Keith Halderman
First, he uses intimidation by the FCC and his cronies at Clear Channel Inc. to partially remove Howard Stern from the airwaves. Yet now, each and every weekday Stern spends a considerable amount of his five hours of airtime broadcasting his opinion, that Bush is a rightwing jerk unfit to be our leader, to his still more than eight million listeners. Also, he is doing this in a exceptionally engaging and intelligent way. And, there is growing evidence that Stern’s voice might even be a significant factor in tipping the election to Kerry.
Next, Bush closes the newspaper of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and now we are fighting his Shiite followers as well as the Sunni Moslems who had supported Hussein. Hardly anyone had ever heard of this guy before the Bush Administration tried to silence him.
Now, the Bush camp is trying to limit the distribution of Michael Moore’s new film Fahrenheit 911. The Disney Corporation is refusing to allow its subsidiary Mirimax to release the movie because it is afraid that Florida Governor Jeb Bush will take away important tax breaks if they do. Now, why would Disney think that unless they had already been warned?
This latest bit of censorship has worked just as well as this first two, in at least one instance. Before I read the story about Disney and Moore I had no intention of going to see the film, now I would not miss it. I am very curious to know what George Bush doesn’t want me to see.
David T. Beito
"I want the American soldier to return to his camp. What I want more is that he returns to the United States," General Muhammad Latif told Reuters in an interview.
Sheldon Richman
Gene Healy
BE AFRAID: Bio-chemical warfare from Islamist terrorists is, to my mind, inevitable.
and links this article from the Washington Post.
The article, about a sad-sack jihadi living with his Mom in France, and cooking up castor-bean poison in a coffee maker, is a good deal more pathetic than frightening:
Benchellali's mother, Hafsa, told police she became concerned after finding strange potions and liquids scattered around her sewing room following one of her son's all-night sessions. But when she confronted her son, he warned her to stay away."He said it was dangerous," the woman said, according to the transcript,"and it was better if I didn't know what he was doing."
Mommm! I'm busy!!
Why is a smart guy like Sullivan buying into the sensationalistic and stupid notion that chem/bio agents are supervillain weapons that can"bring a day of horror like none we have ever known," to quote Bush? Such uncritical thinking is one reason we're subjected to the indignity of having the leader of the most powerful country in history whining at press conferences about Iraqi mustard gas shells.
Well,"be afraid" about this if you want to. I worry more about car bombs and other, conventional means of mayhem.
Gene Healy
But his career is winding down on a note of disgrace. He's done his last stint in government watching the death of the eminently sensible Powell Doctrine. He knew what we were getting into in Iraq. And yet, according the latest Woodward, he never made a concerted effort to stop it. Instead, he allowed himself to be used at the UN to pitch a policy he suspected would lead to disaster. He never even demanded a one-on-one with the president to try to talk him out of it.
Now, he tries to clear his rep through repeated, passive-aggressive sniping to reporters via subordinates, as the Post reports today. The story quotes a GQ reporter:
"It was really weird," he said."I didn't have a particular hunger to interview these guys," but the State Department press aide working with him kept setting up interviews and insisting he meet with more people, he said.
It's just sad. He should have done a William Jennings Bryan and publicly resigned. Instead, Powell, a man with much to be proud of, a man who might have stopped the worst foreign policy disaster in 30 years, is reduced to defending himself through surrogates in the thinking man's Maxim.
Keith Halderman
The second piece, a short article, sent to me by Jeff Schaler and written by a British doctor goes a long way to explaining where this paternalism comes from and what could be done about it. It is one of the most eloquently written essays that I have read in quite some time.
David T. Beito
Arthur Silber
Walter Shapiro offers an unusually revealing account of the disparity between the stated goals of the plan to"transform the Middle East" and the realities of postwar Iraq:
Few administration insiders rival Douglas Feith as a passionate believer in America's ability to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for policy and a protégé of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, has played a lead role in what has turned out to be overly optimistic postwar planning.Yet, several military experts had very different views:To describe Feith as a controversial figure veers close to understatement. Bob Woodward, in his authoritative new book Plan of Attack, recounts that Gen. Tommy Franks described Feith to colleagues as"the (big-time expletive deleted) stupidest guy on the face of the earth."
This context helps explain the anticipation that surrounded Feith's speech Tuesday morning at an American Enterprise Institute conference on Iraq, a year after President Bush declared the end of major combat. ...
In his speech, Feith described postwar civilian life in glowing terms, stressing that"economically, Iraq is recovering" and that"health care spending is 30 times greater than its prewar levels." He contended that"more than half the Iraqi people are active in civic affairs," a claim that would be hard to make about America.
