Rubicon

Parsing the Military Argument

Almost lost in the sound and fury of George Bush's press conference yesterday—and his renewed veto threat—was his assertion that the military leadership knows what would be best for America to do in Iraq and that he is only doing what the generals want him to do. Putting aside the fact that he's lying about his actions—when generals disagree with him, they are fired—note that Bush thinks he's making an unanswerable argument: If the generals want it, it must be the right thing to do.

Unfortunately, for most American politicians—of either party—that is an unanswerable argument. The military serves as the foundation of the American empire, and the military is therefore considered to be the untouchable repository of expertise about whatever is good for the country.

Unless Democrats deny that premise and reassert the supremacy of civilian control, our descent into imperial militarism will continue. It is not enough to fault Bush for his numerous strategic and tactical blunders in Iraq. It is also essential to attack militarism itself and its uses, to question the misplaced Wilsonian idealism that leads all presidents to meddle in other countries, and to redesign a diminished military appropriate to the true defense of the US but not intended for offensive strikes. Democrats must be willing to dismantle the military-industrial complex and reinstitute a restrained, transparent democracy.

During the press conference yesterday, Bush slipped in his argument regarding the generals, and as usual he committed many other blunders, linguistic and conceptual. Here's a sample of his bluster, with my comments:

I think the voters in America want Congress to support our troops in harm -- who are in harm's way. They want money to the troops. [It was Bush who put those troops in harm's way, and Congress wants to bring them home, out of harm's way.]

And they don't want politicians in Washington telling our generals how to fight a war. [The real question is less how than whether to fight an interminable, unjust war.]

It's one thing to object to the policy but it's another thing, when you have troops in harm's way, not to give them the funds they need. [The money would be denied to Bush, the feckless policymaker, who has consistently failed to support the troops. The troops would get the funds they need to leave Iraq expeditiously.]

And no question, there's been a political dance going on here in Washington. You follow this closely; you know what I'm talking about. [Elizabeth de la Vega has something to say about that Republican dance, particularly Karl Rove's dance of death.]

Not only was there a political dance going on -- in other words, people trying to appeal to one side of their party or another. But they then had to bring out new funding streams in order to attract votes to an emergency war supplemental. [After five and a half years of the Afghanistan/Iraq War, Bush continues to demand funds in "emergency" bills rather than through the regular planning and budget process.]

And my concern is several. [sic]

One, Congress shouldn't tell generals how to run the war, Congress should not shortchange our military, Congress should not use an emergency war spending measure as a vehicle to put pet spending projects on that have nothing to do with the war. [Congress, Bush believes, should continue to rubber-stamp his edicts, just as it did under six years of Republican leadership.]

Secondly, as I mentioned in these remarks, delays beyond mid- April and then into May will affect the readiness of the U.S. military. [Almost certainly a lie: last year the Republican Congress did not provide funds until June. If true, it is the result of Bush's long-term trashing of the military.]

In earlier remarks, Bush had said the Army "would be forced to consider cutting back" or "curtailing" certain activities. His careful phraseology indicates that he is more wary than he used to be about outright lies, since he does not assert that these activities would definitely cease. He now prefers more often to mislead, leaving some room for plausible deniability; perhaps these steps would be considered, but not actually taken.

In fact, Bush need only accept the congressional timeline for withdrawal from Iraq to free these "emergency" funds. If he does veto the bill and "shortchange" the troops, the Army would be forced to consider a policy different from the current unsuccessful one. It might even be forced to consider leaving Iraq. That would be a good start.

The Crisis of the Republic

Jonathan Schell is a national treasure. He is a perceptive thinker and trenchant writer who always tackles the largest problems, from war to nuclear weapons to the very fate of the earth. This week he begins a new series of articles in The Nation called "The Crisis of the Republic," examining the deterioration of the United States. Tom Engelhardt reprints the first essay, "Too Late for Empire," at TomDispatch, and he comments:

For all its wealth, its power, its dreams of military domination over the last half-century-plus, the United States, Schell argues in this introduction to his new series, has misunderstood the nature of power in our time and so has become "the fool of history." Our tale, as he tells it, is not one of imperial success followed by crisis, but of a deep and abiding kind of failure; nor is it a tale of a successful empire now in crisis, but of a failed empire now in a state of disarray.

George Bush and his minions may think they are initiating a grand new era of American power, with the sole superpower exercising unquestioned worldwide hegemony, but they are wrong. Great empires are no longer possible in a world that contains both the potential for nuclear-weapon overkill and the "people power" of democratic self-rule. Today's world is postimperial, and the neoconservative fantasists will merely destroy what is left of the American democratic republic, without succeeding in building a stable empire. There will be no pax americana, because it is the nature of the imperial impulse to generate endless wars on the periphery of the empire, as Chalmers Johnson has often noted—and today the whole world is periphery. Meanwhile, the metropole rots from within.

