Maybe the Sunni Will Get What They've Been Praying For

I was a little surprised by the vociferousness of the Saudi denunciation of the American occupation of Iraq (although I'll agree that in this context "occupation" is as good a word as any other). I'm in favor of withdrawing US troops from Iraq as well. But a queasiness that I have about it is the prospect of what might happen in Iraq after that. A worse case scenario is large scale depredations on urban, civilian populations by sectarian militias bent on ethnic cleansing This could occur as Shia-on-Sunni violence in central, urban Iraq. In fact, there's good reason to think that that's exactly what will happen, with Iran coming in as the major power in the Shia regions. There is the possibility that this would draw in Sunni powers to the west, and Saudi Arabia stated recently that they would indeed move to help embattled Sunni forces there if need arose. So are the Saudis now saying that they really and truly want the US to get out of the way? With those prospects as they are? If so then they should be careful what they pray for.

Duty to the Troops

The president is accusing the congressional Democrats of disloyalty to the troops for setting up Iraq withdrawal timetables. He is obfuscating two separate issues. Once having determined the war policy of the government, the executive and the congress have a duty to support the military commander's decisions, for example through provision of funds. But it is an entirely different function of Congress, a constitutionally mandated one, that it participate in the formulation of the war policy in the first place. And so this Democratic congress is trying to do that, with a clear mandate to do that. If it is the policy of the US to withdraw the troops, for example, then the commanders will begin that process and it will be the duty of the government to provide them with the means to do that. Will the Bush administration, if the time comes, live up to this standard of duty to the troops?

Our Nixonian Administration

The New York Times reports today that both the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State have advised the President to shut down the detention facility at Guantanamo. The real news here is that they have been overruled. The Attorney General and the Vice-President disagree. So President Bush is now hunkered down with his cronies. The highest-ranking cabinet members are outsiders and are dismissed. I didn't much care for the policies of Ronald Reagan, but he knew when to give it up to the larger community. This is not a Reaganesque president; this is President Nixon.

The Imperial Vice-Presidency

Harry Truman famously commented that the vice-presidency wasn't worth "a bucket of warm spit." Through much of the country's history the office has been filled by obscure political personages, soon forgotten. Originally the vice-president was elected independently of the president, the ability to cast the deciding vote on Senate ties another facet of the balance of power. In modern times the "two party system" (not a constitutionally mandated system, just a convention that could and probably will someday change) has made a chief function of the vice-president to be the "running mate" in elections, and for most of the twentieth century the idea was to "balance the ticket," at first mostly for regional balance (when we were a more provincial country) and later mostly to assuage ideological factions (leading to right-wing Republican VPs and left-wing Democratic ones). In the age of the endless campaign, the vice-president has frequently been a campaign hatchet-man, doing dirty work for the president.
Today, however, the vice-presidency has evolved into a powerful office. This is not just because of the relationship between President Bush and VP Cheney. The same evolution was evident in the vice-presidency of Al Gore, for example. Since WW II, and during the Cold War, the presidency itself has become increasingly powerful. The exigencies of the security state have caused more power to be concentrated into the hands of the president (the late Arthur Schlesinger's "Imperial Presidency"). The whole executive branch has increased in power and importance, including the office of the vice-presidency. Today, the vice-president is the presumptive party nominee-in-waiting, Mr. Cheney's abstention notwithstanding. Speaking of Mr. Cheney brings me to today's point: he has the idea, based on his experiences in the post-Watergate White House in the 1970s, that executive power was diminished at that time, and a noble institutional project is to try to restore presidential prerogative. He has this exactly backwards. The current president-as-emperor is a result of the Cold War and America's subsequent (and very likely fleeting) role as the "hyperpower." It distorts American foreign policy, that is clearly to be a matter of consensus between the branches according to the constitution, which grants Congress the power to declare war. What we need is a strong and aggressive Congress.

