Jonathan suggested, in this post about ABC reporting that the Bush administration has authorized the CIA to take covert actions to destabilize the Iranian government, not to read the comments at ABC. But because everyone was joking at Drinking Liberally last night at the fact that Bush’s poll ratings stubbornly stay between 25-30%, I thought this would be a good exercise in reminding everyone that there’s a steady 1/4 of the population that’s basically fascist and won’t be budged. So, I mined the comments so you don’t have to.
If it was a secret, it isn’t any longer. I will turn off ABC News and never watch again.
I consider ABC News Traders to the United States
What’s really beautiful about that comment is that without the constant drumbeat from semi-fascist Bush supporters about the dire need for everyone at all points in time to abandon our free and open society, I’d have thought he mistook ABC for a trading corporation instead of a media outlet.
You should be ashamed of yourselves for broadcasting the report on the CIA covert action against IRAN. The key word here is SECRET. The report should be considered traitorous…..
Why, if it is covert, are you airing it and telling the Iranians what we are doing? Do you want more war and more killings of Americans? Let them do their job’s and keep your mouths shut…..
Do you people believe in some things being important to the security of the United States of America? Do you even care that some of your reporting is putting our troops our citizens in foreign countries and even our way of life in danger? YOu can take care of things you don’t like without telling the whole world. Why don’t you help our country stay alive.
It was at this point I realized why some of your stupider wingnuts troll the major media blogs instead of scarier waters where people will actually confront them. This poor moron would probably have a stress-induced heart attack if someone asked him how it’s going to save lives to create a destabilized situation in Iran. Rote accusations are much easier to spill out if you never stop to think them over.
Seems you & the media will go to any extreme to show you bias agains the Bush Administration. Revealing classified operations is consorting with the enemy. I hope you can live with your tresonous actions!!!!!!….
Isn’t this type of reporting TREASON!!!!Where’s the responsibility for the good of the country? This is disgusting! What are you thinking????…..
What part of secret was so hard to comprehend? In the interest of national security, perhaps someone with a brain should have decided NOT to make this a story. FREEdom of the Press.. LOL.. tell me ABC, how much did Lincoln pay you to advertise on this web page?
And so on and so forth. I don’t copy and paste these comments here just to take the temperature of base stupidity in the stubborn 30%, though that itself is actually pretty fun. Mainly to drive home a point. Every time I hear someone wonder out loud how Bush can maintain their support despite his undisguised disgust for democracy, I have to point out that a quarter of the population also loathes democracy, wants an authoritarian state, and despises the very idea of leaders being held accountable to the people. That 25% of the population doesn’t agree with the basic concept that the people are entitled to know what our government is doing because they work for us.
Yes, a free and open society undermines the possibility of covert-from-Americans operations, but as you can probably guess, my feeling about that is, “So what?” The CIA has no business trying to destabilize Iran’s government and whatever they do will probably make things worse over there.
For those trolls about to play “gotcha” on the politicized outing of a CIA agent, I want to make it clear that I said I don’t think the CIA has a right to hide operations from the American people. The actual identies of people engaged in approved intelligence-gathering is another matter entirely.
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If you haven’t read this already, John Rodgers made a similar point a couple of years ago at his blog:
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunch-discussions-145-crazification.html
His thesis is that roughly 27% of the US is crazy and “…put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement.”
I’d also argue that it’s not necessarily that all of the wingnuts that you quote above love authoritarianism. Some of them do (and you can tell these who these people are when they say things like “I used to be a Democrat before 9/11, but now I am outraged about Chappaquidick”), but most of them would have been screaming in the opposite direction if Clinton had pulled these moves back in the day — they’d be calling for impeachment. It’s less about a love for the abstract authoritarianism and more about tribal identification — if their tribe does it, it’s okay. Even more strongly, if their tribe does it, it’s RIGHT. If the “other guy” does it, it’s wrong — possibly “morally reprehensible”. We talk about this as the IOIYAR mentality, but this is a real thing — it’s not just hipocricy, it’s a fundamental belief. It actually IS okay if you are a Republican to do heinous things that you would pillory a Democrat for, because they’re outside of your tribe and shouldn’t do those things.
“Traders”
Like on Wall Street?
Classic.
Is it a coincidence that the 25% or so of the country that really wants that authoritarian, controlling, fascist government correlates to the same percentage of the country that’s hardcore fundamentalist, believes that Jesus is likely to return in the next 5 years, and makes up the Republican base?
I consider ABC News Traders to the United States
Then maybe they should have Most Favored Nation status.
maybe I missed something, but if it were really a secret CIA action, how did ABC know about it? Shouldn’t they be, y’know, better at covert ops, since they’re the CIA and all?
That’s the problem with doing stuff that could be considered illegal–people involved who are either solid citizens or are looking to cover their asses tend to tell reporters.
Amanda wrote:
“CIA has no business trying to destabilize Iran’s government and whatever they do will probably make things worse over there.”
…As it has in the past. Anyone who has read the tragic story of the CIA destabilizing Iran’s democratic government and putting in the a malevolent dictator (the Shah) knows that the CIA is expert in shooting itself in the foot time and time again. Iran could have been our best friend in the Middle East from decades ago. The Folly of Imperalist Fascism knows no limit
Phil above has got it - can you say, ‘planned leak to pressure the Iranians’?
I mean, this like saying that the sky is not just blue, but that it’s cerulean. With maybe an exception for Clinton, when hasn’t the United States been mounting black covert operations to destabilize the Iranian government since 1980? So what are we doing this time, sending the Ayatollahs a new box of cigars? I make fun, but I’m deadly serious - I think that the CIA and military routinely mount ‘destabilization missions’ against foreign governments we don’t like. Iran is probably a top ten recipient of these missions. If I was an Iranian with a terrible sense of humour and a short life-expectancy I’d be tempted to set up a mock border crossing solely for American subversion teams to charge them visa fees.
