Pufferfish

Spin Me Right Round

Good to see Chris Matthews stepping up and admitting it was obnoxious and stupid to say Obama gave his Afghanistan speech at West Point to the "enemy camp." On Tuesday night Matthews wondered aloud why there wasn't more pompom waiving from military cadets; a comment so stupid I had to remind myself to breath. But the larger issue is that Matthews feels free to parrot Republican talking points and assume the military is a "skeptical audience" when a Democrat is commander in chief. Beyond empty Rovian rhetoric there isn't much in the way of evidence except, well, this:

According to an analysis of campaign contributions by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, Democrat Barack Obama has received nearly six times as much money from troops deployed overseas at the time of their contributions than has Republican John McCain.

I realize that's just a snap shot. But it's the most recent snap shot. And it indicates Matthews wasn't just an ass. He was flat out wrong.

And as long as we're on Afghanistan, I need to make a few broader points. After Obama's speech, Dan Senor, former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and general war fanboy, said with a touch of glee: “If you had told me Obama would have doubled the number of troops in Afghan and not significantly reduced our presence in Iraq, I would have had a hard time believing it.” Throw that together with Bill Kristol's ebullient reaction and it's enough to ask how different our Middle East policy is today than it would have been under a third Bush term.

Now, the fundamental problem I have with Obama's Afghanistan plan is that a) there is no achievable mission (other than temporarily delaying a Taliban resurgence) and b) the initial objective of kicking out al Qaeda has morphed (predictably) into reinventing Afghanistan as a “modern state.” That gets us back to Colin Powell's Pottery Barn maxim on invading Iraq: we broke it, now we own it. And if we're to learn anything from history it's that nation-building is a fool’s errand. The idea that Afghans will be ready to assume control of the country in 18 months would be hilarious if it wasn't the actual stated policy goal. The upshot is that Obama's plan has almost no chance of fundamentally changing the country's long-term prospects. I suppose one could argue that's better than a zero chance. And so in an effort to pacify the military and the GOP, Obama is sending in more troops while using the time line for withdrawal to appease his own party and foreign allies, who wouldn't sign on for an indefinite occupation.

As for the GOP's sad attempts to paint Obama as soft, it's Obama who is doubling the troop levels in Afghanistan while the right neglected the country for years. Earlier this week Dick Cheney attacked Obama’s "weakness" for ordering more troops into Afghanistan—despite being presented with the same request from Gen. David D. McKiernan a year earlier and leaving the decision to be made by the next administration. More worrisome is that the GOP establishment thought we had Afghanistan taken care of years ago. In 2005, John McCain declared victory when he said: “The facts on the ground are we went to Afghanistan and we prevailed there.” It was assumed Afghanistan had been locked down. It wasn't. What confidence should we have that this time will be any different?

Profiling The Profilers

"I say, profile away." -- Sarah Palin in an interview with The Weekly Standard while blaming a culture of political correctness that prevents racial profiling.

I'm going to make a leap of faith and assume Palin is talking about Muslim-looking Americans as potential terrorists and not Christian-looking Americans as potential terrorists.

The right has been eager to place blame on political correctness for shielding Nidal Hasan from investigators. It's an ugly critique. These conservatives are stirring up resentment against minorities instead of coping to the fact that clues were clearly missed for reasons unknown.

Until we see an internal memo stating that "Hasan is determined to strike inside the U.S., but liberal groups don't want him touched because Muslims might not like it," this PC talk should be viewed as little more than minority scapegoating that demonizes multi-cultural tolerance and as a tacit assurance that the latent fears of bigots are warranted.

A Circus In Their Minds

Sure it's a bit more fun to wonder out loud about the safety of political children and demand that justice be meted out angry mob style, but there appears to be a rather salient detail that has gotten lost in the blizzard of political posing: The fact that there’s nothing new about trying terrorists in court:

Indeed, the Bush Administration, just like the Obama Administration, pursued two tracks—most cases by far went to federal criminal court and a tiny handful went to military commissions. All that is happening now is some fairly minor adjustments in the gate deciding which cases go where, driven by a desire to secure prompt convictions for prisoners believed guilty of serious crimes.

