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Vern's blog expresses his views; they do not necessarily reflect the views of CRES.
About Vern BarnetLINKS: CRES web site .KC Star columns CAMP columns
EMAIL: .vern@cres.org
Vern’s Blog: Others Say
Just How Free Is the Free Exercise of Religion?
In the first stage of a preliminary hearing called to determine whether Warren Jeffs, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, should stand trial for the crime of accomplice to rape, the state’s key witness declared that she had entered into marriage at the age of 14 against her will and at the command of Mr. Jeffs and other church officials. Mr. Jeffs’s side will get a chance to present its case on Dec. 14, but we already know from his lawyers that the defense will make two arguments: first, that Mr. Jeffs did not abet rape, but merely conducted a marriage ceremony, and second, that he is the victim of religious persecution. In moving to prosecute him, said attorney Walter F. Bugden Jr., the state is continuing “165 years of intolerance for a people who engage in a different cultural and religious practice.”
The practice Mr. Bugden referred to is polygamy. (Mr. Jeffs is said to have between 40 and 60 wives.) Washington County prosecutors point out that the man the young girl married had no other wives and insist that the case isn’t about polygamy at all. Mr. Jeffs’s lawyers reply that, nevertheless, their client’s advocacy and practice of polygamy is the real reason for the action against him. And their contention receives at least some support from a news release put out by the Utah Attorney General’s office at the time of Mr. Jeffs’s indictment: “Utah Attorney general Mark Shurtleff said today that child sex abuse indictments against Warren Jeffs are just the beginning of efforts to make sure all young girls in polygamous communities are protected.”
Mr. Bugden and his associates show no sign of backing away from the “religious persecution” argument, and it seems likely that they will offer a “free exercise” defense based on the First Amendment clause that enjoins Congress (or any other state actor) from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. There is no doubt that Mr. Jeffs’s actions, both as an individual and as a church leader, are religiously motivated. Plural marriage is a central tenet of his religion, and according to testimony given on Nov. 21, he told the young girl that her salvation was at stake and that in commanding her to marry he was passing on “a revelation from God.” The question is, how can the state live up to its duty to protect free exercise if it criminalizes the activity of someone who was only following the dictates of his religion as they had been revealed to him by the deity?
The dilemma cannot be resolved by denying the centrality of plural or church-ordered marriages to Mr. Jeffs’s religion or questioning the authenticity of what he claims as a revelation, for as Justice Antonin Scalia put it in another case (Employment Division v. Smith, 1990), what authority or principle “can be brought to bear to contradict a believer’s assertion that a particular act is ‘central’ to his personal faith?” The answer, of course, is none (an answer ignored by those who presume to tell fundamentalist Muslims that they are mistaken about the actions their faith requires). And it would seem that the court presiding over Mr. Jeffs’s case is faced with the choice of either violating the First Amendment by restricting his right of free exercise or leaving him free to arrange marriages and practice polygamy as his religion dictates he should.
In fact the court can (and no doubt will) evade the choice and the dilemma quite easily by citing a line of precedents that began in 1878 with Reynolds v. The United Sates. In that case, the Supreme Court finessed the free exercise question by privatizing the right. The core issue, then as now, was plural marriage. George Reynolds, like Warren Jeffs, argued that as a Mormon he believed that “it was the duty of male members” of the church “to practise polygamy,” and that the penalty for refusing what he took to be a command “of divine origin” would be “damnation in the life to come.” The court accepted the sincerity of Mr. Reynolds’s religious convictions and assumed the authority of the free exercise clause, but asked, what exactly “is the religious freedom which has been guaranteed?”
The answer it gave (with help from James Madison and Thomas Jefferson) was that the freedom being guaranteed was the freedom to believe or think something, not the freedom to do something: “Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief, they may with practices.” You can believe or say anything you like – including that God wants you to have plural wives – but you can’t act on it. That is to say, free exercise stops at the brain and the mouth.
Put that way, it sounds odd. What kind of freedom is it that can be abrogated the moment the state decides it doesn’t like what you’re doing? But the notion of a religious freedom that places restrictions on religiously motivated behavior makes perfect sense if religion is defined as an assent to certain propositions (Jesus redeemed us on the cross; God brought the chosen people out of Egypt and into the promised land) rather than as the performance of certain acts. When Jefferson called it an “error” to think that “the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws” (in “Notes on the State of Virginia”), he limited the freedom he celebrated to thoughts and ceded to the law jurisdiction over everything bodily, even over things done in the name of those very same thoughts. If, as he said, “the legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” the state has the right both to say what those acts are and to regulate them, even if they flow from a religious conviction. If the exercise of religion must be internalized – made a personal relationship between a man and his faith – in order to protect it from state interference, the price of that protection is the exclusion of religiously inspired actions from the public political sphere.
It is the distinction between the private and the public – what Madison called “the great Barrier” – that allowed the Reynolds court to affirm the free exercise of belief while denying to belief its expression in actions of which the state disapproves. George Reynolds was free to believe, in accordance with the tenets of his religion, that the law banning plural marriage is wrong and “ought not to have been made”; he was even free to work for that law’s repeal. But he was not free to flout it and to claim a religious justification for doing so. For if that claim were to prevail, “this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land,” in which case, the Reynolds court pointed out, government would “exist only in name.” The integrity of both the state and the church can be maintained, according to this view, only if each agrees to stay out of the other’s business.
But what if the religion you espouse does not respect Madison’s “great Barrier” dividing the private from the public and indeed demands that it be breached? That is, what if instead of being a Protestant who believes (with Martin Luther) that faith, not works, is the way to salvation, you are a conservative Catholic or a conservative Mormon or an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Muslim who believes that it is a duty, never to be relaxed, to act in accordance with the tenets of your creed, whether you are at home, in the shop, in the military, in the legislature, in court, in a restaurant, wherever. If faith alone is what is required of you, the restrictions on conduct established by civil law – you can marry only one woman at a time – will not be felt as an infringement on your religious liberty, for the location of that liberty is internal, and it can flourish even if its outward expression is curtailed. But if conduct in the world is what your religion demands of you, laws stipulating which acts you can and cannot perform will be experienced as a diminishing of your right of free exercise. In other words, if your free exercise claims are not made on behalf of the right religion – the religion that honors the public/private distinction – you’re out of luck, as Warren Jeffs will almost certainly be, at least with respect to this part of his defense.
When Justice William Douglas famously declared in Zorach v. Clauson (1952) that “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being,” he might have added, “and that religion is Protestantism,” specifically that version of Protestantism that internalizes religious obligation, leaving the state free to regulate “acts of the body” as it sees fit. The general rule was given in Reynolds and reaffirmed in many subsequent cases: there can be no religious exception to generally applicable laws, if only because once one is granted a thousand others will be requested.
But of course there are exceptions. The Amish got one when they were allowed to remove their children from school after the eighth grade, despite a state law requiring attendance until age 16. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been granted several, including an exemption from the requirement to secure permits before distributing pamphlets. Religious institutions in general get one when they are granted tax-exempt status, and another when they are allowed to discriminate in hiring practices. But Native Americans who ingested peyote for sacramental purposes at a church ceremony didn’t get one. A Jewish Army chaplain didn’t get one when he wanted to wear a yarmulke while on duty. And Bob Jones University didn’t get one when it wanted to maintain its tax-exempt status while discriminating against those who advocated or engaged in interracial dating. To say that the record of decisions in this area is “patchwork” would be an understatement, and a generous one at that. Whether or not a free exercise exception will be granted in a particular instance is anyone’s guess. What we do know is that believers in plural marriage have never been granted one.
Nevertheless, that could change. In 2004, lawyer and commentator Jonathan Turley predicted (in USA Today) that although society now displays a “greater acceptance of gay men and lesbian women” than once was the case, “such a day of social acceptance will never come for polygamists”: “It is unlikely,” he said, “that any network is going to air ‘The Polygamist Eye’” or “add a polygamist twist to ‘Everyone Loves Raymond.’” Two years later, “Everybody Loves Raymond” is in reruns and “Big Love” (which was already in some state of production when Turley wrote) is in its second season.
Polygamy’s day may come a little sooner than “never” (although probably not soon enough for Warren Jeffs). But even if it does come, it will not be a victory for the free exercise right as such, for all it will mean is that the state has decided that a particular religious practice is not the threat to public order and social stability it was previously considered to be, and that decision could in time be reversed. As long as your interest in performing a religiously inspired act can be outweighed by some interest the state prefers, the right to free exercise will continue to be what it always has been, a matter of political judgment rather than of principle.
Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mr. Fish has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University. He is the author of 10 books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/books/review/Buruma.t.html?ref=review
September 17, 2006
Theater of War
By IAN BURUMAAs a former theater critic, Frank Rich has the perfect credentials for writing an account of the Bush administration, which has done so much to blur the lines between politics and show business. Not that this is a unique phenomenon; think of Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul and master of political fictions, or Ronald Reagan, who often appeared to be genuinely confused about the difference between real life and the movies. Show business has always been an essential part of ruling people, and so is the use of fiction, especially when going to war. What would Hitler have been without his vicious fantasies fed to a hungry public through grand spectacles, radio and film? Closer to home, in 1964, to justify American intervention in Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson used news of an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that never took place. What is fascinating about the era of George W. Bush, however, is that the spinmeisters, fake news reporters, photo-op creators, disinformation experts, intelligence manipulators, fictional heroes and public relations men posing as commentators operate in a world where virtual reality has already threatened to eclipse empirical investigation.
Remember that White House aide, quoted by Rich in his introduction, who said that a “judicious study of discernible reality” is “not the way the world really works anymore”? For him, the “reality-based community” of newspapers and broadcasters is old hat, out of touch, even contemptible in “an empire” where “we create our own reality.” This kind of official arrogance is not new, of course, although it is perhaps more common in dictatorships than in democracies. What is disturbing is the way it matches so much else going on in the world: postmodern debunking of objective truth, bloggers and talk radio blowhards driving the media, news organizations being taken over by entertainment corporations and the profusion of ever more sophisticated means to doctor reality.
Rich’s subject is the creation of false reality. “The Greatest Story Ever Sold” is not about policies, or geopolitical analysis. The pros and cons of removing Saddam Hussein by force, the consequences of American military intervention in the Middle East and the threat of Islamist extremism are given scant attention. The author, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, has his liberal views, which are not strikingly original. I happen to agree with him that Karl Rove and George Bush manipulated public fear and wartime patriotism to win elections, and that Dick Cheney and his neocon cheerleaders favored a war in Iraq long before 9/11 “to jump-start a realignment of the Middle East.” Whether Rich is right to say that this has “little or nothing to do with the stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda” is debatable. The neocons may well have believed that an American remake of the Middle East was the best way to tackle terrorism.
