Totten, Sullivan, and Non-Partisans

Michael J. Totten applauds Andrew Sullivan’s announcement that he won’t support Bush for re-election. Sully’s rationale:

Bush’s endorsement of antigay discrimination in the U.S. Constitution itself is a deal-breaker. I can’t endorse him this fall. Like many other gay men and women who have supported him, despite serious disagreements, I feel betrayed, abused, attacked.

I’d be somewhat more sympathetic to Sullivan’s position had either he or the GOP changed positions recently. They haven’t. The GOP, since at least 1980, has been staunchly socially conservative and aligned with the evangelical Christian movement. George W. Bush certainly wore it on his sleeve in 2000. Sully apparently disagrees:

This betrayal exists on two levels. First, it’s a betrayal of the inclusion and compassion once promised by George W. Bush. The proposed constitutional amendment is a conscious and clear attempt to exempt gay citizens—and only gay citizens—from the equal protection of the law. It’s an amendment designed to marginalize an entire minority. When the president endorsed the amendment, he could not even bring himself to say the words “gay,” “lesbian,” or “homosexual.” He could not even manage a sentence to speak to the very Americans he seeks to disenfranchise. I’m sick of being told that, on a personal level, this president is not homophobic. If it’s true, it makes his catering to homophobia even worse—an act of political cynicism. If he cannot even name us, he cannot pretend to accord us dignity and respect. It’s a lie.

While I agree with Sully on the merits of the gay marriage argument, his statement of Bush’s position is odd. I certainly got no signal in 2000 that Bush was a supporter of homosexual marriage, or anything like that. He’s not seeking to marginalize homosexuals—just to maintain the status quo as it existed during the 2000 campaign and, indeed, until a Massachussets court read gay marriage into their constitution.

Totten, himself a former Democrat who supported Bush on the war but likely won’t support him for re-election, notes that some in the far right are saying deplorable things about Sullivan. He encourages him to do what he thinks is right:

Political parties are cruel to people who think. The more partisan members are bigots. They hate people in the other political party, and they hate you if you don’t follow orders. If you’re going to talk about principles you might as well be writing in Martian for those who will jump at a moment’s notice to stay on the right side of the party line.

Quit. Just walk away from the Republican Party. They are not your comrades as you can plainly see. Don’t bother calling yourself a conservative anymore. Publicly declare yourself an Independent and a Centrist. Don’t let anyone call you anything else. Oh, but they’ll try. Ann Coulter will call you a traitor and a leftist. Michael Moore will say you’re an imperial neocon cabalist. Who cares what they think? They’re slapstick buffoons, not your peers.

Your conservative friends who are worth their body weight in water will still be there for you. Your subscription to The Weekly Standard will still arrive in the mail. Your boyfriend will still love you. Your neighbors will still wave hello. Your favorite bartender will still smile when he sees you pull up a stool. Your Web site will still be one of the most popular blogs in the world. Don’t be afraid to lose readers. Some of us have learned a lot from your work, and we are not going anywhere.

All true enough. Except that, as Sullivan himself notes,

I’m not a Republican, so I have no party to leave. I’m not even sure what I would say to a gay Republican right now. But I would insist that the president’s stance is a betrayal of conservatism as well. Civil marriage is a conservative institution in many ways. Denying it to gays is tantamount to arguing that homosexuals should always be at the margins of society, beyond its unifying institutions, outside their own families and society. To my mind, that is unconservative. It segregates and divides people into groups, while conservatism should seek to treat all individuals equally. Worse, the amendment strips states of the right to decide for themselves how they want civil marriage to be defined. Again, that’s a betrayal of a political tradition that has long embraced states’ rights and the benefits of local rather than federal government. And using the sacred Constitution as a political tool is also a frivolous ploy that traditional conservatives would never endorse.

No president is perfect. It’s important to note that even John Kerry opposes equal marriage rights. So do Bill Clinton and Howard Dean. I can live with disagreement on the issue of civil marriage itself. But raising the issue to the level of a constitutional amendment is not something anyone can or should live with. It’s writing gay people out of their own country. It’s the political equivalent of domestic violence. Once that happens you’re a fool to stay in the relationship. You’re asking for more abuse. You’re enabling a movement that seeks to destroy you.

From a purely academic standpoint, I find it puzzling that this one policy statement —on which the leading alternative differs only marginally and one which has zero chance of actually being enacted in law— would be enough to override one’s belief system on a whole variety of other issues. Of course, for me, this is a purely intellectual issue; for Sully, it’s existential.

