Obsidian Wings

COIN v. coins

by Eric Martin

As I was saying, prolonged military occupations inevitably breed resentment and hostility in the underlying population.  The episode described below, occuring in Fallujah - a deeply devout locale known as the "City of Mosques" - is all too typical (via Cernig):

Fallujah, the scene of a bloody U.S. offensive against Sunni insurgents in 2004, has calmed and grown less hostile to American troops since residents turned against al Qaida in Iraq, which had tried to force its brand of Islamist extremism on the population.

Now residents of the city are abuzz that some Americans whom they consider occupiers are also acting as Christian missionaries. Residents said some Marines at the western entrance to their city have been passing out the coins for two days in what they call a "humiliating" attempt to convert them to Christianity.

In the markets, people crowded around men with the coins, passing them to each other and asking in surprise, "Have you seen this?"

The head of the Sunni endowment in Fallujah, the organization that oversees Sunni places of worship and other religious establishments, demanded that the Marines stop.

"We say to the occupiers to stop this," said Sheikh Mohammed Amin Abdel Hadi. "This can cause strife between the Iraqis and especially between Muslim and Christians . ... Please stop these things and leave our homes because we are Muslims and we live in our homes in peace with other religions."

In interviews, residents of Fallujah repeated two words — "humiliation" and "weakness".

"Because we are weak this is happening," said a shop owner who gave his name as Abu Abdullah. "Passing Christianity this way is disrespectful."

Like the recent incident involving the use of the Koran for target practice, this is not the worst atrocity one can imagine occurring in war time.  Still, for a devout citizenry, this is a serious insult.  That insult is magnified exponentially when placed in the context of a prolonged military occupation that has included multiple bloody sieges on the city in question.  It only emphasizes the already prevalent feelings of "humiliation" and "weakness" - which are but pit stops on the road to armed resistance.

The problem for US forces is that there are always going to be a "few bad apples" in a military force that size - even when it places an emphasis on counterinsurgency (COIN) best practices.  Sometimes even good apples will make mistakes with understandably itchy trigger fingers, or be overcome by stress/fear/anger on a given day.  And, as in the present example, even the bad apples might not be acting with malicious intent each time - I'm sure the soldiers in the present example were sincere in the belief in their spiritual obligation to proselytize.  That won't, however, do much to tamp the anger that will likely spike as a result of their actions, nor shield these soldiers from the wrath of insurgent activity. 

The only way to do that is to remove our troops from situations that will, to repeat, inevitably lead to such conflicts.  But then, the Bush administration is afraid that the Iraqi people will get to vote on exactly that issue.

Music To My Ears

by hilzoy

From the Reuters blog:

"During a fund-raiser in Denver, Obama — a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School — was asked what he hoped to accomplish during his first 100 days in office.

“I would call my attorney general in and review every single executive order issued by George Bush and overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution,” said Obama."

It makes me smile just thinking about it.

Have We Lost Our Collective Marbles?

by hilzoy

Yesterday was full of interesting news. Sticking to stories that concern the election: John McCain gave a speech on nuclear non-proliferation. He also wrote an op-ed with Joe Lieberman in which he renounced Bush's policy on North Korea. And then, in the evening, we learned that when he was coming up with his response to the mortgage crisis, McCain's main economic advisor was literally a paid agent of one of the banks most heavily involved in creating that crisis -- a bank that has an enormous amount riding on what our government decides to do in response.

And yet, at about 1am, when I clicked on Memeorandum, I saw -- well, I can't show you, since I don't know how to do that, but I saw something like this (h/t), only twice as big. There were approximately a million stories about the fact that Obama said Auschwitz when he should have said Buchenwald. (The RNC responds, with characteristic understatement: "Obama's frequent exaggerations and outright distortions raise questions about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief.") There were also a couple of stories about Scott McClellan's book, which is slightly more interesting, but not much, since all he really did was say things that everyone but the editors at RedState already know. The Newsweek story on McCain and Phil Gramm, which had put in a brief appearance as a tiny entry in the 'More Items' section, had vanished. McCain's nonproliferation speech, and his break with Bush on North Korea, were nowhere to be found.

