Stay or Leave Part II: The ISG Recommendations

I haven't read the Iraq Study Group Report, but I feel like I have, since it is just about all you hear and read about in the news. The report is getting lots of plaudits from opponents of the Bush Administration for the bleak picture it paints of the situation and for the none-to-subtle indictment its "realist" authors make of the neoconservative perpetrators of this mess. But that was not really the point of the ISG, was it? The point was not to dwell on the failures of the past, failures that have already been massively documented and that even Bush, Rumsfeld and most of the neo-cons now acknowledge. The point was to identify -- in the report's own slogan --"The Way Forward;" to make recommendations as to what to do now. On this score, I can find no one who has anything good to say about the report.

Since the report recommendations (as well as its recriminations) line up so well with the positions being articulated by most of the the Democratic Party leadership and the New York Times editorial page, I would have expected the New York Times' op-ed page to reflect whatever sense of optimism there may be out there. If that expectation is reasonable, then today's op-ed offerings indicate there is nearly universal disappointment in the ISG recommendations and a growing sense that there really is no middle road between "Go Big" and "Go Home".

The Sunday Times has two full pages of op-ed pieces. Today, most of that space was devoted, in one way or another, to the ISG report. The longest of these pieces, "79 Steps To Victory in Iraq," is a collection of a dozen short opinion pieces on the recommendations. Not a single one of them had anything remotely hopeful to say about them. They range between damning with faint praise and damning altogether with no praise at all. Several did agree that success in implementing some of the recommendations is essential if there is to be any hope, but one gets no sense even from these voices that success is actually achievable. The others are contemptuous of the recommendations for exactly that reason: the recommendations are seen as either being banal or as being so removed from reality as to be almost delusional. In total, the sense one gets from reading this dozen reviews is that, even if Bush accepted and attempted to implement, the recommendations, it would change nothing.

Frank Rich's "The Sunshine Boys Can't Save Iraq" makes this point explicitly and goes on to argue that we cannot let the ISG recommendations delude us into thinking there is still hope of achieving even the much watered-down goal of an Iraq "that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself." He compares the ISG to a similar group of "wise men" convened by Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. . . . Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas as a troop pullback, increased training for South Vietnamese forces and a warning to the South Vietnamese government that American assistance would depend on performance. In March, a bipartisan group of wise men . . . was summoned to the White House, where it seconded the notion of disengagement."

Johnson did initiate peace talks, but it took another seven years, another 30,000 American deaths, and one of the worst domestic social upheavals since the Civil War before Johnson's successor's successor (Ford) finally threw in the towel and just left. Rich's closing comment on this parallel, and on the ISG itself, bears consideration:

The lesson in [the Vietnam analogy] is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.

The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.

The third and bleakest column is David Brooks' "After The Fall". Despite being the Times' most conservative columnist, Brooks seems as ready as Rich to admit defeat, and he is focused instead on the consequences. Via the conceit of looking back on the present from the future, Brooks predicts that the ISG recommendations will be followed and American combat troops will be withdrawn in 2008; that this will result in a region-wide "30-Years War" during which political power and organization will be re-distributed on the basis of "family, tribe and faith" rather than existing states; and that this war will claim as victims all of the governments east of Egypt, south of Turkey and west Iran. Brooks acknowledges that this will be "a terrible era [with] horrific turmoil and the emergence of sociopolitical organizations whose likes the world ha[s] never seen." But with that he stops. There is no call to try to avert this outcome. He makes it sound as if he believes it is inevitable:

The Middle East's weak national ties were ripped apart by the rising forces of the 21st century: religious fundamentalism, global terrorism, economic globalization, and transnational communication networks. Efforts to do nation-building without security faced long odds. Efforts to exhort Iraqi and other leaders to behave "responsibly" -- as defined by Western nationalist categories -- were doomed to failure. The American defeat sealed the deal."

(It may be that Brooks believes all of this will occur only if we follow the recommendation to leave by 2008, but if that is his point, he doesn't make it).