Gore Up, McCain Down

Count me as surprised by John McCain's failure to catch fire with conservative caucusees (still too early to call them "primary voters"). On my view he has always been the presumptive front-runner for the GOP nomination because a) I have a lot of admiration for his personal character and b) I'm pretty much diametrically opposed to his solidly conservative positions. The only thing substantive that the Party has to complain about is his zeal for campaign finance reform, and that's tactical on the part of the Party and popular with the mainstream. It seems that the same thing may happen to McCain in 2008 that happened to Al Gore in 2004: the rank and file turn out not to care for the man. It occurs to me that my admiration for McCain was always conditioned by the fact that I have no prospect of ever voting for him. It's another thing when one is actually considering sharing responsibility for installing someone in office. But note that Senator McCain has not yet, in fact, gone the way of Al Gore circa 2004; it's still much too early in the process to say that. Ironically, the polls may be going for Giuliani on the basis of perceived electability in the general election because it's still so long before the primary election: I still say that a pro-choice candidate can't win the GOP nomination, period. McCain should hang in there.
Meanwhile Al Gore is back this week at the number 3 spot in polls of Democratic voters, after Clinton and Obama. Mostly this is because the Obama campaign is hurting Edwards. Obama is occupying the ecological niche of fresh-faced, outsider insurgent, and that's the energy Edwards lives on. In general Obama is making it a lot harder for third-tier candidates (Richardson is another example) to get ink and money. In this way he helps Hillary. He also helps Hillary by taking the heat off of her as the front-runner all this time before the election. My view is that Obama is helping Hillary quite a lot. Another unexpected beneficiary is Al Gore, who has successfully rebranded himself as Party establishment (not Obama) but explicitly left-wing (not the Clintons). Anybody remember Al Gore 1988? He was the right-wing Democrat in that primary season, anti gun control, pro death penalty. That's OK, I like Gore and I'd gladly vote for him. You might think of it as getting the goodness of Clintonismo without the bother of the Clintons themselves, although for myself, I have no problem voting for Clinton either.

Libby and Cheney: No Daylight

A few weeks age a news report went around (discussed on MSNBC for example) that Scooter Libby had gone to see Vice-President Cheney at one point to complain about his high profile in the reporting about the Plame leak scandal. The story was that the VP Chief of Staff felt that he was being singled out. This news report is almost certainly disinformation. The idea is to make it seem that Mr. Libby and the Vice-President were (and are) not working hand-in-glove for Mr. Libby to take the fall for the leak. What happened in fact is that our thuggish Vice-President decided to play rough with the Wilsons. The good news here is that Joe Wilson and his wife have actually obtained a little justice against these mafiosi. The system does work from time to time. Meanwhile the forthcoming pardon for Mr. Libby will not be, I don't think, such a miscarriage of justice; the miscarriage of justice here would be whatever success Mr. Cheney has in obscuring the truth. A little bit of justice today.

Move Away From Pakistan

It was good to see the administration distance itself from Pakistan this week. During the Clinton administration, a long Cold War involvement with that country was finally cooled as Clinton tried to improve ties with India, which is the obvious thing to do at this point in terms of long-term American interests in the subcontinent. Pakistan has long been more oppressive politically than India, as well as having mafiosi elements in the military who have been involved in indiscriminate arms dealing including nuclear proliferation. It has played both ends against the middle, making deals with the US while maintaining ties with militant Islamic groups and with North Korea, for example. Should the government fall there, it will be identified as a client state of the US and the US will take the blame for decades of authoritarian rule (a good bit of which blame will be justified). The Clinton administration (underestimated on foreign policy) had made good progress in thawing out formal relations with India, among other things by shutting down some of the massive arms dealing with Pakistan. It was yet another disastrous effect of 9/11 that the Bush administration threw over all of that progress for the expediancy of trying to buy out the Pakistanis once again, and we have got precious little back in exchange for all the money and weapons. Osama Bin Laden is likely living in Pakistan right now; certainly Pakistan is the source of supplies and access for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Maybe the Bush administration has finally and belatedly discovered some sources of useful information: the State Department and the CIA.

