Category: US election 2004

So it looks like we lost the damn election… I had been trying to steel myself for this, but still it feels like a body blow.
I guess those of us w/ foreign passports could take the easy way out and just stop thinking of ourselves as Americans. I don’t want to do that though. I want to retreat to my bunker in central Virginia and figure out how to reform this imperial beast into something better.
But just think of all the human misery that will occur– inside the US and outside it–before that reform project can take hold.
I am desperately trying not to feel angry with those of our “fellow citizens” who voted W in this time.
Big kudos and thanks to everyone in the peace and justice movement in the US for all their get-out-thevote efforts!!! Maybe in 2008 I should make a point of not quitting the country at election time so I can join that effort more wholeheartedly.
If the Empire ever lets us vote again, that is…

I feel a little impotent sitting here 5,000 miles away from the US in the run-up to an election that is of major importance for the entire world community.
I have cast my vote. I’ve done what I can to persuade all my voting friends and relations to do the same.
Now I sit here and wait. And think.
I’ve dared to dream a little about what might be possible if Kerry’s elected…. But I don’t want to go too far down that road because (a) it might not happen and (b) he might not be nearly as much different from Bush as we would like.
What needs to happen now, it seems to me, is a total rollback of the concept and practice of the US global empire. An equal voice and equal stake for each of God’s children. An end to this whole arrogant nonsense about “manifest destiny.”
100,000 Iraqi deaths. Let’s inscribe that number on our hearts.
(Update: read Scott Ritter’s excellent column, The war on Iraq has made moral cowards of us all.)
Maybe the sheer criminal folly of the venture in Iraq will be enough to persuade Americans of the craziness of the idea of our country trying to dictate everything to everyone else in the world?
I realize this persuasion campaign is not going to succeed overnight. But if Kerry gets elected, at least we can start the conversation.
If Bush gets “re-“elected, the conversation probably won’t start right away… But maybe when it does start, it’ll be even more serious… Because without a doubt if Bush is elected he’s going to create many, many more criminal blunders before we can think about starting rollback.
If the election is close, and long-drawn-out a la 2000, then I guess Bush will continue acting as though he’s the boss till it’s finally decided.
I have a question. If Kerry gets elected, how can we expect Bush to behave throughout his remaining 10 weeks in office? “Helpfully”, from the point of view of easing Kerry’s transition into office and easing the move toward a less arrogant, more multilateral stance in world affairs? Or “snittishly”, like a little boy who realizes he’ll soon lose his chance to play with all those lovely toy weapons, so decides he’s going to fire as many of them as he can before the adults come back and take them away from him?
… Just asking…

Many people have expressed a concern that in the run-up to next Tuesday’s election, the Bushites might be tempted to launch an “October surprise” in the form of some militarily spectacular action … with the most “popular” targets for such a “Wag the Dog” exercise being identified as either (1) Fallujah or (2) some portion of the Iranian nuclear complex.
A number of friends have asked my evaluation of such fears. They are not totally baseless or irrational. In 1981, the context in which Menachem Begin launched the military attack against Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor was precisely the context of a hard-fought election at home. In fact, from the many years I lived in and have been concerned by Lebanon, I can tell you that nearly every election inside Israel was–until PM Barak finally withdrew his troops from this country in 2000– prefaced by the sitting government in Israel launching some extremely lethal new escalation against this poor benighted neighbor.
(And people wonder why many Arabs have a jaded view of Israel’s “democracy”?)
I don’t under-estimate for a minute the degree to which Bush and many people in his entourage take many of their political and military cues from their friends in Israel. Nor do I under-esimate the “native political wiliness” of a person like Karl Rove, whose willingness to resort to electoral dirty tricks has in the past known almost no bounds.
Having said all that, though, I think a Bush-team-generated “October surprise” of the above-mentioned kind is quite unlikely this time around. And for that, I think we have largely the good sense of the Spanish electorate to thank…

Continue reading “‘October surprise’?”

Brilliant US heartland blogger (and JWN linkee) Marine’s Girl has a great report on her blog today, on a John Edwards rally she went to in Lima, Ohio on Sunday.
Ohio is of course a crucial swing state in next Tuesday’s election. (So is her present home state, Michigan.) Of course a Democratic Party rally doesn’t provide a representative cross-section of the American populace. But JWN readers–especially those of you outside the US– might really enjoy MG’s record of what she found there.
If you haven’t read her blog before you should know that her boyfriend, also a strong Bush critic, is a Marines sargeant who has been forced to extend his service in Iraq long after he thought he could quit the Marines.
Read this part, for example:

Continue reading “Marine’s Girl reports Ohio”

The three folks with whom I watched the first debate last night and I all agreed that Kerry made an impressive showing and Bush looked defensive, rattled, and ill-prepared.
The most significant thing Kerry said was to promise– a couple of times– that if elected one of the first things he’d do as president would be to declare straighforwardly that the US has no longterm ambitions to control Iraq, either by keeping a longterm military presence there or (and this was by implication) by controlling the oil industry.
I thought this was an excellent thing to say. Something I’ve been urging him to say for a long-time. A strong, credible declaration like that–backed up by moves like halting the constructin of the 14 “enduring” US military bases in Iraq– can do a lot to change the whole dynamic within the country.
Another welcome thing Kerry said was that it doesn’t help the worldwide fight against nuclear proliferation if the US is busy developing a new generation of bunker-busting nuclear weapons.
So, there are some things about the US’s relationship with the rest of the world that he apparently “gets”…
Well, all well and good if the four of us, sitting in our friends Chip and Betsy’s basement, all thought Kerry did well. But how about the great “American people” out there? What did they think?
The initial poll results I’ve heard about indicate that Kerry did do fairly well with the general public. In addition, this morning I saw a segment of ABC News where the reporter had a breakfast-counter discussion with six people in Ohio who had previously described themselves as “undecided and open to persuasion”…

Continue reading “Kerry’s debate– good enough?”

