“GOP Hypocrisy”: Outraged Over Benghazi, Silent On Iraq
When I heard that the House of Representatives has established a select committee to investigate the attack on Benghazi that left several Americans dead in 2012, I couldn’t help but wonder what these same legislators might have done had Barack Obama been president in 2003, and had the audacity of George W. Bush to attack a sovereign country that had no relevant connection to the 9/11 attacks with the result that nearly 5,000 Americans and well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians (many of them women and children) perished. Had Obama’s war in Iraq also cost American taxpayers $1.7 trillion, with another $490 in veteran expenses (thus far)—with a total cost of $6 trillion projected—I have no doubt that a select committee would long ago have sent him to the Hague for trial as a war criminal.
It’s sad to think how in our fury over Benghazi we’ve almost forgotten a recent war that destroyed so many families, nearly bankrupted this country (and may yet), and led to a hugely destabilized Iraq that no longer serves as a buffer to Iran. Needless to say, this terrible war was pursued under false pretenses, with huge amounts of government corruption—Houston-based company KBR alone (a spinoff from Halliburton, where Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO before becoming vice president) racked up charges of nearly $40 billion during the war, making it (by far) the winner in the Iraq sweepstakes. In most banana republics, this would be cause for serious investigation; but not so much here, where our politicians (or their friends) are allowed to profit from armed invasions. Can it possibly be so that the U.S. Congress has ignored such obvious corruption while investigating over and over whether Susan Rice was given some edited “talking points” on Benghazi? Really?
I’ve spent a good deal of time in the Middle East over the years, lecturing at universities in places like Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Morocco. Soon after the invasion of Iraq, I was staying at a hotel in Amman, when into the hot tub by the pool stepped a tall American with a closely shaved head. He seemed about my age, and we struck up a cheerful conversation. I explained I was in the country at the behest of the Department of State, as a kind of cultural ambassador. He liked this, and told me he was en route to Baghdad. He was a general in the army, a career officer with a specialty in intelligence. I asked him what he thought would come of the Iraq war.
He said, without pausing, that in ten years the U.S. would be out of Iraq, as the American people would never support an expensive war in an obscure country longer than a decade. He was right about that. He guessed that thousands would die. And he was more or less right about that, though his figures were a bit low. He predicted the region would be dangerously destabilized, and that sooner or later Iran would assert control over the Shia majority who would almost certainly take control, repressing the Sunni minority, which Saddam Hussein had led to power. Let’s say he was absolutely on the mark here, as Nouri al-Malaki was hiding from Hussein in Iran before assuming high office in Iraq, where he now has become a kind of dictator, supported strongly by Grand Ayatolla Kazim al Haeri, one of the most influential Shia voices in Iran.
I remember this general shaking his head bitterly, noting that we had turned Iraq into a magnet for all sorts of dangerous elements, drawing al Qaeda into a region where they had only a minimal presence before the war. He also pointed out that large numbers of Iraqi citizens had been displaced, and that the number would increase. Indeed, some four million Iraqis have been run out of their homes, and these wandering families–he said with a wry smirk–would never become our allies in the region (to put it mildly).
A few days after this conversation in Amman, I was giving a lecture on American poetry at a university on the Iraqi-Jordan border, talking to perhaps 800 students about Robert Frost. Afterwards, a young man came up to me with Frost’s poems in hand. He could recite reams of Frost, Dickinson, Whitman, and Lowell, and he did so while I stood there, amazed. He had just completed a degree, he explained, in American poetry, and I asked him if he were going to become a teacher one day. He said, indeed, it was his fondest hope. “But first,” he said, “I am crossing the border into Iraq, to fight against the American invader.” My jaw dropped. “And why is this?” I wondered. He said, “You must understand that, for my generation, this is like the Spanish Civil War. I must join in the fight for freedom. I must join the equivalent of our Lincoln Brigade.”
These encounters in Jordan stick with me, a decade later. Now Iraq lies in ruins, and the U.S. has tens of thousands of enemies with a right to their anger. Meanwhile, Americans mourn the loss of so many brothers, fathers, uncles, sisters, mothers. Many veterans lie in hospitals across the nation, dazed and confused. This war that somehow never found its way onto the books continues to drag on our economy. So why haven’t we brought Bush and Cheney to Washington to answer some very hard questions under oath? Well, I suppose we’ve got Benghazi to worry about.
