Selling "Product"

Of Campaigns and Breakfast Cereals
By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 30, 2004

You want complicated issues? Start with Iraq - a war with no clearly defined goal, not even the remotest timetable for victory, and no exit strategy whatsoever. The ad men (and women) will reduce this monumental tragedy to crisp, poll-tested campaign sound bites.

Or consider the economy. We're in a new world of work in which good jobs at good pay with good benefits are ever more hard to find. Despite the administration's insistence that the economy is strong and getting stronger, there is no light at the end of this dismal tunnel. Job growth is anemic. The middle class is being relentlessly squeezed. And the Census Bureau tells us that in 2003, for the third year in a row, the number of Americans who are poor increased.

As David Leonhardt wrote in The Times on Friday, "The economy's troubles, which first affected high-income families even more than the middle class and poor, have recently hurt families at the bottom and in the middle significantly more than those at the top."

These are issues that should be ruthlessly explored, but the politicians, their handlers and much of the media have taken their cues from Harry Treleaven. You don't want to bore the readers or viewers or voters with anything too complicated. A well-rehearsed comment or two will suffice, followed by the jokes on Leno and Letterman, and then it's on to the "real world" of Paris and Kobe and whatever.

This week's Republican convention in New York is a rigidly scripted theatrical event that will garner a grand total of three hours of live coverage on network television - a reprise of the Democrats' rigidly scripted extravaganza in Boston last month. Anyone who drifts off message will be viewed as a nut.

So we won't get anything but pap about Iraq. We'll be told about the miraculous economic healing powers of the Bush tax cuts. We'll be told that the era of George Bush II has been a rousing success for America.

Serious voters who would like to hear a discussion (from the leaders of both parties) about why we are in Iraq and when and how we might get out of there will be disappointed. So will voters interested in exploring ideas about the leadership role of the United States in the post-9/11 world, which is at least as important as the role thrust upon the U.S. in the aftermath of World War II.

More scary stories are emerging about global warming, and our dependence on foreign oil is undermining our security like never before. But these topics, too, are complex, and therefore, according to the advertising folks and media gurus, too difficult and boring for general consumption.

In other words, we're a nation of nitwits, and a presidential campaign at a critical moment in world history will be spoon-fed to us like an ad for Wheaties.

Raymond Price, a speechwriter for Nixon in the 1968 campaign, was as contemptuous of substance in politics as Treleaven. "It's not what's there that counts," he wrote, "it's what's projected." In Price's view, "Voters are basically lazy, basically uninterested in making an effort to understand what we're talking about."

Voters could revolt against this kind of humiliating treatment. But that would happen only if the Treleavens and Prices of the world were wrong.

Are they?

Patriot Games

Upstaging Before the Show
By TODD S. PURDUM

Published: August 30, 2004

"I've been going to Republican conventions since 1972, and I've never seen a convention with as many protesters in the streets," said David Gergen, who has worked for several Republican presidents, and Bill Clinton. "The irony is that was a convention held here because of echoes of 9/11, but it opens with echoes of Chicago and the Vietnam war.

"The protests are anti-Bush, with heavy antiwar overtones, but this is Chicago without the fisticuffs, without the fight, without the bloodshed - so far," Mr. Gergen added. "To interpret this politically is hard, but my gut is that large, peaceful protests are not what the Republicans want. The protesters are stealing the story for the first day and drowning out the Republican message. If there's violence, that could all change."

To be sure, a seething anger pulsed throughout the protesting crowds. T-shirts and signs branded Mr. Bush a warmonger, a liar or a criminal, and there were fly-swatters with an image of his face. Two protesters, Jim Higgins and Kathy Roberts, dressed in suits made of duct tape to spoof Mr. Bush's handling of national security.

"We're occupying Iraq, but we're using duct tape here at home," Mr. Higgins said.

Moira Weidenborner, an English teacher and native New Yorker, sat on the corner of 14th Street and Seventh Avenue before the march began, straw hat in hand, in a shirt that said: "Justice, No War." She said the people she had met on the streets were "a very broad spectrum."

"There's all this attention on the radicals, which makes me upset," Ms. Weidenborner said. "Look around you today: It is middle class, it is working class, it is just people who want to speak their mind."

But Jason Glodt, executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party, said he thought the protesters did "reflect the base of the Democratic Party," and added: "I hope that all Americans are taking a close look at those protesters and what they represent. I don't think they represent American values.

"It's not their freedom of speech that we disagree with," Mr. Glodt said, "it's the content of what they're saying. It really only motivates us even more to go home and work harder at the grass-roots level and make sure people are going out and voting."

I don't know how this resonates with you, but the suggestion that Democratic values and ideals are somehow unAmerican just pisses me off. Of all the crap the Repubs have pulled in the last ten years, this is the most offensive. There are a whole host of things that reasonable people can disagree about without becoming disagreeable. With this tactic, the Rs have become not just disagreeable, but offensive. When you label your opponant as unworthy of argument, you've marginalized yourself. This is another piece of the Gingrich legacy.

Takin' it to the Streets

AP takes a similar tack.

Protesters Pour Into Manhattan Streets
On Eve of GOP Convention, Thousands Demonstrate Against Bush and Iraq War

By Sara Kugler
The Associated Press
Sunday, August 29, 2004; 5:24 PM

NEW YORK -- Bearing flag-draped boxes resembling coffins and fly-swatters with President Bush's image, more than 100,000 protesters peacefully swarmed Manhattan's streets on the eve of the Republican National Convention to demand that President Bush be turned out of office.

