Needlenose

Steve Gilliard on tracking journalists
=http://www.dailyhowler.comDaily Howler[/url]
Atrios sounds the call
Dionne on the rational hatred of Bush
Recovery fragile
Krugman on so-called boom
TNR on Wolfy — focusing on postwar would have diminished support (implication –> just go in, we’ll be “too big to fail”)Early this week, the Republicans gave a preview of their strategy for taking down Howard Dean if he becomes the Democratic nominee for president:

“Voters don’t normally vote for an angry, pessimistic person to be president of the country,” Matthew Dowd, a senior Bush adviser, said as he pressed the anti-Dean theme this week in an interview at Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign headquarters. “They want somebody, even if times are not great, to be forward looking and optimistic.”

Atrios was right on the spot with the nightmare scenario of where this could be going:

Look for it to be coming out of every Republican’s mouth soon, and then it will increasingly creep into “objective” reporting. The process will go something like this. First, they’ll quote Bush campaign sources describing Dean as “pessimistic.” Next, they’ll move onto Democratic campaign sources, often anonymous, describing Dean as “pessimistic.” Next, they’ll stop bothering getting the quote and just write things like, “Some have criticized Dean for his unappealing pessimism…” And, then, finally, process complete, campaign analysis pieces in print and the “objective journalists” on the roundtable shows, will just write/say things like “Dean’s pessimistic rhetoric…” By the end no discussion or news story about Dean will see the light of day without the word “pessimism.”

Like it or not, this is the way the political game is played. Given that even most people who vote don’t pay much attention to campaigns, the Bushites have long since mastered the art of appealing to ignorance by pounding on broad, simple themes and visceral impressions.

But as I’ve noted before, Dean has some sense of how to play that thematic game, too. In one of my first Needlenose posts a year ago, I called this ability the key requirement for beating Bush, and Dean demonstrated it in again in an overlooked article in yesterday’s Washington Post:

“National security and economic security are the touchstones of the election,” he said in the interview after a rally Monday in Green Bay, Wis. “I think the president has been fairly reckless in just about every area I can think of.”

Dean accused Bush of taking “enormous risks” by refusing to negotiate with North Korea, permitting “warlords” to control much of Afghanistan and failing to address the most serious threats to homeland security.

. . . More than once, Dean drew direct connections between Bush’s 10-year, $3 trillion tax cuts and critical security investments. “If you think tax cuts are more important than homeland security, then I think you’ve made a mistake as president, and clearly that puts us in greater danger,” he said in the interview.

. . . By choosing “ideology over facts,” he added, the Republican administration is “not only a failure, but the most dangerous administration in my lifetime.”

The key isn’t just that he’s repeating his themes; it’s that he’s appealing to something that (in my opinion) people will find believable on a visceral level. Dubya works overtime trying to broadcast his steely determination and absolute certainty as part of his image as Decisive, Steadfast Bush. But the flip side of that is an inability to admit mistakes, arrogance, and a certain amount of mean-spiritedness — and even lazy observers can grasp that. I expect that Dean will keep pushing these rhetorical buttons, and I’m glad he will.

Unpleasant signs of what Iraq’s future holds continue to pop up in the supposedly “quiet” areas of the country. Reuters reports this from Kurdistan in the north:

At least five Iraqis were killed and more than 20 wounded Wednesday when gunfire erupted during a demonstration in Kirkuk, where Kurds are bidding for more control of the oil-rich northern city.

Several thousand Arab and Turkmen protesters marched on the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two main Kurdish factions, and surrounded the building, chanting “No to federalism, Kirkuk is Iraqi.”

Kirkuk’s chief of police said two people were killed in a burst of gunfire. Doctors said three more people died later at a nearby hospital and at least 20 were wounded.

Meanwhile, another Reuters article describes the plight of minority Christians in the Shiite south:

Since the war that toppled Saddam, armed groups have looted and set ablaze several liquor stores in the once freewheeling city, where Shi’ite religious parties now wield power and seek to impose strict moral regulations, similar to Iran’s.

