Heads in the sand

On NPR's Talk of the Nation program today (oh yes, that bastion of left-leaning liberal media biase) there was a story about a study that shows that the majority of Republicans and Bush Supporters still think Iraq has (had) WMD (audio story link). The study, carried out by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), shows that the majority of Bush supporters had WMD and or a major program to develop WMD that was supported by al Qaeda. Not too surprisingly, the majority of Kerry supporters believe the opposite. And again not surprisingly, supporters of both candidates agreed that the US should not have gone to war without definite proof that such a program or actual WMD existed in Iraq in the first place.

But this is where it gets interesting. Even after the Duelfer report (CIA) to Congress that says Iraq did not have a viable WMD program, the majority of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq did, and in fact, perceive that the 9/11 Commission actually concluded the exact opposite! Bush supporters want to believe that the US went to war for justifiable reasons and want to believe the Administration. However, what do they do if the facts and what the President says doesn't agree? In a quote from the PIPA director Steven Kull:

"To support the president and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance, and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about prewar Iraq."

In other words, they're soooo confused!

The complete report (go here) is well worth reading.

Flip Flop or Spin?

I'm not sure that I can remember a nastier presidential election race. Or one that's as full of untruth, innuendo, and falsehood.

Through the proxies of the Republican National Committee, blatantly false charges that purport to describe how Kerry's valor during his Viet Nam service was not how it has been described in the supporting documents for his purple hearts, and his bronze and silver stars for bravery. No real evidence was ever supplied. Unfortunately there are people out there that buy this crap. The Republicans and Bush stay on the attack by characterizing everything that Kerry says as promoting terrorism, or changing his mind, or not being strong enough for America. Cheney spouts off that if Kerry is elected, America will surely be attacked by terrorists (this is the same well-reasoned Vice President who recently so eloquently told a US Senator, in public, to go fuck himself!). While Kerry has been having to spend precious campaign time defending himself against these lies, he's finally been able to start fighting back.

The one I like the best over the past week is when Kerry describes the President as living in his own little world of positive spin. According to the President and his advisors, going to war means never having to say you're sorry.

Bush criticizes Kerry for voting to invade Iraq and then changing his mind. Kerry points out that he voted (along with most of the House and Senate) to give the President the authority to go to war as a last resort. As a last resort!!. When you think about this carefully, the vote was the same as a union voting to grant their representatives a strike authorization during a labor negotiation. It strengthens the hand of the one(s) in authority in the negotiation--if the union negotiators can't reach a resolution, they are authorized to call the strike. In the case of the congressional authorization for invading Iraq was only given in the event that all reasonable solutions had been examined, including the completion of the U.N. weapons inspections. This doesn't even take into account that the vote to authorize the President to go to war was based on faulty intelligence combined with a rush to create a rationale for the invasion. Bush says he would do the exact same thing again. Kerry says he would have made very sure that the rationale for going to war was beyond reproach. Gee, if that's a flip flop, then I'm flopping.

I bought the whole "Iraq was dangerous because of WMD and this must not be allowed" argument. So did most of America. Looking back, where was Sadaam going to go? He wasn't a danger to the U.S. He was bottled up. Economic sanctions were allowing him to line his pockets yet everyone knew this couldn't go on forever. Eventually, some pissed off Iraqi (and there were millions) would have finally gotten to him. Was putting him in jail worth the price we've paid, and are continuing to pay. this doesn't even inlcude the price paid by the millions of Iraqi people caught in the crossfire of militants and their continued terrorism against both Iraqis and the coalition forces. Again, where are the WMD? Why are we in this quagmire?

Bush says he would do it again. So much for learning from your mistakes. In the mind of Bush, to admit otherwise shows a lack of strength. And as I write this, on the TV news two more American soldiers are being reported as killed. I want their sacrifice to mean something. But it has to mean more than the what's being given us.

