Impeaching Bush

Foreign Policy is running a web-only story on their website titled The Case Against George W. Bush. Go read it. To me, this signifies that the Washington political establishment, the constructors of conventional wisdom, now believe that whether or not to impeach is a legitimate debate.

One of the key problems in impeaching Bush is the question of what to impeach him for - his list of misdeeds, lies and political crimes is so long it will be difficult to pick a single issue out of the mix to focus on. Elizabeth Holtzman (the author of the FP piece) picks two. The strongest legal case is the warrantless NSA wiretapping. The strongest political case is the war in Iraq, specifically the claim about uranium from Niger. It all comes down to the clause from article 2, section 3 of the Constitution:

he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed

Difficult to do when you have John Yoo legitimizing that voice inside your head that tells you you're above the law.

Brzezinski's latest Op-Ed

Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote an Op-Ed in yesterday's Washington Post titled "Terrorized by 'War on Terror': How a Three-Word Mantra has Undermined America." It is worth reading in full, but I'd just like to add a comment to his concluding paragraph.

Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, "Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia"? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions.

It makes me sad that a young 'un like me is more cynical than 79 year old Brzezinski. Brzezinski (that name is a pain in the ass to type) refers to Roosevelt's first inaugural address ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"), and a "calm" America winning the Cold War with a "quiet persistence." Yet when I think of American traditions, I think of COINTELPRO and wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr., of the "missile gap," of the Red Scares, of misguided CIA interventions in Latin America and Iran, of "Evil Empire," and of the domino theory.
Paranoia has been a constant in American foreign policy. This was somewhat more understandable when facing five million Soviet soldiers and ten thousand nuclear weapons. Now that our enemies are hiding in caves, and our "vigilance" serves no security-related purpose, it's less understandable. Maybe the problem is that we've been too true to our traditions, and that we need to change them. A new kind of politics! Too bad I don't think Obama's the guy to get us there.

"Distinguished Practitioner"

I just got an email from Georgetown:

*Doug Feith, Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy*

*Fall 2007 Course*

The Security Studies Program has been awarded six seats in Prof. Feith's Fall 2007 course, which will be held on Wednesdays from 3:15 - 5:05 pm. This course may be used to satisfy the elective requirements for a free elective. Those interested should email [administrator's name and email] by Thursday, March 28 at noon. We will select students based on seniority to fill the seats. In the case of a tie, we will break the tie using a lottery. Placement winners will be notified by email by 5 pm on Friday, March 29.

*Class title: /National Security Policy of the Bush Administration – INAF-650/*

Course description:
Coming soon…

I'm sure "Distinguished Practitioner" Doug Feith will lead a totally unbiased look at the Bush Administration's National Security Policy. Really makes me proud of my school. Colbert's take:

"If you do something illegal, you can go to jail. If you do something inappropriate, you can go teach at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University."

When it rains, it pours

A slew of scandals have hit the news lately that would make President Bush sweat if he actually read newspapers.

Scooter Libby found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. Remember when Bush promised to restore "honor and dignity" to the White House in 2000? Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame's civil suit against Libby, Cheney, Rove and Armitage is also coming up soon.
By the way, who knew that Scooter Libby wrote a book filled with prostitution, pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia? I can't find the New Yorker article online, but this is from the google cache of Close Reading Dept. Scooter's Sex Shocker, by Lauren Collins:

Other sex scenes are less conventional. Where his Republican predecessors can seem embarrassingly awkward—the written equivalent of trying to cop a feel while pinning on a a corsage—Libby is unabashed:
"At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest."
And, finally:
"He asked if they should fuck the deer."
The answer, reader, is yes.

Anyway, back to Bush's scandals:

Walter Reed hospitals found in deplorable shape. People are getting fired left and right, including the commander of the hospital, Maj. General Weightman, his replacement, Kevin Kiley, and the Secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey. Bush portrays still himself as Mr. Support the Troops.

A slew of U.S. attorneys are fired because they didn't engage in partisan investigations. David Iglesias, one of the fired attorneys from New Mexico, says that Representative Heather Wilson and Senator Pete Domenici, both Republicans, both pressured him to finish investigations of Democrats in time for November elections. A clause slipped in to the second installment of the Patriot Act by a staffer of Senator Arlen Specter, without the Senator's knowledge, allows the Department of Justice to replace U.S. attorneys with "temporary" replacements that serve indefinitely without Senate confirmation.

