 This week's
(February 2nd) New Yorker has
at least three wonderful surprises. The first is a guest article by the
blogosphere's own Joshua Micah Marshall -- he of the Talking
Points Memo -- entitled Power Rangers: Did the Bush Administration create a new
American empire -- or weaken the old one. Josh draws some
excellent points from history, and shows that the best writers in the
blogosphere have the talent to hold their own in the world's finest
magazine.
Second is a long and fascinating report by Jon Lee Anderson on The Candidate (not available
online) -- based on a series of recent, face-to-face, on-the-ground
interviews with the likely first legitimately elected president of
post-Saddam Iraq, Abdulaziz al-Hakim, and with several of his
supporters, detractors, and informed observers in Iraq. The impressions
from Anderson's report are consistent, and almost the opposite of what
the Bush regime is saying, and doing:
- The American occupying force is increasingly and
uniformly despised by a huge majority, and almost every faction, of
Iraqis. Iraqis overwhelmingly believe the US has long overstayed its
welcome, is now doing far more harm than good, and is going to get
embroiled in greater violence and more sustained and broad-based
opposition the longer it stays. As one Iraqi put it so well "We are
working, but it's really just playing around as long as the Americans
and the British are in charge. It's like Iraq is a TV and the Americans
and the British have the remote control."
- All civility that prevailed in the weeks after the
war, and all progress achieved in post-Saddam Iraq is credited, rightly
or wrongly, to the Iraqis themselves, and especially to the Shia Badr
forces. There is an overwhelming sense that the occupying force doesn't
know what they are doing, have grossly inadequate resources to do
anything anyway, and are trying to run Iraq on the cheap -- no
significant investment in labour or cash to rebuild the country. In
other words, they are just "in the way" of Iraqis getting on with the
job of determining their own future.
- There is enormous resentment of native Iraqis at
what is seen as a paternalistic attitude by the occupiers towards the
ability of Iraq to rebuild itself. They feel insulted at Americans'
misperception of Iraqis as anarchic, politically naive, uneducated and
under-skilled, the Americans' foot-dragging in turning over control to
an elected Iraqi government, and the lack of consultation with Iraqis
in making important decisions affecting Iraq's future.
- Whether the occupiers leave now or later, the future
will inevitably be violent and divisive. Hakim is guarded in his
comments but he makes it absolutely clear that the next government will
be a Shia Islamic state, and Anderson's other interviews make it clear
that significant concessions will be made to the Kurds in the North
(probably an autonomous Kurdish state, setting the stage for a war with
Turkey), and that the Sunnis and Baathists will be caught in the
squeeze, put down in a violent civil war, and/or massacred. It's going
to be ugly, but it's the only way to true constitutional liberalism and
democracy, as everyone except the occupiers knows. The pieced-together
'Governing Council' is unsustainable and will not hang together. In
case there is any doubt about any of this, Anderson quotes one Sunni
businessman who says simply the large Baathist and Sunni minority "will
accept any Sunni government for Iraq, but no other solution". There is
zero chance of that 'solution' coming about.
So let me say it again: The US needs to invest heavily in rebuilding
the Iraqi infrastructure that it destroyed, let the Iraqis do the
rebuilding themselves, can Bremer's hapless Provisional Authority, and
bring the occupying forces home and out of harm's way now. When will someone running for US office have
the courage to stand up and say this? Did we learn nothing from Vietnam?
The best article in the magazine -- in fact the best piece of political
writing I have read in years
-- is the incomparable Hendrik Hertzberg's lead Talk of the Town
commentary entitled Unsteady State. This
short piece should be compulsory reading in journalism school and for
anyone who wants to write for a living, including us bloggers. It's
articulate, packed with brilliantly selected, illuminating examples and
anecdotes in support of his arguments, punctuated with creative and
memorable turns of phrase, short on adjectives, and savage in its broad
and compelling skewering of every aspect of the sorry-ass Bush regime's
three years in power. In just 1200 words, Hertzberg (pictured above)
succinctly sums up why so many of us believe that Bush will be
remembered in perpetuity as the worst president in American history.
Quick, someone sign this guy up to write the Dems' speeches.
Please read the article, save it (it's currently
online but repeated below in its entirety so you'll still be able
to access it when it disappears into the New Yorker archives). And any time
you think you have the stuff to be a world-class editorial writer,
compare this article to your best work and be humbled and amazed. This
guy is the master.
Unsteady State
-- by Hendrik Hertzberg
George W.
Bush says he wants to go to Mars -- a
motion that many of his fellow-citizens would heartily second -- but he
probably doesn't mean it. The speech in which he announced his “New
Vision for Space Exploration” was exceedingly vague about how and when
the trip was to be made. It did say that in 2015 or maybe in 2020
Americans would be going back to the moon, where they would build a
base for “human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond.” An official
likened this speech to President Kennedy's address of May 25, 1961, in
which he asked the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal,
before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning
him safely to the earth.”