Flanked by police in riot gear, the protesters moved through the fortified city, loudly and exuberantly chanting slogans such as "No more years." They accused the Bush White House of prosecuting an unjust war in Iraq, making the country poorer and undermining abortion rights.

There were no reports of major violence and about 100 scattered arrests.

Police gave no official crowd estimate, though one law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, put the crowd at 120,000; organizers claimed it was roughly 400,000.

The march snaked in a circular route around midtown Manhattan, shutting down dozens of blocks and bringing out hordes of police in a city already girded against terrorist attacks.

"They chose New York, where they're universally hated," said writer Laurie Russo, 41, of the New York borough of Queens. "They should have gone somewhere they're more welcome. They exploited 9/11 by having it in New York at this time."

In the largest set of arrests, some 50 protesters on bicycles who stopped near the parade route were carted away in an off-duty city bus. Also, 10 people were arrested after someone set a paper dragon float afire near Madison Square Garden, site of the convention, and nine demonstrators tried to prevent the arrest, authorities said. The nine were charged with assault.

"There's been a few minor arrests," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. "It has been peaceful."

Residents leaned from windows along the demonstration route to shout their support. Scattered opposition was visible only around Madison Square Garden, where the GOP convention opens Monday. Some early convention arrivals looked across police lines, shouting at demonstrators: "Go home!"

"I hope this shows the world that they're not alone in their hatred of George Bush," said Alan Zelenki of Eugene, Ore., who planned for three months to attend this week's protests.

I watched it on C-Span, which is, I think, looking for ways to expand its role in this election season. I'm a big fan of Brian Lamb's networks. I thought they did a nice job with minimal commentary. The spectacle of the flag-draped coffins was extraordinarily moving. For a decentralized protest, this one really looked effective. I'd have been there if I weren't starting a new job in the morning.

John Kerry has energized a whole lot more than his base. He's not a perfect candidate, but the alternative is so perfectly awful that JFK is pulling in an interesting coalition. By the way, I'm pretty sure that the Repubs are on the verge of a major split, win or lose this fall. The Dems have internal tensions in their broad coalition but they don't have internal contradictions, which the Repubs do right now. Their moral theology is going to tear them apart.

Scary Thoughts

Off the Bench
By DAHLIA LITHWICK

Published: August 29, 2004

The Supreme Court is by far the most mysterious branch of government - its members glimpsed only rarely, like Bigfoot, crashing through the forest at twilight. The court is the one branch that operates in near secrecy - no cameras, no tape recorders, no explanations, no press conferences, rare interviews, no review by other branches. The most powerful branch is also the most enigmatic. They love it that way.

So how do the justices spend their summers? Some travel to exotic locales, where they get paid lots of money to teach at fabulous seaside summer law school programs. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught at Hofstra University law school's program in Nice, France, this summer, while Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist taught at Tulane's program at Cambridge.

What else do they do with their summers? Since all four justices over age 70 are hostages to their mutually-assured-destruction refusal to retire (each unwilling to give an opposing president the chance to fill a seat), they probably do lots of resting. Even one extra day on that court may mean casting the deciding vote in Bush v. Kerry - a case poised to detonate over the legal landscape this winter, the moment the recount starts in Ohio.

Shunning travel and speeches, Justice David Souter - the man who says cameras will be rolled into the Supreme Court only over his dead body - hightails it home to New Hampshire each summer, where, like Punxsutawney Phil's New England cousin, he'll hide out until the first Monday in October. Justice Souter will under no circumstances be found in a Louisiana duck blind, where Justice Antonin Scalia is rumored to spend his summers hunting with his pal Dick Cheney.

Moreover, that rumor is totally unfair to Justice Scalia.

Duck season in Louisiana doesn't start until November.

Perhaps the most emblematic justice is Clarence Thomas, who spends much of his summer touring the country in a used bus that's been converted into a luxury motor home. That bus is the perfect symbol for a man who won't read newspapers, or engage audiences that don't share his ideology. It allows him to roam the country, hermetically sealed and unreachable inside a moving fortress.

Ultimately, that's what members of the Supreme Court do each summer - they roam the world, safe with their secrets, secure in their lifetime appointments, unaccountable and unavailable to voters or presidents.

And just as the presidential candidates beg you to know them - to look deep in their eyes and see their souls - the Supreme Court justices beg to be forgotten. They still believe that their sole authority rests in the myth that they are oracles. That's why it's not in their interest to remind you that you'll be picking the next Supreme Court with your vote come November. We forget that appointing judges may be the single most important thing a president does - it's easy to forget it when they've fixed it so you can't even pick Anthony Kennedy out of a lineup.

(He's the guy who looks like Ken Starr.)

Trust me, beneath their sunblock, and their duck hats, sit the nine most powerful, secretive public officials in this land. And whether you can name them or not is immaterial. Because after November, that president whose soul you've come to know so well is going to start naming a whole lot of their successors.

This is the non-reducible bottom for this fall's election and the reason why discussions about whether or not it would be tactically better for the Dems to win the Senate than the White House are absurd. A Bush win would mean a theocracy constructed with the aid of the SCOTUS.

Crime Family

I noted the publication of Kevin Phillip's American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush back in January. A "traditional" conservative, his antipathy for the Bush family hasn't abated and he puts in an appearance in the WaPo today.