Schell begins by lamenting the need to repeat himself, though it's an affliction common to all of us who write regularly about Bush's slow-motion murder of open, responsive government:

Anyone who wants to write about the constitutional crisis unfolding in the United States today faces a peculiar problem at the outset. There is a large body of observations that at one and the same time have been made too often and yet not often enough—too often because they have been repeated to the point of tedium for a minority ready to listen but not often enough because the general public has yet to consider them seriously enough. The problem for a self-respecting writer is that the act of writing almost in its nature promises something new. Repetition is not really writing but propaganda—not illumination for the mind but a mental beating. Here are some examples of the sort of observations I have in mind, at once over-familiar and unheard:

President George W. Bush sent American troops into Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction, but they weren't there.

He said that Saddam Hussein's regime had given help to Al Qaeda, but it had not.

He therefore took the nation to war on the basis of falsehoods.

His administration says that the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere has been the work of a few bad apples in the military, whereas in fact abuses were sanctioned at the highest levels of the executive branch in secret memos.…

[Six similar similar observations, and finally:]

The President's secret legal memos justifying the abuses and torture are based on a conception of the powers of the executive that gives him carte blanche to disregard specific statutes as well as international law in the exercise of self-granted powers to the Commander in Chief nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.

If accepted, these claims would fundamentally alter the structure of the American government, upsetting the system of checks and balances and nullifying fundamental liberties, including Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures and guarantees of due process. As such, they embody apparent failures of the President to carry out his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

The need to repeat these familiar points, as I have just done (while also begging the indulgence of the reader, as I do), is itself a symptom of the crisis. The same concentration of governmental and other power in the hands of a single party that led to the abuses stands in the way of action to address them. The result is a problem of political sanitation. The garbage heaps up in the public square, visible to all and stinking to high heaven, but no garbage truck arrives to take it away. The lawbreaking is exposed, but no legislative body responds. The damning facts pour out, and protests are made, but little is done. Then comes the urge to repeat.

The dilemma is reflected in microcosm in the news media, especially television—a process particularly on display in the failure to challenge the Administration's deceptive rationale for the Iraq War.…

These problems are not new, and Bush is merely the latest and most egregious imperialist. But warnings have been sounded before; Schell quotes the courageous Senator William Fulbright at the time of the Vietnam War:

Before the Second World War our world role was a potential role; we were important in the world for what we could do with our power, for the leadership we might provide, for the example we might set. Now the choices are almost gone: we are almost the world's self-appointed policeman; we are almost the world defender of the status quo. We are well on our way to becoming a traditional great power--an imperial nation if you will--engaged in the exercise of power for its own sake, exercising it to the limit of our capacity and beyond, filling every vacuum and extending the American "presence" to the farthest reaches of the earth. And, as with the great empires of the past, as the power grows, it is becoming an end in itself, separated except by ritual incantation from its initial motives, governed, it would seem, by its own mystique, power without philosophy or purpose. That describes what we have almost become....

The only difference now, says Schell, is that we may safely delete the word "almost." The US has transformed itself into a "pitiful, helpless giant," a great power driven by the sole purpose of maintaining power. The benign founding ideals are in the process of being discarded:  rule by law not by men, government of the people not of the powerful, accountable civil servants not tyrants, checks and balances not edicts, open debate not secret impositions. These are the ideals that gave America power, the "soft power" that is much more durable than hard military power, because it creates allies and friends rather than merely frightening enemies into temporary silence. Now we suffer from "impotent omnipotence," creating more enemies at every turn.

Schell concludes:

Until very recently those authentic questions went substantially unexplored outside scholarly journals, and the country instead busied itself repairing the imperial illusions so rudely dashed by the Vietnam War. Suppressing the lessons of the Chinese Revolution had been easy, since the United States had not fought in China. Getting over the lessons of Vietnam took longer. Many segments of American society, none more than the military, had learned them deeply and vowed "never again." (The poignancy of the generals' recent outspoken statement against the conduct of the war in Iraq lies precisely in the officers' chagrin that they did indeed let it happen again.) The lessons were formulated in military terms in the so-called Powell doctrine, requiring that before military action proceeded there must be a clear military—not political—objective, that there must be a commitment to the use of overwhelming force and that there must be an "exit strategy." Nevertheless, in other quarters the lessons were named a "Vietnam syndrome," an illness, and other explanations were brought forward. The lessons of Vietnam were not so much forgotten as vigorously suppressed, in the name of restoring the reputation of America's military power. Ronald Reagan said of the Vietnam military, "They came home without a victory not because they were defeated but because they were denied a chance to win." After the first Gulf War, President Bush crowed, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" The country was getting ready for the second Iraq War, which violated every tenet of the Powell doctrine.

A parallel evolution was occurring in the constitutional domain. The lesson most of the country learned from Watergate and the forced resignation of Richard Nixon was that the imperial presidency had grown too strong. (In general, our imperial-minded Presidents have had much more success rolling back freedom at home than extending it abroad.) Dick Cheney, who had served as Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford, drew an opposite lesson--that the powers others called imperial were in fact the proper ones for the presidency and had been eviscerated by the opposition to Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. As he has put it, "Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority... the President needs to be effective, especially in the national security area." Taking the Nixon presidency as a model rather than a cautionary tale, he sees new usurpation as restoration. In doing so, he brings an old theme back in new guise—that American weakness in the world is caused by domestic opponents at home. In his view domestic subversion—this time of executive authority, not misguided imperial ambition—is the country's problem.

