Posted by Justin Sarma,
3:39 AM
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Friday, October 08, 2004 Bush's Bulge
After the first presidential debate, there were rumors that Kerry had used a cheat sheet. But Bush did one better. He had an earpiece so he could receive information during the debate. See Salon.com for more info.
This news is a couple days old, but just in case anyone missed it... Apparently Israel has arrested 34 UNRWA employees over the last year, mostly without charges. The head of the UNRWA, Peter Hansen made a particularly controversial statement recently about how some of the 24000 palestinian UNRWA employees are members of militant groups like Hamas, and followed by saying that not every Hamas member was a militant, implying they also had a legit political wing.
I got a kick out of the super blurry picture of the white UN van in the article that is alleged to be holding a rocket. I wonder if they didn't just borrow a pre-gulf war pictures of Saddam's "mobile weapons laboratories", and tack a UN label on it. Needless to say, I'm largely desensitized to any evidence involving blurry arial pictures of white vans. I don't know why news organizations even publish such poor evidence. You'd think it would harm their credibility, but I guess if the evidence is from a government source it instantly becomes newsworthy.
Posted by Justin Sarma,
2:01 AM
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One reason Bill Maher is not still on network TV
"I think Penny Lane is worth 10 dead kids.... I think Darkside of the Moon is worth 100 dead kids"
- Bill Maher on how freedom to smoke weed should not be sacrificed for 'the children'. (Carson Daly's show, late thursday night)
Posted by Timothy,
1:43 AM
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No WMD stockpiles in Iraq after 1991, according to Bush-appointed weapons inspector Charles Duelfer (link)
The latest weapons inspection findings are pretty devastating. I don't even think I would have argued before the war that Iraq had no WMD stockpiles after 1991 (all I said was there was no credible evidence), but now we have the Bush-appointed inspector saying just that. As the NYT editorial today points out, this appears to be a major vindication of the much-attacked sanctions regime: In retrospect, there's no doubt it was more effective than even the anti-war crowd had expected. Nonetheless, Bush continues to say in speeches that Saddam failed to comply with the U.N. weapons inspectors. I haven't yet found anyone who can explain how there could have been any substantial non-compliance if Iraq really had nothing to hide. The lack of motive for non-compliance is a pretty clear indication that the alleged "non-compliance" was mostly media hype.
A decent argument can still be made that Iraq may have been able to reconstitute their weapons were sanctions lifted, as some people wanted, but it doesn't seem plausible that Iraq could have posed any real threat as long as sanctions were in place. The humanitarian argument that less Iraqis would die in an effort to change the regime than would die as a result of indefinite sanctions has some merit, but only if a stable Iraqi government takes hold in the near future. The only other semi-legit argument against sanctions is to attack their credibility by pointing out the alleged oil-for-food scandal. But whatever Saddam may have been skimming off the top, there doesn't seem to be much evidence that he was using that money for WMD-procurement. The Bush Administration is really running out of credible defenses for their blood-soaked invasion.
Posted by Justin Sarma,
1:28 AM
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Thursday, October 07, 2004 The Logic of Justifying Bush's war Mark Kleiman writes:
Let's see if I have this straight:
1. The invasion of Iraq, and its timing, were justified by the risk that, if we waited, Iraq would acquire and stockpile more WMDs and more delivery vehicles, or alternatively supply them to terrorist organizations.
2. The chief U.S. weapons inspector has now reported that Iraq, at the time of the invasion, had no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons and no capacity for producing any, but that Saddam Hussein remained intent on procuring them once sanctions were lifted.
3. No one was in fact proposing lifing sanctions at the time of the invasion.
4. After the release of the report, the President of the United States says that "There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks."
5. The Vice President of the United States says that the report shows that "delay ... was not an option."
Right. There was a real risk that Iraq would give things he didn't actually have to terrorists. And the finding that SH had an intention of doing something in the future when and if sanctions were lifted meant that leaving the sanctions in place and waiting before invading "was not an option."
