Should We Keep the Facts of Torture Secret

An argument I've heard any number of times, in which I find little merit, goes like this:

Some, like U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), argue that the Islamic State and al-Qaeda already have the United States in their cross-hairs, so what’s the difference. That’s true in general, but will this report’s release help these groups find new foot soldiers, followers and funding?

The info in this document, especially with its lurid details, could prove a propaganda bonanza for existing or future terrorist groups — not to mention "lone wolves" who may be incited to violence by it.

This is a serious risk.

The assumption behind the argument is that the people who were on the receiving end of U.S. torture are every bit as in the dark about it as the people of the U.S., who were told about water boarding and not much else. As if, when asked, a suspect who was tortured but eventually released would decline to describe what happened during his detention, lest he make people angry at the U.S.

I recognize that a lot of people here bought into the "They hate us for our freedom" canard, but really.

If You Want to Defend Torture, Start By Admitting That It's Torture

Going back a few weeks, George Will wrote an editorial with a number of similarities to Richard Cohen's piece on the morality of torture, particularly in the manner in which Will substitutes his experience in a movie theater for fact-based argument. Will opens with the sympathetic quotation of Col. Nathan Jessep, Jack Nicholson's character from A Few Good Men,

“I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”

That diatribe was, of course, the lead-in to the film's Perry Mason moment, when Jessup confesses to ordering the abuse of an enlisted man who ended up dead. Will seems particularly taken with the quote, "You [expletive] people... you have no idea how to defend a nation", never mind that Jessup is addressing a military court martial. Sure, it's a movie and Jessup's speech is directed at the movie audience, but his on screen attack is directed at other military officers. Jessup's honor falls short of helping the two enlisted men who carried out his directive avoid being prosecuted for murder. If Will's argument is that there should be no checks on men who believe themselves to be acting in the best interest of the nation, Jessup by this point having rejected the opinions of every other officer who suggested an alternative to the Code Red, having excused himself from the confines of the Marine Corps' regulations and Uniform Code of Military Justice, having happily allowed two enlisted men to be looking at lengthy prison terms for carrying out his orders, and having repeatedly perjured himself on the stand and repeatedly disparaged the other military officers involved in the legal proceeding, he has every right to attempt that argument. But were Will to explore some of our nation's history, including how we came to have a civilian in the role of Commander in Chief, he might come to realize that in fact a Colonel, even one who is extraordinarily self-assured, even one who is doing important work, is and should be answerable to higher authorities.

Switching over to Zero Dark Thirty, Will informs us,

Viewers will know going in how the movie ends. They will not know how they will feel when seeing an American tell a detainee, “When you lie to me I hurt you,” and proceed to do so.

Frankly, "When you lie to me I hurt you," makes for better film than "When I think you have information you're not sharing, I'll keep you awake for 180 hours," but... call it poetic license. But contrary to Will's suggestion, most viewers will have seen plenty of dramatizations that involve torture, including torture committed by Americans. Kiefer Sutherland (whose character disagreed with Jessup's approach in A Few Good Men) made something of a career of it in his series, "24". Another season, another ticking time bomb. The difference is that this is supposed to be "based on a true story", and that unlike other films based upon true stories this one is... I don't know... more graphic? Easier to confuse with a documentary?

As is his wont, Will likes to overstate the benefits of torture, blithely reciting the claims of various Bush Administration officials about how tidbits of relevant information were gleaned from the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, including "the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden". Will implies a straight line from the disclosure of that nickname in 2003 to the killing of Bin Laden some eight years later. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the "ticking timebomb" defense. We cannot know at this juncture whether the nickname of Bin Laden's courier would have been obtained from Mohammed without the use of torture, but we can reasonably conclude that either the name was not of much help to the investigation or that Mohammed poured out so much information under torture that the key to finding Bin Laden was buried in a mountain of irrelevant disclosures, with wild goose chases taking priority over the identification of the courier.

The question of whether torture "works" depends both on the tactics the torturer is willing to use, and also upon the torturer's goal. For example, let's say I want to know what the enemy is up to, and I have 100 enemy operatives in custody. If I am willing to torture all of them, I can start looking for commonalities among their disclosures. Sure, there's a chance that they will have been fed misinformation and not have the information I'm looking for, but odds are I'll learn something useful. Or I'll be able to test their stories and, if my information is good, use torture to punish what I believe to be errors or inaccuracies in the hope that the subject will become terrified of being caught in a lie. It's similar to the manner in which police divide suspects and interrogate them separately, then lie about what the other suspects have said or disclosed in order to try to trick the others. Except with torture. Sure, I may end up torturing people to try to get them to disclose something that they know nothing about, and if I'm not careful I can inadvertently feed them the answers to the questions that will stop the torture and mistake their new answers for actionable intelligence, but if I torture enough people in enough circumstances I will get names, locations, and other information that turn out to be valid. And if I break down the wrong door, shoot the wrong person, pick up and torture an innocent person based upon a bad tip, well, "I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it."

Similarly, I may not care if the person I'm torturing tells the truth. I may want that person to lie. To pose for propaganda pictures or a film, to make or sign a confession to crimes, or to simply be too frightened to ever stand against me or my regime in the future lest he again be picked up and tortured.

Will lectures us,

Viewers of “Zero Dark Thirty” can decide whether or which “enhanced interrogation” measures depicted — slaps, sleep deprivation, humiliation, waterboarding — constitute, in plain English, torture. And they can ponder whether any or all of them would be wrong even if effective.

Sorry, but that's a cop-out. We would not see the situation as ambiguous if a police agency used those techniques to elicit confessions from a criminal suspect, particularly if it were an American citizen being tortured by a police agency in the developing world. We would not see the situation as ambiguous if those techniques were being applied to a U.S. solider in enemy custody. Let's not forget how few seconds it took for Christopher Hitchens to change his position from "waterboarding can't be that bad," to "it's torture." (For the record, sixteen.) If somebody were to put a bag over Will's head, strip him naked, transport him to a remote location, and apply the techniques he describes, I'm somehow not thinking that his subsequent column would be so deferential, "my readers can decide for themselves if the 'enhanced interrogation' measures I describe constitute, in plain English, torture". He would have an opinion.

Will shouldn't be so afraid to take a stand. After all, if these techniques were simply another form of acceptable interrogation, we wouldn't need the euphemisms and we wouldn't be talking about "tough choices" or quoting Colonel Jessup for the principle that "anything goes in the name of freedom". No small part of the reason we're still having this discussion is that men like Michael Mukasey and Bush Administration lickspittles like Marc Theissen refuse to acknowledge the truth of what we were doing, while prominent commentators like George Will provide them with cover. How can he talk about "facing up to what we did" if he's not even willing to hang a name on it?

Why a Coward's Path to Medicare Reform Won't Work

I've made no secret of what I think of policy proposals that are not slated to take effect until after an election or, worse, after the next President is in office. Granted, sometimes the timing issues are a bit more complicated than they might appear at first blush. The "Bush tax cuts" were scheduled to expire after ten years not because Bush wouldn't have preferred to make them permanent, but because they were passed through reconciliation and thus had a ten year shelf life. Obamacare was implemented in phases not because there was concern about earlier implementation, at least on the part of the Democrats, but because of insistence that the bill be revenue neutral. The staged implementation allowed the financial projections to show revenue neutrality over a ten year period. Which is not to say that I don't think that the Obama Administration felt some relief when the least popular aspect of the plan was pushed to 2014, a happy side-effect of the bitter pill.

In stark contrast are policy proposals over issues that a President fears would be damaging. George W. Bush promised that his policies would lead to an independent Palestinian state during his second term because he didn't want to fall flat on his face trying to force a resolution before his reelection, taking advantage of any suckers who supported his reelection based upon his feigned interest in the issue then all-but-dropping it after his reelection.

The more difficult issues of our time, it seems, are placed on the coward's schedule. The ultimate cowards of our current election cycle are Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, who are deliberately creating a conflict between generations in order to try to grease their way into the White House. They have made clear that they want to turn Medicare into a voucher program and would prefer to do so immediately, but they don't have the courage to stand behind those convictions.

Instead they claim that they will pass legislation that will take effect a decade from now, long after their assumed second term ends, that will leave untouched the Medicare benefits of anybody over the age of 55 but will give any younger person a voucher inadequate to pay for equivalent coverage - and with the voucher structured to lose value over time in relation to the projected future cost of health insurance. They pretend that they will make up some of the shortfall by reducing the value of the voucher for wealthier seniors, but know full well that the amount they could save through such a measure would be a relative pittance.

