Iraq: The End Is In Sight Whether We Admit It Or Not.

[Ed. Note: Below is a post I started about three weeks ago. While there has been a lot of new news on this topic, I find that little of it adds much to the substance. So, I decided to go ahead an post it].

On Tuesday [11/14], I argued that we ought to put aside, for now at least, the debate over the run-up to the Iraq war. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post comes to the same conclusion but states the reasons much more eloquently:

In political terms, the debate between President Bush and the Democrats over who knew what when on WMD is hugely important. But it's an argument about yesterday.

In real-world terms, the tentative debate that is starting to take shape about how to salvage the situation in Iraq is far more important. It's an argument about tomorrow.

The WMD shootout is more passionate, more colorful, more driven by a desire to win history's verdict on whether the war was a mistake. The press is really getting pumped about this, since it lets Bush backers paint the Democrats as revisionist liars and Bush detractors accuse the president once again of willful distortion.

The second debate, by contrast, is a depressing one with no great options, unfolding against the backdrop of continuing American and Iraqi casualties. . . .

Something tells me the politicians are reading the polls, which show record low support for the war and record high feelings that Bush justified the invasion by misleading the country.

But the polls don't make a solution any easier to come by, not for those who worry that a U.S. pullout would cause the fragile Baghdad government to collapse and lead to civil war.

Which is why the WMD debate is so much easier: All you have to do is bash the otherside.

Freed by from fear by (or perhaps gripped by a new fear becuase of) Bush's and the War's plummeting approval ratings (new USA Today/Gallup poll results here), Congress is beginning to get involved in this latter debate. The Senate passed overhwelmingly (79-19) a resolution calling for a "significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty" and "the phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq" in the next year. Also passed: an amendment to the Armed Services appropriations bill expressing the view that "2006 should be a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty."

These sentiments are almost completely symbolic and are so vaguely worded that a White House spokeswoman was reportedly able to claim that: "The Senate endorsed administration policy, which is a conditions-based withdrawal in Iraq. " But symbolism is important, and the claim that the resolution endorsed the administration's policy is pathetic rubbish.

I am very conflicted on this issue [as are the Democrats]. I have long argued that, having gone into Iraq, we cannnot afford to fail. I still believe that, but the politics is going to make that concern moot. According to the USA Today/Gallup poll linked above, 19% of Americans want the troops brought home now and another 33% want them brought home within a year. Those numbers are only going to go up as time passes, and with the 2006 elections staring the Republicans in the face, only an al-Zarqawi orchestrated attack in the US could prevent a significant "redeployment" of American troops from Iraq next year.

Note to the Iraqis: "Ready or not, we're outta here!"

Iraq Intelligence Blame Game

A propos of this, former Rep. Martin Frost (D TX) has it exactly right when he says, on Fox news no less, that:

When a president of the United States makes truly outrageous statements, he deserves to be called on them. That’s exactly what happened last Friday when President Bush spoke on Veterans Day.

He is talking, of course, about Bush's Veterans' Day speech claiming that Congress in general, and the Democrats in particular, were equally culpable for the decision to invade Iraq. Frost's rejoinder:

We now know that the intelligence relied upon by the Bush administration to take us to war was faulty. . . . . The issue is not whether the administration intentionally falsified the intelligence but whether the administration was diligent enough in pursuing accurate intelligence—and whether the administration hyped the intelligence it had obtained to sell the war.

Yet Frost goes on to defend the Democratic call for an investigation into the uses Bush et al. put the available intelligence, saying "[I]t is perfectly reasonable to inquire about how the administration got it so terribly wrong and why it hyped this intelligence so aggressively."

Here I disagree. Yes, it is reasonable to inquire into the issue. Just not now.

A Congressional investigation into how the Administration spun intelligence will never answer any question that has any immediate relevance. It will necessarily be little more than frenzy of fingerpointing. Yes, there may be some lessons to be learned, and yes, we should study what happened. But we should do it later. Like 10 years or so from now. For now, the central fact is clear: regradless of who is to blame, we went into war based on assumptions or beliefs that were not true. No one disputes that. Whether Bush alone is to blame or whether Congress and the Democrats share that blame is not really all that important right now. Answering questions like that is why God invented historians. For no, we have more urgent problems to deal with.

Well, I Guess Global Warming Could Be A Problem

Here's something interesting. Why is Venus so much hotter than Earth? Silly me, I had always assumed it was because it was so much closer to the sun. But that is apparently not the case. According to a column by Gwynn Dyer*, the real reason is global warming run amok:

Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and there is not all that huge a difference in the amount of heat they get from the Sun: Earth's orbit is an average of 93 million miles away, while Venus orbits at 67 million miles.

The average temperature on the surface of our planet, at least since life appeared some 3.5 billion years ago, has always stayed between 50 and 68 degrees. On Venus, in shocking contrast, it is 869 degrees. That is hot enough to melt lead.