Progressive Historians - History and Politics Of, By, and For the People.
When I was in Israel last January I sat through I lecture that was supposed to be about Israeli politics. Was more of this British ex-pat’s snarky stand-up with powerpoint. One interesting thing I took away was a comment the presenter made about the US government trying to fight Iran with Cold War tactics in a way that implied disaproval. He also thought Iran was responding with Cold War tactics. He didn’t give any proof so I shelved that memory and this brings it up. Well, here we are. Cold War tactics. I’m leaning towards CIA adventures being a bad idea, partly cause the information I have says the federal government is in the hands of morons who can’t find their butts with both hands and a pair of mirrors. THe other side is CIA intervention in the Cold War seems to have been of no real benefit to the US, no real loss to Soviets, living nightmares and worse for the countries intervened in. More living mightmares in the Middle East is the last thing we need. If we have another half century, we might actually be able to defeat Iran using Cold War tactics if we actually get the tactics right. I repeat, Might. The first part of Cold War tactics is, do not confront your rival with military action directly.
I agree, Amanda, that about a quarter of the population wants a king who is “appointed” by God. They embody the infantile longing for Big Daddy of yore, with those big shoes and big dick. Bush presents miniscule shoes to fill and Laura has already hinted that W is limp in the bedroom. Thus, he fucks Iraq and the world rather than his wife and he walks as if he had a big dick. I kid you not. Watch him walk sometime. He spreads his thighs to accomodate his imagined big dick.
I think another reason that the insanely loyal 25% can’t consider that W is a bad man is because they voted for him and they’re not brave enough to bear their incompetence as voters and citizens. As long as they pretend that W is worthy, they’re worthy to repeat their mistakes…and they will.
Yes… nothing will protect the U.S. like destabilizing another middle eastern country.
Yes… nothing will protect the U.S. like destabilizing another middle eastern country.
Why did the “covert” directive become public? How about this as a scenario:
— Military, supported by Gates, says, no way we’re invading or bombing Iran.
— Admin, stymied, has to look like it’s doing *something* aggressive towards Iran,
to keep anti-Iranian factions happy.
— “Covert action” plan dreamed up and leaked as substitute for “offensive action” plan.
FWIW, even when he resigned in disgrace with the vast majority of the American public recognizing that he was a crook, there were still 20%-25% of the people approving of Nixon unconditionally.
During WW1, the imperial government of Germany granted asylum to a russian insurgent leader who was a wanted terrorist in his native country.The Kaiser ,however,considered him merely a usefull tool,a puppet ,if you will.In order to destabilize Russia,thus gaining military advantage,German secret agents transported this wanted terrorist safely back to Russia and provided military and financial aid for his “revolutionary” purposes.The name of the russian? Why,Vladimir Ilich Lenin,of course…Talk about blowback!
What Richard says - with a link on statistical data.
The only way it gets worse than this is if Dubya is caught eating baby kittens, sexually relating with a White House intern, or in a homosexual tryst (or both, if the intern is male).
Hell, even if it came out that Dubya and Condi are snogging, I’d bet the man would lose only 5% of his approval rating.
I agree about the authoritarian 25%.
But I wonder whether some of these folks might not abandon Bush over immigration reform, which at this point appears to be the only possible major legislative accomplishment of this administration’s last two years in office and which drives the authoritarian quarter crazy since it offends their xenophobia and racism and plays into a whole variety of fears of invasion, subversion and the like.
Sure destabalizing Iran is probably wrong and stupid, but I don’t think the ability of the press to undermine covert operations is de facto a good thing. If this were WWII or another “Just War” then I would be quite upset with ABC. Since almost all of the 25% consider the GWOT to be a “Just War” I can see why they are upset.
Right now though, the line between executive power and just about everything that can check it is so out of whack that I think virtually any afront to Bush’s power is good. We just need to make sure that we don’t start bad precedents in the midst of stopping bad precedents, right?
The idea that this is all somehow news to Iran is quite funny though. It’s news to the American public, almost exclusively.
I actually read those comments as well. There were a few who commended ABC for reporting the story. The bottom line for me is, I can’t trust this current administration to take a shit correctly. Why would I think they would have success trying to covertlt destabalize a foreign Government?
That should be “covertly”.
Ross, Lenin never was a terrorist. His brother was involved in some nihilist group, but as for Lenin himself, he was actually opposed to terrorism.
I don’t agree the number is actually that high–25%. I’d say of the 25%, half of those are the knuckledraggers who consider World Net Daily a “informative news source”… the other half is a collection of those who just don’t have enough time or energy to think about democracy, so they find it easier to just go along with whatever it is the president (whether it be the petulant boy king, or other) decides. See: Brittany Spears.
This reminds me of when the ’secret’ bombing of Cambodia was uncovered - it was not, as Doonsbury pointed out secret to the Cambodians “Look here come the bombs.”
Err, my mistake. I was responding to resident_alien.
“maybe I missed something, but if it were really a secret CIA action, how did ABC know about it?”
Ummm, I know the answer to this one!
‘Cause there are only two kind of secrets that matter to Authoritarian Cults, like the current Cult Of Bush.
One - secrets that are about stuff that embarrasses The Supreme Leader or his top deputies. These secrets must be kept secure at all cost. No measure is too sleazy to protect these secrets or delay their exposure - for example, thousands of Executive Branch emails, which are to be preserved by law, just happen to be on a Republican Party server, and then they get erased - oops!
Two - secrets that may have some partisan political value when revealed at the right moment. “Valerie Plame is Joe Wilson’s wife and she’s a NOC with the CIA!” Or in this case: “We’re running secret operations to undermine Iran - BUT DON’T TELL THEM IRANIANS ‘CAUSE IT’S A SECRET!!!”
