“A Pretty Good Year In A Pretty Bad Century”: A High Point In A Century Marred By The Disastrous Bush Presidency
Imagine the 21st century as a Broadway show. We’re not talking “Hamilton” material. Actually, it’s pretty much a flop. If it were a Broadway show, it would have closed by now.
A year-end 2015 album picture, taken in Paris, showing solemn world leaders gathered to march in mournful defiance of the Islamic state group’s November terrorist attack arrested my attention. There was Germany’s Angela Merkel. There was France’s Francois Hollande. And even Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. But not the American president, Barack Obama. And that seemed strange.
Whatever. But the picture wept. The Islamic State group was our own scary gift to the world, after all, wrapped up during our long war in Iraq; and the tag definitely has George W. Bush’s name on it. Obama has yet to fully face this unforeseen consequence of war, bound to shadow his last year in office. To his credit, he recognizes the futility of going to war once again.
So let’s skip the year in review and go straight to the century in review. It’s a good time to look back over our collective shoulder.
A full 15 years have ended in a pretty pass. At home, we are a nation more roiled by race and police brutality than ever since the 1960s civil rights movement, even with a black president. Income inequality is a plague on our houses. And we are seriously looking at an abrasive reality show host as our next Republican presidential nominee. I mean seriously, folks. Some pundits who urged us onto the Iraq War blithely assert Donald Trump will never win the primary. I don’t put my faith in those wise men. I foresee leading Democratic contender Hillary Clinton facing Trump in the general election.
We’ve seen roughly half and half in Republican and Democratic control this century. Eight years of George W. Bush as president – defined by Sept. 11 and a couple wars – followed by seven years of Barack Obama – defined by picking up the pieces and trying to make peace. A huge economic downturn was also passed along directly from Bush to Obama. The euphoria at Obama’s inauguration lasted about a day in the frigid winter air.
Obama surely deserved better than what he got, but presidents don’t pick their predecessors. Bush had staked all on avenging the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and invested in becoming a “war president.” A Special Forces lightning-like attack on Osama bin Laden, the mastermind, would have been the wiser course of action, as commander-in-chief Obama showed much later. For on 9/11, there was no army against us, just 19 hijackers: Fifteen men from Saudi Arabia, zero from Iraq.
Bush’s slothful insult toward a storied city felled by a hurricane – tipping Air Force One’s wings over New Orleans in 2005 – was the tipping point of his presidency. Suddenly, the dots of his incompetence connected and his approval rating, too, was felled and never got back up again.
Everything that came out of the Bush years – false premises for declaring war, looting antiquities, the Patriot Act, torture, Guantanamo, mass surveillance on citizens, thousands of military and civilian casualties – tarnishes what we are supposed to stand for. In the end, the Islamic State group is the last cosmic slice of “just desserts” for an absolutely meaningless war. Few who thanked soldiers for their service in airports could fully embrace or explain what it was for. Next time, people, get a draft. It’s much harder to go to war with a draft.
As the new century dawned, the omens were plainly ominous. Bush’s victory over Al Gore in late 2000 called into question whether a Supreme Court 5-4 decision is a fair election. It was hard to tell from the timid press coverage, but Gore clearly won the popular vote. Just think how different the last 15 years would have been if the outcome had gone the other way. The peace and prosperity of the Bill Clinton years seem like a dream.
Obama has done much repair work, especially on the economy and foreign policy. In fact, between the Iran deal and the recent Paris Agreement on global warming, the seventh has been his best year in office. In fact, 2015 has been the best year since this century began. But he’s not the best morale-booster. That’s just not his way.
In singing “Amazing Grace” solo at the funeral service of nine murdered black church parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, the president showed amazing grace that moved the nation. For that June day, he became consoler-in-chief. Whether he’ll reach out to the American people to conduct heartfelt dialogues on race in 2016, somehow I doubt it, unless another catalyst arises. An eloquent writer on race in his memoir, Obama seldom put it on the front burner in the White House. But with or without him, it’s a burning subject.
2016, here we come into the maelstrom, a divided country swept by cross-currents. With Clinton in the election cycle, gender may soon join race as a force awakening in the national conversation. Iowa and New Hampshire voters, as usual, will be treated like they know so much. Both are overwhelmingly white states with rural swaths. They do not speak for flash points of violence and pain: Ferguson, Missouri; Chicago, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; Baltimore, Maryland; nor Charleston, South Carolina.