The nature of a two party system is that people who are passionate about politics and reasonably intelligent are almost never satisfied. Certainly the Republican party is too much under the influence of fundamentalist Christians for my tastes. I’ve voted for a few Democrats for lower office, including the U.S. Senate and a state governorship, but that was in Alabama where even the Democrats are rather conservative. I’ve voted Libertarian a few times for lower offices, including U.S. House of Representatives, in elections that the incumbent was going to win by a landslide, anyway.

Still, there hasn’t been a Democratic presidential nominee in my political lifetime (1984-present) that seriously tempted me. Two issues dominate my voting calculations at the presidential level:

1. Who would be the better commander-in-chief of our military? While there have been some significant mistakes in the Iraq War and the war on terrorism has been far too timid for my tastes, I have no reason to suspect John Kerry would be an improvement. He strikes me as incredibly indecisive and likely to be far too willing to bow to international pressure.

2. Who would I rather have appointing Supreme Court justices? This one is just a no-brainer for me. Given that the current deadlock in the Senate is likely to continue, it’s unlikely that either Bush or Kerry would be able to get through an ideologue with a paper trail. Still, Bush’s sensibilities on this front are —by leaps and bounds— more to my liking.

But Sully and Michael have to make their own call on this one. I’ll still read their sites and wave to them if I happen to see them.

Oh, and if you’re feeling particularly non-partisan, might I suggest Ralph Nader?

Three Alabama Policemen Killed

Newsday/AP - 3 Police Officers Shot to Death in Alabama

Three police officers at a house to make an arrest were shot to death Thursday, and the sheriff said a suspect was taken into custody.

Colleagues of the officers found their bodies outside the house where the three had gone to serve “misdemeanor-type warrants,” said Brett Oates, spokesman for Birmingham’s mayor.

Authorities did not release further details, but the small, one-story dwelling, divided into apartments, had a reputation in the low-income neighborhood as a site for drug dealing.

Jefferson County Sheriff Mike Hale said Nathaniel Lauell Woods, 27, and four others were in police custody.

Later, Police Chief Annetta Nunn, who had described Woods as a suspect and released his mug shot, told reporters three people were in custody and declined to say if Woods was among them. It was not known if any charges had been filed.

“We just ask the public to pray for the officers, their families and the officers who are still on duty,” Nunn said at a brief news conference.

For a few days after 9/11, we remembered how dangerous police work can be. We usually forget. Even routine misdemeanor arrests can be fatal in that line of work.

Reagan on the $20 Bill?

Sean Hackbarth argues that Ronald Reagan should replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, rather than Alexander Hamilton on the $10 as previously suggested.

I know my early 19th Century American history is really rusty, but other than killing the national bank, telling John Calhoun to stick it, and winning the Battle of New Orleans after the War of 1812 was in essence over what make him deserve the currency honor more than Reagan?

I would argue that Sean greatly understates Jackson’s contributions at New Orleans. In 1959, the imminent historian John Gale Horton published a first person account, relying on primary source materials, which summarized the conflict thusly:

In Eighteen-fourteen, we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in a town in New Orleans

We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

We looked down the river and we seed the British come
And there must have been a hunnered of ‘em beatin’ on the drum
They stepped so high and they made the bugles ring
We stood beside our cotton bales and didn’t say a thing

We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

Old Hick’ry said we could take ‘em by surprise
If we didn’t fire our muskets till we looked ‘em in the eye
We held our fire till we seed their faces well
Then we opened up our squirrel guns and really gave ‘em…

Well, we fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

Yeah, they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn’t go
They ran so fast that the hounds couldn’t catch ‘em
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

We fired our cannon till the barrel melted down
So we grabbed an alligator and we fought another round
We filled his head with cannon balls and powdered his behind
And when we touched the powder off, the gator lost his mind!

We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’
There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

Yeah, they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn’t go
They ran so fast that the hounds couldn’t catch ‘em
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

So, not only did they defeat a superior foe using asymmetric warfare techniques, fight the elements, and encounter dangerous wildlife, but Jackson was an early exponent of the Adkins diet.

Those Clever Japanese II

Phil Libin continues reporting on neat Japanese technology that we don’t have. (See here for previous marvels.) I’m still waiting for them to turn a television into a watch, however.

Short Moves

Crooked Timber is moving. Their URL will remain the same, however. Go figure.

Update your blogrolls, just in case.

People Are Strange

Sound reasons for cuckoldry?

Mel Gibson No. 1 Thanks to Jesus

CNN Money — Mel Gibson No. 1 thanks to Jesus

Who says you can’t achieve fame and fortune with an indie, filmed entirely in Aramaic and Latin? The movie “The Passion of the Christ” did just that for actor-director Mel Gibson.

