrive at the end of the twentieth century with clean hands. Andrew Bacevich: TNAM, p. 198.

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I just heard Tucker Carlson casually say that he told his "lesbian leftist friend" (probably Rachel Maddow), "when al Qaeda takes over you'll be the first one hung up by your thumbs."  Digby

This idea of al Qaeda taking over the world is a meme I've been reading in right wing and even moderate conservative blogs over the last week or so.  The idea is that if the Democrats are in power--or if Al Gore had been president during 9/11-- it's only a matter of time before American women are forced to wear burkas.  It fits in with the rhetoric coming from the Bushies that we're in World War III struggling to defeat an enemy as aggressive and bent on world domination as the Nazis.

Call me naive, but I guess I'm not that concerned about the prospect of Islamic hordes parachuting into New York and D.C. and landing craft all up and down the eastern seaboard discharging millions of invading Islamic warriors.  Nobody is explicitly promoting this vision of the future,  but isn't it really the subtext of the most recent adminstration propaganda?  Why else would Carlson say what he's saying, even if he's not completely serious.  It wouldn't even be possible to say such a thing if the fear of it wasn't there in the collective unconscious.

I continue to be amazed at the paranoia that animates the right wing in this country and the way that paranoia creates the template by which certain information is selected and other information filtered out.  It has this way of taking serious threats like Islamic terrorism and distorting them into something that bears little resemblance to what they really are. If you can't see a problem clearly, you can't develop the most effective solution for it.  If you have a kitchen fire, you better make sure you understand its cause.  What we're doing in the Middle East is the equivalent of tryng to put out a grease fire with water.

Sure there might be some loony-tunes, fringe Islamists sects which have fantasies of subjugating the world in the name of the prophet. But that's not al Qaeda's current mission, and even if it were, it's not something they are even remotely capable of achieving.  Al Qaeda has been clear that its primary objectives are to repel the western invader from the Islamic soil.  This is primarily a nationalistic impulse that has more in common with the anti-colonial insurgencies of the the mid-twentieth century.  Did the IRA in Ireland want to take over the government in London and make everyone a Catholic? Neither does al Qaeda have a similar interest regarding the U.S.

Their goal, consistent with the strategy of all such anti-colonial insurgencies, is to make the U.S. occupation cost more than it is worth for us, and if that means detonating a nuke on Wall Street or on Capitol Hill, they'll do it.  I have no doubt that they will try.  And it's clear that this is the kind of threat that we must bend all of our energies to prevent, and that this administration has been negligent in giving it the attention it deserves.  Why?  Because all of its energy and resources are bent on occupying the Islamic heartland.  Which only increases the insurgents' motivation to hurt us in ways that will surpass what we suffered in 9/11.

And so the question that never seems to be asked is why are we really there in the Middle East?  Why is it worth the cost to us?  What's really at stake for us there that we are willing to sustain its enormous costs in blood and treasure and to risk inciting even worse terrorist attacks on our own soil?  Why is this worth it to us?  How did this whole thing get started?

Most Americans haven't a clue about the real logic of our invasion or of Islamic hatred of the U.S.  Americans just think of it in simplistic terms: Those hadjis hit us on 9/11, and now we're hitting back. Or they have WMD, and even if they don't, they want them, so we have to occupy them so they won't get them because, because--well just because it's not a good thing for them to have them. But the Muslim extremists most likely to use them against us are living in Pakistan, which already does have nukes.  But Pakistan is our ally, right?  So we don't have to worry, right?  Iran, which has no nukes to give to terrorists, that's who we have to worry about, right?

The reasons promoted by the administration for the invasion of the Islamic heartland make hardly any sense on the face of it, and it doesn't have to because most Americans are oblivious of the long history that led to 9/11.  They accept the administration's blather about how the terrorists hate us because they hate freedom.  But they hate us for the same reason they hated the Russians when they invaded Afghanistan.  They hate us because of our bases and troop presence on Islamic soil.  And they hate us for the long Anglo-American history as colonialist bullies. From the Muslim point of view, we're the barbarians at their gates.

Now you could argue that they have it all wrong and that they're really the barbarians and we have only the most benevolent intentions and that our occupation will benefit these backward Islamic societies in the long run.  That's always been the colonizer's rationalization. But we're not there as neo-Wilsonian missionaries to convert Muslims into a liberal society suffused with Western values. 

That's a justification promoted by the neocons, and it's a smokescreen to hide the real purposes, which is that we are indeed involved in the next world war, a war in which we are the aggressors and the Muslim insurgents are the defenders. It's a war over who's to control the vast energy reserves of the middle east, and the sooner we face up to the fact, the sooner we can have a real debate in the U.S about how to develop a sane energy policy and a sane relationship with these Islamic societies that will support their struggle to find their way into the modern world.