Thomas Donnelly, a defense policy expert at AEI, faulted the Pentagon for not thinking broadly about the aftermath of ousting Saddam Hussein."President Bush asked for regime change," Donnelly said,"but what he got was a plan for regime removal."Metz echoes the precise concern enunciated by Barbara Tuchman, with regard to Vietnam:Steven Metz, a faculty member at the U.S. Army War College, criticized the American commitment in Iraq for being predicated on untested theories. Despite the administration's assertions, Metz said, there is no guarantee that the United States can impose democracy on Iraq or that the geopolitical benefits from such a democracy would be worth the cost. Metz stressed that Iraqis are not necessarily beguiled by abstractions such as democracy. He said their outlook is based on the pragmatic question:"Who is likely to be here in five years and have a gun?"
Americans were always talking about freedom from Communism, whereas the freedom that the mass of Vietnamese wanted was freedom from their exploiters, both French and indigenous. The assumption that humanity at large shared the democratic Western idea of freedom was an American delusion."The freedom we cherish and defend in Europe," stated President Eisenhower on taking office,"is no different than the freedom that is imperiled in Asia." He was mistaken. Humanity may have common ground, but needs and aspirations vary according to circumstances.But perhaps the most intriguing comment Shapiro mentions is this one:
An hour after the AEI conference ended, Rumsfeld faced the cameras for his first protracted public discussion of the chilling film accounts of the sadistic abuse of Iraqi prisoners. No single event has more dramatically undermined U.S. postwar aims. And yet when asked at his news conference for his thoughts about how this savage imagery might affect the Iraqi people, Rumsfeld responded lamely,"I haven't been focused on the war of ideas, to be honest with you, with respect to this issue."And, might I suggest, that is precisely the problem: no one in this administration has been"focused on the war of ideas" in any of the ways that matter.
As Shapiro points out,"nothing is more central to whether Americans in Iraq are perceived as liberators or conquerors." Shapiro here refers to the prisoner abuse story, and one has only to consult what Iraqis themselves are saying about this story to appreciate the truth of his statement. And this is where the administration's defenders make a profound mistake: it does not matter what they think about this and similar stories, and it does not matter how they seek to minimize its impact.
What matters is how Iraqis themselves view it -- and, therefore, how they view the United States. It is all very well for us to talk about how we are"liberating" Iraq, but when the actual, concrete reality of life in Iraq contains horrors such as those now being revealed, how likely is it that Iraqis will put much credit in such theories? This shows the problems in resting foreign policy on (and in justifying wars and occupations by)"untested theories" such as nation-building. (And once again, please don't make the usual appeal to Japan and Germany after World War II: they are not the same as Ken Jowitt explains, and if anything, only underscore why such a notion is not likely to succeed in the Middle East.)
In essence, it could accurately be said at this point that our current foreign policy rests on the error of rationalism: of purportedly interpreting complex social-political dynamics and making plans for future action on the basis of self-contained and self-referencing abstract theories divorced from the specifics of the reality which confronts us. When we disregard history, culture and all the other relevant factors, we should not be surprised when such theories do not work -- and when they lead to disaster, and to results which are exactly the opposite of what we had intended. In other words, when foreign policy (or policy in any area) is justified by recourse to theories which are purposely not tested by reference to specific facts and the details of any specific context, failure to one degree or another is the most likely result, and usually the only likely result, barring an unprecedented stream of miraculous lucky breaks.
We have been down this road before, and we failed to learn the appropriate lessons. All of us, and the Iraqis as well, are paying the price for those mistakes now. And we will all have to pay the price, in countless ways of which we are not even aware at this point, for decades to come.
(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)
Chris Matthew Sciabarra
The lunacy of nation-building and of imposed political settlements—which have been tried over and over again in the Middle East with no long-term success—does not mean that there is no hope for the Arab world. Former Reagan administration advisor Michael Ledeen speaks of a rising revolt against theocracy in Iran, for example, among a younger generation that is fed up with their oppressive government. They eat American foods, wear American jeans, and watch American TV shows. I don't see how a U.S. occupation in any part of the region will nourish this kind of revolt. If anything, the United States may be perceived as a new colonial administrator. Such a perception may only give impetus to the theocrats who may seek to preserve their rule by deflecting the dissatisfaction in their midst toward the"infidel occupiers." I can think of no better ad campaign for the recruitment of future Islamic terrorists.