Gibson, the director, producer and screenwriter for the “Christ” flick, was named the world’s most powerful celebrity by Forbes magazine on Thursday, dethroning “Friends” star Jennifer Aniston from the No. 1 spot she held last year.

The magazine said the “Christ” film helped Gibson earn an estimated $210 million during the past 12 months.

Although the film opened amid a firestorm of controversy in February, “Christ” has grossed $370 million domestically and more than $600 million worldwide.

Aniston, who topped the list last year, came in at No. 17 on the list this year. The popular NBC sitcom that paid her a staggering million dollars per episode came to an end earlier this year.

I fail to see the contradiction between “opened amid a firestorm of controversy” and raking in a lot of money.

And how in the world was Jennifer Aniston #1 on the list?! She’s attractive and all but I’d have guessed several female actors—Halle Barry, Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and J-Lo all come to mind—would be ahead of her in any serious power ranking. They must be using the BCS computer.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Bylines

Megan McArdle explains why the “byline strike” by writers at WSJ is likely to be ineffective:

Quick test: before you read any further, think of an article you’ve read in The Economist in the last three months that was really memorable. Then try as hard as you can to remember the name of the guy who wrote it.

A couple of you may have figured out the catch: The Economist doesn’t have bylines. And yet I’ve only ever met one non-journalist who knew this without being told.

Not only that, but the two publications in question—WSJ and Economist.com—are the only mainline news publications whose content is almost entirely unavailable without paid subscription. Being the cheap bastard shrewd consumer that I am, I therefore get my news elsewhere.

What strikes me as interesting is that the opposite phenomenon seems to be in play in the Blogosphere. Bloggers almost invariably mention the name of other bloggers they cite in a post. Indeed, in many cases, I know the name of the blogger but not the name of the blog.

Beltway Traffic Jam

A stormy Thursday linkfest:

• Kathy Kinsley is moving the world to WordPress, one user at a time.
  
• Jeff Goldstein has finally gotten up to the early 1970s in his movie viewing.
  
• Maria Farrell passes along George R.R. Martin’s claims that he is, in fact, not dying.
  
• Kos denies speculation by Hugh Hewitt that he’s working for Karl Rove.
  
• Jeff Quinton changed his blog’s name a year ago.
  
• Bob warns that a French infiltrator from the Bush team is writing a tell-all book.
  
• Dan Drezner is looking for a guest blogger, preferably without tenure.
  
• Bill Hobbs warns al Qaeda not to strike us, lest we open up a can of nucular whoopass.

To join in, link and send a TrackBack to this post. If your blog doesn’t automatically generate one, use the Send TrackBack feature below. For more information, see this post.

Iraq Torture Video

Stephen Green has a rather graphic video of people being tortured and mutiliated in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. No, it doesn’t involve American MPs or putting panties on the heads of prisoners.

From American Enterprise Institute, from whence the video comes,

For the last 30 years, Iraqis inside Iraq had little knowledge of the full extent of Saddam Hussein’s oppressive tactics. Many Iraqis who have documented his regime’s history argue that Coalition authorities have not done enough to make this history known to the Iraqi people, and proponents of more stringent de-Baathification argue that until this education is completed, Saddam-era officials cannot be trusted with the rule of the new state.

Much of the recent controversy surrounding Abu Ghraib has made only vague reference to the prison’s nightmarish past. Under Saddam Hussein, some thirty thousand people were executed there, and countless more were tortured and mutilated, returning to Iraqi society as visible evidence of the brutality of Baathist rule instead of being lost to the anonymity of mass graves.

Seven of these victims were Baghdadi merchants whose right hands were amputated and presented to Saddam as proof of their punishment. They have recently received medical attention in the United States, and now have the use of modern prosthetic hands. Four of these victims will speak of their experiences before returning to Iraq. In addition to their presentations, an unedited video documenting acts of torture during Saddam’s reign will be shown, and our Iraqi guests will identify persons conducting the torture who hold office in Iraq today.

Movable Type $3.0 Price Change

Six Apart, reacting to substantial backlash about its announced pricing and usage policies for version 3.0 of Movable Type, have revised their prices and policies. Unfortunately, it appears to be too little, too late.

Steven Taylor, for one, is unimpresed:

I remain unsure as to whether I am going to just stick with the current version of MT or migrate to ExpressEngine or WordPress.

Astute observers will note that upgrading to Movable Type 3.0 wasn’t among the options under consideration. Based on what I’ve read so far, my plan is to stick with Movable Type 2.661 for now while I wait for WordPress to get better. I haven’t read much about ExpressEngine that makes it sound worth moving to.