Conservatives for Kerry? Here's Your Man.
An Old Nixon Hand Smacks the Bushes

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page D01

LITCHFIELD, Conn. -- Utter three words -- George Walker Bush -- and watch eminent author Kevin Phillips, a longtime Republican, a former Nixon aide and past party theoretician, pucker like he has inhaled a pickle.

"I've never understood why we take Bush and his family seriously," he says. "They come from the investment-inherited-money wing of the Republican Party. They display no real empathy for anyone who is not of their class."

He pauses a few seconds as his fingers execute a tap dance on his picnic table.

"They aren't supply-siders; they're crony-siders. As far as I'm concerned, I would put Bush on a slow boat to China with all full warning to the Chinese submarine fleet."

Silence again. Phillips sits on his back porch and looks at you from under hooded eyes, with only the vaguest hint of a chipmunk smile. He's a curious cat, this 63-year-old Nixon-era Republican populist. His best-selling, muckraking book on the family that has held the presidency for eight of the past 16 years, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," is a sustained rummage through the Bush family closet. He pulls out all manner of files on the early Bushes and the Walker branch of the family, and their dealings with post-World War I German industrialists and post-World War II Saudi princelings. And he draws a bright connecting line between those wheeler-dealer financiers and their Texas-lite descendants.
....
What bothers him is that generation after generation of Bushes are so unwilling to transcend their class interests.

"An old buccaneer and bootlegger like Joe Kennedy became an SEC head for Roosevelt and cracked down on his own class," Phillips says, adding: "The Bush family would just appoint a Gucci-shoe-licking sycophant. The family has simply developed a culture of being enormously supportive of their class."

Even the president's Texas twang grates on Phillips, whose own accent is clipped and clear and, we must note, a tad patrician. "Listen to them! Assemble the very best panel of linguists you could find and have them listen to brothers Jeb and G.W. -- they wouldn't even guess they're in the same family," Phillips says. "G.W. talks like a cowboy and he's no more a backwoods Texan than I am."

So what's an Nixon-Eisenhower Republican to do when he steps inside a voting booth in November 2004? Phillips shrugs. As it stands, Kerry has his vote, although the text of Phillips's endorsement probably won't appear in any Democratic ads. "I'm hoping that Kerry's a seven on a scale of 10, but I'm afraid maybe he's just a five," Phillips says. "But Kerry's running against a zero. So my choice is clear."

This pretty much sums it up: a fake, a fraud, an incompetent. A lie on two legs. A class warrior with nothing but contempt for the working people of this country. We get the next four days to see how the corporate Repubs are going to put lipstick on this pig.

Contrary to the bobbleheads, the CW on the lefty web is that it is already over: no one who voted for Gore is going to vote for Bush, all the defections are going to go in the other direction. I'm not so sure it's over. If any one of the fifty-eleven investigations into various Bush administration crimes breaks open into the news, everythig could chage very quickly, but I don't see much interest on the part of our drowsy media.

Performance Review

Ten Reasons

(1) He has divided the country; we are all part of a vicious little hissing match. We were united and humbled on Sept. 12, 2001. We are divided and humiliated now, telling lies about each other.

(2) He has divided the world. "We are all Americans now," headlined Le Monde on that Sept. 12. Now there are days when it seems as if they are all anti-Americans.

(3) He is leaving no child or grandchild without debt. He has taken the government from surplus into deficit in the name of national security and increased private investment. We can pay the debt in two ways: with more government revenues (taxation) or by borrowing -- against the sweat and income of new generations. The president has chosen to borrow.

(4) He campaigns as a champion of smaller government, but is greatly increasing the size and role of government. Ideological conservatism, it turns out, costs just as much or more than ideological liberalism. Conservative and liberal politicians are both for increasing the reach and power of government. The difference between them is which parts and functions of the state are to be empowered and financed. The choice is between military measures and order, or more redistribution of income. Money is power.

(5) He is diminishing the military of which he is so proud now as commander in chief. The invasion and occupation of Iraq (news - web sites) have obviously not worked out the way he imagined -- naked torture was not the goal. But the far greater problem for the future is that our proud commander has revealed the hollowness behind the unilateral superpower. From the top down, we have not been able to win Iraq, much less the world. And going into Iraq has compromised or crippled the war on terror he declared himself.

(6) He is diminishing scientific progress, the great engine of the 20th century. Only the truly ignorant can believe that the proper role of government is to hinder medical research and environmental study in the name of God.

(7) He is diminishing the Constitution of the United States. Cheesy tricks like amending the great text of freedom to attack homosexuality can be dismissed as wedge politics. But it is worse to preach against an activist judiciary while appointing more activist judges who happen to hold different beliefs, particularly the idea that civil liberties are the enemies of patriotism, security and freedom itself.

(8) He has surrounded himself with other incompetents. The secretary of state is presiding over the rape of diplomacy and its alliances. The secretary of defense has sent our young men and women into situations they were never meant or trained to handle, and now they are being ordered into battle by an appointed minister in a faraway land. The national security adviser does not seem to know that her job description includes coordinating defense and diplomacy. And then there was our $340,000-a-month local hire, Ahmed Chalabi, sitting in the gallery of our House.

(9) He has been unable or unwilling to deal with declining employment and the rising medical costs of becoming an older nation.

(10) He is, as if by design, destroying the credibility of the United States as a force for peace in the world -- an honest broker -- particularly in the Middle East.