The FBI's use of National Security Letters is riddled with errors and has no oversight. This is probably the least surprising of all of them, given that Bush explicitly said in a signing statement attached to the Patriot Act that the executive can do whatever it wants as long as they can tangentially relate it to national security.

Mark Klein, former AT&T employee who went public a little while ago about the NSA installing secret rooms in phone companies' buildings in order to suck up all the data that passes through there, had an ABC Nightline feature on him and the story. The new bit of news is that the L.A Times editor killed the story because the documents Klein supplied were too technical and he "could not figure out what was going on."

Two guys are suing the NSA for wiretapping them. While the NSA has been wiretapping everybody, it's difficult to establish standing in court because you can't prove that you specifically been harmed or wiretapped. Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor, two lawyers in Oregon, were shown Treasury Dept. papers with their phone logs on them, evidence they can use in court to establish standing.

A lot of this stuff has to do with the Department of Justice. Attorney General Gonzales might be on his way out (or so I can dream). Senator Specter is pissed, saying "One day there will be a new attorney general, maybe sooner rather than later." Maybe Specter is just pissed that he got hoodwinked by his own staffer in that business about replacing U.S. attorneys.

What if World War 3 had happened?

I grew up in a suburb of Boston, northwest of the city. It was near Hanscom Air Force base, as well as Lincoln Labs and the headquarters of Raytheon. Thus, if the US and USSR had started flinging ICBMs at each other, my house definitely would have been glowing. But I always used to wonder exactly how everyone I knew would have died. Would our house have survived the initial blast long enough to burn in the massive firestorms that follow the nuclear blast? Would we have lasted long enough to die from radiation poisoning? Luckily a rather morbid individual named Eric Meyer created a Google Maps tool to map the effects of nuclear explosions. And, assuming a yield of 550 kilotons from a Soviet SS-19, my house would have been destroyed in the initial blast. Click this link to see the map.

On reading the map: Everything in the smallest circle would be flat. The next smallest circle represents 5 PSI, that means that most buildings that aren't blast-resistant would be destroyed. My old house falls in the outer area of that region. Since it's made of wood, we can safely say that my house would have been flattened in WW3.

Have a nice day.

Women's pro soccer is back!

A women's pro soccer league is set to launch in 2008 with 6 teams, expanding to 8 in 2009. The first 6 teams will be in Los Angeles, Dallas, St. Louis, Chicago, Washington, and one location to be determined. They'll be partnering with MLS teams... which makes you wonder whether ever-present rumors of the Kansas City Wizards moving to St. Louis might be true - otherwise the St. Louis team would have no team to partner with.

And now for the obligatory (when talking about American women's soccer) Brandi Chastain picture.

The narrative in action

Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman has an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal today. The closing line is:

However tired, however frustrated, however angry we may feel, we must remember that our forces in Iraq carry America's cause--the cause of freedom--which we abandon at our peril.

That's the basic narrative that Michael Vlahos talks about in his piece in the American Conservative that I wrote about yesterday. In the rest of his OpEd, Lieberman basically accuses Democrats of "undermining General Petraeus before he has been in Iraq for even a month" and argues that Congress shouldn't talk about Iraq until this summer, by which General Petraeus says he'll know whether or not success is possible.

In terms of Lieberman's credibility, it's useful to compare his recent piece to his November 29, 2005 piece, also in the Wall Street Journal. Glenn Greenwald sums it up:

How can Joe Lieberman claim today that we previously lacked sufficient troop strength to hold neighborhoods after they were cleared, when he insisted a year ago that we were holding neighborhoods -- he saw it himself -- and that we were therefore on the verge of success?

The same basic question of credibility can be asked of a majority of columnists and pundits today, from Bill Kristol to Tom Friedman.

Two interesting articles

The Fall of Modernity, by Michael Vlahos, in The American Conservative

If God is talking to you, too, Mr. Cameron - don't listen, by Michael Portillo, in the Sunday Times

Michael Vlahos outlines the narrative Bush has constructed in the Global War on Terror/the Long War/the existential struggle for civilizations of the United States versus some guys in a cave:

In the president’s own words, it is nothing less than “the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history,” pitting “progress” and “freedom” against a “mortal danger to all humanity,” the “enemy of civilization.” Moreover, “the call of history has come to the right country,” and “the defense of freedom is worth the sacrifice.” Ultimately the “evil ones” will be destroyed, and “this great country will lead the world to safety, security, and peace,” a millennial world where “free peoples will own the future.”

