Today’s posting is short on input from Wild Bill. Instead you are referred to two articles from the Washington Post and one from the Boston Globe that are at once among the most interesting and frightening to date on this presidency.
The first, from the Post, appeared buried on page A-18. It reports on serious thinking among defense strategists on the end game in Iraq. Serious thinkers in the defense establishment are beginning to see only two likely outcomes in that beleaguered nation, partition and civil war. While neither of these options is new, that the military is now considering what was just months ago unthinkable is saddening. Not long ago, this article would have drawn swift condemnation by both the president and DOD Secretary Rumsfeld. I await their reaction.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901142.html
The second, also from the Post, is a column by Robert Kagan that shatters the neocon myth that we can simply snap our fingers – or saddle up our cavalry – and enforce the certain march toward democracy in the world. China and Russia are not only not falling in line with the failed notion; they are actively working against it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042801987.html
The final article from the Globe is perhaps the most frightening. This long piece by Charlie Savage describes the systematic grab for power by the Bush administration. While I have been less paranoid than many over this obvious trend to strengthen the presidency at the expense of the other branches, Savage has carefully researched the subject and lays it out chapter and verse. While a multi-page article, I found it riveting and recommend it highly.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/04/30/bush_challenges_hundreds_of_laws/
Boy, Bush is diving deep and bottom feeding as he seeks his place in presidential history. It’s frightening what he’s wrought in five and a half years.
Happy reading,
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Had Enough? Vote Democratic!
Had Enough? Vote Democratic!
Since founding this blog almost two years ago, I’ve been pounding on my readers to vote every Republican out of office in 2006 and 2008. Back in 1946, a fellow named Karl Frost coined a question and the answer that turned into gold for the Republicans in Massachusetts: “Had enough? Vote Republican!” It worked.
An op-ed in today’s New York Times retells the tale and it is instructive for our time and another party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/opinion/29roemer.html?ex=1146974400&en=959dc0adf170ba20&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Iraq! Had enough? Vote Democratic?
Tax cuts for the rich and lower wages for the middle class! Had enough? Vote Democratic!
An energy policy designed by and for big oil! Had enough? Vote Democratic!
Disaster preparedness by the three stooges! Had enough? Vote Democratic!
Port security by Abbot and Costello! Had enough? Vote Democratic!
Domestic wiretapping by Inspector Clouseau! Had enough? Vote Democratic!
Fed up with everything? Had enough? Vote Democratic!
Got it? Had Enough? Vote Democratic!
Blog on!
Since founding this blog almost two years ago, I’ve been pounding on my readers to vote every Republican out of office in 2006 and 2008. Back in 1946, a fellow named Karl Frost coined a question and the answer that turned into gold for the Republicans in Massachusetts: “Had enough? Vote Republican!” It worked.
An op-ed in today’s New York Times retells the tale and it is instructive for our time and another party.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/29/opinion/29roemer.html?ex=1146974400&en=959dc0adf170ba20&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Iraq! Had enough? Vote Democratic?
Tax cuts for the rich and lower wages for the middle class! Had enough? Vote Democratic!
An energy policy designed by and for big oil! Had enough? Vote Democratic!
Disaster preparedness by the three stooges! Had enough? Vote Democratic!
Port security by Abbot and Costello! Had enough? Vote Democratic!
Domestic wiretapping by Inspector Clouseau! Had enough? Vote Democratic!
Fed up with everything? Had enough? Vote Democratic!
Got it? Had Enough? Vote Democratic!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Waste Not, Want Not
Feedback from yesterday’s blog referencing the need for environmentalists to reconsider their aversion to nuclear power as the price and environmental impacts of fossil fuels become ever more burdensome held one major question, “What about the waste?” Having worked on the disposal of nuclear waste for a number of years, I know this is not a simple issue, and I can’t cover it all in one posting.
To begin, we must recognize that the waste from the more than one hundred nuclear plants operating in the country is with us to deal with, and thus far we’ve punted. The government has by necessity been dealing with the waste since the first days of the Manhattan Project and has not yet found an answer that is satisfactory to powers sufficient to resolve the problem.
It was with high hopes for an easy answer to wastes disposal that the nuclear power industry embarked on its way to producing some twenty percent of the electricity used in the United States, but half a century later, we find ourselves still debating the problem. That the spent fuel rods used to power the commercial reactors are highly radioactive and dangerous is not in dispute; they are. But the government and the industry have been unsuccessful in getting the rods moved from the plant site to temporary storage or permanent disposal sites.
After an exhaustive study of all aspects of the problem – so says the government but not nearly to the satisfaction of many environmental and political opponents – Yucca Mountain in remote Western Nevada was identified as the site of the permanent repository of high level nuclear waste. Scientists on both sides have sung of the benefits and dangers of Yucca Mountain like so many dueling banjo players. Unfortunately, the resumes of both sets are distinguished and bureaucrats and politicians have been unable to settle on the answer of safety of the site; someday I suppose the Supreme Court with its nine highly qualified nuclear engineers in black robes will have to decide among the competing arguments.
I’ve been retired for many years so some of these points may be dated, but the government is now approaching nuclear power and its waste problem with a many pronged approach. The feds and the industry are picking up support for the idea – but not the reality – of more power plants. Siting one of those behemoths takes years and is arduous in the extreme. The Not in My Back Yard cries on any such plant can be heard from the field or forest selected for the facility all the way to Capitol Hill in Washington.
To counter the waste problem, President Bush is pushing the idea of reprocessing the spent fuel. Thus, waste from all of the plants would be reprocessed and much of it would be repackaged into new rods and used over again and the total amount of waste to be dealt with would thus be reduced significantly. That sounds great until one examines the impact of this on the possible proliferation of the weapons grade residue throughout the world. Again very distinguished expert scientists have weighed in for and against the idea. Naturally, the Department of Energy and the president assure us that this is a problem that can be managed while the opponents shake their heads.
Another prong is that of temporary - but decades long - storage of the waste. Again, the Department of Energy is working on gaining approval of storage of the material in addition to the final repository at Yucca Mountain. Without a resolution yet in sight, it still appears that progress on storage is being made. But opponents rightly claim that success in this would merely postpone the day of reckoning and hesitate to approve. This leads to the `Riley Rule of Nuclear Waste Disposal.’ To paraphrase former Governor Richard Riley of South Carolina whose state is home to a low level waste disposal facility and who learned through long experience that: “Nuclear waste deposited temporarily at a site soon turns out to be permanently ensconced.” Once placed, it’s political hell to move the stuff; it’s the ultimate tar baby.
The most important thing to understand about the high level rods of nuclear waste is that despite all the rhetoric about how dangerous they are to move, store, and dispose of doing nothing is perhaps the worst course. And that’s the road the United States has taken since 1942. While this posting is about commercial waste, the dangers of doing nothing are doubly scary when it comes to military waste, but that’s a subject for another time.
The situation we have today is that more than a hundred plants in all regions of the country are producing high level waste every year. That waste is in the form of long metal rods. When they are removed from the reactors, they are as radioactive hot as hot can be and they move directly into open cooling pools on the grounds of the plants. When this process began, it was assumed that after the initial cooling period of several years, the somewhat less dangerous rods would be transferred to the ownership of the federal government and disposed of in a safe manner.
Naturally, all of the problems cited earlier and hundreds of others stopped the process, and the rods remain at the plant sites. The original pools were not designed to store the vastly increased number of spent fuel rods, and the owners of the reactors have worked overtime ever since to store the rods safely on their sites. In some cases the pools have become dangerously overcrowded and despite re-racking the rods closer and closer together, they’ve run out of room. Now the companies have had to remove the coolest but still plenty hot and dangerous fuel rods from the pools and store them in huge dry casks. These casks are highly engineered to suffer massive impacts and explosions from the outside without failing; none the less the fuel is stored without all needed protection at the plants.
The bottom line is that waste in place at the existing plants is about as dangerous as can be. The government proposes to transport that waste using the safest system they can conceive of, but this system does not meet the standards of some people, especially opponents of nuclear power. If that question is resolved to the satisfaction of the public and the courts, then nuclear power is likely to become a viable option again. With the increasing cost of fossil fuel in economic and environmental terms, more people formerly opposed to commercial use of nuclear power are looking seriously at the prospect.
The same goes for reprocessing, long term storage, and permanent disposal. With the cost, availability, and security concerns for petroleum looming before politicians and the public, it is possible that the industry will be revitalized.
BUT REMEMBER, DOING NOTHING ABOUT NUCLEAR WASTE IS THE WORST COURSE, AND THAT’S THE ONE WE’RE ON.
Sorry that this posting is so long, but I could have expanded on many of these points and will in the near future. Another article appeared in today’s Washington Post, and it’s linked here for your review.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/26/AR2006042602460.html
Blog on!
Wild Bill
To begin, we must recognize that the waste from the more than one hundred nuclear plants operating in the country is with us to deal with, and thus far we’ve punted. The government has by necessity been dealing with the waste since the first days of the Manhattan Project and has not yet found an answer that is satisfactory to powers sufficient to resolve the problem.
It was with high hopes for an easy answer to wastes disposal that the nuclear power industry embarked on its way to producing some twenty percent of the electricity used in the United States, but half a century later, we find ourselves still debating the problem. That the spent fuel rods used to power the commercial reactors are highly radioactive and dangerous is not in dispute; they are. But the government and the industry have been unsuccessful in getting the rods moved from the plant site to temporary storage or permanent disposal sites.
After an exhaustive study of all aspects of the problem – so says the government but not nearly to the satisfaction of many environmental and political opponents – Yucca Mountain in remote Western Nevada was identified as the site of the permanent repository of high level nuclear waste. Scientists on both sides have sung of the benefits and dangers of Yucca Mountain like so many dueling banjo players. Unfortunately, the resumes of both sets are distinguished and bureaucrats and politicians have been unable to settle on the answer of safety of the site; someday I suppose the Supreme Court with its nine highly qualified nuclear engineers in black robes will have to decide among the competing arguments.
I’ve been retired for many years so some of these points may be dated, but the government is now approaching nuclear power and its waste problem with a many pronged approach. The feds and the industry are picking up support for the idea – but not the reality – of more power plants. Siting one of those behemoths takes years and is arduous in the extreme. The Not in My Back Yard cries on any such plant can be heard from the field or forest selected for the facility all the way to Capitol Hill in Washington.
To counter the waste problem, President Bush is pushing the idea of reprocessing the spent fuel. Thus, waste from all of the plants would be reprocessed and much of it would be repackaged into new rods and used over again and the total amount of waste to be dealt with would thus be reduced significantly. That sounds great until one examines the impact of this on the possible proliferation of the weapons grade residue throughout the world. Again very distinguished expert scientists have weighed in for and against the idea. Naturally, the Department of Energy and the president assure us that this is a problem that can be managed while the opponents shake their heads.
Another prong is that of temporary - but decades long - storage of the waste. Again, the Department of Energy is working on gaining approval of storage of the material in addition to the final repository at Yucca Mountain. Without a resolution yet in sight, it still appears that progress on storage is being made. But opponents rightly claim that success in this would merely postpone the day of reckoning and hesitate to approve. This leads to the `Riley Rule of Nuclear Waste Disposal.’ To paraphrase former Governor Richard Riley of South Carolina whose state is home to a low level waste disposal facility and who learned through long experience that: “Nuclear waste deposited temporarily at a site soon turns out to be permanently ensconced.” Once placed, it’s political hell to move the stuff; it’s the ultimate tar baby.
The most important thing to understand about the high level rods of nuclear waste is that despite all the rhetoric about how dangerous they are to move, store, and dispose of doing nothing is perhaps the worst course. And that’s the road the United States has taken since 1942. While this posting is about commercial waste, the dangers of doing nothing are doubly scary when it comes to military waste, but that’s a subject for another time.
The situation we have today is that more than a hundred plants in all regions of the country are producing high level waste every year. That waste is in the form of long metal rods. When they are removed from the reactors, they are as radioactive hot as hot can be and they move directly into open cooling pools on the grounds of the plants. When this process began, it was assumed that after the initial cooling period of several years, the somewhat less dangerous rods would be transferred to the ownership of the federal government and disposed of in a safe manner.
Naturally, all of the problems cited earlier and hundreds of others stopped the process, and the rods remain at the plant sites. The original pools were not designed to store the vastly increased number of spent fuel rods, and the owners of the reactors have worked overtime ever since to store the rods safely on their sites. In some cases the pools have become dangerously overcrowded and despite re-racking the rods closer and closer together, they’ve run out of room. Now the companies have had to remove the coolest but still plenty hot and dangerous fuel rods from the pools and store them in huge dry casks. These casks are highly engineered to suffer massive impacts and explosions from the outside without failing; none the less the fuel is stored without all needed protection at the plants.
The bottom line is that waste in place at the existing plants is about as dangerous as can be. The government proposes to transport that waste using the safest system they can conceive of, but this system does not meet the standards of some people, especially opponents of nuclear power. If that question is resolved to the satisfaction of the public and the courts, then nuclear power is likely to become a viable option again. With the increasing cost of fossil fuel in economic and environmental terms, more people formerly opposed to commercial use of nuclear power are looking seriously at the prospect.
The same goes for reprocessing, long term storage, and permanent disposal. With the cost, availability, and security concerns for petroleum looming before politicians and the public, it is possible that the industry will be revitalized.
BUT REMEMBER, DOING NOTHING ABOUT NUCLEAR WASTE IS THE WORST COURSE, AND THAT’S THE ONE WE’RE ON.
Sorry that this posting is so long, but I could have expanded on many of these points and will in the near future. Another article appeared in today’s Washington Post, and it’s linked here for your review.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/26/AR2006042602460.html
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
New Nukes Now
Debate over the last several weeks during which gasoline prices soared past $3.00 has pretty well fixed in the public mind the notion that the cheap energy party is over. This is not to say that gasoline prices will not retreat from time to time but that the trend is and ever will be upward. The purpose of this posting is to skewer anti-tax Republicans and kick more than a few green butts.
Since the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, all thoughtful analysts knew this day was coming. That it might have held off for another decade or so is about all the wiggle room available for those resisting tighter energy conservation standards or some form of energy taxes. But the day is here with a vengeance and we can do nothing about our failure to prepare as we should have other than to whine as the numbers on the pump whirr past $30.00 each time we feed old Dobbin.
Democrats were the party of taxation and every time one of the poor fools stepped up to the plate with the notion that we should raise gasoline taxes by fifty cents or a dollar a gallon, the jackass was laughed at by our Republican supply side friends and the tax and spend liberal had to recant or face defeat.
