J.R. Dunn at American Thinker has written an outstanding recap of recent history, set into the broader context of the habitual memory-erasing exercises of the Left. Especially when things are as bleak as they are now on the domestic front right, it helps to be reminded that the Left no longer controls information as completely as they once did.
In fact, the better and truer histories of the Iraq War are already being written. I'm pretty sure this time that unlike Vietnam, it won't take 30 years before America starts getting ahold of the true story.
July 15, 2008
Memory and the Left
By J.R. Dunn
It's difficult to avoid exasperation over the left's absolute refusal to acknowledge the new realities of the Iraq war. The surge, the Anbar awakening, the collapse of the militias (particularly that belonging to everybody's favorite would-be caliph, Moqtada al-Sadr) -- it's as if none of it ever happened, as if one the most impressive turnabouts in modern military annals never took place.
The left, including its Democratic political wing and placeholders in the media, continue on with the same defeatist drone that we've heard since 2003, concentrating on lone (and mercifully rare) suicide bombers, emphasizing Coalition casualties, and highlighting the new government's difficulties. (Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Mr. B.H. Obama, a Democratic senator currently running for president. Reports last week hinted that Obama was about to climb down from his intention to abandon Iraq sixteen months after taking office. But he held tight, assuring reporters he had in no way abandoned his plan for peace in our time.)
There's no point in waiting for the nickel to drop at last. The American left has not missed the unfolding victory in Iraq, nor are they ignoring it. They have forgotten it. They have taken it in, analyzed it, weighed the results, and then flushed it from memory as completely and brutally as a Ministry of Truth goon from 1984.
The process of selective amnesia is an important and often overlooked aspect of the left-wing mentality. It's a direct inheritance from the communists, for whom the capacity to self-edit was often a matter of life and death. In Stalin's Soviet Union, honored heroes of the Revolution could suddenly turn into traitors to the Worker's Paradise and just as suddenly into nonentities on a day-to-day, if not an hour-to-hour basis. Among survivors, the capacity to manipulate memory was honed to a fine instinct. Mentioning the name of a nonperson could get you put on a list, if not shoved aboard the next cattle train headed for the Arctic. Soon, people would be forgetting about you.
This process was also extended to history. At the time of the Bolshevik coup, Stalin was dawdling well to the east of St. Petersberg. He played no serious role in the events that put the Soviets in power. But after he consolidated his position in the early 30s, it turned out he had been everywhere -- advising Lenin, giving speeches to the masses, leading armed revolutionaries. People who remembered differently were soon trying to remember what life was like in regions where the temperature occasionally rose above zero.
The practice -- and the choking terror that provoked it -- soon spread to the international parties, including the CPUSA. Disasters and crimes occurring in the USSR were subject to the same treatment. When Walter Duranty, a paid Soviet propagandist, announced through the New York Times that the Ukrainian Famine hadn't happened, the event was duly put away, even though photographs and eyewitness accounts had been circulating around the country for months. Fifty years later, Robert Conquest's outstanding study of the atrocity, Harvest of Sorrow, was greeted as a revelation.
The same occurred with the purges, the show trials, the mass relocations. Numerous defectors, among them Walter Krivitsky, Igor Gouzenko, and Victor Kravchenko, laid out the facts repeatedly beginning in the late 1930s. All were run through the left's forgetfulness machine.
Possibly the greatest act of selective mass amnesia -- certainly the fastest -- occurred in the summer of 1941. For two years following the August 1939 gangster pact between Hitler and Stalin, international communist parties protested the war against Nazism. The American left worked itself into a frenzy in support of Hitler and his occupation of Europe. A particular target was U.S. materiel aid to Great Britain, at the time standing alone against the Nazi monolith. The campaign's centerpiece was to have been "Peace Week", scheduled for the last week of June 1941. Unfortunately, Hitler chose June 22nd to send three army groups armed with over 4,000 Panzers against the Soviet Union.
Peace Week was called off. Instead, the communists immediately began demonstrating and marching against Hitler and in favor of our brave British allies. (I wonder if Nicholson Baker featured this incident in his "history" of WW II? ...I didn't think so.)
American communism collapsed in the 1950s, confronted by events with too much impact to be ignored (Khrushchev's epoch-making 20th party conference speech and the Hungarian Revolution in particular). But the art of forgetfulness survived, to be picked by New Left and then handed on to "liberalism" when the left took over that moribund ideology in the early 1970s.