You know what else? Other than the fact that health insurance companies don't care to insure seniors, with their unpredictable and often high medical costs as well as end-of-life care, their present proposal sounds an awful lot like "Obamacare for seniors, with a public option." Funny how they're not worried about "individual mandates", public competition with private insurers, and the like when it's their proposal. That's not really a big surprise, though, given that Romney still supports Romneycare - his real objections to "Obamacare" are that (a) objecting could help him defeat a Democratic president and (b) it might work.

Back to the coward's time line. As anybody who knows anything about how our system of government works can tell you, Congress passes spending measures on a year-by-year basis. Congress meets and passes new legislation each year. If this year's Congress passes a law that attempts to bind future congresses, a future congress is free to change or repeal that law.

Why do Romney and Ryan quiver in their boots at suggesting to today's older voters, those age 55 and older, as well as current Medicare recipients that their benefits should be transformed to a voucher program? Simply put, those voters have more money and influence as compared to most other voter blocs, they like and want Medicare, and they vote. Romney and Ryan are happy to try to scare those voters with demagoguery about bureaucrats deciding what care they will get, or budget cuts that don't directly affect benefits and which they, themselves, have endorsed. But when it comes to telling that population, "Medicare costs the nation too much, you paid for it but not enough as compared to what you're getting, and it's only fair that you share the burden of our reform," nope, not happening. They propose continuing what they claim to be an undeserved windfall to today's seniors, while imposing what they claim to be an unreasonable burden on everybody else.

So let's move nine years into the future. Assuming Romney and Ryan win the election, they'll be out of office. And their Medicare reform? It won't yet be in effect. The voters they're presently terrified of confronting will be 65 and older. And an entirely new population of voters will be between the ages of 55 and 65, and the new generation of politician will be every bit as terrified of those voters as Ryan and Romney are right this very minute.

It appears to be the hope of Romney and Ryan that, when confronted with that anger, rather than repudiating the never-implemented Medicare reform, politicians a decade from now will look at the budget picture and say, "Let's just put this voucher thing into effect for everybody." More likely, they'll either say, "Let's put this off another ten years." Faced with enough voter anger, as the deadline becomes real and the weakness of the replacement benefit becomes obvious, they'll say "Oh well, I guess we won't be implementing that plan after all."

Either way, the most likely impact of the cowardly reform schedule is that rather than making tough choices, politicians of the next decade (for most of which Romney and Ryan hope to be leading the pack) will slough off the idea that they need to do any hard work to fix Medicare for the long term because, "Several years from now our reform will come into effect and the markets will magically fix all of this stuff." That is, Romney and Ryan are giving themselves an excuse to do nothing constructive and to show no leadership on the actual issues facing Medicare, knowing full well that their cowardice on the issue could create immense difficulty for the administrations that succeed them.

Perhaps they hope that their fiscal policies will leave the government in such bad shape that it cannot afford to perpetuate Medicare. But if that's the case, they should admit up front that they are offering a recipe to harm and weaken our nation, not one that will give it an strong economic footing. If, on the other hand, they believe their budget plans will improve the nation's finances, what are the odds that their successors are going to take the heat for decisions Romney and Ryan were too cowardly to implement when, just like Romney and Ryan, they can push the issue off onto a future administration.

When Your Actions Are Defensible, You Don't Have to Lie

I'm sure that there are any number of online reactions to John Yoo's recent prevarications in the Washington Post but, even if so, I'll add one more. One of the most incredible aspects of the successful raid on Osama bin Laden's compound is how various incompetents from the Bush Administration have attempted to use the raid to justify torture. Long gone are the days when those same incompetents argued that we didn't actually torture people, and long gone is the "ticking time bomb" excuse for torture. Now the case appears to be that if you obtain through torture any information that with the application of hindsight might somehow connect to a law enforcement success at some point in the future, no matter how many years pass, torture is wonderful, necessary and successful.

The argument belies itself. If the fruits of torture are so accurate and useful, and if the mite of information allegedly gleaned from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in fact led inexorably to the raid on bin Laden, that raid should have occurred six or so years ago - when the information was fresh. Instead what did we see? Yoo's former lord and master, G.W. Bush, declaring that bin Laden was no longer among his priorities - even as far back as 2002:

"The idea of focusing on one person, is, um, really indicates to me that people really don't understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person. And, uh, he's just, he's a person who'se now been marginalized.... So, I don't know where he is, nor, you know, I just don't spend that much time on it, Kelly, to be honest with you."

So when G.W. announced that bin Laden was irrelevant, failing to capture or kill him was no big deal, and that he had other things to worry about it, his lap dogs had not one word of criticism. Now, almost a decade later, they're yipping at President Obama because he succeeded where Bush failed, and suddenly bin Laden is the most important fugitive in the world.

If we step back in time, the story of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's torture seems to be something along the lines of this: He was captured and detained for interrogation, and was proving to be a source of valuable intelligence. Then somebody with a Dick Cheney mindset apparently said, "Hey - we'll get even more information if we torture him," and John Yoo happily signed on to write a memo to immunize the torturers from prosecution. Torture proceeded, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shared countless plots, many of which were never more than pipe dreams, and some of which appear to have been made up on the spot (because, as you know, that's how you stop torture - by telling the torturer what he wants to hear.) And despite the continued protestation of people like Yoo and Marc Thiessen, the torture program was declared a failure and was cancelled.

If, in fact, the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed produced a valuable bit of information that led so easily to bin Laden, as Yoo suggests - facts be damned - why wasn't that lead followed in a timely manner?

The United States located al Qaeda's leader by learning the identity of a trusted courier from the tough interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi.

Armed with the courier's nom de guerre, American intelligence agencies later found him thanks to his phone call to a contact already under electronic surveillance. Last August, the courier traveled to bin Laden's compound, but it took another eight months before the CIA became certain that the al Qaeda leader was hiding inside.

Surely Yoo isn't going to try to argue to us that the courier did not visit bin Laden so much as once between the torture of KSM and last August. If Yoo is correct about the value of that information, then he should be honest about how torture impacted the ability of U.S. intelligence to winnow useful information out of the avalanche of garbage KSM produced under torture.

Yoo offers a childish caricature of how the U.S. might have treated captured war criminals had President Obama been in charge after 9/11:

Imagine what would have happened if the Obama administration had been running things immediately following 9/11. After their "arrest," we would have read KSM and al-Libi their Miranda rights, provided them legal counsel, sent them to the U.S. for detention, and granted them all the rights provided a U.S. citizen in criminal proceedings.

Because, you know, it's either that or rendition, black sites and torture - no possible middle ground. Not only is Yoo offering a false dichotomy, it's not even consistent with his argument - he's suggesting that Bush would have tried to gently capture bin Laden, take him into custody and interrogate him, while President Obama was too much of a cowboy. A little consistency, please?

And let's also remember that the Bush Administration did arrest suspected terrorists after 9/11 and, while it did play fast and loose with the Constitution with no small amount of help from people like Yoo, some notable terrorists were Mirandized and were tried in federal court. I don't recall that, at the time, people like Yoo were decrying how the Bush Administration's successful prosecution of terrorists was undermining the war on terror. You didn't hear Yoo scold President Bush for announcing that he wanted to capture bin Laden "dead or alive." You didn't hear so much of a whimper of criticism when Bush ordered a raid that resulted in the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons, both of whom could have provided valuable intelligence had they been captured alive.

Yoo also acts as if President Obama was in the room when bin Laden was killed, rather than being the person who signed off on a carefully constructed military operation:

As Sunday's operation put so vividly on display, Mr. Obama would rather kill al Qaeda leaders—whether by drones or special ops teams—than wade through the difficult questions raised by their detention. This may have dissuaded Mr. Obama from sending a more robust force to attempt a capture.

Were Yoo an honest man he would admit that, had President Obama turned the mission into a larger operation intended to capture bin Laden, he and his ilk would be the first to point their fingers and screech about his "meddling in a military operation" had the mission failed, or had any soldiers died or been taken prisoner. Had President Obama instructed military leaders to change their plan to prioritize capture, and had that resulted in a similar failure, Yoo would similarly be screeching about the President's incompetence. Bin Laden is reported to have always had a weapon within reach, and he could easily have had his compound rigged with explosives - Yoo's fantasies of, "Maybe if we had sent more helicopters and more soldiers" really aren't reflective of the reality of what happens when soldiers enter a small room to engage in close quarters combat. (In fairness, perhaps Yoo learned military strategy by playing Doom.)

As it stands, the mission was a success, but success isn't good enough for Yoo. Perhaps it's too good, because people like Yoo sometimes seem to be programmed to root for the President to fail. But it's abundantly clear that, even if he thought otherwise, Yoo would have either lavished praise upon G.W. for a similar raid or, at most, kept his mouth shut. Just as he wouldn't be praising the current President for successfully capturing bin Laden, had the man been taken alive.

