The Opinion Mill

Have you been lying awake at night all excited at the thought of having one of the presidential debates in Dubai? Neither have I, but WaPo’s David Ignatius thinks it would be just the keenest thing:

Yes, I know: This is America’s presidential campaign, not a traveling roadshow to be shared with foreigners. And if the candidates can’t even agree on a schedule of town meetings out in the American heartland, why should they travel to a sheikdom that’s 7,000 miles from Washington — and a short boat ride from Iran?

But the idea of a Dubai debate is appealing, not least because it would link the epochal 2008 campaign with a world that cares passionately about where America is heading. The United States is unpopular abroad these days in part because of a perception that we’re arrogant — that we don’t care what the world thinks. An overseas debate would help change that perception.

The idea is appealing to Ignatius because he’s a rich, out-of-touch media drone who would be perfectly happy to live under a religious dictatorship as long as the shopping was good and the air conditioning never cut out.

As for the sheiks, they can afford the fuel to fly out to America. Not many of us are in the position to return the favore these days.

The only thing more confusing than the events in Basra is the jumble of nonsensical assumptions reporters are bringing to their coverage.

E.coli conservatism marches on. A deadly form of malaria not previously seen in Iraq (milder forms are found in the marshy southern portion of the country) is spreading across the country, so far unchecked by any government action. Because of its proficiency at killing Iraqis, doctors have nicknamed it “Blackwater fever,” in honor of the Bush administration’s favorite security firm.

The guy from the Los Angeles Times went looking for good news in Iraq. Really, he tried to find some, but reality and his military handlers kept getting in the way.

First he wanted to go check out that reopened bank branch in Amiriya. Refurbished by the Army at great expense and staffed by the Finance Ministry, it was being touted as another sign of the success story that is Iraq:

Within weeks, I heard back from the military regarding Amiriya. The bank was no longer something the military was willing to highlight.

“The unit operating in the same area as the bank doesn’t categorize the bank operations as a top priority because they don’t directly affect the good of the community of Amiriya,” an Army spokesman, Maj. Mark Cheadle, wrote in an e-mail. “So, the bottom line is they would rather not sponsor an embed or visit for something they don’t deal with on a regular basis.” My request for a follow-up “embed” was denied.

I tried to arrange a visit that would not involve the military, but the neighborhood is surrounded by checkpoints that were judged too dangerous for us to pass. Without being accompanied by soldiers, there was no way for me to tell the story.

Cheadle proposed that I instead write about a videoconference that allowed schoolchildren in Baghdad and Texas to ask questions of each other. I declined.

Okay, so the bank story didn’t go so well. But what about the Chinese restaurant in Baghdad’s Karada district? The one opened by three laid-off steelworkers from China’s Hubei province — the first food joint to be owned and operated by someone from outside the Middle East (and outside the employ of Halliburton) in years. How come the liberal media wouldn’t talk about that, huh?

Whoops:

A few days later, the restaurant employees said they had changed their minds about the interview. They were too scared to raise their profile through a news story. And a Chinese Embassy spokesman said his office had persuaded them to return home, although they were still operating in recent days. “The situation is far too dangerous for them to work here,” the spokesman said.

Because of such fears and the inefficiency that pervades the capital, these “good news” stories evaporated before I could tell them. After only a month in Iraq, I once again left having filed mostly “bad news” stories.

Ah, the hell with it. Let’s put out another press release about the schools that got painted. In another 10 months Bush will be able to slither out of the White House and leave this mess for a Democrat to clean up.

Thanks to John Cole, I see that while the Republicans try to gin up outrage over whether Barack Obama wears a flag pin on his lapel, one of their favorite politically connected firms, Kellogg Brown & Root, is hard at work patriotically vampirizing the U.S. economy:

More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.

The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.

But the use of the loophole results in a significantly greater loss of revenue to the government as a whole, particularly to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. And the creation of shell companies in places such as the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes has long been attacked by members of Congress.

A Globe survey found that the practice is unusual enough that only one other ma jor contractor in Iraq said it does something similar.

“Failing to contribute to Social Security and Medicare thousands of times over isn’t shielding the taxpayers they claim to protect, it’s costing our citizens in the name of short-term corporate greed,” said Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee who has introduced legislation to close loopholes for companies registering overseas.