I suppose one explanation for this might be that people are more interested in gaffes than in policy wonkery. But that can't be it. After all, McCain made a much more serious gaffe in his speech yesterday, but very few people noticed it:

"In John McCain's speech today he says something very very puzzling:

Many believe all we need to do to end the nuclear programs of hostile governments is have our president talk with leaders in Pyongyang and Tehran, as if we haven't tried talking to these governments repeatedly over the past two decades.

So McCain thinks that the President of the United States has been negotiating with the Iranians for the past two decades? Huh? Does McCain not understand that the stated policy of the U.S. government since April 7, 1980 has been to NOT TALK TO THE IRANIANS. And that we have not negotiated with Iran over their nuclear weapons program."

Personally, I think being wrong about official US policy towards Iran, and about whether recent history shows that negotiating with them won't work, is more serious than being wrong about precisely which Nazi concentration camp your great-uncle helped liberate. But then, I also think that at a time when we are involved in two wars, our standing in the world is as low as it has been in recent memory, we have jettisoned our commitment to basic human rights and the rule of law, our economy is tanking, our currency seems to be in free-fall, the energy crisis has finally (and predictably) hit home with a vengeance, food and commodity prices are soaring world-wide, our health insurance system could most charitably be described as badly frayed, our infrastructure seems to be crumbling around us, and a whole lot of people are looking at losing their homes -- at a time like this, there are better things to talk about than flag pins, pastors, and the real explanation for Hillary Clinton's RFK moment.

Honestly: if this campaign is decided on those sorts of issues, we deserve what we get. It's just a pity our election will affect so many other people, who don't.

McCain On Nuclear Proliferation

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

"Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, distanced himself from the Bush administration on Tuesday by vowing to work more closely with Russia on nuclear disarmament and by calling for a reduction in tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

In what his campaign promoted as a major speech on nuclear security policy, Mr. McCain told a largely friendly crowd at the University of Denver that he supported a legally binding accord between the two nations to replace verification requirements in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or Start, which expires in 2009. The Bush administration has refused to accept such binding limits on nuclear weapons, which the administration’s critics say has created paranoia in Moscow."

You can read the full speech here. This is one of those times when it really helps to know the context. For starters, McCain does not have a very strong record on nuclear disarmament. He did vote for Nunn-Lugar and START II, but he also voted against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and against making it a precondition of our deal with India that it not contribute to nuclear proliferation. And while in this speech he comes out against the development of nuclear bunker-buster bombs, he fails to mention not only that funding for that project was cut three years ago, but that he voted against those cuts at the time.

Moreover, McCain's other policies would make the ones he announced yesterday a lot harder. Ilan Goldenberg gives the short version on Democracy arsenal: "McCain’s basic plan is to slap the Russians smack across the face and then ask them for a favor. Somehow I don’t think that will work." The longer version is below the fold.

The McCain Narrative

by publius

Today’s Post article on McCain’s “hide Bush from all cameras” fundraiser explains that McCain is (for now) significantly outperforming his party in the polls. For obvious reasons, it’s imperative that McCain maintain this distance from the GOP in the public’s eyes. That’s why I think that — Reverend Wright, etc. aside — the 2008 election will turn primarily on how McCain is defined. It is the McCain metanarrative that will be the key “battleground state” of the 2008 election.

To back up, I generally believe that elections are determined by fundamentals. Pundits typically overvalue campaign narratives and undervalue underlying metrics such as economic or national security anxieties.

From a “fundamentals” perspective, Obama should win hands down. The economy is bad, the war is bad, and the Republican brand has never been worse. Further, demographics are starting to catch up to the GOP (e.g., the increase of college-educated and non-white voters).

But that said, it’s not clear that those fundamentals will “stick” to McCain. That’s why “superstructure” narratives will play a more significant role this year. Yes, fundamentals matter, but only to the extent one party is blamed for them.