Kerry's Foreign Policy

Jack O’Toole responds to my earlier statement that Kerry’s foreign policy is vague by pointing me to Kerry’s February 27 plan and asking “What more do you want?”

Well, Kerry’s “plan” is certainly long enough to defy easy fisking. But it really says little of substance. For example, his “plan” to fight terrorism has five points. The first:

1.Direct Military Action. John Kerry will always be prepared to use military force when necessary to neutralize terrorists and drain the swamps where they breed.

Hey, draining swaps! Neutralizing terrorists! Sounds good! But, as Jack notes, the devil is in the details. Under what circumstances does Kerry think force would be necessary?

Deploy the Best-Equipped Forces Backed by the Most Accurate Intelligence. Kerry will increase the size of the special operations forces; and, increase training for peace-keeping missions so that failed states can be secured and terrorist sanctuaries denied. He will ensure that America’s fighting men and women always have the best equipment and information.

What does this mean, exactly? Who is it that has better equipped troops?! Certainly, accurate intelligence would be nice. How does he propose acquiring it?

More special operators? What kind? Rangers? SEALs? Green Berets? Psyops? Civil Affairs? All of the above? How will we increase their size (and by how much!?) without compromising standards?

Training for peace keeping missions! What a novel idea! Haven’t we been doing that for more than a decade? What would he do differently?

Tailor Forces to be Better Prepared for Post-conflict and Stability Operations. Kerry will add more engineers, military police, psychological warfare personnel, and civil affairs teams to the military to ensure combat forces are not drawn away to fill roles that stability forces should fill — and that a security vacuum does not threaten hard-won victories.

I’d note that psyops and civil affairs are special operations forces, so this is a bit redundant, but I’ve been arguing for this for around 12 years, so it sounds good. It turns out we’re in the process of doing this as we speak, however. Where are these folks going to come from? How many more do we need?

Increase Active Duty End Strength. To better meet the needs of the War on Terror and America’s global obligations, John Kerry has called for a temporary increase of about 40,000 active-duty Army troops: 20,000 in such specialties as military police and civil affairs, and 20,000 combat.

Hey! He answered one of the questions! Good job. Are we going to mobilize these guys out of the reserves, or train them from scratch? If the latter, where are we going to get their leaders, since it takes 10-20 years to create them under the current system?

CONTINUE READING Kerry's Foreign Policy »

Kerry Should Stay Invisible

Howard Fineman (Newsweek) — Best Advice for Kerry: Be Invisible

I’ve figured out what Sen. John Kerry needs to do to win the White House this November: wrap himself in Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak. If the Massachusetts senator can only stay out of sight for long enough, George W. Bush’s presidency may sink into the sands of Iraq.

Bush’s decision to go to Iraq is one of the most fateful calls any president has made—right up there with Harry Truman’s decision to send aid to Greece and Turkey, JFK’s secret agreement to pull American missiles out of Turkey to end the Cuban missile crisis, and Ronald Reagan’s deal with Gorbachev to begin winding down the cold war. Because Bush’s decision was so important—and because it was so clearly his own to make—it’s central to the campaign. The questions of the season are and will remain: was it worth so much blood and treasure? Did it make us safer?

The American public seems to be slowly but steadily coming to the conclusion that the answer is “no.” Trend lines matter in politics, and the trend of support for the war Bush launched in 2003 has been steadily declining for months, dragging the president’s job-approval rating with it. Even if things go reasonably well in Iraq after the official handover date of June 30—a huge and probably unwarranted assumption—there are growing indications that most voters will see the original decision to go there as wrong, even if they accept the underlying, and still controversial, theory of pre-emptive war, and even if they don’t want a rapid pullout of U.S. troops.

***

As he seeks to defend the war—arguing that the world is far safer with Saddam behind bars—Bush is operating in an increasingly hostile media environment. In journalism, as in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. After 9/11 there was an understandable willingness to cut him slack. That era of good feeling is gone, replaced by a media that feels burned, embarrassed and lied to—and doubly wary of the validity of good news coming from Iraq. There is some; but you won’t see it on TV.

This echoes my thoughts earlier this morning. I believe Fineman accurately captures the mood of the public and the hostility of the press. That said, Kerry will need more than an invisibility cloak. “Not the incumbent” is enough to get someone elected to the town council or the school board; it’s an insufficient basis for electing a wartime president. Kerry will need to persuade the public that he’s a man who can be trusted with protecting their security. That he was a good lieutenant in Vietnam is likely not enough in that regard.

UPDATE: Jim Hoagland disagrees:

The Bush administration’s credibility on managing Iraq has fallen so far that all Kerry has to do to score points is utter that country’s name. His criticisms are seemingly validated daily by the disasters splashed on the front pages and television screens. By cautiously shadowing Bush’s policies and condemning their implementation, Kerry deftly avoids getting in the way of the beating that Iraq is giving the president at this point.