The list is longer, miscalculation after miscalculation. President Bush has not been able to function effectively at this pay grade. He may mean well, but this has been a difficult time, and he is in over his head. We and our kids will pay the price for his blundering, blunderbuss adventure in Washington. He has been tested in a difficult time -- and, unhappily for all of us and the world, he has not been up to the job.

Isn't this the bottom line? He's not up to the job. It is that simple.

Compassion

Dear Team,

I've been deeply moved and very gratified by all the encouragement and congratulations you've sent my way as I begin this transition from 13 unemployed months to a new career in a new field, one that I didn't know even existed a week ago. One that I'm still not sure I have the chops for today. I'm going to be on a steep learning curve. The glory part is that the field is still new enough that EVERYBODY is on a steep learning curve, and I've got a boss who hired me for my work ethic and willingness to try, my commitment to helping others on the staff learn and my desire to "show up excellent," an ego which rejects the "average" work product.

I spent last evening on the phone with Susie Madrak, the Suburban Guerrilla, who called to offer her congrats and commisseration, and we talked a lot about work ethos, the spirituality of work and related topics. Work and spirituality are not separate things, they are all the ways we live and who we are. Suze and I are at one on this. She's still unemployed, by the way, and if you are in a position to hire a gifted writer in Philly, I urge you to click on the link and take a look. She has a gimlet editor's eye for a story. I've never met someone who can pick up the critical detail in the news the way she does. Atrios is good, Susie is better.

I've been rotating the blog in my mind today, and letting it reach out and touch my heart and my gut, the critical elements in its evolution. And I decided I want to tell you something.

Since 1998 I've been living in a world which is so poor that I haven't been able to want anything. For the last two years, I haven't even been able to need anything. Healthcare for me and veterinary care for the cats have been out the window, I've been buying groceries on the fund you've provided. Your generosity has fed the cats and me for the last six months. Think about that for a moment. You actually changed someone's life. And you could do it again, 25 dollars at a time. You are a force to be reckoned with.

Would you consider changing another lefty blogger's life for the better? Jim Capazzola and Susie Madrak are barely hanging on. It took me 13 months to find a job in Bush's economy. Both of my friends are used to working hard, neither are slackers, but they aren't investment bankers in New York, which seems to be the employment strategy for team Bush. If you can hit their tip jars with some help, you'd be doing a kindness to a fellow human who wants to work, isn't some sort of loser who made bad choices, and I'd appreciate it. Remember, the Reagan/Bush doctrine is that if you are unemployed, it means you aren't trying hard enough and it is your fault. Pure Calvinism. The millions who are unemployed are going to be so voting against the Bush Doctrine on economics that I think this election is no longer going to be close.

Next up: the culture wars. Give me a couple of days. I'm moving into longer form blogging while I'm negotiating a change in job/lifestyle. The next week will be an experiment in form and I invite your input.

Shove this Job to the Third World

Office of Tomorrow Has an Address in India
U.S. companies that discreetly embrace outsourcing find workers -- accountants typists, editors -- who are eager and talented.

By David Streitfeld, Times Staff Writer

MADRAS, India — Task by task, function by function, the American office is being hollowed out and reconstituted in places like this, a makeshift facility on the sixth floor of a shopping arcade.

OfficeTiger Ltd., one of the most prominent and aggressive of a new breed of outsourcing companies, has hired 2,000 Indians, most of them young and all of them relentlessly gung-ho.

They work as typists, researchers, librarians, claims processors, proofreaders, accountants and graphic designers. Their clients are U.S. brokerage firms, investment banks, law firms and even copy shops.

The Indians take on jobs both big — 100-page investment reports requiring weeks of work — and small. Iayaraja Marimuthu, for instance, is designing a program for next month's wedding of Ann and John, a Texas couple proclaiming their joy in being "together for life." It will take him less than an hour.

Outsourcing, which started with U.S. firms laying off software programmers and call center workers and hiring cheaper employees overseas, is now stretching to encompass almost any kind of work that is done on a computer and is orderly and repetitive in structure. That's a vast category that stretches from copy editing to financial analysis to tax preparation.

Just as voice mail reduced the need for receptionists and word processors transformed the traditional role of secretaries, outsourcing is beginning to reshape the American office, eliminating some jobs and redefining others. Its proponents say it will lift the burden of tedious chores from millions of office workers, giving them more time to spend on challenging and creative enterprises.

"We're allowing employees to delve deeper, to learn more, to push the boundaries of what had been standard work," says OfficeTiger's American co-founder, Joe Sigelman.

That's one side of the argument.

But for other employees, outsourcing means the permanent threat of dismissal in favor of someone who can do the same job for one-tenth the salary.

It also means revamping the methods of entering certain professions, including law and finance. There's a time-honored tradition in those fields of making new associates do the drudgery. It teaches them the subject and winnows the number of aspirants to the truly dedicated. That won't happen if the drudgery is shipped elsewhere.

Those happy Indian workers don't understand that they are being Wal-marted. The jobs that they are taking from North Carolina and West Virginia will show up in Maylasia next.

Until the planet gets serious about understanding the capital is portable, we are going to be a Wal-Mart world. I don't find that attractive.

David and Goliath

If Ben Barnes didn't help W jump to the front of a line for the TANG that was several thousand long, who did? CNN is treating Barnes' statement as just another piece of opinion, rather than a matter of historical fact. One would think the guy knows what he did. In other news, the most expensive war in American history is going like this:

After 3 Weeks of Fighting in Najaf, 1 Riddle: Who Won?
By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: August 29, 2004

NAJAF, Iraq — In a single moment last week, all the mystery and contradiction surrounding Moktada al-Sadr, Iraq's rebel cleric, came into focus.

