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Volume 1 Issue 194        Today’s News and Views     Monday, July 10, 2006

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Bringing the Church to the Courtroom
Christian Group Becomes Force in Major Legal Battles

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 10, 2006; A01

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- A 29-foot war memorial shaped like a cross should be allowed to remain on public land. A teacher should be able to emphasize references to God in the Declaration of Independence. Protesters should be permitted to approach women near the doors of an abortion clinic.

These courtroom fights and dozens of others pending across the country belong to the portfolio of the ambitious Alliance Defense Fund, a socially conservative legal consortium. It spends $20 million a year seeking to protect what it regards as the place of religion -- and especially Christianity -- in public life.

Considering itself the antithesis of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Scottsdale-based organization has used money and moxie to become the leading player in a movement to tug the nation to the right by challenging decades of legal precedent. By stepping into the nation's most impassioned debates about religion in the public sphere, the group aims to bring law and society into alignment with conservative Christianity.

The group successfully challenged the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses in California and Oregon, and worked on statewide ballot initiatives prohibiting such unions. Its attorneys helped the Boy Scouts win approval of a policy barring gay Scout leaders.

The group has been battling embryonic stem cell research in Missouri and won a Supreme Court stay preventing the removal of California's 29-foot Mount Soledad cross. In Florida, where saving the life of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo became a crusade, the group supported efforts to nourish her.

"What we are really trying to protect are the things this country was founded on," said D. James Kennedy, leader of Florida's Coral Ridge Ministries and one of the prominent Christian conservatives who fashioned the alliance in 1993 as a sharp stick in the national culture debate.

That is not how opponents see the organization. While crediting the ADF with training troops for battles once fought by a haphazard assortment of government lawyers and often ill-prepared volunteers, critics question the alliance's commitment to tolerance and the Constitution.

"They're not for some form of generic religious freedom. They're for Christian superiority, that Christians take over the courts," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. "They are living in this fantasy world where the majority religion, Christianity, is claimed to be literally under attack."

Gary S. McCaleb directs the ADF's litigation team from a file-filled office in a nondescript Scottsdale office park. He said the 16 staff lawyers are in such demand that the ADF created separate divisions for marriage issues and for university free-speech questions.

The ADF underwrites legal fights and increasingly handles litigation itself. Groups receiving significant funding include the American Center for Law & Justice, founded by evangelist Pat Robertson, and Liberty Counsel, backed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

"We're certainly stretched. I feel I could put a hundred attorneys to work tomorrow," said McCaleb, who said the ADF files one to two cases a week and is deeply involved in 80 to 100 open cases at any one time. He calls this a "pivotal time" in U.S. history.

"What we see is an overarching agenda from the left wing and the pro-homosexual groups," said McCaleb, who perceives "clear hostility to Christian thought." He described the stakes as "the fundamental ability of Christians to speak their minds on the issues of the day."

The day McCaleb said this, lawyers were preparing to intervene in the dispute over the Mount Soledad cross, a war memorial erected in 1954 in La Jolla, Calif., and challenged by an atheist veteran. Federal judges ordered the cross to be removed from government land, but Justice Anthony M. Kennedy granted a temporary stay on July 3.

"For private citizens to be told they can't memorialize their dead is an outrage," said McCaleb, noting similar cases elsewhere. "It's not a matter of these crosses radiating secret Christian rays that will convert people."

Federal courts have said in the Mount Soledad case and other disputes that private land, including church property, is the appropriate place for such religious displays. They cite the Establishment Clause in the Constitution, which prohibits the government from sanctioning or favoring one religion over another.

What motivated D. James Kennedy and other conservatives -- including James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family and William Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ -- to form the ADF was the impression that Christians were losing too many such battles.

"It was just years of seeing the ACLU and its cronies attacking religious organizations or religious exercise," Kennedy said. "And, very frequently, there was nobody that even showed up to defend the Christian position."

To change the equation, the alliance hired Reagan-era prosecutor Alan Sears. He later brought in corporate lawyer Jeffery Ventrella. Mostly under Ventrella's watch, the ADF has schooled more than 800 outside lawyers, each promising to donate 450 hours to the cause.

Ventrella runs an annual summer seminar, which this year brought 100 law students to Scottsdale. The idea, according to ADF documents, is to train them in "a distinctly Christian worldview of law" before they head to clerkships and other influential posts, "perhaps even Supreme Court justices."

Some of them met recently at a training session in Chicago. Lawyers and preachers jotted tips as ADF speakers explained that prayer is not always enough: Protecting the faith sometimes demands lawsuits and clamor.

"I was looking for a way to reconcile my faith and my professional life. The ADF helped me be not a Christian and a lawyer but a Christian lawyer," said Chicago litigator Melanie Jo Triebel, who says that the "Christian side of the debate" has not been effective enough.

The ADF's rising profile in churches and the media attracts an average of 300 inquiries a month. One recent day, a call came from a government employee disappointed by a diversity training video because it did not portray homosexuality negatively. A graduating high school senior called to say he had been told not to use Jesus's name in a speech.

"It's definitely an affirmation of our fallen state as humans," Renee Bergmen said of her work evaluating such complaints. "But it's a blessing to provide an answer, and that answer being faith in Jesus Christ."

Every December, the ADF monitors the expression of Christmas, fearful that the encouragement of greetings such as "Happy Holidays" and other steps taken in the name of cultural sensitivity are costing the day its religious identity. Last year, the organization received 434 calls.

A recent case, now pending, focuses on a Pittsburgh ordinance that requires protesters to remain 15 feet from an abortion clinic door. ADF lawyer Elizabeth Murray sued, saying she represented "a compassionate, professional nurse who has devoted much of her life to kindly and gently counseling women during a difficult time in life."

The ADF took up the cause of Stephen Williams, a fifth-grade teacher in Cupertino, Calif. School authorities, wary of proselytizing, said he was overemphasizing religious excerpts from the Declaration of Independence and other documents.

When Williams sued in November 2004, asserting religious discrimination as a Christian, the alliance attracted enormous attention -- particularly from the religious right and conservative media outlets -- when it announced, "Declaration of Independence Banned From Classroom."

Authorities at Stevens Creek Elementary School said the Declaration continued to be taught. They pointed out textbook references and said it hung on school walls. Williams, they said, chose materials so narrow that they were forced to act. Williams agreed to withdraw his suit in August 2005.