With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor.

The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: the actions of the Bush administration make no sense except when viewed in terms of a “bust-out” — that venerable con in which crooks flim-flam their way into getting access to a company’s name and credit lines, then max out the credit lines with bulk purchases of easily disposable items that can be sold at a fraction of their value. The con-men then walk away, leaving the creditors to get what they can from the hollowed-out shell of what was once a functioning, productive business.

Virtually everything Bush and his cronies have done reinforces the view that the past seven years have been a colossal bust-out. The Iraq invasion was never once conducted in a manner that would suggest Bush believed his own guff about weapons of mass destruction; the “War on Terror” has never been conducted in a way that would suggest it was anything but a means to cow critics and expand presidential power in ways that would make it easier to bust open the cash registers, clear the shelves and empty the bank vault. Five years after its formation the Department of Homeland Security is simply an enormous ATM for contractors, with none of its ostensible goals accomplished.

What makes this bust-out even more disgusting than its low-level sewer rat incarnations is its ideologically self-reinforcing nature. Bush conservatives get to “prove” government doesn’t work by filling government jobes with Bush cronies uninterested in anything except suckling at the federal sugar tit. Bush contractors get to cheat the government out of Social Security payments, while Bush himself delivers speeches about how financially untenable the Social Security program has become. Of course government doesn’t work — conservatives are too busy working the government.

You can’t call it an example of one hand washing the other. It’s more like dung beetles helping each other roll their paydays.

The new Vanity Fair has a must-read article on how King George furthered the cause of democracy in the Middle East by trying to cook up a coup in Gaza:

After failing to anticipate Hamas’ victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-Contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Advisor Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

Here’s a slightly bigger helping:

[Palestinian national-security adviser Muhammad] Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’”

Washington reacted with dismay when Abbas began holding talks with Hamas in the hope of establishing a “unity government.”

[…]

“Nobody saw it coming.” Funny how often that phrase turns up with Condi Rice. Maybe that should be the title of Bush’s presidential memoir.

At their joint press conference, Rice smiled as she expressed her nation’s “great admiration” for Abbas’s leadership. Behind closed doors, however, Rice’s tone was sharper, say officials who witnessed their meeting. Isolating Hamas just wasn’t working, she reportedly told Abbas, and America expected him to dissolve the Haniyeh government as soon as possible and hold fresh elections.

What other parts of the world can King George screw up before the end of his term? Venezuela and Colombia? The mind reels. 

I’ve never wished for another January so fervently.

I guess it was about 15 years ago that I was poking around my book collection on a rainy Saturday and realized I had something like 10 books by Garry Wills on various subjects. I’d bought them not because I was a Garry Wills fan as such, but because the subjects promised an interesting read. Each book had delivered on that promise in spades, I realized, and from that point on I was a Garry Wills fan as such.

Though Lincoln at Gettysburg remains the Wills book I return to most often, Wills has written frequently and thoughtfully on the role of religion in American life and politics. His new one Head and Heart: American Christianities, emphasizes the fact that cannot be stated often enough: that separation of church and state is the protector of religion, not its enemy. Pull up a mug of coffee and hear him talk about it on Fresh Air.

* * *

Meanwhile, John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt talk about their new book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, as part of the “Conversations with History” series from UC Berkeley. I dunno, they sound pretty reasonable to me. I didn’t hear anything about wiping Israel off the map or rephrasing the old blood libels. They just talk about AIPAC as another interest group like the National Rifle Association, and gauge the extent of its influence. Sounds like a worthy project to me.

ADDENDUM: Here’s Mearsheimer on The Colbert Report as well.

Once again, Jimmy Carter demonstrates that while his record as president may be a very mixed bag, there’s no doubting that he is incomparably the best ex-president we’ve ever had.

When Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, the predictable rain of hellfire and condemnation descended upon his head. He was, after all, stepping into the most deadlocked area of argument in America, a terrain where ax-grinders and apologists have labeled anyone who dares criticize Israel as either an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. Not only did Carter boldly use the term “apartheid” to question Israel’s moral standing on the Palestinian issue, he went even further and disputed the transparently ridiculous cant that the interests of the United States and Israel are one and the same. For this offense, Jimmy Carter endured everything from condescending lectures on his lack of historical knowledge — yep, the president who brokered the first and most significant peace treaty yet seen in the Middle East, lacking historical knowledge — and outright vilification.

