WhirledView

Listening to the Troops on the Ground

by CKR

Wasn't that what President Bush said he would do with regard to Iraq?

Maybe this is what he means by changing course. He's not going to listen to those guys any more. They haven't been increasing the rate of success by enough lately.

Hasn't the could-have-won-in-Vietnam faction, of which President Bush and certainly Vice President Cheney are charter members, been saying for the last forty years or so that the problem was LBJ's direct mucking with tactics for political reasons?

Today's military is asking for a strategy, according to the article I've linked, not just how many more troops to deploy. Their thinking must still be stuck with that old fogy Clausewitz: war is the continuation of politics by other means. What is the political objective in Iraq? We've had more justifications from the White House than a multiple-choice question on a Politics and Government 101 quiz. And President Bush has been more than circumspect lately in letting us know what this week's objective is, beyond the usual call for a stable and friendly government.

And he might talk to Condi about that stability thing. She's still saying things like "I don't see how the United States of America can ever back off of that commitment in the search somehow for stability -- which I am quite certain will be a false stability."

So yes, let's shake things up a little more and tell those folks in Baghdad that stability and electricity aren't all they're cracked up to be.

A Christmas List for the Incoming Congress

By PLS

There are two categories on my wish list: reordering domestic priorities and restoring democracy at home.

The Emaciated Beast and the Fat Cats

Badly as the US government beast has been starved (military spending aside) for the past half dozen years, the myth of government extravagance persists and people who should know better are reinforcing it. Consider, for instance, a Mike Smith cartoon that appeared this morning in my local daily:

A TV reporter is interviewing a couple with mile high stacks of beribboned presents. He says, “I’m doing a story on how much people are spending this Christmas. How would you describe your level of spending?” Hubby replies, “Federal Government-like.”

No Money for Oversight

A few days earlier, ironically, the Food and Drug Administration confessed that it couldn’t do a thorough job of regulating big pharma’s direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. Why not? Proper vetting, reprimanding offenders and ensuring compliance would “require a vastly increased staff,” which, of course, would require the Health and Human Services Department to demand a larger budget from its political overseers, who have been more interested in tax cuts than Americans’ well being.

Fortunately Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, sees the matter differently. As incoming chair of the Appropriations panel that oversees the FDA budget, he says he “will be pressing the Agency to establish a system [to] protect the health of consumers through proper review and regulation of drug advertising.”

Toxic Lettuce and Spinach

Other members of the appropriations apparatus should see that relevant departments get the funds they need (and systems in place) to ensure the safety of spinach, lettuce and other food crops that have sickened or killed people over in the past few weeks. Universal testing for mad cow disease is a good idea, too, though the cattle industry will insist otherwise.

There’s more, of course. But this will do for starters.

Who’s Really Paying?

Taking risks seriously in order to eliminate them will cost money, yet the current administration and the compliant Republican majority in the House and Senate have been throwing money away. Oil royalties in the billions haven’t been collected systematically. Timber and grazing rights are sold for a song. National parks are made into cash cows for private concessionaires. This amounts to a massive transfer of national wealth to private individuals who need it less than the Katrina victims who have been treated to large doses of Bush administration parsimony and neglect.

Defense Science Board Report on Nuclear Capabilities

by CKR

The Defense Science Board has published its report on nuclear capabilities. The Federation of American Scientists are commenting on it here, here, and here.

I'm working on a post that is taking more time than I had intended, also on nuclear weapons, so I won't be able to comment in detail on the DSB report for a few days at least.

When Los Alamos started having troubles defining its direction in the 1970s, it seemed obvious to me that those troubles wouldn't be alleviated until the country defined its need for nuclear weapons more carefully. That was about the time we were beginning to realize that multiplying our nuclear capability, even against the Soviets, didn't entirely make sense.

When the Soviet Union dissolved, it seemed like the need for a reconsideration of US nuclear capability would be obvious, but fifteen years later, we still have our missiles targeted and ready to destroy Soviet, er, Russian cities, and vice versa. We also can't build any new nukes because Rocky Flats closed down because of its environmental liabilities to Denver and the suburbs growing around it.

And now that we know that terrorists might want nuclear weapons, you might think that our nuclear capability might be reconsidered.

From what the FAS blogs say, it looks like this report isn't that reconsideration.

If the United States wants to continue producing nuclear weapons, it must build some new facilities. Public scrutiny of the potential environmental liabilities and the enormous cost of the facilities will slow down any building, perhaps scuttle it. And that may be just as well until we figure out exactly what kind of nuclear power we want to be.