Outsiders questioned the ADF's motives and legal reasoning.

"They know that a teacher who has a pattern of proselytizing has crossed the line," said Charles C. Haynes, a senior scholar at the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center, asserting that the ADF went too far. "When they do that, it may raise money, it may raise their profile, but it undermines their credibility."

"They seem to have an ACLU-envy problem. They distort the position of the ACLU to justify themselves," said Jeremy Gunn, director of the ACLU's Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. He said the ADF favors a "Walt Disney version of American history."

"There's no mugging of their free speech," Gunn said. "They talk about freedom and liberty. What they really want is the government to endorse their version."

Alliance executives say they are on solid ground when it comes to history and the law, and they insist that the pendulum is beginning to swing their way. Sears said the group, "by grace," expects to grow 20 percent a year.

"Over and over, there's a search-and-destroy mission for religious expression," Ventrella told the trainees in Chicago. "Do we want to forget our religious heritage? When we abandon God, we will forget man. So what's God got to do with it? Everything."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

In YouTube Clips, a Political Edge

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 10, 2006; C01

It starts off like a typical negative ad, with swelling music and pictures of John McCain: "Flip-Flopper? Yes. Waffler? Yes."

But then the Internet spot takes a strange turn: "Eh, whatever. He should still be president," the graphics say. "John McCain 2008. He's Not Hillary."

This is one of the 60,000 videos added each day to YouTube.com, a shoot-it-yourself Web site that has exploded in popularity over the past year. And while many of the most widely viewed videos are merely intended to entertain or titillate -- rants, parodies, pet tricks, soccer brawls, singing, dancing and booty shaking -- company executives say politics is on the rise.

The site's sixth most popular group -- as measured by the number of people who click to subscribe -- is titled "Bush Sucks," with 2,018 members and 741 videos. Also near the top is "Nedheads," with 841 members signing on to a group created by activists backing Ned Lamont in his Democratic primary race against Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut.

While bloggers played a role in the last presidential election, most advertising and message delivery still comes from campaigns, political parties and interest groups with enough money to bankroll a television blitz. But the YouTube revolution -- which includes dozens of sites such as Google Video, Revver.com and Metacafe.com -- could turn that on its head.

If any teenager can put up a video for or against a candidate, and persuade other people to watch that video, the center of gravity could shift to masses of people with camcorders and passable computer skills. And if people increasingly distrust the mainstream media, they might be more receptive to messages created by ordinary folks.

"YouTube is a campaign game-changer, shifting the dynamics of how to reach voters and build intimate relationships," says Julie Supan, senior marketing director for the small, California-based firm, which by one measure now runs the 39th most popular Web site. "YouTube levels the playing field, allowing well-backed and less-known candidates to reach the same audience and share the same stage."

Even the seemingly simple act of posting footage of a politician's interview on "Meet the Press" or "The Daily Show" has a viral quality, because it can be seen by far more people than watched during a single broadcast.

The 18-month-old site, which makes its revenue from banner ads, is free for viewers and contributors. The company says 80 million videos are viewed every day. Each video, group or page is placed in easily searchable categories, and those who subscribe to the groups are automatically notified of new content.

The networks are just starting to awaken to the power of these citizen video sites. After feuding with YouTube for illegally showing a clip from "Saturday Night Live" earlier this year, NBC realized the power of such online promotion and recently struck a deal with the site to publicize its fall lineup. Hollywood studios are interested as well.

Contributors to YouTube seem to lean to the left. There are videos of verbal stumbles labeled "Stupid Bush" and "Bush Screwups," along with "President Bush Drunk," a bit on CBS's "Late Late Show" that slowed down a tape of the president so it appeared as if he were slurring his words. Another shows Bush, in his Texas days, extending his middle finger. (One positive video features a group called the Right Brothers singing "Bush Was Right.")

Any registered user can form a group, and the site includes one called "Support George Bush," which says, "Don't be afraid of your beliefs -- most campuses nationwide have a liberal bias anyway . . . as does the media." But it doesn't crack the top 100 in terms of membership, unlike "Bush Sucks," which is designed "for everyone who hates Bush and all his Republican cronies."

A video about Virginia's junior senator is titled "George Allen (R-Exxon)." It turns out to be an old commercial slamming Allen's votes on energy by Democrat Harris Miller, who lost a primary bid to oppose Allen.

Not everything is serious business. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is razzed with a song parody called "Gay Wedding Bell Blues," to the tune of an old Fifth Dimension song: "I've heard your rants, I wish you'd quit / Just listen to you and hear your passion against gays / (Oh, but you're never gonna take my wedding day)."

And Rudy Giuliani would probably not choose to appear in drag, being nuzzled by Donald Trump, as he does in the video of a six-year-old press roast.

Democrats don't get a free ride on YouTube. While one supporter put up footage from "Imus in the Morning" on MSNBC with the title, "John Kerry goes on the offensive against the right wing smear machine," other videos were titled "Kerry's Lost Again" and "Senator 2 Face Kerry." And several people posted anti-Kerry commercials from the 2004 campaign by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Former senator John Edwards has his own page, or "channel," but elsewhere on the site, someone has posted footage of Edwards in the makeup chair, titled "Pretty Boy John Edwards / Watch as the ambulance chaser pretties up for the camera."

Hillary Rodham Clinton gets skewered in such videos as "The Scariest Monster," "Hillary Clinton's Campaign Frauds," "Hillary's Plantation," "Hillary Goes Nuts" and "Ken Mehlman on Hillary's Anger!," reprising an ABC interview with the Republican Party chairman. A video by a draft-Clinton group -- which flips through images of previous presidents and ends with the former first lady -- has been seen just 351 times, compared with 5,404 views for a draft-McCain video.

Politicians are increasingly joining the party. Former Virginia governor Mark Warner, a Democrat who is weighing a White House bid, has posted a two-minute video, which has been viewed 426 times. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has a channel featuring C-SPAN clips of various Democrats. (Readers can offer comments; one called her "the biggest windbag in the House.") Krissy Keefer, a Green Party candidate challenging Pelosi, also has a channel, which includes a taped endorsement by a San Francisco street poet named Diamond Dave.

YouTube does not verify the identities of the posters. Supan says political campaigns often put up their ads and speeches under unknown screen names but have begun doing so more openly. (Of course, little-known operatives can also post videos mocking opposing candidates.) Television networks have the right to demand that their clips be deleted when posted by people who have no rights to the material, but Supan says such complaints are declining as the major broadcast and cable networks -- all of which have held talks with YouTube -- have recognized the importance of not alienating their viewers.