By: Jay Parini, Professor at Middlebury College; The Daily Beast, May 11, 2914
“So Much For The Nation’s Falling Stature”: Unfortunately For Conservatives And Mitt Romney, Reality Keeps Getting In The Way
A few weeks ago, as part of a larger condemnation of the Obama presidency, Mitt Romney insisted the last five years have been awful for the United States’ stature around the world. “It is hard to name even a single country that has more respect and admiration for America today than when President Obama took office,” the failed candidate said, adding, “Our esteem around the world has fallen.”
For the right, this is a common line of attack. Tea Party favorite Ben Carson recently argued, “Russians seem to be gaining prestige and influence throughout the world as we are losing ours.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney said on “Face the Nation” a month ago that America’s willingness to keep our commitments has been “in doubt for some time now” around the globe “because of the policies of the Obama administration.”
Unfortunately for conservatives, reality keeps getting in the way. Zack Beauchamp reported this morning:
American foreign policy may look like it’s in shambles sometimes, but the world doesn’t seem to think so. According to Gallup’s US Global Leadership Project, a gigantic survey of over 130,000 people in 130 countries, approval of the United States’ leadership bounced up five percentage points in 2013. That’s a lot.
Gallup used its survey data to estimate the percentage of people in each of these 130 countries who say they approve or disapprove of “the leadership of the United States” – basically, of President Obama.
Though there are, not surprisingly, broad regional differences, I found it interesting that in Asia, support for U.S. leadership is stronger now than at any time during either the Obama or the Bush administrations.
The only continent in which U.S. stature has seen a decline is in Africa, but even here, approval of the United States is higher than anywhere else.
What’s more, Gallup also found, “The world felt a little better about U.S. leadership last year, giving it the highest global approval ratings out of five global powers, including Germany, China, the European Union, and Russia.”
Sorry, Mitt.
The political world can, of course, have a debate over why U.S. stature appears to be improving abroad. Beauchamp makes a persuasive case that it’s the result of several factors, including improved European economies, a declining U.S. drone war, and improved relations with Central America.
We can also have a discussion about where the nation’s reputation would be now were it not for the hit we took during the Bush/Cheney era, when the United States’ reputation suffered an actual, not an imaginary, blow.
Regardless, it seems hard to take seriously the assertion that “our esteem around the world has fallen.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 11, 2014
“Enough With Puff Pieces About Painting”: Bush Crew’s Deplorable Return, How Their Reemergence Sends A Deadly Message
It’s been more than five years since Dick Cheney left the White House and nearly eight years since Donald Rumsfeld was booted from the Pentagon. With the obvious exception of George W. Bush himself, no two men were more responsible for the United States’ disastrous and criminal invasion of Iraq, as well as its embrace of a counter-terrorism model built on the twin barbarities of indefinite detention and systematic torture. In the years that have passed since their departure from public office, both men have released best-selling memoirs, made countless media appearances and no doubt added substantially to their already considerable wealth.
In fact, to get a real sense of just how little these men have had to pay for their sins, consider three recent examples.
One is a recent comment from Dick Cheney, delivered in public — not in private, not on background, not via unknown insiders with intimate knowledge of the former vice president’s thinking, but in public — about whether he still supports waterboarding (or torture, as most people besides Cheney tend to call it): “If I had to do it all over again,” Cheney said, “I would.”
The second is the new documentary, “The Unknown Known,” by Errol Morris and about Donald Rumsfeld. Estimations of the film’s quality vary, but all reviewers are unanimous in at least one regard: Rumsfeld, as he comes off in the film, truly has no regrets. Asked by Morris if invading Iraq for the second time, causing hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths and turning millions more into refugees, was worth it, Rumsfeld shrugs off the question and settles for a fittingly cold and glib answer: “Time will tell.”
The third story is, to my mind, the most disturbing. It’s a piece in the New York Times, published Friday, about a third man, a man who ignored warnings of a terrorist attack, plunged his country into two disastrous wars, invaded a sovereign nation without sanction from the United Nations and on false pretexts, signed off on the implementation of a worldwide torture regime, secretly initiated domestic surveillance on an unprecedented scale, oversaw the destruction of one of the world’s greatest cities, and cut taxes for, and thwarted regulations against, the Wall Street power-players who destroyed the global economy and consigned millions of people to lives of poverty, unemployment and deferred dreams. That man is George W. Bush, and the article is a puff piece about his kitschy paintings.