Kerry’s untested (and largely unrealistic) “solutions” of getting France and Germany more involved and providing better training to Iraqis look credible only by comparison to Bush’s recent floundering. Kerry can parry questions about what he would do in Iraq by dwelling on what Bush did, and how it seems to be
failing.

This is really a non-strategy, in my view. It’s working right now because Kerry has the aid of the mass media, which harps on bad news in Iraq (because they involve explosions and are photographable) while largely ignoring the good. Later this summer, though, the two men will go head-to-head. I can’t imagine that Kerry’s continued saying that he’d do exactly what Bush would do except “better” and that France would somehow help out will work. Clinton might have been able to pull that off, but Kerry isn’t that compelling a salesman.

Mobile Phone Virus

Evening Standard — Hackers unleash mobile phones virus

The world’s first computer virus to be spread by mobile phones has been unleashed.

The worm, known as Cabir, is spread via wireless Bluetooth technology and makes the word ‘caribe’ appear on the phone screen.

At present the virus, thought to be the work of international hacker group 29A, is not ‘in the wild’ and has been sent only to anti-virus companies to show the weakness in their technology.

***

If a malicious mobile phone virus was written and sent out it could wipe out contact numbers and other data stored on handsets, as well as sending out messages purporting to come from the victim’s mobile phone.

But Graham Cluley, of Sophos Anti-Virus, said Cabir was more an interesting development rather than a serious threat, calling it ‘a milestone in the timeline of viruses’. He added he believed Windows would remain the primary target for viruses in the near future.

Something else to look forward to, I guess.

Clinton: Impeachment a Badge of Honor

Drudge is fronting an AP story on the forthcoming Clinton auto-lieograpy that demonstrates pretty much what I expected: not a lot of new revelations but that the compilation of old material that, in concentrated form, is rather sickening:

AP — Clinton Says He Never Considered Quitting

Former President Clinton tells CBS’ “60 Minutes” that he never considered resigning and is proud he fought efforts to impeach him amid the scandal over his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

“I stood up to it and beat it back,” Clinton says of the impeachment process, which he describes as “an abuse of power.”

“The whole battle was a badge of honor. I don’t see it as a stain, because it was illegitimate.”

As with anything Clinton, every other word is a double entendre.

Clinton sees the Lewinsky affair as “a terrible moral error” whose disclosure to his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, put him “in the doghouse.”

“I did something for the worst possible reason. Just because I could,” Clinton says of his infidelity. “I think that’s just about the most morally indefensible reason anybody could have for doing anything.”

Yet, oddly, also simultaneously a badge of honor.

While I saw as early as the 1992 primaries that Clinton was a morally corrupt figure, I nonetheless disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision that allowed Paula Jones to sue a sitting president for civil damages for actions that had taken place years before. Not only does it pose serious separation of powers questions, but from a practical standpoint, presidents shouldn’t be burdened with that sort of distraction. (I would stop the statute of limitations clock to preserve plaintiffs’ rights.) Still, once the Court ruled, unanimously, that Clinton had to face the trial, he was obligated to act honorably. He didn’t. Despite his successful spin to the contrary, the case was never “about sex” but rather about lying—in a sexual harrassment case, no less—under oath.

Clinton is one of the more talented presidents in the modern era and accomplished some important things. Unfortunately, his fundamental self-absorption and lack of an ethical core undermined much of his tenure.

Changing Warhorses in Midstream

Michael Barone’s LA Times op-ed, Changing Warhorses in Midstream” makes a rather dramatic comparison:

Consider the presidential election of 1864. The defeat of the incumbent, Abraham Lincoln, would have made an enormous difference. Union casualties were heavy throughout the year. It was widely expected that Gen. George McClellan, ousted from heading the Union army by Lincoln in 1862, would be the Democratic nominee and that he would win. Lincoln was renominated by the Republican National Convention in June, but through September many prominent Republicans were plotting to choose another nominee. Lincoln clearly stood for continued prosecution of the war, and the Republican platform came out strongly for the abolition of slavery. The Democrats were united around McClellan at their August convention but divided on policy. The Copperhead wing of the party wanted immediate peace, and it managed to write the party platform.

Is the 2004 election as consequential as the election of 1864? The answer to that question depends on what you think John Kerry’s military and foreign policy would be, and there is room for thinking many things.