While the site's amateur contributions range from nasty to uplifting to downright silly, they also restore a measure of fun to politics -- precisely what might appeal to younger people turned off by traditional speeches, ads and rhetoric. Supan says the modest viewing levels for politicians' pages reflect the pedestrian content of standard speeches and ads -- and will likely remain that way until they come up with behind-the-scenes footage or other eye-catching fare.

"At the end of the day," she says, "it's all about entertaining."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

FP: How often do you travel outside of the Green Zone?

RN: The restrictions on [journalists’] movements are very severe. It is extremely dangerous to move around anywhere in Iraq, but we do. We all have Iraqi staff who get around, and we go on trips arranged by the U.S. State Department as frequently as we can.

But the military has started censoring many [embedded reporting] arrangements. Before a journalist is allowed to go on an embed now, [the military] check[s] the work you have done previously. They want to know your slant on a story—they use the word slant—what you intend to write, and what you have written from embed trips before. If they don’t like what you have done before, they refuse to take you. There are cases where individual reporters have been blacklisted because the military wasn’t happy with the work they had done on embed. But we get out among the Iraqi public a whole lot more than almost any American official, certainly more than military officials do.

FP: What other challenges do journalists in Iraq face besides security?

RN: Iraqi officials, now that they have their own government, have become extremely bureaucratic and difficult about giving interviews. They want you to do the interview request in a very formal way. In many cases, they ask for your questions in advance. It takes a very long time for them to agree to see people. Add to that the problems of movement and curfews, and it makes getting things done that much more difficult.

FP: The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad recently sent a cable to Washington detailing the dangerous situation under which its Iraqi employees work. Is the situation in the Green Zone as bad as the cable made it out to be?

RN: Yes, it is that bad. [The cable] didn’t come as a surprise to me, except that somebody in the embassy was courageous enough to outline the hardships in very frank detail, and the ambassador was honest enough to put his name to it. It is exactly what our own Iraqi staff has gone through for years now. As early as 2003, the Iraqis who work for us were not telling their family or friends that they worked for Americans. At the time, we thought it was a ridiculous precaution—a throwback to the Saddam era—but as time went on, they proved that they knew their society a lot better than we did.

FP: Where do you get information about the insurgency?

RN: There was a stage in the war when we could talk to insurgents and people representing insurgents. Now, it’s just too dangerous. There is no way to safely contact them. We talk to Sunni leaders who are in touch with at least the Iraqi insurgents, the distinction being that al Qaeda insurgents are mainly foreign terrorists. [Iraqi] groups have a political constituency among Sunni politicians and they are in touch. So we can and do talk to them frequently. In fact, so does the U.S. Embassy.

FP: Are journalists and the military seeing two different pictures in Iraq?

RN: Sometimes it’s hard to say. Many in the military are here on their second or third tour and they don’t want to feel that this is all a doomed enterprise. I’m not saying it is, but to some extent they are victims of their own propaganda. Two reasonable people can look at the same set of information and come to different conclusions. A good example: I traveled recently to Taji for the handover of a large swath of territory north of Baghdad to the Iraqi Army’s 9th Armored Division. This was meant to be a big milestone: an important chunk of territory that has lots of insurgent activity, given over completely to the control of the Iraqi Army. But when we spoke to the Iraqi Army officers, they said they didn’t have enough equipment. They are still completely dependent on the U.S. Army for their logistics, their meals, and a lot of their communications. The United States turned territory over to them, but they are not a functioning, independent army unit yet.

Rod Nordland, chief foreign correspondent for Newsweek, was Baghdad bureau chief from 2003 to 2005.

All contents ©2005 ForeignPolicy.com

Tomgram: Chernus on Karl Rove's Bedtime Stories for Americans

Here's how a Washington Post piece soon after the Supreme Court's smack-down of the Bush administration's Guantanamo policies began:

"Republicans yesterday looked to wrest a political victory from a legal defeat in the Supreme Court, serving notice to Democrats that they must back President Bush on how to try suspects at Guantanamo Bay or risk being branded as weak on terrorism… As the White House and lawmakers weighed next steps, House GOP leaders signaled they are ready to use this week's turn of events as a political weapon."

So what's new? The single greatest skill of the Bush administration -- and especially of its presiding political strategist Karl Rove -- has been turning potential disasters (of which there have been so many) into successful attacks on the Democrats, while, against all odds, briefly elevating the President's approval ratings. This talent for fashioning tall tales and going for the political jugular has, as in the presidential race of 2004 (aided and abetted by the Democrats), proven just enough to get the Republicans past the voters in reasonable shape. The ever-devolving catastrophe in Iraq has been but the latest candidate for such treatment -- as, in the wake of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the President announced that "the tide" was again turning in that country, congressional Republicans launched fierce attacks on Democratic cut-and-runners, and the already astronomical numbers of dead bodies flooding into Baghdad's central morgue rose, post-Zarqawi, by 16%.

As religion professor Ira Chernus suggests below, Rove regularly manages to do his work in part by calling on that oldest of American stories, the one about fighting the savages on a distant frontier in order to make the world safe for settlers. Chernus, a professor of religion, canny guy, and regular Tomdispatch contributor, explains just how this process works (over and over and over again).

Of course, sooner or later, all good (and bad) things must end. We know that. The question is: Will November 2006 be the start of that moment or simply more of the same old, same old? Tom

Karl Rove's Scheherazade Strategy

By Ira Chernus

Karl Rove has a simple rule, they say: When you are falling behind, attack your opponents at their strongest point. In the upcoming election, the Democrats' strongest point should obviously be Iraq. With the spotlight eternally focused on the disastrous war there, Rove has to figure out how to turn its dazzling beam to his party's advantage.

So he's borrowing a page from an ancient Iranian storybook and imitating Scheherazade, the maiden whose husband's policy was "wed 'em, bed 'em, and kill 'em at dawn." Rove is telling Republican candidates to follow Scheherazade's rule: When policy dooms you, start telling stories -- stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy.

The GOP stories are the same ones white people have been telling each other ever since they first set foot on North American shores: If you want to be safe, go to the frontier and wipe out the Indians. As former State Department official John Brown has noted, our Indian wars are not over yet.