But we can take heart: 2015 was a pretty good year in a pretty bad century, so far.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, December 29, 2015
“Ted Cruz’s Plan For ISIS Is Disastrously Inhumane”: The Scary Thing Is That Cruz Might Actually Believe His Campaign Rhetoric
Ted Cruz never says anything good just once — when he finds a line or a joke that gets applause, he repeats it over and over. And one of his big crowd-pleasers at the moment is this little ditty about the Islamic State: “We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out!”
In front of audiences that want to know who’s going to be most ruthless in fighting those terrible terrorists that are terrifying us, it never fails. And it reflects prevailing Republican sentiment, which says that ISIS hasn’t been defeated only because Barack Obama is weak, and with the application of enough force, this problem can be solved.
Just last week, I praised Cruz for being nearly alone among the Republican candidates (Rand Paul joins him in this) in realizing the pitfalls of nation-building. He has said repeatedly that it’s a bad idea for us to go in and occupy a place like Syria in the hopes that we can create a thriving and peaceful democracy there, and that if we were to depose Bashar al-Assad, the vacuum created by his departure would likely be filled by a theocratic regime. But Cruz’s apparent willingness to entertain the idea of unintended consequences obviously has its limits.
Does Cruz actually want to drop nuclear weapons on places where ISIS is operating? That’s what’s implied by the bit about sand glowing in the dark, but he’d never cop to that. How about carpet-bombing? After all, part of the difficulty with fighting ISIS from the air is that they control cities full of civilians. The American military doesn’t lack for ordnance; we could level those cities if we wanted. But doing so would mean thousands and thousands of civilian casualties, killing the very people we’d be claiming to want to save. That’s not only morally abhorrent, it would be extremely likely to produce the kind of hatred towards America that helped Al Qaeda thrive, helped ISIS replace Al Qaeda, and would help the next terrorist group take ISIS’s place.
In an interview Wednesday with NPR, Cruz got asked about this problem, and put his finely honed evasion skills to work. Asked by host Steve Inskeep whether he wanted to “flatten” cities where ISIS is located, Cruz said, “I think we need to use every military tool at our disposal to defeat ISIS.” Inskeep pressed him: “You can flatten a city. Do you want to do that?” Cruz responded, “The problem with what President Obama is doing” is that he’s too soft, noting that in World War II we didn’t worry about the welfare of the German people, we just fought. “FDR carpet-bombed cities,” Inskeep noted. “Is that what you want to do?” Cruz answered, “I want to carpet-bomb ISIS.”
Now perhaps President Cruz’s powers of persuasion would be so extraordinary that he could convince ISIS to leave the cities it controls, where its members sit amongst the innocent civilians it’s oppressing, and march out to the desert so we could more efficiently carpet-bomb them. But I doubt it.
Of course, Cruz is hardly the only presidential candidate offering absurdly simplistic ideas about how to solve this problem. But one might think that the destruction we could wreak upon civilian populations in the Middle East would be a matter of particular concern given our recent history. Estimates of the civilian casualties in the Iraq War range somewhere between 165,000 and 500,000, but conservatives seem convinced that all that suffering and death had nothing to do with the rise of ISIS, and repeating it would be regrettable but not produce any blowback. It appears to be gospel on the right that the people in countries we’ve invaded or bombed are so understanding and forgiving that none of that matters to them; those who become radicalized only “hate us for our freedoms.” Which doesn’t explain why ISIS doesn’t hate Japan or Costa Rica or Switzerland just as much, since in those countries they also have freedoms.
Perhaps we have trouble understanding what it’s like to have a foreign army bombing or occupying your country because it’s been so long. We haven’t had such an army on our soil since the War of 1812, and though we were attacked at Pearl Harbor and then 60 years later on 9/11, those were events confined to a single day. So we can’t seem to grasp the kind of resentment and even hatred that an extended military campaign can foster, no matter how noble the ideals of the country that sent the army carrying it out. When the Bush administration assumed we’d be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq (as Dick Cheney put it), they simply couldn’t contemplate that Iraqis might not be excited to see us rain down bombs, destroy their infrastructure, and then occupy their country, even if they didn’t like the dictator they were living under.