More than 400 liquor stores run by Christians, the only community allowed to sell alcohol under the former Baathist government, were forced to close in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

. . . Iraqi Christians are terrified of armed Shi’ite groups, which have names like God’s Vengeance, God’s Party and the Islamic Bases Organization.

Their members roam the streets to chase mobsters, drug addicts and prostitutes, exacting their brand of what they call God’s law.

The common thread in these stories is ethnic majorities seeking to impose their political and social will by force, with virtually no resistance from the U.S. (which is too busy trying to keep its own troops from being blown up to bother with protecting Iraqi minorities).

Juan Cole has a more extensive roundup of recent news from Basra, including uncontrolled smuggling of oil and illegal drugs that the British openly confess they don’t have the troops to deal with.

Looks like getting a new government on its feet in time for Dubya to use it as a 2004 campaign prop isn’t going so well in that other country we invaded, either, as the New York Times is reporting for tomorrow’s paper:

The chairman walked out of the loya jirga on Tuesday as nerves began to snap on the 17th day of the grand council, gathered here to draw up a new constitution for Afghanistan.

The chairman, Sebaghatullah Mojadeddi, an elderly professor of Islam, suddenly walked out of his office and went home after speaking on the phone to President Hamid Karzai in the early afternoon.

The loya jirga was already at a standstill, with at least 100 delegates boycotting the voting on final amendments in protest at what many called government interference, and all the political leaders had converged on Mr. Mojadeddi’s office.

. . . The debate in its final stages has turned away from the hot topics of Islam, women and human rights, and centered on the struggle for power between the two main ethnic groups: the Pashtuns, who once more feel themselves in the ascendant, and the Tajiks, who have dominated Kabul since the fall of the Taliban.

The rivalry heated up when the Tajik camp accused the chairman and his deputies of rewriting parts of the constitution without consultation and of ignoring their proposed amendments. Sheik Muhammad Asif Mohseni, a Shiite mujahedeen leader, complained that five items agreed to by the working committees were omitted from the final draft.

. . . Mr Mojadeddi promised to work them into the draft, according to Dr. Muhaiuddin Mehdi, a delegate from Kabul who was in the group.

Then in a telephone call with President Karzai the chairman apparently cracked, Dr. Mehdi said. “On one side there is pressure from you and the other side it is the delegates’ views,” he told the president. “I cannot continue any longer.”

Mr. Mojadeddi left for home and returned only when Vice President Abdul Karim Khalili and Foreign Minister Abdullah went to his home to fetch him back, Dr. Mehdi said.

How lovely that, judging from the “there is pressure from you” remark, our handpicked President who looks so good in those jaunty caps is lobbying people to falsify supposedly democratically written documents. And just think, this is the same process the U.S is hoping to visit on Iraq in its best-case scenario (i.e., if they can get their own act together in time while avoiding pressure for full elections).

If only they’d worked out the kinks in this script before the curtain went up.

I haven’t been convinced that this was the best path, but it’s official, as Reuters reports:

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft will step aside from the politically charged investigation into a leak related to the Iraq war and the Justice Department will name a special prosecutor, department officials said on Tuesday.

The officials gave few details, saying only that Ashcroft was stepping down from the investigation and it would now be headed by the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, Patrick Fitzgerald.

Further details are expected at a 2 p.m. news conference.

The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into who had disclosed the identity of a CIA officer whose husband had challenged President Bush’s claims about Iraq’s weapons threat.

Disclosing the identity of a clandestine intelligence officer is a federal crime as is leaking classified information to the media.

My doubts about whether this development would be good news were based on the question of how politically biased the special prosecutor would be. And so, the question to be asked now is, who is Patrick Fitzgerald?

