Arms and influence

Kerik out

IN THE NEWS
Bernard Kerik has turned down his nomination as new Secretary of Homeland Security. Who knows what really happened here. We can only hope that someone noticed that there were many, many people vastly more qualified for the job--unless you don't think the Department of Homeland Security is all that important--and the nanny issue is just a cover story.

Iranian vice-president resigns

IN THE NEWS
I'm no alarmist, but the evolving situation in Iran is very troubling. The politicians trying to relax extreme Islamist controls (and, by extension, the frequently paranoid mindset behind them) have been fighting a cold war with that country's radical right. Lately, they've been losing ground, as evidenced by today's announcement that Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a reformist ally of President Mohammad Khatami, is resigning. The hard liners in the majlis are unwilling to work with reformists like Abtahi at all, and they're clearly hoping to ultimately win a war of political attrition with Khatami, too.

We have almost no leverage with Iran, particularly since the "Axis of Evil" speech and the invasion of Iraq. The American imperial colossus has become a useful political weapon for the extreme Islamists, since they can always point to American statements and actions and say, "See, what are you going to believe? The perfumed words of those who would sell out the Revolution, or your own eyes, which can see what the Americans are doing on our very doorstep?"

Pointing the gun at yourself

IN THE NEWS
What makes the Swift Boat Veterans affair truly nauseating isn’t merely how cynical, unfair, deceitful, and just plain stupid it is. The destructiveness of the media’s attention to this non-issue is the worst part.

As I wrote earlier, the group’s claims are absurd on their face. They also invite re-opening wounds that took a long time to heal. In the process, they risk ripping open veins of discord, antipathy, and doubt that the people who fought the Vietnam War often have just under the skin. What you did in Vietnam was, for many veterans, something they struggled a lifetime to understand, or forgive themselves. Now, if one man’s record of conduct under fire is opened for partisan attack, is anyone’s record now immune to question, no matter how silly the accusation or partisan the accuser? As David Hackworth said recently, this affair pits veteran against veteran, to the detriment of all.

Who really believes that John Kerry fired a grenade launcher inside a boat, just to earn another Purple Heart? (If he did, he would have had to fire it in the air, since the M-47’s grenade won’t arm until it travels a pre-set distance. The grenade would then have had to land back in the boat and exploded with enough explosive force to wound, but not kill. If Kerry accomplished this superhuman feat under fire, he’s certainly deserving of some kind of medal.)

Aside from re-opening old wounds, the destructive power that the media continues to grant the Swift Boat Veterans is the power to blot out other stories. Rather than inventing ridiculous scenarios about a war that was over decades ago, how about doing a better job of the multiple wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere that we're fighting right now? For example, there is the rate of suicide among returning veteran, a cost of war that deserves more attention than it has received.

To put a human face on it, here’s a picture of Dave Guindon. An Air National Guard member, Guindon recently returned from Iraq to his life in New Hampshire. He seemed, like many people fighting inner demons, perfectly normal on the surface, even cheerful. Guindon shot himself soon after his return home.

In the absence of the necessary data about the Iraq war and the US military, it’s premature to draw conclusions about whether the suicide rate among veterans is worse than in other conflicts. Veterans of many wars have played out this tragic script, including American GIs returning from World War II.

There are, however, two important conclusions one can draw from this story and others like it. First, the US military was largely unprepared to help veterans make the psychological return home. In Fort Bragg, North Carolina, authorities are now scrambling to find any available resources, including school counselors, to help identify veterans at risk of suicide and getting them the help they need. (Incidentally, the two-day seminar mentioned in the article linked above is hardly adequate training. In fact, it possibly may make matters worse in some ways, if hastily-trained counselors miss the warning signs and then join the circle of people shattered by the resulting suicide.)

Second, suicides among veterans is one of the inevitable human costs of war. It doesn’t matter if the war was “good” or “bad,” the experience of combat is traumatizing. Even the best soldiers get “used up” after an unpredictable amount of time under fire. It is yet another reason why nations should not go to war lightly, with little preparation, a fuzzy definition of victory, and no sense of the likely aftermath.

In other words, if the press needs to talk about people pointing guns at themselves, they’re covering the wrong story.

[And I really, really hope this is the last time I'll have to post on this matter.]

UPDATE: Bush's statement today is pure blather. It is not a denunciation of the Swift Boat Veterans.

Truth, BS, and grenades

IN THE NEWS
Pictured below is an M-79 grenade launcher. Nicknamed the "blooper," the M-79 was a favorite weapon of Vietnam-era squads. As light as a shotgun, the "blooper" also provided the indirect fire capability of a mortar, without the weight, setup, and risk to fingers when fired. The M-79 was as simple to operate as it was effective: load, point (like a shotgun), shoot (directly at the target, or lobbed "indirectly" over an intervening obstacle), and BLAMMO!