They were almost certainly mistaken. But the point of Rich’s fine polemic is that the Bush administration has consistently lied about the reasons for going to war, about the way it was conducted and about the terrible consequences. Whatever the merits of removing a dictator, waging war under false pretenses is highly damaging to a democracy, especially when one of the ostensible aims is to spread democracy to others. If Rich is correct, which I think he is, the Bush administration has given hypocrisy a bad name.
This is how the war was sold: We were told by Dick Cheney in late 2001 that an official Iraqi connection with the 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta was “pretty well confirmed.” In the summer of 2002, Cheney said that Saddam Hussein “continues to pursue a nuclear weapon” and that there was “no doubt” he had “weapons of mass destruction.” The vice president mentioned aluminum tubes (they had been reported on by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller in The New York Times), which Hussein would use “to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.” This uranium, we were told, had been procured by the Iraqis from Niger. President Bush, in October 2002, said, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
We now know that none of these claims, which together constituted the official reason for unleashing a war, were even remotely true. The later excuses about honest beliefs based on faulty intelligence would have been more convincing if a memo had not surfaced from the British government, quoting the head of British intelligence as saying that the Bush administration had made sure that “the intelligence and facts” about the W.M.D.’s “were being fixed around the policy” of going to war. He said this in July 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq. Even without the memo, it has long been clear that some of the United States government’s own analysts had cast severe doubts on the reasons for going to war.
Yet — and this is where Rich is particularly acute — most serious papers published the White House claims on their front pages, and buried any doubts in small news items at the back. Political weeklies with a liberal pedigree, like The New Republic, fell in line with the neoconservative Weekly Standard, stating that the president would be guilty of “surrender in the war on international terrorism” should he fail to make an effort to topple Saddam Hussein. Bob Woodward, the scourge of the Nixon administration, wrote “Bush at War,” a book that seemed to take everything his White House sources told him at face value.
As soon as the fighting began, showbiz kicked in. Already in Afghanistan, the Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer had been given access to the troops to make a television series about American bravery, even as reporters from papers like The Washington Post were kept away from the scene. Then in Iraq, heroic stories, like the brave battle of Pfc. Jessica Lynch, were invented and packaged for the press, and those who pointed out the fakery were denounced as leftist malcontents. President Bush dressed up as Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” and landed on an aircraft carrier for a photo op declaring a great victory. And the press, by and large, took the bait.
How could this have happened? How could some of the best, most fact-checked, most reputable news organizations in the English-speaking world have been so gullible? How can one explain the temporary paralysis of skepticism? This is perhaps the most painful question raised by Rich’s book, since his own newspaper was clearly implicated. An air of intimidation, which hung over the United States like a noxious vapor after 9/11, is part of the explanation. Susan Sontag became a national hate figure just for saying that United States foreign policy might have had something to do with violent anti-Americanism. When John Ashcroft declared to the Senate that people who challenged his highly questionable policies “give ammunition to America’s enemies,” he was simply echoing the ranters and ravers of talk radio. But they are poisonous buffoons. He was the attorney general. No wonder that the mainstream press, after being continuously accused of “liberal bias,” preferred to keep its head down.
Newspaper editors should not have to feel the need to prove their patriotism, or their absence of bias. Their job is to publish what they believe to be true, based on evidence and good judgment. As Rich points out, such journals as The Nation and The New York Review of Books were quicker to see through government shenanigans than the mainstream press. And reporters from Knight Ridder got the story about intelligence fixing right, before The New York Times caught on. “At Knight Ridder,” Rich says, “there was a clearer institutional grasp of the big picture.”
Intimidation is only part of the story, however. The changing nature of gathering and publishing information has made mainstream journalists unusually defensive. That more people than ever are now able to express their views, on radio shows and Web sites, is perhaps a form of democracy, but it has undermined the authority of editors, whose expertise was meant to act as a filter against nonsense or prejudice. And the deliberate confusion, on television, of news and entertainment has done further damage.
The Republicans, being more populist than the Democrats, have exploited this new climate with far greater finesse. Accusing the media of bias is an act of remarkable chutzpah for an administration that pitches its messages straight at radio talk show hosts and public relations men. Rich gives many examples. One of the more arresting ones is of Dick Cheney appearing on a TV show with Armstrong Williams, a fake journalist on the government payroll, to complain about bias in the press. Something has gone askew when one of the most trusted critics of the Bush administration is Jon Stewart, host of a superb comedy program. It was on his “Daily Show” that Rob Corddry, an actor playing a reporter, lamented that he couldn’t keep up with the government, which had created “a whole new category of fake news — infoganda.” Rich is right: “The more real journalism fumbled its job, the easier it was for such government infoganda to fill the vacuum.”
THERE may be one other reason for the fumbling: the conventional methods of American journalism, marked by an obsession with access and quotes. A good reporter for an American paper must get sources who sound authoritative and quotes that show both sides of a story. His or her own expertise is almost irrelevant. If the opinions of columnists count for too much in the American press, the intelligence of reporters is institutionally underused. The problem is that there are not always two sides to a story. Someone reporting on the persecution of Jews in Germany in 1938 would not have added “balance” by quoting Joseph Goebbels. And besides, as Judith Miller found out, what is the good of quotes if they are based on false information?
Bob Woodward, one of Rich’s chief bêtes noires, has more access in Washington than any journalist, but the weakness of his work is that he never seems to be better than his sources. As Rich rightly observes, “reporters who did not have Woodward’s or Miller’s top-level access within the administration not only got the Iraq story right but got it into newspapers early by seeking out what John Walcott, the Knight Ridder Washington bureau chief, called ‘the blue collar’ sources further down the hierarchy.” This used to be Woodward’s modus operandi, too, in his better days. Fearing the loss of access at the top and overrating the importance of quotes from powerful people, as well as an unjustified terror of being accused of liberal bias, have crippled the press at a time when it is needed more than ever. Frank Rich is an excellent product of that press, and if it ever recovers its high reputation, it will be partly thanks to one man who couldn’t take it anymore.
Ian Buruma is the Henry Luce professor at Bard College. His latest book is “Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.”
A Perfect Storm?
From our October issue: Katrina could lead to a political transformation, but we’ll have to fight for the right kind of transformation. Great -- this is just the fight we want.By Michael Tomasky
Web Exclusive: 09.16.05Is Hurricane Katrina a transformative political moment? Is this finally the time when Americans appraise the failure of the Bush administration -- that is, the failure of modern conservatism -- and say, “Enough”? Can liberals seize the opportunity those failures represent to make a case for a different society, in which repeated warnings about the dangers facing a great city aren't mocked with budget cuts, in which citizens don’t go days without water and food -- a society in which mutual and shared obligations are taken seriously? With the initial shock having faded, these are the important questions. Now comes a new moment, a time to take the administration’s Katrina failures and merge them into a broader case both against conservatism’s vision of society and for ours.
There was talk in Katrina’s immediate aftermath that yes, this is such a transformative moment. John Barry, author of Rising Tide, the story of the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 (the one Randy Newman memorialized in his lush, poignant song “Louisiana 1927”), appeared on various programs to discuss his book. Barry didn’t make the argument explicitly, but the hidden point of hauling him onto the shows was to suggest: The 1927 flood helped lead to the New Deal, because the lack of a unified response made the people back then realize that they needed the government to step in where the private sector would not. (A good sign: The 1997 book has jumped back on the best-seller lists.) Blogs of both the left and the right have overflowed with speculation about the politics of Katrina, and where the nation will go from here.
The Bush administration and its congressional henchpersons have been spinning like tops, working to ensure that the transformation goes in the direction they prefer: of less government, of responsibility thrown onto the states, of more penance owed by the poor and by workers, of more reliance on church-based charity, of consolidation of their movement’s power. It didn’t take George W. Bush long to suspend the Davis-Bacon Act, which protects wage rates on federal construction projects. The need to relocate schoolchildren led to renewed calls for school vouchers. In coming weeks, Republicans in Congress will surely be “revisiting” federal flood insurance and a host of other questions. At the same time, they’ll continue to try to brush away criticism by saying that now is not the time for criticism, and they’ll rig the terms of the investigation into their own failures. Like the bank robber who blames the bank for having the money, the Republicans lost little time in using their own massive failure to assert that government can’t work. The posturing has been at times surreal, giving the post-Katrina period an eerily banana-republic sort of gloss -- the constitutional democratic version of, say, Anastasio Somoza’s response to the Nicaraguan earthquake of 1972, when he appointed a commission to look into the government’s failures that was chaired by ... Anastasio Somoza.
Atypically, in the first two weeks after the disaster, the White House’s spinning was recognized as such by a newly emboldened news media. But we have seen in Iraq and with regard to September 11 how the administration’s resolve can wear the opposition down, take it by surprise; more than once have its lies, repeated over and over, defeated fact. It won’t be easy, fighting all that and building the more important positive case for a government that takes its obligations to its citizens seriously. There is great goodness and generosity in the American people, one by one. But can we, after 25 years of ideological hypnotism, call upon a shared sense of a common good in which we all have a stake?
If we want a democratic and egalitarian transformation to come out of Katrina, we have to fight for it. And we have to fight what for the past two decades has been, for liberals -- or at least for Democrats -- an uncomfortable fight. To be sure, we should perform forensics on the cronyism, incompetence, callousness, and catastrophically tone-deaf management that set the stage for this scandal. But we should do more than criticize and call for investigations -- more, even, than suggest counterproposals to address the crisis. We must, finally, make the big-picture case based on core principles, and show how the very tenets of modern conservatism made Katrina’s consequences far worse than they might have been. For the president to come in now and throw billions at the problem his administration helped to create is less than meaningless. Far from signaling some new conservative commitment to the idea of government, it signals panic at poll numbers; the failure still happened, and the reasons for the failure still stand. The opportunity to draw a clear, connecting line between ideological belief and practical failure has never been greater.
* * *
Of the several central precepts of modern movement conservatism, three played crucial roles here: first, its sanctification of the individual and concomitant rejection of the community as the foundational unit of social organization (except for religious communities, which are to substitute for political action and social investment); second, its glorification of the corporation -- indeed its attempt to model the government on the corporation (although on a very inefficient, corrupted idea of the corporation); and third, its utter anti-empiricism -- its ability to deny any fact that is not either presented in a “study” paid for by the oil industry or insisted upon by those greatest of all deniers of fact, the Christian right.
Modern conservatism’s veneration of the individual goes back at least to the economist Ludwig von Mises, but, for present purposes, let’s trace the line of argument back to a man named Marvin Olasky. In books like The Tragedy of American Compassion, Olasky made the case throughout the 1980s and ’90s that the welfare state had failed the poor -- and that the poor had failed the poor. The honey that made it possible to peddle this medicine in respectable quarters was the idea that a program of spiritual nourishment should come first for the less fortunate. This thinking got the attention of George W. Bush’s advisers in the late ’90s and made Olasky the godfather, as it were, of “compassionate conservatism” (funny, we haven’t heard that phrase invoked since Katrina, have we?).