The immediate reason for the difference is obvious enough: Venus's atmosphere is 90 times thicker than the Earth's, and it is 98 percent carbon dioxide. It is the runaway greenhouse effect produced by that deep, dense blanket of CO2 wrapped around the planet that causes the incredible surface temperatures.

And, it turns out, the reason that Venus has all that CO2 is that it has no life:

Venus is the lost, evil twin of Earth, and it tells us what Earth would be like without life. Living things have taken almost all the CO2 out of the atmosphere, incorporating the carbon into their bodies or burying it in chalk and thus releasing the oxygen to create the atmosphere we have today. The current balance of the Earth's atmosphere - 99 percent nitrogen and oxygen and almost no CO2 - is highly unstable, but the activities of living things have kept it the way it is for several billion years. That, in turn, keeps the Earth cool enough for life to flourish here.

How's that for circularity: Venus has no life becuase it has too much CO2; and it has too much CO2 becuase it has no life. Earth, by cantrast, has life becuase it has very little CO2; and it has very little CO2 becuase it has so much life.

Dyer explains that anomoly thusly:

Here life released the oxygen and fixed the carbon, leaving just enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (about 0.03 percent at present) for a mild greenhouse effect - and presumably modified that level of CO2 as the sun heated up in order to keep the average temperature in the narrow band that is optimal for carbon-based life.

Whereas if life did get started on Venus and began to transform that planet's atmosphere as it changed the Earth's, at some point it was unable to keep up with the rapid accumulation of CO2 and fell victim to a runaway greenhouse effect.

Fascinating.

* I originally read this in the Toledo Blade, but since the Blade does not put wire service reports or syndicated columnists on its website, I had to go elsewhere (Salt Lake Tribune) to find a link.

Piling On

"Time Magazine has given Ohio Gov. Bob Taft a new title: One of the worst governors in America."

Oh, gee, I didn't know that.

I Guess The Hurricane Season Is Over

Or, for the sakes of Julie Wafaei and Colin Angus, I sure hope it is. As reported in tonight's "Geoquiz" from PRI, they are now rowing across the Atlantic from east to west.

This Is Nutty

Can this possibly be true:

According to the NPD Group, a research firm, 18 percent of wireless telephone subscribers in the United States - many of them tech-wise teenagers - download ring tones, at an average cost of $2.32 a pop. Informa, a British research and analysis firm, forecasts that ring tones will grow to a $6.8 billion global business in 2010 from nearly $5 billion in 2005, with the North American business growing to $1.5 billion from $510 million.

Five billion dollars a year for ring tones?!

The end is near.

The Problem With Crying Wolf

Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran's Nuclear Aims, but no one believes them.

The intelligence on Iran just might be solid. But they are having a problem getting much of the world to believe them.

The Buck Stops Nowhere

News flash: Senator Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence thinks Congress ought to "stop and think a moment before we would ever vote for war or to go and take military action."

Yes, indeedy. One would like to think that the Senator had not newly come to such a realization, but I guess late is better than never.

The sad reality, though, is that in matters like this, Congress is at the mercy of the Executive. There is simply no way that 535 congressmen can do independent evaluations of inevitably ambiguous intelligence, especially not within the time frames that are relevant in cases where the issue is whether to go to war. In the end, they, like the public has to trust that the Administration has made the right judgments. And, in the end, it is the President that must take responsibility for being wrong.

Bush is not doing that now any more than he did with regard to the Katrina debacle. Rather than accept responsibility, he is seeking to blame Congress. And, as Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus point out, he is again spinning the facts to do that.

As Senator Robertson effectively admitted, Congress could have done more. But that does not change the fact that Bush was the President who took us to war based on intelligence that was just plain wrong. By constantly seeking to blame someone else, he makes an already bad situation that much worse.

Rethinking Withdrawal From Iraq

I have argued before (see this, this and this, for instance) that, however illegitimate our reasons for invading Iraq were, we have no choice but to stick it out until some semblance of order has been restored and the Iraqi government and security forces are sufficiently well-established and stable to provide some hope that Iraq (and we) will not suffer the fate Afghanistan did when the Soviets finally withdrew. Recently, though, I have read some things that make question this belief.

The first of these was an article on the lessons of Vietnam by Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense under Nixon, in the (November/December) issue of Foreign Affairs. The article is more than a bit self-serving. For instance, Laird says that the way we got into Vietnam (with which he had nothing to do, of course) is "a textbook example of how not to commit American might," while the way we withdrew from Vietnam (with which he claims to have had everything to do) is "the textbook description of how the U. S. military should decamp." More broadly, and more irritatingly, the article is full of "I's," as in "I did this" and "I did that", relegating Nixon and Kissinger to the status of a sometimes reluctant acolytes. Still, for all of that, Laird makes two points that bear thinking about.