It was near midnight Thursday, and the 50-odd reporters following the fighting here were hustled from their hotel by the local police and gathered for a press conference in the courtyard of a home where the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country most powerful Shiite leader, was staying.

Just as one of Ayatollah Sistani's aides stood to announce that a peace deal had been struck, Mr. Sadr, the man most responsible for the bloodshed, scurried out the front door, across the lawn and into the street.

And then he was gone.

The moment seemed to encapsulate the conflicting currents that have made Mr. Sadr, and his relationship to the Iraqi and American governments, so hard to fathom.

It was Mr. Sadr, after all, whose Mahdi Army began the current round of bloodletting by attacking a police station earlier this month after the Iraqi police arrested one of his aides. It was Mr. Sadr who had turned the Imam Ali Shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, into a fortress from which he dared the government and the Americans to expel him. And it was Mr. Sadr, facing an indictment for the murder of a rival cleric, who had mocked the Iraqi government's efforts to arrest him.

Yet for all of that, the burden of announcing the tentative peace accord had fallen to Ayatollah Sistani, the country's most revered religious figure. Mr. Sadr was allowed to dash out the front door.

The kid-glove treatment of Mr. Sadr here, after days of fighting that left hundreds of Iraqis dead, points up the dilemma faced by American commanders and Iraq's new leaders. As much as both groups would like to capture or kill Mr. Sadr - and there is no doubt that they would - neither the American military nor Iraq's American-appointed government feels politically strong enough to get away with it.

It is for that reason, too, that Mr. Sadr and his Mahdi Army will almost certainly be back.

"No one can defeat the Mahdi Army," said Arkan Rahim, a 30-year-old Iraqi who fought the entire three week-long battle. "The Mahdi Army is all Iraqis, the whole Iraqi nation."

An Accord for Now, But Risks Ahead

By Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 28, 2004; Page A01

The Najaf deal may bring short-term peace to the ravaged holy city after three weeks of urban warfare, but the cease-fire terms could pose a long-term danger to U.S. troops and interests in Iraq, U.S. officials and Middle East experts said yesterday. The issues underlying the bloody showdown have not been resolved, they warned.

Rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr is free and capable of rallying his dispersed forces in other Shiite strongholds, many of which are already political cauldrons. The goal of dismantling all Iraq's illegal militias -- with Sadr's Mahdi Army as the test case -- remains elusive for a vulnerable new government struggling to assert centralized control. And the United States has been stuck with the bill for damage to Najaf as part of the deal, the officials and experts said.

U.S. military strategy has also suffered a blow, particularly since Najaf is the third confrontation in five months in which Iraqi insurgents fought American troops until they began to take losses, then agreed to a cease-fire so their fighters could rest and regroup. The fear is that Iraqis now believe they can pick the time and place of their attacks and then beat a safe retreat.

"What we will see here is that the Mahdi Army will just rearm, recruit a new group of fighters and move to another city," said retired Marine Lt. Col. Rick Raftery, an intelligence officer who served in Iraq. "We'll be playing 'whack-a-mole' somewhere else shortly."

Ask yourself the question, why is the most powerful nation on earth reduced to fighting a rag-tag "army" to a draw? Because 1.) we shouldn't be in Iraq in the first place and 2.) Rummy is the new MacNamara. This is the height of self-deception.

Ch-chch-changes

More changes, gang. This week turned out 'way different than anything I expected.

When I started on Wednesday, it was with the expectation of 10 weeks of conference planning/marketing/recruitment for an annual event. My boss was going to rent me quarter time to the COO after the initial crunch in order to look into some "issues" with their brand new data base which has just received all the data reported by the old system. The new system does a lot more things and is highly functional for workgroups outside the fund development shop. And it really is an interlocking workgroup product. The COO's thinking evolved a lot this week and he'd decided by the time I came aboard that they we're probably going to have to hire a d-base administrator to be available to the staff full time, as the entire staff, program to development to education, was going to be using it. I was offered the job this afternoon and accepted it.

When I took this temp position, I thought it was so I could get a foot in the door for openings in the development side. It never occured to me that my geeky side was the employable part. I know a fair amount about d-bases and have used probably dozens of programs, as well as designing the query architecture for a few more. My first real job after undergraduate school was training HR departments,payroll departments and bookkeepers how to use computer data bases and spreadsheets, back in the day when mainframes just became a regular feature of working life, before PCs. Most of you are probably too young to remember when most offices, even pretty big ones, kept their records typed on paper, or in reports generated by punch cards. I was present at the creation of the tech revolution and one of its early enthusiasts. I built my first PC out of a kit from a catalog, soldering iron and all, and went on to own iterations of each generation of the changes. I've designed data bases, word processors and spread sheets from CP/M, Basic and DOS command lines, but when the GUI revolution hit the PC standard, I retired from the design world, in favor of putting those apps into real world use as a writer, organization builder, fundraiser and artist. Now, it seems that this piece of my past is asking for updating. Back at the beginning, I was explaining interactive software to end users and this is what I'll be doing again, in a new environment. It's still all about teaching, which has been the one constant in my life. Teaching and relationships, which is what fund development is, too.