The unvarnished message of Olasky’s work was that poverty is a moral issue, and hence that the poor are by definition of weak moral character. This belief is almost never stated publicly, but it courses through conservatism’s veins. So, a situation like the one that developed in New Orleans, with Homeland Security Department Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Director Michael Brown both unaware that people were trapped in the Superdome and convention center, is in one part a matter of their incompetence (there was certainly incompetence on the part of state and local officials; Louisiana Democrats will never be confused with Platonic philosopher-kings). But in a greater part, such an insouciant posture by high government officials is inevitable after 25 years of such thinking. If you’re poor or black, don’t own a car, live in the low part of town because that’s what you can afford, or perhaps couldn’t get away because you worked the late shift and your boss wouldn’t let you go that night -- tough. You were there in the first place because of your own moral deficiency. The ignorance of Chertoff and Brown does not indicate that they are evil men. They undoubtedly are not. Rather, their words indicate that they are in thrall to an ideology that tells them that the whole of society -- the black and the poor and the lame; in other words, the inconvenient -- is just not their responsibility.
The inconvenient, according to Republican ideology, will be taken care of by religious charities -- our new “government.” It’s a nice idea, and it gives Bush an opportunity to feint toward piety. And, of course, churches -- right-wing ones included -- do wonderful charitable work. But they will never substitute for the federal government. The government will spend $200 billion on Katrina; churches, all told, a fraction of that at best. In addition, the great religious awakening of the last 20 years has not gone, in this respect, as advertised: Net charitable giving, though it flourishes at times like these, has just about kept pace with the gross domestic product.
As to glorification of the corporation: On September 7, David Ignatius of The Washington Post wrote a column analogizing Bush to a CEO (an incompetent CEO). Good start. But the analogy goes much deeper than Ignatius took it, and applies not just to Bush but to the ideology. What it really means is that conservatism sees America not as a nation but as a corporation. This means, in turn, that we are not citizens but shareholders; and that we’re not really equal, because shareholders are not (the more power you have, the more you deserve). This worldview -- more than fear or lassitude or anything having to do with his personality -- is what explains Bush’s slow personal response: When a corporation faces a crisis, the CEO must protect the price first; he must demonstrate to the shareholders that everything is under control. This is why Bush stayed on vacation, even leaving the Crawford ranch (long after it was clear that Katrina would have enormous consequences) to go to Arizona to speak on Medicare and to California to try, one more listless and dishonest time, to defend the war. His instinct was to act as if everything was fine, everything was normal.
That’s not what a real president does. It’s not even what a good corporate CEO does. A good corporate CEO with a broader understanding of shareholder interests (and there are many) takes real action. But Bush has, in real life, been a fantastically abysmal corporate leader (see Harken Energy and Arbusto Oil). Back then, when Bush was in private life, shareholders who were capable of bailing him out of trouble were looked upon favorably. Today, certain shareholders -- like those in New Orleans’ 9th Ward, say -- get less attention. The corporate model of governance, which the media so limned after 9-11, failed miserably during Katrina.
Finally, the contempt for empirical evidence had its obvious consequences. Fantasy-based conservative government has been with us since Ronald Reagan’s time, but in the Bush era, it has beheld its triumph. The warnings about the insufficient levees protecting New Orleans were many, and were issued on multiple occasions over the years. But the administration ignored the warnings, cutting funding by 44 percent since 2001, forcing the New Orleans branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to impose a hiring freeze. Those excised funds, or many of them, were -- speaking of contempt for empirical evidence -- diverted to Iraq. Then, as we learned in the aftermath of the hurricane’s devastation, FEMA, the White House, and other federal agencies knew by at least the Friday before the storm hit land (on a Monday) that the need to get systems into place to help people who would end up stuck in New Orleans was dire. This evidence, too, was ignored. Evidence is for liberals.
There were personal failures here, by Bush, Chertoff, Brown, and doubtless many others. But the far greater failures, it’s absolutely important to keep in mind, were ideological. The conservative belief system exacerbated Katrina’s effects. And that, ultimately, is the field on which the coming battle needs to be fought.
* * *
Democrats in Congress hate to talk about ideology, and in some ways I can’t say that I blame them. For most of them, there is absolutely no profit in it. For 25 years, the essential dynamic of Washington politics has been that the Republicans advance an idea and the Democrats develop a rearguard response, a response that says, “Yes, we, too (believe in a strong defense, are troubled by Hollywood values, want to reduce taxes, etc.), we just think the approach has to be tempered with this or that.” We debate the pros and cons of conservative ideology. But only rarely are liberal principles even on the table.
There may never again be a chance quite like this to draw a crystal-clear line from the A of conservative ideology to the B of the administration’s Katrina failures to the C of the broader lessons about American society. The right, we can be sure, will fight to ensure that its syllogism -- the A of bloated bureaucracy to the B of government failure to the C of replacing government action with private relief -- is the one that takes hold of the public consciousness. Now is the time to make the kinds of arguments Democrats haven’t made for a generation.
Against the three conservative assumptions that worsened the disaster, we liberals must counterpose our beliefs. We cherish individual liberty, but we also believe in a community in which each of us has equal worth. We believe in robust government to do what the corporations refuse to do, or are not constituted to do well. Finally, we believe in reason and evidence, and we believe that it is a core responsibility of government to respond to them.
It’s been 25 long years since the leaders of the Democratic Party as a whole stood up and said these things. About 80 million Americans, those under 25 years of age, have never lived in a country in which our values were defended tenaciously -- not just by Paul Wellstone or Ted Kennedy or a handful of safe-seat members of Congress but by the entire Democratic Party leadership. Another 60 million, those between 25 and 40, have no adult memory of a class of political leaders pugnaciously championing liberal values. Bill Clinton governed that way more than he talked that way; and just as one can understand why Democrats don’t talk about ideology, one can also sympathize with the way Clinton felt hemmed in by the peculiar insanity of the jihad that he faced every day he was in office, which made him feel that he was unusually short of political capital to spend.
Today’s Democrats, it’s quite true, have even less political capital than Clinton did. But they also have less to lose. And they make the fatal mistake of confusing the right-wing noise machine with America. But the right is not America. Washington, dominated by propagandists and those who need to be invited to the propagandists’ parties, is not America. America is a far better place than Washington, and a far better thing than the right-wing noise machine. Americans -- 60-some percent of whom, after all, disapprove of the job this president is doing -- are open to another argument about how our society should be arranged.
The American Prospect will make this argument, as will others of our bent. But ultimately, the Democrats have to make it, and they have to make it in unison and without being afraid of the bullies across the aisle and the blowhards on radio and television. America may not be Washington, but its fate is shaped by what comes out of Washington. If ever there were a moment that should remind the Democrats why they came to Washington in the first place, this is it.
Michael Tomasky is executive editor of The American Prospect.
© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10292
August 16, 2006
NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
Big Talk, Little Will
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMANThe defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman by the upstart antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont has sparked a firestorm of debate about the direction of the Democratic Party. My own heart is with those Democrats who worry that just calling for a pullout from Iraq, while it may be necessary, is not a sufficient response to the biggest threat to open societies today — violent, radical Islam. Unless Democrats persuade voters — in the gut — that they understand this larger challenge, it’s going to be hard for them to win the presidency.
That said, though, the Democratic mainstream is nowhere near as dovish as critics depict. Truth be told, some of the most constructive, on-the-money criticism over the past three years about how to rescue Iraq or improve the broader “war on terrorism” has come from Democrats, like Joe Biden, Carl Levin, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Bill Clinton.
But whatever you think of the Democrats, the important point is this: They are not the party in power today.
What should really worry the country is not whether the Democrats are being dragged to the left by antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in. What should worry the country is that the Bush team and the Republican Party, which control all the levers of power and claim to have thought only about this larger struggle, are in total denial about where their strategy has led.
Besides a few mavericks like Chuck Hagel and John McCain on Iraq and Dick Lugar and George Shultz on energy, how many Republicans have stood up and questioned the decision-making that has turned the Iraq war into a fiasco? Had more of them done so, instead of just mindlessly applauding the administration, the White House might have changed course when it had a chance.
Not only is there no honest self-criticism among Republicans, but — and this is truly contemptible — you have Dick Cheney & Friends focusing their public remarks on why Mr. Lamont’s defeat of Mr. Lieberman only proves that Democrats do not understand that we are in a titanic struggle with “Islamic fascists” and are therefore unfit to lead.
Oh, really? Well, I just have one question for Mr. Cheney: If we’re in such a titanic struggle with radical Islam, and if getting Iraq right is at the center of that struggle, why did you “tough guys” fight the Iraq war with the Rumsfeld Doctrine — just enough troops to lose — and not the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force to create the necessary foundation of any democracy-building project, which is security? How could you send so few troops to fight such an important war when it was obvious that without security Iraqis would fall back on their tribal militias?
Mr. Cheney, if we’re in a titanic struggle with Islamic fascists, why have you and President Bush resisted any serious effort to get Americans to conserve energy? Why do you refuse to push higher mileage standards for U.S. automakers or a gasoline tax that would curb our imports of oil? Here we are in the biggest struggle of our lives and we are funding both sides — the U.S. military with our tax dollars and the radical Islamists and the governments and charities that support them with our gasoline purchases — and you won’t lift a finger to change that. Why? Because it might impose pain on the oil companies and auto lobbies that fund the G.O.P., or require some sacrifice by Americans.
Mr. Cheney, if we’re in a titanic struggle with Islamic fascists, why do you constantly use the “war on terrorism” as a wedge issue in domestic politics to frighten voters away from Democrats. How are we going to sustain such a large, long-term struggle if we are a divided country?
Please, Mr. Cheney, spare us your flag-waving rhetoric about the titanic struggle we are in and how Democrats just don’t understand it. It is just so phony — such a patent ploy to divert Americans from the fact that you have never risen to the challenge of this war. You will the ends, but you won’t will the means. What a fraud!
Friends, we are on a losing trajectory in Iraq, and, as the latest London plot underscores, the wider war with radical Islam is only getting wider. We need to reassess everything we are doing in this “war on terrorism” and figure out what is worth continuing, what needs changing and what sacrifice we need to demand from every American to match our means with our ends. Yes, the Democrats could help by presenting a serious alternative. But unless the party in power for the next two and half years shakes free of its denial, we are in really, really big trouble.