If ABC knows about it and is telling people about this “covert” operation, have no fear, they certainly didn’t find out through “investigative reporting” or some such rot. They were given a tip by some high-ranking Bushite who expected it to be disseminated for political reasons…
Ben Alpers, I’d like to believe that W could lose the final 25% via immigration reform, but he won’t. The final 25% can’t be lost. They would lose their identity if they foresook their Decider. They’re subjects. They’re Disneyfied slaves, singing patriotic songs in the fields.
@ elgie:Lenin was opposed to terrorism as in “random acts of violence and destruction”,but in favour of systematic armed revolution,another version of terrorism,and a more efficient one as well.
JasonC wrote: “…the other half is a collection of those who just don’t have enough time or energy to think about democracy….”
Jason, that’s the premise of Mike Moore’s coming film. Moore asserts that many lack the energy for cognition and citizenship because of debt. We are loaned much more money than is safe and tenable and end up drowning in debt. We’re forced to work and worry and work, which leaves no time for citizenship and deciding. So, we watch Fox and vote for the Decider. And since it’s no longer kosher to blame the filthy Jews, we watch Bill O’Reilly and blame the filthy brown people for our individual and collective poverty.
To a very large extent, I think our continuing “surprise” to find 25% of the population so inclined, is a testament to the degree that almost everyone in the US has internalized at some level the idea of American exceptionalism (even those who consciously disavow it.) Not too surprising - exceptionalism is deeply ingrained into the very fabric of US society. (Even articles on how we suck at one thing or another are generally framed as “surprising”.)
When institutions in any society (political, religious etc.) work to exploit the authoritarian side of human nature, they will always find some fertile ground, the tragedy is when they gain any degree of legitimacy or traction as they currently have in the US. Further danger is then added by the “it can’t happen here” mentality that is fueled in everyone by the pervasive exceptionalist framework.
Personally I don’t really think the Plame incident was a big deal because a spy was exposed, but because it showed the lengths the Bushies would go to ignore evidence that suggested that attacking Iraq was a bad idea.
The CIA is nothing but a sort of legal organized crime cartel. I don’t think their agents deserve anything but jail time.
Ben and Holly, I live around and work with the 25%. I think the anger over immigration can provide cover for getting rid of a president that now embarrasses them but which they will never admit. Believe me some of these people can never admit to being wrong about anything,(I have to work with these people!) let alone The Decider. So immigration will be the issue to use as an excuse to vote against the Republican Party and not mention the Iraq war, while never admitting that’s what they’re doing.
One interesting thing I took away was a comment the presenter made about the US government trying to fight Iran with Cold War tactics in a way that implied disaproval. He also thought Iran was responding with Cold War tactics. He didn’t give any proof so I shelved that memory and this brings it up. Well, here we are. Cold War tactics.
This makes perfect sense: everyone with any say in this administration is a “Cold War thinker”–that’s Condi’s “area of expertise” for gods’ sakes. The people currently in charge
— have an outdated, useless view of the way the world works
— don’t know any other way to see the world
— make really bad decisions that have bad results
and
— refuse to admit they might possibly be wrong in their view or their decisions.
They will continue to fuck up everything they do for precisely those reasons: THEY DON’T LEARN!
Honestly, this aspect of the Bush Administration scares me more than any of their ideology: even if I DID agree with their ideology, their blind incompetance and tremendous hubris means things are going to go to shit. Sometimes I think that even a truly evil but competant administration would be better than a massively incompetant one. (Of course, there’s still the ongoing argument that these people are also evil, but their imcompetance is clearly evident, to me.)
@ resident alien:
then i guess George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, et al were all terrorists, too.
since when is armed revolution terrorism?
armed revolution is always terrorism to the other side….
Perhaps we can have a new assumption:
The faster/louder a person cries “They Hate Our Freedoms!” then the higher the chance that the crier hates our freedoms just as much.
LCforevah, that 25% is the same 25% who clutch their pearls whenever someone waffles or changes their opinion. They consider immutability to be the primary component of leadership. Thus, they voted for a team who can’t learn from their errors, as Dorothy noted. The smartest people I know do change their opinions and beliefs. And the bravest people I know do it publicly. Only stupid cowards can’t shift opinion.
How does the mod-bot work? I’ve posted here hundreds of times, but it keeps delaying my comments. Very annoying.
six-oh-seven-nine, what you just wrote is probably the truest thing I’ll read this week.
opopnax: when you lose, naturally!
Technically, I suppose, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were “enablers” or “demagouges”, Washington, as a feild commander for a more-or-less conventional army, was an “insurgent”, and Sam Adams and the minutemen (the real ones, not to racist fucks on the border) were “terrorists”.
I rember this same convo taking place almost a decade ago, when an election worker at the precinct I was election judge for (!) was arguing against intervening in Kosovo because the KLA were terrorists, “did you know that?”
You’re only a terrorist until you win….
Philosophizer, what you wrote reminds me of the Zinn quote: “How can you make a war on terror if war itself is terrorism?”
opoponax - the only difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is who got to write the history because they won.
Holly, that’s exactly right! They can’t change their opinions without losing face, therefore, they will hide behind the immigration issue when they vote for anything other than the Republican candidates.
“Only stupid cowards can’t shift opinion.” And with the immigration issue, they won’t have to.
To further illustrate the point, I recently went to an emergency responder course, and the law enforcement representative/homeland security resource doing the section on terrorism actually called the Boston Tea Party our first domestic terrorist event. This class was also at least 500 miles from the nearest red state.
The ABC commentators are astoundingly stupid. They’re looking at the wrong side of the leak story; they’re focusing on the media, instead of why the media got the story in the first place.
I don’t necessarily agree that this was a Bush admin tactic, though; they’re the types to think that this sort of thing would actually work. My take, for what it’s worth, is that the President sent down this directive, and the CIA collectively said “oh, you must be kidding”. It’s disastrous, they don’t want to do it, and they don’t necessarily have the operative capability to even do it these days. They can’t directly disobey the president, but they also know as well as anybody else that a black op is dead the second it’s leaked.