A compelling study completed last week by NYU’s Center on Law and Security looks at counterterrorism prosecutions brought by the Bush and Obama Administrations. It notes 828 indictments by the Justice Department on terrorism charges. Of the resolved cases, 88.2% resulted in conviction. The strongest track record was achieved in the Southern District of New York, which, unsurprisingly, is just where Holder wants to send these cases. How does this record stack up to that of the military commissions? On every criterion–time from indictment to conviction, obtaining a conviction, length of sentence meted out—the prosecutors achieved better results in federal court than they did before military commissions. It’s no surprise that the criticisms of the Holder decision dwell on sweeping generalities and cold fear.

And I'm left wondering why Democratic spinners haven't been hitting this talking point.

Anyway, getting back to the idea that a KSM trial could show that torture was not necessary, it's easier to understand what all the GOP-sponsored fuss is about. Well, that and there's little Republicans enjoy more than inducing mass hysteria.

Torture Logic

From the departments of fearmongering and wishful thinking:

"Well, I think it's absurd, and I think the Obama administration will be as much on trail as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed... And God help us if they get off on a technicality because of the way the evidence was gathered. I would tell you not only is the Obama administration finished, I think the Democratic Party is finished."

This would carry a bit more weight if most neutral observers hadn't concluded long ago that Mike Huckabee is a blithering idiot. So as a registered Dem I'm not all that worried. Still, I do think the over-heated rhetoric bellies a fear within conservative ranks that has less to do with terrorists walking free and more to do with destroying the neocon narrative. Here's Marcy Wheeler arguing that John Yoo's real concern with putting KSM on trial is that it will show torture tactics were, gulp, unnecessary:

What the trial will likely show, instead, is that there was a great deal of information already available before they started torturing KSM. It’ll show that the KSM expert in FBI–-who we know was never allowed to get close to the Yoo-sanctioned torture sessions–-knew much if not all of the stuff that KSM was blabbing away after being waterboarded the 183rd time.

That’s the real risk for Yoo: not the illegal actions that the trial will expose. But how much evidence there was independent of Yoo’s little torture shop.

Now there's a happy bit of collateral damage for the Obama Justice Department.

Criminals And Warriors

Matt Yglesias says that if we're going to keep it simple, then international terrorism should be classified as a crime and not an act of war:

In political terms, the right likes the war idea because it involves taking terrorism more “seriously.” But in doing so, you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder.[...]

After all, do we really want to send the message to the world that a self-starting spree killer like Nidal Malik Hasan is actually engaged in some kind of act of holy war? It seems to me that we don’t. A lot of people in the world are interested in glory, and willing to take serious risks with their lives for its sake. Insofar as possible, we want to drain anti-American violence of the aura of glory. And that means by-and-large treating its perpetrators like criminals.

The catch is that Yglesias is still doing quite a bit of nuance, a past time not well received by many Americans. That touch of gray, along with the absence of fearmongering from the Obama White House has me wondering if the majority of Americans think Obama is playing it too cool. Many Americans don't want to hear anything resembling quibbling when it comes to Hasan's classification as a terrorist. It just sounds like liberals being soft. And to a certain extent I agree. But there's also a need to tone down the crazy. We should be able to middle this and say it appears Hasan was motivated by an irrational, perverse religious worldview while refraining from classifying this as part of a Holy War. The problem for liberals is that an intellectual argument is often harder to make than a visceral appeal.

Lessons Learned

This weekend taught us that Republicans are a party of bed-wetters:

What happened to the right wing swagger? When did they turn into such a bunch of scared wimps? When did they go from standing there in the rubble with George Bush and his megaphone to hiding under Dick Cheney’s desk cowering in fear?

Personally, I can’t think of anything more defiant than taking KSM, frog-marching him through Manhattan, giving him a fair trial, and then sending him to prison forever or executing him. That is how you show the terrorists that we aren’t going to be fazed.

Public trials are bad for the torture business, government secrecy and fearmongering. But that's not the argument the right is making. Instead a party that's never been agnostic on the effectiveness of the judicial system is pretending terrorists are larger than our laws and values.

