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Leaks? Quick, get a plumber!
A Rand Corporation analyst came to the Pentagon and suggested that Saudi Arabia is an enemy of the U.S., the Washington Post reported Tuesday. The article points out that this is not the government's policy or view, but rather an independent analyst's perspective; it also suggests that this perspective has growing currency within the Bush administration.
I heard Defense Secretary Rumsfeld fulminating on NPR's top-of-the-hour news about this Pentagon leak. "Unprofessional," he fumed. It did not represent the government's point of view. It was obviously "leaked by someone who wants to feel important." The leaker, he concluded, should go to jail.
This is the Bush administration's reflex every time there's a leak exposing a policy rift: Which traitor broke ranks?
Isn't it time Rumsfeld and his colleagues grew up and admitted that leaks like this happen only when there is genuine disagreement among policymakers, and one of them, vying for position, chooses to send up a flare in the press? (I'm not subscribing here to the darker conspiracy-theory view that these leaks are in fact orchestrated by the administration even as it disavows them. That can happen, but I don't think it happens often, and I don't think it's happening now.)
Rumsfeld may not like that way of doing business. It is arguably not a good way of doing business. But it's not about "wanting to feel important." There's a real issue at stake here: How do we deal with the fact that Saudi Arabia's government is both an ally and in many ways a backer of the radical Islamism that we find ourselves fighting?
Since we're nominally "at war" and American lives are actually and potentially at stake, those policy conflicts ought to be debated in full public view, not left purely to the "professionals." Instead, the Bush administration's first resort is to demand that leakers go to jail.
Which former Republican administration does that remind you of? Right -- one that ended in resignation and disgrace. Rumsfeld knows all about the Nixon crew's way of dealing with leaks, of course; he got his start in politics with them.
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Humiliation as global strategy
There's an interesting debate going on among Glenn Reynolds, Nick Denton and Dave Winer about the following proposition: "the US needs to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime mainly because the West needs to humiliate the Arab world, and dispel the Islamic millenial fantasy."
Doc Searls has the full recap, and a perspective that I find persuasive. ...And as Farhad points out in the comments, taking Saddam out doesn't achieve the goal of humiliating Islamism because Saddam isn't an Islamist: "If we wanted to crush Islamism, we'd crush Saudi Arabia, not Iraq."
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Gore's fire in the belly
When I read it over my morning coffee, I liked Al Gore's Sunday op-ed counterpunch to Joe Lieberman's criticism of his populist, "I'm for the people, not the powerful" rhetoric in 2000. It seems that the Beltway punditocracy did not share the reaction. Slate's William Saletan cites the piece as proof that Gore "still doesn't get it." The piece, Saletan argues, shows Gore hasn't tamed the pugnacious streak that, according to Saletan, cost him the presidency: "As the 2000 presidential debates demonstrated, his driving imperative is to prove that he's right and his opponents are wrong."
The Saletan piece is the kind of classic inside-the-Beltway analysis that, too often, we get, not only from Slate but from the Washington Post and the rest of the political media. Saletan, a smart and insightful writer, seems to have no interest (as Josh Marshall points out today) in even exploring whether Gore was right or not. Right or wrong is irrelevant. Gore is chastised for even caring about whether he was right or wrong. All that matters is tactics. Did Gore find the precise point on the rhetoric dial to press the electorate's buttons or not? Well, he didn't win the election, so obviously he didn't. (Though, actually, he did win a majority of the votes, but Saletan, like the rest of the Beltway world, won't even think of going there -- rehashing the contested 2000 election is so tiresome and unpatriotic in these days of the War on Something or Other.)
Even when viewed purely tactically, it's not at all clear that Saletan is right to blame populism for Gore's failure to capture more votes. Consider this L.A. Times analysis: "Exit polling from the 2000 campaign suggests that Gore's populist appeal neither attracted the working-class voters it targeted nor repelled the more affluent voters that critics believe it alienated. More dramatic was the party's decline in 2000 among culturally conservative rural voters."
Gore has his patently obvious weaknesses as a candidate, but they have mostly stemmed from problems of image and failures of consistency. Whenever Gore puts on those populist shoes he keeps trying on, he goes somewhere interesting -- somewhere that makes the world of Washington insiders profoundly uncomfortable, but that, in this season of outrage against government mismanagement of the economy and corporate misprision, makes a lot of sense to the rest of the country.
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