So they leaked it.
Problem solved.
Dorothy, you got me thinking about something else. This may be mostly my perception of the Cold Warriors, Acheson, Kissinger, Kahn, Zbigniew (spelling?), Dr. Strangelove and anyone else I’m forgetting, they strike me as careful, thoughtful, cold calculating planners (their mistakes and bad ideas still considered). Which the Bushies are really not. Dorothy also mentions that the Cold War is over. Cold War tactics could only work against Iran b/c Iran is a nation state. And that’s if we do it right and Iran plays the game, which kinda requires Iran to build a nuclear arsenal and point it westward. I can’t believe I just typed that. In my last post I said Cold War tactics could work against Iran. Now I feel that I must give it some more thought.
Scott, what definition are you using that makes Adams and the Minute Men terrorists? At Lexington and Concord, they faced British regulars.
I think that attacks — even surprise attacks — on troops are not terrorism. A surprise attack on uniformed military personnel or their installations by another military is a surprise attack; by an informal force within a civilian population, it is insurgency. E.g. terrorists killed approximately 3000 civilians on September 11, 2001; insurgents operating out of the Bekaa Valley killed 248 US Marines and others in Beirut, and the Japanese Navy conducted a surprise attack at Pearl Harbor without first informing the US that they intended to make war.
(Some folks may not like it that I think Beirut, Khobar Towers and the USS Cole are qualitatively different from the Murrah Building and the WTC. Fuck ‘em.)
Also, I don’t believe the term “terrorism” out to include attacks with neither the intent not the likelyhood of civilian casualties. Burning SUVs for political propoganda purposes is vandalism, not terrorism. Blowing up a pub with a warning is a much more dicey area, because it is far too frequent that civilians are still in harm’s way when time expires. The Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings, like Bali and Olympic Park, are undeniably terrorist attacks on civilians.
(I have nuanced views on attacks that kill civilians that are not intended to terrorize, such as damage to war production and interdiction of movement. Basically, if I remember BH Liddell Hart’s post-was addendum right, I agree with him: bombing cities to break a nation’s will to fight is wrong and ineffective; bombing arms makers and killing civilian arms makers is acceptable but not often effective; killing merchant sailors and civilian transport workers to prevent war materials from reaching troops is both acceptable and effective; killing civilian passengers in this way using interdiction of transport as an excuse (e.g. Lusitania) is the same as bombing a residential neighborhood. In our guts, we know that deliberately making war on civilians is wrong; Sir Arthur Harris’s own men called him “Butcher Harris”.)
I used to be a Democrat before 9/11, but now I am outraged about Chappaquiddick. Also, I didn’t leave the Democrat party — it left me.
Thomas:
You know, I hope, the story told about Harris being stopped by a civilian policeman:
“You shouldn’t drive that way, sir, you could kill someone.”
“Son, I kill thousands of people each and every night.”
Incertus: “Is it a coincidence that the 25% or so of the country that really wants that authoritarian, controlling, fascist government correlates to the same percentage of the country that’s hardcore fundamentalist, believes that Jesus is likely to return in the next 5 years, and makes up the Republican base? ”
I will agree with you it’s no mere coincidence. A part of the hardcore Christian radical right do believe that Bush is the Chosen One, who is the only one with the resolve to lead the crusade against the “evildoers”. The other part feel that Bush and Co. are too liberal, not Godly enough, and support the Constitution Party. A part of the 25% are stubborn fools who won’t admit that they are wrong, even in the face of misdeeds, corruption, mistakes and wrongdoing on the part of their regime. Increased gas prices? It’s the fault of the librul Democrats who won’t drill for oil in Alaska or offshore. The misbegotten war in Iraq? The Dems are not supporting the war enough, and are hindering Bush’s efforts to win. Like Bush, they refuse to admit mistakes and accept responsibility. Image is more important than substance.
Thomas wonders “what definition are you using that makes Adams and the Minute Men terrorists? At Lexington and Concord, they faced British regulars.
Without taking one side or the other, Thomas, the definition of a guerrilla or terrorist turns not on their target but on their mode of self-identification. The reason that “guerrillas” or “terrorists” or “franc-tireurs” are anethema to modern organized war is that they breach the rule which (in theory) separates uniformed Legitimate targets from civilian Illegitimate ones. The military reasoning runs thus: “I will spare your civilians from deliberate harm if you distinguish between them and the forces in the field. Cease to do so and my obligation to discriminate between targets also ends”.
And yes, I know, more honoured in the breach than the observance.
6079, I think self-identification is not useful. Every asymmetrical warrior is a “freedom fighter” in his or her own mind, and their means are always justified in their own minds. Only an objective definition provides a way to have a meaningful discussion. If Hamburg and Hiroshima were okay, then so were the Blitz and Guernica.
The state of international law arises from agreements among European states with standing armies, and does not well account for the world of asymmetrical warfare. We need definitions and rules that apply to the world as it is. Wagging our fingers at the less developed nations and telling them to put on uniforms so we can find them and shoot them as useless as British regulars bemoaning the Minute Men fighting as skirmishers from behind cover in running engagements.
Michael Bérubé says
Hey me too! Furthermore I’m incensed that Jimmy Carter was so busy making deals with the USSR to win elections that he couldn’t be bothered to invade Iran. Everything that’s wrong with the middle east was because of him, well him and Clinton. Neither of them did enough to stop 9/11 or Saddam Hussein from getting WMD’s.
Thomas, I may not have been clear and as a result created confusion. When I said “self identification” I meant “how we identify ourselves to those around us”, ie: uniforms, armbands and other specific visual markers of combatant status, not “how we view ourselves”.
I am largely in agreement with your comments on warfare rules and asymetrical warfare. The rules are largely set by western nations to govern how western nations engage each other when both wish to follow the rules, and have little or no applicability, say, to a national liberation struggle. They are also convenient GOTCHA! handles for freaked-out regular armies to attack civilians. (Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, describing the German progress through Belgium, is a good example of how they do this.)