Selective memory was applied with force to the Vietnam war. My Lai retains the power to shock to this day, and to many, stands as a representation for the entire conflict. But the contemporaneous Hue massacre, in which as many as 10,000 businessmen, intellectuals, and officials were slaughtered by Viet Cong cadres, is not even a footnote. Those thousands of dead have simply been forgotten.
Similarly, the last two years of the war in which the new strategy of Gen. Creighton Abrams broke the back of the PAVN forces operating in the south and sent the survivors fleeing over the border into Cambodia and Laos, was also fed into the hopper. Instead, the impression that the U.S. was "defeated" survives among the public at large. Works demonstrating the contrary, such as Lewis Sorley's A Better War, have scarcely made a dent.
And now it's Iraq's turn. For one example, we can look to Haditha. A Marine unit was ambushed, responding as trained against their attackers, who were hiding behind helpless civilians, among them women and children, as many as two dozen of whom were killed. Insurgent war at its most ugly, tragic and unavoidable. The blame, to any rational observer, clearly lay with the Al Queda thugs who insisted on using innocents as a shield.
But rationality is sometimes too much to ask. Haditha was trumpeted as an American war crime, the moment that encapsulated the entire war as an atrocity. The media played it as the My Lai of Iraq, while political opportunists, chief among them John Murtha (whose domain begins only a half mile from where I sit), attacked the Marines as "cold-blooded killers". The "Haditha massacre" was given front-page play for weeks, the name effectively becoming shorthand for American efforts in Iraq.
But today, after the prosecution has fallen apart, after seven of the eight men accused have been held blameless and no real case remains against the eighth, the name of Haditha is difficult to find in mass media. Even after ranking USMC officers were found to have interfered in the case (imagine if this had occurred in any other legal proceeding!), and after several of the cleared Marines announced a lawsuit against Murtha, a sitting congressman, Haditha remains, at best, a back-page story. It has been fed into the grinder, and has become one of those things we're not supposed to think about any more.
The same is true of Iraqi yellowcake, which Joe Wilson, ambassador extraordinaire, and his valiant spy bride demonstrated to the world did not, and could not exist. Yet last weekend 550 tons of the stuff -- a pile large enough that even a diplomat couldn't miss it -- was transferred from Iraq to the U.S. with less coverage than this year's soybean harvest. Saddam Hussein's bomb program, one of the greatest threats to world peace of our time, ended without so much as an echo.
The same weekend saw final victory in Iraq draw nearer with the almost complete pacification of the city of Mosul. Mosul was the last urban redoubt of Al-Queda in Iraq. Their ejection from the city has deprived them of a base of operations and turned them into a force of scattered guerilla bands. Stamping out these final remnants may be a drawn-out process, but the Jihadis are no longer a threat to Iraq as a nation. What a change from 2006! Yet what have we heard about it?
The average leftist is not even aware of any of this. If asked about Iraq, he will drone through the standard run of slogans, none of which made much sense in the first place and now come across as sheer raving. But it doesn't matter. It worked with the famine, it worked with the purges, it worked with Nam, and it will work -- so they think -- with Iraq.
How do you debate with such people? You don't. You can't. St. Augustine once said that there's no use wasting your time arguing with someone who won't grant a subject's basic premises. How much more so with people who won't grant a common reality?
Conservatives tend to be exemplars of civility, given to upholding standards of discourse, always giving their opponents the benefit of the doubt. This is a point of pride, and should not simply be thrown away. But after a certain definite point, you simply become an enabler. To cooperate with such behavior is to concur with it. Instead of acquiescing in this form of deceit (or, as is occasionally still seen, acting shocked that it even occurs) we need to find alternatives.
Fortunately, things have changed since the left's heyday. Haditha is not a forgotten name. That twelve-story pile of yellowcake is proving difficult to ignore. At one point, the left controlled virtually the entire national media sphere. This is no longer the case. If the new media is about anything, it is about discovering, highlighting, and promulgating the things that we're not supposed to know, the stories we're not supposed to think about, the events that are supposed to be forgotten. The Holodomor, the Great Purge, the Hue massacre -- all were buried because they could be. They cannot be buried anymore.
Walter Krivitsky was murdered in 1941 as he was about to reveal to Congress the full extent of Soviet espionage in the United States. Silenced forever, so the Kremlin thought. A cursory web search today comes up with 1,350 entries dealing directly with Krivitsky. You can no longer hide events, personalities, or crimes. Archives, morgues, and secret files simply will not hold them.