Yoo insists that capturing bin Laden "alive would have required the administration to hold and interrogate bin Laden at Guantanamo Bay". Why? Does Yoo believe that the U.S. never held an international criminal, terrorist, or war criminal before we built that prison in Cuba? Has he failed to review the Supreme Court rulings that have resulted from the Bush Administration's treatment of prisoners that have dramatically reduced what were intended as the benefits of the Guantanamo prison - the notion of people like Yoo that the U.S. could sequester prisoners in its custody from any constitutional protections? Perhaps he's imagining that it would become politically necessary, thanks to the hypocritical squawkings of prominent Republicans who, up to Obama's election, favored closing the Guantanamo prison.

As for Yoo's quaint notion that the President should "restart the interrogation program that helped lead us to bin Laden", I again remind him that it was not the Obama administration that abandoned the Bush era torture program as a failure. That was President Bush.

Osama Bin Forgotten

Even back in Bush's day, based upon the de-emphasis of the world's most wanted (but neither captured nor killed) fugitive, I heard Bin Laden referenced as "Bin forgotten". So it's no surprise that a lot of people, particularly young people, have no idea who he is.

A Weak Case for War

If you follow Eunomia, the recent New York Times columns by Ross Douthat and Anne-Marie Slaughter on the possibility of military intervention in Libya may seem like familiar ground. Slaughter advocates a "no fly zone", an approach challenged by others as inappropriate. Douthat implies that we should be cautious.

Douthat has received quite a bit of praise for his column from those who are skeptical of where a "no fly zone" would lead, and he does a good job of gently laying things out.

Moreover, even with the best-laid plans, warfare is always a uniquely high-risk enterprise — which means that the burden of proof should generally rest with hawks rather than with doves, and seven reasonable-sounding reasons for intervening may not add up to a single convincing case for war.

Advocates of a Libyan intervention don’t seem to have internalized these lessons. They have rallied around a no-flight zone as their Plan A for toppling Qaddafi, but most military analysts seem to think that it will fail to do the job, and there’s no consensus on Plan B. Would we escalate to air strikes? Arm the rebels? Sit back and let Qaddafi claim to have outlasted us?

If we did supply the rebels, who exactly would be receiving our money and munitions? Libya’s internal politics are opaque, to put it mildly. But here’s one disquieting data point, courtesy of the Center for a New American Security’s : Eastern Libya, the locus of the rebellion, sent more foreign fighters per capita to join the Iraqi insurgency than any other region in the Arab world.

And if the civil war dragged on, what then? Twice in the last two decades, in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, the United States has helped impose a no-flight zone. In both cases, it was just a stepping-stone to further escalation: bombing campaigns, invasion, occupation and nation-building.

Me? I'm feeling less patient. I am frustrated by calls for military action by people whose positions on Libya seem to shift with the wind. In the 1980's, Qaddafi was crazy, and an undisputed supporter of terrorists. In the 1990's he remained a tyrant, kept at arm's length by much of the west, but our interest in him and his regime diminished. In the 2000's, along came G.W. and all of a sudden Qaddafi was redeemed - because he gave up WMD programs that didn't appear to amount to much and allowing western investment - and he was held up by leaders like Bush and Blair like a trophy, "Exhibit A" that the "War on Terror" worked. And then, lo and behold, it turns out that he's still a tyrant and isn't eager to relinquish power to rebel factions and... it seems like we're back in the 80's.

As I've suggested before, sometimes it feels like the loudest voices for military intervention around the world began and ended their study of military conflict by watching episodes of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers - the good guys go up against opponents who are manifestations of pure evil, defeat them in clean, honorable battle with no collateral damage, and the world is saved! Not even the never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can change their minds. ("All we're doing" is intervening in a civil war while engaging in an act of war against a nation that hasn't attacked us and shows no interest in doing so - first we bomb their air defenses, then we create a 'no fly zone' and then we win! What could possibly go wrong?")

Look, I can understand the sentiment that all you have to do to bring peace, love, understanding and freedom to a population that lives under a tyrant is to decapitate the regime. It's a perfectly appropriate belief to hold before you expose yourself to enough human and military history to see how things are more likely to turn out. Slaughter suggests that if we don't help defeat Qaddafi, "when Colonel Qaddafi massacres the opposition, young protesters across the Middle East will conclude that when we were asked to support their cause with more than words". Except, you know, sometimes the revolution brings to power somebody like Pol Pot or Rouhollah Khomeini. Frying pans, fires, and all that. So I'm with Douthat here - part of the process of deciding when and where to intervene has to be to look at what's likely to result from your intervention.

By virtue of my own frustration with the "Let's have another war" crowd, I do have a criticism of Douthat. The man simply can't bring himself to take a stand. He trots out the parade of horribles, "All this nasty stuff could happen if we intervene militarily in Libya," but he can't bring himself to state a stronger conclusion than "th[e] case [for war] has not yet been made". He's an opinion columnist, and I guess that does count (in a wishy-washy way) as an opinion. And no, I'm not trying to argue that he needs to rule out any possibility that a case could be made that would inspire him to change his mind. But after laying out a strong argument as to why the case has not been made for military intervention, would it have been too much for him to run with his own argument? To emphatically state that the burden of proof is properly placed on the proponents of the war, that we should not be tricked into excusing their failure to meet that burden by rhetorical flourish or by the type of doctored evidence that was at the heart of the case for the war in Iraq?

Is he afraid that he'll be accused of defending a tyrant, much the way skeptics of the war in Iraq were accused of being happy to let Hussein terrorize his people? If that's the worst that can happen, given his position and the fact that he's a reasonably good writer, he can pen a column explaining why that's a (deliberately) unfair and inflammatory argument. If not... come on, man. Take a stand.

Update: Robert Farley comments on the... should I say utilitarian views of the neocons?

Whether they leave the point implicit or explicit, the neocons are reasonably clear about their preferences; we should support the rebels to the extent that we can be certain that they’ll win, and then we should install and support whichever parts of the rebel alliance are most to our liking.

The difficulty comes, of course, when you hitch your wagon to the wrong star - Ahmed Chalabi or, as increasingly appears to be the case, Ahmed Karzai, and the like. It may turn out that, when the shooting is over, there's no part of the "rebel alliance" that's actually to your liking, or deems the person you had hoped would lead and shape the "rebel alliance" into a new government to be wholly unacceptable. And it may be that your anointed leader for the new era is almost as problematic, albeit perhaps in different ways, than the leader you deposed.

Of All the Appalling Things....

I have to agree with Thomas E. Waits on this one:

A friend recently asked me what I really had learned since 9/11, how my sense of the world had changed. That event and its consequences have so dominated my life for the last 10 years that it took me a minute to consider, and I was surprised at my response. I told him that I never expected to live in a country whose government officially embraced torture....

Torture and other abuse of people under American control was more than a crime; it was a strategic blunder: You can't win a war by undermining your own values, the things your country stands for.

Democracy Building According to Jackson Diehl

First, you replace the non-democratic government of the targeted nation with a... dictatorship. Ah, but not just any dictator. A benign dictator. A philosopher king, if you will. And then you charge him with keeping the peace while he assembles the nation's various political factions and they collectively write a constitution. And then they work together to engage the middle class such that, when the election occurs, it's the nation's wealthier members, manufacturers and merchants who choose the next government, not the unwashed masses. Seriously folks, this is the real Deihl:

"This administration has been at best lukewarm towards our cause of democracy," Saad Eddin Ibrahim, one of the most respected Egyptian opposition leaders, told me Thursday.

"Clinton's statement on Tuesday reflected what the policy has been for two years," Ibrahim said. "The second statement was a bit more balanced. But it is still not balanced enough for our taste. What we hope for is explicit support for the demands that are being put forward by the people in the streets."

Those demands are coherent and eminently reasonable: Mubarak should step down and be replaced by a transitional government, headed by ElBaradei and including representatives of all pro-democracy forces. That government could then spend six months to a year rewriting the constitution, allowing political parties to freely organize and preparing for genuinely democratic elections. Given time to establish themselves, secular forces backed by Egypt's growing middle class are likely to rise to the top in those elections - not the Islamists that Mubarak portrays as the only alternative.

I recognize that it takes valuable seconds to find demographic information on nations like Egypt, and that people like Diehl probably have better things to do with their time than to see if the facts support their arguments, but it seems worth asking: In what sort of democratic election will Egypt's middle class be able to define the outcome? Egypt has 9.7% unemployment (a long-term problem, with the official figure likely understating the reality), 20% of the population lives in poverty, and the population is 90% Muslim. Close to 30% of the adult population is illiterate - a 17% male illiteracy rate and a 40.6% female illiteracy rate. One third of the population is under the age of 14. The median age is 24. This may strike Diehl as odd, but those demographics do not suggest to me that a secular middle class will be able to control the reform process.