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2006 15:55:02 +0400Cindy,
These are the facts that are indisputable.On Wednesday evening, Aug. 9th, the Israelis crossed the border into the
Marj(the field) between Khiam and Marjayoun. They went to Klaya and
shelled a convent, and destroyed 30 houses. Klaya is all Christian with no
Hezballah there. They don't even have rocket fire coming from there. Then
they came to Marjayoun, again all Christian. The Lebanese army has a base
there (350 soldiers). They are poorly equipped and can't fight so the
Israelis took over the town in the early morning of the 10th. They wanted
to stay on the base, but the Leb. army refused. The Israelis told them
they could leave, but not the people of Marjayoun. The army refused to go
without the people. Again, there are no Hezballah there nor rockets. The
army patrolled the area to keep them out.All the day on the 10th negotiations went on. The American Embassy told
the Israelis that they couldn't cover for them and there was no excuse to
stay. So, the morning of the 11th. They said the town could go because
they wanted to use it as a base. They waited for the Israelis to let them
go, down to Ibl Saki (Dana Hotel) to Hasbaya. The kept them there until
the afternoon. Then the Israelis purposely bombed the road at 3:30 and
then told the people they have to take another road. Led by the army, a
convoy of 300 cars left at 4 o'clock. The road wound through the mountains
and was long, slow and very rough. A 20 minute drive to Hasbaya took 3
hours. The Israelis knew where the convoy was the entire time because
planes kept circling overhead. The convoy was on TV. Everyone in the
country and out knew where this convoy was going.At about 9:00 at night, an unmanned spy plane fired 8 missles at the convoy
as it drove through the Bekaa valley. It fired at the front of the convoy
and at the back. 8 people were killed and 40 injured.These are the conclusions from this incident.
1. Israel purposely tried to use civilians as human shields in Marjayoun.
2. Israel purposely hindered civilians from fleeing the fighting.
3. Israel purposely and with full knowledge fired on a civilian convoy in
order to simply kill.
4. Israel is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for this and
many more massacres.Israel has stated that they didn't realize that the cars (over 100) were
part of the convoy from Marjayoun. This absolutely is a lie. People in
the convoy saw the planes flying overhead and the Israelis were completely
aware of their position. Besides, all the world knew where the convoy was.cindy, our family is in the north in Amioun with yvonnes family...they are
safe, for now. But, several of our close friends were injured. after the
first missile hit, the army told them to get out from there. Bassam and
about 50 cars turned and raced toward the closest village. A missile hit
20 meters behind him. The plane followed them to the village. If the
Israelis thought that these were Hezballah, then why did they stop firing
when the people reached the village. Send a copy of this to mandee to find
and organization to help us sue the israelis for war crimes.ps..the israeli parliament is asking for an investigation into their gov's
conduct and the IDF targeting of civilians in the war-----------
Fleeing Lebanese Christians See Town Forever Changed
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 13, 2006; A01HASBAYA, Lebanon, Aug. 12
Israeli troops entered Marjayoun at 3:30 a.m. Thursday. They had first seized Burj al-Molouk. Next was Qleia. The last, along a road stretching from the border, was the capital of the province, a faded, once-prosperous town that unfurls up a hill overlooking a valley carpeted in olive trees and the imposing, wizened peaks of Mount Hermon, known here as Jebel al-Sheikh. "They came with the tanks, of course," said Fouad Hamra, the town's mayor.
Residents said the 400 or so families in the town of Marjayoun stayed indoors, some too fearful to look out their windows to the street. Even a loud voice might draw notice, they said. The Israeli presence was ghostly -- some heard voices, a few saw the soldiers themselves, most knew of their presence by word of mouth, news broadcasts and the sound of fighting that went on outside their doors.
"People didn't dare leave their homes," said Hikmat Farha, a 53-year-old resident now staying in a Beirut suburb.
Nearly everyone has now departed the Christian town, where houses of cream stone and red-tiled roofs sit tucked in a southern corner of Lebanon, perched unfortunately along the Israeli border. Some left in the early days of the month-long war, when Israeli forces laid siege to Khiam, a Shiite Muslim town across the valley, where fighting still raged Saturday. Most, like Hamra, left Friday in a harrowing convoy of hundreds of cars that plied a moonlit road and was attacked by Israeli aircraft. Six people were killed and more than 30 wounded.
Now its exiled inhabitants await what many Lebanese fear is the start of a smoldering, undecided war, brokered by a U.N. resolution that might bring a respite rather than peace.
"It's tough for people not to be able to go home," Farha said.
The destruction of the front-line village of Bint Jbeil is far more harrowing, swaths of it pulverized into unrecognizable rubble. The siege of the seaside port of Tyre is more menacing, its thousands of people running short on food, water and gasoline after an Israeli order that any car traveling on any road risks attack. But the experience of Marjayoun is an example, writ in the footnotes of a war, of the sometimes ignored sentiments of conflict: the pain of loss, of uncertainty, of not knowing when homes will become theirs again.
"I wish I knew," Hamra said. "I wish they'd leave now."
The start of Marjayoun's occupation was quiet, but clashes soon erupted. What started them is a matter of dispute. Ever since Israeli forces left Marjayoun and the rest of southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah and its Shiite Muslim militia maintained a discreet presence. There were no retributions. There was no armed presence inside Marjayoun and other villages that belonged to Lebanon's other sects: Druze, Christian and Sunni Muslim. Some residents said it was not Hezbollah that fired on the Israeli troops in Marjayoun, but operatives of a secular, leftist party whose posters still adorn the sides of buildings and telephone poles across the region.
Whatever the cause, Israeli forces fired in Marjayoun. Samir Razzouk's busy shop in the newly renovated town square was destroyed, along with its lottery machine that drew customers and its shelves stuffed to the ceiling with decade-old oddities that gave him a reputation as a pack rat. The house of Suheil Abu Mrad near the town's lone mosque was damaged. So was the house of Karim Jabarra, who provided electricity from a generator when the city's power grid flickered and floundered, as it often did.
The number varied of other houses damaged -- 10, 20, perhaps more. And in a town where houses represent families, and families represent centuries of history, residents said a part of Marjayoun was lost, too.
Water was scarce, an irony for a town whose name means "field of springs" in Arabic. "They had springs outside their homes, and they couldn't reach them," Farha said. Generators began giving out as gasoline ran short. And people decided to leave.
"Everybody will say: 'Why did they leave? How did they leave?' " Farha said. He called the question easy in hindsight. "Looking at the war with your eyeglasses on is easy," he said. "But when you're in the middle of it, it's much more difficult."
Farsan Kfouri said his family of 35, along with others, gathered at 8:30 a.m. Friday on the town's main street. They waited for permission through the day, as Israeli shells crashed down on Khiam and the outskirts of Marjayoun. There were negotiations and rumors about Israeli permission, and the convoy of hundreds of cars finally set off at 4 p.m., passing several miles in two hours along a dirt road with white smoke furling skyward sometimes 500 yards away. Short on gas, some cars were abandoned on the road. "The cars were bumper to bumper, and the people were terrified," he said.
By nightfall, the convoy had split into small groups, making their way through the Bekaa Valley. At times, the road was lit by a full moon, tinted yellow, illuminating the nearby mountains. As they left the valley at about 9 p.m., near the town of Kefraya, known in Lebanon for the wine of its vineyards, some in the convoy saw flashes of light and heard blasts. Chaos ensued. People got out of the cars; the air filled with screams and cries.
Others shouted for the drivers to turn off their car lights. Minutes later, a Lebanese soldier ordered them to turn the lights back on. Cars careened in every direction, trying to retreat. On her way out, Ronitte Daher, the correspondent for an-Nahar newspaper, who was riding with her sister, said she saw the body of a man she knew, Elie Salama, a baker in Marjayoun.
"We thought we'd go out of this region, and we'd be safe, but it was the opposite," she said.
The residents of Marjayoun were told the convoy had permission, but the Israeli military said that although a request was made for safe transit, it was never granted. It said it had mistaken the cars for Hezbollah guerrillas transporting arms.
"The clearance was not clearance enough," Hamra said bitterly.
With his family, Kfouri made it back to Rashaya and stayed with a family. He eventually made it to Beirut 24 hours later.
"Even if there was Hezbollah, they shouldn't have gone ahead and hit innocent civilians," he said.
In all, at least six people died -- two from Marjayoun, one from Deir Mimis, another civilian, a soldier and a Red Cross volunteer. Rumors swirled through the community of Marjayoun: who was hurt, who was killed. Some heard friends were dead who later turned out to be alive. Word spread slowly, since much of the convoy stayed put, the drivers too fearful to go any farther.
"It's so useless," said Nimr Musallam, who left Marjayoun during a lull in fighting two weeks ago. "War is ugly."
The war in southern Lebanon is infused with a Shiite Muslim narrative, both past and present. Memories run deep of the 18-year Israeli occupation over mostly Shiite villages. Often heard in today's conflict is the idea that nothing can be gained without sacrifice, that the Shiite community has already proved its steadfastness by battling the Israelis for more than a month.
There is a sense, too, that the war is not yet over. Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, vowed Saturday that while his group would accept a cease-fire, fighting would persist as long as Israeli troops were on Lebanese land.
"It is our natural right to confront them, fight them and defend our land, our homes and ourselves," he said.
Marjayoun residents expected to escape the brunt of the fighting. It is a Christian town and, during the occupation, it served as the headquarters of Israel's allied militia. The Israelis themselves were not necessarily popular, but the money their presence brought to the town provided a livelihood far better than today, as jobs are scarce and many of its young depart for Beirut or emigrate abroad. Occupation, though, draws on universal notions, as does exile; foremost, perhaps, is the uncertainty of when it will end.
"It's like you're deprived of your home," Musallam said. "It's your dignity, your identity, everything that concerns you."
He thought for a moment. "They could stay for a week, they could stay for a year. I don't know. Really."
As Farha left Marjayoun, his most distinct memory was the empty streets, framed by the olive groves that bend like a bow across the hillsides, interspersed with the grapevines climbing terraces, their ripening red fruit hanging over patios. A crater is carved into one road out of Marjayoun, as it hugs a hill of crumbling terraces and worn stones revealed by time. Five rocks, spaced a yard apart, block another road, impassable but by foot. The one path is a sand trail that arches over a deserted quarry.
Farha left his clothes, his three-month-old dog Max and pretty much all his belongings in a house he had painstakingly remodeled. And he thought back to more distant stories: 1948 and the war that led to Israel's creation. Palestinians in such towns as Haifa, Acre and Jaffa, and villages along the coast, were told to leave their homes for a few days until the war ended. They never returned.
"That is how people left," he said. "They left everything and the next day, in a few days, they thought they would be back."