This in itself marks a change in human affairs more profound than we can easily grasp at the moment. The impossibility of burying information deprives the left of one of its most hallowed weapons. (Attitudes forever lagging behind technology, they are not yet aware of the fact. Obama, in particular, with his habit of saying one thing on Monday and contradicting himself on Wednesday, as if the fix is in down at the newsroom and he can say anything he damn well pleases.)
Of course, the right has been using the new technology, both the Net and talk radio, to confront the left with facts they'd rather not acknowledge for some time now. But certainly more can be done -- more in the way of strategy, more in the way of coordination. We need greater efforts to discover what sets of facts the left particularly wants to hide -- and why. There are reasons why the left needs certain events to be forgotten. Discover those reasons, and it will shake them more than any other single effort. The left has been playing games with reality almost since its inception - let them see how it feels to live with the record like everybody else.
Orwell revealed that control of the past means control of the future. The left has controlled the past for generations. (Not that it's helped them much.) They don't any longer. That the facts can no longer be buried is a victory in and of itself. We will march on from there.
J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker.
Showing posts with label Valerie Plame. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Valerie Plame. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Sunday, July 06, 2008
You Can't Have No Yellowcake and Stockpile It, Too
Yellowcake-gate is much more than a dirty trick played on the American public. It's about the Bush administration's pattern of deception as it pushed and shoved this country into a preemptive war -- from the much-advertised but nonexistent links between Iraq and al-Qaida to the sexing up of Saddam's WMD.
--Arianna Huffington, "Yellowcake-gate" July 16, 2003.
* * * * * *
The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program - a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium - reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.
The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" - the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment - was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.
--“AP Exclusive: US removes uranium from Iraq” July 06, 2008
You remember yellowcake. It’s the stuff George W. Bush was convicted in the press of lying about in his 2003 State of the Union address. That's when he uttered the “16 words” that earned him a moral status several levels below Pontius Pilate: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” It doesn't matter any more but it turned out the 16 words were true.
Then yellowcake played a key role in the career uptick of Joe Wilson and his bombshell wife, deep cover clandestine CIA Agent Valerie Plame, (codename, “Ms. Clairol”).
Wilson wrote an article accusing Bush, Cheney, and Condoleeza Rice of deliberately ignoring his well-documented report that Saddam never tried to buy yellowcake from Niger. It won't help Scooter Libbey now but it turned out that everything Wilson said was false.
Wilson also accused Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby of blowing his wife’s cover. (That is, her CIA cover, not her Vanity Fair cover. Mrs. Wilson's babushka blew that).
That accusation by Wilson turned out to be a lie, too. As even the Washington Post was forced to admit, “it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials.” (“End of an Affair”).
Now, today, it’s being reported by the AP, apparently for the first time, that Saddam had a stockpile of 1.2 million pounds of yellowcake. The “huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium,” the AP report matter-of-factly states, was “the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.”
Saddam Had Nuke Program
By Randall Hoven
The media have been telling us for years that Saddam had no WMD, so "Bush's War": was based on a "lie." And those who believed Saddam did have WMD or WMD programs were delusional or worse.
But today, on July 6, 2008, the Associated Press reports that
*Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program
*At the Tuwaitha nuclear complex just south of Baghdad
*Which included 550 metric tons (over 1.2 million pounds) of "yellowcake", or concentrated uranium
*And multiple devices that could be used in a nuclear weapon.
The AP does not say alleged nuclear program. It does not add "according to military experts." It simply says "Saddam Hussein's nuclear program."
That's pretty big news, isn't it?
For about five years now, those of us who thought Saddam Hussein probably had at least WMD programs, if not WMD themselves, have been called not only wrong, but illogical and insane.
One example was an article by Sharon Begley in the Wall Street Journal titled People Believe a 'Fact' That Fits Their Views Even if It's Clearly False . (Her article series is called, without irony, the "Science Journal".) Ms. Begley reported that "six months after the invasion, one-third of Americans believed WMDs had been found, even though every such tentative claim was discomfirmed [sic]." She cited psychologists to explain this strange behavior. They used terms like "world views" and "mental models."
Jim Lobe at CommonDreams.org (Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community) reported that "Three out of four self-described supporters of President George W. Bush still believe that pre-war Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or active programs to produce them." He went on to quote the director of the polling company as saying
"To support the president and to accept that he took the U.S. to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq."
