Category: US politics

Here’s the latest WaPo-ABC News poll of American public opinion. And here’s the summary from the WaPo’s David Broder and Dan Balz:

Democrats have regained a commanding position going into the final weeks of the midterm-election campaigns, with support eroding for Republicans on Iraq, ethics and presidential leadership, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Apparent Republican gains in September have been reversed in the face of mounting U.S. casualties and gloomy forecasts from Iraq and the scandal involving Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who was forced to resign his congressional post over sexually graphic online conversations with former House pages.
Approval of Congress has plunged to its lowest level in more than a decade (32 percent), and Americans, by a margin of 54 percent to 35 percent, say they trust Democrats more than Republicans to deal with the biggest problems the nation is confronting. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said congressional Democrats deserve to be reelected next month, but just 39 percent said Republicans deserve to return to office.
The poll measures broad public attitudes and cannot be translated into individual House districts, but it sketches an environment that is the most difficult the Republicans have faced since taking control of Congress in the 1994 elections. By a margin of 54 percent to 41 percent, registered voters said they plan to vote for the Democrat over the Republican in congressional elections next month…

So the Dems might regain at least one of the houses of Congress! Which means that at last we might see real hearings and some robust attempts at holding this out-of-control administration somewhat accountable.
I am still really upset that a couple of weeks ago, numerous Democrats voted with the administration’s attempt to strip habeas corpus out of a part of the US legal system, and unquestioningly with the administration’s latest tranche of war-financing. So our campaign to bring our country into a much better relationship with the rest of the world will still be a long one, even if the Dems win both houses of Congress next month.
And some more from Broder and Balz:

Bush’s ratings on the war in Iraq are among the lowest of his presidency, with 35 percent approving of how he is handling the situation and 64 percent disapproving (54 percent strongly disapprove). On terrorism, a majority (53 percent) said they disapprove of his performance. That is the lowest rating Bush has received on his signature issue.
Asked whether the war in Iraq has been worth fighting, 63 percent said no, the highest recorded during Bush’s presidency. Fifty-one percent agreed with Bush’s argument that Iraq is a front in the global campaign against terrorism, the lowest of his presidency. Fifty percent of those surveyed said that the country is safer today than it was before Sept. 11, 2001, but 42 percent, a new high, said the nation is now less safe.

But we still have a lot more public education to do about the need to bring the troops out of Iraq as speedily as possible. B&B write:

Still, there is no significant support for withdrawing U.S. forces immediately. Half of those surveyed — about the same percentage it has been throughout the year — said they would like to see troop levels decrease. Despite the high number of casualties, only a fifth said they supported immediate withdrawal.

Okay, back to the street corner this Thursday, then…

I happen to be in New York this week. Now, I’ve always known that New York was a strongly pro-Israeli city, but I was honestly really surprised to learn that the eminent historian of Europe Tony Judt has now been subjected to a heavy-handed attempt to silence him from speaking out here on the topic of the strength of the Israeli lobby.
That article, by Michael Powell in today’s WaPo, tells us that,

Judt was scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a nonprofit organization that rents space from the [Polish] consulate. Judt’s subject was the Israel lobby in the United States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled honest debate. [!!]
An hour before Judt was to arrive, the Polish Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk canceled the talk. He said the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee had called and he quickly concluded Judt was too controversial.
“The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure,” Kasprzyk said. “That’s obvious — we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that.”
Judt… noted that he was forced to cancel another speech later this month at Manhattan College in the Bronx after a different Jewish group had complained. Other prominent academics have described encountering such problems, in some cases more severe, stretching over the past three decades.
The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling.
“This is serious and frightening, and only in America — not in Israel — is this a problem,” he said. “These are Jewish organizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle East away from anyone who might listen.”

He is darn’ right it’s chilling.
The heads of the two organizations involved both made weaselly excuses about the actions of the groups they lead. Powell writes that they,

denied asking the consulate to block Judt’s speech and accused the professor of retailing “wild conspiracy theories” about their roles. But they applauded the consulate for rescinding Judt’s invitation.
“I think they made the right decision,” said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “He’s taken the position that Israel shouldn’t exist. That puts him on our radar.”
David A. Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, took a similar view. “I never asked for a particular action; I was calling as a friend of Poland,” Harris said. “The message of that evening was going to be entirely contrary to the entire spirit of Polish foreign policy.”

