Iraq War ends. So, condemn it to history classes and exams?

The "war on terror" is a failure

The Economist has a neat way of summarizing the Norway terrorism:

Relative to Norway’s population, the two attacks taken together are of a similar magnitude to the September 11th hijackings in the United States.

Norway's dead from the twin attacks are proportionally worse, strictly on the basis of population.  Norway has a shade under five million people, while the US is home to more than sixty times that number.

Soon after the news of the explosion, pundits were theorizing about Islamic fundamentalist militants and even Kurdish and Uighur elements.  When, as was the case in the Oklahoma City violence, it was "home-grown" terrorism. 

Apparently this extreme right winger boasted about having been in contact with the English Defence League.  Thanks to the New Yorker's profile of this outfit and its leader, only a couple of weeks ago, I can understand why the EDL might have such fanatics. 

One of the many aspects of this atrocious violence in Oslo is that the Bush/Cheney "War or Terror" as a response to 9/11 was one of the worst things they could have done.  And for Obama to continue to wage that war against terror, as if it is something like an identifiable army that can be defeated, is a tragedy.

I am all the more reminded of the television program I watched when I was in India a couple of years ago.  It was in one of those news channels, and was a talk show featuring some wannabe public intellectuals.  The question for this panel was this: "all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims."  I had to force myself to watch it for a while.  It was awful to hear most of them assert that all terrorists are Muslims.

They conveniently forgot all kinds of non-Islamic terrorism within India's borders alone, leave alone the rest of the world.  Two prime ministers were assassinated, and neither was caused by terrorists who were Muslims.  Indira Gandhi was felled by bullets fired by a Sikh, and Rajiv Gandhi was blown to pieces by a Srilankan Tamil suicide bomber.  In contemporary India, Maoist guerrillas use violence, and these are not driven by any religion, Islam or otherwise.

Yet, there was only the Islamic terrorism that was discussed.

It seems to be a similar story in the rest of the world, and definitely in the West.  Even when unfortunate events like in Oslo repeatedly point out that terrorism comes in all flavors.

A rational rethink might then question the War on Terror that the US continues to fight.  But, apparently not.

A violent crime proportionally greater in magnitude than the 9/11 event.  I recall being depressed for a few days after that happened.   I can't begin to imagine the emotions among Norwegians now ...

If it is not "war" in Libya, then ...

In an op-ed piece in the NY Times, though not about the Libya war itself, a University of Chicago law professor and "a longtime supporter and colleague of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago, as well as an informal adviser to his 2008 campaign" writes about his disappointment with the candidate who promised transparency who then has morphed into "our untransparent president":

The record of the Obama administration on this fundamental issue of American democracy has surely fallen short of expectations. This is a lesson in “trust us.” Those in power are always certain that they themselves will act reasonably, and they resist limits on their own discretion. The problem is, “trust us” is no way to run a self-governing society.

Quote of the day, and more about the UK democratic experiment

We will be strong in the defence of freedom.  The Government believes the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused fundamental human rights and historic civil liberties

That is the preamble to the "civil liberties" section of the platform that the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition government. (ht) 
Simply awesome.  After the triangulating Tony Blair and the rather dull Gordon Brown, and their bizarre fetish to faithfully follow the Bush/Cheney approach to infringing on civil liberties, wow, what a refreshing set of sentences.  It simply gets better; here is a sampling:

• We will introduce a Freedom Bill.
• We will scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register and the ContactPoint database, and halt the next generation of biometric passports.
• We will outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
• We will extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.

Hey, can we get that government here, too?  Andrew Sullivan points out that the new "coalition" government is going exactly where President Obama with his huge majority wimped out:

A judge will investigate claims that British intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture of terror suspects, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said tonight. ...
Hague's statement redeems a pledge that both he and his then Liberal Democrat opposite number, Ed Davey, made in opposition. Hague told the BBC: "We have said again in the coalition agreement that we want a judge-led inquiry. So will there be an inquiry of some form? Yes, both parties in the coalition said they wanted that. Now what we're working on is what form that should take."
The coalition agreement published today by the government does not explicitly call for a judicial inquiry; it simply states: "We will never condone the use of torture."