Marjayoun will never be the same, he said. It could be rebuilt, but its terrain will likely remain scarred -- an intricate quilt of Lebanon's diversity. He wondered what would happen to the devastated Shiite villages of Dibin and Blatt next door, and Khiam across the valley. Or the more distant Sunni towns such as Kfar Shouba, Kafr Hammam and Shebaa, many of their residents having fled.
"When you see only Marjayoun around you, you become sad," he said.
Hamra, the mayor, thought back to history, too. He had never left Marjayoun. In the 1967 war, he said, he stood on his balcony, watching residents leave. He did the same in 1982, when Israeli troops invaded Lebanon. And the same in 2000, when they left.
"I was always watching the people," he said. "This time, what happened was a disaster, and I decided to leave."
He paused, thinking ahead. "I'll go back to Marjayoun. Myself, I'll go back." He stopped again. "If they allow me."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/12/AR2006081201072.html?sub=AR
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/04/magazine/04lebanon.html?pagewanted=7&ei=5070&en=0bdfc916ed6f6075&ex=1
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51326
Our moral culpability for Qana
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted: July 31, 2006, 9:13 p.m. Eastern"Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hezbollah," roared Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon on July 27.
"Every village from which a Katyusha is fired must be destroyed," bellowed an Israeli general in a quote bannered by the nation's largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.
The Israeli paper then summarized what the justice minister and general were saying: "In other words, a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire." That was Thursday.
Sunday, in Qana, 57 of Haim Ramon's "terrorists," 37 of them children, were massacred with precision-guided bombs. Apparently, Katyushas had been fired from Qana, near the destroyed building.
"One who goes to sleep with rockets shouldn't be surprised if he doesn't wake up in the morning," said Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman.
Today, we hear unctuous statements about how Israel takes pains to avoid civilian casualties, drops leaflets to warn civilians to flee target areas and conforms to all the rules of civilized warfare.
But Israel's words and deeds contradict her propaganda. As the war began, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert accused Lebanon, which had condemned Hezbollah for the killing and capture of the Israeli soldiers, of an "act of war." Army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz publicly threatened "to turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years."
Gillerman, at a pro-Israel rally in New York, thundered, "[T]o those countries who claim that we are using disproportionate force, I have only this to say: You're damn right we are."
"His comments drew wild applause," said the Jerusalem Post.
Though Israel is dissembling now, Gillerman spoke the truth then. No sooner had Hezbollah taken the two Israeli soldiers hostage than Israel unleashed an air war – on Lebanon. The Beirut airport was bombed, its fuel storage tanks set ablaze. The coast was blockaded. Power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads, trucks and buses were all hit with air strikes.
Within 48 hours, it was apparent Israel was exploiting Hezbollah's attack to execute a preconceived military plan to destroy Lebanon – i.e, the collective punishment of a people and nation for the crimes of a renegade militia they could not control. It was the moral equivalent of a municipal police going berserk, shooting, killing and ravaging an African-American community because Black Panthers had ambushed and killed cops.
If Israel is not in violation of the principle of proportionality, by which Christians are to judge the conduct of a just war, what can that term mean? There are 600 civilian dead in Lebanon, 19 in Israel, a ratio of 30-1 – though Hezbollah is firing unguided rockets, while Israel is using precision-guided munitions.
Thousands of Lebanese civilians are injured. Perhaps 800,000 are homeless.
Yet, whatever one thinks of the morality of what Israel is doing, the stupidity is paralyzing. Instead of maintaining the moral and political high ground it had – when even Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan were condemning Hezbollah and privately hoping Israel would inflict a humiliating defeat on Nasrallah – Israel launched an air war on an innocent people. Now, 87 percent of Lebanese back Hezbollah, and the entire Arab and Islamic world, Shia and Sunni alike, is rallying behind Nasrallah.
And how does one defend the behavior of the United States?
When Gillerman was exulting in the disproportionality of Israel's attack on Lebanon, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton was smiling smugly beside him. When the U.N. Security Council tabled a resolution condemning Hezbollah's igniting of the war and Katyusha attacks, but also the excesses of Israel's reprisals, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton vetoed it. When a few congressmen sought to moderate a pro-Israeli resolution by adding words urging "all sides to protect innocent life and infrastructure," GOP leader John Boehner ordered the words taken down.
Why? Because, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, had prepared the resolution and wanted it passed the way they wrote it. Our Knesset complied. It sailed through the House 410-8.
For two weeks, Bush seemed unable to find a word of criticism for what our friends in Israel were doing to our friends in Lebanon. He publicly sent more bombs to Israel. He and Condi emphasized that America did not want a cease-fire – yet.
And because America provides Israel with the bombs it uses on Lebanon, we refused to restrain the Israelis, and we opposed every effort for a cease-fire before Sunday, America shares full moral and political responsibility for the massacre at Qana.
Rubbing our noses in our own cravenness, "Bibi" Netanyahu took time out, a week ago, from his daily appearances on American television denouncing terrorism to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the terror attack on the King David Hotel by Menachem Begin's Irgun, an attack that killed 92 people, among them British nurses.
This was not a terrorist act, Bibi explained, because Irgun telephoned a 15-minute warning to the hotel before the bombs went off. Right. And those children in that basement in Qana should not have ignored the Israeli leaflets warning them to clear out of southern Lebanon.
Our Israeli friends appear to be playing us for fools.
July 31, 2006
NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
Shock and Awe
By PAUL KRUGMANFor Americans who care deeply about Israel, one of the truly nightmarish things about the war in Lebanon has been watching Israel repeat the same mistakes the United States made in Iraq. It’s as if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been possessed by the deranged spirit of Donald Rumsfeld.
Yes, I know that there are big differences in the origins of the two wars. There’s no question of this war having been sold on false pretenses; unlike America in Iraq, Israel is clearly acting in self-defense.
But both Clausewitz and Sherman were right: war is both a continuation of policy by other means, and all hell. It’s a terrible mistake to start a major military operation, regardless of the moral justification, unless you have very good reason to believe that the action will improve matters.
The most compelling argument against an invasion of Iraq wasn’t the suspicion many of us had, which turned out to be correct, that the administration’s case for war was fraudulent. It was the fact that the real reason government officials and many pundits wanted a war — their belief that if the United States used its military might to “hit someone” in the Arab world, never mind exactly who, it would shock and awe Islamic radicals into giving up terrorism — was, all too obviously, a childish fantasy.
And the results of going to war on the basis of that fantasy were predictably disastrous: the fiasco in Iraq has ended up demonstrating the limits of U.S. power, strengthening radical Islam — especially radical Shiites allied with Iran, a group that includes Hezbollah — and losing America the moral high ground.
What I never expected was that Israel — a nation that has unfortunately had plenty of experience with both war and insurgency — would be susceptible to similar fantasies. Yet that’s what seems to have happened.
There is a case for a full-scale Israeli ground offensive against Hezbollah. It may yet come to that, if Israel can’t find any other way to protect itself. There is also a case for restraint — limited counterstrikes combined with diplomacy, an effort to get other players to rein Hezbollah in, with the option of that full-scale offensive always in the background.
But the actual course Israel has chosen — a bombing campaign that clearly isn’t crippling Hezbollah, but is destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure and killing lots of civilians — achieves the worst of both worlds. Presumably there were people in the Israeli government who assured the political leadership that a rain of smart bombs would smash and/or intimidate Hezbollah into submission. Those people should be fired.
Israel’s decision to rely on shock and awe rather than either diplomacy or boots on the ground, like the U.S. decision to order the U.N. inspectors out and invade Iraq without sufficient troops or a plan to stabilize the country, is having the opposite of its intended effect. Hezbollah has acquired heroic status, while Israel has both damaged its reputation as a regional superpower and made itself a villain in the eyes of the world.
Complaining that this is unfair does no good, just as repeating “but Saddam was evil” does nothing to improve the situation in Iraq. What Israel needs now is a way out of the quagmire. And since Israel doesn’t appear ready to reoccupy southern Lebanon, that means doing what it should have done from the beginning: try restraint and diplomacy. And Israel will negotiate from a far weaker position than seemed possible just three weeks ago.
And what about the role of the United States, which should be trying to contain the crisis? Our response has been both hapless and malign.
For the moment, U.S. policy seems to be to stall and divert efforts to negotiate a cease-fire as long as possible, so as to give Israel a chance to dig its hole even deeper. Also, we aren’t talking to Syria, which might hold the key to resolving the crisis, because President Bush doesn’t believe in talking to bad people, and anyway that’s the kind of thing Bill Clinton did. Did I mention that these people are childish?
Again, Israel has the right to protect itself. If all-out war with Hezbollah becomes impossible to avoid, so be it. But bombing Lebanon isn’t making Israel more secure.
As this column was going to press, Israel — responding to the horror at Qana, where missiles killed dozens of civilians, many of them children — announced a 48-hour suspension of aerial bombardment. But why resume that bombardment when the 48 hours are up? The hard truth is that Israel needs, for its own sake, to stop a bombing campaign that is making its enemies stronger, not weaker.
NYTimes
July 30, 2006
Conservative Pastor Steers Clear of Politics, and Pays
By LAURIE GOODSTEINMAPLEWOOD, Minn. — Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes.
The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?
After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.
“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”
Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.
But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.
“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”
Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.
At least six books on this theme have been published recently, some by Christian publishing houses. Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical, has written “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — an Evangelical’s Lament.”
And Mr. Boyd has a new book out, “The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church,” which is based on his sermons.
“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.
“More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right,” Mr. McLaren said. “You cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can’t say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people.
“Because people think, ‘Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about ‘activist judges.’ ”
Mr. Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church’s board, but his words left some in his congregation stunned. Some said that he was disrespecting President Bush and the military, that he was soft on abortion or telling them not to vote.
“When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker,” said William Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. “But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can’t be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70’s, it wouldn’t have happened. But the church was asleep.”
Mr. Boyd, 49, who preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts, leads a church that occupies a squat block-long building that was once a home improvement chain store.
The church grew from 40 members in 12 years, based in no small part on Mr. Boyd’s draw as an electrifying preacher who stuck closely to Scripture. He has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and he taught theology at Bethel College in St. Paul, where he created a controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Baptist General Conference, mounted an effort to evict Mr. Boyd from the denomination and his teaching post, but he won that battle.
He is known among evangelicals for a bestselling book, “Letters From a Skeptic,” based on correspondence with his father, a leftist union organizer and a lifelong agnostic — an exchange that eventually persuaded his father to embrace Christianity.
Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry.”
He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.
“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.
Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending “your hard-earned money” on good causes.
In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek “power over” others — by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others — “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.
“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.
“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”
Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.
“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”
Some Woodland Hills members said they applauded the sermons because they had resolved their conflicted feelings. David Churchill, a truck driver for U.P.S. and a Teamster for 26 years, said he had been “raised in a religious-right home” but was torn between the Republican expectations of faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union.