Now Rove and his President are trying to sell the Iraq war as a frontier conflict, too. They want us to see U.S. troops as the cavalry putting down the "Injuns." Or better yet, as pioneers creating small enclaves of civilization (in Iraq they're called Green Zones) in the midst of a vast wilderness full of savages. What strength, what courage it takes to survive. But they have a job to do: They must teach the savages how to be free. And above all, like their pioneering forebears, they must have the guts to stick it out until the job is done.

How do we know our military in Iraq has such beneficent motives? The answer is simple -- they are Americans, by definition the heroes, the good guys. Every time they kill a bad guy like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, they only prove once again what good guys they are. (In a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, 68% of Americans said that the U.S. war against Iraq has "helped to improve the lives of the Iraqi people.")

Naturally they hope, one day, to be able to go home to their loved ones and live the peaceable lives they long for. But they aren't quitters like those (Democratic) schoolmarms back East in the halls of Congress. They are real frontiersmen, with the will and the resolve to stay the course. They won't be scared off by suffering or bloodshed; sometimes -- let's be honest -- it takes bloodshed for life to get better.

Republican Fairy Tales of Heroic Masculinity

George W. Bush is already out on the congressional campaign trail riffing on this old yarn. At a fundraiser for one Senate candidate he laid it out in all its marvelous simplicity: "There's an Almighty; a great gift of the Almighty is freedom for every man, woman, and child. ... The American people expect the government to protect them. It's our most important job. … Iraq is now the central front, and we've got a plan to succeed. … There's a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done. They're willing to wave the white flag of surrender."

And there, my friends, is the real choice we're being offered by Rovian rhetoric: weak-willed cowardly Democrats against Republicans who tough it out, whatever the cost, because -- above all -- they are real men.

The urge to prove manhood is central to the story. It may be what got us into Iraq in the first place. For four decades now, neoconservatives have bewailed the feminization of America. A nation where women can wear suits and men can have long flowing hair, even in corporate suites, drives them crazy. Since the 1970s they've touted belligerent policies, swaggering talk, and massive military budgets as the only way to stop liberals from imposing spinelessness on the nation.

The neocons want to turn a nation of soft, lazy, mall-shopping, morally squishy "relativists" back to the manly "strenuous life" that Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan preached. That's one big reason they worked so hard to send "our boys" (and "girls") off to the battlefields of Iraq. Karl Rove himself may not be a neocon, but he's betting that the voters will be mesmerized by John-Wayne-style tales of "real men" fighting evil on the frontier -- at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.

The frontier tales may sound trite and hackneyed to some, but they won't go away. You probably know them by heart. In fact, without a second thought, you probably put them together intuitively and unconsciously to form a single unified narrative, doing the Republicans' work for them. Many of your fellow Americans still take that grand narrative as the tried-and-true tale about the virtues that made America great.

Will women as well as men fall for these fairy tales of heroic masculinity? There is still a gender gap in U.S. politics. But since 9/11 it has narrowed considerably. Plenty of female voters now choose the candidate who best embodies the "manly virtues," because it isn't really about sex or gender. It's about an age-old cultural bias that says males make clear distinctions between good and evil and then do whatever it takes to destroy evil, while females offer dangerously tender-hearted understanding to everyone.

This gets us to the heart of the Scheherazade strategy. It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control. Karl Rove knows that (as Gary Bauer, a religious right politico, once put it) "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it." So Rove constantly invents simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell. He tries to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion.

Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement: I am not merely a feather blown around by what George W. Bush has called "the winds of change." My vote anchors me in the Republican Party -- solid as a rock, tough as the toughest pioneer, willing and able to bring the savage wilderness of this terroristic planet under firm American control.

The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that simple moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what's actually going on out there in the world. Though it never fulfills its promise, too many Americans keep on falling for it. Why? Here are some clues from scholars who trace it back to its roots in American Christianity. Catherine Albanese of the University of California at Santa Barbara writes: "Ordered conduct of foreign policy will, according to the conservative ethic, keep evil at bay and erect the safeguards that protect Christian life. Thus, containment for conservatives means the management of evil." But the management of evil is a lifetime task. Far from relieving anxiety, it is bound to create more of it -- and, Rove assumedly hopes, more people who crave the manly certitude that is supposed to relieve anxiety.

Princeton's John F. Wilson explains why. The obsession with managing evil comes from "a concern, often exaggerated, to achieve control over those aspects of life experienced as uncertain." From the Puritans to the present, people bent on controlling their lives have been haunted by the inescapable fear that they might lose that very control. When they find that they can't control themselves or their lives or surroundings as completely as they might fervently wish, they feel like failures; and, Albanese adds, if they happen to think they are part of God's chosen people, they may also feel a powerful obligation to live up to God's expectation of perfect self-control. So they end up feeling not just like failures but like guilty sinners.

Who wants to shoulder such a heavy burden? "To admit that too much was wrong could jeopardize America's belief in its status as a chosen nation," Albanese says. "Americans could not admit the deepest sources of their guilt without destroying their sense of who they were." So, instead, they went (and still go) looking for other people to control and blame them for their troubles. Our most recent candidates are, of course, the terrorists.

Before you know it, you have, in Wilson's scholarly words, "essentially bipolar frameworks for conceiving of the world: good versus bad, us versus them. The puritan American while tightly disciplined is prone to be uncritical of self and hypercritical of others... [This] presupposes a fundamentally authoritarian pattern of relationships within the world and reinforces that pattern." In other words, when the U.S. military tries to impose a made-in-America order upon Iraq (or anywhere else), it lets us avoid facing up to the abundant ills, evils, and insecurities here at home.

Scheherazade Fantasies and Frontier Realities

These are certainly deeply rooted, complex, and real feelings. Rove's scam works because the bipolar framework seems so believable. There is always more American insecurity to feed our appetite for "staying the course" in Iraq. The U.S. presence there spawns more Iraqi "insurgents," who make the whole story look all too believable on the evening news. The cycle is endless, because the old frontier story that is supposed to ease our insecurity actually fuels it.

It's certainly making the public insecure about the war. In that Washington Post- ABC poll, only 37% of Americans approved of the way Bush is handling it. So Rove's strategy may be an act of desperation. But it's also a shrewd trick -- some might call it genius -- because it plays on the growing fear that Iraq represents something truly awry in the American universe. It links the Democratic party to the chaos of Iraq by turning both into symbols of American weakness, wilderness, and instability.