But the market does not back down in the face of such chuckling and is a far harder task master. And it’s too late for a fifty cent boost in gas prices; the McMansions and Hummers have all been built, bought and stocked. The spaces to be heated and cooled are enormous and the number of people occupying them is miniscule. The distances to employment are long and the thirst of the Sherman tanks protecting Mom and Dick and Jane as they cruise to ball games is equal to that of camels after long desert crossings.
We’ve got the president finally pounding on the oil barons. Republicans who readily bowed, scraped and nodded knowingly as the royals explained the nature of markets for simpleton Democrat lawmakers are now seeking cover by scapegoating their former heroes. The barons and their American automobile manufacturing counterparts are now the ones proclaiming everything is beyond their control. Of course, they led the cavalry in outflanking the greens who sought such crimes as taxes on energy.
To satisfy the bloodlust, the barons will have to retire a few more front men to lives of luxury in order to get past the months leading up to the November election so that a couple of more marginal Republican seats in Congress can be saved, but the ousted oilmen can lick their wounds as they sail their energy efficient fifty foot sail boats across Nantucket Sound. They can lament their fate and console themselves by restating to their plutocrat friends just how ignorant the voters are.
As for the greens, they’re against everything that isn’t `natural’. How quaint. Every small break in their ranks by a member who even hints that the community ought to revisit its revulsion of nuclear power brings forth odious comparisons with Benedict Arnold. Well they damn well better get with the nukes. Renewable energy will take a generation to ease our pain in the market, and cheap energy will not be coming from any corn field now or ever. Cheap is done! Finished! Alternate energy is going to be expensive and will come on line only as the price of petroleum continues toward the stratosphere.
Stories on nuclear power are surfacing with greater regularity these days, and I’m linking to one from today’s New York Times. It takes a decade or more to build a plant, so those who are opposed to such sitings better begin to examine their opposition to these facilities before the price of power slows our economy and the emissions from the coal fired behemoths further raise the hackles of our green friends.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/opinion/26sweet.html?ex=1146715200&en=f0552a9cdc5f4e1f&ei=5070&emc=eta1
We’ve got three hundred million people just beginning to realize that we’re facing a long painful switch away from cheap oil and toward EXPENSIVE alternatives. Our economy cannot sustain purism from right or left. We have to have reasonable solutions as we become conscious of what the hard left and right have done to us.
Vote against the Republicans in the fall and against left leaning Democrats thereafter. Divided centrist government is an absolute must as the world careers wildly beyond our control.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Since the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, all thoughtful analysts knew this day was coming. That it might have held off for another decade or so is about all the wiggle room available for those resisting tighter energy conservation standards or some form of energy taxes. But the day is here with a vengeance and we can do nothing about our failure to prepare as we should have other than to whine as the numbers on the pump whirr past $30.00 each time we feed old Dobbin.
Democrats were the party of taxation and every time one of the poor fools stepped up to the plate with the notion that we should raise gasoline taxes by fifty cents or a dollar a gallon, the jackass was laughed at by our Republican supply side friends and the tax and spend liberal had to recant or face defeat.
But the market does not back down in the face of such chuckling and is a far harder task master. And it’s too late for a fifty cent boost in gas prices; the McMansions and Hummers have all been built, bought and stocked. The spaces to be heated and cooled are enormous and the number of people occupying them is miniscule. The distances to employment are long and the thirst of the Sherman tanks protecting Mom and Dick and Jane as they cruise to ball games is equal to that of camels after long desert crossings.
We’ve got the president finally pounding on the oil barons. Republicans who readily bowed, scraped and nodded knowingly as the royals explained the nature of markets for simpleton Democrat lawmakers are now seeking cover by scapegoating their former heroes. The barons and their American automobile manufacturing counterparts are now the ones proclaiming everything is beyond their control. Of course, they led the cavalry in outflanking the greens who sought such crimes as taxes on energy.
To satisfy the bloodlust, the barons will have to retire a few more front men to lives of luxury in order to get past the months leading up to the November election so that a couple of more marginal Republican seats in Congress can be saved, but the ousted oilmen can lick their wounds as they sail their energy efficient fifty foot sail boats across Nantucket Sound. They can lament their fate and console themselves by restating to their plutocrat friends just how ignorant the voters are.
As for the greens, they’re against everything that isn’t `natural’. How quaint. Every small break in their ranks by a member who even hints that the community ought to revisit its revulsion of nuclear power brings forth odious comparisons with Benedict Arnold. Well they damn well better get with the nukes. Renewable energy will take a generation to ease our pain in the market, and cheap energy will not be coming from any corn field now or ever. Cheap is done! Finished! Alternate energy is going to be expensive and will come on line only as the price of petroleum continues toward the stratosphere.
Stories on nuclear power are surfacing with greater regularity these days, and I’m linking to one from today’s New York Times. It takes a decade or more to build a plant, so those who are opposed to such sitings better begin to examine their opposition to these facilities before the price of power slows our economy and the emissions from the coal fired behemoths further raise the hackles of our green friends.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/opinion/26sweet.html?ex=1146715200&en=f0552a9cdc5f4e1f&ei=5070&emc=eta1
We’ve got three hundred million people just beginning to realize that we’re facing a long painful switch away from cheap oil and toward EXPENSIVE alternatives. Our economy cannot sustain purism from right or left. We have to have reasonable solutions as we become conscious of what the hard left and right have done to us.
Vote against the Republicans in the fall and against left leaning Democrats thereafter. Divided centrist government is an absolute must as the world careers wildly beyond our control.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Scared Silly
Self analysis is extremely difficult. My great interest in life has been some combination of public policy and politics. Born in the depths of The Great Depression in a working class Irish family in a very ethnic enclave in Brockton, Massachusetts, I look back and understand how Franklin Roosevelt came to be my first non-familial hero. The president could do no wrong as far as those living under our roof were concerned, and the adoration of Roosevelt by my family and neighbors was the prime motivating force in my career choices and it still impels me, however faintly.
After a lifetime of serving in the public sector at virtually every level of government in legislative and executive positions and even having faced voters quite a few times, I must say that with all his warts, FDR still holds up for me as one of our greatest presidents and politicians. Despite this regard, over the years since he passed I have moved along political spectrum, mostly away from the liberalism that was the religion of our household. Those whose knowledge of the Depression and W.W. II is derived from books – now the vast majority of Americans – have the almost impossible task of understanding the angst of those two periods and the leadership and comfort delivered by Roosevelt to a frightened people and how hard it was to leave the affiliation.
Being a person impelled to action rather than thought, my drift in political philosophy over the half a century of adulthood was gradual and never straight line. During the Johnson administration, it became obvious to me that the economy could not – despite the president’s assertion – support both guns and butter. LBJ’s aggressive spending on both the Vietnam War and his massive Great Society program did not ring true and despite my warm personal feelings for the president, I began my drift toward conservatism.
Over that same time frame, I very gradually came to believe that the Vietnam War was a fiasco and reluctantly became openly opposed to it. Again, the vast majority adults cannot remember the social conflict of that time. The bitter feelings of people on both sides of that issue will not disappear until all of us who were active are dead, still decades in the future for many.
Despite the personal failings of Richard Nixon, I became more conservative under his administration and finally was able to vote for a Republican when Gerry Ford ran against Jimmy Carter. I perceived that Reagan was to my right in politics, but I voted for him twice. In Bush the elder, I found what I thought to be a moderate comfort zone and was sorry when he lost to Clinton whom I mistook for a throwback to FDR and LBJ. In retrospect, Clinton’s centrism was very much in the Ford/Bush 41 arena.
I welcomed the opportunity to vote for George W. Bush, and I was satisfied with the bland direction of his leadership during the initial months of his presidency, especially with his bold defiance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But as we moved to prepare to invade Iraq, I was horrified. The rationale for the attack and the dealings with the U.N. during the weeks leading up to the war caused me to completely break with Bush and the Republicans.
Obviously, those who have followed this blog for any length of time understand my arguments, so I will not bore them with a lengthy restatement. Newcomers may scan the archives posted on the left as they see fit.
We are now in the midst of rapidly heating conflicts with Iran and North Korea over the development of nuclear weapons. Pyongyang has an arsenal of some size already, and we are extremely concerned with the words of defiance emanating from Tehran. I haven’t blogged much about this situation because I don’t have much of a fix on the situation and I’m scared silly.
Since breaking with the Republicans, I’ve found myself bouncing around the political spectrum like a billiard ball and can’t believe some of the people I’ve been in agreement with from time to time. I never considered myself an arch conservative, yet I often find common cause with Pat Buchanan, and, while I supported and voted for John Kerry, I was uncomfortable with his stand on Iraq until the past couple of weeks.
In today’s Boston Globe, Peter Canellos describes how the right wing of the Republican Party is providing far more of the braking action on Bush’s stridency toward Iraq than are the Democrats, and I agree with them. Yet for all my life I have proclaimed my disgust with those I perceive to be isolationists. It’s an interesting article and here is a link.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/25/bushs_right_flank_balks_at_iran_saber_rattling/
At the end of the day, I’m left with the queasy feeling that Bush has no philosophy and that he’s a messianic character who believes he’s doing God’s work. I worry about people who are so sure that what they’re doing is good, mostly because I don’t share their confidence. Yeah, self analysis is difficult, but George Bush’ll drive you to it.
Anxious in Annandale,
Blog on!
Wild Bill
After a lifetime of serving in the public sector at virtually every level of government in legislative and executive positions and even having faced voters quite a few times, I must say that with all his warts, FDR still holds up for me as one of our greatest presidents and politicians. Despite this regard, over the years since he passed I have moved along political spectrum, mostly away from the liberalism that was the religion of our household. Those whose knowledge of the Depression and W.W. II is derived from books – now the vast majority of Americans – have the almost impossible task of understanding the angst of those two periods and the leadership and comfort delivered by Roosevelt to a frightened people and how hard it was to leave the affiliation.
Being a person impelled to action rather than thought, my drift in political philosophy over the half a century of adulthood was gradual and never straight line. During the Johnson administration, it became obvious to me that the economy could not – despite the president’s assertion – support both guns and butter. LBJ’s aggressive spending on both the Vietnam War and his massive Great Society program did not ring true and despite my warm personal feelings for the president, I began my drift toward conservatism.
Over that same time frame, I very gradually came to believe that the Vietnam War was a fiasco and reluctantly became openly opposed to it. Again, the vast majority adults cannot remember the social conflict of that time. The bitter feelings of people on both sides of that issue will not disappear until all of us who were active are dead, still decades in the future for many.
Despite the personal failings of Richard Nixon, I became more conservative under his administration and finally was able to vote for a Republican when Gerry Ford ran against Jimmy Carter. I perceived that Reagan was to my right in politics, but I voted for him twice. In Bush the elder, I found what I thought to be a moderate comfort zone and was sorry when he lost to Clinton whom I mistook for a throwback to FDR and LBJ. In retrospect, Clinton’s centrism was very much in the Ford/Bush 41 arena.
I welcomed the opportunity to vote for George W. Bush, and I was satisfied with the bland direction of his leadership during the initial months of his presidency, especially with his bold defiance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. But as we moved to prepare to invade Iraq, I was horrified. The rationale for the attack and the dealings with the U.N. during the weeks leading up to the war caused me to completely break with Bush and the Republicans.
Obviously, those who have followed this blog for any length of time understand my arguments, so I will not bore them with a lengthy restatement. Newcomers may scan the archives posted on the left as they see fit.
We are now in the midst of rapidly heating conflicts with Iran and North Korea over the development of nuclear weapons. Pyongyang has an arsenal of some size already, and we are extremely concerned with the words of defiance emanating from Tehran. I haven’t blogged much about this situation because I don’t have much of a fix on the situation and I’m scared silly.
Since breaking with the Republicans, I’ve found myself bouncing around the political spectrum like a billiard ball and can’t believe some of the people I’ve been in agreement with from time to time. I never considered myself an arch conservative, yet I often find common cause with Pat Buchanan, and, while I supported and voted for John Kerry, I was uncomfortable with his stand on Iraq until the past couple of weeks.
In today’s Boston Globe, Peter Canellos describes how the right wing of the Republican Party is providing far more of the braking action on Bush’s stridency toward Iraq than are the Democrats, and I agree with them. Yet for all my life I have proclaimed my disgust with those I perceive to be isolationists. It’s an interesting article and here is a link.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/25/bushs_right_flank_balks_at_iran_saber_rattling/
At the end of the day, I’m left with the queasy feeling that Bush has no philosophy and that he’s a messianic character who believes he’s doing God’s work. I worry about people who are so sure that what they’re doing is good, mostly because I don’t share their confidence. Yeah, self analysis is difficult, but George Bush’ll drive you to it.
Anxious in Annandale,
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Saturday, April 22, 2006
The New Dynasties
America has always had its political dynasties. John Adams was father to John Quincy Adams. The Tafts of Ohio have wielded power in the Buckeye State and on the national stage for more than a century. The Rockefellers of New York, Arkansas, and West Virginia have combined financial and political clout for almost as long. Joe Kennedy’s offspring continue to work their magic from coast to coast. Other examples of dynasties only slightly less celebrated abound around the nation.
Two political dynasties in the news today, the Bushes and the Clintons, seem to me to be significantly different in nature than those mentioned above. While the Bush family’s power grew over the same time frame as many of these others and might well be placed in their category, I think it has morphed into something quite different from these classic dynasties. As well, the Clintons are significantly different from the old time power families, but I think they’re very much like the Bushes of recent times.
The decline of political parties and their traditional bosses has been well documented. Clearly, the role of candidates for high office, especially the presidency, has shifted over the span of the classic dynasties mentioned. No longer are the candidates selected by the party bosses; they are ambitious politicians in their own right and are seen by supporters as representing their views and having the right stuff. Money flows directly to the candidates, and the best politicians are those who can raise the most dollars.
Power follows the money further depleting the impact of the parties. All of the successful dynasties have adjusted to this reality to one degree or another and continue to wield their batons. But the Bushes and the Clintons are qualitatively different from the others. They have turned fund raising into a high art and have the mothers of all rolodexes at their finger tips.
Observing President George W. Bush over the past several weeks - and for the five years of his tenure – we see a man who gives the appearance of being entitled to his office and its trappings, not a career politician who rose through the ranks with the usual skill sets. His hero is Ronald Reagan, yet neither his policies nor his personal skills seem to emulate the great man. The Gipper was a genius of the personal touch, a man never bored by the windbags he was forced to endure. He could fly to the scene of grief or agony and engulf those whose hearts were broken and almost physically lift the pall about them.
Bush sends guests at White House state dinners home so that he may go to bed at ten o’clock. He has no talent for overcoming his boredom as those whose ideas differ from his own prattle on. Even as the President of China, the great rising power in the world, visited Washington, Dubya could barely keep his eyes open as his counterpart spoke. Hundreds of tiny instances of this behavior have been reported over the term of the administration.