When Mr. Boyd preached his sermons, “it was liberating to me,” Mr. Churchill said.
Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than 50 staff members were laid off, he said.
Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school.
“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” she said. “It was some of my best volunteers.”
The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and the teaching pastor at Woodland Hills, said: “Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world. He didn’t give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his speaking, and that’s it.”
In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.
This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Paul.
Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: “I don’t regret any aspect of it at all. It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.”
His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden? Didn’t the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?
One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?”
Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”
Lebanon: Bush’s Moment of Truth
John L. EspositoPresident Bush finds himself today looking at a potential legacy that includes a world in which anti-Americanism will have increased exponentially among America’s friends and foes alike, terrorism will have grown rather than receded, and America will be enmeshed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gaza and now Lebanon provide the Bush administration with a major opportunity to demonstrate its global leadership and its stated commitment to the spread of democracy and promote the Middle East Peace process, policies used by the Bush administration to legitimate the U.S. led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Tragically, the administration has thus far chosen to be part of the problem not of the solution.
From North Africa to Southeast Asia as a recent Gallup World Poll indicates overwhelming majorities (91-95%) said that they did not believe the U.S. is trustworthy, friendly, or treats other countries respectfully nor that it cares about human rights in other countries (80%). Outside of Iraq, there is over 90% agreement among Muslims that the invasion of Iraq has done more harm than good. How has the administration responded? In a world in which the war on global terrorism has come to be equated in the minds of many Muslims (and others) with a war against Islam and the Muslim world, the administration reemphasized the importance of public diplomacy, appointing a talented senior Bush confidante, Karen Hughes, and spoke of a war of ideas.
However, the administration’s responses in Gaza and in Lebanon undercut both the President’s credibility and the war on terrorism. The U.S. has turned a blind eye to Israel’s launching of two wars whose primary victims are civilians. It failed to support U.N. mediation in the face of clear violations of international law and Israel’s use of collective punishment, policies in Gaza that Amnesty International labeled War crimes. It refused to heed calls for a ceasefire and U.N. intervention and continued to provide military assistance to Israel. America, with its unconditional support of Israel, has become a partner not simply in a military action against HAMAS or Hizbollah militants but in a war against democratically elected governments in Gaza and Lebanon, a long time U.S. ally. The "disproportionate response" to Hizbollah's July 12 seizure of two soldiers and killing of three others has resulted in the death of more than 350, the displacement of more than 700,000 and the destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure; its primary victims are hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians not terrorists.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan criticism of the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon as "excessive use of force" was countered the next day by the New York Times headline “U.S. speeds up bomb delivery for the Israelis.” Is it any wonder that news reporters in the Arab world speak of the Israeli-U.S. war, a Western Christian religious leader and long-time resident of Lebanon speaks of “the rape of Lebanon,” or that in Southeast Asia, as one observer put it, “Malaysians are telling Bush, forget the war on terrorism. He is inflaming terrorism!”
There are no easy answers but as John Voll has argued, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon some twenty years ago demonstrated that a massive military response is not the solution (See John O. Voll, Massive Military response is not he Solution”). The administration needs to respond in concert with the international community and international organizations like the United Nations. America must lead in the call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire and a negotiated settlement as well as be a major donor in the restoration of the infrastructures of Gaza and Lebanon. While nothing should compromise America’s commitment to the existence and security of the state of Israel, America’s national interests and credibility not only in the Arab/Muslim world but internationally will depend on our ability to “walk the way we talk.” U.S. policy should make no exceptions, for the Arabs or Israelis, when it comes to the disproportionate use of force, indiscriminate warfare whose primary victims (those killed, injured or displaced) are majorities of innocent civilians not terrorists, collective punishment and the massive violation of human rights.
July 23, 2006
John L Esposito
University Professor & Founding Director
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal
Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding
ICC 260
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C. 20057
Tel. (202) 687-8375; fax (202) 687-8376
http:cmcu.georgetown.edu
NYTimes
July 21, 2006
The Price of Fantasy
By PAUL KRUGMANToday we call them neoconservatives, but when the first George Bush was president, those who believed that America could remake the world to its liking with a series of splendid little wars — people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — were known within the administration as “the crazies.” Grown-ups in both parties rejected their vision as a dangerous fantasy.
But in 2000 the Supreme Court delivered the White House to a man who, although he may be 60, doesn’t act like a grown-up. The second President Bush obviously confuses swagger with strength, and prefers tough talkers like the crazies to people who actually think things through. He got the chance to implement the crazies’ vision after 9/11, which created a climate in which few people in Congress or the news media dared to ask hard questions. And the result is the bloody mess we’re now in.
This isn’t a case of 20-20 hindsight. It was clear from the beginning that the United States didn’t have remotely enough troops to carry out the crazies’ agenda — and Mr. Bush never asked for a bigger army.
As I wrote back in January 2003, this meant that the “Bush doctrine” of preventive war was, in practice, a plan to “talk trash and carry a small stick.” It was obvious even then that the administration was preparing to invade Iraq not because it posed a real threat, but because it looked like a soft target.
The message to North Korea, which really did have an active nuclear program, was clear: “The Bush administration,” I wrote, putting myself in Kim Jong Il’s shoes, “says you’re evil. It won’t offer you aid, even if you cancel your nuclear program, because that would be rewarding evil. It won’t even promise not to attack you, because it believes it has a mission to destroy evil regimes, whether or not they actually pose any threat to the U.S. But for all its belligerence, the Bush administration seems willing to confront only regimes that are militarily weak.” So “the best self-preservation strategy ... is to be dangerous.”
With a few modifications, the same logic applies to Iran. And it’s easier than ever for Iran to be dangerous, now that U.S. forces are bogged down in Iraq.
Would the current crisis on the Israel-Lebanon border have happened even if the Bush administration had actually concentrated on fighting terrorism, rather than using 9/11 as an excuse to pursue the crazies’ agenda? Nobody knows. But it’s clear that the United States would have more options, more ability to influence the situation, if Mr. Bush hadn’t squandered both the nation’s credibility and its military might on his war of choice.
So what happens next?
Few if any of the crazies have the moral courage to admit that they were wrong. Vice President Cheney continues to insist that his two most famous pronouncements about Iraq — his declaration before the invasion that we would be “greeted as liberators” and his assertion a year ago that the insurgency was in its “last throes” — were “basically accurate.”
But if the premise of the Bush doctrine was right, why are things going so badly?
The crazies respond by retreating even further into their fantasies of omnipotence. The only problem, they assert, is a lack of will.
Thus William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, has called for a military strike — an airstrike, since we don’t have any spare ground troops — against Iran.
“Yes, there would be repercussions,” he wrote in his magazine, “and they would be healthy ones.” What would these healthy repercussions be? On Fox News he argued that “the right use of targeted military force” could cause the Iranian people “to reconsider whether they really want to have this regime in power.” Oh, boy.
Mr. Kristol is, of course, a pundit rather than a policymaker. But there’s every reason to suspect that what Mr. Kristol says in public is what Mr. Cheney says in private.
And what about The Decider himself?
For years the self-proclaimed “war president” basked in the adulation of the crazies. Now they’re accusing him of being a wimp. “We have been too weak,” writes Mr. Kristol, “and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak.”
Does Mr. Bush have the maturity to stand up to this kind of pressure? I report, you decide.
Chris Suellentrop in the NYTIMES 2007 July 19:
George Will on Bill Kristol’s ‘Radicalism’George Will has been writing columns quietly critical of the Bush administration for some time, but he’s starting to get louder. Last week, he criticized “Roveology” in Newsweek, arguing that because Republicans, who “theoretically favor much less government,” are holding onto power “by mastering the favor-dispensing and constituency-assembling power of the sprawling government that Democrats did so much to build and justify … Republicans do not deserve the dominance they are thereby achieving.”
In today’s Washington Post column, Will suggests that it is reasonable to speculate about ways in which “the U.S. invasion of Iraq was responsible for the current Middle East conflagration.” He writes, “[I]t is not perverse to wonder whether the spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson – one that conservatives should not have to learn on the job – about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies.”
Will’s real target is The Weekly Standard, which published a piece by editor William Kristol this week contemplating “a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.” Kristol writes:
Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions – and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.
Will, calling Kristol’s magazine the “voice of a spectacularly misnamed radicalism, ‘neoconservativism,’” counters:
“Why wait?” Perhaps because the U.S. military has enough on its plate in the deteriorating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both border Iran. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success, did work against Stalin and his successors, and might be preferable to a war against a nation much larger and more formidable than Iraq. And if Bashar Assad’s regime does not fall after the Weekly Standard’s hoped-for third war, with Iran, does the magazine hope for a fourth?As for the “healthy” repercussions that the Weekly Standard is so eager to experience from yet another war: One envies that publication’s powers of prophecy but wishes it had exercised them on the nation’s behalf before all of the surprises – all of them unpleasant – that Iraq has inflicted.
In unsurprising fashion, Will concludes with a baseball analogy, comparing the neoconservatives to the losingest team in the major leagues, the Kansas City Royals. He suggests that Kristol adopt some of the realism of political philosopher Buddy Bell, the Royals’ manager: “After his team lost its 10th consecutive game in April, Bell said, ‘I never say it can’t get worse.’ In their next game, the Royals extended their losing streak to 11 and in May lost 13 in a row.”
But wait: Will actually may not take this analogy far enough. After a historically bad start, the Royals fired their longtime general manager, Allard Baird, and replaced him with a new general manager, Dayton Moore. Since Baird’s firing, by coincidence or not, the Royals have improved somewhat and are no longer threatening to break the all-time mark for losses in a single baseball season.
The obvious conclusion: If the woes of the Kansas City Royals are analogous to the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, then Donald Rumsfeld is the Allard Baird of the Bush administration. Except he still has his job.