First, Laird argues Vietnam was doomed not the withdrawal of American troops but by the failure of Congress two years later to continue to provide support financial and military assistance to the South.

The truth about Vietnam that revisionist historians conveniently forget is that the United States had not lost when we withdrew in 1973. In fact, we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory two years later when Congress cut off the funding for South Vietnam that had allowed it to continue to fight on its own. . . . Without U.S. funding [to counter the massive support the North was getting from the Soviets], South Vietnam was quickly overrun. We saved a mere $297 million a year and in the process doomed South Vietnam, which had been ably fighting the war without our troops since 1973. I believed then and still believe today that given enough outside resources, South Vietnam was capable of defending itself, just as I believe Iraq can do the same now."

Laird's second and more compelling point is that a commitment to withdrawal was actually a condition precedent to getting the South Vietnamese to defend themselves. He points out that, initially, the most ardent opponents of withdrawal were the South Vietnamese government, "which had turned into a dependent." Laird reprots that when he met with Thieu in 1969 to tell him "the spigot was going to be shut off" Thieu wanted more troops not fewer. Laird argues with some force, in short, that neither the Vietnamese nor the Iraqis can be expected to "stand up" unless and until they become convinced that the US is going to start "standing down":

[As we did in Vietnam,] [w]e need to put our resources and unwavering public support behind a program of "Iraqization" so that we can get out of Iraq and leave the Iraqis in a position to protect themselves. . . . The United States should not let too many more weeks pass before it shows its confidence in the training of the Iraqi armed forces by withdrawing a few thousand U.S. troops from the country. We owe it to the restive people back home to let them know there is an exit strategy, and, more important, we owe it to the Iraqi people. The readiness of the Iraqi forces need not be 100 percent, nor must the new democracy be perfect before we begin our withdrawal. The immediate need is to show our confidence that Iraqis can take care of Iraq on their own terms. Our presence is what feeds the insurgency, and our gradual withdrawal would feed the confidence and the ability of average Iraqis to stand up to the insurgency.

Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis of the Center For American Progress make much the same point in a paper being widely circulated among Democrats, arguing that a phased withdrawal from Iraq should begin as early as January of next year:

Our open-ended commitment of a large number of troops has created a dysfunctional political transition and may be preventing Iraqi political leaders from making the difficult compromises necessary to complete the transition.

Not setting a timetable is a recipe for failure and send the wrong message to the leadership in the Iraqi government -- that they can use the United States as a crutch. As long as the Iraqi leaders believe we will remain in large numbers they will have no incentives to make the compromises in the political transition process necessary to create a stable society. . . . [Also] there is a fundamental problem at the heart of President Bush's vision of our eventual withdrawal of troops -- "As the Iraqis stand up we will stand down." Iraqi forces will never truly stand up on their own as long as we are there in such great numbers. The current debate on Iraqi troop training focuses on building combat skills but ignores an equally important factor -- motivation. Our large military presence creates a disincentive for the Iraqi military and police to step up and take ownership of their security.

In addition, though, Korb makes an additional argument that, if true, is even more compelling: an open-ended commitment of 100,000 or more troops to Iraq poses a clear and present danger to the U. S. Army itself, at least as an all volunteer force. Korb expanded on this point in an earlier column originally published in the New York Daily News:

Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for President Lyndon Johnson, said that while we sent the Army to Vietnam to save Vietnam, we had to withdraw to save the Army. This is where we are today.

By the end of this year, nearly every active-duty soldier will have spent at least two tours in Iraq. . . . Moreover, since the active-duty Army was too small to implement effectively Bush's preventive war in Iraq, the administration has had to rely unduly on the National Guard and Reserves. Part-time soldiers make up about 40% of the troops in Iraq. In order to keep so many reservists there, the Pentagon has had to violate its norm of not mobilizing reservists for more than one year out of five.

Sending [active duty] soldiers back for a third time will ruin the Army's retention rate, which so far has held up. Staying in Iraq through 2006 will completely undermine the Army's recruiting, which despite massive increases in enlistment bonuses is already a disaster. Keeping 50,000 reservists in Iraq throughout 2006 will force the administration to ask Congress to repeal the law that forbids reservists from serving on the active duty for more than two years.