I view this past week with astonishment. Me? A geek? As I shook hands with my new boss I commented that I think I'm going to get awfully geeky. He said, "No, just geekier." I didn't see this one coming but my friend, Sharon, who put me on this path, did. We'll be peers now, in different pipestems of the organization, both of us aware that there are both dangers and delights in two old friends working for the same organization. We both report to the same boss, you can see the issues. I can't be seen as favoring her part of the staff, and I'm a sole operator who reports to the head cheese in admin. Sharon and I are both aware of the pitfalls. We'll make some mistakes and we'll learn. We are both good at viewing and understanding human systems, both of us natural anthropologists and sociologists. She knows where the alliances and informal power structures are, as well as the top-down, so I'm not swimming without a clue.

For this blog, and for you: hey, thanks for reading while I just put more personal content on the Web than I ever have. The blog has been a part of my personal process since the day we went live, but you are seeing a window I want to continue to keep open--not because I want to turn this into Bridget Jones' Diary, I don't, but because this blog is in the early stages of an interactive change and I want you to know about it and participate in it.

For the next couple of weeks, my work life is going to be consuming. It probably won't fit very neatly within a forty hour week. You'll get a couple of posts per day out of me, but my writing is also changing, pulling me into longer form pieces. I've got some magazine comissions and I'm pulled to longer form writing. The Blog will emerge from all of this as something new after Labor Day, when you all have the time to pay attention again. Between now and then, I have some serious thinking to do about the direction.

When my current responsibilities are over, I'm going to be a tech geek, attached to the pipeline, and able to post nearly at will. What do I want to post, what do you want to read? That is the state of the question. I won't be able to provide a daily journal as I have in the past, but I'm not interested in that either. I don't want to be Atrios, Kos, Steve Gilliard or Paul Woodward. I think I have something else to offer but I work best by collaboration and I want to know what you think. Become the new Bump. What you say matters.

Now I'm going to go celebrate, and spend the weekend buying some clothes. I haven't bought any since 1998. Poverty is a hard school.

Melanie

Omnium Gatherum

I slept in this morning, so the morning report will be short. The good news is that the office is still on "summertime," a halfday on Fridays, and I'll be home early to pick up the papers.

Iraqis Stream Into Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 27, 2004; 4:12 AM

BAGHDAD, Aug. 27 – Scores of militiamen loyal to rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr put down their weapons in Najaf Friday as thousands of Iraqis streamed into the once-besieged shrine of Imam Ali following an agreement brokered overnight by the top Shiite Muslim religious figure in Iraq.

Under the agreement, rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr pledged to withdraw his militia from the contested shrine and other parts of the city of Najaf after three weeks of fighting against U.S. and Iraqi forces.

The country’s interim government, in turn, made significant concessions. In exchange for Sadr's compliance, the government pledged to pull U.S. military forces out of Najaf and to allow Sadr, who had been wanted by the former U.S. occupation authority on murder charges, to participate in politics.

"He is as free as any Iraqi citizen to do whatever he would like in Iraq," said Qasim Dawood, a minister of state, after announcing the government's acceptance of the peace plan arranged by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

At 6:30 a.m. Friday, authorities in Najaf permitted the pilgrims to enter the city and walk toward the shrine. The crowd, estimated at more than 10,000 people, was searched for weapons by Iraqi police officers at the edge of Najaf's Old City district, where the shrine is located.

Two hours later, a message conveyed from Sadr was broadcast from the shrine's loudspeakers instructing militiamen to depart with the crowd. "Drop your weapons and leave Najaf and Kufa," the announcement said. "You have done a great job."

Scores of Sadr's militiamen were seen dropping off their weapons at Sadr’s office near the shrine. Those who had been dressed in black shirts and black trousers—the uniform of the Mahdi Army--changed into normal clothes and joined the throng of people.

It was unclear how thoroughly the Mahdi Army was complying with the orders to hand in weapons, however.

Ahmed Shaibani, a Sadr spokesman, pledged that the city would soon be free of militants. He said that members of Sadr’s Mahdi Army would return to their homes and that leaders of the movement would go back to the religious schools that they had been attending.

If that happens—Sadr does not have a good track record when it comes to peace agreements--it would end a conflict that has claimed hundreds of lives and roiled Iraq's Shiite majority, who have been concerned that using force to resolve the standoff could damage the gold-domed edifice.

"Iraq has achieved a victory today," Dawood said at a Thursday night news conference. "No more fights. Najaf and Kufa will be peaceful cities, free from arms, free from militias."

Since I'm not Juan Cole and don't have any scholarly objectivity to protect in this situation (but if you aren't reading him everyday, you are missing 90% of what is happening in Arab lands) allow me to make the following observations:

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is the most powerful man in Iraq. By treating with him successfully, Moqtada has become the power broker of the poor of the slums in the Shiite south. Ayyad Allawi maybe a strong man and a thug, but he has just been made extraneous, for all the world to see, even John Negroponte.

The emergence of the Shiite cleric as the real power in Iraq (this was predictable, and predicted by everyone from me to Juan to Steve Gilliard) is going to make the Sunni, Turkmen and Kurds less than happy. They are restive now, whether or when they will be provoked to uprising is a guess.

Allawi and the fake council which was just selected will have everything they do ratified or vetoed by Sistani. They were a joke before, they are extraneous now. Note to Ambassador Negroponte: the same is true for you.

Over at DKos, Tom Schaller notes that American deaths in Iraq so far this year have now exceeded those for all of 2003. My best guess is that we can say the same for Iraqi civilian deaths, but I think the order of magnitude is probably much different. (Note: I've received an invitation to produce an article for Dr. Schaller's publication, The Gadflyer, and I'll have more to say as we get closer to the publication date. Tom and I have just opened the discussion of a topic for the piece. He has such a strong stable of writers that I don't want to duplicate anything they are quite capable of producing in-house.)