These findings on people's beliefs were based on a survey that asked people if they believed Saddam had WMD or WMD programs . Apparently, Sharon Begley, Jim Lobe and a whole lot of other people not only believed Saddam had no WMD programs, but that anyone who did believe such a thing was clearly illogical or insane. In fact, the only interesting question to them was what is wrong with our minds.
--Arianna Huffington, "Yellowcake-gate" July 16, 2003.
* * * * * *
The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program - a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium - reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.
The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" - the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment - was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.
--“AP Exclusive: US removes uranium from Iraq” July 06, 2008
You remember yellowcake. It’s the stuff George W. Bush was convicted in the press of lying about in his 2003 State of the Union address. That's when he uttered the “16 words” that earned him a moral status several levels below Pontius Pilate: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” It doesn't matter any more but it turned out the 16 words were true.
Then yellowcake played a key role in the career uptick of Joe Wilson and his bombshell wife, deep cover clandestine CIA Agent Valerie Plame, (codename, “Ms. Clairol”).
Wilson wrote an article accusing Bush, Cheney, and Condoleeza Rice of deliberately ignoring his well-documented report that Saddam never tried to buy yellowcake from Niger. It won't help Scooter Libbey now but it turned out that everything Wilson said was false.
Wilson also accused Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby of blowing his wife’s cover. (That is, her CIA cover, not her Vanity Fair cover. Mrs. Wilson's babushka blew that).
That accusation by Wilson turned out to be a lie, too. As even the Washington Post was forced to admit, “it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials.” (“End of an Affair”).
Now, today, it’s being reported by the AP, apparently for the first time, that Saddam had a stockpile of 1.2 million pounds of yellowcake. The “huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium,” the AP report matter-of-factly states, was “the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.”
The nuclear program, that is, that he didn't have, because he never had any stockpiles of WMDs, and never had any yellowcake, nor even tried to buy any yellowcake, because Saddam was a good scout after 1991, and Bush just lied about the whole thing to get us into a war.
Now watch while the Left, hypersensitive enough to ban smoking in bars, trans-fats from restaurants, and carbon dioxide from Earth, suddenly starts defending yellowcake uranium as basically harmless.
Randall Hoven at American Thinker has some thoughts on all this:
Saddam Had Nuke Program
By Randall Hoven
The media have been telling us for years that Saddam had no WMD, so "Bush's War": was based on a "lie." And those who believed Saddam did have WMD or WMD programs were delusional or worse.
But today, on July 6, 2008, the Associated Press reports that
*Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program
*At the Tuwaitha nuclear complex just south of Baghdad
*Which included 550 metric tons (over 1.2 million pounds) of "yellowcake", or concentrated uranium
*And multiple devices that could be used in a nuclear weapon.
The AP does not say alleged nuclear program. It does not add "according to military experts." It simply says "Saddam Hussein's nuclear program."
That's pretty big news, isn't it?
For about five years now, those of us who thought Saddam Hussein probably had at least WMD programs, if not WMD themselves, have been called not only wrong, but illogical and insane.
One example was an article by Sharon Begley in the Wall Street Journal titled People Believe a 'Fact' That Fits Their Views Even if It's Clearly False . (Her article series is called, without irony, the "Science Journal".) Ms. Begley reported that "six months after the invasion, one-third of Americans believed WMDs had been found, even though every such tentative claim was discomfirmed [sic]." She cited psychologists to explain this strange behavior. They used terms like "world views" and "mental models."
Jim Lobe at CommonDreams.org (Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community) reported that "Three out of four self-described supporters of President George W. Bush still believe that pre-war Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or active programs to produce them." He went on to quote the director of the polling company as saying
"To support the president and to accept that he took the U.S. to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq."
These findings on people's beliefs were based on a survey that asked people if they believed Saddam had WMD or WMD programs . Apparently, Sharon Begley, Jim Lobe and a whole lot of other people not only believed Saddam had no WMD programs, but that anyone who did believe such a thing was clearly illogical or insane. In fact, the only interesting question to them was what is wrong with our minds.
Read the rest here.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Conyers Still Determined To Prove a Bad Day Fishing Is Better than a Good Day at Work
Conyers invites McClellan to testify on Valerie Plame-CIA leak
June 9, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan had mouths dropping open all over the nation's capital with his tell-all book about his feelings regarding the Bush administration.
Now he's getting the chance to say it in person -- to the House Judiciary Committee.
John Conyers, the Detroit Democrat who chairs the committee, sent McClellan a letter today inviting him to the committee room June 20 to testify, specifically on the Valerie Plame-CIA leak of a couple years back.