July 17, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
March of Folly
By PAUL KRUGMANSince those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it — and since the cast of characters making pronouncements on the crisis in the Middle East is very much the same as it was three or four years ago — it seems like a good idea to travel down memory lane. Here’s what they said and when they said it:
“The greatest thing to come out of [invading Iraq] for the world economy ... would be $20 a barrel for oil.” Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), February 2003
“Oil Touches Record $78 on Mideast Conflict.” Headline on www.foxnews.com, July 14, 2006
“The administration’s top budget official estimated today that the cost of a war with Iraq could be in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion,” saying that “earlier estimates of $100 billion to $200 billion in Iraq war costs by Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s former chief economic adviser, were too high.” The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2002
“According to C.B.O.’s estimates, from the time U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, $290 billion has been allocated for activities in Iraq. ... Additional costs over the 2007-2016 period would total an estimated $202 billion under the first [optimistic] scenario, and $406 billion under the second one.” Congressional Budget Office, July 13, 2006
“Peacekeeping requirements in Iraq might be much lower than historical experience in the Balkans suggests. There’s been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in Bosnia.” Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense and now president of the World Bank, Feb. 27, 2003
“West Baghdad is no stranger to bombings and killings, but in the past few days all restraint has vanished in an orgy of ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Shia gunmen are seeking to drive out the once-dominant Sunni minority and the Sunnis are forming neighborhood posses to retaliate. Mosques are being attacked. Scores of innocent civilians have been killed, their bodies left lying in the streets.” The Times of London, July 14, 2006
“Earlier this week, I traveled to Baghdad to visit the capital of a free and democratic Iraq.” President Bush, June 17, 2006
“People are doing the same as [in] Saddam’s time and worse. ... These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.” Ayad Allawi, Mr. Bush’s choice as Iraq’s first post-Saddam prime minister, November 2005
“Iraq’s new government has another able leader in Speaker Mashhadani. ... He rejects the use of violence for political ends. And by agreeing to serve in a prominent role in this new unity government, he’s demonstrating leadership and courage.” President Bush, May 22, 2006
“Some people say ‘we saw you beheading, kidnappings and killing. In the end we even started kidnapping women who are our honor.’ These acts are not the work of Iraqis. I am sure that he who does this is a Jew and the son of a Jew.” Mahmoud Mashhadani, speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, July 13, 2006
“My fellow citizens, not only can we win the war in Iraq, we are winning the war in Iraq.” President Bush, Dec. 18, 2005
“I think I would answer that by telling you I don’t think we’re losing.” Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, when asked whether we’re winning in Iraq, July 14, 2006
“Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits for the region. ...Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart, and our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.” Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002
“Bush — The world is coming unglued before his eyes. His naïve dreams are a Wilsonian disaster.” Newsweek Conventional Wisdom Watch, July 24, 2006 edition
“It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.” Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, Dec. 6, 2005
“I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now.” Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, on the campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, April 28, 1999
Op-Ed Columnist
TimesSelect The Treason Card
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 7, 2006The nature of the right-wing attack on The New York Times — an attack not on the newspaper's judgment, but on its motives — seems to have startled many people in the news media. After an editorial in The Wall Street Journal declared that The Times has what amount to treasonous intentions — that it "has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it" — The Journal's own political editor pronounced himself "shocked," saying that "I don't know anybody on the news staff of The Wall Street Journal that believes that."
But anyone who was genuinely shocked by The Journal's willingness to play the treason card must not have been paying attention these past five years.
Over the last few months a series of revelations have confirmed what should have been obvious a long time ago: the Bush administration and the movement it leads have been engaged in an authoritarian project, an effort to remove all the checks and balances that have heretofore constrained the executive branch.
Much of this project involves the assertion of unprecedented executive authority — the right to imprison people indefinitely without charges (and torture them if the administration feels like it), the right to wiretap American citizens without court authorization, the right to declare, when signing laws passed by Congress, that the laws don't really mean what they say.
But an almost equally important aspect of the project has been the attempt to create a political environment in which nobody dares to criticize the administration or reveal inconvenient facts about its actions. And that attempt has relied, from the beginning, on ascribing treasonous motives to those who refuse to toe the line. As far back as 2002, Rush Limbaugh, in words very close to those used by The Wall Street Journal last week, accused Tom Daschle, then the Senate majority leader, of a partisan "attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism."
Those of us who tried to call attention to this authoritarian project years ago have long marveled over the reluctance of many of our colleagues to acknowledge what was going on. For example, for a long time many people in the mainstream media applied a peculiar double standard to political speech, denouncing perfectly normal if forceful political rhetoric from the left as poisonous "Bush hatred," while chuckling indulgently over venom from the right. (That Ann Coulter, she's such a kidder.)
But now the chuckling has stopped: somehow, nobody seems to find calls to send Bill Keller to the gas chamber funny. And while the White House clearly believes that attacking The Times is a winning political move, it doesn't have to turn out that way — not if enough people realize what's at stake.
For I think that most Americans still believe in the principle that the president isn't a king, that he isn't entitled to operate without checks and balances. And President Bush is especially unworthy of our trust, because on every front — from his refusal to protect chemical plants to his officials' exposure of Valerie Plame, from his toleration of war profiteering to his decision to place the C.I.A. in the hands of an incompetent crony — he has consistently played politics with national security.
And he has done so with the approval and encouragement of the same people now attacking The New York Times for its alleged lack of patriotism.
Does anyone remember the editorial that The Wall Street Journal published on Sept. 19, 2001? "So much for Florida," the editorial began, celebrating the way the terrorist attack had pushed aside concerns over the legitimacy of the Supreme Court decision that installed Mr. Bush in the White House. The Journal then warned Mr. Bush not to give in to the "temptation" to "subjugate everything else to the priority of getting bipartisan support for the war on terrorism." Instead, it urged him to use the "political capital" generated by the atrocity to push through tax cuts and right-wing judicial appointments.
Things have changed since then: Mr. Bush's ability to wrap his power grab in the flag has diminished now that most Americans no longer consider him either competent or honest. But the administration and its supporters still believe that they can win political battles by impugning the patriotism of those who won't go along.
For the sake of our country, let's hope that they're wrong.
July 4, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Don't Turn Us Into Poodles
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOFWith President Bush leading a charge against this "disgraceful" newspaper, and a conservative talk show host, Melanie Morgan, suggesting that maybe The Times's executive editor should be executed for treason, we face a fundamental dispute about the role of the news media in America.
At stake is the administration's campaign to recast the relationship between government and press.
One mechanism is the threat to prosecute editors or reporters, for the first time, under the 1917 Espionage Act. Perhaps more likely may be an effort to subpoena James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, two reporters for this newspaper, to compel them to disclose confidential sources — and then to imprison them when they refuse. Granted, many Americans, believing that the press is arrogant and out of control, wouldn't be bothered by that.
Two disclosures by this newspaper have sparked particular outrage: a report about National Security Agency wiretapping without warrants and one about a program to track terror financing by examining bank transfers.
The first scoop strikes me as the best of journalism, for it revealed possibly illegal behavior without any apparent risk to national security. The wiretapping was already well known, and the only new information was that it was conducted without warrants. That's useful information to citizens, but not to terrorists.
The more recent disclosure about bank transfers seems to me a harder call. The program seems both legal and sensible, and it would be a setback in the unlikely event that bankers backed off in the glare of publicity.
So, I might have made that decision differently. But so far there is no evidence that the banking story harmed national security, and I'm sure that editors of this newspaper, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal weighed their responsibilities seriously, for they have repeatedly held back information when necessary. In contrast, the press-bashers have much less credibility.
Take Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Senator Roberts has criticized The Times, but he himself is responsible for an egregious disclosure of classified intelligence. As National Journal reported in April, it was Senator Roberts who stated as the Iraq war began that the U.S. had "human intelligence that indicated the location of Saddam Hussein."
That statement horrified some in our intelligence community by revealing that we had an agent close to Saddam.
No responsible newspaper would risk an agent's life so blithely. And The Times would never have been as cavalier about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as the White House was. The fact is, journalists regularly hold back information for national security reasons; I recently withheld information at the request of the intelligence community about secret terrorist communications.
More broadly, the one thing worse than a press that is "out of control" is one that is under control. Anybody who has lived in a Communist country knows that. Just consider what would happen if the news media as a whole were as docile to the administration as Fox News or The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
When I was covering the war in Iraq, we reporters would sometimes tune to Fox News and watch, mystified, as it purported to describe how Iraqis loved Americans. Such coverage (backed by delusional Journal editorials baffling to anyone who was actually in Iraq) misled conservatives about Iraq from the beginning. In retrospect, the real victims of Fox News weren't the liberals it attacked but the conservatives who believed it.
Historically, we in the press have done more damage to our nation by withholding secret information than by publishing it. One example was this newspaper's withholding details of the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion. President Kennedy himself suggested that the U.S. would have been better served if The Times had published the full story and derailed the invasion.
Then there were the C.I.A. abuses that journalists kept mum about until they spilled over and prompted the Church Committee investigation in the 1970's. And there are secrets we should have found, but didn't: in the run-up to the Iraq war, the press — particularly this newspaper — was too credulous about claims that Iraq possessed large amounts of W.M.D.
In each of these cases, we were too compliant. We failed in our watchdog role, and we failed our country.
So be very wary of Mr. Bush's effort to tame the press. Watchdogs can be mean, dumb and obnoxious, but it would be even more dangerous to trade them in for lap dogs.
July 2, 2006
New York Times Op-Ed Columnist
Can't Win the War? Bomb the Press!
By FRANK RICHOLD GLORY lost today," Bill Frist declaimed last week when his second attempt to rewrite the Constitution in a single month went the way of his happy prognosis for Terri Schiavo. Of course it isn't Old Glory that lost when the flag-burning amendment flamed out. The flag always survives the politicians who wrap themselves in it. What really provoked Mr. Frist's crocodile tears was the foiling of yet another ruse to distract Americans from the wreckage in Iraq. He and his party, eager to change the subject in an election year, just can't let go of their scapegoat strategy. It's illegal Hispanic immigrants, gay couples seeking marital rights, cut-and-run Democrats and rampaging flag burners who have betrayed America's values, not those who bungled a war.
No sooner were the flag burners hustled offstage than a new traitor was unveiled for the Fourth: the press. Public enemy No. 1 is The New York Times, which was accused of a "disgraceful" compromise of national security (by President Bush) and treason (by Representative Peter King of New York and the Coulter amen chorus). The Times's offense was to publish a front-page article about a comprehensive American effort to track terrorists with the aid of a Belgian consortium, Swift, which serves as a clearinghouse for some 7,800 financial institutions in 200 countries.
It was a solid piece of journalism. But if you want to learn the truly dirty secrets of how our government prosecutes this war, the story of how it vilified The Times is more damning than anything in the article that caused the uproar.
The history of that scapegoating begins on the Friday morning, June 23, that The Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal all published accounts of the Swift program first posted on the Web the night before. In his press briefing that morning, Tony Snow fielded many questions about the program's legality. But revealingly, for all his opportunities, he never attacked the news media.
Far from Swift-boating the Swift reportage, he offered tentative praise. "It's interesting," he said, "because I think there's a fair amount of balance in the story in that you do have concrete benefits and you do have the kind of abstract harms that were mentioned in there." He noted that there had been "no allegation of illegality" in the Times article.