As the focus of the political class moves to the 2008 election, one candidate has the inside lane cleared for clean start. With $20 million or more in her war chest, Hillary Clinton is not only the front runner for the Democratic nomination; in fact, it’s almost hers to lose. While as the wife of Bill Clinton she is clearly a derivative candidate, Senator Clinton has worked tirelessly and adroitly to show her political wares. Despite being the constant target of the right wing, she has worked hard in the Senate – and across the nation – to cross party lines and move to the political center. She shows much moxie and great talent, but she remains derivative and without being the wife of Bill Clinton would not be the senior Senator from New York.
As the Bush dynasty licks its wounds from the disaster that this presidency has become, it appears that it will be some time before another with that surname will move to the head of the line in the Republican Party. Should we as voters learn something from this calamitous regime?
How are we to fairly judge Senator Clinton? She is where she is because of her name and relationship to the former president, but she has been tireless in her efforts to show that she is worthy of occupying her post. Still like many senators she has never shown her potential for executive leadership. Her one great chance with health care came to a less than glorious conclusion, but I, for one, think the nation was not ready to deal with the problem and that no one could have done much better.
If Senator Clinton is the default candidate due to the impact of her money raising ability and to the great Clinton rolodex, will we be buying another imperfect and untested candidate? I like Mrs. Clinton and, if she is nominated, I will vote, contribute and post blogs on her behalf. I believe the Democratic candidate will – and should - win, but I’m slightly put off by how the front runner came to claim that position.
But we’re lucky in one respect, the senator didn’t get into Wellesley and Yale Law School because she was a legacy or due to her connections. I’m ready for the first woman president, and she’s already strutting her stuff for us.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Two political dynasties in the news today, the Bushes and the Clintons, seem to me to be significantly different in nature than those mentioned above. While the Bush family’s power grew over the same time frame as many of these others and might well be placed in their category, I think it has morphed into something quite different from these classic dynasties. As well, the Clintons are significantly different from the old time power families, but I think they’re very much like the Bushes of recent times.
The decline of political parties and their traditional bosses has been well documented. Clearly, the role of candidates for high office, especially the presidency, has shifted over the span of the classic dynasties mentioned. No longer are the candidates selected by the party bosses; they are ambitious politicians in their own right and are seen by supporters as representing their views and having the right stuff. Money flows directly to the candidates, and the best politicians are those who can raise the most dollars.
Power follows the money further depleting the impact of the parties. All of the successful dynasties have adjusted to this reality to one degree or another and continue to wield their batons. But the Bushes and the Clintons are qualitatively different from the others. They have turned fund raising into a high art and have the mothers of all rolodexes at their finger tips.
Observing President George W. Bush over the past several weeks - and for the five years of his tenure – we see a man who gives the appearance of being entitled to his office and its trappings, not a career politician who rose through the ranks with the usual skill sets. His hero is Ronald Reagan, yet neither his policies nor his personal skills seem to emulate the great man. The Gipper was a genius of the personal touch, a man never bored by the windbags he was forced to endure. He could fly to the scene of grief or agony and engulf those whose hearts were broken and almost physically lift the pall about them.
Bush sends guests at White House state dinners home so that he may go to bed at ten o’clock. He has no talent for overcoming his boredom as those whose ideas differ from his own prattle on. Even as the President of China, the great rising power in the world, visited Washington, Dubya could barely keep his eyes open as his counterpart spoke. Hundreds of tiny instances of this behavior have been reported over the term of the administration.
As the focus of the political class moves to the 2008 election, one candidate has the inside lane cleared for clean start. With $20 million or more in her war chest, Hillary Clinton is not only the front runner for the Democratic nomination; in fact, it’s almost hers to lose. While as the wife of Bill Clinton she is clearly a derivative candidate, Senator Clinton has worked tirelessly and adroitly to show her political wares. Despite being the constant target of the right wing, she has worked hard in the Senate – and across the nation – to cross party lines and move to the political center. She shows much moxie and great talent, but she remains derivative and without being the wife of Bill Clinton would not be the senior Senator from New York.
As the Bush dynasty licks its wounds from the disaster that this presidency has become, it appears that it will be some time before another with that surname will move to the head of the line in the Republican Party. Should we as voters learn something from this calamitous regime?
How are we to fairly judge Senator Clinton? She is where she is because of her name and relationship to the former president, but she has been tireless in her efforts to show that she is worthy of occupying her post. Still like many senators she has never shown her potential for executive leadership. Her one great chance with health care came to a less than glorious conclusion, but I, for one, think the nation was not ready to deal with the problem and that no one could have done much better.
If Senator Clinton is the default candidate due to the impact of her money raising ability and to the great Clinton rolodex, will we be buying another imperfect and untested candidate? I like Mrs. Clinton and, if she is nominated, I will vote, contribute and post blogs on her behalf. I believe the Democratic candidate will – and should - win, but I’m slightly put off by how the front runner came to claim that position.
But we’re lucky in one respect, the senator didn’t get into Wellesley and Yale Law School because she was a legacy or due to her connections. I’m ready for the first woman president, and she’s already strutting her stuff for us.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Friday, April 21, 2006
Brokeback Mountain
That Brokeback Mountain is an important film is beyond question. Having shattered the taboo of examining many aspects of homosexuality, those who made this work possible can be very proud. But just because it takes great and courageous moral and public policy positions, we must move to the next question, is it a great movie? Unfortunately for me, the answer is no.
The period movie was wonderful in depicting the culturally imposed deceptions that were encouraged upon gays in that time (1963). Many felt compelled to reject or hide their desires creating obvious tragedies as they came to grips with their sexuality. Women (and men) entered into what they perceived to be heterosexual liaisons and marriages with gays who were pretending – if only to themselves - that they might be able to reject their desires over time. The trail of broken lives of all parties was extremely well depicted.
But willing suspension of disbelief is my single most important criterion for excellence in films, and on several points Brokeback gave me problems. I found it difficult to believe that two grown men whom we come to know to have homosexual tendencies were unaware of these feelings until they were grown and thrown together over a very long slow summer of introduction. In contrast, there was no difficulty in speeding up the action in the heterosexual scenes, but the opening on the mountain seemed to take forever.
Second, no matter what the sexual orientation of those who cheat outside of their committed relationships, many are discovered with obviously devastating results. So it was in this film. But the sad and tawdry way that Ennis Del Mar is initially discovered by his wife strained credibility. I found it difficult to believe that the two lovers could not restrain themselves from groping and grinding in broad daylight in what turned out to be full view of the Mrs.
Even more difficult for me was the scene in which Ennis was finally confronted by his wife. While her outrage was palpable and both actors were extraordinary that she waited until long after the divorce to explode at him was less than convincing.
I enjoyed the film and found it very moving. That it broke much ground should be applauded. The performances were truly outstanding, and the cinematography and scenery were wonderful. The flaws I described were in the story itself. It is a film for mature audiences of any sexual orientation, and I recommend it. But it did not cross the line from craft to art for me.
Blog on!
The period movie was wonderful in depicting the culturally imposed deceptions that were encouraged upon gays in that time (1963). Many felt compelled to reject or hide their desires creating obvious tragedies as they came to grips with their sexuality. Women (and men) entered into what they perceived to be heterosexual liaisons and marriages with gays who were pretending – if only to themselves - that they might be able to reject their desires over time. The trail of broken lives of all parties was extremely well depicted.
But willing suspension of disbelief is my single most important criterion for excellence in films, and on several points Brokeback gave me problems. I found it difficult to believe that two grown men whom we come to know to have homosexual tendencies were unaware of these feelings until they were grown and thrown together over a very long slow summer of introduction. In contrast, there was no difficulty in speeding up the action in the heterosexual scenes, but the opening on the mountain seemed to take forever.
Second, no matter what the sexual orientation of those who cheat outside of their committed relationships, many are discovered with obviously devastating results. So it was in this film. But the sad and tawdry way that Ennis Del Mar is initially discovered by his wife strained credibility. I found it difficult to believe that the two lovers could not restrain themselves from groping and grinding in broad daylight in what turned out to be full view of the Mrs.
Even more difficult for me was the scene in which Ennis was finally confronted by his wife. While her outrage was palpable and both actors were extraordinary that she waited until long after the divorce to explode at him was less than convincing.
I enjoyed the film and found it very moving. That it broke much ground should be applauded. The performances were truly outstanding, and the cinematography and scenery were wonderful. The flaws I described were in the story itself. It is a film for mature audiences of any sexual orientation, and I recommend it. But it did not cross the line from craft to art for me.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Stick A Fork In Him
After all the sparks stop flying; after the generals quiet down; after all the manufactured defenses are stilled, Donald Rumsfeld will depart the scene - and shortly at that.
Rumsfeld is damaged goods. Five years of fighting for his reforms with his usual good humor towards subordinates, the media, and the Congress, and three years plus of leading the military in a disastrous war with exquisite micro-management skills, the Secretary has few defenders other than the insider claque that has to cheer him.
Break out the die stamp for the next Medal of Freedom and schedule the Pentagon parade. Don will soon announce that for the good of the president, the prosecution of the war, the transformation of the military, and his need to spend more time with his family, he is stepping down. With extreme regret and despite his personal objections, the president will reluctantly accede to a loyal subordinate’s wishes and accept his resignation.
Stick a fork in him; he’s done on all sides.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Rumsfeld is damaged goods. Five years of fighting for his reforms with his usual good humor towards subordinates, the media, and the Congress, and three years plus of leading the military in a disastrous war with exquisite micro-management skills, the Secretary has few defenders other than the insider claque that has to cheer him.
Break out the die stamp for the next Medal of Freedom and schedule the Pentagon parade. Don will soon announce that for the good of the president, the prosecution of the war, the transformation of the military, and his need to spend more time with his family, he is stepping down. With extreme regret and despite his personal objections, the president will reluctantly accede to a loyal subordinate’s wishes and accept his resignation.
Stick a fork in him; he’s done on all sides.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Is He Done Yet?
With Rummy on a spit and with his front well done, let’s check and see if he’s ready to be turned.
First, the stated reasons for going into Iraq did not pan out. There were no WMDs found and there have been no confirmations that the Saddam government was in any way in cahoots with al Qaeda. Half forgotten and now swept under the rug is the fact that we were not leading a UN authorized mission to enforce Security Council Resolutions. The enforcement action was a construct of our government and its coalition partners, especially The United Kingdom.
When the primary reasons for the preemptive war fell flat, our government and its coalition partners reached into the rhetorical kit bag and decided that democracy and freedom were the primary needs to make the world safe for those of us living in the leafy suburbs, so, with a revisionism that would make the old Politburo proud, we had toppled Saddam’s evil government in order to make the benefits of Western style democracy available to wonderful people of Iraq who were just waiting for the chance to work together like hippies talking their way through their minor differences while roasting marshmallows in front of a camp fire.
After three years of nation building while the Iraqis struggle to form a government that represents the aspirations of all of the disparate groups, a great insurgency rages – an insurgency unanticipated by the president and his top advisors.
Best guess is that we will have invested more than a trillion dollars in this adventure before we stop the checks flowing sometime in the middle of the twenty-second century. Just to drift off point for a moment, the U.S. Civil War that ended in 1865 is only now being closed out as a fiscal problem with the deaths of the last dependents of those who fought at Gettysburg and Manassas. Old veterans seem quite able to reproduce long after they forgot what they were fighting about and they leave dependents with life spans that track ordinary actuarial tables. Five generation of Americans have been born since Appomattox and still we pay.
We’ve lost many more than two thousand men and women in Iraq, a war fought because Saddam was likely to share his weapons of mass destruction with al Qaeda. No weapons – no connection. There is no sign that these deaths are likely to stop accumulating; nor is it likely that the huge number of seriously wounded that daily converges on Walter Reed Hospital will have a diminished flow. The fiscal cost of this carnage, great as it is in present and future outlays, is not nearly as important as the human impact.
While working hard – as hard as a government can ever work – to prove the original bases for war to be true, there can be no doubt that Iraq is now a hotbed of jihad against the U.S. and the West. There’s no attempt to deny that the insurgency is at least partially being fought by affiliates of al Qaeda and that these people are using Iraq as a laboratory on how to engage Western style forces with all of their technological superiority.
Early on the administration stated that we were engaging the terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq so that we would not have to engage them here at home. That’s partially true. We engaged them in Afghanistan because that’s where most of the al Qaeda terrorists were congregating. We went after them and their protectors, the Taliban government, as we damn well should have.
While the same argument was made for Iraq, it wasn’t true at the time so far as we’ve been able to determine – no WMDs, no Saddam/al Qaeda connection, but it’s sure true today. But there can be no guarantees that this argument is working out since there have been attacks in London, Madrid and elsewhere that were I a resident of a coalition nation other than the U.S. would interpret as here rather than there.
Now as we begin to turn Rummy toward his uncooked flank, he and the administration say that the general officers who put him on this spit did their foul deed not because of Iraq but because they were too rigid and didn’t like it when he tried to turn them into a lean mean fighting machine. It’s but sour grapes because they resisted Rummy. My retort to that is sort of a Bushism, “Bring ‘em on!” You bet they resisted becoming too lean a fighting machine. General Shinseki opined that Iraq was going to take a much more corpulent force to sit on the sectarian factions, and he was right.
I’m not competent to say just how lean the military should be, but I sure as hell know that we don’t have enough troops in Iraq to stop those cats from cutting off each others heads. But I don’t want to lose sight of my basic point that we should never have gone in rather than not had a sufficient force. I’m just trying poke a hole in the sour grapes argument being put forth in defense of Don. If Rummy has to go so that the president can find medieval theological manner out of this morass, so be it. Turn him over.
Wrong war, wrong reasons, wrong, wrong, wrong - that’s enough `Ws' for today.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
First, the stated reasons for going into Iraq did not pan out. There were no WMDs found and there have been no confirmations that the Saddam government was in any way in cahoots with al Qaeda. Half forgotten and now swept under the rug is the fact that we were not leading a UN authorized mission to enforce Security Council Resolutions. The enforcement action was a construct of our government and its coalition partners, especially The United Kingdom.
When the primary reasons for the preemptive war fell flat, our government and its coalition partners reached into the rhetorical kit bag and decided that democracy and freedom were the primary needs to make the world safe for those of us living in the leafy suburbs, so, with a revisionism that would make the old Politburo proud, we had toppled Saddam’s evil government in order to make the benefits of Western style democracy available to wonderful people of Iraq who were just waiting for the chance to work together like hippies talking their way through their minor differences while roasting marshmallows in front of a camp fire.
After three years of nation building while the Iraqis struggle to form a government that represents the aspirations of all of the disparate groups, a great insurgency rages – an insurgency unanticipated by the president and his top advisors.