A quick Google search shows him to be a gung-ho prosecutor (which I guess is desirable) in Illinois who has agressively pursued cases on both sides of the political spectrum, filing charges against the Republican ex-governor as well as close associates of the Democratic mayor of Chicago.

The only real black mark I could find is that he does appear to be part of the right-wing legal network — as shown by his participation in a Federalist Society debate, arguing in support of the Patriot Act.

But at least he’s not Ken Starr. And the simple act of Ashcroft stepping aside in his favor communicates even to people who don’t follow the news that this is in fact a serious legal case.

Update: Fitzgerald is also a close friend of Ashcroft’s deputy secretary, the similarly not-obviously-political James Comey, who probably appointed Fitzgerald.

This morning’s batch of Iraq stories from major newspapers gives a few more swift kicks to the notion — previously ridiculed here but still being promoted in supposedly respectable corners — that lurching forward into an invasion with no postwar planning was actually a good plan.

For example, the best thing (perhaps the only thing) we can do to create goodwill over there is to spend money rebuilding the country. But as the Boston Globe reports, because our initial Calvinball approach to awarding contracts was designed for allowed so many blatant ripoffs, complaints have crippled the process:

The Pentagon has frozen new funds approved for Iraqi reconstruction amid growing allegations of corruption and cronyism associated with the rebuilding process.

. . . The freeze will almost certainly mean the United States will not issue new contracts until well after the initial Feb. 1 target date.

The Pentagon’s decision to delay Iraqi reconstruction is another setback for a process already hobbled by political insecurity and, increasingly, concerns over corruption and misconduct. The success of the US-led bid to remake Iraq politically depends largely on efforts to reverse the country’s chronic unemployment by repairing it economically.

. . . Bids for 26 contracts were to be submitted by Jan. 5. But that date has been postponed indefinitely.

Meanwhile, because the U.S. invaded with too few troops to secure the country and then compounded its error by disbanding Iraq’s army, it’s trying to compensate by hurriedly creating new Iraqi police and paramilitary forces. The Washington Post takes a skeptical look at the laughable training and screening process that has resulted:

According to investigations over the past four months by a newly formed internal affairs unit at the Interior Ministry, more than 200 Iraqi policemen in Baghdad have been dismissed and dozens of others have had their pay slashed for crimes ranging from pawning government equipment to extortion and kidnapping.

In addition, roughly 2,500 people on the payroll of the Facilities Protection Service, which guards government buildings, either do not exist or have not been showing up to work, investigators say. And a number of Border Patrol officers have been disciplined for accepting bribes in exchange for allowing people without proper identification to enter Iraq.

In a profile of ongoing anti-U.S. resentment in Fallujah, the Los Angeles Times shows how helpful the new Iraqi police are in assisting Americans against the guerrilla resistance:

Local police, too, remain reluctant to challenge the insurgents, many of whom are relatives. Capt. Ahmed Suleiman, who runs a police station in suburban Fallouja, said every time U.S. forces ask his men to join in a search for guerrillas, he must politely decline.

“We tell them, no, we can’t do that,” Suleiman said. “The moujahedeen would say we are collaborators. You work with the Americans, you die.”

Speaking of which, perhaps with a little more forethought, all those billions of dollars we’ve been spending to deal with an imaginary terrorist threat in Iraq would have been used to alleviate the real dangers in Pakistan — which, unlike Iraq, has nuclear weapons (not to mention a history of exporting nuclear technology) and is chock full of al-Qaeda members and sympathizers. The New York Times explains how the latter are putting a political squeeze on the military ruler there, a nominal ally of the U.S. … when they’re not trying to assassinate him, anyway:

The general now faces an “in-built contradiction,” said Mr. Rizvi, that will start showing strains soon: “On one hand it is clear he has to go against extremist Islamist groups, but he is in coalition with religious parties that support Al Qaeda and Taliban-like elements.”