McCain in Position

John McCain this week affirmed his hawkish position on Iraq (he promises to continue prosecuting the war if elected), and made a big show of his view that Roe v. Wade should be overturned and abortioned outlawed. With the electorate trending to the left and the Democrats smelling blood this looks at first glance like movement in the wrong direction, but McCain knows exactly what he's doing. Now is the time to run for one's party nomination. The general election continues (sigh) to be some ways off. McCain sees that the vogue for "moderate Republicans" is a reflection of the national mood, not the Republican mood. As I mentioned in a previous blog, a pro-choice candidate isn't going to make it through the Republican primaries. I don't think a pro-choice running mate would cut it either. As for the war, the surest way to lock up the conservative base is to champion the policy that they, and only they, continue to support. This brings me to the last point: the smart politician knows that first you have to survive, then you can actually be there for the final battle. It may be that the electorate is going to give the Democrats a turn at bat; unlike the politicians themselves, the American electorate approaches national elections as savvy consumers, mixing and matching and letting the pendulum swing. But there is always a chance that the front-runner will fall. There is a large element of caprice in the process, as McCain knows well. The Republican candidate has, at least, a chance. So McCain's project is to be the Republican candidate, in the literal sense of the term. Thus you constitute a real choice available for a voter to make. I think the odds are against him in the general election, but I think he knows that too. Better to be standing there with your odds, such as they are, than to not be there at the finish at all.

The Fake Fake News

Regarding Fox News's "The 1/2 Hour News Hour," their attempt to counter "The Daily Show" and other popular (read: "liberal") political humor programs, one is struck by the inevitability of their failure (to be funny, that is). The reasons are various and more or less obvious: Fox is a bully, throwing slaps at a straw-man "liberalism" that really doesn't exist; Fox is an embarrasment, the representative of the most well-off Americans that sees itself as put upon and marginalized; Fox is squaresville, too literal-minded, no nuances allowed: nobody like that is funny. But the most interesting reason for the inevitable failure of the show to be funny is that Fox News is fake news in the first place. Colbert understands that Bill O'Reilly, just taken straight, is self-parodic enough. Obviously, the culture warriors at Fox decided to respond to the popularity of Stewart and Colbert (inevitable). Equally obviously, this is another exercise in right-wing propaganda. Fox's slogan "Fair and balanced" is taken with a nudge and a wink by the angry, squaresville right-wing viewers: let's settle down for some grim trashing of The Enemy. Nobody thinks that the reporting is anything but as slanted as can be. When you are already a self-parody, no one is going to accept you as a satirist.

Greatest Rock 'n Roll band on TV

When The Rolling Stones released their album A Bigger Bang to coincide with their 2006 tour, there was a small outburst of clucking on the cable news channels about "Neocon" (I think the name is), a song blasting the Bush Administration. Someone gave me the CD for Christmas, and I listened to it in my car and had a chuckle over the lyrics. "Go get 'em, Mick!" The cable-news culture warriors had not much clue about the Stones, which surprised me as about half of the commentators (the older half) are squarely chronological Boomers who ought to be embarrased if they weren't rolling joints on their Satanic Majesties covers thirty-five years ago. It was taken of course as a sign of the administration's burgeoning unpopularity, but overlooked that a) the Stones have often had a political tune on their albums over the years and b) the lyrics were really nothing more than an expression of what is almost universal European opinion ("How come you're so wrong, neocon?" was the refrain). But what strikes me is that while the latest Stones album, with its one "social commentary," was clucked over so much while we got nary a peep about Living With War, the recent statement from Neil Young. I'm going to try to find some sales figures on the two albums and see how they measure up. Young's album is devoted entirely to his opposition to the Iraq war, with connections to his concerns about consumerism and the environment well filled in. "Ten thousand children scarred for life," "Let's impeach the president for lying." Well won't the cable news pundits feast on this one! Well, no. They are rather conspicuously not talking about it. It appears that some material is just tame enough to be fodder for the mill, but some is too far. Dixie Chicks in between I guess. Neil Young doesn't seem to have to worry too much about a hostile public, though. Why is that?