Obviously, the fact that these men continue to live charmed lives offends our sense of fairness. But it has a more tangible consequence, too. Consider the state of foreign policy thinking within the Republican Party today. Granted, with the recent ascendance of the relatively isolationist Sen. Rand Paul, the GOP’s view of foreign policy is somewhat in flux. But Paul is still an outlier, and a quick glance of the Mitt Romney campaign’s foreign policy experts is enough to show that neoconservatives like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and the rest of that ghoulish clique still call the foreign policy shots for national Republicans. Despite their abject failures — both technocratically and morally — Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld remain in good standing with the people who run one of America’s only two serious political parties. If Mitt Romney were president right now, with Dan Senor by his side, the United States could be ramping up for war with Iran or Russia, preparing to once again spread freedom from the barrel of a gun as if Fallujah and Abu Ghraib never happened.
There’s next to no chance any of these men will ever be officially held accountable for their crimes. All three clearly harbor no regrets. These are the fruits of belonging to the American elite in an era of widespread inequality, when not only the economy, but many pieces of the state itself, act to reinforce and perpetuate the divide separating those who have from those who do not.
Of course, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush are hardly the first American war criminals to escape justice. Richard Nixon, in whose administration the former two men served, immediately comes to mind. Henry Kissinger, too. As was the case for Nixon and Kissinger, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have benefitted from a decision of the political ruling class — and, to a lesser degree, of the general public— that it’s best not to dwell too much on the nastier bits of America’s recent history. Back when some touchingly naïve souls thought it a possibility, President Obama used to dismiss the notion of holding his predecessors accountable for torture by urging America to “look forward.” This was an order that the vast majority of Americans showed themselves willing to follow.
This same dynamic, this resistance on the part of the powerful to hold their fellow elites to account — as well as the general public’s silent acceptance of these different, looser ethical standards — was also a key driver of the government’s response to the financial meltdown of 2008. After the crisis had passed and the Obama administration had begun reconstituting the financial sector (mostly in its prior form, sadly), there were public demands that some of the Wall Streeters responsible be prosecuted for the damage they wrought. But these flashes of public discontent were mostly ignored by the White House, and here we are, five years later, with essentially no Wall Street villain having had to worry about seeing the inside of a jail cell. Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein are richer and more powerful than ever.
I’m hardly the first to notice the difference between how not only society, but also the state, treats the powerful and the rest of the public. Salon alum Glenn Greenwald has made the same point, as has MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. But while it’s a point well worth repeating, I don’t bring it up in order to shed light on the past but rather to sound a warning about the future. Because as bad as accountability norms have already become in the United States, there’s ample reason to worry that they’re soon to get even worse.
For an example of how this might be, consider the recent, much-talked-about essay in the Wall Street Journal by billionaire industrialist and right-wing donor Charles G. Koch. The piece is an odd one, residing somewhere between a talking-points-filled press release and a list of conservative maxims that are too hoary for all but the dullest politicians and the most thoughtless ideologues (despite his political activities, Koch is much more the latter). It’s littered with pablum about liberty and “the principles of a free society,” and is defined by the kind of sloppy, lazy thinking that lays claim to “dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom” without acknowledging that, in the real world, disagreements over the proper application of these universally agreed upon values is the essence of democratic politics.
As Koch goes on, however, it begins to make quite a bit of sense, his inability to recognize the basic mechanics of American democracy. It’s not merely that he’s an unsophisticated and unoriginal thinker (though he certainly is), it’s that he truly doesn’t understand what democracy even is. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the brief, passive-aggressive section of the essay in which Koch defends himself against unnamed “collectivist” bullies. Responding to a fusillade of criticism sent his way by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Koch complains that “collectivists” reject “a free and open debate” and “strive to discredit and intimidate opponents” like himself with “character assassination,” just as “so many despots” and Saul Alinsky did before. (Small consolation, I suppose, that Koch is self-aware enough not to actually call his opponents Hitler, choosing instead to merely make the implication.)
Beyond his comically exaggerated sensitivity, what Koch’s mini jeremiad shows is that the man can’t quite fathom the idea that free speech is not the same thing as freedom from critical speech. At no point in his many attacks has Harry Reid — or any other Democrat of significance, for that matter — said anything about Koch’s private life or soul. Throughout, the criticism has been directed toward his politics and the groups he pays to promote them. Reid has said that Koch wishes to establish a political status quo that shields his power and wealthy from scrutiny or competition. Reid cannot authoritatively speak to what goes on inside Koch’s brain, but his interpretation of Koch’s motives is hardly outside the realm of acceptable discourse in American politics. Keep in mind that ours is an era in which politicians malign the the poor as having bad values, bad habits, bad families and bad minds. People infinitely less influential than Charles Koch, in other words, routinely suffer much worse.