“In his book, Mr. McClellan suggests that senior White House officials may have obstructed justice and engaged in a cover-up regarding the Valerie Plame leak," says Conyers. "This alleged activity could well extend beyond the scope of the offenses for which Scooter Libby has been convicted and deserves further attention.”
Or not.
June 9, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan had mouths dropping open all over the nation's capital with his tell-all book about his feelings regarding the Bush administration.
Now he's getting the chance to say it in person -- to the House Judiciary Committee.
John Conyers, the Detroit Democrat who chairs the committee, sent McClellan a letter today inviting him to the committee room June 20 to testify, specifically on the Valerie Plame-CIA leak of a couple years back.
“In his book, Mr. McClellan suggests that senior White House officials may have obstructed justice and engaged in a cover-up regarding the Valerie Plame leak," says Conyers. "This alleged activity could well extend beyond the scope of the offenses for which Scooter Libby has been convicted and deserves further attention.”
Or not.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Sneeze Alert: Political Progress in Iraq, and a Judge Wearing Plame-Proof Robes
It’s allergy season, and if you were in the middle of sneezing you may have missed some critical news in Detroit’s premiere news daily, the once-great Detroit News.
First, there was an in-depth, one-inch report, (or as in-depth as you can get in 31 words), in a teeny-weeny sidebar “Iraq update,” attached to a buzzkill article entitled “'Fear' dominates Iraq."
The tiny story reads in full:
Sunnis return to parliament
Sunni legislators returned to Iraq's parliament Thursday after a five-week boycott, raising hopes the assembly can make progress on power-sharing bills demanded by Washington before the lawmakers take a month's break.
Now, you may recall that, earlier this week, the US Senate shut down all normal business for some 36 or more hours in order to grandstand on an Iraq war funding amendment premised on the Democratic argument that there has been absolutely, positively no political improvements in Iraq to justify the continuing military surge.
This slogan of no progress was repeated approximately four times per hour for a day and a half. It wasn’t true, as these slogans never are true, but that doesn’t matter now.
I would expect that, even setting aside the other previous political progress that the Democrats flatly refused to acknowledge, that the return of Sunni legislators after a five-week boycott is both welcome and unexpected news of political progress. Even more surprising and welcome for Democrats, who are committed to the dogma that Iraq is embroiled in an intractable civil war between Sunnis and Shias, which should make it all the more remarkable and cheering that one side in the war would show up at parliament to work on legislation peacefully with the other side.
The other buried news was on on the back page of the front section, just below “Scientists say checkers-playing computer can never lose.” It's an AP story reporting that Valerie Plame’s lawsuit against the Bush administration was just tossed out of court. (“Judge dismisses CIA leak case suit.”)
Though I’m sure the disappointed couple left the courtroom without benefit of being frog-marched, I’ll bet Ambassador Wilson and his wife were hopping mad at Judge John D. Bates’s opinion.
This also deserved a bigger headline.
The legal and political saga of Valerie Plame has been with us for four years, and continues to be a rallying point for enemies of the President. Because of it, innumerable Congressional hearings have been launched, thousands of articles, and millions of inches of snotty commentary have been written smearing the President as “leaking” confidential information. Based solely upon the mythical crimes against Ms. Plame, Democrats have called for everything from impeachment of Bush and Cheney to the use of the guillotine for executive branch officials who anger Washington socialites.
So one would think it would be a bigger story than this, sort of as if Planet Earth were suddenly found to be rotating from east to west.
Yesterday the court dismissed the Plame case in part for a lack of jurisdiction. But the dismissal was also because the court found no merit in Ms. Plame’s claims that White House personnel violated her privacy rights by discussing her and her irritating husband after they insinuated themselves into the national debate over the invasion of Iraq.
The critical bit about the judge's opinion was left out of the AP/News story, but the Washington Post included it in their story. (“Plame's Suit Against Top Officials Dismissed”).
Judge Bates wrote “there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush administration's handling of prewar foreign intelligence, by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants' duties as high-level Executive Branch officials."
There should never have been any doubt about this, and for those of us who have never sworn a blood oath against George W. Bush, it seems rather obvious. But once in a while it takes an adversarial process, a strict rational evidentiary standard, somebody on the other side raising objections to unfair arguments, and a judge with a gavel, to undo years of slanders amassed by false reporting in an unbridled press.
I love it when this happens.