So where does all of this leave me? Not much further than I was when I wrote this in response to Billy Bob's question, "Stay or Leave?" I admit to being disappointed that the ISG recommendations seem to be either banal or impractical. What did I expect? Not much really. But I did so want to find some reason to hope that I had allowed myself to begin to look forward to the release of those recommendations. When they came out, though, my first thought was the same one I had 4 years ago when Colin Powell made his pitch to the UN on why Iraq was dangerous: "Is THAT all you could come up with?"

So, I am right back where I started from: unable to join Frank Rich and John Murtagh in abandoning entirely any hope of avoiding the kind of future Brooks sees, but yet seeing no reason to believe that there is any way to succeed in doing so.

I can see only three courses that we might pursue at this point: Go Big and Long, Go Small and Long, or Go Home. The first of these is the preference of the right, and a long term occupation of Iraq may well be the course that has the best chance of avoiding a total collapse into chaos (although even that approach didn't work well for the Russians in Afghanistan). But there are neither enough troops nor enough electoral stomach to "go big," so this option is not any more realistic than hoping Iran and Syria will play nice. The "go home" option is the obvious choice if you have abandoned hope or if you believe that the Iraqis and their neighbors will learn to get along once we leave. I am not yet quite ready to do the former; nor am I willing to engage in the self-delusion required for the latter. This leaves the "go small and long" option, which is pretty much what the ISG recommended. So, as lame as those recommendations are, I guess that, for now, I am prepared to give them a try. However, I recognize that if the denoument in five years (or more) years is not any different than it would have been if we left now, the additional thousands of US casualities will lay heavy on my conscience. (I ignore the Iraqi caualities not out of indifference but out of a belief that they will occur regardless of what we do).

Note to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle: May you rot in hell for putting us in this situation. Better yet, may you be sent to spend the rest of your miserable lives in Baghdad. And then go to hell.

Let The Culture Wars Begin (Again)

Oh dear. Mary Cheney is pregnant.

Who cares?

Well, appaently, lots of people. From the NYT article linked above:

Family Pride, a gay rights group, noted that Ms. Cheney’s home state of Virginia does not recognize same-sex marriages or civil unions to same-sex couples.

"The news of Mary Cheney’s pregnancy exemplifies, once again, how the best interests of children are denied when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens are treated unfairly and accorded different and unequal rights and responsibilities than other parents," the group’s executive director, Jennifer Chrisler, said in a statement.

Focus on the Family, an influential Christian group that has provided crucial political support to President Bush, released a statement that criticized child rearing by same-sex couples.

"Mary Cheney’s pregnancy raises the question of what’s best for children," the group’s director of issues analysis, Carrie Gordon Earll, said in a statement. "Just because it’s possible to conceive a child outside of the relationship of a married mother and father doesn’t mean it’s the best for the child. Love can’t replace a mom or a dad."

As if the welfare of children had anything to do with this. On either side.

The End Of An Era

There is a club in downtown Toledo (aptly named The Toledo Club) that was founded well over a century ago by the glass barons and other industrialists and luminaries that served as Toledo's founding fathers: Edward Drummond Libbey and Michael J Ownes (Libbey Glass, Libbey Owens Ford and Owens Illinois), John North Willys (Willys Overland), Morrison R Waite (7th Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), and David Ross Locke (newspaper publisher and abolitionist essayist). As with clubs like this in other cities, The Toledo Club was, for most of its existence, an exclusive bastion of old, rich, mostly white, men. Today, women are allowed to become members, and a few intrepid souls have done so, but for the most part the Club remains what it has always been: a place for men to get together in comfortable surroundings and do what men love to do -- talk, tell stories, share gossip, make contacts and deals, and indulge their taste for fine cigars and good liquor, all in an milieu free from the constraints (whether real or perceived) imposed on such activities by the "fairer sex."

Over the years, the Club has not escaped the campaign against second-hand smoke, and large portions of the Club are off-limits to smoking now. But there is one room -- The Oak Room -- where smoking continues to be allowed and where a simpatico bartender pours "three-fingers-in-a-rain-barrel" drinks of fine Scotch, Gin, Vodka, Bourbon or whatever else might suit the a man's fancy. Because of this, the Oak Room has become, for many, both the avatar and conservator of a great tradition.

