Antiwar.com Blog

The Toledo Blade is reporting that the US Marine Corps is again conducting urban warfare training exersizes in the streets of the USA, this time attacking downtown office buildings in Toledo, Ohio.

Are we to believe that this is to help them in their imperial mission overseas? That downtown office buildings in Ohio more closely resemble the terrain in Iraq than custom built taxpayer set pieces on the hundreds of bases around this country?

Or is it simply that they want the soldiers and citizens to get used to seeing each other in such circumstances?

Andrew Sullivan – for whom every topic is ultimately just another opportunity for navel-gazing – offers his mea sorta culpa. Let’s have a mercifully abridged look:

In retrospect, neoconservatives (and I fully include myself [We know, Andrew, we know – Ed.]) made three huge errors. The first was to overestimate the competence of government, especially in very tricky areas like WMD intelligence. The shock of 9/11 provoked an overestimation of the risks we faced. And our fear forced errors into a deeply fallible system.

I was too trusting, too shocked, too afraid – too, in a word, human. Uh huh.

When doubts were raised, they were far too swiftly dismissed.

Were raised? Did they just wash ashore at high tide, or were they raised by the very people Sullivan has been calling traitors and dupes for the past four years?

[T]he miraculously peaceful end of the cold war lulled many of us into overconfidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better. The second error was narcissism. America’s power blinded many of us to the resentments that hegemony always provokes.

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Could this be some sort of epiphany about empire and intervention? Get real:

Sometimes the right thing to do will spawn backlash, and we should do it anyway. But that makes it all the more imperative that when we do go out on a limb, we get things right. In those instances, we need to make our margin of error as small as humanly possible. Too many in the Bush Administration, alas, did the opposite. They sent far too few troops, were reckless in postinvasion planning and turned a deaf ear to constructive criticism, even from within their own ranks.

Like from me, Andrew Sullivan! I always said we should get things right!

The final error was not taking culture seriously enough. There is a large discrepancy between neoconservatism’s skepticism of government’s ability to change culture at home and its naivete when it comes to complex, tribal, sectarian cultures abroad.

I’ll give Andy a congratulatory “duh” on that one.

We have learned a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis and several thousand killed and injured American soldiers than for a few humiliated pundits.

But this self-effacing essay for Time magazine will help to even the score.

The correct response to that is not more spin but a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors, and by writers like me.

First rule of neocon punditry: by taking meaningless “responsibility” for the bad consequences, you can logically take credit for the allegedly good ones. But you must first remind the audience that there was really no better choice than the one you advocated:

All this is true, and it needs to be faced. But it is also true that we are where we are. And true that there was no easy alternative three years ago. You’d like Saddam still in power, with our sanctions starving millions while U.N. funds lined the pockets of crooks and criminals? At some point the wreckage that is and was Iraq would have had to be dealt with. If we hadn’t invaded, at some point in the death spiral of Saddam’s disintegrating Iraq, others would. It is also true that it is far too soon to know the ultimate outcome of our gamble.

Yeah, those goddamn French were probably just pissed at us because they wanted to invade Iraq, but we beat them to it. And this too-soon-to-know-the-ultimate-outcome bit is a moral monstrosity cloaked in banality. It’s NOT too soon to know the ultimate outcome of “our gamble” (what did Sullivan put on the table?) for the scores of thousands already dead. What Sullivan is saying is that if the Iraqis ever manage to overcome the suffering inflicted on them by the War Party (including its years of supporting Saddam), then Sullivan will accept their humble thanks. Think I’m being too harsh? Well, here comes, as Andy might say, the money shot:

What we do know is that for all our mistakes, free elections have been held in a largely Arab Muslim country. We know that the Kurds in the north enjoy freedoms and a nascent civil society that is a huge improvement on the past. We know that the culture of the marsh Arabs in the south is beginning to revive.

Blah, blah, blah. But, in conclusion, how does Andrew Sullivan feel about all of this?

