The Truth Will Out

Quotes for the week, if not the year:

History appears poised to confirm that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now ... What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary. ...

I spent countless hours defending the Administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided.

Scott McClellan, Bush's Press Secretary from July 17, 2003 – April 26, 2006.

When even those closest to George Bush are confessing their disillusionment with his misguided and dishonest campaign, I guess there's some hope that American history books will record the details of our engagement with Iraq with a modicum of accuracy.

Further Reading:

• The Independent
• Rueters
• The Times

A Boot Stamping on a Human Face

Always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

- 1984 by George Orwell

Rather than returning our liberties, the Bush administration has just curtailed them some more:

First, the law requires telecommunications companies to make their facilities available for government wiretaps, and it grants them immunity from lawsuits for complying. Under the old program, such companies participated only voluntarily – and some were sued for allegedly violating their customers' privacy.

Second, Bush has said his original surveillance program was restricted to calls and e-mails involving a suspected terrorist, but the new law has no such limit. Instead, it allows executive-branch agencies to conduct oversight-free surveillance of all international calls and e-mails, including those with Americans on the line, with the sole requirement that the intelligence-gathering is "directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." There is no requirement that either caller be a suspected terrorist, spy, or criminal.

There's a scene early on in The Bourne Ultimatum where a reporter says the word "blackbriar" during a cell phone conversation in Europe and it triggers surveillance at the CIA within the United States.

It's chilling because it's not science fiction. It's current fact.

And how ironic that a (hugely entertaining) blockbuster about an individual combating big-government surveillance (and rendition) should come out the very weekend our real-life government has quantifiably extended its reach. It's a surreal world we live in when our diminishing freedoms are accompanied by Hollywood commentary and its attendant profits.

50's 2 Cents

George Bush has a talent: He has less compassion than the average human being. By all means, I don't aspire to be like George Bush.

- Rapper 50 Cent in an New York interview about his influences.

Impeach Is Not a Dirty Word

The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.

In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

- Umberto Eco

There was a time when I thought the idea of impeaching Bush was a little radical. After all, we get the government we deserve. But now that it's clear that his administration is likely the most inept and deceptive one we've had in my lifetime, I'll happily acquiesce to the idea. Forgetting about the war in Iraq, just within the last couple of weeks:

• Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona describes how he was asked to ignore science in order to propagate a political agenda:

  "The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to 'water down' a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

  Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

  And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a 'prominent family' that he refused to name.

  'I was specifically told by a senior person, "Why would you want to help those people?"' Dr. Carmona said.

  The Special Olympics is one of the nation’s premier charitable organizations to benefit disabled people, and the Kennedys have long been deeply involved in it."

  All indignant emphasis mine.

• Bush commutes the sentence of a crony, Scooter Libby, who may have implicated people further up the food chain in his administration.


• Bush exerts executive privilege, telling Sara Taylor she need not testify openly before Congress on matters, which might also implicate his administration. (What do you have to hide, W?)
  


• Bush tells Harriet Miers not to show up for questioning before Congress, an action which may lead to contempt charges against Miers. (Keeping in mind that neither Taylor nor Miers even work for Bush any more.)
  
  

Conservatives don't like you to throw the "f" word (not to mention the "d" word) around, and, sure it does sound a little intemperate, but these four recent actions being just part of a long litany of similar action under this administration, doesn't the term "Ur-fascism" begin to apply?

If I sound a little obstreperous at this point, please consider giving Umberto Eco's "14 Ways of Looking at a Brown Shirt" a read. His short piece ends thusly:

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Mission Accomplished

Four years ago George Bush spoke those words, and four years later, they are still premature.

I'm again prompted to wonder where we might be if we had poured our efforts into Afghanistan, instead of invading a second country under false pretenses. For one thing, as this graphic shows, there would be far fewer American and Iraqi casualties. As a matter of fact, U.S. casualties in Iraq surpassed the 9/11 death toll in September of last year.

I incorporated the Iraqi death toll in this graphic not to minimize the deaths of American civilians and soldiers, but to demonstrate that the number of lives taken in our reaction to 9/11 - both American and Iraqi - is of an order of magnitude far, far greater than the lives lost in the United States on that day. And, yes, the vast majority of those lives are Iraqi. It would be intellectually dishonest not to recognize that. And inhumane. Nonetheless, how often is that last figure ever mentioned in the mass media?

Incidentally, these figures do not include the lives of those coalition members from other countries. The total number of coalition casualties (including U.S. troops) stands at 3,624.

Putting the "White" in White House

In this damning New Republic article, Johann Hari details how a rather fringe-ish British historian earned a three-hour meeting with George Bush (I can't bring myself to place the elevating title in front of his name these days). Couldn't hurt that Andrew Roberts considers W a Churchill for the 21st century, but that's among the least disturbing of his beliefs.

Here's a quick bulleting of Roberts' beliefs and actions as detailed in the article:

• Regularly describes the British empire as "glorious"
• Spoke to the Springbok Club in 2001, a South African group, which still flies the flag of apartheid South Africa at its meetings and extols "the re-establishment of civilized European rule throughout the African continent."
• Direct quote: "Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance."
• Defends various and sundry massacres for their settling effects
• "[H]e has advised Bush to adopt 'the whole idea of mass internment,' saying: 'I think it is the way the administration of Iraq should go.' At his lunch with Bush, according to economist Irwin Stelzer, who was present, Roberts cited Ireland as a place where internment worked."
• Defends British concentration camps used in the Boer War
• "He counsels that 'there can be no greater test of statesmanship than sticking to unpopular but correct policies.' The real threat isn't abroad, but at home, among domestic critics. Roberts writes, 'The greatest danger to [the British and, by extension, the American] continued imperium came not from declared enemies without, but rather from vociferous enemies within their own society.'"
• Similarly, on Vietnam, he writes: "Some of the media was indeed a prime enemy of the conflict."

As Hari points out, Bush couldn't be getting more anachronistic advice:

Target civilians, introduce mass internment, don't worry about whether people hate you, bear down on dissent because it will sap the empire's willpower, ignore your critics because they're just jealous, and--above all--keep on fighting and you'll prevail.

It seems that Bush looks to historians as he looks to his advisers: to be told he's doing just fine. But to hear that message, he's had to scrape around for a fifth-rate Rudyard Kipling mocked by almost all serious historians and soaked in slaughter.

Roberts wrote TNR to rebut "Hari's despicable and cowardly attack," but if you read his letter, it seems he didn't have the heart (or ammunition) to respond most of what Hari actually had to say. And Hari takes the opportunity to write a pretty convincing, lengthy counter-rebuttal.

There's also some interesting debate in the comments about the validity or reductionism of employing terms like "racist," "white supremacist" or "imperialist ideology" when critiquing the likes of Roberts. Worth considering, for sure, but the term "imperialist" hardly seems a stretch when describing Roberts. Sounds like he'd embrace it. Kinda like cursing me with the term "humanist" or "liberal."