We could note, of course (as Powell does) that Judt is Jewish; he was “born and raised in England and lost much of his family in the Holocaust.” (Though note, too, that Powell also quotes Judt as making the quite non-remarkable observation that, “”For many, the way to be Jewish in this country is to aggressively assert that the Holocaust is your identification tag… I know perfectly well my history, but it never occurred to me that my most prominent identity was as a Jew.”)
Also, while Abe Foxman might accuse Judt of saying that Israel “shouldn’t exist”, actually Judt’s position is that the best outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is probably a secular, binational state. Again, that should be quite non-remarkable… But not, apparently, in this stewing mass of ultra-Zionist intolerance that is New York City.
Okay, I know I shouldn’t do the whole city down. Some of my very best friends, after all, are New Yorkers…
Actually, I think this childish over-reaction from Foxman, Harris, and Co, may well be just another example of what I remarked on recently here, with respect to Tom Friedman and Henry Kissinger, namely that,

the bloody nose that Hizbullah was able to deal to Israel’s once-‘famed’ military in South Lebanon this summer [seems to have had] the effect of driving some long-time American supporters of Israel almost batty?

Poor old Tony Judt. But his point that the pro-Israeli organizations have done a lot to stifle open discussion of Israeli-Palestinian issues within the United States seems now to have been well demonstrated.

‘Tis the season for “big” political books in Washington DC. The WaPo’s Karen DeYoung has a new one just about to come out on Colin Powell– just at the same time that Bob Woodward’s book about the whole Bush administration will be hitting the bookstores. Today, he got a first chunk of his excerpted in the main section of the paper. As for DeYoung, she had a longish excerpt from her book, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, in the paper’s color-mag section today.
Her book won’t be coming out till October 10. It is based on a number of interviews with Powell– and probably even more from members of his entourage like Rich Armitage and Larry Wilkerson.
To me, the biggest revelation in DeYoung’s excerpt today is this: Colin Powell was held captive by heinous forces in his office in the State Department for the entire four years he was Secretary of State.
Who knew?
… Well, that, at least, is the only way I can interpret this little portion of DeYoung’s prose, where she was discussing the humiliating circumstances in which Bush brought Powell’s tenure as SecState to an end in Nov 2004: “After four long years, Powell had anticipated the end of his service and sometimes even longed for it.”
So, um, if he had– not just once, but “sometimes”– “longed” for the end of his service, then why on earth did he stay? I mean, being Secretary of State is not like being in the military, where you have to sign a termed contract that has some extremely tough constraining clauses. At least, I always used to think that a SecState was quite free to leave her/his post any time. (Especially if he or she “longs” to do so, wouldn’t you think?)
But now, I am learning that there must have been some heinous force tying Powell to his desk there. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser…
Pat Lang, however, has another explanation for what was going on with Powell. He calls it the “Great Man Syndrome”, that is, the delusion a person might have that he is “great” and even indispensable.
Here’s what else he writes about Powell there:

Here is the case of a wise and great man (perhaps “dimly wise and rudely great” but, nevertheless..) who, I think, could have been president of the United States and who, with seemingly unwavering determination threw himself under the wheels of a bus. (rhetorical flourish)
Powell knew that “W” was out if his depth as president. He had to know that. He must have known that the “Vulcans” were successfully tutoring his boss on the subject of “the world.” Powell certainly knew that the imagined connections of [Al-Qaeda] to the Iraqi government were false. He clearly doubted the whole tissue of falsehood surrounding the WMD “pitch.” (Wolfie’s description)
If I am correct about this, than why on earth did he go up to New York to the UN to smear shit all over the memory of his service? Why?
The answer given to me by my bag of analytic tools is that he just could not remove himself from the action. He was a victim of GMS…