Regrets? [Cue Sinatra. – Ed.] Yes. But the certainty of some today that we have failed is as dubious as the callow triumphalism of yesterday. War is always, in the end, a matter of flexibility and will. And sometimes the darkest days are inevitable – even necessary – before the sky ultimately clears.

What a friggin’ hack.

Christopher Hitchens calls for détente with Iran! (While covering his ass for previous warmongering, but still…)

In a very interesting piece at the Telegraph, self-described imperialist Niall Ferguson revisits Gladstone’s six principles of foreign policy. One struck me as particularly fitting in light of Bush’s India-Pakistan tour:

“Even when you do a good thing,” Gladstone wisely observed, “you may do it in so bad a way that you may entirely spoil the beneficial effect; and if we were to make ourselves the apostles of peace in the sense of conveying to the minds of other nations that we thought ourselves more entitled to an opinion on that subject than they are… well, very likely we should destroy the whole value of our doctrines.” Substitute the word “freedom” for “peace”, and there you have the crux of the case against President Bush.

Or imagine that the “good thing” in this case is limiting nuclear proliferation, then enjoy this mind-blowing statement from the emperor. Regarding Pakistan’s request to receive the same deal on civilian nuclear technology Bush had just given India, Bush said,

We discussed the civilian nuclear program and I explained to him [Musharraf] that Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories.

I’m not a big fan of Gen. Musharraf, but he must be possessed of a truly Christ-like forbearance to endure a lecture on his own country’s history and needs from a man who not so long ago was unable to name the leaders of India and Pakistan.

Good God. Did you know about this? Credit card payments at a certain percentage above one’s average payment automatically trigger an investigation by Homeland Security.

(Via LRC.)

Well, Murray Waas at the National Journal has another scoop, and this ought to be a big one.

It seems Waas has confirmed that Bush was told about the State Department’s INR, the DOE and the IAEA’s insistance that those infamous aluminum tubes were for rockets back in October of 2002. Rice has lied repeatedly, claiming that Bush never heard of such a thing until after the war started. The only reason they were getting away with it was because the administration had only released portions of the National Intelligence Estimates, but never the president’s summeries.

Never mind the fact that there were major dissents from within the government on the pages of the major American newspapers throughout the later part of 2002, and the beginning of 2003.

We are supposed to let him off the hook for that oversight with the common assumption that the man can barely read and doesn’t bother with the news.

HUME: How do you get your news?

BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me. In all due respect, you’ve got a beautiful face and everything.

I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves. But like Condoleezza, in her case, the national security adviser is getting her news directly from the participants on the world stage.

HUME: Has that been your practice since day one, or is that a practice that you’ve…

BUSH: Practice since day one.

HUME: Really?

Now it is clear that Bush had been told that Iraq was not enriching uranium, and had no intention of causing harm to the United States unless attacked. The State Department even correctly predicted that even if the US did invade Iraq, Saddam still wouldn’t attack the US mainland.

So, this is just one more piece for the growing pile of evidence that the president knew good and well that he was completely full of it when he tried to pretend that Iraq was a threat to the United States. There’s Woodward, “F*** Saddam. We’re taking him out.” Paul O’Neil, “From the first cabinet meeting…” Richard Clark “Wolfowitz was pushing Myroie’s crack-pottery, but I told ’em!” The Downing Street Memos “Intelligence is being fixed around the policy.” and now a credible report about the NIE’s that Bush is known to have read “in Tenet’s presence.”

I still have one question that maybe some bloggers out there can answer, Who is “Joe the CIA agent” featured prominently in this New York Times piece from October 3, 2004 who was supposedly the major force in getting the CIA to back the Pentagon neocons’ lies about the tubes?

Considering the state of near total war that existed between the CIA and OSP, this seems like an interesting avenue to go down.

Any takers?

Update: Oops, it was CIA Joe, Joe T. (Turner?), not CIA Mike. Cooperative Research has a bit of information which makes him seem to be just some jerk, pushing his own crap on everyone, rather than a neocon plant, which is, of course, the easiest explanation. If Dick Cheney’s shopping for a bill of goods, why not sell him some and get a promotion? What’s a few hundred thousand dead people compared to a nice retirement?