First, there was an in-depth, one-inch report, (or as in-depth as you can get in 31 words), in a teeny-weeny sidebar “Iraq update,” attached to a buzzkill article entitled “'Fear' dominates Iraq."
The tiny story reads in full:
Sunnis return to parliament
Sunni legislators returned to Iraq's parliament Thursday after a five-week boycott, raising hopes the assembly can make progress on power-sharing bills demanded by Washington before the lawmakers take a month's break.
Now, you may recall that, earlier this week, the US Senate shut down all normal business for some 36 or more hours in order to grandstand on an Iraq war funding amendment premised on the Democratic argument that there has been absolutely, positively no political improvements in Iraq to justify the continuing military surge.
This slogan of no progress was repeated approximately four times per hour for a day and a half. It wasn’t true, as these slogans never are true, but that doesn’t matter now.
I would expect that, even setting aside the other previous political progress that the Democrats flatly refused to acknowledge, that the return of Sunni legislators after a five-week boycott is both welcome and unexpected news of political progress. Even more surprising and welcome for Democrats, who are committed to the dogma that Iraq is embroiled in an intractable civil war between Sunnis and Shias, which should make it all the more remarkable and cheering that one side in the war would show up at parliament to work on legislation peacefully with the other side.
The other buried news was on on the back page of the front section, just below “Scientists say checkers-playing computer can never lose.” It's an AP story reporting that Valerie Plame’s lawsuit against the Bush administration was just tossed out of court. (“Judge dismisses CIA leak case suit.”)
Though I’m sure the disappointed couple left the courtroom without benefit of being frog-marched, I’ll bet Ambassador Wilson and his wife were hopping mad at Judge John D. Bates’s opinion.
This also deserved a bigger headline.
The legal and political saga of Valerie Plame has been with us for four years, and continues to be a rallying point for enemies of the President. Because of it, innumerable Congressional hearings have been launched, thousands of articles, and millions of inches of snotty commentary have been written smearing the President as “leaking” confidential information. Based solely upon the mythical crimes against Ms. Plame, Democrats have called for everything from impeachment of Bush and Cheney to the use of the guillotine for executive branch officials who anger Washington socialites.
So one would think it would be a bigger story than this, sort of as if Planet Earth were suddenly found to be rotating from east to west.
Yesterday the court dismissed the Plame case in part for a lack of jurisdiction. But the dismissal was also because the court found no merit in Ms. Plame’s claims that White House personnel violated her privacy rights by discussing her and her irritating husband after they insinuated themselves into the national debate over the invasion of Iraq.
The critical bit about the judge's opinion was left out of the AP/News story, but the Washington Post included it in their story. (“Plame's Suit Against Top Officials Dismissed”).
Judge Bates wrote “there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush administration's handling of prewar foreign intelligence, by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants' duties as high-level Executive Branch officials."
There should never have been any doubt about this, and for those of us who have never sworn a blood oath against George W. Bush, it seems rather obvious. But once in a while it takes an adversarial process, a strict rational evidentiary standard, somebody on the other side raising objections to unfair arguments, and a judge with a gavel, to undo years of slanders amassed by false reporting in an unbridled press.
I love it when this happens.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The Soldier's Creed
Fouad Ajami sent the following open letter in last Friday's Wall Street Journal to President Bush. Its subject is I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. It is well worth reading, and thinking about.
Fallen Soldier
Mr. President, do not leave this man behind.
BY FOUAD AJAMI
Friday, June 8, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Mr. President, some weeks ago, I wrote a letter of appeal, a character reference, to Judge Reggie B. Walton, urging leniency for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Scooter, I said, has seen the undoing of his world, but he comes before a "just court in a just and decent country." I was joined by men and women of greater acclaim in our public life, but the petitions were in vain. Now the legal process has played out, Judge Walton has issued a harsh prison term of 30 months, and what will rescue this honorable man is the power of pardon that is exclusively yours.
This case has been, from the start, about the Iraq war and its legitimacy. Judge Walton came to it late; before him were laid bare the technical and narrowly legalistic matters of it. But you possess a greater knowledge of this case, a keen sense of the man caught up in this storm, and of the great contest and tensions that swirl around the Iraq war. To Scooter's detractors, and yours, it was the "sin" of that devoted public servant that he believed in the nobility of this war, that he did not trim his sails, and that he didn't duck when the war lost its luster.
In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.