For me, there was an uncanny, almost a full-circle feeling in reading DeYoung’s piece. Powell’s hapless February 2003 presentation to the UN was the subject of my first two posts here on JWN (1 and 2). In the second of those, I noted the parallels between the flimsy public “justifications” Powell and his cronies were amassing for the increasingly imminent attack on Iraq and the extremely flimsy “justifications” Shimon Peres had provided for his 1996 assault against Lebanon.
The really frustrating thing is that none of these gung-ho militarists ever seems to learn anything from his mistakes or those of his close allies. I mean, Colin Powell, for goodness’ sakes!! He was the guy who quintessentially had “learned” the lessons of Vietnam, had worked hard to reconstruct the US army after that debacle, wrote very movingly in his memoir about the terrible costs of Vietnam… But there he was in February 2003– not in a uniform, but still, in a very real sense, playing a dealbreaker role there in the administration.
I mean, if he had come out in public back on February 6, 2003, and had said, “Mr. President, all this so-called ‘intel’ you’ve stove-piped to me about Iraqi links with Al- Qaeda or Iraqi WMDs is a crock of s**t,” then he could have stopped this war in its tracks. His credibility– then– was just so, so much greater than the President’s.
Heck, he didn’t even have to come out in public and say anything. All he needed to do, back at that time, was resign.
But he didn’t.
And the world got what the world got in the way of war, devastation, fitna, and destruction. Most of it, quite unforgivably, in Iraq, but some here in the US, too.
Just because of Colin Powell’s attachment to his position.
I am beyond words.

Bob Woodward is a once-revered icon of the Washington journalism establishment. Back in the 1970s, he and Carl Bernstein helped to break the story of the involvement of the Nixon White House in the Watergate break-in. Earlier in the G.W. Bush presidency, Woodward had two very laudatory and insider-y books about the Bush administration, which portrayed Bush as a decisive, etc “great strategic thinker” (ha-ha-ha), though they did also reveal some pretty interesting details about how decisions were getting made inside the GWB White House.
Now the tide has turned on the Bush presidency. And if we need any more proof of this, it can lie in the fact that Woodward has been cutting his losses– i.e., saying “to heck with continuing to kiss butt in order to get good access, let’s tell some truth round here!” That, at least, seems to be the big message about his latest book, due out Monday.
However, the NYT’s David Sanger managed to buy an early copy and wrote about it in Friday’s paper, with a follow-up piece in Saturday’s paper.
In addition, Woodward has taped an interview for CBS’s program “60 Minutes”, and some excerpts of that were made available today.
Highlights from what Sanger wrote in today’s NYT:

The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser [Robert Blackwill] who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war. [Gosh, sounds a lot like Israel today, don’t you think? ~HC]
… Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.
It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.
The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.
Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.
… Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.
On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.
In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.
The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”
The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.
After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.

In Saturday’s paper Sanger writes that White House spokesman Tony Snow tried to rebut some of the book’s main findings. But Sanger notes that Snow did not explain,

why Mr. Bush’s upbeat assessments of a “Plan for Victory” in Iraq, laid out in a series of speeches late last year, contrasted so sharply with the contents of classified memorandums written by officials who warned that failure was also a significant possibility.
Some of those memorandums were written by Philip D. Zelikow, a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, including one in early 2005 in which Mr. Zelikow characterized Iraq as “a failed state” two years after the invasion, and another in September 2005, in which he said there was a 70 percent chance of success in achieving a stable, democratic state. That meant, Mr. Zelikow said, that there was a 30 percent chance of failure, including what he called a “significant risk” of “catastrophic failure,” meaning a collapse of the state Mr. Bush has tried to create.

In the CBS News interview, Woodward told interviewer Mike Wallace that,

the president and vice president often meet with Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, as an adviser. [Kissinger???? See here. ~HC] Says Woodward, “Now what’s Kissinger’s advice? In Iraq, he declared very simply, ‘Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.'” Woodward adds. “This is so fascinating. Kissinger’s fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will.”
President Bush is absolutely certain that he has the U.S. and Iraq on the right course, says Woodward. So certain is the president on this matter, Woodward says, that when Mr. Bush had key Republicans to the White House to discuss Iraq, he told them, “I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney [his dog] are the only ones supporting me.”