Indeed, some elements in the coalition are perhaps allied to — and certainly sympathetic to — the militant groups now under scrutiny for trying to kill the president. They gained record support in elections last year after General Musharraf weakened mainstream secular political parties, which he apparently saw as a more direct threat.

. . . Equally unnerving is the prospect that the militants may be working with members of the security forces, whether the army or the police. Twice now potential assassins have effectively penetrated the president’s security cordon and identified which of multiple motorcades he was traveling in.

As others have noted, Pakistan falling into the direct or indirect control of Islamic radicals would be an almost unthinkable disaster for U.S. interests. Is it still so great that we don’t seem to have the slightest plan to prevent it, or deal with the (perhaps literal) fallout if it happens?

Update: I didn’t realize it when I posted, but the New York Times has more on this exact subject, as does See Why? (which is where I found the link).

…some of them are just slow, as evidenced by Repugnican Congressperson Christopher Cox who has finally figured out that the mis-Administration’s color-code bullshit alert system is needlessly alarming in its lack of specificity. Says Cox:

“…an awful lot of people who really can’t do much with this information other than hand-wring and hanky-twist. I think we always have to worry about scaring people to death. Right now, the color-code level is a one-size-fits-all notion. It applies to a quarter-billion people in America. We thought that over time if we continue to have this general alert system that people would begin to ignore the alert, and even states and localities and local officials would find that it would be hard to justify the increased expense.”

Of course maybe Repugs like Cox are actually smart, just illiterate (or Fox-disinformed) – for progressive bloggers, this is last year’s news. Check out my comments to Swopa’s January post on a typical Bushian ‘false alarm’ here:

“What good is a terrorist alert when you don’t know who, what, where, when & why? Not very useful in helping you avoid being a victim, but certainly good scaring the hell out of everybody.

Like the boy who cried wolf, repeated warnings with a high Terror Advisory Bullshit level will gradually result dull the public’s reaction, perhaps resulting with the public ignoring the real wolf when he reappears.”

Just in the past week, this sales pitch was echoed in a mostly flattering Washington Post profile and a

Giving him the benefit of the doubt as Calpundit did last week

fighting at loya jirga
not home for Xmas
Sistani calls for UN
“Ayatollah Sistani maintains his call for elections in Iraq unless a neutral UN committee, appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan, visits Iraq and reaches the conclusion that in the current circumstances it is technically and politically impossible to hold general elections,” said interim Governing Council member Muwaffak al-Rubaie.
showdown predicted
12/4 update
12/10 update
Allawi lobbying Sistani
Hilla follows Sistani’s leadI’d like to propose a New Year’s resolution for everyone who discusses politics: Can we please drop the embarrassing notion that neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz (the deputy defense secretary generally considered the intellectual architect of the Iraq war) are genuinely interested in promoting democracy?

Wolfowitz has been casting himself as an apostle of freedom ever since it turned out that Iraq didn’t really have those nasty “weapons of mass destruction” that everyone in the Orwell Bush administration assured us it had. A week ago, in considering him for “Man of the Year” honors, Time magazine bought into the scam, including this Hallmark-worthy suck-up quote:

Says a close associate of the deputy’s: “Paul asks himself every day how he can limit suffering by toppling another dictator or by helping people to govern themselves.”

. . . Wolfowitz has spent much of his career as a fierce defender of democracy. In Ronald Reagan’s State Department, he pushed autocrats in Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea toward reform.

Ahh, but wait a minute. The Asia Times remembers things a bit differently, and with much greater detail:

. . . During those years, Wolfowitz helped reframe US foreign policy to reflect the fanatical anti-communism of Ronald Reagan, which firmly rejected any linkage between foreign policy and human rights.

In Asia, that meant ending constraints on military and economic aid to authoritarian allies like Chun Doo-hwan of South Korea, who was chosen as the first foreign head of state to visit Reagan at the White House. . . . Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia received the same friendly treatment. But the policy failed. By the mid-1980s, both the Korean and Filipino people were sick of their US-backed police states. In 1985, a surge of “people power” ended Marcos’s reign; the next year, massive demonstrations in the streets of Seoul forced Chun to resign.