Then again, Koch, in so many ways, isn’t like most people. Unlike most people, he can directly reach any Republican politician in the country by simply picking up the phone. Unlike most people, he can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on misleading attack ads and cynical, quixotic campaigns to persuade young people to forego health insurance. Unlike most people, he can take advantage of Citizens United in order to funnel countless millions through shadowy outside groups, largely obscuring his political activities and denying Americans the right to know whose interests are being represented when a politician swears to fight higher taxes on the wealthy and roll back regulations on industrial pollution. Unlike most Americans, Koch can now take advantage of McCutcheon, the Supreme Court’s sequel to Citizens United, which lifted aggregate caps on political donations and took us one more step closer to having no limits whatsoever on how America’s wealthiest citizens can use their largesse to influence the political process.
And that, from all appearances, is how Koch and his ilk like it. With Republicans in Congress stymying any attempt to make political donations transparent, so people at least can follow the money, and with the conservative Supreme Court widely considered to be far from finished destroying campaign finance law from within, Koch can rest easy knowing that his power will remain not only overwhelming but also little understood. He can go on supporting politicians who thwart Medicaid expansions one minute and funding outside groups who castigate Obamacare for not covering more people the next. He can keep bankrolling anti-Obamacare ads that stretch the truth so thin as to render it translucent. He can keep polluting our air, contaminating our water and destroying our environment without having to even pay for the privilege.
He can keep being unaccountable.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, April 5, 2014
“The Right’s Ugly Food-Stamp Obsession Is Back!”: Why Lying Dog-Whistle Politics Returned
“Welcome to Obama’s America,” Fox’s Eric Bolling told his audience Tuesday – a dystopia where people now use food stamps to patronize “strip clubs, liquor stores, pot dispensaries.” Following up on its rubbishy August 2013 faux-exposé “The Great Food Stamp Binge,” Fox again profiled “surfing freeloader” Jason Greenslate, who is allegedly “livin’ large” in San Diego, thanks to the SNAP program, commonly known as food stamps. After Bill O’Reilly’s errand boy Jesse Watters caught up with Greenslate again Monday night, “The Five” used the lazy surfer as “the representative of literally millions of Americans,” in Bolling’s words. It was epic.
“He’s playing the system, he’s stretching the rules to their limits,” Bolling told Fox’s angry, fearful, mostly elderly viewers. “But what would you expect with a $105 billion program that’s almost tripled under Obamanomics? That’s what you would expect, right there, take a look at it. But what’s next? Strip clubs, liquor stores, pot dispensaries? Oh, that’s already going on, folks. Welcome to Obama’s America.”
Bolling’s rant came a day after Dick Cheney visited Fox and attacked Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s military cuts, telling Sean Hannity, bizarrely, that Obama “would much rather spend the money on food stamps than he would on a strong military or support for our troops.”
The right just can’t leave that old dog-whistle alone. It’s 2012 all over again – Newt Gingrich will be reviving his claim that Obama’s “the food stamp president” any minute now. In “Obama’s America,” the right is determined to make the president the tribune of a moocher-rewarding, ever-expanding welfare state, even if they have to lie to do so.
Of course in Obama’s America (and everyone else’s) SNAP regulations prohibit buying alcohol or tobacco with food stamps, let alone drugs, and they can’t be used at restaurants or bars, let alone strip clubs. But Bolling wants Fox viewers in a perpetual state of moral panic, and the notion that slackers like Greenslate are “livin’ large” – Fox’s term — on the public dime just works, the facts be damned.
Cheney’s rant was in some ways more offensive. Charging that the cuts proposed by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel are “really devastating,” Cheney went on: “It does enormous long-term damage to our military. They act as though it is like highway spending and you can turn it on and off. The fact of the matter is he is having a huge impact on the ability of future presidents to deal with future crises that are bound to arise.”
Of course, as Think Progress noted back when Cheney began lobbying against defense cuts in 2012, the former vice president himself presided over a 25 percent cut to the defense budget back when he was defense secretary under George H.W. Bush. The fighting force was reduced by 500,000 active-duty soldiers, a move that was blessed by Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell.
That was then. These cuts are the work of Obama’s team. So not only must they be attacked as dangerous, they’ve got to be framed as something the corrupt Chicago “gangster” is doing to reward his coalition of slackers, moochers and lazy white surfers.
Now, maybe it’s progress that Fox is making a white surfer the poster boy for food stamp abuse – but it’s the link to “Obama’s America” that updates Reagan’s old imagery about Cadillac-driving welfare queens and “young bucks” using food stamps to buy “T-bone steaks.”
In fact only 1 percent of SNAP funds are wasted in fraud. Three-quarters of SNAP households include an elderly or disabled person or a child, and fully 42 percent of adult recipients are also working, but making too little to feed themselves and their families. Among the nation’s food stamp recipients are almost a million military veterans, who were slurred by Cheney, and thousands of active duty military too. Military families spent $100 million in food stamp funds at military grocery stores in 2013.