He then highlights the three key weaknesses of this narrative:

First, the American war narrative rejects modernity’s future constituents: its message is that we are foreclosing on them. We do this knowing that American modernity cannot long survive repossessing its promise of a universal vision for humankind.
Second, American modernity loses authority because our war promotes alternative and resistant communities. Demonizing them elevates them, and their new stature creates competing alternatives to modernity.
Third, the American war narrative shows modernity helpless in its own defense. Military failure becomes a literal stripping of our world authority, actually pushing the global future away from us.

Portillo's column in the Sunday Times shows what happens when leaders drink their own Kool-Aid and believe this narrative. Tony Blair, who was seen in the 1990s as a reasonable fellow, is now rightly seen as a total nutcase who is responsible for British soldiers staying and dying in Iraq "because Mr Blair finds it too embarrassing to end what has become a symbolic presence and withdraw them." He also spent $30,000 on psychics to try to find bin Ladin and Iraqi WMD. He, like Bush, cared more about what God thought about invading Iraq than his electorate.

It should be absolutely unacceptable for any politician in a democracy to justify policy based on what voices they hear in their head. It's disappointing that nobody in the U.S. media talks about this (you'll notice almost all the links are to the British press). To me, Bush and Blair's obsession with Christianity shows two things:

1) There's no conscious effort to create a narrative or information strategy that will favor the United States over al Qaeda. The United States accepts al Qaeda's and Sam Huntington's "clash of civilizations" narrative naturally, apparently partly due to the religious faith of our leaders. The lack of a coherent information strategy is something repeatedly raised by guys like John Nagl and David Kilcullen. Maybe that failing is due to the fact that, on the core issue of "what is the conflict between the West and al Qaeda all about", some of our leaders actually agree with al Qaeda's viewpoint. (Administration officials and ideologues have made Osama bin Laden’s job much easier. “You don’t play to the enemy’s global information strategy of making it all one fight,” Kilcullen said.)

2) It also shows that either deterrence is falsely linked with rationality, or that deterrence is a myth. After all, a leader who believes that he's John Belushi on a mission from God is hardly "rational" in the traditional sense. Crazy leaders aren't particular to Bush or the United States - Reagan had his astrologers and psychics, Mao was usually high on barbiturates, Hitler did speed and cocaine on a daily basis. Reagan and Mao both successfully practiced deterrence. So, given that the "irrationality" of Saddam was a major factor given for why we had to invade Iraq, because he couldn't be deterred, and that irrationality is also given as reason to invade Iran in the future, perhaps we should reexamine whether deterrence is based on a rational cost-benefit calculation, or a simple unreasoning terror of unknowable consequences.

Giuliani

Why is Giuliani taken seriously as a Presidential candidate? Oh right, he was mayor when something bad happened in his city.

Sometimes the Onion sums up everything perfectly.

Read the Mahablog for stuff you should know about Giuliani if you are considering voting for him. Parts one and two.

Interesting poll

Gallup just did a poll asking people whether they would vote for a Catholic, a Mormon, a Jew, a Black person, a Hispanic, a woman, etc. Here's the data:

If Your Party Nominated A Generally Would You Be Comfortable
In Voting Well-Qualified Candidate For WH '08 For A WH
'08er Who Was ___,  Would You Vote For That Person?   
                                     
                         Yes  No                 
Catholic                  95%  4%                          
Black                     94   5  
Jewish                    92   7   
A woman                   88  11        
Hispanic                  87  12   
Mormon                    72  24 
Married for third time    67  30  
72 years old              57  42
A homosexual              55  43   
An atheist                45  53 

Apparently there are 159,630,450 Americans who would never vote for me for President based purely on my lack of religious faith. To me it's strange that the most people would never consider voting for an atheist, yet atheists aren't historically as persecuted as gays, Jews, or a lot of the groups in that list; gays, Jews, blacks, etc. have been murdered for being gay, Jewish or black, but I'm unaware of any of that happening to atheists.
I am reminded that, in terms of national politics, we have Catholic, Jewish, black, Hispanic, female, Mormon, divorced, gay and old Congressional Representatives, but no atheists yet. I'm disappointed they didn't ask about Muslims. That would be a fascinating data point to track over time.