Given the M-79's lethality, a soldier in Vietnam--from the Army, Navy, or SEALs--knew without asking too many questions what to do with this weapon. Conversely, they also knew what not to do with it--including firing it to detonate inside a boat, where it could not only kill or maim everyone aboard, but also start secondary explosions as other ammunition started to "cook off."

Therefore, it's ludicrous to claim that someone hungry for the glory of another Purple Heart would fire an M-79 inside a swift boat, let alone one already under fire. If anyone claims otherwise, invite them to personally demonstrate how they might be able to injure themselves slightly by firing the weapon in an enclosed area comparable to a boat. If they decline, I'd recommend asking them, "So how stupid did you think I am?"

Glub, glub, glub...

IN THE NEWS
I guess you have to be a goggle-eyed rube to expect the American press to stop pointing the camera at the Swift Boat Veterans. No matter how much they've discredited themselves, poisoned public discourse, re-opened old Vietnam wounds and rubbed salt in them, and generally demonstrated how odious they truly are, they're still getting air time and column inches of print from the mainstream media.

I guess I need to look in the mirror for tell-tale signs of Rubus goggleoculus. I had thought that, by now, someone would have turned off the mike, not returned the phone calls, scratched them from the talking head invitee list. Even James Corsi's anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic rants weren't a painful enough jab to the journalistic dinosaur's tail for the walnut-sized brain at the other end to register that something had happened.

When I last wrote about this issue (and believe me, I really, really hate writing about this noxious distraction from things that really matter), I noted that Bill Clinton, when he was running for the presidency in 1992, chose to leave George Bush's World War II service record alone. He apparently assumed it was as honorable as portrayed, and in no way would it have been proper to make it a campaign issue. Bush's odd story about, while floating in the middle of the Pacific after being shot down by a Japanese fighter, thinking about the separation of church and state was an open invitation to at least a few good snipes. But no, the Democratic contender stayed away from that "character" issue.

Someone, however, attacked Bush Sr.'s service record with the ferocity of a rabid badger. Care to guess who that someone is? No, not Al Sharpton. Not James Carville. Not Al Gore.

The badger/human hybrid in question was James Sampley, founder of Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry. Sampley claims that Bush bailed out too early, leaving his fellow fighter pilots in mortal danger. (Click here, if you can stomach it, for more background on Sampley.)

Contrast the likes of Sampley, Corsi, and O'Neill with John McCain and David Ifshin. You'll note where the link goes, to a Christian minister's account of the McCain/Ifshin friendship. Randy Becton, the minister, wants people to see in this story a Christian parable of reconciliation and respect.

Thomas Jefferson once hired someone to smear John Adams in print. (When Jefferson didn't completely pay, the author retaliated by publishing the rumor about Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemmings.) The incident destroyed the friendship between the two men, who took year to finally reconcile with one another. A hard lesson learned early in the republic--or maybe not.

Self-inflicted wounds

IN THE NEWS
As I argued in an earlier post, you break at your peril the implicit truce among people with strongly conflicting opinions over the Vietnam War. And if you break the truce for base partisan reasons, you reap the whirlwind.

As the week ended, the campaign of Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth collapsed:

• The press, having found the energy to get off the sofa and actually research a story, discovered that none of the Swift Boat Veterans had actually served with Kerry on the boat.


• Retired Admiral Roy Hoffman, a co-founder of the group, admitted that, although Kerry was under his command, he didn't really know anything about his service in Vietnam.


• Another key figure in the organization, John O'Neill, turns out to have been a Nixon-era dirty tricks operative, a protege of Charles Colson. O'Neill has a long history of animus to Kerry, whom he tried to discredit when Kerry voiced his anti-war sentiments back in 1971.


• O'Neills co-author for his anti-Kerry screed, Unfit for Command, is James Corsi, a nasty, foul-mouthed bigot with some, shall we say, unsavory opinions about Muslims and Catholics. (Not to mention his equally rabid attacks on the entire Clinton family and, of all people, Katie Couric.)


• Commander George Elliot retracted his accusation that Kerry did not deserve the Silver Star.

The sinking of the Swift Boat Veterans couldn't happen fast enough. What the mainstream press, the megaphone that O'Neill et al. enjoyed for far too long, will yet again fail to ask itself, however, is, How could we give such obviously unsavory people free press for as long as we did? And why were we printing rumors when we should have been researching the story ourselves?

UPDATE: Queenmommy made an excellent point last night that I'll add to this commentary. What if Bill Clinton had attacked George Bush's WWII service record in 1992? Bush's odd anecdote about musing on the separation of chuch and state while bobbing in the middle of the Pacific was certainly grist for at least one joke during the presidential debates. And who knows what else one might have nitpicked in Bush's record?