A week later came Bush's
State of the Union address, the text of
which one scans in vain for any mention of Mars, the moon, or space
exploration. The subject has already been dropped. (By contrast,
Kennedy's 1962 State of the Union reiterated and discussed the lunar
excursion he had proposed eight months before.) Nor is a short
attention span the only sign of Bush's lack of seriousness about his
interplanetary venture. There is also its Wal-Mart price tag. The
President is asking Congress for an extra two hundred million dollars
per year, about what it costs to make a movie like “Waterworld.”
Another couple of billion is to be cannibalized out of the existing
space budget. This kind of money will get no one to Mars, but that
isn't to say that Bush's project will yield no results. It has already
led to the cancellation of maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's
most scientifically valuable project, which means that the Hubble will
go blind in three or four years’ time. Bush's “New Vision” is a sharp
stick in the eye.
Polls published between the
two Bush speeches revealed a distinct
lack of public enthusiasm for the President's space proposal, and it
will be surprising if he mentions it again anytime soon. But
“Mars,” “the moon,” and “space” are not the only words missing in
action from the State of the Union. So are “unemployment,” “aids,”
and “the environment.” “Deficit” makes but a single appearance, as
part
of an utterly unconvincing, detail-free assertion that the gigantic
budget shortfalls with which Bush has replaced the surpluses he
inherited can be halved in five years if Congress would just “focus on
priorities.”
The word “war,” on the other
hand, makes a dozen appearances in the
speech, while “terror” and its derivatives appear twenty times. The
surrounding contexts suggest that Bush and his political handlers plan
to use 9/11 and its aftermath every bit as ruthlessly this year as they
did in 2002, when Republicans captured control of the Senate by
portraying Democrats as friends of terrorism. (The most prominent
victim of this strategy was Senator Max Cleland, of Georgia, who lost
three limbs fighting in Vietnam, and who was defeated by ads showing
his face alongside those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.) In
2004, according to Bush, “we face a choice: we can go forward with
confidence and resolve, or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion
that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to
us.” If the choice he is talking about is November's (and what else
could it be?), then this is slander. The illusion that Bush describes
is shared by none of the four remaining Democratic candidates with a
chance at nomination. Nor, by the way, do any of them doubt that the
Iraqi people are better off without the regime of Saddam Hussein. And,
while all four are for other reasons critical of Bush's Iraq policies,
all recognize that, like it or not, the rehabilitation of Iraq is now
an American responsibility.
The truth is that at this
point no one can be sure whether the Iraq
war, in its over-all effect, will turn out in the end to have helped or
hindered the larger campaign against Islamism terrorism. What does seem
fairly clear is that Iraq's biological, chemical, and, especially,
nuclear weapons did not exist. Public and congressional support for the
war, as well as the scattered international support it enjoyed, was
therefore purchased falsely and, to a degree not yet known,
dishonestly. There has been a serious breach of trust, which cannot
fail to have damaging results. “For diplomacy to be effective, words
must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America,” the
President said in his speech, and for a moment one couldn't be sure one
had heard him right. Was he speaking ironically? America's word -- the
present Administration's, anyway -- has in fact been cast into the deepest
doubt, and that is one of the reasons its diplomacy has not been
effective. Bush was talking about Libya's promise, post-Iraq, to
abandon its (not very scary) nuclear ambitions, and what he actually
meant, of course, is that no one now doubts America's will to make war.
But that is not true, either. Iraq has stretched the Pentagon's legions
thin, and the misinformation that the Administration promulgated, from
whatever admixture of intelligence failure and deliberate distortion,
means that it will no longer be possible to rally domestic or
international support for military adventures in the absence of a clear
and independently verifiable casus belli.
Washington's word won't do.
Bush's only serious (that
is, expensive) domestic program, as
always, is yet another mammoth tax entitlement for the rich and the
superrich. The new plan would make permanent his earlier tax cuts,
which, in a gimmick designed to make future deficits look less
terrifying, were scheduled to expire in 2010. This new round of relief
for the unneedy, like the previous three, is to be financed (though the
President didn't mention this part) by confiscating the Social Security
“trust fund,” curtailing federal activities that benefit society at
large, and borrowing more trillions -- taking out a fourth mortgage on the
future, payable to foreign creditors. The rest of Bush's proposals were
either ruinously expensive, socially poisonous non-starters (such as
privatizing Social Security) or cheap cuts of wormy red meat for the
conservative and evangelical base. Of the latter the cheapest was an
exhortation to professional athletes to quit taking steroids, the
wormiest a threat to deface the Constitution with anti-gay graffiti.
In last year's State of the
Union, Bush's buzz phrase was “weapons
of mass destruction,” the threat of which justified the impending
conquest of Iraq. This year's speech subsumed that phrase into the
longer, mealier “weapons of mass destruction-related program
activities,” a usefully adaptable locution. Were teams of inspectors to
fan out across Bush's domestic policies in search of solutions to the
nation's problems, they would be less likely to return empty-handed if
they settle for environment-related program activities (such as logging
in national forests), education-related program activities (such as
requiring tests without providing the funds to help kids pass them),
and health care-related program activities (such as forbidding Medicare
to negotiate for lower drug prices). Like the speech itself, all this
comes under the heading of winning the election-related program
activities. Here's hoping it will prove equally effective.
|
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