Dr. Cole made his usual reasoned and thoughtful presentation on The Newshour last night. Click on the link above and read his site to hear him without the constraints of a chiron which offers his academic credential. And thank him for offering the public service of a daily update in addition to all of his academic duties and his unlooked for role as news commentator on the TV and in the papers. This has cut deeply into his production as a scholar, but I think he finds it satisfying. Scholars write for other scholars, Dr. Cole is now hard at work for those of us in the lay community who are trying to learn and understand life in a conflict a half-world away which now has something to say about our fate. We owe him a debt of gratitude which we can never adequately repay. He has been one of the most reliable, thoughtful and reasoned Arabists working in public since our current madness began.

Fog of War

At Least 25 Killed in Mosque Attack in Kufa
Sistani Heads to Najaf in Attempt to End Uprising

By Michael Georgy
Reuters
Thursday, August 26, 2004; 5:41 AM

NAJAF, Iraq, Aug 26 (Reuters) - A mortar attack on a packed mosque in the town of Kufa on Thursday killed at least 25 people as Iraq's most influential Shi'ite cleric headed to the nearby holy city of Najaf to try to end a bloody three-week uprising.

The Interior Ministry said 60 people had been wounded in Kufa, where hundreds of supporters of rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr -- the firebrand leader behind the Najaf rebellion -- were in the town's main mosque when the mortar bomb hit.

Television pictures showed dozens of wounded men on the ground amid pools of blood or being ferried to Kufa's hospital.

Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was heading for Najaf to try to persuade Sadr's Mehdi Army militia to leave a sacred shrine where they are holed up and end fighting with U.S. marines that has killed hundreds of people.

Both Sistani and Sadr called on their supporters to converge on Najaf.

Supporters of Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric were fired upon in the town of Kufa and 20 people were killed, a Reuters witness said. It was unclear who opened fire.

Sadr supporters marching to Najaf from Kufa were also attacked and several were wounded, witnesses scene.

A senior aide travelling with Sistani on the lengthy journey from the southern city of Basra said the 73-year-old Iranian-born cleric would not delay his trip despite the Kufa bloodshed, which could ignite passions among Sadr's supporters.

At the moment we don't know who was responsible for the attack on the Kufa mosque, but let's say the "coalition" forces are under reasonable suspicion. Combine this with American conduct in Fallujah, Najaf and Abu Ghraib, rumors of mass executions in Afghanistan and you have to wonder if there is anything left of the American image around the world.

I heard Brooking's Michael O'Hanlon on NPR make the point, a good one, that America looks very much like Billy in the "Family Circus" comic: things get broken and "I don't know" is responsible. A few low-level functionaries take the fall. Plausible deniability remains supreme at the highest level. Honor, personal or national, is sacrificed for the trappings of power.

If there is anything left of the American Republic in five years, I wonder how we will look back on these dark years? The judgement of history has been rendered on our Viet Nam misadventure, and yet we are still fighting that war among ourselves.

The Responsibility Administration

No Smoking Gun
By DAHLIA LITHWICK

Published: August 26, 2004

It has been four months since the photos from Abu Ghraib came to light, and America still can't decide what to make of them. Yes, they're appalling. But who's to blame? With the release of two new reports this week, we still can't quite connect the torture and abuse to the commander in chief or his defense secretary; we still can't quite find that smoking gun.

Because there's never going to be a smoking gun.

If you're waiting around for evidence of the phone call from Donald Rumsfeld to Pfc. Lynndie England - the one where he orders the "code red," instructing her to pile up a bunch of naked, hooded men and strike a queen-of-the-mountain pose - you'll wait forever. That's not how armies function. Armies depend on the realities of the chain of command and the cha-cha of plausible deniability.

This week's report by the James Schlesinger panel offers the closest thing we'll get to a smoking gun. Connect the dots and it's all there: the sadism at Abu Ghraib stemmed from "confusion." Confusion sounds accidental - like maybe it just blew in off the Atlantic - but the report is clear that this confusion resulted from systemic failures at the highest levels. The report faults ambiguous interrogation mandates, an inadequate postwar plan, poor training and a lack of oversight. It notes that much of this confusion stemmed from the Bush administration's posture that the Geneva Conventions applied only where the president saw fit, and that the definition of "interrogation" was up for grabs at Guantánamo Bay, thus possibly at Abu Ghraib.

Or you can put your ear right up to the horse's mouth, where - even before the Schlesinger report - Mr. Rumsfeld owned the blame. "These events occurred on my watch. As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them and I take full responsibility," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee last May. But we live in an era when such words are intended to signify simultaneous culpability and absolution.

Mr. Schlesinger's insistence that Mr. Rumsfeld not leave office - because his departure would "be a boon to all of America's enemies" - is a pragmatic argument. It doesn't even pretend to be a just one.

You can choose to connect these dots, or cast your vote in November based on whether Colonel Mustard was in a Swift boat with a lead pipe. But Abu Ghraib can't be blamed solely on bad apples anymore. It was the direct consequence of an administration ready to bargain away the rule of law. That started with the suspension of basic prisoner protections, because this was a "new kind of war." It led to the creation of a legal sinkhole on Guantánamo Bay. And it reached its zenith when high officials opined that torture isn't torture unless there's some attendant organ failure.