Best guess is that we will have invested more than a trillion dollars in this adventure before we stop the checks flowing sometime in the middle of the twenty-second century. Just to drift off point for a moment, the U.S. Civil War that ended in 1865 is only now being closed out as a fiscal problem with the deaths of the last dependents of those who fought at Gettysburg and Manassas. Old veterans seem quite able to reproduce long after they forgot what they were fighting about and they leave dependents with life spans that track ordinary actuarial tables. Five generation of Americans have been born since Appomattox and still we pay.
We’ve lost many more than two thousand men and women in Iraq, a war fought because Saddam was likely to share his weapons of mass destruction with al Qaeda. No weapons – no connection. There is no sign that these deaths are likely to stop accumulating; nor is it likely that the huge number of seriously wounded that daily converges on Walter Reed Hospital will have a diminished flow. The fiscal cost of this carnage, great as it is in present and future outlays, is not nearly as important as the human impact.
While working hard – as hard as a government can ever work – to prove the original bases for war to be true, there can be no doubt that Iraq is now a hotbed of jihad against the U.S. and the West. There’s no attempt to deny that the insurgency is at least partially being fought by affiliates of al Qaeda and that these people are using Iraq as a laboratory on how to engage Western style forces with all of their technological superiority.
Early on the administration stated that we were engaging the terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq so that we would not have to engage them here at home. That’s partially true. We engaged them in Afghanistan because that’s where most of the al Qaeda terrorists were congregating. We went after them and their protectors, the Taliban government, as we damn well should have.
While the same argument was made for Iraq, it wasn’t true at the time so far as we’ve been able to determine – no WMDs, no Saddam/al Qaeda connection, but it’s sure true today. But there can be no guarantees that this argument is working out since there have been attacks in London, Madrid and elsewhere that were I a resident of a coalition nation other than the U.S. would interpret as here rather than there.
Now as we begin to turn Rummy toward his uncooked flank, he and the administration say that the general officers who put him on this spit did their foul deed not because of Iraq but because they were too rigid and didn’t like it when he tried to turn them into a lean mean fighting machine. It’s but sour grapes because they resisted Rummy. My retort to that is sort of a Bushism, “Bring ‘em on!” You bet they resisted becoming too lean a fighting machine. General Shinseki opined that Iraq was going to take a much more corpulent force to sit on the sectarian factions, and he was right.
I’m not competent to say just how lean the military should be, but I sure as hell know that we don’t have enough troops in Iraq to stop those cats from cutting off each others heads. But I don’t want to lose sight of my basic point that we should never have gone in rather than not had a sufficient force. I’m just trying poke a hole in the sour grapes argument being put forth in defense of Don. If Rummy has to go so that the president can find medieval theological manner out of this morass, so be it. Turn him over.
Wrong war, wrong reasons, wrong, wrong, wrong - that’s enough `Ws' for today.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Panic in the Puzzle Palace
There’s panic at the Pentagon and in the White House, too. Rumsfeld is under fire and there’s lots of dry tinder across the river, so President Bush rushes to the defense of his beleaguered minister and beats the bushes for other endorsements.
In a particularly strange op-ed piece entitled A General Misunderstanding in today’s New York Times retired Marine Lt. General Michael DeLong provides a backhanded slap at his former boss, Secretary Rumsfeld.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/opinion/16delong.html
Instead of merely attacking his former star studded colleagues for nipping at Don’s heels, he turns the argument around in a manner that I inferred blamed the generals and Rumsfeld, and DeLong undermines the entire Iraqi adventure as flaw filled and too risk laden from the planning stage.
Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War that I have touted so highly to my readers, took a very different tack in the Los Angeles Times op-ed piece. Bacevich sees the attacks by the generals as an effort to blame Rumsfeld for everything and to escape their own responsibility for military failures in the adventure. I found his article quite compelling.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bacevich15apr15,0,4080791.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
But my own reading of the rodent entrails – without objective basis – is that the retired general officers are attempting to assure planning for the Iranian crisis building and looming before us is far better than that done for Iraq. Seymour Hirsch’s New Yorker article this week frightened people in and out of the Pentagon, and by calling Rumsfeld on the carpet for the prewar inadequacies of the Iraq War and his subsequent micro-management is a way to slow the juggernaut that is rapidly gaining power within the administration. Rumsfeld may be but a handy target and a lightning rod against the civilian defense experts who have gained so much power in recent years; our buddies the neocons are at it again.
In any event, Rumsfeld is unlikely to be in his job at the end of this administration, and, regardless of how this revolt or squabble (you define it), the world is getting more dangerous each day. The generals don’t appreciate how Iraq was handled, and they don’t want to be in the same position if and when we take on Iran.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
In a particularly strange op-ed piece entitled A General Misunderstanding in today’s New York Times retired Marine Lt. General Michael DeLong provides a backhanded slap at his former boss, Secretary Rumsfeld.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/opinion/16delong.html
Instead of merely attacking his former star studded colleagues for nipping at Don’s heels, he turns the argument around in a manner that I inferred blamed the generals and Rumsfeld, and DeLong undermines the entire Iraqi adventure as flaw filled and too risk laden from the planning stage.
Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War that I have touted so highly to my readers, took a very different tack in the Los Angeles Times op-ed piece. Bacevich sees the attacks by the generals as an effort to blame Rumsfeld for everything and to escape their own responsibility for military failures in the adventure. I found his article quite compelling.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bacevich15apr15,0,4080791.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
But my own reading of the rodent entrails – without objective basis – is that the retired general officers are attempting to assure planning for the Iranian crisis building and looming before us is far better than that done for Iraq. Seymour Hirsch’s New Yorker article this week frightened people in and out of the Pentagon, and by calling Rumsfeld on the carpet for the prewar inadequacies of the Iraq War and his subsequent micro-management is a way to slow the juggernaut that is rapidly gaining power within the administration. Rumsfeld may be but a handy target and a lightning rod against the civilian defense experts who have gained so much power in recent years; our buddies the neocons are at it again.
In any event, Rumsfeld is unlikely to be in his job at the end of this administration, and, regardless of how this revolt or squabble (you define it), the world is getting more dangerous each day. The generals don’t appreciate how Iraq was handled, and they don’t want to be in the same position if and when we take on Iran.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Lefty Love
Moderates and independents must suffer strange bedfellows. This morning (4/15/06), a Washington Post article on liberal bloggers describes in minute detail the rage and hatred of the left. I’ve haven’t been paying attention to my southpaw pals during the long period of angst caused by my former friends on the right. But today I feel like a circus bareback rider straddling two wild steeds racing toward a blazing hoop. I see it clearly, the animals verge left and right, and I’m thrown through the conflagration to my doom.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401648.html?referrer=emailarticle
Just as I receive court papers finalizing my divorce from the right, I learn that my new love is even more outrageous than the kooks I’ve been railing against. When I was a boy – no need to remind that it was long, long ago – there was a radio soap opera with a lead in that went something like, “Can an innocent farm girl from the Midwest find happiness as the wife of…” While no innocent farm girl, I’m still shocked by the rage on both sides of the political spectrum and worry how this wild adventure will turn out.
I’ve made my speeches of denunciation and farewell to the right. Their outrageous behavior made it impossible for me to go on living under the same roof. But on my way to the bower of my new flame, I learn that Lefty Love is nothing but a smearing slime ball. What can an innocent moderate do under such awful conditions? I can’t turn back and forgive these idiots for Iraq, Katrina, port security, failed Social Security reform, and a thousand and one other blunders.
There is no other course but to proceed with the divorce and to sign a pre-nup with my loutish seducers. If the adults (so called) running the Democratic Party cannot assure that their wildly outraged hippy anarchist offspring are not brought and kept under control that as a sober and forthright adult, I will simply walk away from them as well.
Nothing brings forth the need for divided government like listening to the base of both parties.
Democrats in ’06 and ’08, Republicans in ’10. Commitment to adulthood, that’s the moderate cry – boohoo.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401648.html?referrer=emailarticle
Just as I receive court papers finalizing my divorce from the right, I learn that my new love is even more outrageous than the kooks I’ve been railing against. When I was a boy – no need to remind that it was long, long ago – there was a radio soap opera with a lead in that went something like, “Can an innocent farm girl from the Midwest find happiness as the wife of…” While no innocent farm girl, I’m still shocked by the rage on both sides of the political spectrum and worry how this wild adventure will turn out.
I’ve made my speeches of denunciation and farewell to the right. Their outrageous behavior made it impossible for me to go on living under the same roof. But on my way to the bower of my new flame, I learn that Lefty Love is nothing but a smearing slime ball. What can an innocent moderate do under such awful conditions? I can’t turn back and forgive these idiots for Iraq, Katrina, port security, failed Social Security reform, and a thousand and one other blunders.
There is no other course but to proceed with the divorce and to sign a pre-nup with my loutish seducers. If the adults (so called) running the Democratic Party cannot assure that their wildly outraged hippy anarchist offspring are not brought and kept under control that as a sober and forthright adult, I will simply walk away from them as well.
Nothing brings forth the need for divided government like listening to the base of both parties.
Democrats in ’06 and ’08, Republicans in ’10. Commitment to adulthood, that’s the moderate cry – boohoo.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Friday, April 14, 2006
No Time for Heroes
The saddest element in Iraq for me was something I never anticipated; the nature of the conflict has left little room for to reward our troops for their heroism.
My opposition was based on traditional conservative realpolitik rejection of involvement in conflicts that did not involve vital threats to the country or its allies, that did not take into account the difficulty of the resistance (in this case the tribal and sectarian divides in Iraq), and the idea that we were taking our eye off of the ball of hunting down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Since many Republicans, including the first Bush’s National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, were singing from the same hymnbook, I felt that I was in a small but not outlandish group.
As the war unfolded, I was shocked by our propaganda campaign that failed so badly in the Muslim world. Obviously, when we went into Iraq we lost credibility throughout Islam. But by failing to understand – or at least acknowledge - the nature of the opposition to our objectives, we ceded a great deal of legitimacy in that part of the world. By not granting anything beyond evil to our enemies, we gave them credibility with millions who when the attacks of 9/11 occurred were on our side or neutral.
While we are completely hostile to al Qaeda and are in a death struggle with them, by simply labeling them as evil doers and not granting them standing as an enemy with grievances, we gave them access to millions of sympathizers who might have been neutralized or won to our side. There is no doubt that there can be no compromise with al Qaeda; they are intent on killing as many Americans and Westerners as they can and on driving us from land they see as their own. But in labeling them simply evil, we strip them of their perceived legitimacy of driving the infidels (that’s us) from hallowed soil or in opposing regimes in the region that many Muslims find suspect at best.
A civilization that contains well over a billion human beings with a different mindset cannot be won over by calling those fighting in the name of their God simply evil. The vast majority of Muslims living inside and out of their recognized land do not believe in the al Qaeda agenda. But in setting up a black and white you’re with us or you’re against us scenario, the millions of Muslims who can see shades of gray are sent packing – at least sympathetically and symbolically - into the camp of our enemies.
Thus, we have vested the suicide bombers and agents of al Qaeda who die for their cause with an heroic status within that civilization that we cannot understand but that is real for a significant portion of the billion or more believers in Allah.
On our own side, the nature of the Iraq War today has left our marvelous troops with little cover. We view our service men and women as fighting against forces of evil, but the insurgency they face on a daily basis affords them little opportunity for traditional fighting. The deaths and wounding of our men and women are rarely in firefights where their mettle can be tested and rewarded. Daily, we learn that they depart from defended places and are simply blown up on their way. Driving from the compound is heroic in itself, but it doesn't show up that way anywhere. This is so sad.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
My opposition was based on traditional conservative realpolitik rejection of involvement in conflicts that did not involve vital threats to the country or its allies, that did not take into account the difficulty of the resistance (in this case the tribal and sectarian divides in Iraq), and the idea that we were taking our eye off of the ball of hunting down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Since many Republicans, including the first Bush’s National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, were singing from the same hymnbook, I felt that I was in a small but not outlandish group.
As the war unfolded, I was shocked by our propaganda campaign that failed so badly in the Muslim world. Obviously, when we went into Iraq we lost credibility throughout Islam. But by failing to understand – or at least acknowledge - the nature of the opposition to our objectives, we ceded a great deal of legitimacy in that part of the world. By not granting anything beyond evil to our enemies, we gave them credibility with millions who when the attacks of 9/11 occurred were on our side or neutral.
While we are completely hostile to al Qaeda and are in a death struggle with them, by simply labeling them as evil doers and not granting them standing as an enemy with grievances, we gave them access to millions of sympathizers who might have been neutralized or won to our side. There is no doubt that there can be no compromise with al Qaeda; they are intent on killing as many Americans and Westerners as they can and on driving us from land they see as their own. But in labeling them simply evil, we strip them of their perceived legitimacy of driving the infidels (that’s us) from hallowed soil or in opposing regimes in the region that many Muslims find suspect at best.
A civilization that contains well over a billion human beings with a different mindset cannot be won over by calling those fighting in the name of their God simply evil. The vast majority of Muslims living inside and out of their recognized land do not believe in the al Qaeda agenda. But in setting up a black and white you’re with us or you’re against us scenario, the millions of Muslims who can see shades of gray are sent packing – at least sympathetically and symbolically - into the camp of our enemies.
Thus, we have vested the suicide bombers and agents of al Qaeda who die for their cause with an heroic status within that civilization that we cannot understand but that is real for a significant portion of the billion or more believers in Allah.
On our own side, the nature of the Iraq War today has left our marvelous troops with little cover. We view our service men and women as fighting against forces of evil, but the insurgency they face on a daily basis affords them little opportunity for traditional fighting. The deaths and wounding of our men and women are rarely in firefights where their mettle can be tested and rewarded. Daily, we learn that they depart from defended places and are simply blown up on their way. Driving from the compound is heroic in itself, but it doesn't show up that way anywhere. This is so sad.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Thursday, April 13, 2006
The Gang That Can't Shoot Straight
Is the gang in charge one that can't shoot straight or simply one that will not be straight with the American people?
President Bush’s reaction to a Washington Post story charging him with not speaking truthfully when he announced that the coalition forces in Iraq had found the weapons of mass destruction is very troubling. On Wednesday, April 12, 2006, a Reuters’ story recapitulated an earlier Post story and reported on the White House reaction.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/12/AR2006041201059.html?referrer=emailarticle
On May 29, 2003, the president announced that WMDs – in the form of two mobile biological weapons laboratories – had been found. The Post reported that an American and British team of experts had examined these trailers and after an exhaustive study of the facilities unanimously concluded that they were not connected in any way with WMDs. A comprehensive report to that effect was sent to the Pentagon two day prior to the presidential statement on coalition success in finding these weapons manufacturing facilities.
