Seriously

Kevin Drum flags this steaming pile of crap from Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs:

The lefty blogosphere, meanwhile, has gotten itself all in a tizzy over the failings of the "foreign policy community." The funny thing is...hell, I'll just come out and say it: the netroots' attitude toward professionals isn't that different from the neocons'....

The charges the bloggers are making now are very similar to those that the neocons made a few years ago: mainstream foreign-policy experts are politicised careerists, biased hacks, and hide-bound traditionalists who have gotten everything wrong in the past and don't deserve to be listened to in the future. (Take a look at pretty much any old Jim Hoagland column and you'll see what I mean.) Back then, the neocons directed their fire primarily at the national security bureaucracies — freedom-hating mediocrities at the CIA, pin-striped wussies at the State Department, cowardly soldiers at the Pentagon. Now the bloggers' attacks are generally aimed at the think-tank world.

Wow. Not unlike the pathetic whines of the traditional media, who think that they must be doing something right because they get complaints from "both sides," when the right-wing wants them to advance their agenda and the left just wants an honest discussion.

America's foreign policy is a disaster. The majority of Americans think the Iraq War was a mistake, wasn't worth it and would like to see it over with as soon as possible. In fact, the majority of people on Earth think that. By any objective standard, in fighting the Iraq War, none of the goals one would normally hope to accomplish in a war have been reached. Unless you see the Iraq War as a step in a desirable expansion of hostile actions in the region, which is, of course, the neocon agenda.

On one hand, a small faction of people who are complaining that the professionals are not helping them advance their narrow agenda.

On the other hand, everybody else, with countless different agendas, who have witnessed the disaster yielded by the neocons and complain that we turn on the TV every day to see only neocons and think-tankers calling us "unserious" and supporting that disastrous agenda.

Yeah, the netroots' attitude is just like the neocons'.

John Bolton

I don't even know what to say anymore. They're all pathological.

Clearer Than Truth

DB should probably be happy to see that conservatives are beginning to ask questions and are trying to learn lessons from the failures of their movement, which are abundant. It's probably too much to ask that they ask the right questions and learn the right lessons.

Once again, with thousands of lives lost, millions of families destroyed and billions of dollars down the drain, it's all about them. And hippies.

Rod Dreher is as conservative as it gets -- a contributor to National Review and the Corner, a current columnist for The Dallas Morning News, a self-described "practicing Christian and political conservative."

Today, Dreher has an extraordinary (oral) essay at NPR in which he recounts how the conduct of President Bush (for whom he voted twice) in the Iraq War (which he supported) is causing him to question, really to abandon, the core political beliefs he has held since childhood.

...

I had a heretical thought for a conservative - that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word - that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot - that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn't the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

Dreher's oral essay is highly commendable and I would encourage more like it. I certainly don't want to insult him for it.

But still... Is there any chance America's conservatives will stop soiling themselves over the Sixties? Really, what is wrong with these people? The problems facing America today are bigger than their personal hang-ups. It would be nice to see conservatives questioning something other than their playground social skills.

Lyndon Johnson famously and wrongly predicted "If we allow Vietnam to fall, tomorrow we'll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week in San Francisco."

John McCain says this time it will be different.

We left Vietnam, it was over, we just had to heal the wounds of war. We leave this place... and they'll follow us home," he said on a news show recently. "So there's a great deal more at stake."

It was bad enough that 30 years after it was made as clear as possible that the Domino Effect is a load of crap, the "grown-ups" running the country thought they could start tipping dominoes of their own in the Middle East. But now, with that total failure nearly complete, we have a fresh example, burning on our televisions in real time. And conservatives still think entire nations have the same properties as children's toys.