The Republican Scheherazades say, in effect, "Things may seem out of control now, but they're bound to be far worse under the Democrats, who are completely incapable of keeping our fragile lives sheltered from the winds of violent change." They tell the old familiar tales to plant seeds of doubt, to send the voter into the booth asking one big question: "Even if the Republicans are obviously not in control of this perilous world, do I dare to take a chance on those weak-willed flip-flop Democrats?" If a vote against the Democrats becomes a vote against uncontrollable change -- then the Republicans are likely to have another election in their pockets.

Though the frontier story and its twisted offspring have deep roots in puritan Christianity, don't just blame the Christians for them. Long ago these tales became the common property of secular American culture, too. And don't just blame the Republicans. These are the same stories that led Democrats from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton to places like The Somme, My Lai, and Mogadishu, promising wars to end war or communism or terrorism.

Yet ever since Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, the Republicans have managed to make the old stories their own private property. When Democrats try to tell them, they just don't sound believable any more. Right now, in fact, nothing that most mainstream Democrats have to say seems to have the ring of believability -- or the Scheherazade strategy wouldn't have a chance of saving the Republicans' political life in November. So what's a Democrat to do?

A Dem can start by seeing the risks in the Scheherazade strategy. For one thing, Rove's story depends on believable images of American strength. If U.S. forces in Iraq keep suffering disasters between now and election day, voters going into the booth will have a harder time hanging on to the image of Republicans as their manly saviors.

It also depends on voters letting fairy tales, not logical thinking about policies, determine their vote. The Democrats should not assume that most voters will fall prey to alluring but absurd tales, as the king in Scheherazade did. They can tell the voters -- and themselves -- a frontier story about another traditional American virtue: the courage to trust that ordinary people will use hard-headed common sense to separate fact from fiction.

The old stories tell us that the actual pioneers, not the ones who so long inhabited our movie screens, had to confront life honestly. They couldn't afford to "stay the course" just for the sake of saving face. And they couldn't afford to play politics with matters of life or death. When things went wrong, they were brave enough to admit it and use good old American ingenuity to set things right. They were true democrats, expecting everyone to shoulder their share of responsibility and giving their neighbors the right to express their own opinions. They didn't call disagreement "disloyalty." They knew that even the humblest guy or gal might have the best idea for fixing things.

Out on the frontier, pioneers needed that kind of courage and common sense to make sure they and their families survived. It may be just what the Democrats need to survive, too -- trusting ordinary people, even Iraqis, to find practical solutions to practical problems. If the Republican candidates want to play Scheherazade, they have to recognize that the Democrats might have a more honest, compelling story to tell. And we, the voters, are the king. We get to decide who remains alive at dawn on November 8 and who ends up a political corpse.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of the forthcoming book Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu

Copyright 2006 Ira Chernus
posted July 7, 2006 at 9:18 am

TWO weeks and counting, and the editor of The New York Times still has not been sentenced to the gas chamber. What a bummer for one California radio talk-show host, Melanie Morgan, who pronounced The Times guilty of treason and expressly endorsed that punishment. She and the rest of the get-the-press lynch mob are growing restless, wondering why newspapers haven't been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. "If Bush believes what he is saying," taunted Pat Buchanan, "why does he not do his duty as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States?"

Here's why. First, there is no evidence that the Times article on tracking terrorist finances either breached national security or revealed any "secrets" that had not already been publicized by either the administration or Swift, the Belgian financial clearinghouse enlisted in the effort. Second, the legal bar would be insurmountable: even Gabriel Schoenfeld, who first floated the idea of prosecuting The Times under the Espionage Act in an essay in Commentary, told The Nation this month that the chance of it happening was .05 percent.

But the third and most important explanation has nothing to do with the facts of the case or the law and everything to do with politics. For all the lynch mob's efforts to single out The Times — "It's the old trick, go after New York, go after big, ethnic New York," as Chris Matthews put it — three papers broke Swift stories on their front pages. Even in this bash-the-press environment, the last spectacle needed by a president with an approval rating in the 30's is the national firestorm that would greet a doomed Justice Department prosecution of The Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.

The administration has a more insidious game plan instead: it has manufactured and milked this controversy to reboot its intimidation of the press, hoping journalists will pull punches in an election year. There are momentous stories far more worrisome to the White House than the less-than-shocking Swift program, whether in the chaos of Anbar Province or the ruins of New Orleans. If the press muzzles itself, its under-the-radar self-censorship will be far more valuable than a Nixonesque frontal assault that ends up as a 24/7 hurricane veering toward the Supreme Court.

Will this plan work? It did after 9/11. The chilling words articulated at the get-go by Ari Fleischer (Americans must "watch what they say") carried over to the run-up to the Iraq war, when the administration's W.M.D. claims went unchallenged by most news organizations. That this strategy may work again can be seen in the fascinating escalation in tactics by the Bush White House's most powerful not-so-secret agent in the press itself, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The Journal is not Fox News or an idle blogger or radio bloviator. It's the establishment voice of the party in power. The infamous editorial it ran on June 30 ("Fit and Unfit to Print"), an instant classic, doesn't just confer its imprimatur on the administration's latest crusade to conflate aggressive journalism with treason, but also ups the ante.

The editorial was ostensibly a frontal attack on The Times, accusing its editors of not believing America is "really at war" and of exercising bad faith in running its report on the Swift operation. But an attack on The Times by The Journal's editorial page is a shrug-inducing dog-bites-man story; the paper's conservative editorialists have long dueled with a rival whose editorials usually argue the other side. (And sometimes the Times opinion writers gleefully return the fire.) What was groundbreaking and unsettling about the Journal editorial was that it besmirched the separately run news operation of The Journal itself.

By any standard, The Journal is one of the great newspapers in the world, whether you agree with its editorials or not. As befits a great newspaper, its journalists are fearless in pursuit of news, as tragically exemplified by Daniel Pearl. Like reporters at The Times, those at The Journal operate independently of the paper's opinion pages. Witness The Journal's schism during the Enron scandal. Its editorial page belittled the scandal's significance most of the way, resisting even mild criticisms of Enron (it was "partly a victim of its own success") until it filed for bankruptcy. The dearly departed Ken Lay, after all, was the leading Bush financial patron; to the Journal editorialists, the "Clintonian moral climate" of the 1990's was a root cause of Enron's problems. Meanwhile, The Journal's investigative reporters had gone their own way months earlier, helping unearth the scandal. So much so that Mr. Lay tried to argue his innocence in the spring by testifying that a "witch hunt" by the paper's reporters had more to do with his company's demise than he did.