Hitchens's Iraq Problem

Christopher Hitchens, ambitious pretender to Orwell's crown, is a great asset to American journalism. Contrarian that he is, he is a European who has established himself on the stage of American letters at a time when most Europeans have simply lost track of us in their own projection of the Other. He also does politics, history, literature, and even a bit of philosophy here and there, and thus shows our public writers how things should be done, an erudite polymath sitting on the panel with the cable-news weenies like a hatched cuckoo bird in a nest of starlings. Unfortunately he has a problem with the Bush invasion of Iraq: he supports it. Present tense. This requires a degree of gymnastics too outlandish to preserve his credibility. Currently he has a column in Slate that illustrates the problem ("Fighting Words: A Wartime Lexicon." Doesn't get any more Orwellian than that). Everyone else, he says, must accept responsibility for their own parts in the debacle. More finely: coverage of said debacle ought not refer to the US as the sole intentional agent of "determined action." Sunnis are not just "caught up" in sectarian strife, there are intelligent strategists and ruthless tacticians operating to shape policies, including suicide-bombing policy, for example. And he adds the standard line that the alternative was leaving the "Saddam Hussein dynasty" in power. All true, all missing the point. The lesson here is that global security cannot be insured by a lone power (there are no "super" men or "super" powers), operating outside what meagre facility for international due process we have (said meagreness also being largely a consequence of American resistance to community standards). Europe must at a minimum develop the capacity to maintain security on the European continent; Arabs must match economic development with social and political development; Israelis must do what is necessary to acheive real peace with their neighbors; Latin Americans must accept the economic and social consequences of cultural conservatism; Africans must confront corruption, and so on and on. As things now stand, none of this will occur until the American behemoth topples over, but it doesn't have to be that way. The behemoth could get out of the way. Right, there's the energy problem. And this administration has done worse than nothing to deal with that problem. Integrity has two components. The first is that one must stick by what one sincerely believes to be true, no small order, and I bother to refer directly to Mr. Hitchens because he sets such a fine example there. But the second essential component of integrity is the capacity to change one's mind, not to identify with one's own past positions too much. How many scientists have fallen off the virtuous path on that one? It's that getting out of the way thing again.

Can Bush Hand Off the War?

Oh, I know he can in the literal sense. He can postpone disaster until he leaves office, toss the grenade to his successor and get out of the foxhole before it blows. The question is, will the public buy this maneuver, set up as it is to avoid a popular or historical verdict that the disaster was his fault, the war his war? Maybe he can; there isn't necessarily any justice, you know. But the question goes to criticism of those who voted for the original war resolutions and now criticize him. Isn't this hypocritical, the criticism goes, to have supported him but now to turn on him? Nonsense. The Congress gave the President a chance. He was respected and given his freedom to pursue foreign policy as he saw fit, backed up by the government. If his war policy fails, it is not because politicians in Washington meddled in the project. Anyway, that was years ago now. I was against the war, even went to a demonstration or two before the invasion, and I was disappointed in people like Senator Clinton and Senator Kerry who gave their votes for the war effort in the first place. But that doesn't mean they can't legitimately oppose it now, and it will be an injury to history if President Bush is not held accountable in the end, whenever that end may come.