Johnson worried "what will happen to the other hundred little countries" if we didn't keep trying to prop up the South Vietnamese government. Yesterday, on KCRW's "Left, Right & Center," Tony Blankley responded to a question about what could go wrong if the U.S. pulled out of Iraq:

Nobody can predict. But an awful lot of experts who are not supporters of the president think there's a high likelihood that if civil war breaks out completely and were not there to contain it in any way, that Turkey will get sucked into Kurdistan, that Syria will be lapping over to support the Shias, that the Saudis, Egyptians and other Sunni countries will be giving more and more support to the beleaguered Sunni 20 percent. And in the middle of all this of course is little Israel, which according to the London Times last week, a paper of some repute having been in business for a few centuries, that they have a plan, not that they're necessarily planning to execute, they have a plan to use nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities. Now, you can't... you know, plus 19 million barrels of oil flowing through the Hormuz Straights, keeping the world's economy functioning, all in jeopardy, the Saudi oil fields, which are unfortunately for the Saudis or those Sunni country, the Shias happen to live on the Saudi oil, the danger there... so that is the most flammable possible setting.

Robert Scheer responded by asking what criminals running the country could have possibly thought it would be a good idea to set that in motion? He also pointed out that nobody is suggesting that we just pull out in 24 hours, screaming and running as fast as we can.

Finally, Scheer noted that smart people think the answer is, as the Iraq Study Group suggested, to "stop demonizing" all these other countries and start trying to work with them.

Yesterday, DB wrote about Dean Acheson, the Cold War and the neocon's dangerous and ridiculous belief that "Arabs only understand force." It's clear that the Cheney Administration is incapable of seeing the world as anything other than full of demons. But getting the public to stop thinking like Cheney is going to be a tall order.

Acheson is famous for a lot of things he did and said, but one of his quotes stands out above most -- Acheson said he advised Harry Truman, during the Cold War, to paint a picture of the world that was "clearer than truth."

Clearer than truth is a concept that our current government has embraced more than any other. Dreher is wise to be reconsidering the blind faith with which he has accepted Bush and Cheney's pronouncements. It is obvious that other conservatives aren't even ready to get as far as he has. But DB has serious doubts about the extent of his and others' epiphanies.

When I was a teenager, I was stunned to hear my grandmother explain to me that she "would never buy a Japanese car because of the war." Even though my grandfather was in the Pacific, I never heard a single pronouncement like that. No sentiments like that about any group of people from any member of my family. Ever. To this day, that statement is singular in my recollections of all my conversations with her or any of my relatives, which is probably why it has stuck with me.

In his excellent book, "War Without Mercy," historian John Dower writes about the demonization of the Japanese during WWII. Calling them "Japs," cartooning them as monkeys with thick glasses, treating them as sub-human... It was all part of the war machine. And when the war ended, so did all the institutionalized hatred, just like that (finger snap). But decades later, you still wouldn't see my grandmother piloting a Toyota.

I wonder if even the conservatives who get as far as questioning their leaders will ever get to the point where they can consider having a civil conversation with the countries we fear the most. In a never-ending war on terror, orchestrated by a cabal that thinks that Arabs can uniformly be defeated with sexual shame, I wonder if the American public will ever have a chance to think more clearly than "clearer than truth" as we interact with the rest of the world.

The Neocon Mind

DB has never been an enormous fan of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, but he deserves credit for one immeasurably large contribution to all mankind. If he didn't have a level head for at least a few days in October 1962, there's a pretty good chance that the world might have ended. McNamara was the main proponent of the U.S. blockade of Cuba during the Missile Crisis.

When it was discovered that the Soviet Union was delivering nuclear weapons to Cuba, President Kennedy called his closest advisors to a series of meetings. In his Executive Committee (EXCOMM) meetings, Kennedy discussed the options. If you want to hear what it sounds like when the President of the United States is considering "trading Berlin" during a "nuclear exchange" (and if you have time to download a 130MB MP3), click here. It's fairly disquieting.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy wrote in "Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis" that the Russians were a week away from having the ability to kill 80 million Americans within minutes. What Kennedy did not know at the time was that there were already operational nuclear weapons installed there (and that Cuban President Fidel Castro would implore Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to launch them during the crisis).