White House press secretary Scott McClelland reacted angrily to the story and charged the Post with reckless reporting saying that the report from the field was preliminary and that the president was unaware of the team’s findings when he made his famous statement.
The interchange leads to many questions. Was the president so desperate for a success story in Iraq that he couldn’t wait for the final report of the military which was studying the mobile labs? Were those responsible for getting this vital bit of information to the president so incompetent that they sat on this significant – and now embarrassing – intelligence for two days while the president prepared to speak to the press and the nation? Why after this intelligence was circulated to key spokespersons did the administration continue to insist for many months that WMDs had been found? These questions and dozens more must be answered; until they are, the president’s personal credibility and the competence of the intelligence, DOD, and White House staffs are clearly in question.
Every day with every announcement and every denial the competence and the truthfulness of the highest officials in the land becomes more uncertain. And these folks have more power in their command than all of the governments of all of the nations in the history of the world combined. Scary, eh?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
President Bush’s reaction to a Washington Post story charging him with not speaking truthfully when he announced that the coalition forces in Iraq had found the weapons of mass destruction is very troubling. On Wednesday, April 12, 2006, a Reuters’ story recapitulated an earlier Post story and reported on the White House reaction.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/12/AR2006041201059.html?referrer=emailarticle
On May 29, 2003, the president announced that WMDs – in the form of two mobile biological weapons laboratories – had been found. The Post reported that an American and British team of experts had examined these trailers and after an exhaustive study of the facilities unanimously concluded that they were not connected in any way with WMDs. A comprehensive report to that effect was sent to the Pentagon two day prior to the presidential statement on coalition success in finding these weapons manufacturing facilities.
White House press secretary Scott McClelland reacted angrily to the story and charged the Post with reckless reporting saying that the report from the field was preliminary and that the president was unaware of the team’s findings when he made his famous statement.
The interchange leads to many questions. Was the president so desperate for a success story in Iraq that he couldn’t wait for the final report of the military which was studying the mobile labs? Were those responsible for getting this vital bit of information to the president so incompetent that they sat on this significant – and now embarrassing – intelligence for two days while the president prepared to speak to the press and the nation? Why after this intelligence was circulated to key spokespersons did the administration continue to insist for many months that WMDs had been found? These questions and dozens more must be answered; until they are, the president’s personal credibility and the competence of the intelligence, DOD, and White House staffs are clearly in question.
Every day with every announcement and every denial the competence and the truthfulness of the highest officials in the land becomes more uncertain. And these folks have more power in their command than all of the governments of all of the nations in the history of the world combined. Scary, eh?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Goodbye Don
Don Rumsfeld’s got to go! Democrats, Republicans, retired generals, and girl scouts everywhere are screaming for Don’s head. Based on his performance over the past five years, I add my voice – electronically - to the chorus. That Rumsfeld should be dismissed is the easy part; who would replace him is the question? The Secretary of Defense job is the most difficult in government and possibly in the world, and even defining the required characteristics of the candidates is very difficult.
First, the candidate must be very intelligent, and the people selected for the post since it was established during the Truman administration have met that test to one degree or another. Intellectually, it is a far more demanding than any other cabinet post and it requires years of preparation. Based on their life experiences, most past secretaries appear to have been ready to assume the post.
Secondly, the candidates must be strong enough to maintain civilian control over the senior military officers who advise them. Here the picture is a little murkier since grading the incumbents is more subjective and times have changed. The officers coming out of W.W.II seem to have been larger than life and far more swashbuckling than the bureaucrats who have succeeded them in the technical world of today’s military.
My all time example of an officer who had strong opinions and required significant oversight was Gen. Curtis Lemay who rose to become Air Force Chief of Staff. As I recall his bellicose advice coming out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he must have been a difficult man for any politician to face down. Certainly the last several Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have gone out of their way to constantly restate the military commitment to honor civilian oversight.
General MacArthur was the last senior military man to seriously challenge his orders, but President Truman was up to the task of setting that situation straight by relieving the general of his command of allied forces in Korea, not that there wasn’t political hell to pay for it, including possible loss of the presidency in 1952.
That leads me to discuss two secretaries whose strength is undisputed, Robert S. McNamara, and the present incumbent, Donald Rumsfeld. Both men occupied the position in times of great national and international stress, Vietnam and Iraq. Out of both of these difficult periods came complaints that the military had not pushed hard enough on the civilian overlords.
A casual and personal review of the characteristics of McNamara and Rumsfeld leads me to think that both men were confident in their intellect to the point of hubris. McNamara was positively brilliant and was convinced that he could develop information systems that captured the situation in Vietnam and the world that gave him insight not available to those who were not his equals. So it is with Rumsfeld, a man of supreme intellectual confidence and one who appears unable to bear the loss of a single debating point with his subordinates or the media.
In reviewing the list of DOD secretaries it is difficult to find anyone whose combination of brilliance and arrogance is up to that of McNamara or Rumsfeld. While others such as Harold Brown and William Perry were clearly brilliant, they seem in retrospect not to have been so completely overbearing in their approaches to subordinates. James Schlesinger, too, was a brilliant occupant of the office and was known to not suffer fools gladly – and cast a rather broad definition of those in the category. But these men were in office during times that did not call for them to dominate those in the Department such as those that faced McNamara and Rumsfeld.
So, while Rumsfeld is certainly getting close to the end of his tenure at the Pentagon, the world situation since 9/11 which led to the events in Iraq and Afghanistan and the problems looming with Iran and North Korea, the president should give serious consideration to the person he chooses to replace the DOD Secretary. Clearly, an individual so brilliant as to intimidate the officer corps and with the hubris to pay little attention to the members would be a poor and possibly disastrous choice.
We’re no longer facing down the Kremlin and the philosophy of mutually assured destruction has taken on an altogether new meaning as we face the amorphous threat of such organizations as al Qaeda and its suicidal agents. A person with the sense and competence of Frank Carlucci or the political savvy of Melvin Laird, Harold Brown, or William Cohen would settle the nerves of the girls scouts – mine too.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
First, the candidate must be very intelligent, and the people selected for the post since it was established during the Truman administration have met that test to one degree or another. Intellectually, it is a far more demanding than any other cabinet post and it requires years of preparation. Based on their life experiences, most past secretaries appear to have been ready to assume the post.
Secondly, the candidates must be strong enough to maintain civilian control over the senior military officers who advise them. Here the picture is a little murkier since grading the incumbents is more subjective and times have changed. The officers coming out of W.W.II seem to have been larger than life and far more swashbuckling than the bureaucrats who have succeeded them in the technical world of today’s military.
My all time example of an officer who had strong opinions and required significant oversight was Gen. Curtis Lemay who rose to become Air Force Chief of Staff. As I recall his bellicose advice coming out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he must have been a difficult man for any politician to face down. Certainly the last several Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have gone out of their way to constantly restate the military commitment to honor civilian oversight.
General MacArthur was the last senior military man to seriously challenge his orders, but President Truman was up to the task of setting that situation straight by relieving the general of his command of allied forces in Korea, not that there wasn’t political hell to pay for it, including possible loss of the presidency in 1952.
That leads me to discuss two secretaries whose strength is undisputed, Robert S. McNamara, and the present incumbent, Donald Rumsfeld. Both men occupied the position in times of great national and international stress, Vietnam and Iraq. Out of both of these difficult periods came complaints that the military had not pushed hard enough on the civilian overlords.
A casual and personal review of the characteristics of McNamara and Rumsfeld leads me to think that both men were confident in their intellect to the point of hubris. McNamara was positively brilliant and was convinced that he could develop information systems that captured the situation in Vietnam and the world that gave him insight not available to those who were not his equals. So it is with Rumsfeld, a man of supreme intellectual confidence and one who appears unable to bear the loss of a single debating point with his subordinates or the media.
In reviewing the list of DOD secretaries it is difficult to find anyone whose combination of brilliance and arrogance is up to that of McNamara or Rumsfeld. While others such as Harold Brown and William Perry were clearly brilliant, they seem in retrospect not to have been so completely overbearing in their approaches to subordinates. James Schlesinger, too, was a brilliant occupant of the office and was known to not suffer fools gladly – and cast a rather broad definition of those in the category. But these men were in office during times that did not call for them to dominate those in the Department such as those that faced McNamara and Rumsfeld.
So, while Rumsfeld is certainly getting close to the end of his tenure at the Pentagon, the world situation since 9/11 which led to the events in Iraq and Afghanistan and the problems looming with Iran and North Korea, the president should give serious consideration to the person he chooses to replace the DOD Secretary. Clearly, an individual so brilliant as to intimidate the officer corps and with the hubris to pay little attention to the members would be a poor and possibly disastrous choice.
We’re no longer facing down the Kremlin and the philosophy of mutually assured destruction has taken on an altogether new meaning as we face the amorphous threat of such organizations as al Qaeda and its suicidal agents. A person with the sense and competence of Frank Carlucci or the political savvy of Melvin Laird, Harold Brown, or William Cohen would settle the nerves of the girls scouts – mine too.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Leaks v. Releases
I’m not as upset about the allegations that President Bush authorized the release of information that supported his run up to the Iraq War and countered to some degree the argument of Ambassador Joseph Wilson regarding the phony story that Saddam was seeking uranium from Niger. Since I thought the whole run up to the war was phony as hell, why would I be upset about a tempest such as this?
Naturally, almost everybody, including me, expected that a half a dozen canisters of poison gas and two labs with some germs would be found and this would be enough to exonerate Bush on his WMD whopper. Unfortunately for him, the best laid plans of mice and men oft go… It still would have been a rotten war, but at least the proponents would have covered their butts.
With the preventive attack on Iraq I was convinced that we were dealing with a messianic president hell bent on going to war no matter what. To think that administrations and their opponents won’t use every tool, fair or foul, at their disposal to win their points is naive. The only thing the bugs me is the deception of Bush and his crowd that proclaims their goodness, righteousness, and, above all, values at every turn. The only difference between this crowd and every administration that’s gone before is that they’re bigger hypocrites than all of their predecessors put together.
Once you’ve decided to go to war, cherry picking intelligence to support the effort is what governments do, even ours. Really, there are some who think that some of the charges against King George III were stretched a tad; that our sojourn into Mexico in the nineteenth century wasn’t exactly as we’d been led to believe; that McKinley and his Vice President – what was his name? - weren’t beyond hyperbole concerning Spain; that LBJ and his Tonkin incident weren’t totally as stated; and so it went throughout our two hundred years.
In the case of a war you’ve decided is immoral or illegal and that doesn’t have wide or deep support, fruit picking from the other side can be anticipated as well. The Pentagon Papers of the Vietnam come quickly to mind. In this case, Joe Wilson was confident of his opinion on the uranium question and the war as he – and I - saw it was based on at least one false premise, and he wrote his op-ed piece with complete understanding that he was stepping into the line of fire.
That presidential governance in this democracy means you have the power to take executive action without the support of everybody should not surprise us. To martial public opinion almost by definition means that you have to pick and choose which bits of information to emphasize and which to minimize. Wilson and Bush did their things. Naturally, it’s the Scooters of the world who have to fall on their swords. But guys like Cap Weinberger who were a little too aggressive in the past in such capers were taken off the hook by presidents who understood the game. So Scooter will probably not spend too many nights in the gray bar motel.
A separate issue is the outing of Wilson’s wife. So far, no one is alleging that President Bush or Dick Cheney authorized that Ms. Plame be identified as being a covert CIA operative. Naturally, if that were the case, this little embarrassment for the administration would become far more serious and could lead to impeachment. Also, if Mr. Libby is convicted of intentionally releasing Ms. Plame’s name, he will indeed be in serious jeopardy, and he should be.
Many do not realize the seriousness of the outing of Ms. Plame. To us, she was simply a mid to high level bureaucrat working at CIA headquarters when the information was first released in a column by Robert Novak. It is unlikely that such an expose threatens the life of Valerie Plame rather it puts in jeopardy the lives of foreign contacts from whom in the past she extracted information or assistance and, without getting to far off the track, any American agents and other operatives that could somehow be connected with her in her postings.
The Plame affair is a life and death matter and should be pursued to the end by the prosecutor and the Agency.
So until this gets to be more than embarrassment for the president, I’m happy to watch poor Scott McClellan dance and explain again and again the difference between `leaks’ and `releases’.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Naturally, almost everybody, including me, expected that a half a dozen canisters of poison gas and two labs with some germs would be found and this would be enough to exonerate Bush on his WMD whopper. Unfortunately for him, the best laid plans of mice and men oft go… It still would have been a rotten war, but at least the proponents would have covered their butts.
With the preventive attack on Iraq I was convinced that we were dealing with a messianic president hell bent on going to war no matter what. To think that administrations and their opponents won’t use every tool, fair or foul, at their disposal to win their points is naive. The only thing the bugs me is the deception of Bush and his crowd that proclaims their goodness, righteousness, and, above all, values at every turn. The only difference between this crowd and every administration that’s gone before is that they’re bigger hypocrites than all of their predecessors put together.
Once you’ve decided to go to war, cherry picking intelligence to support the effort is what governments do, even ours. Really, there are some who think that some of the charges against King George III were stretched a tad; that our sojourn into Mexico in the nineteenth century wasn’t exactly as we’d been led to believe; that McKinley and his Vice President – what was his name? - weren’t beyond hyperbole concerning Spain; that LBJ and his Tonkin incident weren’t totally as stated; and so it went throughout our two hundred years.
In the case of a war you’ve decided is immoral or illegal and that doesn’t have wide or deep support, fruit picking from the other side can be anticipated as well. The Pentagon Papers of the Vietnam come quickly to mind. In this case, Joe Wilson was confident of his opinion on the uranium question and the war as he – and I - saw it was based on at least one false premise, and he wrote his op-ed piece with complete understanding that he was stepping into the line of fire.
That presidential governance in this democracy means you have the power to take executive action without the support of everybody should not surprise us. To martial public opinion almost by definition means that you have to pick and choose which bits of information to emphasize and which to minimize. Wilson and Bush did their things. Naturally, it’s the Scooters of the world who have to fall on their swords. But guys like Cap Weinberger who were a little too aggressive in the past in such capers were taken off the hook by presidents who understood the game. So Scooter will probably not spend too many nights in the gray bar motel.
A separate issue is the outing of Wilson’s wife. So far, no one is alleging that President Bush or Dick Cheney authorized that Ms. Plame be identified as being a covert CIA operative. Naturally, if that were the case, this little embarrassment for the administration would become far more serious and could lead to impeachment. Also, if Mr. Libby is convicted of intentionally releasing Ms. Plame’s name, he will indeed be in serious jeopardy, and he should be.