Or, even more ghoulishly, what if Clinton had savaged Bob Dole in 1996 over his WWII record? Perhaps Dole wasn't being courageous when he lost use of his arm in Italy. (Ann Coulter made this kind of charge against triple amputee Max Cleland, by the way.) Perhaps there were other incidents when Dole behaved in a less than honorable or valorous fashion.

Of course, if Clinton personally had made these attacks, he would have deserved to lose the election. In fact, if any of his allies or surrogates made them, Clinton would have about 30 seconds to denounce them and defend Bush and Dole as veterans. After that 30 seconds, pffft! Few Americans would have tolerated him as the Democratic candidate, let alone the elected president.

In fact, whatever you think of Clinton, you probably never imagined before now that he might cravenly attack Bush or Dole's war records. Unthinkable.

Ahem. Ahem AHEM. (That's the sound of me trying not to have to say the obvious about blind spots, double standards, and a certain candidate for President who's quiet about the Swift Boat Veterans.)

Moon over Pyongyang

IN THE NEWS
At this rate, I'm struggling to get past the weekly new items that, given this blog's focus, need a little extra attention or context. I'd love to return to the time-hallowed principles of strategy, now that we're finally at the cusp of talking about terrorism and guerrilla warfare in greater detail.

But how can you ignore a story like, "Reverend Moon Provides North Korea with Submarine-Launched Nuclear Missile Technology"? I won't even try.

Reverend Moon straddles some of the most extreme political contradictions without causing him any apparent discomfort--perhaps because his worldview is so bizarre already that loving communists and anti-communists at the same time is neurotic chump change compared to psychoses like, "I'm Emperor of the Universe, and the spirits of all historically important individuals, from Jesus to Stalin, bow down before me!" Plus getting coronated in the Dirksen Office Building, with members of Congress watching or even participating in the ceremony. Moon is a major supporter of the radical right, and his Unification Church owns the ultra-conservative Washington Times. He also has spent the last several years trying his own, one-man version of detente with North Korea, including a $3 million "birthday present" to Kim Jung Il, plus tens of millions of dollars worth of subterranean payments to his father, Kim Il Sung. Moon wants to build a Unification Church Disneyland in North Korea, and, sadly, bribing the country's paranoid autocrat seems the only way Moon can make his dream come true.

Moon has already served a prison sentence for tax evasion. Now, if there is a just and angry God who doesn't like upstarts like Moon trying to seize his throne, he'll someday soon be facing even graver criminal charges for providing fellow Korean megalomaniac Kim Jung Il with dangerous SLBM technology through a Moon front company.

Click here, here, here, and here for more details.

The first sting of backlash?

IN THE NEWS
There appear to be significant signs of a domestic political backlash against the Administration's national security policies, and against Bush himself. Here are a few recent signs:

In a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, more Americans said that Kerry was more qualified to be commander-in-chief than Bush by a significant margin, 52% to 44%. Now the caveats: it's only one poll; there are many months to go before the election; the pollsters got their answers right after the Democratic convention. Still, it's a pretty striking result, if national security is Bush's strong card among mainstream voters. (The conservative Kulturkampf is always there for the radical right.)

After the Supreme Court gave the Justice Department a well-deserved slap in the face over the Guantanamo detentions, the Bush Administration isn't exactly complying with the spirit of the Supreme Court's ruling--if even the letter. The Supreme Court justices don't like being misled, and they were clearly not happy with the Bush Administration's selective presentation of the facts, let alone the legal argument that boiled down to, "You gotta trust the President. You just gotta." When the Court re-convenes for a new session, more cases from the war against al Qaeda--and not just ones focused on the Guantanamo Bay prisoners--may reach the Supreme Court's inbox. What then, when the Solicitor General has to stand before the Court and make his argument?

The 9/11 Commission members are mighty displeased with Bush's own definition of a national intelligence director. The commissioners point out the obvious defect: with no staff, budget, or Cabinet-level authority, who will take this Great Coordinator seriously? (Don't look for the best and brightest to be on the interview list for this job.) If you get John Lehman--former Secretary of the Navy, the hawk behind the Reagan Administration's naval build-up, as genuine a Republican Realpolitik realist as you can get--irritated at you on a key national security issue, you're not doing well. Of course, the way Bush received the Commission's report--second-hand, through the National Security Advisor, who presumably gave him the executive summary--was itself an insult to the commissioners. I don't think that anyone should rush into accepting the 9/11 Commission's advice, the labor of man experienced hands, but not immune to potential flaws. (The centralization of intelligence has its pros and cons, for example.) However, Bush's announcement of the new position was the Washington equivalent of tipping a penny: it would have been better had you done nothing at all.