Can this pattern be broken? Voices are already being heard advising that the opposition to the Iraq War and the failed vision it embodies should, with the next election in mind, now embrace a generalized new readiness to use force. But that way lies only a new chapter in the sorry history of the pitiful, helpless giant. The needed lesson is exactly the opposite—to learn or relearn, or perhaps we must say re-relearn, the lessons regarding the limitations on the use of force that have been taught and then rejected so many times in recent decades. Only then will we be able to stop repeating ourselves and, giving up dreams of imperial grandeur, start saying and doing something new.

If Bush were to send a million American troops to Iraq, he could not suppress the insurgency. If he were to provide cover to his surrogate Israeli forces for a full year, they could not destroy Hezbollah or Hamas. If he were to nuke Iran, he could not transform the Iranian government into a more congenial shape. Military power is temporary, illusory power; with every blunt blow, the US creates more enemies than it destroys. And in the process, the US will destroy itself.

Defeat and de Brain

In Sunday's Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau depicted a George Bush press conference about Iraq. Bush was his usual disembodied asterisk (elected? appointed?) wearing his usual warfighter gear (Greek helmet with tattered plume). The dialog was disturbingly close to being realistic:

Reporter: Sir, with no end to the violence in Iraq in sight, why do you still feel victory is possible?

Bush: Because I feel it in my gut. In other words, it's a gut feeling.… And my gut tells me to trust my heart!… And what I know in my heart … gives me the spine … to put real muscle behind our strategy for victory!

Reporter: Any word from the brain?

Bush: No, that's for defeatists.

Bush cannot admit, to himself or others, that he has made a mistake … ever. But he has noticed that others have failed to bring his rosy screenplay to life with appropriate panache. Nouri al-Maliki, prime minister of Iraq, for example, with whom he shared a few moments at the White House podium today, has been something of a disappointment to our fearless leader. He has not, somehow, been able to conjure peace and roses from the chaos Bush created in Iraq.

Despite the failure of Operation Forward Together, the six-week-old Baghdad security plan (Maliki's failure, now, not Bush's), he is no defeatist. The Commando in Chief will now bring several thousand American troops from other parts of the country to the seething capital, imagining (the new screenplay, this) that they will magically pacify the multisectarian city of seven million angry and fearful people. Peter Baker and Josh White of the Washington Post describe the scene in Washington:

Bush sounded unusually dour and acknowledged that the situation in Iraq in many ways has worsened lately. But he vowed to adjust tactics to deal with evolving threats and to keep U.S. forces in Iraq as long as necessary to fortify Maliki's government until it can defend itself.…

[T]he deteriorating security situation seemed to all but doom the prospect for significant troop withdrawals before the November congressional elections. The Pentagon had drawn up scenarios that envisioned pulling out as many as 30,000 troops this year, but military officials said yesterday that those now appear implausible and that U.S. forces will probably remain at the current level of 127,000 for several months at least.

"Obviously, the violence in Baghdad is still terrible, and therefore there needs to be more troops," Bush said in a news conference with Maliki.

"Conditions change inside a country," he added. "And the question is: Are we going to be facile enough to change with [them]? Will we be nimble enough? Will we be able to deal with the circumstances on the ground? And the answer is, yes, we will."

Resolute as always, the fearless leader—facile as always—is prepared to deal with changing conditions (who could have imagined?) by consulting his omniscient gut and sending more soldiers into the cauldron to kill and die. His new Iraqi puppet, however, failed to play his assigned role when the subject turned to Lebanon. Maliki condemned Israel's terrorist attacks on civilians and called for "an immediate cease-fire," while Bush thought there should be a few hundred more dead children before any cease-fire would be "sustainable." And back in Iraq:

"No question, it's tough in Baghdad," Bush said, "and no question, it's tough in other parts of Iraq. But there are also places where progress is being made."

He didn't say where those places are, but victory (however illusory) is his watchword, and staying the course (however lemming-like) is his strategy, and anyone who doesn't agree is a defeatist. Terrible word, defeatist. Retreat. Slink away. Cut and run. That's what those defeatists do.

Michael T. Klare has decided that, if these are the terms of definition, we liberals should be "in favor of abandoning the U.S. imperial role worldwide." If that's what they want to call defeatism, let's all cut and run. Not merely for pragmatic reasons, but because we really are in favor of democracy and freedom for people everywhere. Klare (at TomDispatch) explains:

The United States, I'm convinced, would be a whole lot better off -- and its military personnel a whole lot safer -- if we repudiated the global-dominance project of the Bush administration and its neo-conservative boosters.

Supposedly, the U.S. military has expanded its presence and combat role around the world to foster democracy and prevail in the President's War on Terror; and, without a doubt, many brave Americans have risked their lives -- and some have died – in the pursuit of these noble objectives. But this is not, I believe, what has motivated Messrs. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld in their pursuit of global supremacy. Rather, they appear driven by a messianic determination to impose American dominance on large swaths of the planet and to employ this hegemonic presence to gain control over global energy supplies. In attempting to do so, they are bankrupting the nation and exposing American citizens to a higher, not lower, risk of terrorist attack.