That, though, as Woodward also told Wallace,

insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. “It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That’s more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces,” says Woodward.
The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. “The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], ‘Oh, no, things are going to get better,'”

I am really glad this book is coming out in the run-up to the elections. In conjunction with the still-unfolding news about the involvement of sleazeball lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s many contacts with the White House and today’s abrupt resignation of Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley after revelations that he’d sent some highly improper instant messages to male teenagers working as “pages” in Congress, it’s been a bad news day all round for the Republicans.
(Even sleazier: Foley was chair of something called the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus and had recently introduced legislation to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He was also a deputy whip for the GOP. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.)

I read with interest the attempt the attempt that Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin made to draft a “speech” for Democratic congressional candidates trying to run against the Bush administration on the Iraq issue. (Hat-tip to Juan for that.)
Trudy made a number of excellent points in her draft– primarily, that it was the Republicans who got the US into the mess it is currently in, in Iraq, so why on earth should we trust them to get us out of it?
However, I was left vaguely dissatisfied with her column there, and I think that was primarily because she made not one mention of the UN. And I totally don’t see any chance of achieving a non-catastrophic end-game for the US in Iraq without securing the active engagement of the UN there. (Another reason for my dissatisfaction with what she wrote was that she came very close to suggesting– in the way John Kerry and other fairly hawkish Dems have until recently– that what is actually needed to stabilize Iraq is an increased US military presence there. As though that could “solve” anything?)
So then, I decided to go on over to the website of our strongly “anti-this-war” Democratic candidate for the US Senate in November, Jim Webb, to see what he is actually, in this very real electoral race, saying about the war.
Webb is a fascinating candidate– not least, because he jumped ship from the Republicans to run in the Democratic primary for this race… And while he was still a Republican, and a very young man, he was Secretary of the Navy in the second Reagan administration. Prior to that, he was in the Marine Corps, as his son now is. He makes great, and apparently effective, play of all this military experience when he debates with our sitting, and extremely pro-Bush, Republican (junior) Senator, George Allen, whose finest day of glory was long ago on some Virginia football field.
Webb has the advantage– like our local, anti-war, Democratic Congressional candidate, Al Weed, of having been against the invasion of Iraq from the very beginning. So neither of these guys has to “square the circle” in the same way John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, etc have to do, in terms of having to explain themselves on why they supported both the war-enabling congressional resolution and the actual war itself, back in the day.
Much of what Webb says is fairly (but not brilliantly) smart, in a foreign-policy “realist” kind of way:

The overriding challenge of today for our country is international terrorism. And I would say that terrorism and Iraq were separate issues until George W. Bush incorrectly and unwisely linked them. We need to end the occupation of Iraq so that we can repair our relationships around the world and turn our focus back to the larger issue of terrorism.
Terrorism is intimately linked with the troubles in the Middle East, but what we’ve done in Iraq has been to make these problems worse. In my view, the conditions in Lebanon today are a direct result of the complete failure of our Iraq policy and indeed our entire Middle East policy. This administration planned from the beginning to make war in Iraq and it used the public fear and anger after September 11th to pursue that objective. I predicted at the time that invading and occupying Iraq would only strengthen Iran, therefore, benefiting virtually all of America’s enemies in that region, as well as affecting our relationships with other countries throughout the world. This administration and its supporters refuse to connect the actions in Iraq to the larger problems in the Middle East generally and to terrorism specifically nor do they appear to appreciate that their foreign policy has affected a wide range of issues across the globe which demand our strategic focus…

Here’s a very good point that he makes:

Continue reading “What should the Dems say about Iraq?”