Attack Dogs

As with probably 99.9% of all bloggers, I pretty much have come to the realization I don't have a lot to say that would interest the idle reader. However, after opening up the Blogger app tonight, I remembered I had saved a quote that I had wanted to use.

Right now it's the night after the end of the Republican Party National Convention. As with all such conventions, there was much chest thumping for achievements, real and imagined. And there were a considerable number of attacks on the character, intelligence, and leadership abilities of the Democratic challenger, John Kerry. Maybe it's a matter of perception; since I support Kerry's candidacy, but the attacks seem to have become extremely personal, bordering on the outright nasty.

I'm not naieve--I know that the people running the Democratic Party campaign aren't above such nastiness. But at this point in time, and maybe it's because the RNC really believes they are vulnerable, all semblence of decency seems to have gone out the window. The attacks range from lies and innuendo about Kerry's very real and heroic Viet Nam service record (even my Dad has fallen for the "Swift Boat" bullshit) to the truly personal snide remarks about Kerry's wife.

So I end this with the following quote from the Kerry nomination acceptance speach. Yes, it's a little personal as well, and I can understand if it makes a staunch Republican a little hot. However, these statements are truly based in fact, a point that an honest person will have trouble denying.

I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war. I will have a vice president who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. I will have a Secretary of Defense who will listen to the best advice of our military leaders. And I will appoint an Attorney General who actually upholds the Constitution of the United States.
John Kerry, during his acceptance speech as the Democratic National Party nominee for President of the United States, July 29, 2004

I suspect the next few months will truly bring out the best in America.

The digital age

Is it a new age in war reporting? Not that different perhaps, except maybe with the rapidity that information, whether it be text, photos, or video can be posted to the web from almost anywhere in the world. Paul Andrews published a piece in today's Seattle Times entitled "Digital Age reveals war's brutal details". In the column, Andrews discusses how the administration, particularly Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, failed to see how visual proof of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq would inflame world wide public sentiment far more than any written report. Rumsfeld is supposed to have said (and I paraphrase) that he had no idea how powerful the pictures could be. They seemed so much worse than the report he'd had since January. I sometimes wonder if this is just another example of the conceit continuously exhibited by members of the Bush Administration, or is it just that they're naive?

Now Seymour Hersh reports (in the New Yorker) that the intimidating and degrading treatment of prisoners in the War on Terror became policy after 9/11. Of course this is being denied, but I suspect that it will be shown that harsher interrogation methods became the norm, sanctioned all the way up the Defense and Justice lines of responsibility. The privates, specialists, and sargents all caught in the photos will take the brunt of it. They're in the pictures (how dumb was that?!), and soldiers,while required to follow orders justly, also have the responsibility to not carry out illegal orders. But they will argue that these methods of "softening up" of prisoners to make them more amenable to interrogation was acceptable practice.

One thing is obvioius. There needs to be accountability all the way up the chain of command, all the way to Rumsfeld. Yet the President and VP say that Rumsfeld is doing a great job. Rumsfeld flies to Iraq and tells troops at a rally that he doesn't read the newspapers anymore, insinuating that news organizations aren't presenting the truth, and gets a big cheer.

The conceit of power. Americans deserve more than that.

thoughts of color

This past week I spent three days in Washington DC to attend a NOAA workshop on OHH at our headquarters in Silver Spring MD. I ended up getting a room at a hotel located almost due south from the capital dome, but with Interstate 395 in between. I could see the dome from my room, albeit with several industrial type buildings and the freeway in the foreground. As usual, getting around was not difficult because of the Metro system (including from the airport), although after arriving I did get off at a train station that was much farther from the hotel than I thought, and it took me quite a bit longer trekking through some rather seedy looking territory to get there.