To be sure, the public is currently blaming them on the GOP — that’s why the Congressional landscape looks so bleak. But McCain is — for now — perceived by much of the public to be separate from these otherwise putrid fundamentals. The smell ain’t stickin’ on him yet.

That’s why campaign narratives — particularly “distancing” strategies — will prove so important to McCain. They’re the only way he can separate himself from the GOP’s brand this year. Specifically, they would allow him to acknowledge these problems (something Bush and the GOP failed to do in 2006), while simultaneously avoiding damage from them by donning a “maverick reformer” cloak.

And to be fair, McCain has bucked his party at times (immigration, climate change — sort of). But on most of the big issues of the day — Iraq, health care, taxes, foreign policy — he is quite honestly a continuation (at best) of Bush and the modern GOP. In fact, he’d frankly be worse on foreign policy — he was a neocon before it was cool.

Accordingly, the million dollar question is whose definition of McCain wins out. Can McCain leverage his high-profile breaks with the GOP to craft a larger “maverick reformer” narrative. And, if so, can he do so without alienating the conservative base? A tricky task, but far from impossible.

Likewise, the challenge for Obama is to keep doing precisely what he’s doing — painting McCain as Bush III. Will he remained disciplined enough to tie the day-to-day skirmishes into these larger metathemes (the campaign has excelled at that thus far). If so, and if that narrative sticks, then it will tie McCain to the same fundamentals that are going to hurt Republicans across the country this fall. In other words, if McCain is Bush, then Obama wins.

Yes, it’s important that Obama isn’t defined as some sort of radical Islamic black nationalist boogeyman. But the real fight is over the definition of McCain. If McCain gets painted as “more of the same,” then the fundamentals will kick in and Obama’s “definition” will become largely irrelevant.

Warning: Schadenfreude Ahead!

by hilzoy

MSNBC (h/t):

"Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s national campaign general co-chair was being paid by a Swiss bank to lobby Congress about the U.S. mortgage crisis at the same time he was advising McCain about his economic policy, federal records show.

“Countdown with Keith Olbermann” reported Tuesday night that lobbying disclosure forms, filed by the giant Swiss bank UBS, list McCain’s campaign co-chair, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, as a lobbyist dealing specifically with legislation regarding the mortgage crisis as recently as Dec. 31, 2007.

Gramm joined the bank in 2002 and had registered as a lobbyist by 2004. UBS filed paperwork deregistering Gramm on April 18 of this year. Gramm continues to serve as a UBS vice chairman."

You can see the lobbying disclosure forms at the MSNBC link above. They are as advertised. (On all except the first, note the little "Next" button at the upper left; it takes you to subsequent pages, on some of which you will find Gramm's name.)

Gramm is bad news with or without his lobbying job. As I wrote two months ago, he was heavily involved in the Enron crash, and some of his legislation helped make the current crisis possible. To quote James Galbraith:

"Phil Gramm's career was as the most aggressive advocate of every predatory and rapacious element that the financial sector has," Galbraith said. "He's a sorcerer's apprentice of instability and disaster in the financial system."

But it just defies belief that McCain would have, as his main economic advisor and one of the people responsible for his plan to deal with the mortgage crisis, someone who was a paid lobbyist for a bank that was heavily involved in that crisis, a firm that has just advised some of its employees not to travel to the US for legal reasons, and that stands to gain or lose a lot depending on what the federal government decides to do about it. What's next: the revelation that McCain's policy on Iran is being written by a lobbyist for the makers of cruise missiles? Or that he has outsourced his health care policy to a lobbyist for the National Funeral Directors Association?

My best guess -- and it's only a guess -- is that there are certain things about himself that McCain is so sure of that he does not see how he could ever be challenged on them. He knows that he is a man of honor, so why would he need to keep people with obvious conflicts of interest away from his campaign -- even when he is taking their advice on topics that, by his own admission, he doesn't know much about? Likewise, he knows that he cares about the military, so why would he need to actually acquire a decent record on veterans' issues?