In today’s WaPo, Charles Babington and Jonathan Weisman have a little more on the back-story behind the sad little pro-administration letter that high-ranking JAGs from the four services and a legal advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs sent to Congressional leaders on Sept. 13. (As noted here yesterday.)
The WaPo reporters write this:

The Pentagon letter immediately generated controversy. Senior judge advocates general had publicly questioned many aspects of the administration’s position, especially any reinterpreting of the Geneva Conventions. The White House and GOP lawmakers seized on what appeared to be a change of heart to say that they now have military lawyers on their side.
But the letter was signed only after an extraordinary round of negotiations Wednesday between the judge advocates and William J. Haynes II, the Defense Department’s general counsel, according to Republican opponents of Bush’s proposal. The military lawyers refused to sign a letter of endorsement. But after hours of cajoling, they assented to write that they “do not object,” according to three Senate GOP sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were divulging private negotiations.
[Dissident Senate ASC member Sen. Lindsey] Graham, a former Air Force judge advocate general, promised to summon the lawyers to a committee hearing and to ask for an explanation of the circumstances surrounding the letter.
One of the military lawyers, Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., reiterated yesterday that he still has reservations about the administration’s proposal, just not in the areas discussed in the letter. He said he was not forced to sign.
“I made my several personal objections to the administration’s proposal clear in my [House] testimony,” Dunlap said. “This matter was not among them.”

And then, Babington and Weisman have this extremely disturbing description of how White House snow-job-maker-in-chief Tony “Snow” tried to belittle the distinguished professional experience on the basis of which Colin Powell came out publicly against the administration’s proposal:

At a feisty briefing, Snow said critics have misconstrued the administration’s intent, which he said is to define the Geneva Conventions’ ban on cruel and inhumane treatment, not to undermine it.
“Somehow I think there’s this construct in people’s minds that we want to restore the rack and start getting people screaming, having their bones crunching,” Snow said. “And that’s not at all what this is about.”
He said Powell did not discuss the issue with the White House before releasing his letter.
“They don’t understand what we’re trying to do here,” he said of Powell and retired Army Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., who wrote a similar letter. Asked if Powell is “confused,” Snow said, “Yes.”

Snow’s biography makes no mention of him ever having served in the military or had any responsibility for the making of national-security decisions.
So the reason we should take his argumentation on this whole issue seriously is— ?

Our senior Senator from Virginia, John Warner, today led three other Republicans in the Senate Armed Services Committee–and all the committee’s eleven Democratic members– in endorsing legislative language that preserves the vital “common Article 3” of the Geneva Conventions exactly as it is. The legislation in question is that to establish the special “military commissions” (courts), that the Prez asked for last week.
The vote by Warner and his allies delivers a hefty whump to the President’s plan to make this aspect of “fighting terrorism” into a partisan issue that, his political advisors had hoped, could help the Repubs in the upcoming mid-term elections. These four Republican Senators– Warner of Virginia, McCain of Arizona, Collins of Maine, and Lindsey Graham of S. Carolina– have shown two things:

(1) They will not allow the president to play politics with an issue of such fundamental importance as the US’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions, and
(2) They have a clear understanding of the need for, and value of, international reciprocity regarding such international obligations.

That Warner and McCain led this ASC mutiny is notable. Sen. Warner has served two terms in the military: one in the US Navy at the very end of WW2, and one in the Marines during the Korean War. Later he served first as Under-Secretary of the Navy then as Secretary of the Navy (1972-74). He has been in the senate since 1978.
McCain also served in the navy, and is well-known for having been taken captive in Vietnam during the Vietnam war, during which time he gained a vivid and very personal understanding of the importance of the Geneva Conventions.
Bush’s defeat on this issue is all the more notable since today he had also taken the step– extremely unusual for him– of actually traveling the 1.5 miles to Capitol Hill to lobby Congress for his Article-3-busting language in person.
He succeeded in getting the House Armed Services Committee to endorse his language. But Warner, McCain, and their colleagues he was unable to persuade.
One other notable aspect of this vote was the intense lobbying around it by retired military leaders– and indeed, by some serving military officers (is this illegal?). On the pro-Article-3 side, General John Vessey, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a forceful letter to Sen. McCain on September 12, saying that reported plans to dilute Article 3,

may weaken America in two respects. First it would undermine the moral basis which has generally guided [our] conduct in war throughout our history. Second, it could give opponents a legal argument for the mistreatment of Americans being held prisoner in time of war.