It is hard to argue with any of this. But what gives me pause is that the cost of being wrong -- of withdrawing too early or too quickly -- is potentially enormous. Even during the height of the buildup in Vietnam, no one ever claimed that the fall of South Vietnam would pose an immediate threat to US security. No one argued, for instance that Vietnam would attack us. That war was simply one battle in a much larger ideological war against communism. We cannot be so sanguine about Iraq. Absent a stable government, there is a very real possibility that Iraq will become another pre-9/11 Afghanistan. The 9/11 attacks themselves are a testament to how great -- and immediate -- threat that would pose to US security. But, as Peter Bergen and Alec Reynolds argue, also in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, it is not just the US that is in danger:

The foreign volunteers in Afghanistan saw the Soviet defeat as a victory for Islam against a superpower that had invaded a Muslim country. Estimates of the number of foreign fighters who fought in Afghanistan begin in the low thousands; some spent years in combat, while others came only for what amounted to a jihad vacation. The jihadists gained legitimacy and prestige from their triumph both within the militant community and among ordinary Muslims, as well as the confidence to carry their jihad to other countries where they believed Muslims required assistance. When veterans of the guerrilla campaign returned home with their experience, ideology, and weapons, they destabilized once-tranquil countries and inflamed already unstable ones.

Moreover, Bergen and Reynolds argue, Iraq could well be much worse than Afghanistan:

The current war in Iraq will generate a ferocious blowback of its own, which -- as a recent classified CIA assessment predicts -- could be longer and more powerful than that from Afghanistan. Foreign volunteers fighting U.S. troops in Iraq today will find new targets around the world after the war ends.

My God, what a mess!

Defending Torture

In an op-ed piece in today's LA Times, David Gelertner takes on the daunting task of defending Dick Cheney's efforts to exempt the CIA from John McCain's efforts to "prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons in the detention of the U.S. government. " It comes down to this: never say never.

Here's the argument:

Suppose a nuclear bomb is primed to detonate somewhere in Manhattan. . . and we've captured a terrorist who knows where the bomb is. But he won't talk. By forbidding torture, you inflict death on many thousands of innocents and endless suffering on the families of those who died at a terrorist's whim — and who might have lived had government done its ugly duty.

Here's the problem: In the hypothetical Gelertner poses, the law would be irrelevant. Does anyone doubt that torture would occur under these circumstances even if illegal?

The fact that one can imagine a case in which a heinous act might be justified is not a reason for refusing to make that act illegal. If it were, there would be no laws, since one can always imagine a case when breaking any law would be justified. What the law is intended to do is to prevent acts that are almost always wrong. We then rely on the administration of the law -- prosecutorial discretion, jury nulllification, etc. -- to deal with the very rare cases in which the prohibitions make no sense in light of the facts.

The salutory benefit of this apparoach is that it places constraints on those who find themselves in a position to run afoul of the law. Before they act, they must decide whether the harm to be avoided by torture (or any other illegal act) is so great that they are willing to go to jail to prevent it. Such a constraint seems very unlikely to result in preventing a person from doing whatever it takes to find the hidden nuclear weapon in Manhattan. But it might well be enough to prevent the sorts of routine abuses of detainees that have come to light as a result of the war on terrorism.

Update: If you are interested, the text of the McCain Amendment is posted here, on the Physicians for Human Rights website

Funny Stuff

On the lighter side:

From Broken Newz comes the revelation that President Bush May Send Up To 5 Marines For French Assistance in quelling the riots.

President Bush has authorized the Joint Chiefs to begin drawing up a battle plan to pull France's ass out of the fire again. Facing an apparent overwhelming force of up to 400 pissed off teenagers Mr. Bush doubts France's ability to hold off the little pissants. "Hell, if the last two world wars are any indication, I would expect France to surrender any day now", said Bush.

Joint Chiefs head, Gen. Peter Pace, warned the President that it might be necessary to send up to 5 marines to get things under control. The general admitted that 5 marines may be overkill but he wanted to get this thing under control within 24 hours of arriving on scene. He stated he was having a hard time finding even one marine to help those ungrateful bastards out for a third time but thought that he could persuade a few women marines to do the job before they went on pregnancy leave.

Along the same lines is this:

And, there is this brief report from "America's Finest News Source," The Onion: "Faith Healer Loses Patient During Routine Miracle"

Then there is the peek provided by Christopher Buckley into ethics "refresher courses" being taught now at the White House: "Remedial Ethics"

But the best is from the American Comedy Network. As reported in the Washington Post last week, "[With] sustained combat in Iraq mak[ing] it harder than ever to fill the ranks of the all-volunteer force, newly released Pentagon demographic data show that the military is leaning heavily for recruits on economically depressed, rural areas where youths' need for jobs may outweigh the risks of going to war." This alarmed Karl Rove, of course, since economically depressed rural areas are mostly in Red States. "Horrors!" thought Karl. "We are shipping the future of the Republican "base" off to get killed in Iraq!" Since doing anything to either decrease the demand for cannon fodder or increase economic opportunity for the rural poor was inconsistent with neo-con ideology, Karl realized (brilliant mind that he is) that the only real choice was to equalize the political implications by recruiting more youths from economically depressed urban areas, most of which are, of course, in Blue States. Toward this end, Karl paid an advertising agency 40 kajillion dollars to develop a new ad campaign aimed at the hood: "I Need Soldiers."

