Needlenose

Imagine this WWII headline:

“Japanese attempt to fire a bullet at American forces. Republicans demand Roosevelt’s resignation”.

Now you’ve got a picture of the basic lack of seriousness and rationality associated with the right-wing claims, and the media’s stenography, about the Lap Bomber incident.  The basic premise of the Cheneyites argument is that, while we are engaged in a worldwide war against an implacable and omnipresent foe,  if one enemy footsoldier attempts one act of war anyplace in the world, it signifies that everyone in the administration has failed in their duty and must resign.  Predictably, rather than pointing out that, when at war, enemies fight back and casualties can occur, the media swallows whole the moronic paradigm of risk-free, casualty-free global war as presented by Cheney and Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra.

The Republican strategy for exploiting politically the failed bombing attempt is conveniently outlined in Murdoch’s house organ for the right, the Wall Street Journal.  While Rep. Hoekstra, in a direct mail appeal, calls the Obama administration and Democrats “weak-kneed liberals”, and Cheney clangs his familiar gong of inexperience and mushiness, the best Axelrod can come up with is to call it “unbecoming” of Republicans to exploit national security politically.  WSJ notes that the White House has leaked to bloggers the fact that the Yemeni Al Queda leaders are former Guantanamo inmates released by Bush, and has also publicized some high-profile arrests, like the David Headley case.  The thing that no-one dares do is question the basic premise that the US can be engaged in multiple shooting wars in the Middle East, while also using unmanned drones to target suspects in multiple countries  where we are not officially at war (unfortunately slaughtering a few wedding parties in the bargain), without any cost or interruption to the daily security of Americans at home. 

As illustrated by my fictitous headline, if Republicans really believed their rhetoric of war, it would be obvious that wars presume enemies, and enemies fight back.  Wouldn’t it be refreshing if some intrepid journalist pointed out the fact that, in war, especially guerilla wars with no borders and no defined state actors, civilians are at risk, and that that is the price of “superpower” status and world policeman actions?

So can Obama and Democrats use this line of argument to bolster their case? Unfortunately, the answer is clear.  Unlike the British, who, while thoroughly despicable in their conduct of colonial empire, at least kept the stiff upper lip when the inevitable casualties ensued, the American public, body politic and media is so fundamentally immature that the idea of war without sacrifice (except some poor anonomous farmboys and homeboys whose official portraits scroll by on the evening news) is accepted as the norm, and any hostile act shakes our republic to the core. Any politician who notes that empire has cost, that enemies have resources, and that hypocrisy and abandonment of our core principles, as demonstrated by our support of Israeli exceptionalism and torture for convenience, has a price, would be committing political suicide for stating what any mature advisor would consider obvious. 

Would it have been a tragedy if that plane had been blasted from the sky?  Obviously, as it is a tragedy that the Taliban has murdered an entire CIA station in Afghanistan.  The greater tragedy is the fact that the solidarity in face of war that lead to the defeat of a far more dangerous and implacable foe in WWII has been abandoned by the Babbitts of the Republican right in their desperation to reclaim the right to undo our republic from within, as they have successfully done during every Repug administration in recent history.  And the foundational catastrophe of our age is that the press, in its laziness and frivolity, accepts every shoddy premise put forth by the know-nothing caucus as if it’s a serious critique, without once noting that a lie is a lie, or that a failed party with blood on its hands from 9/11 to Iraq to Abu Ghraib to Palestine to the dismantling of our moral legitimacy and economic stability has little right to give lessons in war policy.

I did some further reflection on the ‘same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ‘same tired premise.’  Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.

After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy.   Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that  enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.

9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror.  They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.

The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.

In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then  install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’   Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.

Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more.  The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains.  The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ‘safe from Terrorism.’

Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.

Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.

Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.

First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror.  It’s impossible.  It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents.  Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.

Terrorists come in many flavors.  Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists.  No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear.    This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!

I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.

This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists.   Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there.  Ergo – stalement.

How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again?  It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground.  And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global?  There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.

Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy.  And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog.  Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds.  Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.

Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs -  and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.

Muriel Kane reports for Raw Story:

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an “executive assassination ring” throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

. . . “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”

My first reaction to reading this was skeptical: “Who did they assassinate?” After all, how could the claim be true if they completely failed to accomplish anything?

Then I remembered who was in charge.  Failure would be the expected result, wouldn’t it?

Eric Black has more on Hersh’s comments, in a less snarky vein. Ditto Emptywheel, with more on the incompetence angle. Kinda like the Keystone Kops, only with more dead bodies.

Via email, but I’m told it was in a Washington Post slideshow from the inauguration yesterday.

Over the holiday I was thinking how nice it would be to ‘get over’ the Bush years by having a fitting send-off for him before the inaguration – what about having a big shoe-in on 1/19?  Maybe we could do one in each big city, organize it through meetups?

I’m picturing having some big effigies of Shrubya and Dick.  Everybody could bring some old shoes from their closets and we could all fling our shoes at the effigies.  Sure, it wouldn’t be as gratifying as flinging them at the real guys, but there is a much lower chance of getting shot by an overzealous Secret Service guy.

What do y’all thinK?

Swopa must be off doing something either more productive or more entertaining. Therefore I must post Cheney’s disclosure that he worked on the Plame press talking points.

From all-but-admitting that he was the force behind the waterboarding and Gitmo to casually almost admitting to this felony, Cheney is just laughing at us, knowing that he ‘got away with it.’

“Thanks for explaining how to use the bureaucracy to circumvent the President and impose my own policies… Hillary passes along her thanks, too!”

(Via Reuters:  “Vice President Dick Cheney bids farewell to Vice President-elect Joe Biden, following their nearly hour-long visit at the vice president’s residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington.”)

Beware the kiss of death.

Oh dear.