The Toledo Club is not unique in all of this, of course, even in Toledo. The Country Clubs, originally founded by the same types of people who founded the Toledo Club for essentially the same kinds of purposes, have been through similar transitions. Yet there remains in each of these an "inner-sanctum" where the traditions are observed and defended from the seeming relentless forces of temperance.

All of the people who frequent such places have long shared one belief: that, having been driven so far underground, they were safe; that the smoking abolitionists would simply not be able to stamp out these last few islands of freedom. After all, we are talking about a single room in a private club! Surely they can't reach there without making smoking illegal per se!

Alas, how wrong they were.

Tomorrow, December 7, what is probably the most comprehensive smoking ban ever enacted goes into effect, state-wide, in Ohio. Passed by citizen initiative in the November elections, the ban technically extends only to places to which the public has access (bars and bowling alleys included). Private clubs are nominally exempted. However, there's a catch: to be a "private club,"you can have no employees.

There are creative lawyers (some in my own firm) working diligently on behalf of paying clients to find loopholes in this prohibition. They may do so, although I think it will be hard to find any that are likely to withstand scrutiny. But in reality the war is over. The abolitionists have breached the wall between the public and the private. Efforts to preserve that distinction will continue for some time, I think, but those will simply be the final skirmishes in a war that has already been lost. There is no place the smoking nazis cannot reach.

The tactical stroke of genius that made this possible was a shift of focus from patrons to employees. As long as the battle was being fought to protect "patrons" of establishments, there was considerable force to the argument that no person had an absolute right to enter privately owned places. If a person objected to or was concerned about the second-hand smoke, he or she could go to places that didn't allow it. In the end, the market would sort things out, with each business having to decide whether it would be better off with or without smoking. But, when the focus turned to employees, who have far less of an ability to choose where they work, that argument lost much, maybe all of its force. It is a common-place that business owners have a duty to protect their workers from work-place injury, and imposing an obligation to protect them from second hand smoke is a small step from the existing obligation to protect them from repetitive motion injury or other workplace ills.

Yes, I am a smoker, but that is not really the reason I find this sort of thing repugnant. I am always looking for a reason to quit, and now I have another one. My wife won't let me smoke in my house (indeed, even I don't like the smell) and my state will not let me smoke indoors anywhere else. So, maybe, finally, the lack of places to do it will make me quit. And, if it does, I will feel a twinge of gratitude.

But there is something inestimably sad about the outlawing of places like the Oak Room. (The same is no doubt true about the corner bar; I just don't go there too often). It is a reduction in the diversity of our society; another step in its homogenization. Hell, we do LOTS of things that are bad for our health. Driving being the poster child. But in our terror of "adverse health effects" and our insistence that the "majority rules" not just in most places but in all places, we are gradually eliminating the variation that makes life interesting.

Or so it seems to me.

Shame On Us, Each of Us

This picture from the New York Times greeted me as I opened my e-mail this mnorning:




It was not a good way to start the day.

In case you didn't see this or another article on the same subject, that is Jose Padillla on his way to to the dentist for a root canal. For some reason not entirely clear, Padilla's jailors chose to videotape Padilla's transfer to the dental offices. Here's a description of the overall process used:

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

But worse was yet to come, becuase as the article progressed to tell the story of Padilla's "detainment" one could almost imagine Padilla being grateful for the break the dental appointment provided in the relentess tedium and humiliation (and probably terror) that has been his life for the last three-and-a-half years.

In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, "as part of an interrogation plan." . . . .

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of "truth serums."

Such treament is (thank God) apparently without precedent

Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.

Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law, said, "There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement."

Let that last bit register for a minute: "especially considering that this was pretrial confinement."

Padilla, an American citizen "detained" on American soil, was originally thought to be plotting to blow up a "dirty bomb." But, just as it appeared that the issue of his detainment by the military, without charges or hearing, was about to get to the Supreme Court, the governement changed its theory (thereby lettiong the "favorable" Court of Appeals decision stand) and classified Padilla as a criminal defendant, turning him over to civil authorities for trial.