It was a similarly top-flight Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wrote his paper's Swift story. But the Journal editorial page couldn't ignore him if it was attacking The Times for publishing its Swift scoop on the same day. So instead it maligned him by echoing Tony Snow's official White House line: The Journal was merely following The Times once it knew that The Times would publish anyway. As if this weren't insulting enough, the editorial suggested that the Treasury Department leaked much of the story to The Journal and that a Journal reporter could be relied upon to write a "straighter" account more to the government's liking than that of a Times reporter.

This version of events does not jibe with an e-mail sent by The Journal's own Washington bureau chief, Gerald Seib, on the day the Swift articles ran. "I was surprised to see your news story about the New York Times 'scoop' on the government program to monitor international bank transactions," Mr. Seib wrote to Joe Strupp of the trade publication Editor & Publisher. "As you could tell from the lead story on the front page of The Wall Street Journal today, we had the same story. Moreover, we posted it online early last evening, virtually at the same time The Times did. In sum, we and The Times were both chasing the story and crossed the finish line at the same time — and well ahead of The Los Angeles Times, which posted its story well after ours went up."

In other words, The Journal's journalists were doing their job with their usual professionalism. But by twisting this history, the Journal editorial page was sending an unsubtle shot across the bow, warning those in the newsroom (and every other newsroom) that their patriotism would be impugned, as The Times's had been, if they investigated administration conduct in wartime in ways that displeased the White House.

Any fan of The Journal's news operation expects it to stand up to this bullying. But the nastiness of the Journal editorial is a preview of what we can expect from the administration and all of its surrogates this year. In "The One Percent Doctrine," the revelatory book about wartime successes and failures now (happily) outpacing Ann Coulter at Amazon.com, the former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind explains just how tough it is for a reporter in this climate: "to report about national affairs and, especially, national security in this contentious period demands at least a spoonful of disobedience — a countermeasure to strong assurances by those in power that the obedient will be rewarded or, at the very least, have nothing to worry about."

The trouble is we have plenty to worry about. For all the airy talk about the First Amendment, civil liberties and Thomas Jefferson in the debate over the Swift story and the National Security Agency surveillance story before it, there's an urgent practical matter at stake, too. Now more than ever, after years of false reports of missions accomplished, the voters need to do what Congress has failed to do and hold those who mismanage America's ever-expanding war accountable for their performance in real time.

As George Will wrote in March, all three members of the "axis of evil" — Iraq, Iran and North Korea — are "more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined in 2002." So is Afghanistan, which is spiraling into Taliban-and-drug-lord anarchy, without nearly enough troops or other assistance to secure it. On the first anniversary of the London bombings, and on a surging wave of new bin Laden and al-Zawahiri videos, the two foremost Qaeda experts outside government, Peter Bergen and the former C.I.A. officer Michael Scheuer, both sounded alarms that contradict the insistent administration refrain that the terrorists are on the run.

We can believe instead, if we choose to, that all is well and that the press shouldn't question our government's account of how it is winning the war brilliantly at every turn. (The former C.I.A. analytical chief, Jami Miscik, decodes this game in "The One Percent Doctrine": the administration tells "only half the story, the part that makes us look good," and keeps the other half classified.) We can believe that reporters, rather than terrorists, are the villains. We can debate whether traitorous editors should be sent to gas chambers or merely tarred and feathered.

Or we can hope that the press will rise to the occasion and bring Americans more news we can use, not less, at a perilous time when every piece of information counts.

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From the Los Angeles Times

Police Abuses in Iraq Detailed

Confidential documents cover more than 400 investigations. Brutality, bribery and cooperation with militia fighters are common, a report says.

By Solomon Moore
Times Staff Writer

July 9, 2006

BAGHDAD — Brutality and corruption are rampant in Iraq's police force, with abuses including the rape of female prisoners, the release of terrorism suspects in exchange for bribes, assassinations of police officers and participation in insurgent bombings, according to confidential Iraqi government documents detailing more than 400 police corruption investigations.

A recent assessment by State Department police training contractors echoes the investigative documents, concluding that strong paramilitary and insurgent influences within the force and endemic corruption have undermined public confidence in the government.

Officers also have beaten prisoners to death, been involved in kidnapping rings, sold thousands of stolen and forged Iraqi passports and passed along vital information to insurgents, the Iraqi documents allege.

The documents, which cover part of 2005 and 2006, were obtained by The Times and authenticated by current and former police officials.

The alleged offenses span dozens of police units and hundreds of officers, including beat cops, generals and police chiefs. Officers were punished in some instances, but the vast majority of cases are either under investigation or were dropped because of lack of evidence or witness testimony.

The investigative documents are the latest in a string of disturbing revelations of abuse and corruption by Iraq's Interior Ministry, a Cabinet-level agency that employs 268,610 police, immigration, facilities security and dignitary protection officers.

After the discovery in November of a secret Interior Ministry detention facility in Baghdad operated by police intelligence officials affiliated with a Shiite Muslim militia, U.S. officials declared 2006 "the year of the police." They vowed a renewed effort to expand and professionalize Iraq's civilian officer corps.

President Bush has said that the training of a competent Iraqi police force is linked to the timing of an eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops and a key element in the war in Iraq.

But U.S. officials say the renegade force in the ministry's intelligence service that ran the bunker in Baghdad's Jadiriya neighborhood continues to operate out of the Interior Ministry building's seventh floor. A senior U.S. military official in Iraq, who spoke on condition of anonymity in an interview last month, confirmed that one of the leaders of the renegade group, Mahmoud Waeli, is the "minister of intelligence for the Badr Corps" Shiite militia and a main recruiter of paramilitary elements for Interior Ministry police forces.

"We're gradually working the process to take them out of the equation," the military official said. "We developed the information. We also developed a prosecutorial case."

Bayan Jabr, a prominent Shiite, was interior minister at the time of the investigations detailed in the documents and has been accused of allowing Shiite paramilitary fighters to run rampant in the security forces.

U.S. officials interviewed for this article said the ability of Jabr's replacement, Jawad Bolani, to deal with the corruption and militia influence in the police force will be a crucial test of his leadership.