Update: Mark Kleiman continues "I'm no Krauthammer." Well, Charles Krauthammer himself on Fox News just said something that would respond to Kleiman. Krauthammer said that the sanctions regime was slipping away, day by day. And I think it deserves a response (one Kleiman does not go into). Even if it was true the sanctions regime was slipping away under the Clinton administration, and keeping 'Saddam in a box' was not sustainable in the long term, acting immediately when the administration did was NOT a necessity. I remember many people arguing AT THE TIME, before the U.S. went to war, that we should wait, build alliances, let the inspections process continue and assess later whether an invasion was necessary and wise. Krauthammer was talking about the regime was being undermined during the Clinton administrationm, so it was ridiculous to think the sanctions regime was going to collapse in May 2004. (Oh, here's one post that caught on my eye on the corner)
Posted by Timothy,
11:23 PM
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Israeli Soldiers and Disobeying Orders I said nothing when John Stevenson first made this comment on the Dartmouth Observer. Now that he has repeated himself on RockyBlog, I feel like commenting. Stevenson says this about a possible forced evacuation of settlers in the occupied territories:
“Such an action raises a whole host of questions, the foremost being: when ordered to do so should a soldier act against a fellow citizen? If we learned anything from witnessing the universally condemned horrors of the Nazi regime, or of the totalitarian terror inside the Soviet Union (with whom a number of academics sympathized at the time), it should be this: soldiers, when asked by superior officers to execute an order against a non-combatant, especially a fellow-citizen, has a moral obligation to disobey.”
Huh? Stevenson seems to be saying that soldiers should NEVER execute ANY order against ANY non-combatant. We are in danger of trivializing the horrors of the Third Reich and the USSR if we reduce its lessons to such flat and overstated banalities. One lesson from Nuremberg is that the ‘just following orders’ is not an excuse. But judgment works both ways. If we say that soldiers can be held accountable for their own actions, then we are saying they are capable of exercising that independent moral judgment. And then we should not reduce the moral complexity of what a soldier faces to such simplistic rules like the one Stevenson proclaims.
Force can be used unjustly, but surely sometimes force can be used to protect persons, and remedy injustice. Stevenson himself seems to also think that there no "reasonable" person thinks that the settlements in the West Bank are indefensible and there is only one "side" to the issue. There is some moral complexity here, but I do not think Stevenson has captured it.
Posted by Timothy,
1:36 AM
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Wednesday, October 06, 2004 David McLaughlin Andrew Samwick has a post on the memorial for the former Dartmouth president.
Posted by Timothy,
3:15 PM
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Why is Cheney such a serial liar?
Cheney said during the debate tonight: "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight." Cheney's got an "Al Gore" Problem.
Posted by Timothy,
2:06 AM
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Tuesday, October 05, 2004 Debate Analysis If I remember right from my days of high school policy debate, someone who put out a lot of points so their opponent does not have time to answer all the charges, is known at being good at "spreading". Cheney was good at spreading. He fired off a lot of rapid fire charges against both Kerry and Edwards' records. I respect that. What I don't respect (though it could still be an effective tactic) is how Cheney complained twice that he didn't have time to respond, or, where to start with all that Edwards had thrown at him. And sometimes Cheney would not even use his time. If you can dish it out, take it. This was particularly true on how Cheney never really bothered giving any substantive answer to charges about Haliburton. I thought Edwards was effective in using this to explain why he didn't vote the $87 billion (or rather, as Edwards did not say, for a particular version of the $87 billion bill). Cheney just refered to people to factcheck.com. But Cheney should get his facts right: this url takes you to a personal message by George Soros saying why we should not re-elect President Bush. Oops. (I presume Cheney meant factcheck.org, which has been cited frequently in the media.)
Overall, Cheney was better at marshalling a lot of factual claims in the debate. They may or may not always be accurate facts, but his use of numerous talking points was often superior to Edwards. A lot of what Cheney says will turn out, I suspect, to be distortions. Conservatives have been complaining about all the things Bush did not say against Kerry. I saw most of those things mentioned by Cheney. Cheney showed how to effectively use right-wing attacks during a debate.