I’m coming near the end of a 24-hour, drop-by appearance in my home town, playing hooky from residential conference some 50 miles away. Thursday afternoon I went to a small-group presentation on the 9/11 Commission’s work, given by its Executive Director Phil Zelikow. Then I got to watch the Democratic Convention on C-SPAN, including John Kerry’s 55-minute “acceptance” speech…
A couple of themes emerged as common to both experiences: themes that show us just how eager Kerry and the rest of the Dems are these days not to lay themselves open to any charges that at a time when the country is at “war” they are openly attacking or criticizing the Prez on matters of significance.
Especially regarding foreign policy.
Thus, at a time when everyone realizes that the main issue is Iraq, Kerry is not telling us anything specific at all about what he would do there that is different from what the current Prez is already doing– except, perhaps, “internationalize” it a bit more (though heaven knows, Bush has been trying to do that, as well, without too much success).
And at a time when just about everyone in the US with two synapses to rub together in their brains realizes that the Bush administration’s fawning embrace of Sharon’s agenda in Palestine has been building huge resentment of US policy throughout the more-vital-than-ever Muslim world, and boosting recruitment for the Islamist extremist groups considerably– not a word from Kerry or any of the rest of the Dems that would indicate even a chink of light between them and Bush/Sharon on Palestine.
Similarly in the work of the 9/11 Commission…

Continue reading “Democrats pull punches on Iraq, Palestine”

Well, I’m still not particularly enamoured of the lackluster John Kerry. And no, despite what it may have seemed from this recent post, I certainly don’t want to see him being pushed any further to the RIGHT.
Anyway, today I happened on this piece by Jodi Wilgoren in the NYT. It’s titled “Kerry Foreign Policy Crew Has a Clintonian Look to It”, which is an accurate description of the situation, as evidenced by what Wilgoren writes about there… Basically, the same-old-same-old: Berger, Holbrooke, Perry, Albright (yawn), with the addition of a couple of slightly younger–but oh yes, most decidely white male–faces.
Zzzzz.
We don’t need that same-old over again. We need vision. We need a true commitment to internationalism. We need… well, a whole bunch of things very different from what these tired old retreads seem to promise.
Anyway, down there in the body of this piece, my attention was drawn to this handful of sentences, describing a conversation Wilgoren must have had with that tired old veteran’s veteran in the foreign-policy analysis world, Les (“let’s split Iraq into three!”) Gelb:

Continue reading “Who wants to be ‘feared’?”

Let’s face it, John Kerry has NOT come out with a clear position on the all-important Iraq question. He needs a running-mate who has.
So how about Marines Gen. Anthony C. Zinni (retd.)?
Zinni’s book only came out today. No time to read it yet! But he did a really good interview with CBS yesterday. (And here are the remarks he made at the Center for Defense Information on May 12th.)
Zinni was also the one who famously, before the fact of the Bushite invasion of Iraq, warned it would turn into a “Bay of Goats”.
Yesterday, to CBS’s Steve Kroft, he said:

And to think that we are going to ‘stay the course,’ the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it’s time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it’s been a failure.

The only thing I’d fault there is to say it’s time to do both: to change course and to hold the present bunch of so-called ‘policymakers’ acountable.
Exactly who, in Zinni’s view, is it that should be held accountable?

Well, it starts with at the top. If you’re the secretary of defense and you’re responsible for that. If you’re responsible for that planning and that execution on the ground. If you’ve assumed responsibility for the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and everything else, then you bear responsibility…
Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced.
[Kroft comments coyly that, “Zinni is talking about a group of policymakers within the administration known as ‘the neo-conservatives’ who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel.” He names as members of this group Wolfie, Feith, Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, and ‘Scooter’ Libby, and adds: “Zinni believes they are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy in Iraq.” Zinni responds as follows…]
I think it’s the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody – everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do…
And one article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that’s the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn’t criticize who they were. I certainly don’t know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I’m not interested.
I know what strategy they promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have convinced the president and the secretary to do. And I don’t believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in Washington that doesn’t know where it came from.

So anyway, what state does Zinni come from? Could he balance the ticket geographically? Who knows?
But quite aside from any musing about Kerry putting him on the ticket, I think it is great that this accomplished, well-informed, and insightful person has gotten his views so well out there in the public discourse–and just before the Prez finally goes on the air tonight to “reassure” us that he has a policy on Iraq.
(As my son said: If the only thing the President has been able to say during the past four important days is that he will “shortly be making a speech designed to reassure us”– then how reassuring is that?)