On September 13 Colin Powell, who both succeeded Vessey as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and– perhaps more notably– actually served as Pres. Bush’s first Secretary of State, sent a short letter to McCain endorsing what Vessey had written.
On Sept. 12, 29 former generals, admirals, and high-ranking civilian Pentagon officials had sent a fairly lengthy letter to Sens Warner and Carl Levin (the ranking Democratic member on the ASC) in support of leaving US adherence to Article 3 exactly as it was. These august individuals argued,

The framers of the [Geneva] Conventions, including the American representatives, in particular wanted to ensure that Common Article 3 would apply in situations where a state party to the treaty, like the United States, fights an adversary that is not a party [to the Geneva Conventions], including irregular forces like al Qaeda. The United States military has abided by the basic requirements of Common Article 3 in every conflict since the Conventions were adopted. In each case, we applied the Geneva Conventions — including, at a minimum, Common Article 3 — even to enemies that systematically violated the Conventions themselves.
We have abided by this standard in our own conduct for a simple reason: the same standard serves to protect American servicemen and women when they engage in conflicts covered by Common Article 3. Preserving the integrity of this standard has become increasingly important in recent years when our adversaries often are not nation-states…
We have people deployed right now in theaters where Common Article 3 is the only source of legal protection should they be captured. If we allow that standard to be eroded, we put their safety at greater risk.
Last week, the Department of Defense issued a Directive reaffirming that the military will uphold the requirements of Common Article 3 with respect to all prisoners in its custody. We welcome this new policy. Our servicemen and women have operated for too long with unclear and unlawful guidance on detainee treatment, and some have been left to take the blame when things went wrong. The guidance is now clear.
But that clarity will be short-lived if the approach taken by Administration’s bill prevails. In contrast to the Pentagon’s new rules on detainee treatment, the bill would limit our definition of Common Article 3’s terms by introducing a flexible, sliding scale that might allow certain coercive interrogation techniques under some circumstances, while forbidding them under others. This would replace an absolute standard – Common Article 3 — with a relative one. To do so will only create further confusion.
Moreover, were we to take this step, we would be viewed by the rest of the world as having formally renounced the clear strictures of the Geneva Conventions. Our enemies would be encouraged to interpret the Conventions in their own way as well, placing our troops in jeopardy in future conflicts. And American moral authority in the war would be further damaged.
All of this is unnecessary. As the senior serving Judge Advocates General recently testified, our armed forces have trained to Common Article 3 and can live within its requirements while waging the war on terror effectively.
As the United States has greater exposure militarily than any other nation, we have long emphasized the reciprocal nature of the Geneva Conventions. That is why we believe – and the United States has always asserted — that a broad interpretation of Common Article 3 is vital to the safety of U.S. personnel. But the Administration’s bill would put us on the opposite side of that argument…

Powerful stuff. Even more so when you read the (auto)biographical information the writers have included there at the end of the letter.
And on the other side of the argument, we have–
A sad, perfunctory little letter addressed to the Chairs of, respectively, the House ASC and the Senate ASC, by (I think) the serving Judges Advocate-General of the four armed services and a colonel described as “Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff”.
These five guys say,

We do not object to section 6 of the Administration proposal, which would clarify [actually, obfuscate and dilute] the obligations of the United States under common Article 3… Indeed, we think these provisions would be helpful to our fighting men and women at war on behalf of our Country.