These religious reactionaries are, partially, the Frankenstein monsters of US foreign policy: during the Cold War, the U.S. propped up puppet dictators to do its global bidding, and its intervention was partially responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as an anti-American political force in Iran. The Iranians threw off the U.S.-backed Shah, and elevated Khomeini to a position of leadership. A hostage crisis followed, as did the US support for Iraq's Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran, and for the Afghan"freedom fighters" in their war with the Soviets, thereby empowering a group of mujahideen who were to become Al Qaeda and Taliban warriors. Such are the internal contradictions of US foreign policy that continue till this day.
While the war in Iraq dominates the headlines, with its predictably obscene by-products—e.g., the US torture of Iraqis in the very Abu Ghraib prison used by the murderous Hussein regime—the Pentagon admits that Iraq will require the presence of over 138,000 US troops"at least until the end of 2005."
But if the US wants to learn a bit about how to encourage"democracy" in Iraq, it ought to look toward"those friendly Iranians," as Nicholas D. Kristof puts it, who are fomenting a revolution in Iran, which is slowly becoming"a pro-American country." Not"pro-American" in the sense of wanting to see US troops on Iranian soil—more in terms of the culture wars, that is, the wars that matter. Kristof tells us that so many of the Iranians he interviewed have expressed a desire to come to America. They wear blue jeans, read Hillary Clinton, John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, and, of course, Harry Potter. They watch American movies like"Titanic" and revel in such American TV shows as"Baywatch." And they have one message for the Islamic theocrats, who continue to denounce America as the Great Satan in their blitz of"propaganda":"To hell with the mullahs."
This is an important and continuing development, and a healthy one, considering the history of US intervention in Iran. As Kristof observes:"In the 1960's and 1970's, the U.S. spent millions backing a pro-Western modernizing shah—and the result was an outpouring of venom that led to our diplomats' being held hostage. Since then, Iran has been ruled by mullahs who despise everything we stand for ..." But as Kristof explains, among the younger generation,"being pro-American is a way to take a swipe at the Iranian regime."
And the regime knows it. Indeed,"[o]ne opinion poll showed that 74 percent of Iranians want a dialogue with the U.S.—and the finding so irritated the authorities that they arrested the pollster." But the mullahs couldn't arrest all of those Iranian citizens who had"responded to the 9/11 attacks with a spontaneous candlelight vigil as a show of sympathy."
The Bush administration, which has squandered much of the global good will of 9/11, needs to learn a new phrase if it wants to encourage dialogue with a younger generation of authentic"freedom fighters": Laissez Faire. Hands off!"Left to its own devices," says Kristof,"the Islamic revolution is headed for collapse, and there is a better chance of a strongly pro-American democratic government in Tehran in a decade than in Baghdad." If the administration decides to approach a looming crisis over Iran's nuclear program with the same"bring-it-on" approach that it pioneered in Iraq, Kristof states, it will only succeed in"inflaming Iranian nationalism and uniting the population behind the regime."
That's a form of"nation-building" at which the neocon interventionists might very well succeed. To the detriment of freedom.
Robert L. Campbell
Shelby Thames, the President of the University of Southern Mississippi, is losing no chance to keep his institution in crisis, or guarantee close media attention to its troubles.
On Monday, May 3, Thames called a breakfast meeting with the 5 academic deans and the dean of the library. The announced agenda was to"improve communication" with faculty, staff, and students, in the wake of 2 years of conflict and the crisis that Thames ignited when he fired two senior professors on March 5.
But there never has been any problem of communication under the Thames administration. Thames has no difficulty ensuring that everyone knows which arbitrary commands he wants them to follow. And he has no interest in anything they might wish to say back, unless it's"Yes, sir!" It's also characteristic that the Monday meeting did not include either the Hattiesburg-based Provost, Tim Hudson, or the Provost at the Gulf Coast satellite campus, Jay Grimes. Thames has no use for a Chief Academic Officer standing in the way of direct communication him and the deans. Presumably only issues of convenience prevent him from giving marching orders straight to 40 department chairs, or even to 540 professors.
What Thames really did on Monday was ordain the formation of a President's University Council, whose 18 members would be selected by the deans. The deans, in turn, are frightened that they will be fired should they do the slightest thing to displease Thames. (Just last Friday they were reminded that they were being"grossly insubordinate" on account of their worries about violating the state Freedom of Information Act by failing to turn over information about merit raises to the Faculty Senate.) If the deans can find them, they will obligingly select people who will represent Shelby Thames to the faculty, staff, and students--not people who will represent the faculty, staff, or students to the upper administration. And if they can't find willing representatives of the Thames administration... no doubt their failure will also be taken as gross insubordination.