Asked to comment on the new campaign, President Bush said that "In the war against the evildoers, all of the poor needed to bear the burden equally."

Can Bill Keller Be Far Behind?

Surpising exactly no one, Judy Miller has "retired" from the New York Times. Given his role in the go-to-jail fiasco, and the very public blame game he precipitated with Miller (see this and this and this), it may not be far fetched to suppose that Bill Keller will himself follow Judy out the door before too very much longer. Recall that Bill Keller came in to replace Harold Raines as a result of the Jason Blair scandal. Now he has been wounded, perhaps fatally, by his own trust in another rogue reporter. The Times really does need to do something about its quality control.

Update: Lynne Duke of the Washington Post has a great report on conversations with Judy.

I have (very reluctantly, I admit) begun to believe that the Washington Post has supplanted the NYT as the counrty's paper of record.

So it's True? The CIA Does Have "Black Prisons"?

From today's Washington Post:

Congress's top Republican leaders yesterday demanded an immediate joint House and Senate investigation into the disclosure of classified information to The Washington Post that detailed a web of secret prisons being used to house and interrogate terrorism suspects.

At first blush this seems just nutty. If it isn't true, how could it be "classified"? If it is true, how could the Republicans want to investigate it?

Puerile Press: Trashing The Cheerleaders

The blogosphere is awash with posts like this one: Carolina Panthers Cheerleaders Arrested for Bathroom Sex. The MSM isn't much better. A search for "cheerleaders" on Google News returned almost 700 articles as of 12:40 pm ET, including reports from such mavens of American cheerleading as the Xinhua News Agency, the Hindustan Times and the the Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald. The frenzy is so high that the Carolina Panthers web site has reportedly been crashed by the voyeurs.

The problem is, though, that all of these reports have almost no connection to reality.

First, the cheerleaders were not arrested for having sex in the bathroom. Thomas is charged with misdemeanor battery for striking a woman and with "giving a false name and causing harm to another," a third-degree felony. Keathley was charged with two misdemeanors, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. No one has been charged with anything remotely related to sex.

Second, the story that they were having sex is almost certainly BS as well. The actual facts -- which have been available from the outset but largely ignored -- were reported yesterday in the Tampa Tribune (albeit in paragraph 10 of a 15 paragraph story:

Jennifer Chaconas, who said she was in the bar at the time, disputed the pair were having sex. Chaconas, 29, said she and a friend were waiting in line to use the restroom when others became agitated because two stalls were out of order and two women were sharing a stall.

The other women shook the stall door, saying things such as, "What are you doing in there, having sex?" Chaconas said.

At the time, the woman later identified as Thomas appeared so drunk that she "couldn't stand right" and slumped against the stall, Chaconas said. Keathley stood on the toilet to look over the top of the door and said something such as, "We have an issue."

Holden said Monday that she heard moaning but "couldn't tell what was going on."

The true story is almost certainly prosaic: Thomas was throwing up and her friend was helping her. But that's not news, is it?

Farming Frenzy

The federal government is poised to pay $20+ billion dollars to corn farmers this year. Not to buy corn, mind you. But to cover losses the farmers would otherwise suffer becuase they produced far more corn that they can sell.

How can such a thing be justified?

Hooray!

This is encouraging on so may levels:

All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.

Full NYT article here.

Some Really Bad News Of A Personal Sort

billy bob, a friend, both of me and this blog, is on his way to Iraq.

I am depressed.

The very best to you, billy bob. We will be thinking of you.

Stay in touch.

Political Pendulums

James Taranto had (for him) a singularly introspective piece in today's WSJ Best of the Web. He argues, quite rightly I think, That JFK represented the high point of "confident liberlaism;" that the ensuing years marked a gradual decline in the power of liberalism culminating in the disasterous Presidency of Jimmy Carter; and that Reagan marked the beginning of an era of "confident conservatism" that has culminated in the Presidency of George Bush. Looking forward, he sees "the presidency of George W. Bush, and especially his muscular foreign policy, as a continuation of the Reagan era." But even he does not really believe that, for he goes on to acknowledge that:

There is an argument to be made on the other side: that conservatism is now in its LBJ phase, having produced swollen government at home and overextended America's capabilities abroad. The left, meanwhile, is as weak, angry and paranoid as the right was in the heyday of the John Birch Society--but perhaps one day it will reconnect with reality and resurge politically.

I think he is right in a general sense: there is an ebb and flow between progressive and conservative impulses and the success of either inevitably generates in its devotees the hubris that in the end is its downfall. I also tend to think he is right in his charatcterization of today's "Left": they do tend to resemble the Right in the days of LBJ.