While the meeting went well, and I got a chance to sightsee a little on my last day, that's actually not the reason I'm writing this. The point is more that I was in a largely black part of DC and it was clear that the neighborhood was a little rough. The plexiglass shield protecting the wait staff at a Taco Bell and a local gas station attest to that. It did tend to make me feel a little more vulnerable than usual. This made me wonder. Did I feel this way because of any real physical danger? Probably not, at least no more so than some parts of downtown Seattle. Being a white liberal, I would like to think that I would have no feelings of discomfort around people of color. But I have to admit, getting on a crowded subway train when you're the only white person, does feel different. I think this is where many of us may begin to understand what racism and prejudice feels like. I don't mean to suggest that I experienced this in any overt way. But I certainly felt what it means to be a minority.

After a day of this, I really felt more relaxed. Of course I was still wary. Not because of color. It still was a rough neighborhood.

Update for April

There's still almost two weeks left in April and now the US military death toll in Iraq is up to 100 for the month. There's not much else to say except that the insurgency shows little in the way of a decrease in intensity.

Failure is an option

I was planning to write this on Monday (April 12th) when US combat deaths in Iraq had reached 73 for the month of April. Today I hear it's over 90.

9-11, or at least the conditions and security breakdowns that lead to 9-11, was no-one's fault. Wait, make that the other guy's fault. Oh, what possibly could we have done differently?!

Exit strategy?

The past couple of weeks, the situation in Iraq has worsened, and (pardon my grammer) is getting worser. Besides the various "insurgents" taking the fight directly to American and other coalition troops, inflicting significant casulties, there is growing evidence that both Sunni and Shiite factions are joining together in the uprising against American occupation.

In this light, I couldn't let pass by a Maureen Dowd editorial in the NY Times, that quoted SecDef Rumsfeld saying the following:

"We're trying to explain how things are going, and they are going as they are going. Some things are going well and some things obviously are not going well. You're going to have good days and bad days." [On the road to democracy, this] "is one moment, and there will be other moments. And there will be good moments and there will be less good moments."

Granted Dowd's firmly on the "other" side of the political aisle. However I can't understand why anyone would think such a pithy analysis can be simply accepted by the public.

Come on, tell it like it is. It's becoming hard for me to believe that anyone can say they know how this is going to turn out in the end. Personally, I think we all should be getting very worried.

High level pissing match

This was the week that Richard A. Clarke, the President's former anti-terrorism advisor (more specifically, the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism under both Clinton and Bush), came out with a new tell-all book entitled "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror". The main premise (paraphrasing others because I have not read it) is that President Bush and his staff were overly focused on Iraq from the time they took office, way before 9/11. He claims that his warnings (and those of many others) about the dangers of Al Qaeda were routinely downplayed because of the preoccupation with Iraq. He wasn't sure that the National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, even knew who/what Al Qaeda was after taking office with the President. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, he was essentially ordered to find the link between Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and Al Qaeda. Not finding one, he was told to look harder. It seems clear from the accounts of Clarke and of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that President Bush was focused on taking out Saddam even before taking office.

Not surprisingly, the personal attacks on Clarke from the administration and other Republican luminaries has been fast and furious. Clarke has definitely struck a nerve with this book. Whatever and whomever you believe, it does make for good entertainment.

Now the campaign begins...

John Kerry all but wrapped up the Democratic nomination by almost sweeping Super Tuesday's primaries last Tuesday. It's been expected for several weeks now, but even before the end of Tuesday, Republican attack ads started. Not that Democrats haven't been doing the same thing (but they're just right).

Pres. Bush and his Dept. of Labor are planning to reclassify mostly minimum wage fast food jobs as manufacturing jobs. that would show a nice bump in the stats for jobs in the manufacturing sector. I know that fast food sometimes tastes like it's made out of wood, but this might be going a little far.

I saw one of the new Bush commercials tonight. The one that uses the images of 9/11. Even before seeing it and only hearing it on the radio, I thought this was disgusting. Tonight I saw it...if I had had a loved family member or a friend lost in that attack, I would be disgusted over the blatant usage of this tragedy for political gain. As it is, while I'm not surprised that the RNC would sink to such a level, I'm sure this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Watch out for the stampede of attack ads.