Awkward Like a Fox

I was surprised by the media's coverage of Hilary's joke that she "knew about evil men" on the stump the other day. The first question she was asked (by a reporter, that is) was the obvious one, had she been referring to her wayward husband? With widened eyes she protested, oh no, it had been about the political bad guys, haha. Then someone on cable news took it all literally: "It's a gaffe, isn't it Rona, and will it do her damage? And as if she expected us to believe it was about those bad guys!" It was a joke, and obviously about her husband, and he probably even helped her out thinking it up. It's got that Clinton sense of judo. Here's what's happening: Hilary has two tasks (among others) right now - that is, early in the campaign. First, the Dems lost by very narrow margins in the last two elections. The early campaign focus has to be on that base (Republicans understand this). Second, Bill has to be played front and center. He's the reason she's there historically, and he's very popular with the party rank and file. One of Gore's chief mistakes in 2000 was not deploying him where he would have helped (one of a couple of mistakes that, just by itself, would have turned that election). So Bill's got to be aired out. And, like admitting you inhaled, early on is the time to do it. Use the infidelity issue to your advantage: appeal to the experience of ordinary women. Exploit the gender gap, which might be wide in 2008 if the GOP is still running on national security issues. Above all, rinse the tension out of the Monica issue by finding a way to allude to it. And that's just what she did.

Puerto Rican Parties Undergoing Change

In Puerto Rico there are three main political parties, organized around the "status issue," the relationship between Puerto Rico and the US: The pro-statehood party is the Partido Nuevo Progresista ("PNP," the letters given their Spanish pronunciation); the Partido Popular Democratico ("Los Populares"), sometimes "The Commonwealth party," who favor preserving the current status as worked out by Munoz Marin in the early 1950s; and the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueno ("PIP," pronounced as in Spanish peep), or universally "Los Independentistas," whose name is self-explanatory. The reality for a long time is that the PNP and the Populares are the two leading parties, historically the PIP has had from 5 to 15 percent of the vote but in recent years that has fallen to dismall performances of less than 5 percent, bad enough that the party's formal credentials would be imperilled were support to drop any lower. "Melones" are Puerto Rican voters who are green (PIP) on the outside (talking on the street) but red (Popular) on the inside (in the voting booth), but even that political behavior is more rare as the two major parties square off over the governer's seat and the legislature. In recent years, after a period of seeming political domination, the PNP has lost power in the wake of a long, persistent problem with corruption. Pedro Rossello, the ambitious PNP cacique who had another senator step aside when he needed a seat after his election loss, was particularly damaged as many of the people in his cabinet and campaign were indicted on the most venal of charges (diverting money for personal use is almost always the gist of it here: even the AIDS money was stolen by the doctors in charge). The current Populare governer, known universally as "Anibal," was a party functionary when a replacement was needed for Sila Calderon. Calderon was the first woman governer of Puerto Rico, but she was essentially a conservative figure both politically and personally as a member of the island's traditional oligarchy. Anibal has performed, I would say, above expectations, but I write today because of interesting stirrings amongst the PNP. It was always discouraging to me, as a North American resident here, that the PNP, which nominally seeks integration with US political institutions, had so many problems both with corruption and with distinctly non-democratic (small "d") behavior. I think part of this reflected the style of Rossello, and now the party is moving on to other candidates. But I see this as part of something deeper. The political organization of the society here is not very well-rationalized. Natural divides between liberal and conservative policies are scrambled by the centrality of the status issue. Ultimately the problem for the Populares is that their agenda is to preserve things as they are, but in reality everything is changing day by day (including the relationship with the United States). On the PNP side there is at least a possibility that a political party will organize itself along broader social and political lines. Paradoxically, it may be that political organization that does not place the status issue at the center of everything will be the key to creating conditions where the issue can be resolved.

How to Reform the Primaries

The presidential primary system needs reform. States acting in self-interest have sought to secure their status as bellweather states by scheduling primaries and caucuses earlier and earlier. It's a degenerative problem. The earlier and longer the primaries, the less relevant to the political process they become. A primary in Nevada in February of next year would be little more than a glorified poll. The solution is a fixed, rotating primary schedule. Over the course of April and May of an election year there would be, say, eight elections (weekly), distributed over eight regionally-balanced and size-balanced groups of states, chosen by lottery. The political conventions would be held during the month of June (or something like that). Each election cycle the order of the groups of states would change in rotation through all the states. This primary system would insure fairness for all of the states, and would help to prevent the political dominance of regions. It would also produce some colorful politics.