Once he has his President's University Council in place, Thames will be able to pronounce the Faculty Senate, the Academic Council, the Graduate Council and other such faculty bodies superfluous, and either go around them or declare them disbanded. Since the PUC is also slated to include student"representatives," he can also be rid of the Student Government, should it ever be jolted out of its current placid compliance with his dictates.
The Thames regime has now thoroughly antagonized the media in Mississippi. The Hattiesburg American (a newspaper in the Gannett chain, whose papers suck up notoriously to the local establishment in their respective markets) has filed a state Freedom of Information Act request for the names of everyone whose email the Thames administration has put under surveillance.
Anything approaching a truthful answer to that question would further undermine Thames' credibilty. In his testimony during the hearing on April 28, Thames claimed that he had ordered the email of Professors Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer monitored starting on January 16, 2004, after TV station WDAM got wind that there was something irregular with the credentials of his Vice President for Research, Angie Dvorak. But during the hearing he produced printouts of Stringer's email going as far back as May 2003. And informed sources at USM have charged that at least Stringer's email was already being monitored as far back as the summer of 2003. Indeed, they say that Dvorak herself was in charge of the monitoring, which was carried out, not by the regular Information Technology staff at USM, but by employees at Pileum Corporation, an outfit to which some USM iTech functions have been contracted out. The President of Pileum, Jill Beneke, sat close by as Thames read aloud from intercepted emails during the hearing last week.
Of course, credulous employees and students of USM might be reassured by the email that was broadcast to them today:
The University of Southern Mississippi has more than 12,000 e-mails per day pass through our technology system. iTech, the university's technology support division, does not monitor e-mails. The e-mails monitored for the hearing were done so in accordance with university policy and state law. The monitoring was limited in its scope and time. No monitoring is occurring at this time. We encourage faculty, staff and students to review the university's information technology use and security policy, which can be accessed at http://www.usm.edu/infosec/policy.
That information technology use and security policy allows the administration to read anyone's email at any time for any reason--and does not require them to announce that they are doing it.
What's more, newspapers in other parts of Mississippi are starting to weigh in. The Greenwood, MS paper ran an editorial today that questioned the leadership of Thames and his henchcrew.
Meanwhile, according to records meticulously maintained by a contributor at the Fire Shelby message board, 43 members of the faculty have left USM during the past academic year, or will be leaving as it ends, 17 of them to retirement. Some of them have come out in public and cited the Thames adminstration as their prime motive for leaving. And 16 administrators are leaving, 4 to retirement; they include 3 key players in Financial Affairs, whom Thames is believed to have forced out.
Will Thames fulfill the longings of his backers, and remain in office so he can fire more tenured faculty, and disband the Faculty Senate? Or has he already inflicted enough damage to weary the patience of the Mississippi College Board, to whom he reports?
Sheldon Richman
The first part isn't perfect—but all things considered, not bad. I didn't have time to see if socialism made the cut.
David T. Beito
Sheldon Richman
This is one of the killer lines from George Will’s excellent column about George Bush today in the Washington Post. I recommend it.
Charles W. Nuckolls
As part of a project, I examined the prison records and interviewed surviving American guards and their Japanese prisoners. Not one incident of cruelty to prisoners was reported. On the contrary, prison life was amazingly courteous, and both sides expressed a warmth and admiration for each other that is clearly the reverse of what we now find at the Baghdad prison under the command of American forces.
Iraq is not Japan, to be sure. But one finds, over and over again, the comparison being made. If there is any validity to it, then I suggest the main lesson to be learned is this: to convert an enemy into an ally cannot be done when prisoners are treated sadistically, and forced to perform sodomizing acts in front of their camera-toting American tormentors.
Richard Minear's 1971 book,"Victor's Justice," lambasted the American Occupation of Japan, and especially the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, for concealing a blood-lust for vengeance in the legal niceties of a courtroom charade. Yet in Iraq, what we see is not even the charade, nor any pretense of law and justice. In fact, it is not even the lust for vengeance. It is just stupid, blind cruelty.
We should remember that in 1945 Americans convicted and executed General Yamashita for less.
Pat Lynch
Iraqi prisoners being abused certainly has consequences in settling that dispute, but what impact does it have world-wide? Especially since our credibility is already shot among many in the Europe and the developing world because we haven't found any weapons of mass destruction. So when Sudan wins a seat on a UN committee to deal with human rights issues how much weight does our, correct, decision to walk out of the committee carry? Answer - none. We look no better than Sudan to many people, and frankly that's a shame. It's not because our government is some paradigm. It obviously isn't. But when a tyrannical, murderous regime thumbs their nose at us and points to our abuses in Iraq, and those accusations ring true with many folks in the Arab world things are out of whack.