***

There is something to say for Mead’s argument, but I take a different view. Bush, in his formal National Security Strategy statement and in his actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, has transformed U.S. foreign policy more than any president since Truman. The very violence of Kerry’s denunciations of Bush; his contempt for the president, which he makes no effort to conceal; the suggestion that America under Bush is totally isolated from the world — these positions will have consequences. They affect what other nations and what the terrorists think the U.S. will do and thus have a role in determining how they will act.

Moreover, Kerry will be the nominee of a party that is split as much as McClellan’s was. About half of Democrats favor the Iraq war and about half are against. Pollster Scott Rasmussen recently reported that 62% of Americans agreed that the world would be a better place if other countries became more like the United States, while only 14% believed it would be a worse place. But there is a big difference between Republicans and Democrats. Fully 81% of Bush voters but only 48% of Kerry voters agreed with the statement.

The next four years are likely to present unforeseen challenges, and the difference between Bush and Kerry, although not as great as that between Lincoln and McClellan, will probably be greater than the differences between candidates in the wartime elections of the 20th century. Throwing out this president would make a difference.

As even occasional readers know, I prefer Bush over Kerry in this election. I’m not, however, sure that the “don’t change horse in mid-stream” argument is particularly helpful to Bush in this case. Ronald Reagan used it quite successfully in 1984, but then his policies were quite popular. He used it again in 1988, urging the election of his Vice President, saying, “But when you have to change horses in midstream, doesn’t it make sense to switch to the one who’s going the same way?” But the polls clearly show an ambivalence toward Bush’s policies and the current direction of travel.

Rhetorically, there’s not much difference between Bush and Kerry on Iraq. Both want to finish what we started. Pretty clearly, though, a President Kerry wouldn’t have initiated this war—which may or may not earn him points with the electorate at this stage; how it will play out by November is unknowable at this stage, given how much in flux the Iraq situation is.

More importantly, though, in assessing Barone’s thesis, is the fact that Bush and Kerry have fundamentally different views on the war on terrorism. The Bush policy is much more aggressive—a literal rather than a figurative war—than we’d likely see under Kerry. Ultimately, though, we have to speculate on what Kerry would do since he’s been incredibly vague, preferring to criticize the Bush policy without arguing a concrete alternative.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

UPDATE II: I essentially agree with Kevin Drum on the strained nature of the Bush-Lincoln comparison. I was going to write about that when I first read the subtitle of Barone’s piece, but I got sidetracked by the substance of the Bush-Kerry difference and the tactical issues.

One could plausibly argue that the terrorist threat is comparable to that of secession, I suppose, but the Bush-Kerry gap is smaller than that seen in several other wartime elections—Nixon-McGovern as the most obvious ferinstance.

Iraq Roundup

The terrorists continue to kill people and disrupt the rebuilding of Iraq, but there are nonetheless important milestones being reached daily.

WaPo — Explosion Outside Iraqi Recruiting Station Kills 35

A car bomb steered to its target by a suicide driver exploded in a tremendous blast outside an Iraqi security forces recruiting station in downtown Baghdad Thursday, killing at least 35 people and wounding 138 others who were waiting to sign up or passing by.

A white sport-utility vehicle packed with artillery shells blew up as about 100 recruits were trying to enter the station outside Baghdad’s Muthanna airport, Iraqi officials said. Many of the victims had just gotten off a bus when the suicide car bomb detonated.

Although the base is used by both the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and the U.S. military, no American or Iraqi troops were killed or injured, according to Col. Mike Murray of the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division. Murray told reporters that most of the victims were passersby.

Visiting the scene under the protection of Iraqi police and western security guards, Iraq’s interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, described the bombing as a “cowardly attack” aimed at “the stability of Iraq and the Iraqi people,” news agencies reported.

“We are going to face these escalations,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “The Iraqi people are going to prevail, and the government of Iraq is determined to go ahead in confronting the enemies.”

USA Today — Iraqis To Regain Control Of The Renovated Baghdad Airport

raq’s new leadership will take control of a rehabilitated Baghdad International Airport in the next few weeks. The hand-over is expected to open the door for the first normal commercial service since the U.S. invasion 15 months ago.

For the past year, American experts and Iraqi technicians have been working to repair and update the former Saddam International Airport. Although the French-designed airport is only 22 years old, it had fallen into disrepair. United Nations-mandated sanctions, flight restrictions and a battle between invading U.S. troops and Saddam Hussein’s army left their marks.

Now one of three main terminals has been restored, improvements to the main runway and the radars are underway and Iraqi air traffic controllers returned to the tower two weeks ago. They are handling most of the roughly 50 cargo charter flights a day. There also is a daily charter passenger flight from Jordan.