Glenn Greenwald, too, points out this contrast:

[Just] contrast all of this to what is taking place in the United States under Democratic Party rule.  We get -- from the current Government -- presidential assassination programs, detention with no charges, senseless demands for further reductions of core rights when arrested, ongoing secret prisons filled with abuse, military commissions, warrantless surveillance of emails, and presidential secrecy claims to block courts from reviewing claims of government crimes.  The Democratic-led Congress takes still new steps to block the closing of Guantanamo.  Democratic leaders push for biometric, national ID cards.  The most minimal surveillance safeguards are ignored.  Even the miniscule limits on eavesdropping powers are transgressed.  And from just this week:  "Millions of Americans arrested for but not convicted of crimes will likely have their DNA forcibly extracted and added to a national database, according to a bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday" (h/t Dan Gillmor). Can anyone even imagine for one second Barack Obama standing up and saying:  "My administration believes that the American state has become too authoritarian"?

It will be neat if a news person can get Dick Cheney's reaction to the coalition government's platform.  BTW, where is that war criminal man?  He has not been snarking in the news lately ...

Cartoon of the day: Joe Biden's colorful language :)

John Dickerson notes that this is, of course, not the first time:

America has a long and honorable tradition of top elected officials using salty language. Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Bush and Clinton all used rough language. Jimmy Carter did, too. (Though his best moment may have come when he didn't mean to: Speaking in Poland, he said "I want to know the Polish people," which was translated into Polish as, "I want to have carnal knowledge of the Polish people.") It is true that our first president was against it: Gen. George Washington issued "General Orders on Profanity" to his troops in 1776.
Ronald Reagan appears to be the modern president who kept it cleanest. He didn't even write out swear words in his diary. ("I'll hail it as a great bipartisan solution," he wrote of his tax cutting plan. "H—l! It's more than I thought we could get.") But he did sometimes resort to them in private conversation.

On Cheney behaving like his first name

Over to James Fallows:

Since the results of the 2008 election became clear, the 43rd President of the United States has behaved in a way that brings honor to him, his family, his office, and his country. By all reports he did what he could to smooth the transition to his successor, including dealing with the house-is-burning-down world financial crisis. Since leaving office he has -- like most of his predecessors in their first years out of power -- maintained a dignified distance from public controversies and let the new team have its chance. He has acted as if aware that there are national interests larger than his own possible interests in score-settling or reputational-repair.

The former vice president, Dick Cheney, has brought dishonor to himself, his office, and his country. I am not aware of a case of a former president or vice president behaving as despicably as Cheney has done in the ten months since leaving power, most recently but not exclusively with his comments to Politico about Obama's decisions on Afghanistan. (Aaron Burr might win the title, for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, but Burr was a sitting vice president at the time.) Cheney has acted as if utterly unconcerned with the welfare of his country, its armed forces, or the people now trying to make difficult decisions. He has put narrow score-settling interest far, far above national interest.

The mystery is that Cheney has been through this process before. As chief of staff in Gerald Ford's White House, he was in charge of the transition to the Jimmy Carter team after Ford narrowly lost in 1976. Anyone who dealt with him then was impressed by his openness, his awareness of continuing national interest, his lack of bitterness -- and overall his resemblance to the George W. Bush of 2009. Whatever happened to that Dick Cheney is a matter of mystery. If only he would, for one moment, just shut up and follow the post-transition example of all three presidents he served: Ford, Bush, and Bush.

Cubicles and "monolithic insanity"

Dilbert was a wonderful antidote to my cubicle angst, back in the day when I used to inhabit one for forty hours every week. As a cubicle dweller, I had very few things. One day a colleague asked me whether it is because of my religious beliefs that I did not have any photo of my family in my cubicle. I tell you, there is a formula for being a cubicle worker--a photo or two of the family/pets, a small bowl of candies, kleenex, maybe a pretentious book, .... I was almost ready to respond that I have no religious belief, and that I do not believe in any god. Now, but I held myself back because that would have made me even more of non-conformist in that colleague's eye!

There is at least one good thing being a tenured faculty member in a university--we get our own office spaces, with a door and windows 8-) Not that I do anything in my office for which I need any enclosed, private space. Neither do I really need an office to display my book collection (I do not have one, anyway!).

So, where did this idea of cubicle originate? Over to the Scientific American:

[Open-plan] offices and cubicles were invented by architects and designers who were trying to make the world a better place—who thought that to break down the social walls that divide people, you had to break down the real walls, too.
In the early 20th century modernist architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright saw walls and rooms as downright fascist. The spaciousness and flexibility of an open plan, they thought, would liberate homeowners and office dwellers from the confines of boxes. But companies took up their idea less out of a democratic ideology than a desire to pack in as many workers as they could.