Many do not realize the seriousness of the outing of Ms. Plame. To us, she was simply a mid to high level bureaucrat working at CIA headquarters when the information was first released in a column by Robert Novak. It is unlikely that such an expose threatens the life of Valerie Plame rather it puts in jeopardy the lives of foreign contacts from whom in the past she extracted information or assistance and, without getting to far off the track, any American agents and other operatives that could somehow be connected with her in her postings.
The Plame affair is a life and death matter and should be pursued to the end by the prosecutor and the Agency.
So until this gets to be more than embarrassment for the president, I’m happy to watch poor Scott McClellan dance and explain again and again the difference between `leaks’ and `releases’.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Friday, April 07, 2006
Incompetence Hell!
Everybody’s jumping on the incompetence of the Bush administration; Iraq, Katrina, Social Security, you name it, they’ve goofed it up. The Democrats are pinning their November hopes on it; the Republicans are saying that President ____ is gone and they’re not responsible for the turds all over the landscape. On and on it goes, and while it’s true that they’re incompetent, it’s not as good as it looks as an issue.
A few days ago, I took Richard Cohen of the Washington Post to task for weaseling his way out the failure in Iraq by blaming the mess on the incompetence thing rather than the hubris that brought us to our present state. Now I see it as a pattern that the Republicans can twist to their elective advantage.
Let’s take a few the issues that have been handled incompetently and see where this can lead. First, Iraq; of course they blew it by failing to send in sufficient troops from the get go. We should have defended the Iraqi antiquities from looters. We should have acknowledged the insurgency sooner. We handled the Baathists badly. On and on, it went; we blew many an issue. But Secretary Rice has found the flaw in the argument and attempted to turn all of these tactical errors – and thousands more - to the advantage of the administration by saying none of these blunders mean anything compared to the strategic home run of dumping Saddam.
Wrong, Condi, wrong! The venture was morally and strategically wrong, a national blunder of the highest order. Our hubris in sending too few troops and all of the other mistakes simply brought the problems to the surface faster. Bottom line; we shouldn’t have attacked. Our outrageous arrogance in this mad adventure is what is killing our troops and draining our treasure; it’s not just the tactical incompetence.
Social Security; the president mocked the third rail of American politics and grasped the hot rod with both hands. He was inflexible and obdurate. Sure, he was incompetent and should have attempted a bi-partisan approach. He listened to no one outside of his inner circle and it shot a lighting bolt through him and his plan.
Katrina; of course Bush’s response was incompetent, but the storm was so devastating that even if he and Brownie had been on the ball, we’d pretty much be facing the situation on the ground as it is today.
And so it is with everything the administration touches, but this administration is already history. The Republicans are shedding ____ and DeLay and all their other sources of embarrassment and are readying to say it was all ____’s fault, but he’s gone and they are still the party of ideas. Right; and I’m running for president on the Republican ticket.
If we let these brown nosers on the Hill who went along with Bush in the roughshod way they’ve run the government for the past five and a half years off by simply shedding the president, we don’t deserve any better. The conservative movement is bankrupt of ideas; the ruling party has become corrupt; they’ve entangled us in the biggest mess to confront the nation in more than a generation. And if we simply go along with this `incompetence thing’, we’re stepping into a mine field.
The Congress must be won be Democrats in ’06, and the Democratic candidate must be a centrist and win in ’08. Certainly, the Democrats remember why they got sent to Limbo and will behave for a little while until we can strive for divided government in ’10. If we can’t punish the bums by throwing them out, how’re they ever going to become competent?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
A few days ago, I took Richard Cohen of the Washington Post to task for weaseling his way out the failure in Iraq by blaming the mess on the incompetence thing rather than the hubris that brought us to our present state. Now I see it as a pattern that the Republicans can twist to their elective advantage.
Let’s take a few the issues that have been handled incompetently and see where this can lead. First, Iraq; of course they blew it by failing to send in sufficient troops from the get go. We should have defended the Iraqi antiquities from looters. We should have acknowledged the insurgency sooner. We handled the Baathists badly. On and on, it went; we blew many an issue. But Secretary Rice has found the flaw in the argument and attempted to turn all of these tactical errors – and thousands more - to the advantage of the administration by saying none of these blunders mean anything compared to the strategic home run of dumping Saddam.
Wrong, Condi, wrong! The venture was morally and strategically wrong, a national blunder of the highest order. Our hubris in sending too few troops and all of the other mistakes simply brought the problems to the surface faster. Bottom line; we shouldn’t have attacked. Our outrageous arrogance in this mad adventure is what is killing our troops and draining our treasure; it’s not just the tactical incompetence.
Social Security; the president mocked the third rail of American politics and grasped the hot rod with both hands. He was inflexible and obdurate. Sure, he was incompetent and should have attempted a bi-partisan approach. He listened to no one outside of his inner circle and it shot a lighting bolt through him and his plan.
Katrina; of course Bush’s response was incompetent, but the storm was so devastating that even if he and Brownie had been on the ball, we’d pretty much be facing the situation on the ground as it is today.
And so it is with everything the administration touches, but this administration is already history. The Republicans are shedding ____ and DeLay and all their other sources of embarrassment and are readying to say it was all ____’s fault, but he’s gone and they are still the party of ideas. Right; and I’m running for president on the Republican ticket.
If we let these brown nosers on the Hill who went along with Bush in the roughshod way they’ve run the government for the past five and a half years off by simply shedding the president, we don’t deserve any better. The conservative movement is bankrupt of ideas; the ruling party has become corrupt; they’ve entangled us in the biggest mess to confront the nation in more than a generation. And if we simply go along with this `incompetence thing’, we’re stepping into a mine field.
The Congress must be won be Democrats in ’06, and the Democratic candidate must be a centrist and win in ’08. Certainly, the Democrats remember why they got sent to Limbo and will behave for a little while until we can strive for divided government in ’10. If we can’t punish the bums by throwing them out, how’re they ever going to become competent?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Gorilla, what Gorilla?
I didn’t see that big silverback in the room before, but by golly he’s here. Does Israel’s lobbying arm in the U.S. wield disproportionate power as compared with other nations? If your answer is yes, do you consider yourself an anti-Semite? If no, are your ready to label those who see it differently as anti-Semitic? Heavy stuff – about eight hundred pounds of gorilla that’s just now being noticed, or at least acknowledged.
Scholars from Harvard and the University of Chicago have written a paper that says that the Israeli lobby is too powerful and damages both the U.S. and Israel. This has led to some but not all leading American Jews to scream anti-Semitism at the authors. One in op-ed in the New York Times quotes others on the sloppy scholarship that went into the effort and the ever reticent and understated Alan Dershowitz asserts that the careers of the alleged scholars were ruined by this baloney.
Are those who criticize Israel and those in America who lobby aggressively on behalf of the state anti-Semites? Obviously, many are, but many more are not. But defenders of the status quo are quick to lash out with the charge. It seems to me that that many of the most aggressive supporters of Israel in this country are not keeping up with events in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem where public opinion seems to be shifting in the direction of many of the American critics.
I think we should look beyond the eight hundred pound gorilla to the ten ton T-Rex that looms so large behind it that we cannot see it as anything but a huge gray mass, Evangelical Christianity. While American support of Israel has indeed been great since the state was recognized during the Truman administration and while the Israeli lobby has been extraordinarily effective, a major part of the more aggressive American position in recent decades has not been the sole result of the Israeli foreign office or Washington lobbyists who seek to keep Israel at the fore of American thought but of Evangelical leaders who have an agenda that is far more aggressive than appears to be desired by the government and citizens of Israel.
For years, many political leaders in Israel have recognized that the settlements issue, as constituted, was not in the best interest of the nation, and Ariel Sharon, a leading architect of the program, was in the process of abandoning much of the effort. Demography and the adverse impacts of the occupation were tearing the country apart. The recent national vote appears to support the Sharon initiative.
But among the greatest cheerleaders for the settlements and expanded Israeli boundaries are American Christian fundamentalists who find support for their position in Biblical references and prophesies. Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ spur many American to support aggressive policies for both countries that appear far from the best interest of the parties, at least as seen by those with more secular views.
The Middle East is volatile enough without the constant pressure being applied to the mix by those promoting a religious overlay not sought by the American or Israeli governments or by the vast majority of those living in Israel.
So while the gorilla seems to be coming into focus for many Americans, and while name calling seems to be rising exponentially, let’s cool the rhetoric and look to the T-Rex theocrats looming large behind it.
Who knows what names Wild Bill will be called after this one?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Scholars from Harvard and the University of Chicago have written a paper that says that the Israeli lobby is too powerful and damages both the U.S. and Israel. This has led to some but not all leading American Jews to scream anti-Semitism at the authors. One in op-ed in the New York Times quotes others on the sloppy scholarship that went into the effort and the ever reticent and understated Alan Dershowitz asserts that the careers of the alleged scholars were ruined by this baloney.
Are those who criticize Israel and those in America who lobby aggressively on behalf of the state anti-Semites? Obviously, many are, but many more are not. But defenders of the status quo are quick to lash out with the charge. It seems to me that that many of the most aggressive supporters of Israel in this country are not keeping up with events in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem where public opinion seems to be shifting in the direction of many of the American critics.
I think we should look beyond the eight hundred pound gorilla to the ten ton T-Rex that looms so large behind it that we cannot see it as anything but a huge gray mass, Evangelical Christianity. While American support of Israel has indeed been great since the state was recognized during the Truman administration and while the Israeli lobby has been extraordinarily effective, a major part of the more aggressive American position in recent decades has not been the sole result of the Israeli foreign office or Washington lobbyists who seek to keep Israel at the fore of American thought but of Evangelical leaders who have an agenda that is far more aggressive than appears to be desired by the government and citizens of Israel.
For years, many political leaders in Israel have recognized that the settlements issue, as constituted, was not in the best interest of the nation, and Ariel Sharon, a leading architect of the program, was in the process of abandoning much of the effort. Demography and the adverse impacts of the occupation were tearing the country apart. The recent national vote appears to support the Sharon initiative.
But among the greatest cheerleaders for the settlements and expanded Israeli boundaries are American Christian fundamentalists who find support for their position in Biblical references and prophesies. Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ spur many American to support aggressive policies for both countries that appear far from the best interest of the parties, at least as seen by those with more secular views.
The Middle East is volatile enough without the constant pressure being applied to the mix by those promoting a religious overlay not sought by the American or Israeli governments or by the vast majority of those living in Israel.
So while the gorilla seems to be coming into focus for many Americans, and while name calling seems to be rising exponentially, let’s cool the rhetoric and look to the T-Rex theocrats looming large behind it.
Who knows what names Wild Bill will be called after this one?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Borderlands
Last Thursday (March 30, 2006) I took Lou Dobbs of CNN to task over the nativism exhibited in his evening telecasts concerning illegal immigrants. One of my major points in a posting titled Good Night Lou was a point obscured by Dobbs’ rants that there could be a qualitative difference in the immigration across the Mexican border among those crossing into the U.S. This posting is easily accessed by clicking on that title to the left of this missive.
Samuel P. Huntington, a professor at Harvard and an experienced government official, penned The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. This book, an expansion of a paper Huntington had written earlier was, in my judgment, looking more to the problems evident between Islam and its many neighboring civilizations, but a chapter was devoted to what he termed `cleft nations’ that I thought was prescient on our Southwest. I cited this in the posting on Dobbs, and I think it is an extremely important point.
Today, the Strategic Forecasting, Inc.’s newsletter, the Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report, makes the same point in a slightly different manner and I’m copying it for you following my sign off. Stratfor labels this difference as `borderlands' and it's a very clear staement of the problem. Unfortunately, it doesn't copy well, but I do recommend that you try to read it. Many readers of this blog subscribe to this free newsletter, and I recommend it to those who don’t. In any event, I found this particular issue extremely interesting and wanted to share it with you.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
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Borderlands and Immigrants
By George Friedman
The United States has returned to its recurring debate over immigration. This edition of the debate, focused intensely on the question of illegal immigration from Mexico, is phrased in a very traditional way. One side argues that illegal migration from Mexico threatens both American economic interests and security. The other side argues that the United States historically has thrived on immigration, and that this wave of migration is no different. As is frequently the case, the policy debate fails to take fundamental geopolitical realities into account.To begin with, it is absolutely true that the United States has always been an immigrant society. Even the first settlers in the United States -- the American Indian tribes -- were migrants. Certainly, since the first settlements were established, successive waves of immigration have both driven the American economy and terrified those who were already living in the country. When the Scots-Irish began arriving in the late 1700s, the English settlers of all social classes thought that their arrival would place enormous pressure on existing economic processes, as well as bring crime and immorality to the United States.The Scots-Irish were dramatically different culturally, and their arrival certainly generated stress. However, they proved crucial for populating the continent west of the Alleghenies. The Scots-Irish solved a demographic problem that was at the core of the United States: Given its population at that time, there simply were not enough Americans to expand settlements west of the mountains -- and this posed a security threat. If the U.S. population remained clustered in a long, thin line along the Atlantic sea board, with poor lines of communication running north-south, the country would be vulnerable to European, and especially British, attack. The United States had to expand westward, and it lacked the population to do so. The Americans needed the Scots-Irish.Successive waves of immigrants came to the United States over the next 200 years. In each case, they came looking for economic opportunity. In each case, there was massive anxiety that the arrival of these migrants would crowd the job market, driving down wages, and that the heterogeneous cultures would create massive social stress. The Irish immigration of the 1840s, the migrations from eastern and southern Europe in the 1880s -- all triggered the same concerns. Nevertheless, without those waves of immigration, the United States would not have been able to populate the continent, to industrialize or to field the mass armies of the 20th century that established the nation as a global power.Population Density and Economic ReturnsLogic would have it that immigration should undermine the economic well-being of those who already live in the United States. But this logic assumes that there is a zero-sum game. That may be true in Europe or Asia. It has not been true in the United States. The key is population density: The density of the United States, excluding Alaska, is 34 people per square kilometer. By comparison, the population density in the United Kingdom is 247 per square kilometer, 231 in Germany and 337 in Japan. The European Union, taken as a whole, has a population density of 115. If the United States were to equal the United Kingdom in terms of density, it would have a population of about 2 billion people. Even accepting the premise that some parts of the United States are uninhabitable and that the United Kingdom is over-inhabited, the point is that the United States' population is still small relative to available land. That means that it has not come even close to diminishing economic returns. To the extent to which the population-to-land ratio determines productivity -- and this, in our view, is the critical variable -- the United States still can utilize population increases. At a time when population growth from native births is quite low, this means that the United States still can metabolize immigrants. It is, therefore, no accident that over the past 40 years, the United States has absorbed a massive influx of Asian immigrants who have been net producers over time. It's a big country, and much of it is barely inhabited.On this level, the immigration issue poses no significant questions. It is a replay of a debate that has been ongoing since the founding of the country. Those who have predicted social and economic disaster as a result of immigration have been consistently wrong. Those who have predicted growing prosperity have been right. Those who have said that the national character of the United States would change dramatically have been somewhat right; core values have remained in place, but the Anglo-Protestant ethnicity represented at the founding has certainly been transformed. How one feels about this transformation depends on ideology and taste. But the simple fact is this: The United States not only would not have become a trans-continental power without immigration; it would not have industrialized. Masses of immigrants formed the armies of workers that drove industrialism and made the United States into a significant world power. No immigration, no United States.Geography: The Difference With MexicoNow, it would seem at first glance that the current surge of Mexican migration should be understood in this context and, as such, simply welcomed. If immigration is good, then why wouldn't immigration from Mexico be good? Certainly, there is no cultural argument against it; if the United States could assimilate Ukrainian Jews, Sicilians and Pakistanis, there is no self-evident reason why it could not absorb Mexicans. The argument against the Mexican migration would seem on its face to be simply a repeat of old, failed arguments against past migrations.But Mexican migration should not be viewed in the same way as other migrations. When a Ukrainian Jew or a Sicilian or an Indian came to the United States, their arrival represented a sharp geographical event; whatever memories they might have of their birthplace, whatever cultural values they might bring with them, the geographical milieu was being abandoned. And with that, so were the geopolitical consequences of their migration. Sicilians might remember Sicily, they might harbor a cultural commitment to its values and they might even have a sense of residual loyalty to Sicily or to Italy -- but Italy was thousands of miles away. The Italian government could neither control nor exploit the migrant's presence in the United States. Simply put, these immigrants did not represent a geopolitical threat; even if they did not assimilate to American culture -- remaining huddled together in their "little Italys" -- they did not threaten the United States in any way. Their strength was in the country they had left, and that country was far away. That is why, in the end, these immigrants assimilated, or their children did. Without assimilation, they were adrift.