The End of the Beginning on Environmental Policy

In the President's State of the Union speech last night, between the usual State of the Union laundry list of well-intentioned promises in the first half to the depressingly familiar obsession with terrorism and war in the second, there was one genuinely newsworthy moment. It was an historic moment, in fact. George W. Bush set the country the goal of reducing oil consumption by twenty percent in the next ten years.
I know, beware. What does he mean exactly? He's trying to lull us into thinking he's on the right page with energy policy, he's sneaky and persistant, don't trust. True enough. But making such an ambitious statement reflects both the degree to which public opinion now forces him to act and, possibly, a real opinion shift in the man. Remember these are the people who cut off alternative fuel research during the first week of their administration. This is the administration that abolished the National Biological Survey. The personal fortunes of the President and Vice-President are oil money. The "alternative fuel" research agenda of the Republicans is scamulous, with its emphasis on ethanol marketing (pork) and hydrogen cells (remote). But last night we saw the dawn of the day that all governments will have to pursue sound energy and environmental policy as a matter of simple necessity. A new age.

Winning the GOP Primary

Today's Republican Party is not capable of nominating a pro-choice candidate. I will believe it when I see it, not before. This means that the northeastern moderate Republicans, people like Pataki but most notably Giuliani, are likely going to exert influence on the platform (to use a dated phrase) by brokering delegates. I don't think hizzoner can be considered a front-runner for the party's nomination. I even think a vice-presidential candidate who had to explain to party crowds his pro-choice stance would dampen turnout too much in crucial states. Meanwhile Senator McCain could be losing some steam among the party's likely primary voters, although that's more of an odor than a proposition at this point. Could turn out to be a surprising primary.

Ozzie and Harriet in Baghdad

The problem with a secular, confederate regime like the one Washington wants for Iraq is that everyone there, all of the actual individual players, have well-defined sectarian identities that will in fact be motivating their behavior for the foreseeable future. For Washington they are expected to join in an elaborate act of Kabuki theater.

What Hilary Has

What Hilary has is poll numbers. Everyone says her "negatives" are too high, but nobody appointed her the front runner. We're talking about Senator Clinton for one reason: polls of likely Democratic primary voters show her in the lead. In fact she does well in all kinds of polls, including match-up polls with likely Republican nominees. The only one who so far often edges her out is Senator McCain. The argument that people don't like her isn't persuasive when she rules at the polls. For myself, I'd be happy to get Bill back, and I doubt I'm alone on that. My likely-Democratic acquaintances who say nobody will vote for Hilary will all vote for her themselves if she's the nominee; at least, I haven't heard from any who wouldn't.

Seeing Iran

It is important to see Iran clearly: to understand this important country. Right now the West is misunderstanding Iran in two different directions: on the one hand, the provincial President Ahmadinejad and his unworldly clerical backers lead us to forget that Iran is a large, sophisticated country, with ancient cultural, literary and, yes, political traditions, multiple social strata and factions and a worldy, sophisticated educated class. On the other hand, President Ahmadinejad also causes us to fear Iran as a looming, dangerous menace, perhaps even worthy of full-scale attack in the eyes of the belligerent Bushies, rather than the semi-impoverished country that imports 40 percent of its oil, that has no navy or air force, that it is. The solution is to stop dancing with Ahmadinejad and the rest of the fundamentalist Quixotes who precariously hold power for the time being, to disdain his Holocaust denial, for example, as the rank idiocy that it is, and to speak to cosmopolitan Iran directly. In the end this sophisticated people will work through their historically inevitable experiment with Islamic government and will evolve a modern government that is worthy of the proud history of the Persian plateau.