Playing WhirledView’s Al Kamen

By PHK

Remember Diane Zeleny? Neocon Reuel Marc Gerecht’s spouse and Karen Hughes’ favorite civil servant who had been assigned to a newly created State Department senior level Foreign Service position in Brussels, even through she did not have the qualifications for the job? The official title, by the way, for the position is Regional Public Diplomacy Hub director.

Turns out that with a little pressure (actually quite a lot) from the American Foreign Service Association, Condi and Karen had second and third thoughts. Zeleny’s assignment has been curtailed. The position will then be filled according to negotiated labor-management rules our erstwhile political appointees should have adhered to in the first place. Although from what I saw in the AFSA cable today announcing the decision, some of those rules are to be tightened so mis-assignments like Zeleny’s are less likely to occur in the future.

Meanwhile, Zeleny will be returning to the city on the Potomac much sooner than she expected. Unless, of course, she’s found something else that will keep her and her daughter on the fringes of the Grande Place that she apparently loves so much.

And while I’m playing WhirldView’s Al Kamen, the other good news is right here on the banks of the Rio Grande, er, more accurately, an hour or so's drive to the northeast of the Rio Grande.

The Board of Regents of New Mexico Highlands University unanimously appointed Dr. James Fries as its new president over the weekend. He signed the four year contract on Saturday.

Jim had a stellar reputation as president of the College of Santa Fe which he rescued from the grim reaper a number of years ago and also a financially troubled Highlands when he was interim president for the year 2001- 2002. Highlands is considered the state’s foremost Hispanic university and has had more than it’s share of controversy and questionable leadership. This open admissions university is based in Las Vegas – an hour’s drive east of Santa Fe – but also offers courses in Santa Fe and Rio Rancho. Needless to say, Jim knows the school well. He’s intelligent, savvy, nice, honest and delighted with the appointment which officially begins on January 22. This, in my view, is a win-win situation. And by the way, his last name is pronounced “freeze.”

So kudos to AFSA for taking on the political leadership in State – and to the Highlands Board of Regents for placing their trust in Jim Fries. Every so often things do turn out far better than expected.

Jeane Kirkpatrick - in memoriam

By PHK

Jeane Kirkpatrick died of congestive heart failure on December 9 at the age of 80. She was the first female US Ambassador to the United Nations where she served from 1981-85. She was appointed to this illustrious position by Ronald Reagan, although his was a presidency, whose administration did little, if anything, to advance the careers of professional women in the government throughout his eight years in office.

“Always ardent and often provocative” – U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan

Like almost all other appointees to that prestigious Ambassadorial position, Kirkpatrick was not a career US government employee. She was appointed to it as Reagan’s personal emissary - usual for American administrations. Her hard-line anti-Communist political views, not her gender, were the determining factors in her appointment. The position at the UN was clearly the pinnacle of her foreign affairs career. After it ended in 1985 and Reagan did not reappoint her to it or any other position, she returned to academia as well as entered the think-tank world while serving on various mostly anti-Communist blue ribbon panels and delegations under Republican administrations until her death earlier this month.

Early in her career, Kirkpatrick had briefly worked as a research analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. As a political scientist with a PhD from Columbia University, she was associated with a field until recently dominated by men. It must not have been easy. Yet as far as I know, Kirkpatrick was – as a female in a man’s world - more idiosyncratic than a trend-setter or trail-blazer. For that matter, she – unlike Madeleine Albright who held the same position years later under President Clinton – has never been credited as a mentor who tried to help younger women move ahead in the competitive field of foreign affairs. Kirkpatrick, however, did write a chapter in Great American Conservative Women published in 2002 which was titled “Women Should Refuse to Choose between Family and Career,” a choice she herself as a mother with three sons refused to make.

Kirkpatrick had begun her own career as one of a number of once youthful left wing Democratic intellectuals who at mid-life turned themselves from card carrying Socialists (in her case) or Communists into hawkish, crotchety hard-line, might-makes-right, Israel right or wrong, neoconservatives because they believed that US foreign policy had been too soft on Communism under a succession of Republican and Democratic administrations.

As it turned out, the neoconservatives, including Kirkpatrick, profited mightily from their makeover in the Reagan then the Bush ’43 administrations. Whether their oversized influence on US foreign policy has been beneficial to the US – or the world in general is, in my view, however, questionable.