(We got a very, very small taste of this intimidation here at Opinion Mill HQ during the last blowup in Lebanon. The Woman Warrior put out a banner reading KILLING CHILDREN IS NOT SELF DEFENSE. Congregants from the synagogue across the street swarmed up our driveway to shout at us; that night, self-righteous vandals trespassed on our property and cut the banner down. I argued with people for hours, and I might just as profitably have given physics lectures to my dogs. There was simply no argument or fact they could hear that would shake their conviction that Israel is an unblemished paragon of virtue in everything it does, or that the idea of carpet-bombing civilians in a country just groping its way to democracy might be, at the very least, contrary to Israel’s long-term interests.)

So the Martin Petezes of the opinion world threw everything they had at Carter, and guess what? His book has struck a chord. Philip Weiss notes that the very intensity of the vilification aimed at Carter has only served to boost interest in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. And it isn’t one of the bogus freak-show controversies that Ann Coulter and Osama bin D’Souza whip up to sell their vacuous tomes, either; the book is attracting sincere people who genuinely want to see and hear something new about the Middle East.

Just as he helped break the deadlock between Israel and Egypt, Jimmy Carter is helping tear down the intellectual walls that pen in the debate about how to end the untenable situation in Israel. He’s raising awareness of preventable diseases in Africa and doing yeoman work with with Habitat For Humanity. Where other ex-presidents are content to pocket their pensions, play golf and select ghostwriters to pen their memoirs, Jimmy Carter is out there doing good.

I hope he stays with us a good many more years, but when Jimmy Carter does finally shuffle off this mortal coil, the wingnut noise machine is going to go into hyperdrive with posthumous smears and distortions of his record. Let’s all be ready. As I noted above, there’s a good deal in the Carter record I’m not happy about, but there’s also a good deal to admire and applaud — a lot more than for, say, Gerald R. Ford, whose recent passing an epic blizzard of B.S. Let’s all be on our guard.

What do Fareed Zakaria, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and Peter Beinart have in common? Well, for one thing they were wrong — spectacularly, disastrously wrong — about supporting the Iraq war.

And what do William Lind, Robert Scheer and Scott Ritter have in common? They were right — brilliantly, cleansingly right in denouncing the war and warning that it would have dreadful consequences for America and the world.

And yet, as this brilliantly written article points out, one group is enjoying more success and media prominence than ever, while the other group remains exiled on the fringes of public commentary.

Which group is hitting the jackpot? I don’t want to spoil any surprises for you, but here’s a hint: It ain’t the group that was right about the war.

Contrary to what some acquaintances have been saying, the timing of Saddam’s execution had nothing to do with obscuring the news that the number of U.S. casualties in Iraq has passed the 3,000 mark. As Juan Cole notes in Salon, it had everything to do with the sectarian carnage that preceded the trial — carnage the execution will only inflame:

When the death verdict was announced against Saddam in November, Sunni Arabs in Baquba, to the northeast of the capital, staged a big pro-Saddam demonstration. They were attacked by the Shiite police that dominate that mixed city, who killed 20 demonstrators and wounded a similar number. There were also pro-Saddam demonstrations in Fallujah and Mosul. Baghdad had to be put under curfew.

The tribunal also had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam’s hanging. It was a slap in the face to Sunni Arabs. This weekend marks Eid al-Adha, the Holy Day of Sacrifice, on which Muslims commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for God. Shiites celebrate it Sunday. Sunnis celebrate it Saturday –- and Iraqi law forbids executing the condemned on a major holiday. Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar.

The timing also allowed Saddam, in his farewell address to Iraq, to pose as a “sacrifice” for his nation, an explicit reference to Eid al-Adha. The tribunal had given the old secular nationalist the chance to use religious language to play on the sympathies of the whole Iraqi public.

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Cole’s piece is a must-read for anyone in search of the informed, historically astute analysis lacking in the endless snuff-film replays of the hanging on the Carrion News Network. Though I should note that if Saddam’s execution accomplishes nothing else, it will have gotten the cable “news” channels to pay attention to a death in Iraq — something they seem loath to do when the death involves an American soldier put in harm’s way by the lies of our sleazy, pathetic president.