The UN is not a useful forum, and this decision to elect Sudan has little real consequence for the world. However, we are obviously better than the Sudanese government. When the contrast between the U.S. and a country like Sudan can be obscured by the abuses we've committed in Iraq, it's a shame for freedom and our struggle for liberty.
Robert L. Campbell
During the crisis at the University of Southern Mississippi, President Shelby Thames and his cronies have done an excellent job of keeping an a major source of embarrassment alive.
When a university administrator, or anyone who enjoys the sponsorship of administrators, is caught misrepresenting his or her background or accomplishments, the top administrators normally work feverishly to ensure that the charges of misrepresentation do not get press coverage. They do not bring the issue in front of the public, let alone strive to keep it there.
Yet keep it there is precisely what Shelby Thames, the President of the University of Southern Mississippi, and his backers have done, in their ham-handed efforts to protect his Vice President for Research and Economic Development, Angelina Dvorak.
The wall of containment was breached on January 16, 2004, when information about Angeline Dvorak's vita was released to local television station WDAM. On January 20, 2004, Shelby Thames and Angelina Dvorak called a press conference to proclaim that she had not made any misrepresentations on her vita. At the press conference Dvorak threatened to sue anyone who questioned her claim to have been an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, instead of President of Ashland Community College, with tenured Associate Professor status in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. When the press conference took place, the USM chapter of the American Association of University Professors, led by Frank Glamser, had not even issued its report on Dvorak's credentials.
By calling Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer into his office on March 5 and firing them for daring to check out claims made on Dvorak's vita, Thames ensured that questions about Dvorak's credentials would keep following her around. Even after the awkward settlement that was imposed during Glamser and Stringer's appeal hearing of April 28, Thames and his allies have repeatedly renewed the issue in front of the public.
When Thames backer and soon-to-be state College Board President Roy Klumb went on a call-in show and tried to obliterate the settlement, he was keeping Dvorak's credentials in front of the public. When the Mississippi Business Journal published an interview with Dvorak under the headline,"In the middle of a storm, Dvorak credentials stand up," it put the issue back in front of the public. And the MBJ article was obviously Dvorak's idea: The opening paragraphs make the now-familiar false claim that the Vice President for Research at USM does not need to be a tenured faculty member--even though evaluating faculty members for tenure and promotion is part of the Vice President's job, and USM's Faculty Handbook requires that anyone who evaluates faculty members for tenure must be tenured, and anyone who evaluates faculty members for promotion must have attained the rank that the faculty member is being considered for promotion to. The actual interview questions are all softballs; the article's author, Lynne W. Jeter, not only wrote for Pointe Innovation magazine, which Dvorak says she founded, but published a book about WorldCom that managed to skate over the company's accounting scandal and ensuing bankruptcy.
So the questions about Dvorak's vita are never going to go away. (If you have a subscription you can see, for instance, how they are treated in the Chronicle of Higher Education's recent update on the USM crisis.) Dvorak, Thames, his spokesflack Lisa Mader, and his backer Roy Klumb have done everything in their power to make sure that they won't. They have acted in flagant disregard of the administrator's prime imperative: Avoid Bad Publicity.
Meanwhile:
Thames met with the deans of the five colleges and the library yesterday morning. So far, they all still have their jobs, but well-informed sources indicate that at least two of them remain in imminent danger of being fired. Myron Henry, the President of the Faculty Senate, and several other vocal critics of Thames and his henchcrew are thought to be close in line behind them, should Thames remain in power.
The Academic Council at USM met yesterday and passed a unanimous resolution demanding that the administration cease surveillance of faculty and student emails, and publicly reveal the names of those who have been spied on in the past.
And today the student newspaper at USM hits the administration hard, regarding the settlement, the email spying, and the order to the deans to violate the state Freedom of Information Act.
As always, for the latest news see the Fire Shelby Web site.
Mark Brady
Mark Brady
And if you can't get enough of this particular spy scandal, you can read Michael Gillard's obituary of Corbally published in the Guardian last week.
William Marina
Blog viewers who have been reading about the emerging atrocities issue in Iraq may find the following artcle of mine, just posted at The Independent Insitute web site, of interest. It deals also with the Philippines and Vietnam. To view it, Click Here.
Sheldon Richman