The challenges facing Bolani, a Shiite engineer who has no policing experience and entered politics for the first time after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, are highlighted in a recent assessment by police trainers hired by the State Department. According to the report, corruption in the Interior Ministry has hampered its effectiveness and its credibility with Iraqis.

"Despite great progress and genuine commitment on the part of many ministry officials, the current climate of corruption, human rights violations and sectarian violence found in Iraq's security forces undermines public confidence," according to the document, titled "Year of the Police In-Stride Assessment, October 2005 to May 2006."

Elements of the Ministry of the Interior, or MOI, "have been co-opted by insurgents, terrorists and sectarian militias. Payroll fraud, other kinds of corruption and intimidation campaigns by insurgent and militia organizations undermine police effectiveness in key cities throughout Iraq," the report says.

The report increased tensions between the Pentagon, which runs the police training program, and the State Department, which has been pushing to expand its limited training role in Iraq, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The report strikes contradictory tones, saying that the Interior Ministry continues to improve and that its forces are on track to take over civil security from U.S. and Iraqi military elements by the end of the year, while outlining shocking problems with corruption and abuse.

"The document basically shows that Interior Ministry management has failed," the U.S. official said. "The document didn't directly address U.S. policy failures, but I guess it does show that too."

Interior Ministry officials have taken steps to "improve detainee life," the report says. "However, there are elements within the MOI which continue to abuse detainees."

Referring to Sunni Arab insurgent groups and Shiite paramilitary organizations, the report says "these groups exploit MOI forces to further insurgent, party and sectarian goals. As a result, many Iraqis do not trust the police. Divisions falling along militia lines have led to violence among police.

"MOI officials and forces are widely reported to engage in bribery, extortion and theft," the report says. "For example, there are numerous credible reports of ministry and police officials requiring payment from would-be recruits to join the police."

The report's findings are borne out in hundreds of pages of internal investigative documents.

The documents include worksheets with hundreds of short summaries of alleged police crimes, letters referring accused officers to Iraq's anti-corruption agencies and courts, citizen complaints of police abuse and corruption, police inspector general summaries detailing financial crimes and fraudulent contracting practices and reports on alleged sympathizers of Saddam Hussein's former regime.

In crisp bureaucratic Arabic, the documents detail a police force in which abuse and death at the hands of policemen is frighteningly common.

Police officers' loyalties appear to be a major problem, with dozens of accounts of insurgent infiltration and terrorist acts committed by ministry officials.

In one case, a ring of Baghdad police officers — including a colonel, two lieutenants and a captain — were accused of stealing communications equipment for insurgents, who used the electronics for remote bomb triggers. In another case, a medic with the Interior Ministry's elite commando force in Baghdad was fired after he was accused of planting improvised explosives and conducting assassinations.

In Diyala province, where last month U.S. forces killed Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, investigators were looking into allegations that a police officer detonated a suicide vest in the bombing of a police station. In a separate case, a brigadier general, a colonel and a criminal judge were accused of taking bribes from a suspected terrorist.

Police officers have also organized kidnapping rings that abduct civilians for ransom — in some of the cases, the victims are police officers. Two Baghdad police commanders kidnapped a lieutenant colonel, stole his ministry car and demanded tens of thousands of dollars from the victim's family, the documents allege. In that case, the two accused, Maj. Gen. Naief Abdul Ezaq and Capt. Methaq Sebah Mahmoud, were fired and taken to court.

The abbreviated notes on the case do not make clear whether the two officers received further punishment, but the fact that the documents mention the courts being involved in the incident at all makes it stand out from the rest of the cases.

In another case, the bodyguards of a police colonel in the Zayona neighborhood of Baghdad kidnapped merchants for ransom, according to the documents. In the capital's Ghazaliya neighborhood, a lieutenant and his brother-in-law kidnapped a man and demanded a huge ransom from his family.

Abuse by police is also a common theme. The victims include citizens who tried to complain about police misbehavior, drivers who disobeyed traffic police commands and, in several cases, other police officers.

But detainees appear to be targeted most often. The U.S. military has been working with the Iraqi government to standardize detention facilities and policies, and the U.S. assessment claims that several site visits turned up no serious human rights abuses. But the ministry documents reveal a brutal detention system in which officers run hidden jails, and torture and detainee deaths are common.

The documents mention four investigations into the deaths of 15 prisoners at the hands police commando units.

In the Rusafa section of Baghdad, a predominantly Shiite area known for its strong militia presence, police tortured detainees with electricity, beatings and, in at least one case, rape, according to the internal documents. Relief was reserved for those detainees whose relatives could afford to bribe detention officers to release them.

The Wolf Brigade, a notorious commando unit, illegally detained more than 650 prisoners, according to the documents. During a mass release of Wolf Brigade prisoners last November, a Times reporter saw dozens of malnourished men among the released detainees; several were so weak that they could not walk without assistance.

Female detainees are often sexually assaulted. According to the documents, the commander of a detention center in the Karkh neighborhood of the capital raped a woman who was an alleged insurgent in August. That same month, two lieutenants tortured and raped two other female detainees.

Among the strongest reprimands — and the most outrageous corruption — detailed in the documents are the cases involving two provincial police chiefs who were removed.

Brig. Gen. Adil Molan Ghaidan, the former Diyala province police chief, was accused of drinking on the job, illegally confiscating real estate from citizens, knowingly paying ghost employees and harboring suspected terrorists. He was removed from the force about six months ago, police sources say.

Before his removal several months ago, Maj. Gen. Ahmad Mohammed Aljiboori, the former Nineveh province police chief, allegedly assigned a private army of 1,400 officers to personal security detail. According to an internal inquiry, Aljiboori claimed the force was not under the Interior Ministry's control.

The document also accuses Aljiboori of detaining 300 Iraqis for two months without charges, wasting thousands of dollars on extravagant banquets and neglecting antiterrorism efforts to focus on arresting car dealers. The document says Aljiboori confiscated most of the cars for personal gain and gave some of them away to friends as gifts.

U.S. officials say they have known about Interior Ministry abuses for years but have done little to thwart them, choosing instead to push Iraqi leaders to solve their own problems.

"The military had been at the bunker prior to the raid in November," said the U.S. official, referring to the Jadiriya facility. "But they said nothing."

Some U.S. military leaders want American officials to have a stronger hand with the Interior Ministry, arguing that continuing corruption and militia influence are dashing any hope for a speedy American withdrawal.