As for the need of rules, let’s not forget that even if there are rules there will always be forces who have compelling reasons to break them.
Always reminds me of this quote: “If fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” - Upton Sinclair. Only, with all due respect to Mr. Sinclair, it should read “When fascism…”
Or maybe even, “now that fascism has gotten here…”
You get the idea.
I don’t know whether or not Bush’s approval ratings really are as high as 25%. Sure, that’s what the numbers come out to, but what’s the sample size and distribution?
It would not surprise me if half of the comments on that ABC story, or many other comment boards, were left by the same five idiots. Or paid shills.
Amanda, I’d suggest that what you’re seeing is not necessarily the loathing of democracy (though that probably plays a role). Part of it, at least, is that Bush has been built up as a hero for several years.
There’s a lot of things that get tied together with that. First, he was a hero because he was a good, godly man so you have people who feel they are standing up for their religion when they defend him. Second, he was a hero because some of his actions were deemed heroic by the right set of people. No one wants to believe they were wrong for believing in him. Third, people felt it was a personal triumph to continue to believe in him despite all the vicious attacks against him by “the left” (or whomever the enemy was called).
A lot of people have too much invested in Bush being a good leader to recognize the simple truth that he’s always been a bumbling incompetent propped up by those who felt they could gain something by supporting him.
A lot of those who are complaining are not complaining because they hate democracy or the free press; they’re complaining because it’s their hero Bush they see as being attacked, yet again, by “the liberal press”.
Furthermore I’m incensed that Jimmy Carter was so busy making deals with the USSR to win elections that he couldn’t be bothered to invade Iran. Everything that’s wrong with the middle east was because of him, well him and Clinton. Neither of them did enough to stop 9/11 or Saddam Hussein from getting WMD’s.
Oboy, CJS, have I got a book for you.
But you’re right that Clinton and Carter didn’t do enough about Saddam and WMDs. Thank goodness Reagan fixed that.
John P, I agree about the Bush worship in the face of all facts to the contrary regarding his competence. This really started with the uplifting of Reagan, after the humiliation of Nixon. I always considered Reagan to be a B-list movie actor who was really good at delivering presidential scripts, but was never a real President. He was necessary after the Nixon debacle, and my perception is that the base that upholds both Reagan and Bush can’t get over what happened with Nixon, to the point that the base is ignoring the list of Bush’s impeachable offenses–they’re simply not going to go through that again. This might also explain the relentless imperative to impeach over a bj, as if that would be equivalent to what Nixon did.
I think that attacks — even surprise attacks — on troops are not terrorism.
However, in Iraq, attacks on US troops are being called terrorism, at least by the US.
And if we choose to include that in the definition of terrorism, then the acts of the Minutemen during the US Revolution are properly measured by that yardstick, and terrorism.
I probably should have included the snark tags.
Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August
The book so good that they had to create a prize for it.
For those that don’t know the story, the Pulitzer for History was always assumed to be reserved by the testator’s wish to a work on an American subject. When GoA came out, it was waaay better than anything else and the committee felt they needed to grant an award. However, since it deals only with the beginning of the war, it can’t even marginally be called an American subject. So they created the Pulitzer for General Nonfiction.
6079, now I see what you mean. In the modern world, as you say, the refusal of combattants against vastly superior conventional forces to mark themselves as combattants is just an easy excuse to kill noncombattants: which is counterproductive in that it only makes those populations ever more radically opposed to their killers and supportive of the fighters hiding among them. (Gee, Guernica sure intimidated those Basques, that’s why they were the only meaningful underground resistence to Franco for decades after. And those Brits gave up right away when they had to send their children out of the city during the Blitz. And shooting lots of innocent Vietnamese got them to give up the VC no problem. Now, in Iraq, if our commanders just incarcerate and beat a few more Baghdad cab drivers, the insurgent’s families will turn them over to us and we will finally be greeted as liberators. /snark.)
It is imperative to expose this Administration’s hidden agenda. And the story that abc News supposedly had released is our business and it should never have been secret. People like the wingnut who said that he will never watch abc again are the real traitors. And this truly underscores the reaso as to why the Freedom of Information Act needs to be greatly strengthened so that no government can deny FOIA request for anything — even if they claim so-called executive privilege.
Ursula, I’m not on board with the administration’s loose and self-serving use of the term. To this administration, “terrorism” is attacks on any of our interests (including property) by anyone other than the military of a state that we recognize. That’s just nonsense. If it was okay for our attacks on British regulars from bushes were military engagements (and they were) then Iraqis that set off IEDs to kill our troops are participating in military engagements. They are insurgents, they are the enemy. But calling them terrorists makes the term largely meaningless.
Our Commander in Chief has put our uniformed troops in the middle of a civil war that they cannot quell, and they will keep getting killed or wounded as long as they are there. Even leaving the nefarious history out, that is irresponsible. We need to bring our troops home, now.
“However, in Iraq, attacks on US troops are being called terrorism, at least by the US.”
Bushite “Logic”:
1. Anything a “terrorist” does is terrorism.
2. A “terrorist” is anyone who is called a “terrorist” by the Bushites.
Therefore, attacks on American soldiers and mercenaries/contractors is “terrorism” - by definition - to Bushites…
“semi-fascist Bush supporters” Why do you say “semi”? I have maintained since 2001 that Bush is a Hitler. Nothing has proven me wrong since.
Good at covert ops… The CIA… Does not compute!
How about the lack of a state machinery of death that systematically dehumanizes and slaughters millions of people?
For a start.