Grasping that requires empathy and a little imagination, neither of which is in good supply in the GOP these days, let alone among its presidential candidates. It’s the luxury of running for office that you can make all problems sound simple, pretend that you can carpet-bomb a city and kill only the bad guys and not the people living there, and act as though strength and resolve are all you need to solve problems. The scary thing to contemplate is that someone like Ted Cruz might actually believe his campaign rhetoric, and put it into action if he became president.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, December 10, 2015
“A Stupid, Bone-Deep Republican Orthodoxy”: The Quack Science Behind Donald Trump’s Love Of Torture
Torture is utterly worthless for interrogation. This fact is now established beyond doubt, thanks to extensive scholarly investigation and specific investigations conducted by the Senate and independent groups.
And yet, vastly too many people, from the average citizen up to top political elites, still believe otherwise. Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson recently argued that torture should again become American policy.
Sadly, yet another work on the pointlessness of torture is rather timely. This time it’s Shane O’Mara, a Professor of Experimental Brain Research at Dublin College. His book is called Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation.
I have previously recounted Professor Darius Rejali’s argument against the utility of torture. He builds a comprehensive case, from simple mechanical problems with inflicting pain on someone to how it corrodes the professionalism of organizations that practice it. O’Mara, by contrast, restricts himself to the effects of torture on the nervous system, which are explored in extreme detail.
He does this through an exploration of the notorious Torture Memos, written by Bush administration lawyer John Yoo. The memos provide a view of the Bush administration’s original pro-torture case, as well as a reasonable approximation of the lay arguments in favor of torture. In O’Mara’s work, each memo section dealing with a particular torture technique is compared to a thorough investigation of the corresponding studies.
In each case, the memos are found to be utterly disconnected from the relevant scientific literature. The psychiatric and medical evidence is very complex, but it basically boils down to the same basic problem with using torture for interrogation, just manifested in different ways. Interrogation is the act of trying to induce a captive to recite the contents of his memory, but torture deeply damages the memory functions of the brain.
Memory is complicated and delicate, prone to faults and breakdown. Eyewitness reports are unreliable and easy to influence. More surprising, it is extremely easy to induce false confessions — and not only through torture. Simply hurting someone until they agree to to sign a confession they know to be false generally works well (as the Chicago police department could tell you). But it’s trivially easy to get people in laboratory experiments to actually believe they have committed crimes they did not do in reality, with well-placed suggestions and social pressure.
Extreme stress, such as that brought on by severe pain or drowning panic (eg., from waterboarding) directly damages an already shaky and unreliable memory system. Many experiments have demonstrated that “extreme behavioral stressors caused grave memory deficits: in particular, impairment in visuospatial capacity and recall of previously learned information,” writes O’Mara. Extreme heat or cold similarly disrupt brain function — and can even result in permanent brain damage.
Sleep deprivation can be even worse for memory function. Extreme lack of sleep — the memos state that prisoners can be kept awake for up to 180 hours — induces a state akin to a major psychiatric disorder. Victims become profoundly disorientated and incoherent, and often hallucinate vividly. That it might be problematic for an interrogation method to induce an inability to distinguish between reality and imagination seems not to have occurred to anyone: “The vast empirical literature showing these deleterious effects is uncited in toto in the Torture Memos.”
Worse still, there in an additive effect when such techniques are combined — sleep deprivation plus hypothermia is worse for brain function than either one in isolation, and so on. This, naturally, was the default approach to CIA interrogation in the Bush years.
Torturing for information is like trying to build a sand castle with a firehose, and it is patently obvious that Yoo (and by extension, the rest of the Bush torturers) did not do the slightest scholarly investigation of it. However, Yoo adopts a confident, expert tone, often stating categorically what the medical literature does and does not show (constantly getting it wrong), and citing all manner of empirical data — just none that are remotely relevant. It shows every possible sign of an amoral legal hack backfilling to justify a preconceived decision, and papering over his utter medical ignorance with bluster and citation of half-understood or straight-up fabricated evidence.