WaPo — U.S. Sets Conditions For Detainee Transfer

The United States will turn over detainees to Iraqi authorities as soon after June 30 as U.S. officials determine that they can be held safely and in compliance with international human rights norms, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Wednesday.

The U.S. position was delivered during the opening round of high-level security consultations between Iraq’s new interim leadership and a delegation led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and his British counterpart, Kevin Tebbit. The talks are intended to help pave the way for the scheduled transfer of limited sovereignty to Iraq at the end of the month and the arrival in the next few weeks of a new set of top U.S. diplomatic and military authorities, who U.S. officials said plan to pursue more detailed discussions on managing the next phase of U.S.-Iraqi relations.

WSJ — Iraqis May Get More Influence Over U.S. Military Operations [$]

Facing an increasingly violent insurgency and the fast-approaching transfer of sovereignty, U.S. officials are pushing to give the new Iraqi government far more influence over how U.S. military operations in Iraq are conducted and what future Iraqi security forces should look like.

U.S. officials say it is critical that the U.S. military look less like an occupying force in Iraq, where its presence is desperately needed but increasingly unpopular with average Iraqis who blame the U.S. for failing to prevent a recent spike in violence. Iraqi insurgents yesterday assassinated a senior Iraqi security official in the rich northern oil fields near Kirkuk and exploded a second critical pipeline in the south, cutting off the flow of oil and costing Iraqis as much as $60 million a day. In Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, insurgents struck a U.S. base with a rocket killing two soldiers and wounding more than 20.

The attacks yesterday are the latest in a string of assassinations of senior and midlevel Iraqi government officials and car bombings that have rocked Baghdad over the past two weeks and driven home just how fragile the security situation is in the country.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have been increasingly at odds over how to fight the insurgency and how best to conduct sensitive military operations such as the recent U.S. assaults on radical Shiite and Sunni forces in the cities of Najaf and Fallujah, where the Iraqis say U.S. troops have been too heavy-handed. Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi yesterday discussed the need for a consultative body that would allow Iraqis to play a role in shaping large U.S. military operations in Iraq after the sovereignty transfer. Mr. Wolfowitz is in Baghdad to discuss Iraq’s security, economy and political process with interim-government leaders in advance of the June 30 transfer of power.

Spy Work In Iraq Riddled By Failures

LA Times - Spy Work In Iraq Riddled By Failures

A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq, whose alarming reports of Saddam Hussein’s illicit weapons were rushed to the White House shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by the CIA and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.

The CIA’s reliance on the two Iraqis, who were recruited by Britain’s MI6 in late 2002 and thought to have access to Hussein’s inner circle, is the latest example to come to light of the failures in human intelligence gathering in Iraq. U.S. agencies were also beset by broader, more systemic problems that included failures in analyzing communications intercepts and spy satellite images, the officials interviewed by The Times said.

U.S. experts, for example, still have not been able to determine the meaning of three secretly taped conversations that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell played to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 in making the case for war. Investigators have been unable to identify who was speaking on the tapes or precisely what they were talking about.

U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short, half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S. intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not there.

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Most important, they say, was the fact that the CIA was unable to recruit a spy in or close to Hussein’s inner circle before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. The lack of access was especially glaring because U.S. intelligence had made Iraq a priority target since the 1980s.

“We had zilch in terms of direct sources,” said David Kay, who led the search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq last year as special advisor to CIA director George J. Tenet.

There’s quite a bit more like that in the story, including details of MI-6’s infiltration of the UN inspection teams that provided perhaps the best human intelligence assets we had in Iraq. Some of it is simply wrong, such as the assertion that the CIA “failed to predict Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.” In fact, their assessment was overridden by President George H.W. Bush, whose own human intelligence contacts assured him otherwise.

While much of this is useful, it is underpinned by a rather unrealistic expectation of what intelligence agencies can reasonably accomplish. Calling it a “failure” every time we act on partial information is problematic, as it reinforces the natural bureaucratic tendency to hedge bets. When starting from the premise that Saddam was actively pursuing a weapons program—certainly, a reasonable bet—it’s hardly surprising that a cylindrical storage silo was identified as being used for missiles. The reverse error—misidentifying missile silos as chicken coops—would have been far more catastrophic.

The nature of intelligence is that one is trying to discover information that people are actively trying to hide and then extrapolate future actions. Professional analysts can’t do that particularly well within our own society—where information is freely available and reporters constantly talk to decision-makers.

Friedman's Maid

Thomas Friedman [RSS] is a wee bit optimistic this morning. He has a rather simplistic plan for transforming the Arab world:

To put it another way, there are two ways for the U.S. to promote reform in the Arab world — where there is an ocean of untapped brainpower, particularly among women. One way is to try to dictate it, which is not working. American policy has become so unpopular in the Arab world that anti-reformers can easily delegitimize the reform process by labeling it a “U.S. plot to destroy Islam,” and reformers are silenced because they don’t want to be seen as promoting a made-in-America agenda.