Thomas: I’m not thinking so much of Lexington and Concord as the Boston Tea Party, and I guess the minutemen were the wrong ones to finger for this, since they’re mostly talked aobut in a New England context, but the bushwhacking, atrocities, massacres, and general anarchy from both sides that prevailed in the backwoods and Appalachians in the South (at least there, I’m far from an expert) are terrorism by pretty much any reasonable definition…
“How about the lack of a state machinery of death that systematically dehumanizes and slaughters millions of people?”
Okay, how about a low-rent Hitler from about 1935 or so…?
good post.
opsec was something drilled into the bones of all us dopes in the navy during the early 80’s. it doesn’t apply to the press. the press are constitutionally exempt and to be free to investigate and report their findings as a check and balance against a government out f control and short circuiting constitutional safeguards.
treason is where you deliberately weaken or breech security for personal gain in a time of war, it is punishable by death, and applies only to those who are acting under the auspices of the government or one of it’s agencies… such as a contractor working on a new design of prop for submersibles or flight controls…
treason, is what dick cheney, scooter libby, and carl rove should be tried for.
it is the purpose and responsibility of a free press corp to investigate and hold the government accountable.
sinclair lewis was writing about the nations tendency to embrace fascism back in the 1930’s. bush isn’t a semi fascist, anymore than he is a semi christian. he is exactly a fascist, and a born again christian, and both together blend seemlessly into a fanatascism that becomes impervious to reason.
the 25% or plus who support blindly, are willingly fascist. they do not think they are wrong, they do not question themselves, they are annointed…
and the rest of us need to face a few facts and figure out a way to stop this.
Of course the CIA leaked it.
They’re the worlds most overfed, least competent intelligence agency. Back in the early nineties, during the halcyon Clinton years, the CIA got its entire network in Iran rolled up by Revolutionary Guards Corps Intelligence.
Now that it’s leaked, Bush will simply turn to the real professionals over at the Department of Defense who can actually get something done in a reasonably competent time frame. They tend not to leak.
Saying that we shouldn’t conduct covert operations against the Iranians is like saying we shouldn’t conduct covert operations against the Nazis. It just shows how far out of touch the Left has become.
Terrorism is when the act of violence is done primarily for political reasons AND the act is planned to spread TERROR amongst non-combattant voter type people and thus influence them to influence their government in ways desirable to the perpetrators.
Insurrections, revolutions, insurgencies, etc. may but do not necessarily have to perpetrate terrorist acts. Some acts contain both terrorist and military objectives; e.g., the firebombing of Dresden. Just because an act has some military worth in the traditional sense does not mean that it is not also terrorism. Even acts against purely military targets can be said to be terrorism if their real objective is to influence the people funing the military unit which is attacked to withdraw the same.
My 2¢ worth.
25% of Americans think Jesus rode a dinosaur to the last supper
25% of Americans think Budweiser is beer
25% of Americans think NASCAR is racing
25% of Americans think science is a liberal plot
25% of Americans…
Well, you get the point.
Grandjester, all those people you listed out are the same people. The fact they voted for Bush is just another strike against them…
The far right and far left are going to end up tearing this country apart. What ABC news did is what news organizations do, a scorpion has to do what a scorpion has to do. The leakers are a different story. They are not heroes, they are not traitors, but they ought to expect to be disciplined for their actions, perhaps including dismissal from their positions. A president should be able to trust those in his employ whether his/her name is Clinton or Bush. Enough with the political infighting. It’s hurting us all.
The CIA covertly giving out information on a bad policy is different than the Administration outing Plame.
No one ever talks about the front energy company that Plame worked for, Brewster Jennings.
Years and years of work were thrown away for petty political reasons. Note this was an operation tasked with tracking WMD in the Middle East. The front company exposed was the real tragedy because all their important work will be lost, and to build another front with the same capability will take years and years to develop. At a point in history when we most need this sort of inteligence….
I don’t know if Jesus rode a dinosaur or not, but I tell you, if a church had an image of Jesus riding a velociraptor instead of on a crucifix, I might be tempted to convert. Jesus on a dino is fucking sweet. I mean, imagine this, only with Jesus instead of a Dr. McNinja.
Eh? Eh?
Effing sweeeeeet.
“Eat my body… drink my blood… feed my dinosaur.”
“The leakers are a different story. They are not heroes, they are not traitors, but they ought to expect to be disciplined for their actions, perhaps including dismissal from their positions.”
So I assume you’ve already written your representative and your senator to demand that Dick Cheney and Karl Rove be dismissed, right?…
A president should be able to trust those in his employ whether his/her name is Clinton or Bush.
A president should expect those in his employ to act in an ethical, moral manner no matter the presidents name.
A democracy should have no secrets from its citizens, especially secret extrajudicial murders.
[…] So Amanda is spot-on right, here, when she says Bush’s approval rating will never dip below 25%. The good news about this is that it is good to know exactly how many people are complete fucking idiots when it comes to politics. But that’s about all the use you can get out of it. […]
Besides which, the reason we “know” about these supposed plots to destabilize the Iranian government is the same reason we learned about the Bush Administration’s extra-legal international Gulag network. The government wants that information to be out in public. It’s their ever-so-clever way of putting pressure on the Iranians in a deniable fashion. They intend for the “bad guys” to learn about this kind of quasi-illegal stuff, so they’ll sweat and tremble in their big black bad-guys’s boots.
Oh, zey are so clevaire, zese Bush Administration strategic geniuses! Certainment, ze “bad guys” would nevair suspect that it is nothing but a brilliante mind-foute! For zey are ignorant camel-drivers! who live in Bedouin tents in ze desert!, not masterminds, like Rumsfeld and Feith and Cheney and that lot. Mwah ha ha!
God, the utter contempt the Iranians must have toward our flat-peter President and his Keystone Kops staff.
if it weren’t so pathetically true, this would be funny. I hope your numbers about the hardcore facists faction are high but could be, how to tell beside inference from those poll numbers.