Energy is what it's all about. Oil, and the corporate control of the vast profits to be made. (Klare's excellent book Blood and Oil makes the case.) There are other paths than military adventurism to achieve security from terrorism—and to achieve energy security. In fact, as we now see clearly in Iraq (and in Lebanon), overwhelming military force is at best a temporary dike against disaster, at worst a deadly irritant creating a multitude of new enemies.

Defeatist? I agree with Klare:

A retreat from empire would also force us to use oil more sparingly and this, in turn, would enable us to address another critical threat to American security: the danger of catastrophic environmental damage caused by global climate change. As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, our shores are highly vulnerable to powerful hurricanes; and higher ocean temperatures, caused by global warming, are producing increasingly violent ones. Global warming is also contributing to the extreme drought and susceptibility to voracious forest fires in many areas of the American West. By reducing our petroleum consumption and relying more on ethanol, bio-diesel, wind power, solar, and other domestically-produced, alternative sources of energy -- but especially by putting our money into the development of such alternatives rather than to imperial expansion around the globe -- we can, in the long run, reduce our exposure to violence abroad and to environmental catastrophe at home.

So yes, I'm a "defeatist" when it comes to imperial expansion. But I'm a hawk when it comes to overcoming terrorism, saving American lives, averting environmental collapse, and promoting core American values. This is the only truly patriotic course that any of us can espouse.

It's also the only course an engaged brain would think of proposing.

Sole King and Decider

Back in the Bronze Age of American politics, during the 1984 election campaign, Elizabeth Drew interviewed Walter Mondale on PBS. He was running against sunny, Teflon-coated Ronald Reagan, and the dour Mondale didn't have a chance at the presidency. But Drew, having honed her acerbic style at the New Yorker, was a merciless interviewer, and Mondale didn't know how to respond. Watching on TV, I didn't either, and I blamed Drew. I wanted Mondale to look good—unlike Reagan, he did offer reasonable policies and had a serious record as a public servant—and I thought she should have given him some space to repeat Democratic talking points. Be friendly, I thought. Be nice.

If only I had known what good journalism is! Drew's searching questions and her unwillingness to accept mere talking points were the very essence of good journalism, and if I had been reading and listening to British media more often then, I might have recognized it. But American TV personalities of the eighties—like the milquetoasts who have inherited their comfortable chairs today—were often worshipfully obsequious around the slightest whiff of power. The relationship between press and government in Britain seems often more confrontational. (As in Ireland: Carole Coleman's 2004 interview of Bush for Irish TV is still worth watching.) BBC interviewers tend  to approach politicians with the presumption that they're not telling the truth—or anyway not the whole truth—and therefore followup questions are almost always obligatory. That's what Elizabeth Drew was like, and her interview style was so unusual it seemed bizarre.

I am happy to say that Drew is back. To be fair, she never left the scene, though a later puffy incarnation of the New Yorker did not welcome her, nor did the rightward-swinging PBS. And now her style is essential, more than ever. In these parlous times, under the reign of King George the Lesser, she writes, with an acerbity ever more finely honed, of the end of a balanced American republic and the triumph of tyranny. From the New York Review of Books, "Power Grab":

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the White House has made an unprecedented reach for power. It has systematically attempted to defy, control, or threaten the institutions that could challenge it: Congress, the courts, and the press. It has attempted to upset the balance of power among the three branches of government provided for in the Constitution; but its most aggressive and consistent assaults have been against the legislative branch: Bush has time and again said that he feels free to carry out a law as he sees fit, not as Congress wrote it. Through secrecy and contemptuous treatment of Congress, the Bush White House has made the executive branch less accountable than at any time in modern American history. And because of the complaisance of Congress, it has largely succeeded in its efforts.…

From the time of the vote on the Iraq war, many Democrats have been reluctant to be caught on the "wrong side" of "national security" issues, even those blatantly cooked up by the White House. It usually requires a strong public reaction, as there was on the subject of torture, for Congress to make a move against the President's actions. A Republican senator told me, "There's a feeling on the Hill that the public doesn't care about it, that it's willing to give up liberties in order to defeat the terrorists." Some of the proposals offered on Capitol Hill for regulating the NSA wiretaps amount to little regulation at all.

At the center of the current conflict over the Constitution is a president who surrounds himself with proven loyalists, who is not interested in complexities, and who is averse to debate and intolerant of dissenters within his administration and elsewhere. (A prominent Washington Republican who had raised a lot of money for Bush was dropped from the Christmas party list after he said something mildly critical of the President.) A Republican lobbyist close to the White House described to me what he called the Cult of Bush: "This group is all about loyalty and the definition of loyalty extends to policy-making, politics, and to the execution of policy—and to the regulatory agencies." The result, this man said, is that the people in the agencies, including the regulatory agencies, "become robotrons and just do what they're told. There's no dialogue."

This is not a matter of a few policies about which reasonable people might reasonably disagree. It's not a matter of competence, or of an interest in the minutiae of good government. We're talking about the very essence of governmental structure, about where sovereignty resides, about who has the final say: the people and their representatives, or a single individual.