It’s a sad irony that a great deal of this evidence on torture comes from experiments on U.S. soldiers being trained to survive enemy capture — but there is virtually no science on actual interrogation practices. Indeed, ordinary police are given a mere handful of hours in interrogation instruction, while the CIA actively threw out the government’s best interrogators. Of all the trillions spent on the war on terror, it’s beyond disgraceful that none of it managed to finance a couple studies on quality interrogation.
At any rate, as O’Mara notes, the pro-torture case, from Yoo on down, rests entirely on folk wisdom — probably instilled by one of a hundred action movies or TV shows, where the tough hero saves the world from a nuclear explosion by a quick and easy application of brutal violence. Such portrayals are as immoral as they are unrealistic.
That brings me back to Trump. In his justification for bringing torture back, he inadvertently let slip one of the real lizard-brain motivators behind torture: a desire for retribution. “If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing,” he recently said at a rally. This attitude is not just monstrous (recall that a great many people tortured by the U.S. were entirely innocent) but dangerous. It places the desire for vengeance against suspected terrorists above the need for quality interrogation and intelligence work. It’s stupid, childish, and bone-deep Republican orthodoxy.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, December 7, 2015
“Serving The Cause Of Terrorist Jihad”: Paris Terror; Why ISIS Needs The ‘Useful Idiots’ Who Demonize Muslims
When France’s prime minister Manuel Valls said after last Friday’s attacks in Paris, “nous sommes en guerre” – we are at war – there could be no doubt that the rest of the civilized world, including the United States and NATO, will stand beside our oldest ally in a common struggle to extirpate the barbaric ISIS.
But as this conflict deepens and national emotions surge, it is vital to keep minds clear and principles intact.
Sadly the Republican candidates for president, and too many in their party, will seek to use this crisis as a partisan weapon against President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential contender. They will charge the Obama administration with “weakness” even as American warplanes fly thousands of sorties against ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria. Such political attacks sound ridiculous to anyone familiar with the recent history of the Mideast. As a product of Al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS rose directly from the ill-conceived invasion and occupation of that unfortunate country – and the fact that Clinton mistakenly voted to give George W. Bush the conditional authority to wage that war in no way makes her (or Obama) responsible for its botched execution.
The social chaos, religious strife, and massive bloodshed resulting from the US invasion created fertile ground for a new terrorist movement. And as Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick explains in Black Flags, his authoritative new history of the rise of ISIS, the Bush administration elevated its founder, a minor Jordanian gangster named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, into an international terrorist celebrity with its bogus claim that he represented a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
So when historians someday apportion blame, that process won’t flatter the Republicans and their neoconservative advisers, who assured us that “regime change” in Iraq would reshape the region at very little cost to us. Few national security predictions have ever been so confident and so wrong, with such enormous and enduring consequences. Influenced by those advisers, the Bush White House failed to address the terrorist threat before 9/11, and later used it to build a fraudulent justification for invading Iraq.
We might thus hesitate before continuing to follow the counsel of such figures – from William Kristol to Dick Cheney to Jeb Bush, one of the original members of the Project for the New American Century, a powerful lobbying outfit formed 15 years ago to promote war in Iraq, among other misguided ideas. These are the same characters who fought more recently to kill the Iran nuclear deal. Had they succeeded, we now would have no chance of even minimal cooperation with Tehran against ISIS, which is vital.
We would do better instead to reject their ill-conceived notions – and especially their mindless hostility toward Muslims and Islam.
Consider the latest instance: Along with Senator Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Ben Carson and too many other Republicans, “moderate” Jeb Bush today articulates a response to ISIS that includes ominous anti-Muslim overtones. Specifically, he and Cruz urge the government to accept Christian but not Muslim refugees from Syria — and this is merely the most recent in a wave of remarks and statements offensive to Muslims from Republican elected officials and political hopefuls. Whenever a Republican candidate — or any other American — endorses bigotry against Islam and its billion-plus believers, he or she becomes a “useful idiot” serving the cause of terrorist jihad.
As George W. Bush said in his finest hour, our cause is not a war against Islam or the overwhelming majority of Muslims who live peacefully and loyally in the United States and in scores of other nations, from Europe to Malaysia. Indeed, the destruction of ISIS will require an unbreakable alliance with Islam’s true followers, not only in Syria and Iraq but in every place that jihadi terrorists may target. We cannot rely on military, police, and intelligence cooperation from people demonized and demeaned by political leaders and media outlets.