Mr. President, the one defining mark of your own moral outlook is the distinction between friend and foe, a refusal to be lulled into moral and political compromises. Your critics have made much of this and have seen it as self-righteousness and moral absolutism, but this has guided you through the great, divisive issues faced by our country over these last, searing years. Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war's critics. He didn't sit around the councils of power only to make the rounds in Georgetown's salons insinuating that this was not his war all along. He didn't claim this war when it promised an easy victory only to desert it when it stalled in the alleyways of Fallujah and Baghdad and in the twilight world of Arab politics. You are not a lawyer, Mr. President, nor is the vast populace out there. The men and women who entrusted you with the presidency, I dare say, are hard pressed to understand why former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was the admitted leaker of Mrs. Wilson's identity to columnist Robert Novak, has the comforts of home and freedom and privilege while Scooter Libby faces the dreaded prospect of imprisonment.
Much ink has been spilled on this case, and its moral and legal absurdity is more evident by the day. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could not, and would not, decide whether this was a case about outing an undercover agent, or a plain case of perjury and obstruction of justice. He had the best of possible worlds: He presented this case as one of perjury, insisted that the undercover status of Valerie Plame Wilson was of no consequence, then shifted grounds to introduce the Intelligence Identities Protection Act at a latter phase in the proceedings. The "covertness" of Mrs. Wilson was never convincingly and fully established. Even Judge Walton himself was not sure of her employment status. So the recollections of Scooter Libby clashed with those of journalist Tim Russert? Surely, we don't end an honorable career in public service and haul a man off to prison on that thinnest of reeds.
A war raged in the inner councils of your administration. The Department of State and the CIA let it be known that they were on the side of the angels, that they harbored great doubts about this expedition into Iraq, that they were "multilateralists" at heart, but that they had lost the war to Vice President Dick Cheney and to the "hawks" around him. In the midst of this, Scooter Libby worked tirelessly and quietly to prosecute and explain and defend this war. He accepted the logic of the Iraq war, the great surprises we met in the course of this war.
He was never a triumphalist. The man I got to know in the aftermath of 9/11, the man you know so much better, was stoical about our causes in the Arab-Islamic world. He was a man of great depth. He knew moral complexity (his remarkably lyrical novel, "The Apprentice," bears witness to an eye for human folly and disappointment) but he stuck to your agenda and to this war. He was not steeped in the ways of the Arabs, but he sought out, tirelessly, all that could be ascertained about the radicalisms threatening our country. From my vantage point as an interpreter of Arab and Islamic matters, I could testify to his great curiosity and relentless devotion. He was keen to understand the winds at play in the Islamic world. This legal process thus removed from the higher ranks of our national security a man of real abilities and insight.
The Schadenfreude of your political detractors over the Libby verdict lays bare the essence of this case: an indictment of the Iraq war itself. The critics of the war shall grant you no reprieve if you let Scooter Libby do prison time. They will see his imprisonment as additional proof that this has been a war of folly from the outset.
At the beginning of this ordeal, it would have been the proper thing to acknowledge that this case rested on a political difference over the prosecution of the war, that Valerie Plame Wilson and Joseph Wilson were protagonists in a struggle over the conflict. It was then, it should be recalled, that you, Mr. President, said that any of your staff caught up in that case "would no longer work in my administration." And it was then that the Justice Department stepped out of the way to let a special prosecutor launch an investigation that would, by necessity, have to vindicate itself. The better part of wisdom was to see the matter for what it was--a policy difference over the war, a matter that should never have been criminalized.
The prosecutor, and the jury and the judge, had before them a case that purported to stand alone, a trial of one man's memory and recollections. But you have before you what they and the rest of us don't--a memory of the passions and the panic, and the certitude, which gave rise to the war. And a sense, I am confident, of the quiet and selfless man who sat in the outer circle when your cabinet deliberated over our country's choices in Iraq, and in those burning grounds of the Arab-Islamic world. Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.
Mr. Ajami, the 2006 Bradley Prize recipient, teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.
Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Fallen Soldier
Mr. President, do not leave this man behind.
BY FOUAD AJAMI
Friday, June 8, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Mr. President, some weeks ago, I wrote a letter of appeal, a character reference, to Judge Reggie B. Walton, urging leniency for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Scooter, I said, has seen the undoing of his world, but he comes before a "just court in a just and decent country." I was joined by men and women of greater acclaim in our public life, but the petitions were in vain. Now the legal process has played out, Judge Walton has issued a harsh prison term of 30 months, and what will rescue this honorable man is the power of pardon that is exclusively yours.