"I am the decider," said His Worshipfulness recently, a perfectly reasonable thing for a hereditary, absolute monarch to say. Not even the ex-king, George's Georgian father, can sway his decisive decisions (as Sidney Blumenthal relates in Salon). The young ruler confided his reasoning to the obsequious Bob Woodward: "I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel I owe anybody an explanation."

That is the interesting thing. Maybe somebody needs to do something about it. Somebody in the Supreme Court, perhaps, or somebody in Congress, or (Jesus forfend!) somebody in the executive branch of the United States government—a person, say, who has read some history, is familiar with the Constitution, and comprehends the difference between a democratic republic and a monarchical empire. Somebody who might, perhaps, get the ball rolling on this impeachment thing. Any noncomatose Republicans out there? Any courageous Democrats? Read Drew's indictment, and act. Act now. Hurry up please, it's time.

The Military Option

George Bush is militarizing the entire government of the United States. When there are two options for achieving a desired purpose, he always chooses the military option.

In dealing with Iraq, he could have allowed the UN arms inspectors to do their work, discovered that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, and then followed a multilateral diplomatic path to achieving peace and security. Instead, he chose the military option and invaded Iraq.

In organizing the intelligence capabilities of the government, he could have relied on professional advice, appointed nonpolitical managers, and strengthened the operational capabilities of the CIA and the FBI to function lawfully. Instead, he chose the military option and gave free rein to the NSA and the Defense Department to spy on Americans and ignore real threats.

In dealing with Iran, he could have decided to work diplomatically through the IAEA, respond positively to the recent Iranian overtures, and open frank and serious discussions about nuclear proliferation and other matters of mutual concern. Instead, he now brandishes the military option and threatens Iran with aerial attack.

In confronting the complex issues of legal and illegal immigration into the US, he could have solicited ideas from relevant groups and experts; developed a set of proposals that recognizes the needs of immigrants, would-be immigrants, American workers, and businesspeople; and proposed an approach that would unify citizens and noncitizens. Instead, he proposes the military option, sending the National Guard to patrol the Mexican border.

George Bush has a toolbox with one tool, the blunt tool of military force, and he uses it for every purpose. When the military is used in missions for which it was not designed, or for undemocratic, imperial purposes, it is weakened for its principal role, domestic defense. And we are one step closer to a dictatorship.

Mayday! Mayday!

As an military brat in 1952, I lived on a US Army base in occupied Japan, and when May Day rolled around, we were ordered to remain on base—not to venture out into Tokyo—because the Communists, we were told, were planning demonstrations, and Americans might get hurt. Extra soldiers were stationed at the gates of Washington Heights, and no one was allowed in or out. As it turned out, the labor-union demonstrations were entirely peaceful, though many unpleasant words were uttered about the occupying Americans and about the right-wing Japanese politicians they supported.

On May 2, everything returned to normal: our family's Japanese maid and cook came back to work, everyone was pleasant and proper, the right-wing politicians continued to pass anti-labor laws and consolidate their power, and the American occupation carried on with the corporatization of Japan. It was then I learned that May Day is International Workers' Day, and I was surprised to find out that some workers were so angry at being treated unfairly that they marched up and down the street, carrying signs and shouting slogans. At age 12, of course, I did not lose my faith in our sacred American mission, our duty to bring democracy and capitalism to the underprivileged nations who yearned to breathe free. I did not really understand why those Japanese workers were marching.

The struggle continues today, and the story of workers and unions and labor-oriented political parties continues to be entangled with the story of American empire-building  and free-market zealousness. One aspect of that entanglement is that very few Americans identify themselves as workers, and they do not realize what they could gain by making common cause with other workers (in particular, with immigrants). They think of themselves more often as incipient plutocrats, just one job or one stroke of luck away from being rich capitalists themselves, so they don't want to join in workers' protests or press the government to ensure economic fairness. Even the struggling minimum-wage workers who by rights ought to be joining protests and demanding a government of the people—and showing solidarity with immigrants—tend to support the harshly individualistic American system, every man for himself and no safety net.

It seems fitting, therefore, that it was on May 1 three years ago George Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished" in his bomber-boy costume. He thought that the military fireworks and epaulets would provide the plebs with diverting circuses (if not always enough bread), while emphasizing the doctrine that any problems the poor plebs might be experiencing are temporary, blamable on someone else, and susceptible to dramatically instantaneous solutions—like a lottery jackpot or a war.

In fact, a properly functioning government—like a properly functioning economy—is not a simple matter of invading an oil-rich country, or wearing a jaunty costume while making an inspiring speech. It requires more thought, more careful planning, than that. It also seems fitting, therefore, that on this May Day, following the death of John Kenneth Galbraith at age 97, people were looking again at what he wrote about such matters.  As Stephanie Flanders writes in the Financial Times (London), Galbraith's ideas are more relevant than ever (via Brad DeLong):

[M]any of the dangers of untrammelled markets he had described in the 1950s and 1960s, not least the coexistence of "private opulence and public squalor", seem rather more obvious in George W. Bush's America than they had been in Eisenhower's or Kennedy's. The return of an income distribution that looks increasingly similar to that of a century ago must make his work increasingly relevant.