Diehl criticizes the Obama Administration for standing behind Mubarak instead of... I'm not sure what. I guess, telling him to resign and appoint a philosopher king as his successor.

Thus began what may be remembered as one of the most shortsighted and wrongheaded policies the United States has ever pursued in the Middle East. Admittedly, the bar is high. But the Obama administration's embrace of Mubarak, even as the octogenarian strongman refused to allow the emergence of a moderate, middle-class-based, pro-democracy opposition, has helped bring the United States' most important Arab ally to the brink of revolution.

There are two ways of looking at this, of course. Diehl's way, that within days Mubarak's regime will fall and a forward-looking, secular, democratic regime will take over, reform the nation of Egypt and uplift its people, and leave its people angry that the U.S. wasn't more supportive at the onset of their revolution. Or that the Mubarak regime will prove sufficiently stable to withstand the protests. But since Diehl is suggesting that Egyptians resent President Obama's supposed abandonment of the Bush-era "freedom agenda", it's worth stepping back a few years to see how Bush treated Egypt and Mubarak. And who better to give us that history than Jackson Diehl?

So Democrats have to start by "reclaiming our own ground," [Will] Marshall says. His book proposes two important ways to do that. First, Democrats can clean up the crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the CIA's secret prisons, and restore America's reputation as the world's foremost defender of human rights. They can also end Bush's cynical policy of demanding democracy from enemy regimes such as Iran and Syria while tolerating the continued autocracy of such friends as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Were Diehl attempting to be fair, he would also acknowledge how the Bush Administration insisted upon elections for the Palestinian Authority then reacted in horror when the wrong party won. Diehl appears to share that sense of "democracy" - he doesn't want elections in Egypt now, implicitly acknowledging that Islamic factions would win an election. He wants the nation ruled by the benign dictator until secular parties "establish themselves" and we can be pretty sure that "secular forces backed by Egypt's growing middle class are likely to rise to the top in those elections". Should Diehl get his wish, one wonders... will Diehl call for elections if, six months or a year from now, it still looks like Islamic parties would prevail in an election? No, actually one doesn't. It looks like Diehl's "freedom agenda" is that of Bush: it only counts as freedom if the correct person or party comes out on top.

We can also play the game of "Which Secretary of State is Diehl attacking"?

But her aims are utterly different from those with which Bush began his second term - such as the "freedom agenda" he restated in Prague. Democracy promotion in the Middle East is out, replaced by a belated but intense effort to broker a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians. Even more strikingly, the "regime change" strategy that once marked Bush administration policy toward North Korea has been dropped in favor of an all-out effort to negotiate a rapprochement with dictator Kim Jong Il.

vs.

Bland, carefully balanced statements were issued by second- and third-level spokesmen, while [she and the President] - who regularly ripped Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu - remained silent.

Condi vs. Hillary. Yes, that first comment was directed at Condoleezza Rice. Except when Rice walked away from the "freedom agenda" and embraced tyrants Diehl saw her moves as "bold new strategies" - "No wonder, perhaps, that the secretary hasn't bothered with directives about dissidents."

Diehl's primary mistake lies in his hallucinatory belief that the U.S. can control events in Egypt - or is it that he believes he can control the events through some form of extremely powerful wishful thinking: That the U.S. could do something that would inspire Mubarak to resign and appoint Mohamed ElBaradei to be his temporary successor. That the masses would accept Mohamed ElBaradei as the leader, and would accept his initiative to draft a constitution establishing Egypt as a secular democracy. That the various political factions involved would cooperate in creating such a constitution, and the factions Diehl wants to see marginalized or excluded from that process would acquiesce. That secular political parties would flourish - but perhaps just two or three of them, such that they could reasonably form a government. That the middle class would overwhelmingly and successfully elect a secular, democratic government. And that all of this could be achieved within six months. As Daniel Larison has observed,

The administration could tell Mubarak that. Instead of the increased criticism it has already promised, the administration could threaten Mubarak with its “wrath.” Would this entail merely the suspension of aid, or would it involve more serious penalties? In other words, what exactly should the administration be threatening to do to Mubarak and his allies if they do not comply? It’s all very well to bluster and make threats, but Mubarak knows that our government is not going to risk seriously undermining the current government. He will assume that the administration is bluffing and playing to its domestic audience, and he will probably be right. If the administration is not bluffing, it genuinely risks making the same mistake that Carter made in his handling of the Shah and domestic opposition to his regime.

Larison continues with an explanation of why it's unrealistic to expect the Muslim Brotherhood to remain on the sidelines. Larison predicts, quite reasonably,

By the end of the week, it looks as if the Brotherhood will have officially joined the protests as well. The protesters cannot be neatly separated into the “good” secular democrats here and the unacceptable Islamists over there. For that matter, there is as yet no evidence that any of the protesters object to the Brotherhood’s participation.

Larison relates the observation of Jonathan Wright that one of the reasons the Islamic Brotherhood has remained in the background is likely because its involvement "would frighten off some of the other groups" and that with its open involvement "the government will feel free to use much more brutal methods to disperse protesters". If Mubarak falls and a new government is to be peacefully formed, the Islamic Brotherhood will demand a seat at the table.

The Childish Nature of American Politics

My, how American loves leadership. The country loved George W. Bush when he "led" us into two completely unfunded wars, costing in the $trillions. The seniors loved George W. Bush for his "leadership" on Medicare, giving them another unfunded benefit projected to cost about 3/4 of another $trillion over the next decade. The nation, most notably the wealthiest 3% of the nation, is angry that G.W.'s unfunded tax cuts might not be extended - who cares about the unfunded $trillions lost to the tax cut, or that the cuts were scheduled by Bush to expire as part of the maneuverings to ram them through Congress without adequate funding or consideration of the future. That is leadership, American style, and the Republicans had his back.

Meanwhile, three items on our national budget prevent us from having any reasonable expectation of a balanced budget in the short- or longer term: Military spending, Medicare and Social Security. Bush, a self-described war president who had launched those two unfunded wars, was interested in increasing military spending. And he just got through making Medicare less sustainable, so he wasn't about to send the contradictory message that it was a pressing financial priority. So he picked the easiest of the three, and a long-term thorn in the side of the Republican Party, and announced a partial privatization plan for Social Security.

The question at this point is not whether Bush's plan was a good idea. It was poorly conceived - or, I suppose, well-conceived if you would have been among the money managers who received a government license to skim a percentage off of people's private accounts as "compensation" for your services. The question is not whether private accounts would have produced a greater return than treasury bonds. If you weren't already aware that it's foolish to believe that the stock market only goes up, the financial industry collapse and current recession should have set you straight. The question is, what price will the public pay for reform? What happened when the Grandpa Simpsons of the nation (that is, all of them except this one) got wind of the notion that somebody might be trying to cut their Social Security, the Republicans who had been so happy to push through Bush's $trillions in unfunded tax cuts and expenditures scurried for cover.

Some cynicism is appropriate here. Had Bush been serious about Social Security reform, in the sense of making the books balance for the indefinite future, he could have found enough Democrats to support reform. It's been done before - some minor tweaks to contributions, payouts, and the age at which you are eligible for partial or full benefits, and suddenly the program is projected to be sound for another century. Bush preferred to keep the system in a state of crisis, or more correctly something that could be misrepresented as a state of crisis, to make people believe that change must occur, and that it must occur quickly. Because it appears that about the only time you can get the public behind something that might involve even slight sacrifice is when you are dealing with imminent catastrophe. Bush's goal was not to fix the Social Security system, it was to undermine and privatize that system.

But what happened to any sense that you can lead a society toward an improved long-term outcome through some modest, short term shared sacrifice or adjustment, rather than waiting for that crisis? Absurd? Take a look at Ruth Marcus:

I write this from a perspective of sympathy with Obama's aims and overall support for his performance over the past two years. But Obama's dismissive analysis omits the non-emergency choices he made - primarily to press for and, in the end, muscle through the passage of health-care reform - and the ensuing discomfort of voters.

Discomfort that is entirely understandable, even to those of us who supported health-care reform.

Marcus speaks of how various Obama Administration ideas created "perceptions of intrusive government", but elides any mention of the intentional distortions that fueled those misperceptions. The health care reform plan that she sees as "too much" for the American people to take, of course, is similar to the Republican counter-proposal to the Clinton plan from twenty years ago, and is almost identical to the plan implemented for Massachusetts by once and future Republican Presidential contender Mitt Romney. "Cap and trade" was similarly a Republican idea, once championed by John McCain and supported in the tentative Democratic legislation by Lindsey Graham. The auto bailout started under the Bush Administration, and the larger financial industry bailout was also a continuation of Bush policies. By the time of the election, anybody paying attention was aware that the auto industry "takeover" had turned out to be a remarkable success.