Ironically I quit watching ABC ages ago, particularly because they outfoxed Fox with that load of pure crap on how Clinton caused 9/11. So, in my post, I gave TruthOut the credit for the story because without them filtering it to me, I would not have encountered the story at all.
If Bush has learned anything it is that he can no longer sell his fxxked up plans to the country so he is just ducking the people alltogether this time around. There are probably plenty of people in his administration who have not lost their minds yet and would feel compelled to expose this folly, if indeed, leaking it were not an administration intention in its war of nerves with Teheran.
As people with longer memories will know, we have been through all of this before.
Roy:
You ask, you get. He’s on a vegetarian, though. Not nearly as impressive. Incidentally, I got this picture from the dinosaur entry at Conservapedia, but it’s been taken down since, so I think it was a snarky addition in the first place.
I can’t help picturing the CIA sneaking into Iraq with boxes of dynamite and giant anvils, all labeled “ACME.”
(beepbeep)
opoponax - the only difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is who got to write the history because they won.
And when the last GI scurries out of Iraq, what do you think the people shooting at them (including the Al Qaeda carpetbagers) will be crowing?
It’s not just that Iraq was and is a mistake, it’s also that Bush placed your country in a no-win situation - either you stay there forever, or you give the other side a propaganda victory.
Scott, what definition are you using that makes Adams and the Minute Men terrorists? At Lexington and Concord, they faced British regulars.
You mean they rebelled against the rightful soveriegn power, shooting civil servants of the legal government.
Saying that we shouldn’t conduct covert operations against the Iranians is like saying we shouldn’t conduct covert operations against the Nazis. It just shows how far out of touch the Left has become.
Except for the teeny tiny distinction that the Iranians have invaded, well, nobody. Let me stress that again - no-one. For this entire century, as far as I know.
Their “crimes” are as follows:
i, They have a hand in shit-stirring against Israel via proxies. Which makes them different from each and every other Middle Eastern nation - how? And makes them morally different from Israel and the US how?
ii, They are accused (without independent proof) by the Bush Administration of seeking the same weapons Israel, India and Pakistan have. Oh, and the US.
section9:
I swear I’m the only person left in this country who thinks that Iran is almost totally harmless. Iran couldn’t conquer a day-old donut with a cup of coffee, much less make a noticeable dent in American interests. Personally, I think they’re trying to develop nukes not because they’re actively trying to kill us, or even because they want to supply terrorists, but because we scare the shit out of them. For very good reason, too, from what I can tell.
The best way to avert an attack from a vastly superior opponent is to convince them that you’re a whole lot tougher than you really are.
Holly Capote:
Is that in Sicko, or is he already planning this for his next one after that?Lesbia, “How about the lack of a state machinery of death that systematically dehumanizes and slaughters millions of people?”
Hitler didn’t become the great reaper overnight. MikeEss has it about right. Look back to 1933 when Hitler came to power. It took him several years to set up the state machinery.
The final solution was only decided on in 1942.
With the Patriot Act and the lesser known Military Commissions Act, Bush is well on his way, with similarities to Hitler’s Enabling Act.
Hitler didn’t launch his all out war until 1939, six years after coming to power, though in the meantime he did take over Austria and Czechoslovakia. Bush only needed two years for his war. Now he wants to expand it to Iran, and the sell-out Demo-rats are letting him do it. It is still far from WWII granted. But as the wingnut commentators can’t resist making such comparisons, I am just throwing it back at them.
I suppose it is part of the human condition, that people will refuse to see when they are wrong.
Of course, we liberals haven’t been tested on this for quite a while, at least when it comes to presidential politics. Has there been any time when someone who assumed Shrub was wrong on any given issue wasn’t right? If someone who was publicly liberal but equally insane was in power, how would we react? How many would see no wrong with a Democrat for president?
I’m thinking of those who will support virulently forced-pregnancy Democrats, just because they are Democrats…
The really scary thing is, a significant fraction of the 75% who now dislike Bush do so because he’s not being tough enough.
Y’know, he’s giving in to the ‘Rats on immigration (cause it’s only the ‘Rats who want to let little brown people in, not good Republican corporations), on Iraq (cause the defeatocrat traitors are tying his hands, doncha know), on gay marriage (must be that backslider Cheney, why can’t he be a man like Keyes and disown his own daughter)…
If only they’d let Bush be Bush!
Dan:
Well, as the old joke goes, one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. Hell… sometimes your whole week.
If they had any atomic bombs, it would require a truly grave danger to make it worthwhile to attack them. The losses we’d face (even if only of equipment) would be too high.
What’s really scary about this is, from Iran’s perspective, it’s awfully rational. The US made absolutely sure that Saddam had no weapons, and then attacked (but pretended they thought there *were* still weapons there). Why shouldn’t they do their best to get nukes, since it’s clear that disarming didn’t help Saddam?
Excuse me, but why on earth should I be bothered that the CIA lost a tool they were using to try to maintain a US monopoly on weapons of mass destruction?
The sort of intelligence that we as ordinary people need is what the USA is up to, not what countries in the middle East are up to.
“If they had any atomic bombs, it would require a truly grave danger to make it worthwhile to attack them. The losses we’d face (even if only of equipment) would be too high.”
The situation in North Korea is more than adequate proof that the possion of atomic weapons can be a deterrent to stronger nations. Iran has every incentive to acquire “The Bomb” because it’s been proven as an effective defense.
As a child of an era when the threat of nuclear annihilation was an every day possibility, it gives me no great pleasure to make a Dr. Strangelove-ian observation like that, but it still seems to be absolutely (if cynically) correct…
Perhaps the best summary of the Iranian situation came from a British journalist. (paraphrase-from-memory alert!):
“I don’t think that the Iranians have the bomb or are close to it. I don’t want them to have a bomb, and even the concept frightens me. But they’d be insane not to try.”
Remember, these are the same people who compared the Southern Poverty Law Center to Al-Qaeda, and when they finally figured they had to own up to the Ted Klaudt story after 3 days, they assumed he was a Democrat and blamed the victims.