Every imbecile who threatens Muslims is an unwitting agent of ISIS; in fact, it would be unsurprising to learn that ISIS itself is covertly promoting such messages in order to intensify enmity between the peoples of the Quran and the rest of the world. Certainly that is among the primary objectives of attacks like last week’s atrocities in Paris.
What we need now is a diplomatic solution for Syria, which may at last be on the horizon if the Russians are serious about bringing down ISIS. We need a smart, careful, and focused military strategy that builds on recent advances by Kurdish and Shiite forces on the ground. And we need to assure Muslims everywhere – as President Obama has wisely insisted — that they have a place of security and honor in the world we hope to build.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editor’s Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 16, 2015
“Poppy Speaks Out At Last — Too Little, Too Late”: The American People Are Still Paying The Price
If only “Poppy” had quit in 1992, after one White House term, then the 41st president’s fruit would not be so bitter. George Herbert Walker Bush would have dined out on German reunification and the multinational coalition in the first Gulf War — a desert cakewalk. Through no fault of his own, the Soviet Union and the Cold War ended on his watch, and that should be enough for any man pushing 70.
“I didn’t finish the job,” Bush I said. He’s now 91.
Out on the stump, the monumentally ambitious president found he could not connect to the American people. A jolly good fellow who wrote a ton of thank-you notes, he went as far as China and Langley for the blue-chip resume, always a team player who never had “the vision thing.”
Earlier, in 1988, he won as Ronald Reagan’s chosen understudy. But like many men of his Ivy League WASP war hero mold, he could not speak straight to the heart of people at home. Not to save his political life. His speech often sounded strangled.
A new biography, an elegant volume composed by author and presidential historian Jon Meacham, is titled Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. It’s based on the former president’s diaries and revealing chats, often at the family compound on the Maine coast.
The result of that sharing is the most generous portrait that the former president, nicknamed “Poppy” since prep school, could hope for. Meacham’s work is written in a gentlemanly spirit, just as his American Lion book on the gruff general and president, Andrew Jackson, glowed. For that he won the Pulitzer Prize. (Meacham once deftly edited a magazine piece of mine.) Meacham excuses Bush’s mean moments in political combat as untrue to his code. (The 1988 campaign was not pretty.) Nor does he pass judgment on Bush’s loyal service to President Richard M. Nixon.
Bush realized late there was no way to win against the young Bill Clinton, who could coax the stars out of the sky. The generational contrast was stark. We learn that Bush confided to his diary that he felt the war-high in his approval rating was thin ice. The future won; the past lost. Bush had been schooled and worked in exclusively male institutions; Clinton was educated in co-ed settings and married another Yale Law School graduate. (Barbara Pierce Bush dropped out of Smith College to marry Poppy.)
Now it turns out, tragically, Poppy’s speech troubles extended to his own firstborn son George W. Bush as wily Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — who pushed the nation down the path of war in Iraq. More than most, the Bushes have played their family dramas out in public, at our expense. The American people are still paying the bill — and so are Iraq, Syria and other countries bathed in blood. The show was not even fun to watch.
The Bushes are not just genteel from a long New England line. Their manners mask a cutthroat bunch — jocks who don’t crack books much — when they aren’t writing adoring notes to fellow Bushes. Winning and loyalty are cherished, whether it’s horseshoes or the Florida presidential contest in 2000. They have their men, like lifelong friend James Baker, always there to help in a pinch. In Florida, with brother Jeb Bush as governor, the cliffhanger was almost a cosmic family thank-you note to opponent Al Gore, Clinton’s vice president — whom Poppy had once referred to as a pair of “bozos.” (Now he and Clinton are tight.)
Cheney’s war-mongering as his son’s vice president offended Poppy; building up his own power base was the last thing he would have done as Reagan’s No. 2. Bush, ever the good team player, found Cheney’s aggression a terrible influence. Yet Poppy had hired Cheney to be his secretary of defense and so — well, it was all in the tribe. As a seasoned foreign policy hand, Poppy knew the “axis of evil” language used by his son was trouble. But he never spoke “mano a mano” to his son, as columnist Maureen Dowd noted.
So why not say something at the time to us, the American people? It’s clear: We’re not their kind, dear.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 13, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 