. . . In May 1997, a year before Suharto was driven out of office, Wolfowitz told Congress of “the significant progress” Indonesia has made under the “strong and remarkable leadership of President Suharto.” In an interview on PBS in February 2000, Wolfowitz was asked about General Wiranto, who had just been forced to resign after being named by Indonesian authorities as the mastermind of the 1999 military rampage in East Timor. He praised Wiranto as “the general who commanded the army during the first elections in Indonesian history”. Wiranto “may have done bad things in East Timor or failed to stop bad things in East Timor, but that’s what makes it so tricky,” he added.

Not much concern for limiting suffering there, is there? Nor was a desire for promoting democracy foremost in Wolfowitz’s heart when he signed orders undermining audits of Iraq rebuilding contracts and restricting those contracts to nations already helping us with the war. As Joshua Marshall wrote a couple of weeks ago, the latter order wasn’t intended to help with our current situation so much as to make our bullying more effective in organizing future wars — which gets closer to what Wolfowitz’s real philosophy is.

I wrote four months ago that “the war’s goal wasn’t to project American ideas into the Middle East — it was to project American power there.” That’s where Wolfowitz is coming from. The neoconservative/Bushite game plan for transforming the region is based not on the inspiring example of a hypothetical democracy in Iraq, but on the ongoing and credible threat of further American military actions.

If you take a look at pre-September 11th neoconservative documents like the Project for a New American Century’s 1997 statement of principles or its 2000 report on defense strategy (link is a PDF download), you’ll see an obsession with expanding U.S. military capabilities and “protecting American interests” overseas, with only a passing reference to democracy. More than anything else, you’ll see a slavish devotion to increasing defense spending, particularly on big-ticket items (like missile shields) that will enrich huge military contractors — the same folks who benefit from pork-filled reconstruction deals in Iraq that Wolfowitz is protecting.

So let’s recognize the democracy/idealism chatter for the elaborate smokescreen it is. Okay?

An Associated Press article today quotes Lt. Col. Steve Russell of the 4th Infantry Division on the progress we’re making against the guerrillas in Iraq:

At the same time, the cost of recruiting attackers is thought to have gone up, Russell said. Gunmen and other fighters that were rumored to be paid somewhere around $250 per attack are now said to be demanding as much as $1,000.

On a hunch, I did a quick Google search, and found the following in an article by a different Associated Press reporter in August, quoting Russell’s boss in the 4th Infantry Division, Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno:

The success of the raids has also made it more difficult for guerrilla leaders to mount attacks on U.S. troops, Odierno said. Guerrilla organizers have been forced to increase the amount they pay for attacks on coalition forces to $1,000 from $250.

”The pay has significantly gone up, which is a good thing because it shows they’re starting to have trouble recruiting people,” he said.

I wonder if the AP knows it’s getting recycled spin that’s at least five months old … or what they would do if someone brought it to their attention.

http://www.needlenose.com/pMachineFree2.2.1/weblog.php?id=P679

Bremer’s hope that Iraqis could write a constitution before he departs had been intended to prevent extremists from dominating the drafting process. U.S. officials acknowledge that risk exists, but said it had been outweighed by the need to end the civil occupation by the summer. The presence of U.S. troops in Iraq will go on longer, military officials have said.

Food Rationing System

An unwillingness to assume other risks has also scuttled, at least temporarily, plans to overhaul a national food-rationing program that was a cornerstone of Hussein’s welfare state. Several senior officials want to replace monthly handouts of flour, cooking oil, beans and other staples — received by more than 90 percent of Iraqis — with a cash payment of about $15. Although the proposal has the enthusiastic support of economic conservatives in the occupation authority, concerns about the logistics have put the effort on hold.