Ah, yes, democracy in the work place. Let us see. In my last job/career before returning to academia, we proles were in cubes, with offices with doors for senior staff. Well, with reorganization, one office became vacant, and two of us proles expressed interest to our director. Guess what he did? He did not want to make one happy and the other unhappy--so, neither got the office. I left for academia a couple of months after that--no, not because I did not get that office! And the other person left for another job. Yes, office life was crazy, as much as life in the ivory tower is crazy.

Anyway, the cubes were all modular, which meant that we could get larger cubes too! But, the dull boring modular cubes were apparently not what Herman Miller had in mind:

In 1968 Herman Miller began to sell its system as modular components, with the unfortunate consequence of letting companies cherry-pick the space-saving aspects of these designs and leave out the humanizing touches. As corporations began to shift all their employees, not only clerks, into open-plan offices, Herman Miller designer Robert Propst disavowed what he had spawned, calling it “monolithic insanity.”

Lovely phrase: monolithic insanity. The same phrase will describe Dick Cheney also really well. muahahaha

Dick (Cheney) Uncut.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Dick (Uncut)
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Economic Crisis

Obama v. Cheney on Torture

What if Obama captures Osama?

The GOP is in shreds. What might be the ultimate proverbial nail in the coffin here? The capture of Osama bin Laden--dead or alive.

• It is not unrealistic. It looks like Pakistan's government and military are really following up on the understanding that their country is at risk, and are now expanding their all-out-assault even beyond Swat Valley, into the tribal areas where bin Laden might be living. Of course, I want to see the action happen in order to believe that Zardari and his people are serious about it--there is always the possibility that they are putting on a show in order to shake loose a few more billion from the US government.
• "Defence" has always been the GOP's mantra as their qualification, and the Democrats' liability. So, it will be quite a counter to that if the "liberal" Obama ends up capturing bin Laden, something that Bush/Cheney/GOP could not. The GOP then loses its ultimate, maybe its one and only, political asset. And when that is gone, well, the GOP is gone, for all purposes. It will be quite an effort for Republicans to reshape their party.
• Which means that gerrymandered seats will be the only way Republicans will be able to make their voices heard in the House of Reps. Senate elections being state-wide elections, well, Republicans will be screwed. Senate seats and governorships will come down to individual personalities and charisma. Presidency? They may as well forget until 2016, at the earliest, and 2020 is more realistic.
• I am sure Obama and his people are acutely aware of this. After all, if I can think along this logic!!! I wonder if this, too, is the reason why there is so much of a focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan now. I would not be suprised at all, if such political considerations have influenced their decision as much as genuine national security reasons have. In fact, I say there is nothing wrong in that: after all, bin Laden is the #1 most wanted criminal.

Torture, and government transparency

I really, really, hope that not only will there be a "truth" commission to clear up everything related to torture, but that it will also help clean up DC, at least for a couple of years, just like when the Watergate inquiry lead to a little bit of housecleaning before the vultures returned.
In today's NY Times, Frank Rich writes that we need to do this, and now:

the new administration doesn’t want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general’s report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!

The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.

And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.

It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew...” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.

I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

Torture. Photos. Obama. Tweedldum-tweedledee :-(

So, President Obama's first major flip-flop: he says no to releasing the torture photos. To the few people who ever cared to know what I thought, well, I suppose I can tell them "I told you so!"

I am just tired of the tweedledum-tweedledees that come and go in politics. There are two sayings in India, using the context of Ramayana as a way to describe life and government. One is that it does not matter if Rama rules or Ravana rules. The other is that whoever rules Lanka will behave like a Ravana. (Click here for info on Ramayana, Rama, Ravana, Lanka)
Turns out that it does not matter whether it is a Bush or Cheney or Obama, the rationale for not discussing torture and the photos is not different.
Here is an excerpt from what Obama said:

It's therefore my belief that the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.

Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse. And obviously the thing that is most important in my mind is making sure that we are abiding by the Army Manual and that we are swiftly investigating any instances in which individuals have not acted appropriately, and that they are appropriately sanctioned. That's my aim and I do not believe that the release of these photos at this time would further that goal.

Now, let me be clear: I am concerned about how the release of these photos would be -- would impact on the safety of our troops. I have made it very clear to all who are within the chain of command, however, of the United States Armed Forces that the abuse of detainees in our custody is prohibited and will not be tolerated.