So Marcus appears to be saying that as long as there are groups willing to play off of the public's fears and insecurities, even if it means portraying as frightening the very policies they once endorsed, and even if it means refusing to work for better solutions in order to obstruct reforms they concede are necessary, it's best to do nothing. The Obama Administration was not acting like G.W. on Social Security reform. It repeatedly reached out to and included Republicans in the drafting of its legislation, and to entice Republican support and contribution. It's possible that had the Republican Party been less interested in obstructionism, something they correctly anticipated would help them in the 2010 election, and more interested in forming good policy, we would have passed a better healthcare reform bill without the public misconception that this is a big government bill that's going to destroy health insurance as we know it.

If you look at the few Republicans who are willing to articulate a healthcare policy, you tend to see the Newt Gingrich brand of reform - eliminate comprehensive health insurance in favor of catastrophic coverage and health savings accounts. If you come down with cancer, you're covered. If you develop a chronic health condition, you had better either be born rich or keep your job because you're going to pay for that out of your "savings". What if your salary is to meager to allow for any appreciable contribution to your health savings account? Well, that would be your problem, wouldn't it. And do you know how we get to that system from the one we have? By forcing a crisis. The bad news for the Republican Party arising from the modest healthcare reform bill is that it forestalls catastrophe, and creates a framework through which an alternative to the Gingrich-style system can evolve without the current system first reaching the point of catastrophic failure. So yes, they ginned up hysterical opposition to a center-right reform bill and are screeching about repeal. But in the view of Ruth Marcus, all of that is President Obama's fault - it's too scary when the government tries to act in a grown-up manner and prevent things from reaching a crisis point.

Fareed Zakaria was on Real Time last week, and reminded Adrian Fenty that it's better to serve one term in office with real accomplishments than to serve multiple terms with little to show for it. Even though he's among the first to trumpet his own accomplishments, Fenty didn't seem comfortable with that idea. (What's the first thing a politician thinks of when he wakes up in the morning? How to get reelected.) But Zakaria's point is valid, and it's one I wish our political leaders were mature enough to internalize. It would also be helpful if our political press weren't so happy to cover the horse race instead of the issues and, after egging on the mud-slinging and "objectively" refusing to separate fact from fiction, weren't so quick to blame the politicians who try to show actual leadership, make tough decisions, and prevent crises for getting ahead of the American people.

Geithner's Five Myths

Tim Geithner describes five "myths" of the financial industry bailout. Here's the condensed version:

1. The TARP cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars: Well, maybe, but not If we assume a best case scenario and ignore the cost of servicing the resulting debt, and if I divide up the amounts behind a cloud of words it doesn't sound like all that much, does it?

2. The TARP was a gift for Wall Street that did nothing for Main Street: Haven't you ever heard of trickle-down economics?

3. The TARP was a quick fix for the market meltdown but left our financial system weak: Our banks are bigger and more centralized than ever!

4. The TARP worsened the concentration of the banking sector, leaving it more vulnerable to another crisis: Well, yes. But other nations have even more consolidation, for what that's worth. And if we pretend that recent legislation would actually prevent another taxpayer-funded bailout, we can all be happy.

5. The TARP was the centerpiece of a strategy by President Obama to assert more government control over the economy: Nonsense. It was Bush's idea, and Obama simply ran with it.

Feel better now?

You Mean It's Easier to Abolish Trials?

Who would have thunk it?

Law professor Jack Goldsmith argues that there are three reasons to offer suspected terrorists a criminal trial: "trials permit punishment, including the death penalty", "trials 'give vent to the outrage' over attacks on civilians", and

The final answer, and the one that largely motivates the Obama administration, is that trials are perceived to be more legitimate than detention, especially among civil libertarians and foreign allies.

And let's not forget, serve as a model of American justice for those in nations whose totalitarian leaders will happily agree with Goldsmith's central thesis, that there's no point in giving a trial to somebody you have no intention of ever releasing, save perhaps for a show trial with a predetermined outcome.

Although he concedes that civilian trials "often do work" and notes that "[h]undreds of terrorism-related cases in federal court" have been successfully prosecuted, Goldsmith dances around the central problem in holding civilian trials for certain key Guantanamo detainees,

But Mr. Ghailani and his fellow detainees at Guantánamo Bay are a different matter. The Ghailani case shows why the administration has been so hesitant to pursue criminal trials for them: the demanding standards of civilian justice make it very hard to convict when the defendant contests the charges and the government must rely on classified information and evidence produced by aggressive interrogations.

The use of classified information has been raised as a specter in many prior terrorist prosecutions, but has not prevented successful prosecution of even one case. Goldman himself has told us in relation to an earlier argument that many years have passed since the time of the offenses being prosecuted; it is difficult to imagine that any legitimate secrets would have to be disclosed at a trial, particularly given the track record of prosecution of similar suspects for similar acts without any such disclosure. So, Goldsmith's euphemism aside, what we're really talking about is the use of coerced confessions, principally information obtained through acts like waterboarding that the Bush Administration's defenders insist "aren't torture (when we do it)".

Goldsmith apparently can't build a general case against trial so he instead focuses on a specific case, that of "Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa". He notes that a federal judge excluded from evidence as fruit of the poisonous tree the testimony of a witness who the government "learned about... through interrogating Mr. Ghailani at a secret overseas prison run by the C.I.A." He fails to mention a second problem with the testimony of that witness that was raised by the trial judge, whether the statements elicited from him were also coerced. Even when the judge's concerns were clear, the government chose not to present an affidavit from the witness to challenge the judge's perception.

As a former member of the Bush Administration I can understand why Mr. Goldsmith has chosen to ignore the fundamental problem - the choice by the Bush Administration to behave lawlessly. Bush and Cheney lack the courage to defend their actions, instead playing games of semantics ("It's not torture, it's an 'enhanced interrogation'") or invoking national security ("We can't afford another terrorist attack, so we're entitled to ignore the rule of law - and no, we don't have to disclose or justify our actions to anyone").

I'll admit that I have some difficulty giving the Bush/Cheney regime benefit of the doubt on issues of executive power and privilege, as their across-the-board pattern was to take an expansionist view of executive power and to act aggressively to test the limits of executive power. Also, if the Bush Administration thought its actions were defensible you would think it would have actually offered a defense of them rather than trying to reshape the debate and redefine the language used to describe its actions.

Yet even if we assume that in this specific context they believed that their actions were necessary in the defense of the state, you can't avoid the fact that they and their advisers - a group that would appear to include Goldsmith - knew what the consequences of their actions would be. They chose not to work through Congress or seek judicial review. It was no surprise to me to see Cheney's smug response to candidate Obama's proposal to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and try the suspects held there - because he knew that once the Obama Administration looked inside the case files it would find that between genuine state secrets and the use of torture and other questionable tactics (both by us and by regimes that 'assisted' us with detentions and interrogations, or provided information from their own prisoners) the civilian trial of many or most of the remaining Guantanamo detainees would be difficult to impossible. I would expect in many of the cases that even in the context of military tribunals, which Goldsmith assures us "have relatively forgiving evidence rules and aren’t constrained by constitutional trial rules like the right to a jury and to confront witnesses", trial would be difficult - at least, a trial expected to withstand appellate review.

So yes, as Goldsmith says, due to the choices of his former employer it is extremely difficult to try some of the high profile terrorist suspects presently detained by the United States, and as we don't want to pay the price defined by our nation's laws and Constitution for cases in which evidence is obtained unlawfully or where we're not willing to actually present evidence in court, it certainly is easier to detain people, as Goldmith euphemistically puts it, "until the conflict with Al Qaeda ends" - that is, indefinitely. Life in prison without charge or trial. Those who defend the choices of the Bush Administration no doubt happily endorse Goldsmith's description of what this means,

The administration would save money and time, avoid political headaches and better preserve intelligence sources and methods if it simply dropped its attempts to prosecute high-level terrorists and relied exclusively on military detention instead.

But really, if you think through the implications, the only people who should be happy with Goldsmith's preferred outcome are the world's remaining tyrants, despots and dictators.

Ambiguous Terror Warnings

Anne Applebaum notes that terror warnings aren't particularly useful. Given that we have a five level alertness scale that never seems to drop below the most serious two levels, and that warnings like "something bad might happen in Europe" aren't helpful, it's hard to argue. But at the same time it's going to keep happening.

The Bush Administration was accused of demagoguery in its use of pre-election terror warnings, and to some degree the same suspicions have been directed at the Obama Administration. But there's more to it than that. Between human nature and a political system that sometimes seems designed to cater to the least informed people in our society, politicians have given themselves scant room for error. If you drop the terror alert level to green and a terrorist act occurs, you've fallen asleep on the job. If you keep it at orange or red, people can't claim they weren't warned. It's not so much that you have good intelligence that justifies keeping the warning that high - it's that you diminish the extent to which you can be held accountable for mistakes or for the unknown.