This case has been, from the start, about the Iraq war and its legitimacy. Judge Walton came to it late; before him were laid bare the technical and narrowly legalistic matters of it. But you possess a greater knowledge of this case, a keen sense of the man caught up in this storm, and of the great contest and tensions that swirl around the Iraq war. To Scooter's detractors, and yours, it was the "sin" of that devoted public servant that he believed in the nobility of this war, that he did not trim his sails, and that he didn't duck when the war lost its luster.
In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.
Mr. President, the one defining mark of your own moral outlook is the distinction between friend and foe, a refusal to be lulled into moral and political compromises. Your critics have made much of this and have seen it as self-righteousness and moral absolutism, but this has guided you through the great, divisive issues faced by our country over these last, searing years. Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war's critics. He didn't sit around the councils of power only to make the rounds in Georgetown's salons insinuating that this was not his war all along. He didn't claim this war when it promised an easy victory only to desert it when it stalled in the alleyways of Fallujah and Baghdad and in the twilight world of Arab politics. You are not a lawyer, Mr. President, nor is the vast populace out there. The men and women who entrusted you with the presidency, I dare say, are hard pressed to understand why former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was the admitted leaker of Mrs. Wilson's identity to columnist Robert Novak, has the comforts of home and freedom and privilege while Scooter Libby faces the dreaded prospect of imprisonment.
Much ink has been spilled on this case, and its moral and legal absurdity is more evident by the day. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could not, and would not, decide whether this was a case about outing an undercover agent, or a plain case of perjury and obstruction of justice. He had the best of possible worlds: He presented this case as one of perjury, insisted that the undercover status of Valerie Plame Wilson was of no consequence, then shifted grounds to introduce the Intelligence Identities Protection Act at a latter phase in the proceedings. The "covertness" of Mrs. Wilson was never convincingly and fully established. Even Judge Walton himself was not sure of her employment status. So the recollections of Scooter Libby clashed with those of journalist Tim Russert? Surely, we don't end an honorable career in public service and haul a man off to prison on that thinnest of reeds.
A war raged in the inner councils of your administration. The Department of State and the CIA let it be known that they were on the side of the angels, that they harbored great doubts about this expedition into Iraq, that they were "multilateralists" at heart, but that they had lost the war to Vice President Dick Cheney and to the "hawks" around him. In the midst of this, Scooter Libby worked tirelessly and quietly to prosecute and explain and defend this war. He accepted the logic of the Iraq war, the great surprises we met in the course of this war.
He was never a triumphalist. The man I got to know in the aftermath of 9/11, the man you know so much better, was stoical about our causes in the Arab-Islamic world. He was a man of great depth. He knew moral complexity (his remarkably lyrical novel, "The Apprentice," bears witness to an eye for human folly and disappointment) but he stuck to your agenda and to this war. He was not steeped in the ways of the Arabs, but he sought out, tirelessly, all that could be ascertained about the radicalisms threatening our country. From my vantage point as an interpreter of Arab and Islamic matters, I could testify to his great curiosity and relentless devotion. He was keen to understand the winds at play in the Islamic world. This legal process thus removed from the higher ranks of our national security a man of real abilities and insight.
The Schadenfreude of your political detractors over the Libby verdict lays bare the essence of this case: an indictment of the Iraq war itself. The critics of the war shall grant you no reprieve if you let Scooter Libby do prison time. They will see his imprisonment as additional proof that this has been a war of folly from the outset.
At the beginning of this ordeal, it would have been the proper thing to acknowledge that this case rested on a political difference over the prosecution of the war, that Valerie Plame Wilson and Joseph Wilson were protagonists in a struggle over the conflict. It was then, it should be recalled, that you, Mr. President, said that any of your staff caught up in that case "would no longer work in my administration." And it was then that the Justice Department stepped out of the way to let a special prosecutor launch an investigation that would, by necessity, have to vindicate itself. The better part of wisdom was to see the matter for what it was--a policy difference over the war, a matter that should never have been criminalized.
The prosecutor, and the jury and the judge, had before them a case that purported to stand alone, a trial of one man's memory and recollections. But you have before you what they and the rest of us don't--a memory of the passions and the panic, and the certitude, which gave rise to the war. And a sense, I am confident, of the quiet and selfless man who sat in the outer circle when your cabinet deliberated over our country's choices in Iraq, and in those burning grounds of the Arab-Islamic world. Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.
Mr. Ajami, the 2006 Bradley Prize recipient, teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.
Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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