God And Country

While Rod Dreher warbles on about Christian devotion to God over country and beats the drum for a holy war, Daniel Larison calmly makes a point that seems to escape conservatives:

Americanists who want to continue bludgeoning and bombing other countries cannot expect the immigrant populations they so happily welcome to remain indifferent to what is being done to their home countries or co-religionists. To the extent that the Americanism to which they expect immigrants to assimilate involves unnecessary and aggressive wars against other nations, it is the hawkish Americanists who are contributing to the erosion of national unity even as they squawk about the need for assimilation and it is they who are putting the loyalties of new Americans to the test.

Of course, it's the hawks who would say the only unity worth preserving is one in their own image.

Was It Terrorism?

Glenn Greenwald questions whether the attack at Ft. Hood was terrorism:

If one accepts that broadened definition of "terrorism" -- that it includes violence that targets not only civilians but also combatants who are unarmed or not engaged in combat at the time of the attack -- it seems impossible to exclude from that term many of the acts in which the U.S. and our allies routinely engage. Indeed, a large part of our "war" strategy is to kill people we deem to be "terrorists" or "combatants" without regard to whether they're armed or engaged in hostilities at the moment we kill them. Isn't that exactly what we do when we use drone attacks in Pakistan? [...]

It's likely that there will always be a lack of clarity about exactly what motivated Hasan -- some combination of mental instability, religious fervor and political conviction -- but, regardless of motive, the only way to define an attack on soldiers as an act of "terrorism" is to indict ourselves in the same way.

The "goodness" of one side against another doesn't matter much in the laws of war. Either way, I suppose I'm less interested in whether Hasan committed "terrorism" than I am in what right-wing ideologues want to do with the label. As Matt Duss put it: "the definition of terrorism is not 'any violence by any Muslim anywhere at any time for any reason'." Unfortunately, that was the working definition used by the Bush administration since 9-11: picture for a moment the breathless press conferences and raised terrorism Amber alerts had the attack happened at this time last year.

Emblematic of neo-conservative attempts to portray Islam as violent, today David Brooks inarticulately stated in his column that the "struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy." This is wrong. The struggle is against Islamofascism. Just as the violence committed by anti-choice activist Scott Roeder when assassinating Dr. George Tiller did not stem from Christianity, but from Christianism. They are both a radical, political perversion of religion. Sadly, a writer of Brooks' caliber knows exactly what he is doing.

The War Comes Home

It's understandable that in the fog of reporting a tragedy, the media would be overwhelmed with conflicting reports, wild speculation and false assertions. It's not understandable that much of the bad information was then broadcast:

I don't know exactly how to define what the balance should be, but particularly for politically explosive stories like this one, it seems clear that media outlets ought to exercise far more restraint and fact-checking rigor than they do. As it is, it's an orgy of rumor-mongering, speculation and falsehoods that play a very significant role in shaping public perceptions and enabling all sorts of ill-intentioned exploitation.

During a big event, the media's need to say something takes precedence over the need to say something accurate. Then again, it's made all the more difficult when a U.S. senator is giving an interview claiming that one shooter was in custody and 'another is still at large.' So it went with last night's coverage, which Michelle Malkin nonetheless quickly labeled as the "whitewashing of jihad by the MSM." That's an incredibly weak and disingenuous charge to throw out mere hours into a chaotic killing spree when the identity of the killer (or killers) remained in doubt, let alone the motive.

But the motive for Malkin and her ilk isn't to advocate for accurate reporting. It's to build a narrative that Muslims are inherently dangerous (and that the MSM, what with its pursuit of political correctness, is complicit in covering for them). Malkin and the right will use this tragedy as a means to divide the country while rendering a minority as the perpetual suspect. This is a woman who maintains that placing Americans of Japanese descent in internment camps during WWII was a good idea; better safe than sorry. Other than selling books, fear and loathing does nothing but undermine a multi-faith democracy by appealing to primal identities. As Andrew Sullivan notes, despite an attack like this, the American experiment "requires insisting that our membership in society is based on a citizenship devoted to core ideas, not a citizenship based on raw religious or ethnic identity."