The Mexican situation is different. When a Mexican comes to the United States, there is frequently no geographical split. There is geographical continuity. His roots are just across the land border. Therefore, the entire immigration dynamic shifts. An Italian, a Jew, an Indian can return to his home country, but only with great effort and disruption. A Mexican can and does return with considerable ease. He can, if he chooses, live his life in a perpetual ambiguity.The Borderland BattlegroundThis has nothing to do with Mexicans as a people, but rather with a geographical concept called "borderlands." Traveling through Europe, one will find many borderlands. Alsace-Lorraine is a borderland between Germany and France; the inhabitants are both French and German, and in some ways neither. It also is possible to find Hungarians -- living Hungarian lives -- deep inside Slovakia and Romania. Borderlands can be found throughout the world. They are the places where the borders have shifted, leaving members of one nation stranded on the other side of the frontier. In many cases, these people now hold the citizenship of the countries in which they reside (according to recognized borders), but they think and speak in the language on the other side of the border. The border moved, but their homes didn't. There has been no decisive geographical event; they have not left their homeland. Only the legal abstraction of a border, and the non-abstract presence of a conquering army, has changed their reality. Borderlands sometimes are political flashpoints, when the relative power of the two countries is shifting and one is reclaiming its old territory, as Germany did in 1940, or France in 1918. Sometimes the regions are quiet; the borders that have been imposed remain inviolable, due to the continued power of the conqueror. Sometimes, populations move back and forth in the borderland, as politics and economics shift. Borderlands are everywhere. They are the archaeological remains of history, except that these remains have a tendency to come back to life.The U.S.-Mexican frontier is a borderland. The United States, to all intents and purposes, conquered the region in the period between the Texan revolution (1835-36) and the Mexican-American war (1846-48). As a result of the war, the border moved and areas that had been Mexican territory became part of the United States. There was little ethnic cleansing. American citizens settled into the territory in increasing numbers over time, but the extant Mexican culture remained in place. The border was a political dividing line but was never a physical division; the area north of the border retained a certain Mexican presence, while the area south of the border became heavily influenced by American culture. The economic patterns that tied the area north of the Rio Grande to the area south of it did not disappear. At times they atrophied; at times they intensified; but the links were always there, and neither Washington nor Mexico City objected. It was the natural characteristic of the borderland.It was not inevitable that the borderland would be held by the United States. Anyone looking at North America in 1800 might have bet that Mexico, not the United States, would be the dominant power of the continent. Why that didn't turn out to be the case is a long story, but by 1846, the Mexicans had lost direct control of the borderland. They have not regained it since. But that does not mean that the borderland is unambiguously American -- and it does not mean that, over the next couple of hundred years, should Washington's power weaken and Mexico City's increase, the borders might not shift once again. How many times, after all, have the Franco-German borders shifted? For the moment, however, Washington is enormously more powerful than Mexico City, so the borders will stay where they are.The Heart of the MatterWe are in a period, as happens with borderlands, when major population shifts are under way. This should not be understood as immigration. Or more precisely, these shifts should not be understood as immigration in the same sense that we talk about immigration from, say, Brazil, where the geographical relationship between migrant and home country is ruptured. The immigration from Mexico to the United States is a regional migration within a borderland between two powers -- powers that have drawn a border based on military and political history, and in which two very different populations intermingle. Right now, the United States is economically dynamic relative to Mexico. Therefore, Mexicans tend to migrate northward, across the political border, within the geographical definition of the borderland. The map declares a border. Culture and history, however, take a different view.The immigration debate in the U.S. Congress, which conflates Asian immigrations with Mexican immigrations, is mixing apples and oranges. Chinese immigration is part of the process of populating the United States -- a process that has been occurring since the founding of the Republic. Mexican immigration is, to borrow a term from physics, the Brownian motion of the borderland. This process is nearly as old as the Republic, but there is a crucial difference: It is not about populating the continent nearly as much as it is about the dynamics of the borderland.One way to lose control of a borderland is by losing control of its population. In general, most Mexicans cross the border for strictly economic reasons. Some wish to settle in the United States, some wish to assimilate. Others intend to be here temporarily. Some intend to cross the border for economic reasons -- to work -- and remain Mexicans in the full sense of the word. Now, so long as this migration remains economic and cultural, there is little concern for the United States. But when this last class of migrants crosses the border with political aspirations, such as the recovery of lost Mexican territories from the United States, that is the danger point.Americans went to Texas in the 1820s. They entered the borderland. They then decided to make a political claim against Mexico, demanding a redefinition of the formal borders between Mexico and the United States. In other words, they came to make money and stayed to make a revolution. There is little evidence -- flag-waving notwithstanding -- that there is any practical move afoot now to reverse the American conquest of Mexican territories. Nevertheless, that is the danger with all borderlands: that those on the "wrong" side of the border will take action to move the border back. For the United States, this makes the question of Mexican immigration within the borderland different from that of Mexican immigration to places well removed from it. In fact, it makes the issue of Mexican migration different from all other immigrations to the United States. The current congressional debate is about "immigration" as a whole, but that makes little sense. It needs to be about three different questions: 1. Immigration from other parts of the world to the United States2. Immigration from Mexico to areas well removed from the southern border region3. Immigration from Mexico to areas within the borderlands that were created by the U.S. conquests Treating these three issues as if they were the same thing confuses matters. The issue is not immigration in general, nor even Mexican immigration. It is about the borderland and its future. The question of legal and illegal immigration and various solutions to the problems must be addressed in this context.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
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Samuel P. Huntington, a professor at Harvard and an experienced government official, penned The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. This book, an expansion of a paper Huntington had written earlier was, in my judgment, looking more to the problems evident between Islam and its many neighboring civilizations, but a chapter was devoted to what he termed `cleft nations’ that I thought was prescient on our Southwest. I cited this in the posting on Dobbs, and I think it is an extremely important point.
Today, the Strategic Forecasting, Inc.’s newsletter, the Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report, makes the same point in a slightly different manner and I’m copying it for you following my sign off. Stratfor labels this difference as `borderlands' and it's a very clear staement of the problem. Unfortunately, it doesn't copy well, but I do recommend that you try to read it. Many readers of this blog subscribe to this free newsletter, and I recommend it to those who don’t. In any event, I found this particular issue extremely interesting and wanted to share it with you.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Stratfor.comServicesSubscriptionsReportsPartnersPress RoomContact Us
GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT
04.04.2006
READ MORE...
Analyses Country Profiles - Archive Forecasts Geopolitical Diary Global Market Brief - Archive Intelligence Guidance Net Assessment Situation Reports Special Reports Strategic Markets - Archive Stratfor Weekly Terrorism Brief Terrorism Intelligence Report Travel Security - Archive US - IRAQ War Coverage
Borderlands and Immigrants
By George Friedman
The United States has returned to its recurring debate over immigration. This edition of the debate, focused intensely on the question of illegal immigration from Mexico, is phrased in a very traditional way. One side argues that illegal migration from Mexico threatens both American economic interests and security. The other side argues that the United States historically has thrived on immigration, and that this wave of migration is no different. As is frequently the case, the policy debate fails to take fundamental geopolitical realities into account.To begin with, it is absolutely true that the United States has always been an immigrant society. Even the first settlers in the United States -- the American Indian tribes -- were migrants. Certainly, since the first settlements were established, successive waves of immigration have both driven the American economy and terrified those who were already living in the country. When the Scots-Irish began arriving in the late 1700s, the English settlers of all social classes thought that their arrival would place enormous pressure on existing economic processes, as well as bring crime and immorality to the United States.The Scots-Irish were dramatically different culturally, and their arrival certainly generated stress. However, they proved crucial for populating the continent west of the Alleghenies. The Scots-Irish solved a demographic problem that was at the core of the United States: Given its population at that time, there simply were not enough Americans to expand settlements west of the mountains -- and this posed a security threat. If the U.S. population remained clustered in a long, thin line along the Atlantic sea board, with poor lines of communication running north-south, the country would be vulnerable to European, and especially British, attack. The United States had to expand westward, and it lacked the population to do so. The Americans needed the Scots-Irish.Successive waves of immigrants came to the United States over the next 200 years. In each case, they came looking for economic opportunity. In each case, there was massive anxiety that the arrival of these migrants would crowd the job market, driving down wages, and that the heterogeneous cultures would create massive social stress. The Irish immigration of the 1840s, the migrations from eastern and southern Europe in the 1880s -- all triggered the same concerns. Nevertheless, without those waves of immigration, the United States would not have been able to populate the continent, to industrialize or to field the mass armies of the 20th century that established the nation as a global power.Population Density and Economic ReturnsLogic would have it that immigration should undermine the economic well-being of those who already live in the United States. But this logic assumes that there is a zero-sum game. That may be true in Europe or Asia. It has not been true in the United States. The key is population density: The density of the United States, excluding Alaska, is 34 people per square kilometer. By comparison, the population density in the United Kingdom is 247 per square kilometer, 231 in Germany and 337 in Japan. The European Union, taken as a whole, has a population density of 115. If the United States were to equal the United Kingdom in terms of density, it would have a population of about 2 billion people. Even accepting the premise that some parts of the United States are uninhabitable and that the United Kingdom is over-inhabited, the point is that the United States' population is still small relative to available land. That means that it has not come even close to diminishing economic returns. To the extent to which the population-to-land ratio determines productivity -- and this, in our view, is the critical variable -- the United States still can utilize population increases. At a time when population growth from native births is quite low, this means that the United States still can metabolize immigrants. It is, therefore, no accident that over the past 40 years, the United States has absorbed a massive influx of Asian immigrants who have been net producers over time. It's a big country, and much of it is barely inhabited.On this level, the immigration issue poses no significant questions. It is a replay of a debate that has been ongoing since the founding of the country. Those who have predicted social and economic disaster as a result of immigration have been consistently wrong. Those who have predicted growing prosperity have been right. Those who have said that the national character of the United States would change dramatically have been somewhat right; core values have remained in place, but the Anglo-Protestant ethnicity represented at the founding has certainly been transformed. How one feels about this transformation depends on ideology and taste. But the simple fact is this: The United States not only would not have become a trans-continental power without immigration; it would not have industrialized. Masses of immigrants formed the armies of workers that drove industrialism and made the United States into a significant world power. No immigration, no United States.Geography: The Difference With MexicoNow, it would seem at first glance that the current surge of Mexican migration should be understood in this context and, as such, simply welcomed. If immigration is good, then why wouldn't immigration from Mexico be good? Certainly, there is no cultural argument against it; if the United States could assimilate Ukrainian Jews, Sicilians and Pakistanis, there is no self-evident reason why it could not absorb Mexicans. The argument against the Mexican migration would seem on its face to be simply a repeat of old, failed arguments against past migrations.But Mexican migration should not be viewed in the same way as other migrations. When a Ukrainian Jew or a Sicilian or an Indian came to the United States, their arrival represented a sharp geographical event; whatever memories they might have of their birthplace, whatever cultural values they might bring with them, the geographical milieu was being abandoned. And with that, so were the geopolitical consequences of their migration. Sicilians might remember Sicily, they might harbor a cultural commitment to its values and they might even have a sense of residual loyalty to Sicily or to Italy -- but Italy was thousands of miles away. The Italian government could neither control nor exploit the migrant's presence in the United States. Simply put, these immigrants did not represent a geopolitical threat; even if they did not assimilate to American culture -- remaining huddled together in their "little Italys" -- they did not threaten the United States in any way. Their strength was in the country they had left, and that country was far away. That is why, in the end, these immigrants assimilated, or their children did. Without assimilation, they were adrift.