Militarism and Oil

A half century ago, the proximity of a Communist threat--to Western Europe or East Asia, for example--tended to determine the stationing of U.S. forces abroad.  Today, increasingly, the profile of the American military presence abroad corresponds to the location of large oil and natural gas reserves." Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism, p. 102

***

The right-wing strategy was to use the American military to achieve economic and strategic goals in the Middle East: to gain control of the second largest oil reserve in the world; to place military bases right in the heart of the Middle East for the sake of economic and political intimidation; to open up Middle East markets and economic opportunities for American corporations; and to place American culture and a controllable government in the heart of the Middle East. The justification was 9/11 — to identify the Iraq invasion as part of the “War on Terror” and claim that it is necessary in order to protect America and spread democracy.

What has been the result?

Domestically, the “War on Terror” has been a major success for the radical right. Bush has been returned to office and the radical right controls all branches of our government. They are realizing their goals. Social programs are being gutted. Deregulation and privatization are thriving. Even highways are being privatized. Taxpayers’ money is being transferred to the ultra-rich making them richer. Two right-wing justices have been appointed to the Supreme Court and right-wing judges are taking over courts all over America. The environment continues to be plundered. Domestic surveillance is in place. Corporate profits have doubled while wage levels have declined. Oil profits are astronomical. And the radical rights social agenda is taking hold. The “culture war” is being won on many fronts. And it is still widely accepted that we are fighting a “War on Terror.” The metaphor is still in place. We are still taking off our shoes at the airports, and now we cannot take bottled water on the planes. Terror is being propped up.

But while the radical right has done well on the domestic front, America and Americans have fared less well both at home and abroad.

What was the moral of 9/11?

To Osama bin Laden, the moral was simple: American power can be used against America itself. This moral has defined the post 9/11 world: the more America uses military force in the Middle East, the more damage is done to America and Americans.--George Lakoff & Evan Frisch

Do you remember Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" Speech?  He gave it in July 1979, and although we look back on it now through the lens of Reagan's "Morning in America" alternative fantasy, Carter's was a speech that boosted his sagging approval ratings at the time.  The key to the speech was to ask for sacrifice from the American people in a long term-struggle for energy independence. Bacevich says about it:

For Carter, the "crisis" facing the nation could not have a military solution.  That crisis was at root internal rather than external.  Resolving it required spiritual and cultural renewal at home rather than deploying U.S. power to create a world order accommodating the nation's dependence upon and growing preoccupation with material resources from abroad.

Although Carter' s stance was relentlessly inward looking, his analysis had important strategic implications.  To the extent that "foreign oil" refers implicitly to the Persian Gulf--as it did then and does today--Carter was in essence proposing to arrest the growing strategic importance attributed to that region.  He sensed intuitively that a failure to reverse the nation's energy dependence was sure to draw the United States ever more deeply into the vortex of Persian Gulf politics, which could at best distract attention from but was even more likely to exacerbate the internal crisis that was his central concern.

This is, of course, precisely what has come to pass, with massive and problematic implications for the nation's security and for U.S. military posture and priorities.

The idea, of course, that less is better is un-American, and Carter's adversaries attacked Carter for his effrontery:

Those adversaries--Ronald Reagan first and foremost--offered a different message, not of need to cut back but of abundance without end.  They assured Americans not only that compromising their lifestyle was unnecessary but that the prospects for economic expansion were limitless and could be had without moral complications or great cost.  This rather than nagging about shallow materialism, was what Americans wanted to hear.  Thus did Carter pave the way for his own electoral defeat a year later.

It's ironic to say the least that the reefs of Middle Eastern politics that concerned Carter most were the primary cause of the shipwreck that became his presidency.  In the October after his speech Carter allowed the deposed Iranian Shah Reza Pahlevi entry into the United States thus triggering enraged Iranian revolutionaries to storm the American embassy and to seize there 66 hostages.  After the aborted hostage rescue mission in April, the only time Carter sent the military into action, Carter's fate was sealed.  The irony was doubly compounded by the release of the hostages on Ronald Reagan's inauguration day, twenty minutes after he gave his speech. 

Most Americans have very little interest in or knowledge about history.  This is a trait that is easily exploited by political demagoguery because the real historical cause and effect can be disregarded and replaced with other explanations that have little to do with reality and everything to do with political expediency.  People who actually know something and object to these distortions are easily dismissed as ivory-tower "intellectuals."

In a future post, I will get into a closer examination of the history of the central role that oil is playing in shaping U.S foreign policy.  But the point today is to remember that we Americans made a choice about twenty-six years ago.  It was a choice about oil and on another level about the projection of American military power, and it's a choice that has had huge consequences--none of them positive.