I note, of course, that as serving members of the military we cannot expoect these guys to come out and write or say anything in public that is critical of the President’s policy. I find it outrageous, though, that the Bushies have dragged these poor men into the fight on their side like this. (It would have been good if even one of them had resigned rather than be used in that way.)
Anyway, there have been some people in the serving military a bit braver than those five sad, weak-kneed individuals. For example, Human Rights First tells us that, in response to Bush’s Sept. 6 speech on the need for new legislation, “the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, Lt. Gen. John F. Kimmons, announced the Army’s rejection of coercive interrogation techniques in its revised Field Manual on Interrogations. Lt. Gen. Kimmons stated categorically that “[n]o good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices.”
Actually, that whole resource sheet from HRF is really well written and clearly argued.
So I’m not sure what will end up happening with this legislation. At some point, the full Senate needs to vote on it– not sure when– and at that point, the President might get the vote he needs. Or he might not…
But anyway, I think I’m going to call Sen Warner’s office tomorrow and give him a big bravo. Any JWN readers who live in– especially– Virginia, Arizona, Maine, or South Carolina should think of giving their relevant Senator a call along the same lines. Quite often we call our senators or representatives to ask them to do something. But they no doubt also appreciate it when we call to say a heartfelt “Thank you for going out on a limb and standing up for an important set of principles there.”

Did the bloody nose that Hizbullah was able to deal to Israel’s once-“famed” military in South Lebanon this summer have the effect of driving some long-time American supporters of Israel almost batty?
I wanted to explore this issue in a post here this evening, with special reference to columns that Tom Friedman had in today’s New York Times and Henry Kissinger in the WaPo.
Hard to write as much as I wanted on the topic, though. I have the paper versions of both papers here in front of me, but you can’t access either of these texts on the web. (I think that as subscribers to the NYT, our family is probably entitled to get into the special “premium” part of their website where Tom Friedman lurks. But I’ve never figured how to do it.) As for Henry the K, his stuff is far too “high-value” for the WaPo to even dream of putting it on their website.
I have frequently disagreed with Tom in recent years. But I do think that, generally, he has tried to be a moral and humane individual. That’s why it was so disturbing to read these kinds of things in the column he had today:

If Hizbullah could just attack Israel– unprovoked– claiming among its goals the liberation of Jerusalem [excuse me??], and using missiles provided by an Iranian regime that says Israel should be wiped off the map, then it was a war about everything. And Israel had to respond resolutely.
So, gauging the right response was intrinsically hard. In the end, Mr. Olmert bombarded Hezbollah’s infrastructure, and tragically but inevitably, the homes of Hezbollah’s Shiite followers, among whom Hezbollah fighters were embedded.
The Israeli response was brutal, but it did send a deterrent message…

Where can you start to unpack such over-hyped and partisan war-mongering?
The Lebanese of all sects whose homes, roads, bridges, power stations, and other vital inastructure were deliberately targeted by Israel would be amazed by Tom’s description of what happened. Back on July 12 itself, the Israeli government publicly announced that it had decided to go to war against the whole country of Lebanon. (And what amazing accuracy Tom claimed– that those Israeli 2,000-lb bombs could actually discriminate between the home of a Shiite Hizbullah follower, and someone who was not!)
Here’s what Gen. Udi Adam, the head of the IDF’s northern command, said on July 12:

“This affair is between Israel and the state of Lebanon… Where to attack? Once it is inside Lebanon, everything is legitimate — not just southern Lebanon, not just the line of Hezbollah posts.”

Adam, by the way, handed in his resignation today. He was the guy whose performance during the war was so much criticized by chief of staff Dan Halutz that Halutz put another general in to work over him…
Unlike Tom Friedman, the Israeli political and military leaders understood clearly that the conflict was not about Hizbullah fighting “to liberate Jerusalem”, but about the terms on which each side might win the release of people taken captive by the other side. (Yes, it was also about each side reasserting its deterrent power– and both sides succeeded in doing that, Tom, not just one… )
Here’s what Halutz himself said on July 12:

“If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon’s clock back 20 years.”

Well, Tom goes on and on in that alarmist vein. I can’t re-type it all into here. But he does say this:

The UN/European force evolving in Lebanon may offer a new model. It’s not “land for peace” or “land for war”, but what I’d call “land for NATO.” Israel withdraws and the border is secured by a force that is UN on the outside but NATO on the inside.