“Its a great idea that the academics thought up, but it wasn’t in tune with the political realities,” said a U.S. official familiar with discussions of the issue. “We have to look at what we gain versus what we risk. Right now, we don’t need to be adding any more challenges to those we already have.”Atrios nailed it in his one-line summary last night — the neoconservatives have learned that the toy country they begged Dubya to give them isn’t as much fun as they hoped, as the Washington Post reports:

The United States has backed away from several of its more ambitious initiatives to transform Iraq’s economy, political system and security forces as attacks on U.S. troops have escalated and the timetable for ending the civil occupation has accelerated.

Plans to privatize state-owned businesses — a key part of a larger Bush administration goal to replace the socialist economy of deposed president Saddam Hussein with a free-market system — have been dropped over the past few months. . . .

“There’s no question that many of the big-picture items have been pushed down the list or erased completely,” said a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq’s reconstruction, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Right now, everyone’s attention is focused [on] doing what we need to do to hand over sovereignty by next summer.”

. . . The new approach, U.S. diplomats said, calls into question the prospects for initiatives touted by conservative strategists to fashion Iraq into a secular, pluralistic, market-driven nation. While the diplomats maintain those goals are still attainable, the senior official said, “ideology has become subordinate to the schedule.”

And why is the schedule — the need to cut and run, sovereignty-wise, by July 1 — so important? In a word, fear. We’re running in order to avoid being chased out:

With goodwill toward Americans ebbing fast, Bremer and his lieutenants have also concluded that it does not make sense to cause new social disruptions or antagonize Iraqis allied with the United States. Selling off state-owned factories would lead to thousands of layoffs, which could prompt labor unrest in a country where 60 percent of the population is already unemployed.

I guess Bremer isn’t quite so willing to “bet the occupation” on ideological dreams as he seemed a few months ago. For just how far the U.S. is scaling back its fantasy vision of a pro-corporate, pro-Israel, secular and democratic Iraq, an excellent overview article in the Los Angeles Times sums it up perfectly:

Said one person close to the process: “If we have something that vaguely looks like a government, and we don’t have Americans dying every day, that would be a wild success.”

That’s it in a nutshell. The ship of the U.S occupation of Iraq is having trouble staying afloat, and they’re desperately throwing as much baggage overboard as they can. A free-market economy has gone over the side already (which is perhaps for the best anyway), and the next decision will be whether to throw secularism and/or democracy to the sharks as well.

If they think Dubya’s election is at stake, the Bushites will dump both. It’s moments like this when you learn what people’s priorities really are.

Really, I was willing to accept the possibility that the U.S. was making progress against the guerrillas in Iraq. And I thought we were, given that all the arrests being reported by our military seemed to coincide with a drop in insurgent attacks.

But then ten Americans were killed just within the last few days, and today there is this unpleasant news:

At least six foreign soldiers were killed and 27 injured in a string of attacks on U.S.-allied forces and Iraqi targets in the southern city of Kerbala on Saturday, military officials said.

Hospital officials in Kerbala said at least seven Iraqi civilians and police were also killed and 80 were wounded.

. . . The commander of the multi-national force in the region, General Andrzej Tyszkiewicz, said the attackers used four suicide car bombs, mortars and machine-guns against two bases and the town council building.

A separate report adds that five American soldiers were wounded in Baghdad by a pair of roadside bombs.

This may indicate a guerrilla opposition that is feeling some pressure (shifting its attacks to a previously quiet Shiite city, perhaps hoping a U.S. crackdown in the area will help draw the Shiites into the fray) … but it definitely doesn’t look like one that’s on its last legs, given their ability to plan and carry out coordinated simultaneous attacks like this.

Which makes me a little more worried about all those arrests the U.S. military keeps reporting. If their reports are true, what do these attacks mean — that all we’re doing is rounding up sand from the Sahara desert, or water from the Pacific Ocean? The myth that this is just a “handful of dead-enders” trying to bring Saddam Hussein back into power is exposed more and more each day.