Galbraith’s persistent criticisms of Ronald Reagan’s (and Margaret Thatcher’s) policies culminated in the publication, in 1992, of a surprisingly influential book, The Culture of Contentment. It described how the emergence of a contented, voting majority in the US and elsewhere was hastening the emergence of a new and dangerously marginalised underclass; offering, in the words of one reviewer, “both a compelling logic and a tempting vindication of those disillusioned by electoral defeat”.

In fact, it is precisely these ideas of a restored social compact that might provide the foundation for electoral victory against Bushian crony capitalism and imperialism—for the whole society, not for the "marginalized underclass" alone. Galbraith's final book, The Economics of Innocent Fraud, emphasizes the need for  a "coalition of the concerned":

The affluent would still be affluent, the comfortable still comfortable, but the poor would be part of the political system.

And that would be a very good thing. It's fitting, too, that the million people marching for immigrants' rights around the country made their statement on May Day, International Workers' Day. In fact, we are all workers or would-be workers. We are all citizens or would-be citizens. Those of us who are comfortable cannot expect the society to become inclusive and democratic again if we remain locked in our safe military bases and gated communities. The coalition of the concerned must join together with the ranks of the dispossessed, as many did this May Day. It was a good start.

Rumsfeld's Only Tool

Donald Rumsfeld's toolbox has only one tool in it: military force. Like a carpenter who has nothing but a sledgehammer, he approaches every situation with the same response. BAM! POW! SMASH!

It's not surprising, then, that when Rumsfeld plans a defense against the next terrorist attack—the attack his previous strategy has made inevitable—he plans more of the same. One sledgehammer is good, so two would be better. No, let's have three large sledgehammers!

Rumsfeld's way of doing things does not make us safer, because it creates more enemies of America, more terrorists. But it's the only way he knows. Ann Scott Tyson has the story in the Washington Post:.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has approved the military's most ambitious plan yet to fight terrorism around the world and retaliate more rapidly and decisively in the case of another major terrorist attack on the United States, according to defense officials.

The long-awaited campaign plan for the global war on terrorism, as well as two subordinate plans also approved within the past month by Rumsfeld, are considered the Pentagon's highest priority, according to officials familiar with the three documents who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about them publicly.

Details of the plans are secret, but in general they envision a significantly expanded role for the military -- and, in particular, a growing force of elite Special Operations troops -- in continuous operations to combat terrorism outside of war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Developed over about three years by the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, the plans reflect a beefing up of the Pentagon's involvement in domains traditionally handled by the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department.

For example, SOCOM has dispatched small teams of Army Green Berets and other Special Operations troops to U.S. embassies in about 20 countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America, where they do operational planning and intelligence gathering to enhance the ability to conduct military operations where the United States is not at war.

And in a subtle but important shift contained in a classified order last year, the Pentagon gained the leeway to inform -- rather than gain the approval of -- the U.S. ambassador before conducting military operations in a foreign country, according to several administration officials. "We do not need ambassador-level approval," said one defense official familiar with the order.

No stinking State Department, please! If you let an ambassador decide, he would just do diplomacy, and that's not good enough. It doesn't kill enough people.

We must have complete secrecy, too, to make certain Congress doesn't get in the way of these worldwide military operations. All civilians are irrelevant, except of course for Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush. Tyson continues:

The Pentagon declined to comment on the counterterrorism plans or their approval, citing longstanding policy. "We do not discuss contingency plans or future operations," said Cmdr. Greg Hicks, a Defense Department spokesman. SOCOM's deputy commander, Vice Adm. Eric T. Olson, said earlier this month in Senate testimony that the plans had been approved.

Special Operations Command, led by Gen. Doug Brown, has been building up its headquarters and writing the plans since 2003, when Rumsfeld first designated it as the lead command for the war on terrorism. Its budget has grown 60 percent since 2003 to $8 billion in fiscal 2007. President Bush empowered the 53,000-strong command with coordinating the entire military's efforts in counterterrorism in 2004.

"SOCOM is, in fact, in charge of the global war on terror," Brown said in testimony before the House last month. In this role, SOCOM directs and coordinates actions by the military's regional combatant commands. SOCOM, if directed, can also command its own counterterrorist operations -- such as when a threat spans regional boundaries or the mission is highly sensitive -- but it has not done so yet, according to Olson, and other officials say that is likely to be the exception to the rule.

To extend its reach to more countries, SOCOM is increasing by 13,000 the number of Special Operations troops, including Special Forces soldiers skilled in language and working with indigenous militaries, and Delta Force operatives and Navy SEAL teams that form clandestine "special mission units" engaged in reconnaissance, intelligence gathering and man-hunting. Already, SOCOM is seeing its biggest deployments in history, with 7,000 troops overseas today, but the majority have been concentrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, with 85 percent last year in the Middle East, Central Asia or the Horn of Africa.

State Department officials, meanwhile, said that although, for the most part, cooperation with the military teams has been good, they remain concerned over continued "gray areas" regarding their status. "Special Ops wants the flexibility and speed to go in there. . . . but there's understandably questions of how you do that and how you have clear lines of authority," one U.S. official said. There remains "continuing discussion, to put it politely, in terms of how this is going to work," the official said. SOCOM says the teams work for the regional commanders.

Those secret operatives work for their secret commanders, who report only to the secretive secretary of defense. This is the essential reason Donald Rumsfeld must be fired, the essential reason Dick Cheney and George Bush must be impeached and removed from office. They are transforming the United States into a tyrannical military empire. Democracy has nothing to do with it, in Baghdad or in Washington.

Hu's on First

In 2002, the US trade deficit with China was $103 billion. In 2005, it was $202 billion. It doesn't show any signs of diminishing. That means that many, many dollars are crossing the Pacific every month, nearly 20 billion of them, leaving the US and entering China. And a large percentage of those dollars are invested in US Treasury bonds, financing the US government's budget deficit, which is expected to remain at an unsustainable level of 3.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product for the next decade. In 2005, "net foreign purchases of U.S. Treasury securities were a record $196.8 billion," according to the US Commerce Department.

Higher trade deficit, higher budget deficit, more US assets owned by China. When Hu Jintao sees George Bush in Washington this week, the Chinese president is visiting his biggest debtor. Furthermore, the dollar is shaky, poised for a likely plunge in value, as the Left Coaster reports, while the Chinese economy is growing at an annual rate of 10.2 percent, and Hu is allowing a minor revaluation of the undervalued yuan. The economic cards are all in China's hand, and Bush has nothing to show.

Except, of course, the only card Bush knows how to play: military power. Michael Klare writes in TomDispatch about the great-power games that are now ramping up, and the serious dangers they present. Hu and Bush may be smiling at each other in the White House this week, but the maneuvering for position has begun. And, Klare writes, Bush is now focused on military containment of China above all other priorities:

The truly commanding objective [of Bush's military strategy] -- the underlying basis for budgets and troop deployments -- is the containment of China. This objective governed White House planning during the administration's first seven months in office, only to be set aside by the perceived obligation to highlight anti-terrorism after 9/11; but now, despite Bush's preoccupation with Iraq and Iran, the White House is also reemphasizing its paramount focus on China, risking a new Asian arms race with potentially catastrophic consequences.…

Washington's concern over growing Chinese influence in Southeast Asia has come to be intertwined with the U.S. drive for hegemony in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. This has given China policy an even more elevated significance in Washington -- and helps explain its return with a passion despite the seemingly all-consuming preoccupations of the war in Iraq.

Whatever the exact balance of factors, the Bush administration is now clearly engaged in a coordinated, systematic effort to contain Chinese power and influence in Asia. This effort appears to have three broad objectives: to convert existing relations with Japan, Australia, and South Korea into a robust, integrated anti-Chinese alliance system; to bring other nations, especially India, into this system; and to expand U.S. military capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region.…

China, however, has always responded to perceived threats of encirclement in a vigorous and muscular fashion as well, and so we should assume that Beijing will balance all that charm with a military buildup of its own. Such a drive will not bring China to the brink of military equality with the United States -- that is not a condition it can realistically aspire to over the next few decades. But it will provide further justification for those in the United States who seek to accelerate the containment of China, and so will produce a self-fulfilling loop of distrust, competition, and crisis. This will make the amicable long-term settlement of the Taiwan problem and of North Korea's nuclear program that much more difficult, and increase the risk of unintended escalation to full-scale war in Asia. There can be no victors from such a conflagration.

We need a president who understands the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the United States, who values the give-and-take of true diplomacy, who truly wants to live harmoniously with other nations rather than proving American supremacy. We need an adult in the White House.

When Bush replied to critics of Donald Rumsfeld the other day—petulantly refusing to fire the incompetent defense secretary—he barked, "I am the decider!" His whiny tone and angry affect were frightening: he sounded like an adolescent who, challenged for his adolescent behavior, had no response other than "I don't care! That's what I want!" No reasons, no discussion, no attempt to convince the critics, merely an assertion of royal prerogative. A bully's reply.

This is the man-child who is trying to deal with Hu Jintao and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Bush may be the decider, but his decisions are based on little more than a sense of personal entitlement, bluster, and aggression. And his spectrum of responses ranges from angry threat to nuclear attack. Not a pleasant prospect. Hu will certainly emerge the winner this week.

Quote of the Week: Michael Kinsley

The old Wilsonian instinct is alive and well across a large part of the spectrum of American politics. Nearly everyone, it seems, from dingbat-right to center-left—we'll leave out Pat Buchanan and Noam Chomsky (and myself, thank you very much)—thinks the USA has a duty to spread the gospel of democracy, freedom, and capitalism to those who lack God's Washington's grace.

Yes, it's the white man's burden, in a new disguise, and despite the rocky record in Iraq, you can almost hear Congress as an Easter choir, led by George Bush, singing:

From Greenland's icy mountains, from India’s coral strand;
Where Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sand:
From many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver their land from error’s chain.

When Reginald Heber wrote the hymn in 1819, he was thinking about spreading Christianity, but Bush has in mind something even more exciting when he sings Heber's words, "Shall we to those benighted the lamp of life deny?" He's thinking about spreading Americanism (including, of course, his version of Christianity) to many more exotic places, starting with Iran.