The Mexican situation is different. When a Mexican comes to the United States, there is frequently no geographical split. There is geographical continuity. His roots are just across the land border. Therefore, the entire immigration dynamic shifts. An Italian, a Jew, an Indian can return to his home country, but only with great effort and disruption. A Mexican can and does return with considerable ease. He can, if he chooses, live his life in a perpetual ambiguity.The Borderland BattlegroundThis has nothing to do with Mexicans as a people, but rather with a geographical concept called "borderlands." Traveling through Europe, one will find many borderlands. Alsace-Lorraine is a borderland between Germany and France; the inhabitants are both French and German, and in some ways neither. It also is possible to find Hungarians -- living Hungarian lives -- deep inside Slovakia and Romania. Borderlands can be found throughout the world. They are the places where the borders have shifted, leaving members of one nation stranded on the other side of the frontier. In many cases, these people now hold the citizenship of the countries in which they reside (according to recognized borders), but they think and speak in the language on the other side of the border. The border moved, but their homes didn't. There has been no decisive geographical event; they have not left their homeland. Only the legal abstraction of a border, and the non-abstract presence of a conquering army, has changed their reality. Borderlands sometimes are political flashpoints, when the relative power of the two countries is shifting and one is reclaiming its old territory, as Germany did in 1940, or France in 1918. Sometimes the regions are quiet; the borders that have been imposed remain inviolable, due to the continued power of the conqueror. Sometimes, populations move back and forth in the borderland, as politics and economics shift. Borderlands are everywhere. They are the archaeological remains of history, except that these remains have a tendency to come back to life.The U.S.-Mexican frontier is a borderland. The United States, to all intents and purposes, conquered the region in the period between the Texan revolution (1835-36) and the Mexican-American war (1846-48). As a result of the war, the border moved and areas that had been Mexican territory became part of the United States. There was little ethnic cleansing. American citizens settled into the territory in increasing numbers over time, but the extant Mexican culture remained in place. The border was a political dividing line but was never a physical division; the area north of the border retained a certain Mexican presence, while the area south of the border became heavily influenced by American culture. The economic patterns that tied the area north of the Rio Grande to the area south of it did not disappear. At times they atrophied; at times they intensified; but the links were always there, and neither Washington nor Mexico City objected. It was the natural characteristic of the borderland.It was not inevitable that the borderland would be held by the United States. Anyone looking at North America in 1800 might have bet that Mexico, not the United States, would be the dominant power of the continent. Why that didn't turn out to be the case is a long story, but by 1846, the Mexicans had lost direct control of the borderland. They have not regained it since. But that does not mean that the borderland is unambiguously American -- and it does not mean that, over the next couple of hundred years, should Washington's power weaken and Mexico City's increase, the borders might not shift once again. How many times, after all, have the Franco-German borders shifted? For the moment, however, Washington is enormously more powerful than Mexico City, so the borders will stay where they are.The Heart of the MatterWe are in a period, as happens with borderlands, when major population shifts are under way. This should not be understood as immigration. Or more precisely, these shifts should not be understood as immigration in the same sense that we talk about immigration from, say, Brazil, where the geographical relationship between migrant and home country is ruptured. The immigration from Mexico to the United States is a regional migration within a borderland between two powers -- powers that have drawn a border based on military and political history, and in which two very different populations intermingle. Right now, the United States is economically dynamic relative to Mexico. Therefore, Mexicans tend to migrate northward, across the political border, within the geographical definition of the borderland. The map declares a border. Culture and history, however, take a different view.The immigration debate in the U.S. Congress, which conflates Asian immigrations with Mexican immigrations, is mixing apples and oranges. Chinese immigration is part of the process of populating the United States -- a process that has been occurring since the founding of the Republic. Mexican immigration is, to borrow a term from physics, the Brownian motion of the borderland. This process is nearly as old as the Republic, but there is a crucial difference: It is not about populating the continent nearly as much as it is about the dynamics of the borderland.One way to lose control of a borderland is by losing control of its population. In general, most Mexicans cross the border for strictly economic reasons. Some wish to settle in the United States, some wish to assimilate. Others intend to be here temporarily. Some intend to cross the border for economic reasons -- to work -- and remain Mexicans in the full sense of the word. Now, so long as this migration remains economic and cultural, there is little concern for the United States. But when this last class of migrants crosses the border with political aspirations, such as the recovery of lost Mexican territories from the United States, that is the danger point.Americans went to Texas in the 1820s. They entered the borderland. They then decided to make a political claim against Mexico, demanding a redefinition of the formal borders between Mexico and the United States. In other words, they came to make money and stayed to make a revolution. There is little evidence -- flag-waving notwithstanding -- that there is any practical move afoot now to reverse the American conquest of Mexican territories. Nevertheless, that is the danger with all borderlands: that those on the "wrong" side of the border will take action to move the border back. For the United States, this makes the question of Mexican immigration within the borderland different from that of Mexican immigration to places well removed from it. In fact, it makes the issue of Mexican migration different from all other immigrations to the United States. The current congressional debate is about "immigration" as a whole, but that makes little sense. It needs to be about three different questions: 1. Immigration from other parts of the world to the United States2. Immigration from Mexico to areas well removed from the southern border region3. Immigration from Mexico to areas within the borderlands that were created by the U.S. conquests Treating these three issues as if they were the same thing confuses matters. The issue is not immigration in general, nor even Mexican immigration. It is about the borderland and its future. The question of legal and illegal immigration and various solutions to the problems must be addressed in this context.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
Get ready to have Stratfor’s top analysts bring you up to speed every day on key events around the world – now in a new online audio format!
Just launched, Stratfor’s daily podcast series will help you:
Stay on top of developments with insightful, to-the-point daily overviews of the most critical global events
Access the information you need in a fast, concise and convenient online audio format – downloadable so you can even take it with you wherever you go
Save time with one reliable, objective source for understanding what is going on in the world
PLUS
It’s FREE and available to everyone!
Tap into the network for access and updates: Subscribe, get a Free 7-day Trial, or sign up for any of our three Free Weekly Intelligence Reports today! Listen to the latest podcast now at www.stratfor.com!
Distribution and Reprints
This report may be distributed or republished with attribution to Strategic Forecasting, Inc. at http://www.stratfor.com/. For media requests, partnership opportunities, or commercial distribution or republication, please contact pr@stratfor.com.
Do you have a friend or acquaintance that would benefit from the consistent actionable intelligence of the FREE STRATFOR Weekly Geopolitical Intelligence Report?
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Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Wrong, Richard, Wrong
Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is often – no, almost always - on the same beam as me, and I have never challenged any of his assumptions until today. As regular readers of this blog know, Richard’s columns are often cited, always glowingly. But in his column in today’s paper I’m convinced that he has built his argument on a false premise, namely that the United States might have succeeded in Iraq but for the incompetence of the Bush Administration. Richard is big and brave enough to say that he was wrong on buying into the Iraq adventure but, again, for the wrong reason, the incompetence thing. This is not to say that Bush was competent in this social and military experiment, rather that incompetence was but a secondary problem in the sad state in which we find ourselves.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/03/AR2006040301609.html?referrer=emailarticle
While Richard recognizes that the generals who counseled we could not attain our objectives with the number of troops being assembled and that a force of far greater magnitude would be required to occupy and pacify the country after the Saddam regime was toppled were right, it is there that the columnist makes his mistake. It was not the incompetence of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, et al that drove the Hummer off the cliff; instead, it was the hubris of those same people who believed that we could enter into the heart of Islamic civilization, Iraq, and expect to make that the linchpin of our success in the war on terror.
By diverting our attention from Afghanistan where we were engaged in overthrowing the Taliban and hunting down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, a war in which we were supported by almost the entire civilized world, by cooking the intelligence to the show that Iraq was a threat to us and in cahoots with those who had attacked us on 9/11, and by believing that we could reshape Islam and gain strategic advantage over the Persian Gulf that we went wrong.
The neocons provided the intellectual muscle for this idea, and it was Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon gurus who believed that our military would show to better advantage in Iraq. Their salesmanship to the true believer, George W. Bush, set the nation into the abyss that Richard describes so well.
Turning Richard’s argument around, it is my view that if we had instituted a draft and enlarged the military beyond the numbers ever dreamed of by the generals and if we had sent a force even greater than that suggested by former Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki that we would have ultimately wound up pretty much where we are today. Our troops would have to come home someday and spending at a rate double the disabling figure that we expend today would make withdrawal an even greater imperative than we now face. And with withdrawal would come the political situation with all its sectarian and tribal strife similar to that we lament at present.
So instead of fighting al Qaeda and those governments like the Taliban that directly supported it, we went for broke and decided that we could transform the world and enhance our strategic position in the Middle East and the world – and we failed. Not just incompetence, Richard, it was the hubris that did us in.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/03/AR2006040301609.html?referrer=emailarticle
While Richard recognizes that the generals who counseled we could not attain our objectives with the number of troops being assembled and that a force of far greater magnitude would be required to occupy and pacify the country after the Saddam regime was toppled were right, it is there that the columnist makes his mistake. It was not the incompetence of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, et al that drove the Hummer off the cliff; instead, it was the hubris of those same people who believed that we could enter into the heart of Islamic civilization, Iraq, and expect to make that the linchpin of our success in the war on terror.
By diverting our attention from Afghanistan where we were engaged in overthrowing the Taliban and hunting down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, a war in which we were supported by almost the entire civilized world, by cooking the intelligence to the show that Iraq was a threat to us and in cahoots with those who had attacked us on 9/11, and by believing that we could reshape Islam and gain strategic advantage over the Persian Gulf that we went wrong.
The neocons provided the intellectual muscle for this idea, and it was Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon gurus who believed that our military would show to better advantage in Iraq. Their salesmanship to the true believer, George W. Bush, set the nation into the abyss that Richard describes so well.
Turning Richard’s argument around, it is my view that if we had instituted a draft and enlarged the military beyond the numbers ever dreamed of by the generals and if we had sent a force even greater than that suggested by former Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki that we would have ultimately wound up pretty much where we are today. Our troops would have to come home someday and spending at a rate double the disabling figure that we expend today would make withdrawal an even greater imperative than we now face. And with withdrawal would come the political situation with all its sectarian and tribal strife similar to that we lament at present.
So instead of fighting al Qaeda and those governments like the Taliban that directly supported it, we went for broke and decided that we could transform the world and enhance our strategic position in the Middle East and the world – and we failed. Not just incompetence, Richard, it was the hubris that did us in.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Shattering the coalition
George W. Bush is spending what remains of his political capital on the issue of illegal immigration. Since his hand was forced some time ago, he has taken the reasonable position that we must seal our borders, legally admit as many of all kinds of workers as our economy requires to keep the engine running at a reasonable speed without hurting American citizens, and providing some sort of a `guest worker’ program for the ten or more million illegal aliens already in the country. To me this is a sensible and good approach to the situation.
Large segments of the Republicans coalition find this position by President ____ to be an anathema. But a smaller number have reached beyond party core and reached out to Democrats and independents in an effort to find an equitable solution. The Senate Judiciary Committee led by Senators Specter, McCain and Kennedy seems to be settling in on an approach similar to the president’s.
Majority Leader, Senator Bill Frist is threatening a showdown on the floor of the Senate in support of far more draconian measures that are in accord with an onerous bill that has already passed the House. Since the Republicans in the House have the votes to block any conference committee result that includes anything that could be interpreted as amnesty, the likely bottom line result is that no immigration legislation will be enacted this election year.
My purpose today is to compare President Bush quite favorably with President Lyndon Johnson whose heroic action on civil rights made America a better place then and that created a legal legacy that makes it better today. Johnson was a master at extruding the legislation that he wanted from the Congress. His hero was Franklin Roosevelt and, like FDR, LBJ forced the action on the Hill. Johnson might have been even better a getting his way than Roosevelt.
As has been described far better by others, Johnson and Martin Luther King did a great dance over civil rights and Johnson ultimately did what he thought was right and supported sweeping changes for the country. Because of this, Blacks – and all others outside the political mainstream because of race, color, religion, ethnicity, sex and any other political disability – were afforded the protections that we now take for granted.
But there was a down side for Johnson. He knew as he moved on civil rights that he was doing what should be done, but he knew too that the great Democratic coalition that had been cobbled together by Roosevelt a generation earlier would be shattered. Johnson knew full well that his aggressive policies would result in the diminution of the Democrat Party for the rest of the twentieth century, especially in the South. As an American, he acted in the best interest of the country, but as a loyal Democrat he was well aware that he was undermining the party that he loved and that had brought him to the pinnacle of political power.
Today, the condition of the ruling Republican coalition is horrible. Power has corrupted it. Incompetence has clogged its arteries. And the segments have taken to fighting among themselves and to undermining President ____ whom they no longer see in the picture.
But Mr. Bush is taking a principled stand on immigration, and his alliance with moderate Republican and Democrats senators on the immigration question will finish off the ruling coalition as we’ve known it for a dozen years and as it has been building since Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Regardless of whether the president and the senators are successful in getting an immigration act, the nativist parts of the coalition will forever hate _____ _ ____ and after a generation and half the Democrats, including many in the South will return to power.
As Vietnam destroyed Johnson so the Iraq War has ruined George W. Bush’s presidency, but he can redeem himself partially in history by fighting hard for the immigration policy that he has been championing.
This may well assure the loss of power for his party, but is the right thing. For this, I salute the president.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Large segments of the Republicans coalition find this position by President ____ to be an anathema. But a smaller number have reached beyond party core and reached out to Democrats and independents in an effort to find an equitable solution. The Senate Judiciary Committee led by Senators Specter, McCain and Kennedy seems to be settling in on an approach similar to the president’s.
Majority Leader, Senator Bill Frist is threatening a showdown on the floor of the Senate in support of far more draconian measures that are in accord with an onerous bill that has already passed the House. Since the Republicans in the House have the votes to block any conference committee result that includes anything that could be interpreted as amnesty, the likely bottom line result is that no immigration legislation will be enacted this election year.
My purpose today is to compare President Bush quite favorably with President Lyndon Johnson whose heroic action on civil rights made America a better place then and that created a legal legacy that makes it better today. Johnson was a master at extruding the legislation that he wanted from the Congress. His hero was Franklin Roosevelt and, like FDR, LBJ forced the action on the Hill. Johnson might have been even better a getting his way than Roosevelt.
As has been described far better by others, Johnson and Martin Luther King did a great dance over civil rights and Johnson ultimately did what he thought was right and supported sweeping changes for the country. Because of this, Blacks – and all others outside the political mainstream because of race, color, religion, ethnicity, sex and any other political disability – were afforded the protections that we now take for granted.
But there was a down side for Johnson. He knew as he moved on civil rights that he was doing what should be done, but he knew too that the great Democratic coalition that had been cobbled together by Roosevelt a generation earlier would be shattered. Johnson knew full well that his aggressive policies would result in the diminution of the Democrat Party for the rest of the twentieth century, especially in the South. As an American, he acted in the best interest of the country, but as a loyal Democrat he was well aware that he was undermining the party that he loved and that had brought him to the pinnacle of political power.
Today, the condition of the ruling Republican coalition is horrible. Power has corrupted it. Incompetence has clogged its arteries. And the segments have taken to fighting among themselves and to undermining President ____ whom they no longer see in the picture.
But Mr. Bush is taking a principled stand on immigration, and his alliance with moderate Republican and Democrats senators on the immigration question will finish off the ruling coalition as we’ve known it for a dozen years and as it has been building since Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Regardless of whether the president and the senators are successful in getting an immigration act, the nativist parts of the coalition will forever hate _____ _ ____ and after a generation and half the Democrats, including many in the South will return to power.
As Vietnam destroyed Johnson so the Iraq War has ruined George W. Bush’s presidency, but he can redeem himself partially in history by fighting hard for the immigration policy that he has been championing.
This may well assure the loss of power for his party, but is the right thing. For this, I salute the president.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
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