So with due respect to Applebaum's contention that too many ambiguous terror warnings "put the U.S. government in the position of the boy who cried wolf", it's not going to stop.

Thanks to Michael Gerson, It's All So Obvious....

All we have to do in Afghanistan is "win then negotiate". (Um... but wouldn't that be appeasement?)

Gerson's editorial, as you might expect, is useless. It tells us why we should "win" - because if we don't there is no question but that the girls and women of Afghanistan will suffer horribly in at least parts, and more realistically in most or all of the country. But he ignores both the present reality, that girls and women continue to suffer horribly in parts of Afghanistan despite a massive military presence, the cultural factors that have created and will perpetuate that reality, and a history in which the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and gave girls and women many rights that they enjoyed right up to the end of Soviet occupation, and the fact that desire for victory is not a strategy.

I'm not sure whether Gerson is simply sharing the Kool-Aid served up by his former boss - that the war is about the rights of women, with the implication that its success be measured by the progress of women in Afghan society - or if he's also drinking. Certainly, the more you learn about the plight of women under the Taliban, the more horrifying the conception of allowing that type of oppression to recur. But the sad reality is that Bush's strategy for Afghanistan appears to have in fact been to keep enough troops present to avoid overtly losing that war before the end of his presidency. His administration recognized that the best way to keep the public engaged and supportive of that war, and the one in Iraq, was to contend that a principal goal of the wars was to advance civil rights for women and for marginalized ethnic groups and, as Gerson continues to argue, that negotiation or withdrawal would lead to horrors for those groups. It's hard to argue with that. The problem is, as they say, it's easier said than done.

The position advanced by Gerson - we must "win" - tells us nothing either about how we might win or what a victory might look like. It did provide Bush with convenient cover for his strategy of perpetuating a war that he seemed to have lost interest in demonstrably winning - but there's a world of difference between advancing and solidifying the rights of women and minorities, and giving them lip service when your only real goal is to avoid revealing your war strategy as an abject failure.

Gerson also parrots the inevitable argument of proponents of indefinite occupation - that the groups that are resisting occupation are simply waiting us out, and even if they give lip service to our goals as part of a negotiation aimed at getting us out of their country they'll revert to their actual policies the moment we're gone. But that doesn't distinguish this occupation from any other. Unless you're going to follow the model of an occupying power that is going to dig in, force cultural change, and remain in occupation for the decades - perhaps generations - it takes for the occupied people to incorporate your culture, you can expect that the occupied people will return to many, most, and perhaps all of their own cultural traditions once allowed to do so. When we talk about the Russian Jews or Chinese Catholics, we talk about the indomitable human spirit. Just because you don't like the Taliban's religious or cultural beliefs doesn't mean that they're any less sincere or deeply held. For that matter, Gerson apparently believes that it's only the Taliban that oppresses women, while many non-Talibani warlords have historically done exactly the same thing and continued those practices even after the Taliban was deposed.

Similarly, we can look at our own nation's history. Gerson is probably aware of the U.S. civil war and its nominal end of slavery. He is probably aware that it took more than a century for overtly racist laws and policies to be ended in many southern states. He may be aware that racism lives on in this country and that there remains a population of people who argue that African Americans are socially or genetically inferior, sometimes both. Perhaps he's forgotten that women didn't have the right to vote in this country until 1920. Even in the western world, effecting cultural change can be painfully slow.

Perhaps Gerson's not aware of the fact that even long-term occupation doesn't guarantee that a group opposed to the occupation won't rise in power after the occupation ends, either to rebel against the government or to form a secessionist movement. Perhaps he missed how several European nations reverted to ethnic conflict, even dividing into separate nations, after the fall of the Soviet Empire. Perhaps he missed the ugly ethnic rivalries present in many nations of the post-colonial world, including Iraq. Closer to Afghanistan... no, make that in Afghanistan... perhaps he missed the collapse of the government left behind by the USSR when it ended its occupation. Perhaps he's never heard an Afghan speak with pride about how his nation has never been successfully conquered. Perhaps he is also unfamiliar with the concept of blowback. Perhaps he missed how Israel's efforts to defeat the PLO led to its ill-fated occupation of Southern Lebanon, and turned Hezbollah into its enemy, or how its efforts to marginalize and defeat the secular PLO in the occupied territories led to the rise of Hamas.

Whether or not he tried, even as he provided a link to the actual story, Gerson couldn't quite bring himself to be honest. He argues that, when asked about the possibility of settlement with the Taliban, CIA Director Leon Panetta responded that they're not truly interested in reconciliation. In fact, Panetta was speaking broadly of "insurgent groups". Gerson's notion that this means the U.S. should double down, committing even more troops and money to defeat insurgent groups who show no interest in sincere negotiation after being on the receiving end of the longest war in U.S. history might, perhaps, make a more thoughtful person wonder if a military victory can be achieved. Such a person might question whether massive military actions, injuries and deaths to civilians, the overwhelming presence of foreign occupying forces, and the effort by those forces to redefine local culture might not be an effective mechanism to force a monumental shift of Afghan culture. Or whether it's reasonable or feasible to wipe out an enemy that has sufficient support within the community that its fighters can fade into the civilian population when they want to hide from occupying forces. (Has Gerson read nothing about the Vietnam War?)

With due respect to Gerson's emphasis on human rights, that apparently commenced with the U.S. occupation, perhaps he should spend some time explaining the policy positions of the pre-9/11 Bush Administration. Does Gerson agree that women's rights should take a back seat to the war on drugs? That they don't merit mention when we're talking about eradication of opium poppies, but for some reason must be front and center in any discussions that are intended to end a bona fide, shooting war? It's easy to endorse the human rights conception of the war in Afghanistan, which is why the Bush Administration pushed that conception of the war, but if you look at the Bush Administration's actions it's difficult to view its professed interest in the plight of Afghan women as anything more than spin. Gerson started penning speeches for Bush in 1999 - he must know that history. For that matter, he must be aware of how hard Bush pushed (or should I say didn't push) Saudi Arabia to improve its treatment of women.

Some fair questions for Gerson:

• How, exactly, is he defining victory in Afghanistan?

• How long will it take to achieve that victory?

• What will be the cost in both dollars and lives?

• Are there any U.S. strategic interests that he deems more important than human rights for the Afghan people and, if so, what are they?

• What should the United States do if it finds a way to achieve all of its military and security objectives in Afghanistan, but with the trade-off being that it does nothing to alleviate the plight of women?

• What level of human rights would Gerson find sufficient - for example, does he envision a U.S. military occupation that lasts until Afghanistan treats women in the manner of the United States? In the manner of Saudi Arabia?

• What if the generals to whom Gerson insists we must defer find that, to defeat the Taliban, the U.S. must ally itself with warlords who don't share the Taliban's religious zeal but treat women in the same manner as does the Taliban?

As Gerson also contends that we're now "winning" in Iraq, it's also fair to ask - if we apply the measure of his former boss, how are we actually doing? Or is he changing the measure of what victory is supposed to look like as a matter of convenience to his present argument? If I may be concrete, if we were to assume a full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, should we expect the post-victory Iraqi government to support or oppose Iran's nuclear program, and on what evidence?

Remember Everything Bad That Happened In The Last Decade?

It actually happened in the last year That's right, folks, in a standard regurgitation of Republican talking points, Mark Thiessen is back with a new entry for the contest.

Now, those of you with memories may recall that George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus, and immediately launched a plan to turn that into a deficit avoid paying down the deficit too quickly by granting massive tax cuts to the wealthy. No, really, I'm being too fair to Bush. As you have a memory you recall that he had a one-size-fits-all tax policy - the economy is strong so we can improve it with a tax cut; the economy is weakening so we need a tax cut to restore it; we're in a recession and nothing improves a weak economy like a tax cut.... The only economic plan he had was to cut taxes for the rich, damn the consequences. (At least so far, Thiessen's distortions are at least on par with Gerson's.)

A quick dose of reality:

That is to say, virtually all of the red ink in the budget is attributable to an economic downturn that started under George "tax cuts will make the economy perfect" Bush, two wars started by President Bush, and those tax cuts that were supposed to fix every imaginable economic problem. TARP and the bailout, started under Bush, and recovery spending represent a very small part of the picture. When Thiessen argues, "Polls show that Americans want candidates for Congress who support spending cuts and consider the national debt the greatest threat to our country, on par with the threat of terrorism", he had best take heed that he is arguing that the public views the devastation caused by his former boss as on par with the 9/11 attacks.