"further inflame anti-American sentiments"; "put our troops in greater danger"; "chilling effect"; "impact on the safety of our troops"; "abuse ... will not be tolerated"
notice these phrases? aren't these the kinds of phrases that Bush/Cheney always used? That they couldn't/wouldn't discuss anything with us hoi polloi because of these very reasons? I completely support the notion that we ought not to put our troops in greater danger; which is why we should not even escalate our war efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And, yes, when a student looks worried because her boyfriend might get deployed to these wars, I see a personal connection to unnecessary conflict.

All this means that the big time campaign that Cheney was engaged in was a huge success for him. Look at his victories: photos will not be released; he has nothing but praise for the new general for Afghanistan; Pelosi and the Democrats are now rapidly trying to cover their behinds with spins on what they (didn't) know and when they (didn't) know ....
So, it is not a surprise at all that the neoconservative authors of the disasters of the last eight years are absolutely in support of Obama's decision.

I have a simple yardstick for the President: run your decisions by the likes of Kristol. If they like it, make sure to do the opposite! That simple, Mr. President.

Let us see what Jon Stewart has to say about this in the next couple of days. The following is what he had about Dick Cheney's all out media assault:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Excuse Me Your Dick Is Out
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Very depressing: Bush/Cheney era lives on

People laughed Ralph Nader off when he often compared the two major parties as tweedledum and tweedledee. Watch this video and think about Nader's remarks:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Via Glenn Greenwald, who writes:

Several weeks ago, I noted that unlike the Right -- which turned itself into a virtual cult of uncritical reverence for George W. Bush especially during the first several years of his administration -- large numbers of Bush critics have been admirably willing to criticize Obama when he embraces the very policies that prompted so much anger and controversy during the Bush years. Last night, Keith Olbermann -- who has undoubtedly been one of the most swooning and often-uncritical admirers of Barack Obama of anyone in the country (behavior for which I rather harshly criticized him in the past) -- devoted the first two segments of his show to emphatically lambasting Obama and Eric Holder's DOJ for the story I wrote about on Monday: namely, the Obama administration's use of the radical Bush/Cheney state secrets doctrine and -- worse still -- a brand new claim of "sovereign immunity" to insist that courts lack the authority to decide whether the Bush administration broke the law in illegally spying on Americans.

The fact that Keith Olbermann, an intense Obama supporter, spent the first ten minutes of his show attacking Obama for replicating (and, in this instance, actually surpassing) some of the worst Bush/Cheney abuses of executive power and secrecy claims reflects just how extreme is the conduct of the Obama DOJ here.

Only Sunday and Monday left for pardons!

I was driving back home when I listened to the president bid his adieu in which he reminded us about the very successful two-terms in which he made all the tough decisions on behalf of us.  It felt like he was telling us that in order to make sure that we would rather take up the president-elect's advice to look forward and not backwards.

Which is why I like the following comments by Christopher Hayes:

1) Yesterday, AG designee Eric Holder said, without hesitation that water-boarding is torture.

2) Dick Cheney has admitted authorizing water-boarding.

3) Dick Cheney has admitted authorizing torture.

4) Torture is a felony under US law punishable by up to 20 years of prison.

5) Dick Cheney authorized a felony.

QED, right? Is there any other way to reason through these premises and deductions?

Georgia understimated Russia. Russia "over-retaliated"

Gary Brecher at Exiled Online sums it up well:
The fretting and fussing and sky-is-falling crap about this war is going to die down fast, and the bottom line will be simple: the Georgians overplayed their hand and got slapped, and we caught a little of the follow-through, which is what happens when you waste your best troops—and Georgia’s, for that matter—on a dumb war in the wrong place. We detatched Kosovo from a Russian ally; they detached South Ossetia from an American ally. It’s a pawn exchange, if that. If it signals anything bigger, it’s the fact that the US is weaker than it was ten years ago and Russia is much, much stronger than it was in Yeltsin’s time. But anybody with sense knew all that already.

But, before concluding thus, Brecher writes:
Most likely the Georgians just thought the Russians wouldn’t react. They were doing something they learned from Bush and Cheney: sticking to best-case scenarios, positive thinking. The Georgian plan was classic shock’n’awe with no hard, grown-up thinking about the long term. Their shiny new army would go in, zap the South Ossetians while they were on a peace hangover (the worst kind), and then…uh, they’d be welcomed as liberators? Sure, just like we were in Iraq. Man, you pay a price for believing in Bush. The Georgians did.