Fox and Cheney don’t want you to think about the veteran or the soldier or the single mother or the disabled senior on food stamps. They don’t want Fox viewers to ask why 42 percent of recipients make such low wages that they qualify for food assistance, or why so many veterans and even active-duty soldiers need help. To distract from an economy that’s increasingly hoarding rewards at the top, they point to a cartoonish moocher and blame Obama.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, February 26, 2014
“It’s All About Who’s In The White House”: Republicans Only Oppose NSA When ‘Big Brother’ Isn’t Them
Let’s cut to the chase: If Big Brother wants you, he’s got you, Act 215 telephone “metadata” notwithstanding. This disconcerting fact of modern life has been true more or less since the invention of the camera, the microphone and the tape recorder.
See the excellent German film The Lives of Others for details. The Stasi managed to collect vast libraries of gossip and slander against East German citizens entirely without computerized databases. It wasn’t people’s smartphones that betrayed them to the secret police, because they didn’t have any. Mostly it was colleagues, neighbors, friends and family.
Similarly, when J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI wanted to dig the dirt on Martin Luther King, they bugged his hotel rooms and infiltrated his inner circle with hired betrayers. Once the target was chosen, technological wizardry was secondary.
I am moved to these observations by the fact that the Republican National Committee has now joined the Snowdenista left in pretending to be outraged by something they manifestly do not fear.
The same GOP that rationalized torture and cheered the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretaps as recently as 2006 now denounces the National Security Agency’s “Section 215” bulk collection of telephone data as “an invasion into the personal lives of American citizens that violates the right of free speech and association afforded by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
Oh, and the Fourth Amendment too. See, keeping a no-names database of phone numbers called, date, time and duration threatens fundamental privacy rights, although actual wiretapping evidently did not. Never mind that Republicans in Congress approved it.
It’s easy to suspect that for the RNC, it’s all about who’s in the White House. The End.
However, there’s an equivalent amount of exaggeration at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Partly for dramatic effect, people talk about data collection as if it were equivalent to surveillance.
Here’s the estimable blogger Digby Parton on the “chilling effect” of NSA data hoarding:
“It’s the self-censorship, the hesitation, the fear that what you say or write or otherwise express today could be lurking somewhere on what Snowden referred to as your ‘permanent record’ and come back to haunt you in the future. The collection of all this mass data amounts to a government dossier on every individual who has a cell phone or a computer. It’s forcing journalists, teachers and political dissidents to be afraid of doing their jobs and exercising their democratic rights. It’s making average citizens think twice about even doing silly things like search Amazon for pressure cookers or take a look at a controversial web-site.”
I don’t think Digby herself is afraid for one minute. I know I’m not. Are you?
She adds that “no matter how much you may trust Barack Obama not to abuse that information, it was only a few years ago that a man named Dick Cheney had access to it.”
Point taken.
Oddly enough, that’s pretty much what President Obama had to say in his speech proposing NSA reforms: “Given the unique power of the state, it is not enough for leaders to say: Trust us. We won’t abuse the data we collect. For history has too many examples when that trust has been breached.”
Accordingly, Obama proposed several reforms calculated to make misuse of NSA data more unlikely. He accepted the suggestion of his own commission to take telephone records out of NSA’s control. Instead, the data would be stored either by the phone companies where it originates or by some third party as yet undefined.
To access that database, NSA would need an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. No intelligence bureaucrat would be able to spy on his ex-wife or your mother-in-law strictly on his own say-so.
The president also proposed adding citizen advocates to the FISA court specifically to defend civil liberties—making that body function less like a grand jury and more like a court of law. He added a presidential directive explicitly forbidding NSA from spying upon domestic political critics.
Obama would also sharply limit the number of people whose records can be searched even with a valid FISA warrant.
Taken together, these are fairly substantial reforms. As a pro-cop liberal, I worry that forcing NSA to gather data from hither and yon might prove too cumbersome in an emergency. Sometimes, though, perfect efficiency ill accords with democratic values.
Meanwhile, however, the 18th century ain’t coming back. Anybody who imagines that NSA data gathering and cyber-espionage are going away may as well yearn for a world where there are no hostile, anti-democratic powers or mad religious extremists eager to bring down the Great Satan through whatever combination of sabotage and mayhem they can inflict. Indeed, we must pray that our adversaries are as fearful and intimidated by U.S. intelligence agencies as are some of our more imaginative countrymen.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 29, 2014
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