Needless to say, facts be damned, Thiessen wants to put the responsibility for the Bush debacle (each and every one of them, but in this specific context the budget deficit) on President Obama's shoulders:

Last week in Wisconsin, he declared "We've got to get this debt and our deficit under control." This from the man who rammed an $877 billion stimulus bill and a $1 trillion government health-care bill through Congress. In just 17 months, Obama and the Democrats have increased the national debt by 23 percent, and have put the country on track for another decade of red ink.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain....

There's also a legitimate question about whether this is the time for austerity or for stimulus spending. Yes, we can grant that Bush's economic incompetence placed the Obama administration in the position of having to deficit spend in order to fund the stimulus bill, and that it will again have to deficit spend to finance a new stimulus bill. But there's no sign that the economy is bouncing back without stimulus spending and, Thiessen's distortions aside, when the economy falters and housing prices are depressed, and unemployment is high, tax revenues go down. Perhaps Thiessen didn't notice that virtually every state is in the midst of a financial crisis, despite the austerity measures they've taken to date, because of the impact of the recession. Certainly, an argument can be made for austerity, but so far the facts suggest that additional stimulus spending is the far wiser choice.

I was agnostic on stimulus spending, and am fiscally conservative by nature - I completely disagreed with the Bush Administration's massive tax cuts backed up with their "deficits don't matter" prattle. (Where was Thiessen at that time? Oh yeah... writing speeches in defense of those policies.) I came to view the financial industry bailout as a necessary evil, albeit one that as implemented showered money on the undeserving and represents some of the worst lemon socialism in our nation's history. If the federal government is going to do something about unemployment, it seems obvious that its two principal tools are direct employment (hiring more federal employees) or stimulus spending.

One might suspect that hacks like Thiessen are arguing for cuts and against stimulus because they know as much - but feel that hurting the economy, the states, and the people of the nation will help the Republicans in the November elections. In fact, Dean Baker is presently making that argument:

While it may be bad taste to accuse a major national political party of deliberately wanting to throw people out of jobs, there is no other plausible explanation for the Republicans' behaviour. They have balked at supporting nearly every bill that had any serious hope of creating or keeping jobs, most recently filibustering on bills that provided aid to state and local governments and extending unemployment benefits. The result of the Republicans' actions, unless they are reversed quickly, is that hundreds of thousands more workers will be thrown out of work by the mid-terms.

* * *

The other argument the Republicans give is that these bills would add to the national debt. For example, the latest extension of unemployment benefits would have added $22bn to the debt by the end of 2011. This means that the debt would be $9,807,000,000 instead of $9,785,000,000 at the end of fiscal 2011, an increase of the debt-to-GDP ratio from 65.3% to 65.4%.

It is possible that Congressional Republicans, who were willing to vote for hundreds of billions of dollars of war expenditures without paying for them, or trillions of dollars of tax cuts without paying for them, are actually concerned about this sort of increase in the national debt. It is possible that this is true, but not very plausible.

The more likely explanation is that the Republicans want to block anything that can boost the economy and create jobs.

So Republican operatives like Thiessen create what can reasonably be described as a pessimism bubble (yes, I'm alluding to Douthat), in which the United States is on the verge of falling into the same trap as the weakest economy in the developed world, a line of nonsense that Douthat is unwilling to swallow:

But even now, there isn’t a major power in the world that wouldn’t happily change places with the United States. Our weaknesses are real, but so is our potential for resilience. While our rivals (in Asia as well as the West) face a slow demographic decline, our population is steadily increasing. The European Union’s recent follies make our creaking 200-year-old institutions look flexible by comparison. And China can throw up all the high-speed rails and solar panels it wants, but it won’t change the fact that most of the country is still sunk in rural poverty.

Republican fear mongering is red meat for the Tea Party Movement, a largely Republican force that the party wants to keep inside its tent. And yes, Douthat has a point that our nation does face problems that are different, and perhaps more difficult, than in the past (I would argue definitely more difficult), but that's not a justification for lies and misrepresentations designed to gin up fear about and opposition to legislation and spending initiatives that could both help the economy and position the U.S. for long-term growth.

Thiessen compares the outcome of the British election to a "Tea Party government". The election result in the U.K. is a bit odd - imagine a very close election that resulted in a Republican majority by virtue of people like Bernie Sanders choosing to caucus with the Republicans. The British government is taking the approach of austerity, in Thiessen's words, "necessitated by years of Labor profligacy, which produced the second-largest budget deficit in Europe" - recall that Labor came into power under Clinton and only lost power this year. So most of those years of what Thiessen sees as fiscal irresponsibility overlap with Bush's Presidency - yet somehow the Republican Congress that Bush inherited, and the massive tax cuts, war spending, and unfunded entitlements of the Bush era are flushed down Thiessen's memory hole.

Incredibly, in relation to a country that has a much higher tax rate than ours - and in which part of the austerity measure is to further raise taxes. Recall, Thiessen is arguing that the British budget would please the Tea Party movement. Where can I find the portion of the Tea Party platform (not that one actually exists, but let's go with the commercial ventures that are trying to profit from their organization of the Tea Party movement) or the Republican Party who is willing to admit that the people of this nation are not under-taxed? Thiessen defends the British budget as offering a "balance of spending cuts to tax increases is 77 to 23 percent" - okay, let's hear the Republican Party offer up a budget with a similar balance of tax increases and spending cuts, and see how it goes over with the Tea Party Movement. (I expect the Republican Party's silence to be deafening.)

Over the next couple of years we'll find out if Europe's new devotion to austerity delivers the robust economic growth predicted by its advocates. I'm not optimistic. I'm not going to speculate as to whether the nation's of Europe are in a position to attempt more stimulus spending, and I don't have the numbers in front of me, but (fear-mongering aside) we are - and Thiessen's propaganda having been duly considered, another major stimulus bill won't bankrupt us and, if it works, should at least party pay for itself through increased tax revenue resulting from economic growth. With a stimulus bill we would have a clear exercise in contrasts - who pulls out of the economic slump first, the budget slashers or the stimulus spenders. I suspect that people like Thiessen believe it's the latter, which is why they (and similarly positioned newly fledged deficit hawks) advocate the former.

Cutting Afghanistan Into Pieces... With Honor?

No surprise here.... Henry Kissinger has crawled out of the woodwork to warn us of the perils of abandoning a "war forever" approach to Afghanistan:

We have a basic national interest to prevent jihadist Islam from gaining additional momentum, which it will surely do if it can claim to have defeated the United States and its allies after overcoming the Soviet Union. A precipitate withdrawal would weaken governments in many countries with significant Islamic minorities. It would be seen in India as an abdication of the U.S. role in stabilizing the Middle East and South Asia and spur radical drift in Pakistan. It would, almost everywhere, raise questions about America's ability to define or execute its proclaimed goals.

Does that sound an awful lot like Kissinger's laundry list of reasons for why we had to stay in Vietnam? And yet after U.S. forces withdrew his parade of horribles did not come to pass. Yes, the consequences were horrific for the allied Vietnamese we left behind. But it was in fact Vietnam that brought an end to the rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and despite being one of the five remaining communist nations on the planet (Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, China, and North Korea) it now welcomes tourists from the U.S. and is a trading partner. (Kissinger should perhaps think long and hard about the list of the five remaining communist nations, and contemplate whether all of them would still be communist but for the policies and interventions he favored.)

In many ways Kissinger is engaged in the same exercise that others engaged in before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, presenting apocalyptic hypothetical scenarios of what could happen if the U.S. proceeded with the wars. Yes, we could get the worst case scenario. But we could get something that looks quite different and, let's be honest, the accuracy of Kissinger's prognostications have historically been abysmal, including in relation to the Iraq war.

The people who deserve credit for their predictions are those in the first Bush Administration who advised Bush the Elder that having accomplished our military goals for Iraq it was best to depart as opposed to toppling Hussein's regime and getting bogged down in endless war. No doubt, there were some extremely ugly consequences to that decision, which Bush the Elder was willing to accept. Where was Kissinger when the "candy and flowers", "it'll be a cakewalk" crowd got the ear of Bush the Younger, and talked him out of wars that focused on narrow military objectives and into "regime change".

Don't get me wrong, I have long held the position that top-down democratization of a nation without either a democratic tradition or institutions was unlikely to succeed. It's much easier to impose a steel-fisted tyrant, with or without a velvet glove. Russia's experience indicates such a tyrant is unlikely to maintain his hold in Afghanistan absent significant outside military support. But let's pretend that Karzai's regime were about to flower into a progressive democracy. Is it not self-evident that the military commitment necessary to support and nourish a nascent democracy would be far greater than that needed to support a tyrant? To look at it another way, western powers have a long track record of imposing, supporting and otherwise backing various leaders in the post-colonial era. When we compare the number of flourishing democracies that resulted to the number of tyrannical regimes, how do things stack up?