There are zigs and zags in every election year, and by no means is this blog an authoritative voice about US electoral politics. However, there's one element of the heightened alert in New York, Newark, and Washington that can't escape being part of the election: what happens if a terrorist attack really does strike the United States? The received wisdom is that this horrible event will help Bush in the polls.

I'm not so sure. In fact, the pendulum of public opinion might swing in the opposite direction. The poll I cited above already shows that doubt about Bush as a commander-in-chief has crept into the minds of many voters. If al Qaeda does succeed in another attack, I'm sure that many Americans will immediately want to know why the US government is spending its blood and treasure in Iraq if terrorists are still capable of striking at home--always the ultimate "front line" in counterterrorism. Other questions will naturally follow, too.

I can't say how many people will feel this way. I'd guess, however, that more people in the traditional Republican base will feel them than many Republicans would admit. Military families, for example, have by and large been taken for granted by the Administration, and it was clear that Kerry struck a nerve whenever he mentioned their treatment (cutting benefits, denying combat pay, etc.) during his acceptance speech. Certainly a lot of career military people themselves are unhappy with the Bush Administration, and they made their feelings heard through retired General Anthony Zinni and (of all people) Tom Clancy.

You can't alienate the centrist voter, and the Supreme Court, and traditional Republican voters, and the movers and shakers in the national security elite, and the US military, and still expect to win an election and govern after it.

The PLO: Can't live with 'em...

IN THE NEWS
The recent outbreaks of violence directed against Yassir Arafat personally, and the Palestinian Authority generally, is a long time coming. Palestinians in the occupied territories had mixed feelings about Arafat's return as part of the peace process. Symbolically, he's undoubtedly critical for the Palestinian struggle. That's why, every time the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) encircled his compound, support for the Chairman spiked. As soon as the Israeli tanks withdrew, however, his approval ratings plummeted.

In day-to-day life, Palestinians don't live, breathe, and work because of Arafat's talismanic role in the Palestinian struggle. They depend on being able to start a business, get medical care, hire a contractor to repair their homes, or other mundane tasks. That's when Palestinians run afoul of the corruption that Arafat brought with him. Palestinians, already feeling let down by the Israelis, the United States, the oil-rich Arab states, the UN, and nearly everyone else, have hit rock-bottom with the sense of betrayal that comes with the corruption.

That sad fact doesn't just make daily life in the occupied territories harder for the Palestinians, however. It also makes it harder for everyone (including Americans) somehow involved in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle to find a mutual exit from this mess. As Arafat's authority disintegrates so badly that the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade is now shooting at his deputies, who fills the political vacuum? With whom will the Israelis, or anyone else, deal?

The best answer, of course, is Hamas. You might remember them as the terrorist group whose leaders the IDF has been killing. They're not likely to submit to Israeli coercion any time soon, and the way Hamas has managed charities, medical care, and various public services continues to win the respect of many Palestinians--including those who don't approve of the "military" action Hamas also directs.

I've heard a lot of different perspectives on the historical moment on which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict turned: the offer that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat in 2000. Of course, the range of opinion on this moment has the usual range that anything about this conflict usually sees: from one extreme to another. On on extreme, people argue that Barak offered Arafat everything he could ever want. On the other extreme, you'll hear that the offer was either an insult or a trap.

History, however, is made of the quiet drip-drip-drip of everyday life as much as by the explosive ruptures of events like wars, failed negotiations, or assassinations. Daily life in the occupied territories has become even more morally arid than it was before. The statement, "Arafat blew it," applies as much to widespread corruption as it might to Arafat's rejection of the Barak offer--if not moreso. In one case, he might have proved impossible to deal with as the representative of the Palestinians. In the other, he proved unwilling to convince the Palestinians themselves that he has their interests in his heart.

Just plain weird

IN THE NEWS
That's about all I can say about the Sandy Berger story. This whole incident smells like something where you absolutely cannot trust the first statements, presented as facts, that surface in the press. Has someone of Berger's experience suddenly devolved into the Iran-Contra scandal's poster girl, Fawn Hall, stuffing classified documents into his/her clothes?

Uhhh, maybe. Maybe not. I can't believe that he needed to pilfer documents about port security. The documents that are available to the public on this and other homeland security topics are pretty good, as Berger (or anyone working for him) should know. So, was this an innocent mix-up of piles of documents? An unforgiveably sloppy way of handling official documents? A complete fabrication? Something else?

Who the hell knows? Unlike the pundits, I'm not going to speculate. Almost everything about the 9/11 Commission has an aura of unreality already.