The very concepts of responsibility and accountability have become completely debased there are no consequences. Donald Rumsfeld oversees a military establishment which is, apparently, completely out of control. James Schlesinger couldn't be more wrong: it is Rumsfeld who gives aid and comfort to America's enemies through incompetence and shocking disregard for the sensibilities of the rest of the world, which creates more enemies. If this is the kind of "wise advisor" Bush surrounds himself with, it is long past time to get a clue. The rest of the planet surely has.

The Provinces

A degree in bullying and self-interest? No thanks

The decline of American studies reveals our increasing dislike of the US
Polly Toynbee
Wednesday August 25, 2004

The Guardian

Turn to the Guardian's university clearing pages and there are many vacancies for a subject that was once hugely popular. Until recently, American studies departments sprang up everywhere. But no longer.

Now 28 universities still have American studies places unfilled, and they include many at well-regarded institutions - Essex, Keele, Kent and Swansea among them. Due to lack of demand, five universities have closed American studies departments while others have cut staff. Keele, traditionally the top-ranking American studies department, with a maximum, grade five ranking for research for the past few years, has had to fire half its staff. Professor Ian Bell at Keele says: "Students don't want to be branded by doing American studies. They still want to do American modules as part of English or history but, after Bush, they shy away from being labelled as pro-American - not after the obscenity of Iraq."

It's only a straw in the wind: student choices are notoriously fickle. But it fits the picture of a groundswell of anti-American feeling. Where in the world could you walk down the street and not collect overwhelmingly negative vox pops on Bush's America and its global impact? Last year's BBC/ICM poll, taken in a string of countries across the continents, found only Israel in support of Bush - with Canada, Australia and Korea least unfavourable, but still with a majority against.

That is not necessarily the same as anti-Americanism. The Bushites in their daily, foul-mouthed email assaults on Guardian writers try to portray current anti-American sentiment as racist, akin to anti-semitic. They try to pretend "old" Europe is just effetely snobbish about the Ugly Americans. They dismiss anti-Bush disgust in developing countries as envy and as ignorant support for terror.

But opinion polls make it clear that people are well able to separate their feelings about Americans from the politicians and policies now occupying the White House: 81% of the British say, "I like the Americans as people", according to Mori, but only 19% admire American society. They overwhelmingly reject the proposition "We would be better off if we were more like the Americans in many respects" - the view of the right and of younger Tories infatuated with US neo-conservatism.

How much wider the Atlantic has grown under Bush. A Mori poll for the German Marshall Fund examined European attitudes towards America. It found massive condemnation of US Middle East policy (among the British just as strongly) and equally strong opprobrium for US policies on global warming and nuclear proliferation. Most Europeans - the British too - want the European Union to become a superpower to match the US, with a strong leadership in world affairs. (Americans said they wanted to be the only superpower.) Yet there was also surprisingly strong support among two-thirds of Europeans for strengthening Nato - even in France.

However, President Bush's election pledge this week to withdraw 70,000 troops from Germany and Korea may bring an abrupt end to Europe's old doublethink on Nato. If the troops go, it may force Europe to confront the hypocrisy of detesting America while relying on it to provide the defence European nations refuse to pay for. The Bushite emailers are justified in sneering, "We pulled your sorry asses out of two world wars" (the printable version), and it's just as well Fox News hasn't covered celebrations in Paris this week that pretend France liberated itself, with never a mention of Europe's American saviours.

If a Bush victory brings a major withdrawal from Europe, it should prod the EU into coordinating its defence capability, without having to beg the US for a transport plane to mount every tiny border peacekeeping operation in Macedonia. If the EU starts to put its still considerable defence spending to better collective use, Bush won't like it: his ministers protested when Blair and Chirac began the task.

If Bush wins it may galvanise Europe into a stronger sense of what it must do in response. Forget Blair's phantom "bridge" across the Atlantic, and start building across the Channel. (Sadly there has been no growth in university applications to read European studies or languages.)

The world waits on the US elections with particular trepidation this time. The fall of the Berlin wall was a great opportunity missed for America the victor to become the global force for good it thinks it is. The fall of the twin towers was a chance to reclaim that lost global respect, but in every action Bush has swelled the ranks of those who cheered in the streets when it happened.

ICM's poll reveals a world that thinks America arrogant, less cultured, a worse place to live than their own countries and a threat to world peace. Is that hatred now irreversibly hardwired?

Even for Polly Toynbee, this piece has drifted a shade over the left edge, but she has a point. It is a measure of how far the US has fallen when The Guardian starts printing anti-American screeds. Most of the former Western Alliance are looking at our election this fall not as a referendum on Bush but as a referendum on American sanity. That probably isn't an argument you can use with your Aunt Tess or your neighbor, but keep it in abeyance, as I hope to have more later.

The rest of the world really does see the Bush presidency as some sort of collective nervous breakdown on our part, and they are hoping we recover soon. I'm still reeling from the fact that W could do so many things imbecile wrong and half the country still wants to re-elect him, including most of my relatives. He speaks to the fears and class hatreds of this country in a way I've heard few demagogues do, and he does it successfully. He provokes the "us and them" think which has always been part of the American wallpaper. The now-vanquished protection of two oceans has always kept us a provincial people, and Bush is a man of the province, of the small mind, of the threatened hearth. He makes Pat Buchanan look like an internationalist. Bush wants us to concentrate our fears, not just of the rest of the world, but of each other. And that is the most stinging indictment of his presidency and of his "christianity" that I can think of.