On Oct. 18, the EXCOMM met to come up with their plan:

The members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were unanimous in calling for immediate military action. They forcefully presented their view that the blockade would not be effective. General Curtis LeMay, Air Force Chief of Staff, argued strongly with the President that a military attack was essential. When the President questioned what the response of the Russians might be, General LeMay assured him there would be no reaction. President Kennedy was skeptical. "They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something. They can't, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and then do nothing. If they don't take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin."

...

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson began attending our meetings, and he was strongly in favor an air attack. I was a great admirer of his. In 1961, President Kennedy asked him to prepare a report for the National Security Council recommending a course of action to deal with the Russian threat to Berlin. Listening to his presentation then, I had thought to myself that I had never heard anyone so lucid and convincing and would never wish to be on the other side of an argument with him. Now he made his arguments that an air attack and invasion represented our only alternative in the same clear and brilliant way. He said that the President of the United States had the responsibility for the security of the people of the United States and of the whole free world, that it was his obligation to take the only action which could protect that security, and that that meant destroying the missiles.

There are apparently no tapes or transcripts of the meetings with Dean Acheson, only an extremely lonely-sounding JFK describing Acheson's position (6MB MP3).

[INTERESTING SIDE NOTE: If there is anybody on earth who could brag to know the most about these tapes and transcripts, it might be Philip Zelikow, whose recent departure from the State Department figures prominently in Sidney Blumenthal's important story about the irrelevancy of Condoleezza Rice this week. Zelikow was co-editor of "The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: The Great Crises", the official transcriptions of the EXCOMM meetings.]

Though there are no tapes of what Acheson said to Kennedy, the film "Thirteen Days" portrays the meeting like this:

Dean Acheson: Gentlemen, for the last fifteen years, I've fought at this table alongside your predecessors in the struggle against the Soviet. Now I do not wish to seem melodramatic, but I do wish to impress upon you a lesson I learned with bitter tears and great sacrifice. The Soviet understands only one language: action. Respects only one word: force.

It's not entirely unfair to put those words in Acheson's mouth. Acheson was Harry Truman's Secretary of State and was an important player in the administration during the Korean War, about which Truman later commented "The conclusion that I had come to was that force was the only language that the Russian dictatorship could understand."

Fortunately, Acheson and the Joint Chiefs did not win the debate over Cuba. If they had, the human race today would probably consist of a handful of mutants in mineshafts.

When Seymour Hersh wrote his stunning article about Abu Ghraib in 2004, it contained this disturbing passage (among many):

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. "The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women... and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world," Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, "or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private." The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged- "one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."

Much has been written already to discredit "The Arab Mind." Its absurd reduction of millions of people to a cartoon stereotype has already led to Americans building naked pyramids of Iraqis. But even though Bush called Abu Ghraib the biggest mistake of the war last June, as Dibgy notes, the U.S. Marines are still encouraged to read this garbage.

But there is something disturbing on that reading list, which is that the top recomendation for staff sergeants and first lieutenants --- the leaders who generally have the most face to face contact with the locals --- is that piece of trash "The Arab Mind." I had thought that it was only considered a bible by the senior brass. I didn't know they were having the troops read it too. No wonder things have gone so badly.

This is another in a long line of errors, but it points to one of the biggest motivations for this invasion and occupation --- racism. There were far too many people who were willing to believe that when it came to teaching the world who's boss, any arab would do. This book helped create the sense that arabs are all alike and that they are just a little bit less evolved than we purebred (hah!) Americans.

They're still encouraged to read it because the people running America still think it's the bible. To Dick Cheney and his cabal, Arabs only understand force.

So here we are today, on the brink of a war with Iran. Our nation (and Israel) considering using tactical nukes. An administration convinced the enemy only understands force and we must escalate and expand a war we are losing because any sign of weakness will "embolden" them.

A regional conflict which some in Washington have described as having the potential to become a "miniature Armageddon" or "potential World War III" and an administration comprised entirely of neocons.

There's nobody even as level-headed as Robert Freaking McNamara, nor is George W. Bush remotely as smart as John F. Kennedy.

God help us all.