Michael Kinsley hates to give up on the missionary ideal, but based on the evidence he is more skeptical than he once was, and he doubts that the conversion of Iran is desirable right now. Even if the song is still good, he says, the singer leaves something to be desired. Here's Kinsley, in Slate:

So, after more than half a century of active meddling—protecting our interests, promoting our values, encouraging democracy, fighting terrorism, seeking stability, defending human rights, pushing peace—it's come to this. In Iraq we find ourselves unwilling regents of a society splitting into a gangland of warring militias and death squads, with our side (labeled "the government") outperforming the other side (labeled "the terrorists") in both the quantity and gruesome quality of its daily atrocities. In Iran, an irrational government that hates us with special passion is closer to getting the bomb than Iraq—the country we went to war with to keep from getting the bomb—ever was.

And in Afghanistan—site of the Iraq war prequel that actually followed the script (invade, topple brutal regime, wipe out terrorists, establish democracy, accept grateful thanks, get out)—the good guys we put in power came close, a couple weeks ago, to executing a man for the crime of converting to Christianity. Meanwhile, the bad guys (the Taliban and al-Qaida) keep a low news profile by concentrating on killing children and other Afghan civilians rather than too many American soldiers.

When the United States should use its military strength to achieve worthy goals abroad is an important question. But based on this record, it seems a bit theoretical. It's like asking whether Donald Trump should use his superpowers to cure AIDS. Or what George W. Bush should say when he wins the Nobel Prize in physics. A more pressing question is: Can't anyone here play this game?

Or sing this song? And by the way, if we ever get a competent singer, shouldn't we start looking for a different song too?

Conservative in Name Only

The Conservative Political Action Conference wound up yesterday with a stem-winder from Newt Gingrich, disgraced ex-speaker of the House. He called for a return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when taking candy from babies and kicking poor people hadn't got such a bad name, back when Ronald Reagan could still put a smiling face on selfishness.

There was an undercurrent of nostalgia this week at the Omni Shoreham in Washington, a yearning for the time when people who called themselves conservative didn't have to make excuses for George Bush's Katrina/Iraq spendthrift budgets and incompetent management. As Will Lester put it in the Washington Post, "Conservatives at this conference expressed mounting frustration with the expansion of government and increased spending in the last five years, even with Republicans in control of the White House and Congress." Gingrich, of course, put the usual reactionary spin on the incompetence: it didn't demonstrate the ideological rigidity and corporate cronyism of the Bush Republican party—no no!—it showed that government can't do anything right.

Clearly, these so-called conservatives are struggling to define what conservatism means. It used to mean the belief in a small, competent government that provided a relatively honest legal infrastructure and protection against domestic criminals and foreign invaders. No handouts to the undeserving, balanced budgets, a small standing army, and few foreign entanglements. The party of the rich, yes, though with mildly progressive taxation and the kind of noblesse oblige that pays some attention to those, as we say, less fortunate.

One installation at this conference, however, tells a different tale. In Salon, Michael Scherer reports that Lockheed Martin set up an F-22 Raptor simulator, with a red button to drop the bomb, and it was a big hit. A video game with real-world significance, it represents Lockheed's latest sales job to push its overpriced, Cold War–designed empire builder. And it was lots of fun for the contingent of blue-blazered college kids at the conference to pretend to fly a bleeding-edge fighter jet.

The significance of the F-22 is clear, and it is not conservative in any traditional sense: these Republicans are willing to spend enormous sums of public money to reward rich corporate supporters, increase government debt, and maintain the American empire. They like a large government, as long as they control it. Their sense of entitlement rules out reasonable self-taxation or onerous service (especially military service), and when they do assume official positions they waste money, trash the government, and harm citizens. They care about power and money, and they do not let small matters of legality interfere. The results of this reactionary, militaristic class warfare are the chaos of Iraq, the debacle of Katrina, the disappearance of domestic social services, the mountain of public debt, and the secret lawlessness of NSA spying. It is conservative only in the intent to keep the rich rich and the powerful powerful.

And they can't even shoot straight. Dick Cheney with a shotgun is more dangerous to fellow hunters than to quail. Dick Cheney with a government is more dangerous to fellow Americans than to Osama bin Laden.

Update, 2/13: Glenn Greenwald explored some of the same territory yesterday with his usual lucidity, and he concluded:

That "conservatism" has come to mean "loyalty to George Bush" is particularly ironic given how truly un-conservative the Administration is. It is not only the obvious (though significant) explosion of deficit spending under this Administration – and that explosion has occurred far beyond military or 9/11-related spending and extends into almost all arenas of domestic programs as well. Far beyond that is the fact that the core, defining attributes of political conservatism could not be any more foreign to the world view of the Bush follower.

As though to support his thesis, various rightwing bloggers attacked Greenwald as a "liberal," and today he replied, cogently and at length. True conservatives like Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan are a pleasure to read. Though I often disagree with their ideas, they compete on the battlefield of rational thought, without resorting to simplistic labels or blind party loyalty.