From 1978 until her death, Kirkpatrick’s intellectual home was the neoconservative dominated American Enterprise Institute (her office was next to the even more controversial John Bolton) where she remains on the roster as a resident senior scholar beyond the date of her death. Her webpage and photo are still there – even if she isn’t. She had become a faculty member at Georgetown University in 1967.

What stands out to me as I reviewed various articles about her illustrious and controversial career was her virulent, vocal and militaristic approach to Communism. From her perspective, authoritarian governments were far more likely to become democratic than communist ones – a logic which led her to support Latin American dictatorships and oppose the Sandinistas and Castro.

This is what attracted her to Reagan and him to her and landed her that prestigious, high profile Ambassadorial post in New York his first term.

Along with Reagan, she has been credited for “ultimately” . . . helping to pave the way for the Soviet Union’s downfall.” (The Independent) I suspect she should have been given some “credit” for helping to instigate, or at least fan the flames of what turned into the Iran-Contra fiasco as well.

Leaving Iran-Contra aside, I, question the American right wing mythology that claims the Reagan administration’s massive increases in defense spending – a cause Kirkpatrick championed - forced the Soviets to spend themselves into oblivion. In fact, Kirkpatrick, herself, was one of Reagan’s admirers who helped create and propagate that myth just as she claimed the Democrats “always blame America first.”

I don’t think the unraveling of the Soviet Union happened that way.

Easy Rider

by CKR

I'm reading the second volume of John Fowles's diaries. From the entry for the period 3-11 October 1969, after seeing the film Easy Rider:

I think this is the trap the younger generation today are falling into: they have rejected culture, book culture especially, and they embrace direct experience, doing your thing, finding your own scene and all the rest of the cant phrases--which is good, it may be, which does give them a sharper experiencing of now, a Zen-like piercing of the overlay of reason and culture. What worries me is what happens when they grow up and find they can't live the direct-experience life any more. It'll be too late for the books, the culture, then.

Also tonight, I found the much-linked "Stalingrad on the Tigris" by Pat Lang. (H/T to parvati_roma and ZenPundit, among others.)

The file Lang provides is not the first place I've heard resonances of Richard Wagner. The response to defeat is greater striving. Will alone will carry us forward.

But it carries us forward to the death of the gods.

Wagner took some meaty German stories (two from my favorite Wolfram) and engorged them with his personal psychodramas into bloated morality, or perhaps amorality, plays. His music soars and inspires, perhaps too glibly. He's made it almost impossible for us to see the stories themselves any more, which were different from his operas.

So does Bush infuse his personal psychodrama into the already-engorged war fantasies of the right wing. We must will ourselves into--what? Does this have something to do with internal emptinesses left over from the sixties?

Even Wagner noted that constant motion distracts from Parzival's spiritual journey, however badly he mucked up Wolfram's story. The horror comes when a president manifests that demonic motion in war.

The sense of things gone Wagnerianly wrong has made its way into a bumper sticker:

Frodo failed. Bush has the ring.

I know that's not directly Wagnerian, but he stole the idea first.

Saturday Aloe Watch

by CKR

Progress has been a bit slow this week. The individual florets are rotating down and should soon be opening.

What We Can't Afford - Updated

by CKR

We all know that tax cuts are the primary budget policy of this administration. E. J. Dionne today makes the point that those tax cuts have taken away some of the options a president might want in conducting this war.

The president's options in Iraq are severely constrained because our military is too small for the foreign policy he is pursuing.

(snip)

So here we are: Policymakers and politicians will demand more and more from the volunteers who serve our country, but they can't find the gumption to ask shareholders to pay a bit more tax on their dividends or high earners to pay slightly larger levies on their incomes. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, since 2001 we've offered $2 in tax cuts for every $1 we have spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And we can't afford to track visitors to the US, after all the hoo-ha about RFID chips in passports and fingerprints and visas. But hey, the NSA knows who the bad guys are, and they're tapping their phones!

Update: Senator Feinstein is not happy about this development.

US-VISIT officials had concluded that the exit program could not now be launched at land crossings without major traffic delays or enormous cost to expand facilities, roads and communication links.

Well, duh. Didn't they plan and cost out the entire program when they started it?

The 6 October Science magazine reports that the National Science Foundation has been relying on a rented Russian icebreaker to transport fuel to its Antarctic research stations. US icebreakers were shifted from the Coast Guard to the NSF by the Bush administration. The fleet is aging, the two main icebreakers at the end of their 30-year life spans. But hey! Maybe the NSF can be thankful that the Coast Guard didn't order up some icebreakers too.