Grandjester–
Hey now, Budweiser is good beer.
I never got into NASCAR but it is racing, somewhat.
I wouldn’t say “totally harmless,” but I agree with Phoenician, they haven’t attempted to wreck any serious harm outside their own borders. Nor are they in much of a position to do so, nukes or none. The Iranian Islamic Republic is organized around Shi’ite Islam as state religion. (At that, there are serious doctrinal splits within Shi’ism, and Iran is divided by several of them…) Since I think the chances of voluntary conversion of Sunnis to Shi’ism (or vice versa) are next to zero, geographically this means that they could probably absorb Iraq, either by outright fusion (pretty unlikely, considering the long history of bad blood between the nations) or by securing a close alliance with an independent Shi’a dominated Iraq. Beyond that point, there are large Shi’a groups in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel itself–but these are minorities, if large ones. Any comparison between Iran and the Third Reich is ridiculous on geopolitical grounds.
OTOH, they did one hell of a job defending themselves against a well-funded onslaught by Saddam, backed by both the USA and the USSR. Just look at the geography of the place to start with. Then consider that despite the fact that Khomeni’s Islamic Republic was far from universally popular, one reason his domestic opponents either fell in line or stood out to be eliminated with general consent was that defensive war. It devastated them, and their ultimate settlement was a defeat–but they hung on to their territory and independence.
I’ve often opined too that as theocratic regimes go, especially compared to the sorts of (Sunni) Islamic fundamentalists backed by the Saudis (and hence, not so indirectly, by our tax dollars in Cold War and post-Cold War policy) they are far more balanced and reasonable. It’s a solid society, and the worst thing we can do to encourage its worst elements is to bluster and threaten. Time and again, they’ve proven that if we cut deals with them they will deal, and the more we do toward peaceful relations, the better it gets domestically from our point of view. If we must go picking fights with Islamic theocracies it would be far more sensible to reverse our policies vis a vis Saudi Arabia.
But we just don’t have the right to go around dictating to other people, period. We’re reaping the whirlwind for doing that for half a century and more, and more of the same can only make things worse. Our policies have systematically undermined, even assasinated, the moderates the American public wishes we were dealing with.
What should never be overlooked, but generally is, is that the so-called “Cold War” was merely another rationalization for imperial business as usual. The Soviet Union was never in a position to snatch the global empire we got the British to mortgage to us. Our policy in the Third World proceeded under the cover of a global chess game, but was essentially the same as that of the European powers that seized control formally after undermining these vast regions of the world informally as part of the general development of global capitalism. This is why they have continued in essentially unchanged form despite the demise of the alleged Evil Empire we were supposedly “protecting” these people and ourselves from. If one recognizes that the real purpose of most allegedly anti-Soviet policies outside Western Europe (heck, even inside Western Europe–we had to rig at least one election each in France and Italy in the late ’40s and early ’50s to keep those countries from breaking away from “our” camp)were mainly geared toward ruling those countries against the best interest of the native peoples, rather than to keep the Russian bear at bay, then those policies make a lot more sense–on their ruthless terms. And so does anti-American sentiment.
If our tax dollars had not consistently gone for over half a century toward securing regimes all over the globe that answered to foreign capital and not their own people, I think that the economic and social history of the Third World would have been radically different, and we’d have no pretexts today, or even causes, to have military forces capable of matching the entire armed might of the world combined, nor would we have conveniently compliant regimes (which are inconveniently difficult to keep in power without ongoing terrorism against the peoples of the world, to be sure) to base our forces in. Had the USA simply withdrawn into isolationism, I suppose some other power, perhaps even an unchecked Soviet Union, might have moved, clumsily and with far fewer resources, to fill the imperial vacuum, but at the end of WWII we stood in a very unique and enviable position to check others from such schemes–if only we had refrained from doing so ourselves.
But while if you research the attitudes of Americans, particularly WWII vets, in the few years after the war, you might be amazed how open-mindedly progressive very large numbers of them were, to wish for such an alternate history would be ridiculously Utopian. Even in 1945–I might say especially in 1945–the USA was ruled by wealth, wealth that kept an unusually low public profile, but nevertheless ruled and (provided, in those years so close to the Depression and the perception that victory in WWII was the product of the collective self-sacrifice of ordinary Americans, that they kept the facade of operating in the public interest intact) ruled with the full assent of that same liberal-minded public. The corporate elite knew they were on probation for good behavior in those years, which is why they worked so hard at shaping a public consensus rather than the general apathy they rely on today. But they also had an amazingly free hand to operate to secure their best interests with little check or scrutiny.
I think there is a clear distinction between “terrorism” and legitimate freedom fighting, but in general we’ve been trained to see essentially all of the latter as instances of the former, and not see our own routine recourses to terror for what they are. One reason, I think, that US political rhetoric so freely accuses this that or the other scapegoat dictator du jour of creating and harboring “armies of terrorists” (I remember this talk way back in the ’80s) is that the USA almost uniquely has done that very thing again and again. There is a huge difference between us and the various states we conveniently nominate as “rouge” states from year to year; we are the global superpower, they are not. Generally speaking I suspect it is risky at best and suicidal very often to cultivate ideological loose cannons which most real bands of actual terrorists are; it works out to far more liability than benefit for your average run of the mill strongman to rationally choose. The USA’s military/security complex thought we were different, and pragmatically generally were. I’m amazed at how little blowback we have directly and spectactularly suffered after all our devastating meddling, most of it via either “plausibly deniable” bona fide terrorist armies or baffling economic string-pulling few of us understand. People are actually amazingly tolerant or forgiving, or perhaps they just don’t want to bring down the full weight of US arms on their heads.
But we’ve set one hell of a bad example, and whether or not we enter into an era where some combination of desperation and our objective weakening exposes us to the bill to be paid, we are in no position to preach.