Where I think he is wrong, though, is in his prediction (more properly hope, I think) that "confident conservatism" will survive George Bush. We may have to go through liberalism's analog to Richard Nixon and conservativism's version of Jimmy Carter first. But my guess is that, 25 years from now, we will all recognize that the admisistraion of George Bush was the point at which "confident conservatism" began to wane as a force in American politics.

And then the cycle will start all over again, of course.

Cat Fights

According to an e-mail I got this afternoon from the NY Times, the most-read article for October at Times.com was Maureen Dowd's "What's A Modern Girl To Do?. Like all of Maureen's stuff, it is full of amusing one-liners and over-the-top charicatures, and, no doubt, it's "most-read" status was helped by the fact that many on-line readers have been deprived for the last month of Maureen "fixes" becuase she and the other Times op-ed columnists are now confined to the paid-subscription-only "Times Select" site. But, if I am representative, most of these readers came away from the read feeling a trifle embarrased by the transparently personal complaint that seems to underlie Maureen's Lament: (a) Dowd wants to be married; (b) she has failed to achieve this becuase men are scared of strong, intelligent women and want relationships only with dependent serving girls; and (c) she feels abandoned by today's young women who (she believes) are willing, even eager, to sacrifice their own ambitions in order to catch a man.

I would go on. But the critique has already been done for me by Katie Rophie's piece in Slate entitled Is Maureen Dowd Necessary? If you are one of the (apparently many) who read Dowd's lament, you owe it to yourself to read Rophie's response as well.

What the Polls Say About Bush -- and about Us.

I am normally not poll maven, but I found the results of the latest Washington Post/ABC poll fascinating. Bush gets hammered, of course, but the interesting thing is the breadth and depth of the antipathy. The public is evenly split (49% to 49%) on whether Bush "can be trusted in a crisis. " But on every other issue, the negatives significantly outweigh the positives, by nearly 2-to-1 in many cases. To me, the most startling of these is the responses to the question of whether the interviewee is personally satisfied with Bush's policies. 60% said no, and over 40% of this total (25% of the overall sample) said they were actually angry about these policies.

Two other things about the poll suprised and pleased me. First, despite massive dissatisfaction with Bush and despite solid majorities who believe that Iraq was not worth it (60% to 39%) and did not contribute to US security (52% to 46%) a majority (52% to 44%) still favor keeping troops in Iraq until civil order is restored. Second, 64% want Roe v. Wade to be upheld with only 31% wanting to see it overturned.

These results are, I believe, a testament to the basic good sense -- and sense of reponsibility -- of the American people.

Complete results are here. But some of the more interesting results are set out below:

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?

• Approve: 39%
• Strongly: 20%
• Somewhat: 18 %
• Disapprovel: 60%
• Somewhat Disapprove: 13%
• Strongly Disapprove: 47%

Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling :

a. The situation in Iraq:

• Approve: 36%
  
• Disapprove: 64%

b. The situation with gasoline prices:

• Approve: 26%
  
• Disapprove: 68%

c. The US campaign against terrorism

• Approve: 48%
  
• Disapprove: 51%

d. The economy:

• Approve: 36%
  
• Disapprove: 61%
  

e. Health care

• Approve: 34%
• Disapprove: 61%

Do you think things in this country are generally going in the right direction or do you feel things have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track?

• Right Direction: 30%
• Wrong Track: 68%

Please tell me whether the following statement applies to Bush or not.

a. He understands the problems of people like you:

• Yes: 34%
  
• No: 66%

b. He is a strong leader:

• Yes: 47%
  
• No: 53%

c. He can be trusted in a crisis

• Yes: 49%
  
• No: 49%

d. He is honest and trustworthy:

• Yes: 40%
  
• No: 58%

e. He shares your values:

• Yes: 40%
  
• No: 58%

Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in the Bush Administration: a great deal, quite a lot, some, or very little?

• Great deal: 15%
  
• A lot: 14%
  
• Some: 22%
  
• Little: 41%
  
• None: 8%

Would you say your confidence in the Bush administration lately has been increasing, decreasing, or has it remained the same?

• Increasing: 2%
  
• Decreasing: 49%
  
• Remained the same: 48%

How do you personally feel about the Bush administration's policies?

• Positive: 38%
• Enthusiastic: 8%
• Satisfied: 30%
• Negative:62%
• Dissatisfied: 37%
• Angry: 25%

How would you rate Bush's handling of ethics in government?

• Excellent: 7%
• Good: 25%
• Fair: 29%
• Poor: 38%

Do you think the overall level of ethics and honesty in the federal government has risen, fallen or stayed the same with Bush as president?

• Risen: 17%
• Fallen: 43%
• Same : 39%

All in all, do you think the war with Iraq was worth fighting, or not?

• Worth fighting: 39%
• Strongly: 25%
• Somewhat: 13%
  
• Not worth fighting: 60%
• Somewhat: 12%
• Strongly: 48%
  

Do you think the war with Iraq has or has not contributed to the long-term security of the United States?