If this is at all right, it promises to be an entertaining campaign. Meanwhile, will the last lobbyist to leave the McCain campaign please turn out the lights?

E Pur Si Muove! Open Thread

by hilzoy

Ben Smith puts the fact that 10% of Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim in context:

"Large minorities of Americans consistently say they hold wildly out-of-the-mainstream views, often specifically discredited beliefs. In some cases, those views should make them pretty profoundly alienated from one party or the other.

For instance:

22 percent believe President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.

30 percent believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

23 percent believe they've been in the presence of a ghost.

18 percent believe the sun revolves around the Earth."

That last is pretty scary. I mean, there are certain things I just assume that everyone knows (except for Sherlock Holmes, who had his reasons.) The fact that the earth revolves round the sun is one of them. The idea that nearly one in five Americans does not know this is unnerving. I am not at all consoled by the fact that a few years before this poll was taken (in the 90s), only 74% of Germans and 67% of Britons got it right.

However, here's something even stranger: not only do 23% of Americans claim to have been in the presence of a ghost; five per cent think they have seen a monster in the closet. Unless their definition of "monster" includes, say, cockroaches, or they included small children in their survey sample, that's really strange.

Open Thread.

Memorial Day

by hilzoy

Some things don't get easier.

***

4,081 in Iraq; hundreds more in Afghanistan; even more who never made the official statistics. May we hold them in our memories, and honor them in our lives.

Electability

by hilzoy

Hillary Clinton has an op-ed in the NY Daily News called "Why I Continue To Run." In addition to lamenting the fact that an unnamed "some" took her remarks about Bobby Kennedy's assassination out of context, she makes two points that are worth remarking on. First:

"I am running because I believe staying in this race will help unite the Democratic Party. I believe that if Sen. Obama and I both make our case - and all Democrats have the chance to make their voices heard - in the end, everyone will be more likely to rally around the nominee."

This might or might not be true in the abstract. In the actual world, however, everything depends on how Hillary Clinton conducts herself. She can continue to make her case in a constructive and positive way, trying to show that she is the best candidate while doing her best to defuse the idea that the nomination was somehow stolen from her, and to reconcile her followers to the idea that she lost fair and square; or she can try to undermine Obama's claim to be the legitimate nominee, if he wins. "Staying in the race" describes both options. But only one of them "will help unite the Democratic Party", and make "everyone (...) more likely to rally around the nominee." Hillary Clinton has not chosen that option.

I just heard someone on one of the talk shows say that it must be hard for Hillary Clinton to give up her dreams. I appreciate this fact, and I do not envy her. However, as I wrote a few days ago, Hillary Clinton is a responsible moral agent. She has the power to decide which of these two approaches she will pursue. Moreover, she has now had several months to get used to the idea that she lost. If she were an adult, she would deal with it. The fact that she seems instead to require our indulgence while she sorts through her emotional issues just gives me one more reason to be glad she lost: Presidents are often confronted with crises, at 3am and other times, and they do not always have the luxury of working through all the stages of grief before coming up with a response.

Clinton also claims that she is more electable than Obama:

"Finally, I am running because I believe I'm the strongest candidate to stand toe-to-toe with Sen. McCain. Delegate math might be complicated - but electoral math is not. Our campaign is winning the popular vote - and we've been winning the swing states we need to get 270 electoral votes and take back the White House: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arkansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Michigan, Florida and West Virginia."

Let's leave aside both the arguments about the popular vote and the problems involved in extrapolating from primary votes to the general election, and focus on electability in the actual world. In the actual world, the only way Clinton can win the nomination, absent some genuine catastrophe, is for the superdelegates to decide to give her the nomination. If that happened, would she be more electable? She might have an edge over Obama in Appalachia, but she would surely be at a serious disadvantage among African-American voters. This might not have been true had she won the primary on pledged delegates: in that case, Obama's supporters would probably be disappointed, but would manage to get over it.