At the start of the Iraq War, CWD and I had several discussions about the Bush Administration's approach, why it was unlikely to succeed even if it abandoned its grandiose ambitions to simultaneously attempt shock therapy-style privatization on the nation, how building democracy at the local level would make sense, and why that would not be acceptable to the Bush Administration. There are no state secrets in any of that. What was amazing is how we were supposed to take seriously the "it'll be a cakewalk" crowd - the idea that post-war occupation could be done on the cheap, and that Bush's hand-selected proposed leaders for both Iraq and Afghanistan would be welcomed by willing, grateful nations with showers of candy and flowers.

So now, as the Afghan War becomes the longest in U.S. history, Kissinger wants to take a bottom-up approach to reinventing its government. Or perhaps it's "start at the bottom and stay there," with regional warlords kept in check with the perpetual placement of U.S. occupation forces, as opposed to by a national government or military. Many of those local governments would look like, no, they would be the Taliban. Many others would be non-Talibani, but would take an approach every bit as oppressive to the rights of girls and women. War advocates seem to flip-flop between "We can't leave because it will be horrible to women," and "We really can't do much even if we stay" - for most of them the human rights side of the war has always been an argument of convenience, not belief. Kissinger, on the other hand, isn't making a human rights argument and makes no argument that his ideas will result in democratization - his record suggests that he has interest in neither.

The difference between the Afghanistan of days gone by, in which local warlords ignored, imperiled, and even overthrew a central government, while trying to amass as much wealth and power as possible, and the one that Kissinger envisions is... well, his warlords would apparently behave themselves. Beyond that, Kissinger's ideas sound a lot like what one might read in an annual report, were Afghanistan a corporation....

A regional diplomacy should seek to establish a framework to insulate Afghanistan from the storms raging around it rather than allow the country to serve as their epicenter. It would also try to build Afghanistan into a regional development plan, perhaps encouraged by the Afghan economy's reported growth rate of 15 percent last year.

Kissinger's notion that the U.S. would be less able to engage Iran, as opposed to more able, were its military not bogged down in a perpetual Afghan war, is laughable - and should the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan I would not be surprised if he's one of the loudest voices arguing "Don't bring them home when Iran's right there, next door, waiting to be invaded." His fear seems to be less that Afghanistan might devolve into chaos, or that it might again provide safe haven for international terrorists, and more that a competing power might manage to take control of the nation and its resources.

The Story Of Our Country

Paul Gottfried writes,

What are at issue here are two different conceptions of the welfare state, both with rival advocates. The Tea Partiers favor a massive welfare state, providing that entitlements are aimed at them. They oppose the increased use of revenues and above all, the increase of taxes to finance a different welfare state, one designed to accommodate low-income minorities, government workers, and amnestied illegal aliens.

I disagree with Gottfried, on the whole. The population in this nation that wants a social safety net that helps others is quite small. Pretty much every population, individual or corporate, fits the description Gottfried assigns to Tea Partiers, "favor[ing] a massive welfare state, providing that entitlements are aimed at them".

For those trying to ensure a social safety net to benefit others, I'm really not aware of any of note who favor what is so easily caricatured as "a massive welfare state". That may be a suitable description for some of the advocates of social welfare programs in the 1960's or 1970's, but the notion of "a hand up, not a handout" seems more resonant post Reagan's "welfare queen" stories and Clinton's welfare reform. (G.W.'s advisors recognized that fact, and thus put those very words into his mouth; unfortunately, he had little interest in doing more than mouthing them.)

These are the groups that are likely to benefit most from the present Democratic revamping of the public sector. They are also groups that will propel Democratic victories in the future; and what such legislation as national health care, and the bill to amnesty illegals, now under congressional consideration, will do is create a more solidified Democratic constituency.

Even if you accept Gottfried's thesis that the Democrats are trying to build a welfare state that will inure principally to the benefit of low-income minorities, government workers, and beneficiaries of what to-date is an imaginary amnesty bill, what he describes is in no way altruistic. He's describing G.W.'s push for immigration reform in the early months of his Presidency (when his approval ratings were quickly tanking), G.W.'s push for a massive expansion of the corporate welfare state, G.W.'s unfunded "Medicare, Part D", G.W.'s financial industry bailout proposal (initially "You give us $1 trillion or so, you get no oversight, we're not answerable to anybody in how we spend the money", but "refined" into a corporate welfare program both parties could support). You could argue that Bush thought each of those welfare programs was "for the good of the nation" but, as with Gottfried's cynical interpretation of the Obama Administration's agenda, "for the good of the party" might be a better answer.

Gottfried's idea that "a gift-bearing regime always lands up producing squabbles among the gift-recipients" is not untrue, but given the actual track record of the Republican Party the conceit that we're talking about a "democratic welfare state" is laughable. Both parties got us into this mess, and it's usually the Republicans who strive to identify and exploit wedge issues to create the various "squabbles" over who gets what.

Bush was trying to serve business interests that want immigration reform, and to gain advantage in the immigrant communities that would benefit from reform and amnesty; it's not that the Democrats have an advantage in implementing immigration reform, so much as it is that the Republican Party's catering to populist rage against immigrants "taking our jobs" has poisoned the well for that party's outreach. It's the same thing Chairman Steele conceded to the African American community. The Democratic Party doesn't have to work very hard to gain an advantage in the communities the Republican Party is content to alienate as they instead attempt to leverage Tea Party rage.

Good Things vs. Bad Things

Back in the day, Charles Krauthammer knew a good thing when he saw it:

On the domestic front, more shock. Democrats understand that the Bush tax cuts make structural changes that will long outlive him. Like the Reagan cuts, they will starve the government of revenue for years to come.

Bush, Krauthammer lectured, was viewed by Democrats as "demonic" for creating funding shortages that would force structural changes in government.

As you guessed, that was then, this is now:

But even if it were revenue-neutral, Obamacare preempts and appropriates for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare's $500 billion of cuts in Medicare and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.

Spending and taxes are not separate issues. Bush's tax cuts didn't lead to the structural changes of Krauthammer's dreams - the Republican party is profligate, so tax cuts led to extraordinary deficit spending. If he were to try to hold a consistent thesis, Krauthammer would have to acknowledge that whether the cash shortfall he envisions as bringing about a "structural change" comes from taxing or spending, it will either "starve the government" (and force the cuts of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security for which he yearns) or it won't. When the Bush tax cuts didn't prevent G.W. from pushing Medicare Part D through Congress without funding the new benefit, there was no caterwauling by Krauthammer about how Bush would have to raise taxes. (But he's never been one to strive for intellectual consistency.)

I find it fascinating that Krauthammer's new professed fear is that the Obama Administration will pass a "consumption tax". Recall the Republican "FairTax" proposal - here are Tom Delay and Bruce Bartlett back in 2005, describing a VAT / consumption tax / "national sales tax" as a cornerstone for "tax reform". In 2006, Rep. Darrell Issa took up the cause. A consumption tax was also recommended in 2005 by G.W. Bush's President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. What other conclusion could you possibly draw, other than that a consumption tax is an evil Democratic plot to take over the world?

In fairness to Krauthammer, he loves the idea of replacing income taxes with a consumption tax - it would be, after all, regressive, easily avoided by the wealthy, and completely inadequate to fund the government. And then there's the issue that we're trying to reinvigorate the economy by boosting consumption. Whether nor not you believe that to be a good idea, it goes without saying that a VAT would depress consumption by making goods more expensive.

Krauthammer personifies the type of person who made healthcare reform such a mess. "It must be revenue neutral! Oh... it's revenue neutral? Then it must cut spending by hundreds of billions because it's not good enough for it to be revenue neutral - in the future spending may not go down, and taxes may not go up." We would likely have ended up with better legislation if the major goals of healthcare reform had been addressed independently. Even within one bill, issues such as universality, spending and improved efficiency could have been separately addressed, but that would have required more honesty from opponents of reform. That would mean, for example, no editorials selectively attacking out the components of the bill that would increase spending in willful disregard of other provisions that cut spending or raised revenue.

It would have made sense for there to have been a new payroll tax (albeit, one that did not implicate additional double- and triple-¹... or perhaps create quadruple-taxation) to collect money for premiums (see, e.g., my suggestion from yesterday). But every politician since Mondale has been effectively forced to take a "no new taxes", or at least a "no new taxes on the middle class" position, much to the pleasure of people like Krauthammer. Between those promises and the import of stimulating the economy, no, we won't have a consumption tax - not even (or should I say "and certainly not") at the level of luxury goods - any time soon.

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1. When you calculate multiple taxes based upon net pay, you're effectively taxing the same money over and over again. The Republican Party tends to be very concerned when this affects the rich, thus lamenting that taxes on dividends and large estates are "double taxation", but don't appear at all concerned about the same phenomenon affecting the wages of working Americans.