Mr. Padilla’s status was abruptly changed to criminal defendant from enemy combatant last fall. At the time, the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention — and thus the issue of the president’s authority to seize an American citizen on American soil and hold him indefinitely without charges — when the Bush administration pre-empted its decision by filing criminal charges against Mr. Padilla.

Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America.

Mr. Padilla is portrayed in the indictment as the recruit of a "North American terror support cell" that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist “global jihad” in general, with a special interest in Bosnia and Chechnya. Mr. Padilla, the indictment asserts, traveled overseas 'to participate in violent jihad" and filled out an application for a mujahedin training camp in Afghanistan.

In citing this article, I do not intend to try, again, to excoriate Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the other architects of the US policies on detainees. Those folks are well beyond redemption or understanding on this issue. What I really wonder about now are the hundreds of "little people" -- soldiers, jailors, and lawyers -- who actually implement this system. What are they thinking? How do they sleep at night? Is the Nuremberg Defense -- "just following orders" -- enough to allow them to look themslves in the mirror?

In reading this article, I was reminded, again, of Hannah Arendt's famous book on Eichman: "The Banality of Evil."

Coconuts

As if the world didn't have enough on its plate already, it sounds like there has been a coup in Fiji. That by itself would not be particularly noteworthy. After all, this is the 4th Fijian coup in 20 years (about as often as we have elections) and, after all, how does a coup in Fiji really impact American interests (or anyone else's, for that matter).

But one thing about the BBC reporting on this cuaght my ear on the way home from work tonight. Apparently, one of the main reasons for the coup is that the commander of the army is angry that the government is proposing to grant amnesty to . . . ready for this? . . . the last group who had staged a coup.

Talk about glass houses and stones and so forth. How goofy a reason for a coup can there be?

The SEC (Seriously Effusive Crybabies) Gets What It Wants

Well, Florida and it's coach Urban Meyer whined their way into the national championship game on the theory that the SEC is by far the toughest conference in the country. That is just the silliest claim I've ever heard. These guys are simply incestuous. They play no one but themselves. The only teams in the SEC with a winning record were Florida, Auburn, LSU, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The non-conference games these team played were:

Florida, the SEC East Champion: So. Miss (8-4 in Conference USA), Central Fla (4-8 in Conference USA), W. Caorlina (2-9 in Southern Conf -- Div 1-AA BTW) and Fla St (6-6 in the ACC).

Arkansas, the SEC West champion: Utah St (1-11 in the WAC), SE Missouri St (4-7 in the Ohio Valley - IAA again), and la. Monroe (6-6 in the Sun Belt). Oh yes, they also played USC -- and got thumped, 50-14!

LSU (now ranked # 5 in the nation): La. Lafayette (6-6 in the Sun Belt), Arizona (6-6 in the Pac 10), Tulane (4-8 in Conf USA), and Fresno St (4-8 in the WAC).

Auburn (supposedly the best starting out): Wash St (6-6 in the PAC 10), Buffalo (2-10 in the Mid-Am), Tulane (4-8 in Conf USA) and Ark. St (6-6 in the Sun Belt).

And then there is Tennessee, the team Urban Meyer is so proud of having beaten at Tennessee: Cal(9-3 in the Pac 10, which lost to USC which thumped Arkansas which thumped Arkansas BTW), Air Force (winning by 1 point against a team that was 4-8 in the Mountain West), Marshall (5-7 in Conf USA), and Memphis (2-10 in Conf USA).

The only teams in the SEC top five who beat a non-conference team with a winning record were Tennessee, who beat Cal, and Florida, who beat So. Mississippi. The idea that the SEC is the toughest conference in the country is simply a myth.

But, for all of that, I am glad Michigan didn't get into the national championship game. It will play USC in the Rose Bowl. So that is no big loss for the Big Ten. But the really sweet part of it is that the Big Ten will get a chance to thump the top two teams in the SEC: OSU vs Florida and Wisconsin vs. Arkansas. Moreover, if Notre Dame can beat LSU and Wake Forest can beat Louisville, then Big Ten Teams shouild end the season 1, 2 and 3: OSU, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Maybe THAT will finally shut up America's great conferenence of crybabies: the SEC.

Oh, and as an added delicacy: Penn State beats Tennessee?