What Cheney did not do was marshal facts to DEFEND the Bush administration's record, as oppossed to attack Kerry and Edward's record. Bob Schieffer on CBS said that Cheney did not provide a coherant defense to questions about the war on Iraq. Cheney's debate showed that even with a skilled, prepared debator, the administration is unable and unwilling argue confront the facts and argue about their justification for the war.
Gwen Ifell began the debate by asking about three damaging pieces of news. Cheney did not give any substantive answer. It was rather pathetic. They just don't know what to say. I mean, they can attack John Edwards for not including the costs of Iraqi lives in his calculations, and that can be effective, but Cheney still hasn't answered why so many American troops had to die. He didn't even really answer the question about troop levels being too low. Cheney's answer seemed to be: commanders on the ground will tell us what they need. Bullshit. The Admin. has eased out generals and other figures who have said the war will take more troops or cost more, and this sent a clear signal.
What Edwards did a good job at was really going after the administration on Iraq. Cheney did not have any substantive answer to any of that. Cheney showed how the Bushies might still win here: talk about how horrible it is to insult the Prime Minister of Iraq as a puppet of the Bush administration (except, oops, the Bush campaign wrote Allawi's speech. I wish that truth could have been spoken). The Kerry people need to be answer the causalty point: that was just good debate rhetoric on Cheney's part, and an ineffective response on Edward's part.
Edwards was really strong in the beginning, when he talked about Iraq and Bin Laden. He really emphasized, in a crisp clear way, the campaign's message: we were attacked by Bin Laden; Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 and Iraq has little or nothing to do with Al Qaeda. Just as Bush should learn from Cheney, Kerry can learn from Edwards (though it was weird how Edwards seem to be repeating Kerry's word when he talked about Torra Bora). Edwards seemed tired, especially as the night wore on. He messed up a line, saying Saddam Hussein, and then correcting himself to say Bin Laden. (He muffed a riff about flip flopping that should have been a great sound bite).
On Bin Laden, Cheney lied. Cheney claimed that he had never suggested that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack on 9-11. Cheney also looked nasty and testy, and the spinsters seem to be trying to say this is because he is comfy in his own skin.
Edwards was generally upbeat, and really on when he talked about health care and poverty. He also did not let Cheney control the flow of the debate (when Cheney answered a question about jobs by turning to education, Edwards said to the moderator, the question was about jobs and poverty right? Well he talked about education, and I hope to talk about that later, but... and then went into his spiel; that was another way to show how clueless the administration was about the subject of jobs.
Cheney, by the way, seemed nasty and had a sort of smirk. Why aren't I saying that he was like Bush in this aura of arrogance, and I cannot believe this guy is up here on the stage with me? Cheney had some of the raw material to be painted for that off camera reaction, but we already knew what (we think) Cheney is like. Bush acted petulant without warrant. Cheney at least respected his enemy enough to do bring a bunch of ammunition to the debate. Bush didn't seem to bother, and got annoyed when he was questioned.
Anyway, both candidates did a good job attacking. Neither did a particularly great job defending their guy at the top of the ticket. Cheney did not even bother at some points to answer a charge. Edwards tried to give a plausible answer and then, I suppose, turn it back to the offense. Both sides had moments in the debate, both in terms of style and substance, that need to be emulated by the guy at the top. Cheney was not 'likeable' but this was no surprise. Edwards was effective, when he delivered his lines well, but he stumbled over them too much.
OH: Edwards' closing was bad. It was upstaged by Cheney's rather deft pre-emption earlier, when Cheney said, like Edwards I came from modest roots.
Also, Josh Marshall talks here about Bremer's saying we needed a higher level of troops and this was a criticism known then and beforehand. As a lot of have long said: what an incompetent administation. Rumsfeld is a screw-up for saying effectively: looting happens. It remains to be seen how effectively Kerry and Edwards can tie this in by noting the rush to war is one of the reasons for inadequate war planning (another reason for such bad planning, I posit, is that honest war planning would have made the war seem less appealling in the first place).