This was accurate. The story was balanced, just as Mr. Snow said. And it was no cause for a national-security alarm for the simple reason that since 9/11, our government has repeatedly advertised that it is following the terrorists' money trail, a tactic enhanced by the broad new powers over financial institutions that Mr. Bush sought and received. In November 2002, he and the Treasury secretary at the time, Paul O'Neill, even held a televised event promoting their Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center, established expressly, in the president's words, to "investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks." As for Swift, Dan Froomkin of washingtonpost.com points out that it can't resist bragging on its own Web site that it "has a history of cooperating in good faith with authorities," including treasury departments and law enforcement agencies, in trying "to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities."
Only a terrorist who couldn't shoot straight would assume that Swift was not part of the American effort to stalk terrorist transactions; that's tantamount to assuming that cops would track down license plate numbers without enlisting the Department of Motor Vehicles. But, unfortunately for us, terrorists are not so stupid: it's been reported as far back as 2003 (in The Washington Post) and as recently as this month (in Ron Suskind's must-read best seller, "The One Percent Doctrine") that our enemies long ago took Mr. Bush at his word and abandoned banks for couriers, money brokers, front companies and suitcases stuffed with cash and gold. Tom Brokaw summarized the consensus of terrorism experts last week when he told Chris Matthews of MSNBC: "I don't know anyone who believes that the terrorist network said, 'Oh my God, they're tracing our financial transactions? What a surprise.' Of course, they knew that they were doing that."
The real news conveyed by The Times and its competitors was not the huge program to track terrorist finances, but that per usual from the administration that gave us Gitmo, the program was conducted with little oversight from the other two branches of government. Even so, the reporting on the pros and cons of that approach was, as Mr. Snow said, balanced.
Or so he said Friday morning, June 23. By Monday, the president had entered the fray and Mr. Snow was accusing The Times of putting the "public's right to know" over "somebody's right to live." What had happened over the weekend to prompt this escalation of hysteria? The same stuff that always happens when the White House scapegoats the press (or anyone else): bad and embarrassing news that the White House wants to drown out.
One such looming embarrassment was that breathless arrest in Miami of what federal authorities billed as a "homegrown terrorist cell." This amazing feat of derring-do had all the melodramatic trappings of a carefully staged administration P.R. extravaganza. On June 22, the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, just happened to be on "Larry King Live" speaking about his concerns about "homegrown terrorists" when, by a remarkable coincidence, Larry King announced a "report just in" from a Miami station on a federal terrorism investigation. The next day — the same day the Swift story was published — brought the full-dress dog-and-pony show by the intrepid attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.
But rain soon started to fall on this parade. The seven men accused of plotting to take down the Sears Tower in Chicago and collaborate with Al Qaeda on a "full ground war" turned out to have neither weapons nor explosives nor links to Al Qaeda; both the F.B.I. and the Chicago police said there was no operational threat. By Saturday the administration's overhyped victory against terrorists was already deflating into a national punch line, a nostalgic remembrance of John Ashcroft orange terror alerts past.
Sunday brought another unwanted revelation (from Michael R. Gordon of The Times): Gen. George Casey Jr., the commander in Iraq, was drafting a plan for sharp troop reductions there, some of them to precede this year's election. Inconveniently enough, the Casey approach was a virtual double for the phased withdrawals advocated by Senate Democrats days earlier and incessantly slurred as "cut-and-run" defeatism by Republicans.
By the time of the Bush-Snow eruption on Monday, the Democrats were holding hearings on the Hill about prewar intelligence. It was better that Americans hear tirades about traitors in the press than be tempted to listen to the testimony of Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who described Mr. Powell's February 2003 United Nations presentation on Iraq's W.M.D. as "the perpetuation of a hoax."
It's not only the White House that has a vested political interest in concocting a smoke screen by demonizing the fourth estate as a fifth column. The Democrats were holding their hearing because Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, has for two years been stalling his panel's promised investigation into how the administration used intelligence before the war. Hoping that we'd forget about that continuing cover-up, Mr. Roberts last week made a big show of calling for an investigation into the Swift story's supposed damage to national security.
Representative King, so eager to label others treasonous, has humiliating headlines of his own to counteract: he's the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee who has so little clout and bureaucratic aptitude that he couldn't stop the government led by his own party from stripping New York City, in his home state, of 40 percent of its counterterrorism funding. If there's another terrorist attack, he may be the last person in New York who should accuse others, as he did The Times on the House floor on Thursday, of having blood "on their hands."
Such ravings make it hard not to think of the official assault on The Times and The Washington Post over the Pentagon Papers. In 1972, on the first anniversary of the publication of that classified Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, The Times's managing editor then, A. M. Rosenthal, reminisced in print about the hyperbolic predictions that had been made by the Nixon White House and its supporters: "Codes would be broken. Military security endangered. Foreign governments would be afraid to deal with us. There would be nothing secret left." None of that happened. What did happen was that Americans learned "how secrecy had become a way of life" for a government whose clandestine policy decisions had fomented a disaster.
The assault on a free press during our own wartime should be recognized for what it is: another desperate ploy by officials trying to hide their own lethal mistakes in the shadows. It's the antithesis of everything we celebrate with the blazing lights of Independence Day.
An Israeli Speaks out Against Israel's Recent ActionsWhat Israel is doing in Gaza has nothing to do with securing Gilad Shalit's release,
according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz commentator Gideon Levy. July 2, 2006
A Black Flag
By Gideon LevyA black flag hangs over the "rolling" operation in Gaza. The more the operation "rolls," the darker the flag becomes. The "summer rains" we are showering on Gaza are not only pointless, but are first and foremost blatantly illegitimate. It is not legitimate to cut off 750,000 people from electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not legitimate to penetrate Syria's airspace. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a government and a quarter of a parliament.
A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization. The harsher the steps, the more monstrous and stupid they become, the more the moral underpinnings for them are removed and the stronger the impression that the Israeli government has lost its nerve. Now one must hope that the weekend lull, whether initiated by Egypt or the prime minister, and in any case to the dismay of Channel 2's Roni Daniel and the IDF, will lead to a radical change.
Everything must be done to win Gilad Shalit's release. What we are doing now in Gaza has nothing to do with freeing him. It is a widescale act of vengeance, the kind that the IDF and Shin Bet have wanted to conduct for some time, mostly motivated by the deep frustration that the army commanders feel about their impotence against the Qassams and the daring Palestinian guerilla raid. There's a huge gap between the army unleashing its frustration and a clever and legitimate operation to free the kidnapped soldier.
To prevent the army from running as amok as it would like, a strong and judicious political echelon is required. But facing off against the frustrated army is Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz's tyro regime, weak and happless. Until the weekend lull, it appeared that each step proposed by the army and Shin Bet had been immediately approved for backing. That does not bode well, not only for the chances of freeing Shalit, but also for the future management of the government, which is being revealed to be as weak as the Hamas government.
The only wise and restrained voice heard so far was that of the soldier's father, Noam Shalit, of all people. That noble man called at what is clearly his most difficult hour, not for stridency and not for further damage done to the lives of soldiers and innocent Palestinians. Against the background of the IDF's unrestrained actions and the arrogant bragging of the latest macho spokesmen, Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant of the Southern Command and Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, Shalit's father's voice stood out like a voice crying in the wilderness.
Sending tens of thousands of miserable inhabitants running from their homes, dozens of kilometers from where his son is supposedly hidden, and cutting off the electricity to hundreds of thousands of others, is certainly not what he meant in his understated emotional pleas. It's a shame nobody is listening to him, of all people.
The legitimate basis for the IDF's operation was stripped away the moment it began. It's no accident that nobody mentions the day before the attack on the Kerem Shalom fort, when the IDF kidnapped two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from their home in Gaza. The difference between us and them? We kidnapped civilians and they captured a soldier, we are a state and they are a terror organization. How ridiculously pathetic Amos Gilad sounds when he says that the capture of Shalit was "illegitimate and illegal," unlike when the IDF grabs civilians from their homes. How can a senior official in the defense ministry claim that "the head of the snake" is in Damascus, when the IDF uses the exact same methods?
True, when the IDF and Shin Bet grab civilians from their homes - and they do so often - it is not to murder them later. But sometimes they are killed on the doorsteps of their homes, although it is not necessary, and sometimes they are grabbed to serve as "bargaining chips," like in Lebanon and now, with the Palestinian legislators. What an uproar there would be if the Palestinians had grabbed half the members of the Israeli government. How would we label them?
Collective punishment is illegitimate and it does not have a smidgeon of intelligence. Where will the inhabitants of Beit Hanun run? With typical hardheartedness the military reporters say they were not "expelled" but that it was "recommended" they leave, for the benefit, of course, of those running for their lives. And what will this inhumane step lead to? Support for the Israeli government? Their enlistment as informants and collaborators for the Shin Bet? Can the miserable farmers of Beit Hanun and Beit Lahia do anything about the Qassam rocket-launching cells? Will bombing an already destroyed airport do anything to free the soldier or was it just to decorate the headlines?
Did anyone think about what would have happened if Syrian planes had managed to down one of the Israeli planes that brazenly buzzed their president's palace? Would we have declared war on Syria? Another "legitimate war"? Will the blackout of Gaza bring down the Hamas government or cause the population to rally around it? And even if the Hamas government falls, as Washington wants, what will happen on the day after? These are questions for which nobody has any real answers. As usual here: Quiet, we're shooting. But this time we are not only shooting. We are bombing and shelling, darkening and destroying, imposing a siege and kidnapping like the worst of terrorists and nobody breaks the silence to ask, what the hell for, and according to what right?
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A note from Tikkun:Why Aren’t American Jewish voices of Protest Being Heard?
The answer is simple: the forces that support Israel’s government no matter what it does have successfully united and created ÅIPAC as their primary spokesgroup. But the forces that critique Israeli policy and yet wish to Israel secure and safe have refused to unite their energies. Instead, they find minor points to disagree with each other and then use that as their basis for insisting that a unified alternative to AIPAC will not be created with their participation.
We in the Tikkun Community have repeatedly called for this kind of coalition to work together and create a progressive alternative to AIPAC. We recognize the legitimacy of groups saying that there need to be some clear guidelines so that this alternative to AIPAC is not dismissed as part of the anti-Israel forces whose real agenda is to dismantle the state of Israel altogether, nor part of the “Palestinians are always victims and Israelis are always evil” propaganda machine. Similarly, it should not be a technocratic peace voice that talks only in terms of why peace is in the interests of the Jewish people-it must affirm the humanity of the Palestinian people and acknowledge that their human rights are important to us also, not only instrumentally as a way to maximize the best interests of Jews.
You can do something about this. Challenge those who support these peace groups and insist that they get their organizations to work together with Tikkun and with each other to form a united progressive middle path voice in Washington, D.C. While recognizing that each group has legitimate needs in terms of fundraising and getting their own groups’ ego needs met, it’s also important to recognize ye