The other way for us to promote reform is to get out of the way so people in the Middle East can see clearly that many of their maids’ children — from India, China, Sri Lanka and the Philippines — are excelling at math, science and engineering, leaving Arab children, not to mention many American children, in the dust. (Over one million Indians work in Saudi Arabia alone.)

Only when the Arabs focus on how their maids’ children are doing in the world, not what the Americans are doing in their region, will they revisit one of the most famous sayings of the Prophet Muhammad: “Seek knowledge, even unto China. That is the duty for every Muslim.”

Does Friedman really believe that the leaders of the Arab world don’t realize that their economies are undeveloped compared to virtually everyone on the planet? The problem is that these leaders are themselves phenomenally wealthy and privileged under the status quo; they have little interest in ensuring that their maid’s children become well off. Indeed, such wealth generally comes at the price of additional freedom and resistance. Furthermore, all the major Arab states have a significant Islamist movement. Opening up their societies to increase economic prosperity would likely enrage the clerics, since decadence follows wealth as night follows day. Given that most of these leaders’ hold on power is already tenuous, rocking the boat is hardly in their interest.

Friedman’s other idea is more intriguing:

I would suggest that next year the G-8 invite both India and China to join, and hold the next G-10 summit either at one of the manicured campuses of Indian outsourcing companies or in Shanghai’s manufacturing hub. Then invite Arab leaders to attend. India and China were once seen as their equals.

Now, again, it’s not as if the Arab leaders don’t already fully comprehend that India and even China are ahead of them economically. Indeed, it wasn’t all that long ago (in Arab time) that the West was far inferior to the Islamic world, either.

Adding India and China to the G-8 likely makes sense for other reasons, though. For one thing, now that Russia—which has never been an economic powerhouse and shows no signs of heading in that direction—is a member, there’s no rationale I can think of for excluding them. It would give us leverage in directing the ongoing transformation of their economies and provide a much more useful forum than the UN for engaging the world’s most significant states.

Turning the Tables on E-Mail Swindlers

I’ve always assumed that most accounts of people playing tricks on e-mail hoaxsters, such as that rich prince from Nigeria who needs me to loan him some money, were urban legends. Apparently not all of them are.

NYT - Turning the Tables on E-Mail Swindlers [RSS]

In one escapade recounted at Scamorama, a fraud baiter posing as one Pierpont Emanuel Weaver, a wealthy businessman, appeared to persuade a con man in Ghana in 2002 to send almost $100 worth of gold to Indiana - for “testing purposes as my chemist requires” - after being asked to put up $1.8 million for a share in a gold fortune. In other cases, swindlers are tricked into posing for pictures holding self-mocking signs, pictures then posted online. Or they are led to travel hundreds of miles to pick up a payment, only to come up empty-handed.

A 47-year-old manufacturing executive in Lincoln, Neb., said he had been engaged in such pranks for almost three years. “I’ve had many, many good laughs at their expense, and have spent nothing but time,” he said. “They have spent countless hours creating fake documents, obtaining photos of themselves holding funny signs, running to the Western Union miles away from where they live to obtain money which I never actually sent, and printing out counterfeit checks to send me.” As for his motivation, he said, “Hopefully, along the way, I’ve diverted enough of their time and resources to keep them from successfully scamming at least one hapless (albeit, most likely, greedy) victim.”

And while not every success story can be substantiated, some law enforcement officials say the fraud baiters had proved to be crucial allies.

“I personally feel that we wouldn’t have had the same effect with our initiative if we hadn’t combined forces with the international scam-baiting community,” Rian Visser, an inspector and electronic-fraud investigator for the South African Police Service, said in a telephone interview. “I can’t see any law enforcement agency not making use of them. They are on the front lines, and they have information that is very valuable.”

In March, Mr. Visser established www.419legal.org as a clearinghouse for information about advance-fee fraud and as a launching pad for attacking fraud artists. (Mr. Visser said his government’s approval process for creating an official site would have taken months.)

Since March, he said, the fraud baiters have provided information that has led to seven arrests in South Africa and the seizure of property used by West African expatriates to conduct fraud. Last month, he said, they provided information that led to the closing of a fake South African embassy in Amsterdam that fraud artists had established to lend credence to their operations. One Saudi victim had lost $100,000 to that group, Mr. Visser said. He added that when the fraud baiters provide reliable information about fraud in unrelated countries, he relays the tips through Interpol.

Interesting.