He even gives an approving nod to a quote from the Israeli analyst Yaron Ezrahi who says this might be a model for the West Bank and Gaza, too.
I doubt it. NATO???
And moving rapidly along, here, to Kissinger’s lengthy bloviation (“After Lebanon”) in today’s WaPo… Well, here’s an AFP digest of what HK wrote. But again we have the same frenzied tone as from Tom Friedman, and the same hyped-up worries that, with the rise of Hizbullah and Hamas, the very existence of Israel seems to hang in the balance. Get a grip, guys! Israel still has huge military capabilities and a robust population. What’s more, it is quite capable (if it chooses to, which I hope it doesn’t) to continue oppressing the Palestinians for many years into the future.
Let’s review the facts here a little. Which side is occupying land belong to the other side– the Arabs or the Israelis? Which side has thousands of members of the other side’s population in its prisons– the Arabs or the Israelis? Which side is still many times more capable than the other of affecting the lives and wellbeing of members of the other side– the Arabs or the Israelis?
Israel is doing okay. It is nowhere near the point of being about to be “conquered.” Take a d-e-e-p breath.
Kissinger:

Hezbollah, which took over southern Lebanon [!], and Hamas and various jihadist groups, which marginalized the Palestinian Authority in Gaza[!], disdain the schemes of moderate Arab and Israeli leaders. They reject the very existence of Israel, not any particular set of borders.
One of the consequences is that the traditional peace process is in shambles…

Gimme a break!
Where does this whole narrative to the effect that there was a humming-along peace process prior to the “assaults” by Hamas and Hizbullah, and then they stopped it in its tracks– what planet does that stuff come from?? Not the planet Earth, that’s for sure. Guys! The “peace process” died many, many years ago. haven’t you been on the same planet here smelling its corpse along with the rest of us?
And who was it who marginalized the PA in Gaza, and then the pro-US March 14 movement in Lebanon? It was Israel and the US that accomplished those amazing feats, much more than Hamas and Hizbullah.
Anyway, Kissinger goes on to hype up the Iranian “threat”, stating as a fact that,

It works on a nuclear weapons program, which would drive nuclear proliferation out of control and provide a safety net for the systematic destruction of at least the regional order. The challenge is now about world order more than about adjustments within an accepted framework.

Dr. Strangelove lives!
… But anyway, I’ve been wondering what it has been about the events of the past few weeks that have driven these two guys toward the brink of insanity. I think it is this. I think that both of them– Freidman and Kissinger– have operated for so long on the basis of the never-spoken assumption of Israel’s ability to dominate the strategic environment of the entire Near East that what Hizbullah was able to do to the IDF in Jebel Amel (south Lebanon) in the past two months has shaken their worldview(s) to their very foundations.
I mean, if you’re a Tom Friedman, and you write a lot about the Middle East and care about it a lot, and are a liberal kind of a pro-Israeli, you can be “liberal” so long as Israel’s domination of the whole Middle East (and the pro-Israeli narrative’s domination of the US public discourse) both remain unchallenged. But when a ragtag bunch of Shiite militiamen in south Lebanon are capable of bloodying the nose of the great, heroic Israeli military– why, then the rubber of the Friedmanesque “liberalism” smashes hard against the road of his pro-Israelism… and its the liberalism that gets stripped off, isn’t it? (As well as a lot of Tom’s attentiveness to veracity.)
And if you’re Henry Kissinger, and you make gazillions of bucks from “consulting” with a whole range of governments in the Middle East– Israel, Arab government, Turkey, various Central Asian petrocracies– well, you can carry on servicing all those clients with equanimity so long as the assumption of the domination of the enture region by the US-Israeli alliance is never brought into question at all. But when it is? … Well, that just has to be deeply shocking for the old guy; and so now you see Kissinger retreating into a tight little “Euro-heritage power” lager. (a.k.a. NATO, come to think of it.)
But you know what? Today’s world is a world in which all nations and all peoples are vulnerable… Some more so, some less so, but all of us vulnerable, none of us totally self-sufficient. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s part of the human condition, from the very earliest days of humanity.
But I guess for these guys, this is a shocking prospect. Personally, I find it really interesting to see the degree to which, as it now seems, both of these weighty members of the US commentatoriat– and likely many others as well– have been affected by that one little turn of events this summer in distant Lebanon.