• Contributed greatly: 25%
• Contributed somewhat: 21%
• Did not contribute: 52%

Do you think the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored there, even if that means continued U.S. military casualties; OR, do you think the United States should withdraw its military forces from Iraq in order to avoid further U.S. military casualties, even if that means civil order is not restored there?

• Keep forces: 52%
• Withdraw forces: 44%

The Supreme Court legalized abortion 32 years ago in the ruling known as Roe versus Wade. If that case came before the court again, would you want Alito to vote to uphold Roe versus Wade, or vote to overturn it?

• Uphold: 64%
  
• Overturn: 31%

Greenspan's Parting Shot: Reduce The Deficit

Allen Greenspan testified before Congress yesterday for what may well be the last time as Fed Chairman. His message: For now, the economy is doing well depsite the hurricanes, but the continuing growth of the federal deficit is unsustainable:

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said yesterday that the U.S. economy is in generally good health but will suffer in coming years unless Congress slows the growth of federal budget deficits. . . ."Unless the situation is reversed, at some point these budget trends will cause serious economic disruptions," he said.

Greenspan also repeated that he favors extending recently enacted tax cuts that are scheduled to expire in coming years but only if they are offset by spending cuts of similar value so they do not boost the deficit.

"We should not be cutting taxes by borrowing," Greenspan said, sticking to a position at odds with the White House and Republican congressional leadership. "We should be cutting taxes by reducing the level of spending."

I have to admit that my first reaction to this was pretty negative. I agree that deficit reduction is a (perhaps the) top domestic priority, but, even assuming federal spending cuts are the best way to do reduce the deficits, the idea that we will ever have the political will to cut spending appreciably seems laughable. As others have noted, the Republicans are no better at spending restraint than Democrats. Where Democrats (at least historically) could fairly be labeled the "tax and spend" party, the Republicans have shown themselves to be the "borrow and spend" party. The common demoninator to both is "spend." The only difference is where the money comes from: American taxpayers or Chinese investors. And, it is a mistake to blame the parties or politicians themselves. As the old saw goes, in a democracy, the people end up getting the government they deserve. The basic problem is that we the people want things that we are not willing to pay for, not just from government, but in our private lives as well.

Kevin Drum argues that recent events in Colorado may signal that our our quarter-century love affair with tax cuts is fading a bit:

Business is the chisel driving a crack between moderate Republicans and the anti-tax fanatics. Although there is no group in Washington more loyal to the GOP's anti-tax doctrine than the Chamber of Commerce, in the states, reality often trumps ideology. “For businesses to be successful, you need roads and you need higher education, both of which have gotten worse under TABOR [Clorado's "taxpayer Bill of Rights]and will continue to get worse,” says Tom Clark of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, who notes that higher education has shrunk from 25 percent of the state budget in 1995 to about 10 percent today. “I'm a Republican,” Clark says, “but I made the decision not to give any money to the state [Republican]party.”

And what happened? On Tuesday, Colorado voters passed Referendum C, which gutted TABOR: The Taxpayer's Bill of Rights is "as good as dead" in Colorado, state Rep. Joe Stengel told conservative leaders from across the country Tuesday.

He then refers to a WSJ article reporting that:

[C]onservatives immediately fretted that the Colorado vote might signal an erosion of public support for spending discipline. And early indications for the next test suggest they have good reason for concern.

All eyes now turn to California, where voters Tuesday will decide on a state spending cap that would limit education spending. A Los Angeles Times poll this week shows that the measure, backed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, faces an uphill fight.

I hate to burst Kevin's bubble, but the votes in both Colorado and California do not appear to have much at all to say about a wllingness to pay taxes. Each, rather, is a vote against constraints on government spending. And, therein lies the problem: We voters do not like to limit on government spending any more than we want to limit our own spending. But this says nothing about our willingness to pay taxes any more than it says anything about our willingness to pay our credit card debts.

I'm not sure what the point of all of this is, for I have no solutions. I guess I am just discouraged, and I know I fear for my children.

Spinning Iraq Intelligence: The Reasons Matter

Today, both Robert Brooks in the New York Times and the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal take the Democrats, and Harry Reid in particular, to task for claiming that the Bush Administration "manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq." Brooks' piece is much the more amusing of the two, portraying Harry Reid as a demented conspiracy theorist "sit[ting] alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes." But Brooks' basic point is that most of the claims made by the Bushies in the run-up to the war had been made before -- by Democrats in the Clinton Administration:

• "[In 1998] Clinton argued, 'Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions ... and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.' "
• "In 1997 Clinton's defense secretary, William Cohen, went on national television and informed the American people that if Saddam has 'as much VX in storage as the U.N. suspects' he would 'be able to kill every human being on the face of the planet.' "
• "Secretary of State Madeleine Albright compared Saddam to Hitler and warned that he could 'use his weapons of mass destruction' or 'become the salesman for weapons of mass destruction.' "
• "Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned that 'Saddam's history of aggression, and his recent record of deception and defiance, leave no doubt that he would resume his drive for regional domination if he had the chance. Year after year, in conflict after conflict, Saddam has proven that he seeks weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, in order to use them.' "
• "[I]n 2002 Al Gore declared that Saddam Hussein 'has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.'
• "In 2001, a Clinton assistant secretary of state, Robert Einhorn, said at a Congressional hearing, 'Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors.' "
• "Clinton National Security Council staffer Kenneth Pollack has written, 'The U.S. Intelligence Community's belief toward the end of the Clinton administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons.' "

The Wall Street Journal editorial takes on the "manipulation" claims more prosaically and more directly:

In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan 500-page report that found numerous failures of intelligence gathering and analysis. As for the Bush Administration's role, "The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," (our emphasis).

The Butler Report, published by the British in July 2004, similarly found no evidence of "deliberate distortion," although it too found much to criticize in the quality of prewar intelligence.

The March 2005 Robb-Silberman report on WMD intelligence was equally categorical, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . .analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments."

* * * *

In short, everyone who has looked into the question of whether the Bush Administration lied about intelligence, distorted intelligence, or pressured intelligence agencies to produce assessments that would support a supposedly pre-baked decision to invade Iraq has come up with the same answer: No, no, no and no.

Everyone, that is, except Joseph Wilson IV.

And, as, Max Boot pointed out in yesterday's LA Times, Wilson was at least as guilty of "manipulating" the facts as anyone else:

The problem here is that the one undisputed liar in this whole sordid affair doesn't work for the administration. In his attempts to turn his wife into an antiwar martyr, Joseph C. Wilson IV has retailed more whoppers than Burger King.

The least consequential of these fibs was his denial that it was his wife who got him sent to Niger in February 2002 to check out claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium. . . . Much more egregious were the ways in which Wilson misrepresented his findings. In his famous New York Times Op-Ed article (July 6, 2003), Wilson gave the impression that his eight-day jaunt proved that Iraq was not trying to acquire uranium in Africa. Therefore, when administration officials nevertheless cited concerns about Hussein's nuclear ambitions, Wilson claimed that they had "twisted" evidence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." The Senate Intelligence Committee was not kind to this claim either.

The panel's report found that, far from discrediting the Iraq-Niger uranium link, Wilson actually provided fresh details about a 1999 meeting between Niger's prime minister and an Iraqi delegation. Beyond that, he had not supplied new information. According to the panel, intelligence analysts "did not think" that his findings "clarified the story on the reported Iraq-Niger uranium deal." In other words, Wilson had hardly exposed as fraudulent the "16 words" included in the 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." In fact, the British government, in its own post-invasion review of intelligence, found that this claim was "well founded."

OK. OK. Surprise, surprise. No one is pure. The intelligence was spotty and ambiguous, and politicians and op-ed writers on both sides of the political spectrum emphsized the parts that advanced their underlying agendas and de-emphsized or ignored the rest. What else is new?

Still, it seems to me there is a difference. It lies not in the fact of the "spin" but in the reasons for it. The goal of the Clinton administration was to keep the United Nations from abandoning the inspection process and the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War. The goal of the Bush Administration was to take us to war. That difference is important. It is one thing to ignore ambiguity when the proposed reponse is diplomatic and economic pressure and another thing entirely when the proposed response is war.

It is not the "manipulation" of intelligence that is the real problem here. It is the willingness of this administration -- any administration -- to go to war in the face of very ambiguous intelligence about the degree to which US security is actually treatened.

Even more, I think, it is about trust. I can remember reading Colin Powell's address to the UN and thinkng, "Is that all?? Man, that's thin!" Yet I, like so many others, bouyed in part by the apparent success of the invasion of Afghanistan, decided to trust them. It is the fact that this trust was so obvioulsy misplaced that generates the real bitterness and anger.

On most issues, people expect politicians and editorialists to "spin" the facts and are therefore suitably skeptical of arguments made for and against a given proposal. Not so with wars, though. The decision to take the Country to war is the single most important decision any government can make. People expect that, on this decision at least, their leaders, regardless of political party or ideology, will not take the Country to war without a very, very good reason for doing so. People also recognize that the publicly available facts may be only a small part of the story. As a consequence, on questions of war, people are much more willing to trust the President and his advisors than they are on virtually any other issue. When it turns out, as it so often has in the last several decades, that this trust has been misplaced, that an Administration's reasons for going to war had more to do with ideology than security, people get angry and, in the end, lose a bit of their capacity to trust even on questions of war. That is a very dangerous thing, becuase there someday might actually be a real good reason to go to war, yet the people may be unwilling to believe. One can only cry wolf so many times.