Obviously, I cannot speak for African-American voters, but I imagine a number of them might wonder whether it's possible for an African-American candidate to win at all; and that a larger number probably feel that if a black candidate were to win, that candidate would have to surmount challenges that no white candidate has to face. For instance, any black candidate has to negotiate a whole minefield of issues, as was shown by the number of insulting articles early on about whether Obama was "black enough", and, in a different way, by the focus on Jeremiah Wright. Had Obama lost straightforwardly, I imagine those voters would have been disappointed, but hardly surprised. And since African-Americans have an unbroken record of voting for white candidates for President, there's no need to ask whether they would have been willing to do vote for one this time.

But despite the fears of those voters, Obama has actually won a majority of pledged delegates, and he won them with the support of a lot of white voters in a lot of predominantly white states. This strikes me as a wonderful thing; I cannot imagine how it would feel if I had gone through my entire life wondering, in my heart of hearts, whether anyone who looked like me could ever win a major party nomination. And if, at this point, the superdelegates were to give the nomination to Hillary Clinton, or to any white candidate, it's hard for me to see how I would not feel robbed not only of my candidate's shot at the nomination, but of some portion of my hopes for my country.

Again, I cannot speak for African-American voters, but I cannot imagine how Hillary Clinton could be nominated at this point, after Obama won a majority of pledged delegates, without taking a very big hit to her ability to motivate and mobilize African-American voters. Any attempt to figure out who is more electable has to take this into account. Talking about Clinton's edge in Kentucky and West Virginia without taking into consideration the damage she would do to Democratic support among African-Americans, is at best pointless, and at worst dishonest.

Taking Tough Action

by hilzoy

The NYT has a story headlined 'Worries in G.O.P. About Disarray in McCain Camp'. It contained this rather astonishing passage:

"The string of departures from the campaign was prompted by questions about lobbying activities by aides and advisers to Mr. McCain and a new policy, which he dictated, that active lobbyists not be allowed to hold paying jobs in the campaign. Mr. Schmidt said that policy was an example of how Mr. McCain would take tough action, part of a contrast he said they would draw with Mr. Obama for “giving great speeches” but having no record of accomplishment."

Let me get this straight. Obama has refused, from the outset, to take money from lobbyists and PACs. He has also refused to have lobbyists on his paid staff. When the RNC has tried to catch him in hypocrisy, it has had to resort to such claims as: he lets lobbyists give him free advice! He has people on his staff who used to be lobbyists!

By contrast, until quite recently, John McCain's campaign was full of lobbyists:

"For years, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has railed against lobbyists and the influence of "special interests" in Washington, touting on his campaign Web site his fight against "the 'revolving door' by which lawmakers and other influential officials leave their posts and become lobbyists for the special interests they have aided."

But when McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.

Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O' Lakes, UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae. (...)

Even as Black provides a private voice and a public face for McCain, he also leads his lobbying firm, which offers corporate interests and foreign governments the promise of access to the most powerful lawmakers. Some of those companies have interests before the Senate and, in particular, the Commerce Committee, of which McCain is a member.

Black said he does a lot of his work by telephone from McCain's Straight Talk Express bus."

Yep: McCain's senior political advisor was running a lobbying firm which was registered as an agent for several foreign governments as well as a whole host of corporations, from McCain's campaign bus. But when it turned out that two of McCain's people had lobbied for the odious Government of Myanmar, McCain suddenly saw the wisdom of adopting Obama's approach, and started shedding lobbyists. (Not, however, Charlie Black: while he has resigned from his lobbying firm, the fact that he has represented Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, Mohamed Siad Barre, Jonas Savimbi, and Ahmed Chalabi is apparently not a problem.)

And the fact that Obama spotted the problems with having lobbyists working for his campaign from the outset and avoided it, while McCain let it fester until it blew up in his face, is supposed to show that McCain "takes tough action" while Obama just gives speeches? Sounds like a winning argument to me.

(cross-posted at Washington Monthly)