Another senior military official said U.S. policy in regard to the ministry was confused and disengaged. The official, who asked not to be identified because his comments impugned his superiors, said the Pentagon and State Department had failed to coordinate their efforts and were disengaged from the Iraqi police leaders.

"They sit up there on the 11th floor of the ministry building and don't talk to the Iraqis," the official said of U.S. police trainers assigned to the Interior Ministry headquarters tower. "They say they do policy and [that] it's up to the Iraqis — well, they're just doing nothing. The MOI is the most broken ministry in Iraq."

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

Blowback Can Be a Bitch

Posted by James Wolcott

It's as if the American military and media thought that the deaths of Iraqi civilians from US action somehow wouldn't count as long as we didn't actually count them. Digby the indispensable analyzes and amplifies an important piece by Andrew Bacevich in the Washington Post about the callow attitude towards civilian casualties that has helped make enemies of those we boast about having liberated.

Bacevich:

"This disdain for counting bodies, especially those of Iraqi civilians killed in the course of U.S. operations, is among the reasons why U.S. forces find themselves in another quagmire. It's not that the United States has an aversion to all body counts. We tally every U.S. service member who falls in Iraq, and rightly so. But only in recent months have military leaders finally begun to count -- for internal use only -- some of the very large number of Iraqi noncombatants whom American bullets and bombs have killed.

"Through the war's first three years, any Iraqi venturing too close to an American convoy or checkpoint was likely to come under fire. Thousands of these 'escalation of force' episodes occurred. Now, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, has begun to recognize the hidden cost of such an approach. 'People who were on the fence or supported us' in the past 'have in fact decided to strike out against us,' he recently acknowledged."

To which Digby remarks, "An occupying army has been shooting civilians indiscriminately (or at least it seems that way) engendering resentment among the population and they are just now recognizing that this might not have been the best idea in the world? Jesus."

Well, at least American policy is consistent, because we've been making the same mortal mistakes in Afghanistan, perhaps with even more roaring disregard. Christina Lamb, who's been doing stalwart reporting from Afghanistan for the Times of London, has a long reflection today about the comeback of the Taliban, the isolated state of the Kabul government, and the tragic repeat of the Russian folly. Its title, "Death Trap", pretty much sets the tone. History has never favored the invader or occupier in Afghanistan, and, according to Lamb, what's made the British mission even more vexingly quixotic has been the roadkill and bomb craters left by the US military in its high-powered, high-altitude hot rodding, which tends to rile the locals and swell the ranks of militias.

"...[T]he continuing air raids across Afghanistan, sometimes on wedding parties or innocent villagers, ...have led to the loss of thousands of civilian lives. In May this year there were an astonishing 750 bombing raids*, according to American Central Command."

"Karzai has repeatedly complained to the Americans about the bombers and the lack of cultural sensitivity of raids on the ground — doors kicked down in the middle of the night, male soldiers entering women’s quarters or taking in dogs which are considered unclean.

"Another bitter complaint is of American convoys driving too fast and not stopping when they run someone down. It was such an incident in Kabul that provoked a six-hour riot last month — yet two weeks later a US truck ran over a child in exactly the same place.

"'How can we go in offering school sets and candy to people when the Americans have just bombed someone’s family or run over their daughter?' asked an exasperated senior ISAF [International Security Assistance Force, under Nato control] officer."

[snip]

"Against such a backdrop, it seems hopelessly naive for the British to hope that locals in Helmand will differentiate between them and the Americans. At every meeting I attended, para commanders started off by telling local elders, 'we’re British, not Americans,' an odd comment for such close allies.

"At a shura or traditional meeting in Gereshk, elders complained about soldiers bursting into their women’s quarters.

"'It’s not us, we’ve had endless cultural training about this,' said Major Paul Blair, the local British commander. 'But of course they don’t see the difference.'

"'You don’t even differentiate between Pashtuns and Tajiks, let alone different Pashtun tribes,' replied a local teacher. 'Why should we?'

"Back at the camp after this discussion we found that a convoy of Americans had arrived. They were laughing about running over some goats on the way in. 'Now I’m going to have to make another phone call to the district chief to sort it out,' grumbled Blair."

Goatkill, something fun to tell the folks back home about.

Surveying the Mission: Intractable in Afghanistan, Lamb concludes: "It did not have to be this way. Just as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda would never have taken hold if the West had not abandoned Afghanistan after the Russians withdrew in 1989, so we would not be in the mess we are today if London and Washington had focused on Afghan nation-building after 2001 instead of pursuing other foreign adventures."

For Bush-Blair, "nation-building" has become a phrase intended to justify open-ended occupation...given the corporate corruption of the bidding process, I'm not sure nation building would have been attempted in good faith even if the neocons and Cheney-Rumsfeld hadn't been in a mad rush to get to Baghdad, and from there to Tehran. In any event, as Digby observes, the US is the victim of its own original sin.

"...the fundamental flaw remains the invasion itself, a bad decision from which everything else flows. The lesson is that an illegal, dishonest war of choice is doomed on its own terms. In the modern world outright conquest is impossible and anything else cannot be finessed with spin and wishful thinking.

"That we compounded that error with a comic book understanding of the people we were 'liberating' and a lack of postwar planning that was criminal in its negligence is just more evidence of the perfidy of this administration and its congressional enablers. But the central problem remains that it is not how we waged the war, it's that we waged it at all."

*William S. Lind, commenting on the bombing extravaganza in a column titled "Air Strikes in Afghanistan: Aargh!," marvels at the Pentagon's tactical genius for getting it exactly wrong: In guerrilla war, "Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren't your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends, and fellow tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42 cm. siege mortars."

07.09.06 4:24PM

Dear Sony,

Please fire your ad agency. Lynching isn't a joke. Do not attempt to convince the gaming public that your system is superior by likening your potential customers to anime-besotted Klansmen.

Yours truly,

&c

Nubian is encouraging readers to complain to Sony about the ad. Here is the contact information she supplies:

SONY CORPORATE OFFICES:
Sony Computer Entertainment America
PO Box 5888
San Mateo, CA 94402-0888
800-345-7669 (800-345-SONY)
M-SAT 6:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m. PST
Sunday 7:00 a.m. – 6:30 p.m

Hat tip to Amanda of Pandagon.

[Bla(c)kademic, Pandagon]

Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute.