The Smoking Gun

The International Herald Tribune did a piece on the Congressional "debate" over Iraq withdrawal that included the following quote:

But Kingston [Representative Jack Kingston of Georgia] said Republicans forced the vote out of frustration with Democratic tactics. "We had just had it with Democrats running around saying President Bush lied. It was time for us to call their bluff," he said.

Remember Watergate. Up to the end, Republicans in Congress were saying that no one had found the "smoking gun." Then as now, the landscape was littered with bullet-riddled bodies, spent cartridges, and the smell of gunsmoke, but there were then, as there apparently are now, those who would dispute the sufficiency of the evidence.

What do they need? The LA Times is now reporting that German intelligence people, five of them, all confirm that Berlin warned Washington not to believe "Curveball," the Iraqi source who dreamed up some of the later discredited claims about Saddam's WMD.

Like Watergate, we have the original events and we have the coverup of those events. Bush is still telling the American people that all the world's intelligence services joined him in being wrong about Iraq. Clearly not true and three years after the fact, Bush knows it now whether he did at the time or not.

This comes under the heading of "everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten." It's not true and he knows it, but he says it anyway. That's called lying. President Bush lied about when he persuaded us that an invasion of Iraq was necessary. He is lying now about whether he lied about Iraq then. Mr. Kingston, you need to come to terms with that.

At long last, have you no shame?

Mark Twain said, as best I can recall, "Suppose I was a member of Congress. Suppose I was an idiot. Ah, but I repeat myself."

The Republican vote on Iraq hits a new depth. I'm sick. Not a political ploy, says Rep. Hunter, who introduced the resolution and intended from the start to vote against it. A legitimate question, he says. Has he never heard of the phrase, putting words in other people's mouths? How can there be a debate on a resolution that both sides oppose?

Three members voted in favor anyway. Does anyone remember the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? It passed the senate 98-2. Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening were the only two senators who voted no. This resolution went down 3-403. Some day we may remember those three.

Shiites torturing Sunnis -- Why didn't anybody look?

The important thing about the newly uncovered Iraqi torture centers is not that they existed, which was almost predictable, but that they were discovered by accident by people who weren't looking for them.

Reuters is reporting that not only were people being tortured, but they were being released back into society. Evidently, the Iraqi Interior folks weren't too worried about being found out, or the consequences if they were. A quote from the story:

Sunni politician Omar Hujail, of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said it was not the only place where Sunni Arabs were held and tortured. "We have been telling them for ages that there are people wearing the uniforms of the interior ministry raiding houses at night and arresting people but everybody denied it."

There now isn't much doubt that the Sunnis were generally right. There may be questions about specific stories, but not the general outline. Several questions arise immediately.

Why weren't the people doing the torturing worried about letting torturees back out? Obviously, they were going to tell people. Sunnis would be outraged. Did these people care? Did they ever conceive of a society in which Sunnis would be able to take such grievances into a judicial system and get fair treatment. Obviously not. And just as obviously, the Sunnis have known so, which is why they don't believe this "constitution" is going to do anything to protect them.

But this is only surprising to those Americans who have believed for two and a half years that things were going to somehow work out. We can't do much about it. But as Americans, we ought to consider this. We are spending conservatively $50 billion on this war per year, not counting its unbudgeted aftermath. We have an intelligence establishment that sucks up $30 billion or more. It may be $40 billion, but let's use 30 to avoid arguments. The primary mission for that $30 billion should be to learn whether things are going properly in our expenditure of $50 billion to execute the war.

Yet, if they knew, they didn't tell us. We have two possibilities. They didn't know, in which case we should send all our overpaid spooks home and devote the $30 billion to deficit reduction. In the past, they have made excuses about not being able to find where Saddam had WMD in a country the size of Texas (or Alaska or California, I don't recall). But this place was in the ministry's compound in Baghdad. Not hard to find. People were reporting the stuff in the popular press. Not hard to get a lead.

The second possibility is more likely. We knew. How could we not know? We have satellites that can show a man reading a newspaper and this could have escaped our notice? Not damned likely.

So if we knew and didn't stop it, why? Surely not because we thought this was a good way to reconcile the Sunnis. The only explanation is that we have lost all control over this government, we know it and they know it, and we're just hoping like hell that something turns out right and we can leave.

Whether Saddam had WMD was never the question.

President George W. Bush wants us to believe that since a great many people considered Saddam likely to have WMD in the winter of 2003, those people must have agreed with his rationale for war. Now that is rewriting history.

Looking back at the evidence, much of it still available on the Web for anyone who cares to look, it seems clear that the majority opinion in January 2003 was that Saddam had some WMD somewhere in Iraq. It also looks as though that opinion was eroding as the weeks passed and nothing was found. However, there's no getting around the fact that many people thought he had them. Looking at his archives, Juan Cole, hardly a fan of the war, appears to be saying that not finding WMD, although possible and worth considering, was still speculation.

What separated George W. Bush from most of the rest of the world's leaders at the time was his willingness to invade a sovereign nation based on hunches. As his supporters keep saying, this is a global war on terror and what better idea do you have?

In an active Washington Post blog this morning, a number of people took up that challenge. Finding Osama bin Laden, fixing Afghanistan, etc. Personally, I don't know about either of those. My guess is that Osama is semi-retired. We give him too much credit if we think he can pull a lot of strings from a location in Pakistan which, almost by definition since we can't find it, has no modern communications. Dead or alive, who cares? And while reconstructing Afghanistan may be an admirable goal, I don't see that worldwide terror has risen because we haven't.

But the question posed a false challenge. Are opponents of the war obliged to devise more effective positive actions? I don't think the alternatives mentioned were really dependent on Iraq. For instance, we haven't found bin Laden because we haven't invaded Pakistan to find him. The reasons not to do so are the same with or without Iraq.

The alternative to invading Iraq was not finding bin Laden. The alternative to invading Iraq was not invading Iraq. It was clear how we could contain his threat; ongoing inspections. We would have done just as well in preventing terror attacks, probably better, and it would have been a lot cheaper than half a trillion dollars.

The Arab League solves Iraq? Not likely.

Milton Viorst, writing today in the International Herald Tribune, suggests that we might get ourselves out of Iraq with the assistance of the Arab League. He cites the "successful" end of the Lebanese civil war in the late 80's as evidence that it can be done.

Dream on! The most intractable problem working against a peaceful, united Iraq is Kurdistan. The Kurds are not Arabs. They are distinctly unhappy with having been kept in an Arab-dominated country, so they are most unlikely to view the Arab League as a legitimate power broker. It seems necessary to say this over and over; they have what they want, which is de facto separation, and they have the military means to retain it. There is never again going to be a united Iraq with the Kurds accepting "majority rule" over more than some nominal aspect of their life.

Andrew Sullivan has the bright idea that all we need is to "seal the borders" with Syria and Iran. The administration officials with whom he speaks say it can't be done, but Sullivan knows better. He knows this, we presume, based on the vast expertise in military operations that he developed as an editor of the New Republic. We have a gung-ho military in this country, and when they say they can't do something, I'm inclined to credit them.

The pattern, however, is familiar. When people talk us into a war that we're supposed to be able to win easily, and then we can't, they start to say that all we need to do is X. This doesn't mean that X is their final demand. If we did X and it was not enough, they would tell us that all we needed was Y. Or Z. Always something more.

Then when the dust settles, they'll pontificate that we lost the war because we didn't have the "will to win." It's an intellectually bankrupt strategy, harking back to Vietnam.

Speaking of Vietnam, Sullivan shares with us the news from Iraq that our troops are happy and confident, based in part on a 20:1 kill ratio. General Westmoreland must be turning in his grave. Twenty to one was roughly what we achieved in Vietnam. Which was a victory, right?

Pat Robertson Warns Dover, Pennsylvania

The word has come from Pat Robertson that Dover had better look out. They've voted out the pro-creationism (masquerading as Intelligent Design) school board members and God is pissed. As Robertson put it, "God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever."

In other words, God is tolerant and loving but not infinitely tolerant and loving. Dunno. That sounds to me like it's starting down a slippery theological slope.

On a more practical note, Robertson is ripping away the fig leaf that Intelligent Design was anything except an effort to introduce Christian theology into public schools. If it weren't, why would he be invoking the wrath of God? It was rather funny when one of the defeated pro-ID board members said that the issue had absolutely nothing to do with religion and that this was merely a misconception on the part of its opponents.

Indian Congress is Corrupt! This is News?

The Volcker Report on the Iraq Food-for-Oil program has discovered that high officials in India profited privately from arrangements that also benefited Saddam Hussein personally in ways not envisioned when the program was established. The foreign minister Natwar Singh seems to be singled out.

The foreign press is understandably isn't paying much attention to this. Everyone in India knows that Congress is corrupt, top to bottom, stem to stern, except for a few unrepresentative individuals. The only reason that this is a big story in India is that it comes from sources that are going to be difficult to impeach. Not that they won't try. Narwar Singh's response has been to attack Volcker and the UN, and wrap himself in the Congress' history in the Independence movement.

It would have been astounding if a program like this had not involved corruption. Corruption is the standard modus operandi throughout the world. Billions of dollars were moving around either through official government channels or with government approval, and in much of the world there simply wouldn't be non-corrupt options available.

Relatively clean and efficient government is a very recent phenomenon and is still limited to the nations with advanced economies. And not uniformly even there, as we are likely to discover as investigations of the New Orleans levees bring things to light.

Why the Pakistan Earthquake Doesn't Move Us

President Musharraf is reported in the Statesman to be ready to slow down the purchase of F-16 fighters from the U.S. in order to handle relief and reconstruction after the earthquake. He had been planning to buy 75 planes for $3 billion, which works out to $40 million each. Our government says this is OK, because Pakistan is our ally in the war on terror.

F-16's in the war on terror? What exactly does that mean? The only possible threat for which such aircraft would be appropriate would be India. China at the outside. Certainly not Osama bin Laden.

But leaving aside the question of how Pakistan spends its own meager resources, it does appear that the world is not rushing to send aid. I can think of many reasons. One is that the Indonesian tsunami victims included Westerners. No doubt about it. We are more sympathetic when our fellow countrymen are involved. Call it racist or whatever, but it's a fact of human nature.

But I think there are two other factors in play. One is the sense from westerners that maybe the Arabs should take care of this one. The amount by which the price of oil exceeds the prices which OPEC says it would like to see (although that itself seems to be climbing upwards) is at least $20/barrel. Nearly the entire amount that the UN is trying to obtain could be provided by OPEC with the excess earnings it receives in one day.

But the other is that Pakistan simply doesn't present a sympathetic picture. George Bush may regard Pakistan as an ally, but ordinary people watching TV aren't going to see that. Osama is still probably hiding out in Pakistan. The country doesn't protect its own women from gang rapes "for honor." Its Shiites and Sunnis attack one another in their mosques. In the midst all this, Pakistan-based terrorists killed dozens of innocent civilians in Delhi.

I think I reflect the views of a lot of people when I say I just don't especially like these people. Anyone with a hundred million odd citizens must be dealt with, but except by the most cynical calculations, Pakistan is not an ally of Western nations, the ones who have kept their wallets largely shut after this disaster.

Having said that, cynical calculations are appropriate for foreign policy decisions and one should be made here. We are flushing billions through Iraq as we try to win their hearts and minds. For a few hundred million, we could ensure that the Pakistani countryside is littered with cartons reading, "aid provided by the American people," for years to come. The illusion that American care about the sufferings of ordinary Pakistanis, even if untrue, would bring our country more lasting benefit than blasting flat a dozen intransigent Fallujahs. Cheaper, too.

We're getting better in Iraq, says the Pentagon

The New York Times reported today that the October death toll for Americans in Iraq was 92, the fourth highest on record. Most deaths are roadside bombs these days, which the insurgents have become much more adroit at producing. That's true, say the military spokesmen, but don't worry. We're getting better at countering this threat.

Let's do a reality check. If we're getting better at this, why are we losing more soldiers. If we're being successful in disrupting the influx of foreign fighters, why are there just as many of them. If we've pacified Fallujah, why can't we enter the city except in armored vehicles? If we've broken the back of the insurgency, why are they still standing. If they are in their final throes, ...

This is starting to sound all too reminiscent of Viet Nam.