Saturday, October 04, 2003

How dost thou sucketh? Let me count the ways. . . The administration treated the UN with contempt--and then went back to ask that body's help. They used bait and switch tactics to convince people that Saddam and Bin Laden/al-Qaida were synonomous. . .that to pursue Saddam was to pursue BinLaden/al-Qaida. Then they let both of them escape. That's lying compounded by incompetence. The only thing we have to fear is the lack of fear: that's this administration's apparent mantra. By warning everyone to stay frightened,  they justify closed hearings, inaccessible reports, the Patriot Act, no-bid contracts, and the anti-democratic  notion that to question is to give aid and comfort to the enemy. For Operation Desert Storm, in which we engaged our allies, we paid 1/10 of the freight. For this war we're apparently paying 100%, because we were unwilling to wait or listen to allies and the UN who were never willing to sign on. Whatever happened to the art of persuasion and the policy of exhausting all other options?. Karl Rove (probably it was Karl Rove) pandered to the basest instincts of the basest members of the republican party during the 2000 primaries--encouraging talk about John McCain's illegitimate nigger baby. . .supposedly the spawn of McCain's dalliance with African-American prostitutes. (The baby was actually a Bangladeshi orphan Mrs. McCain obtained from a Mother Teresa orphanage).  Ran up a deficit that most mainstream economists warn will have long-term harmful effects on this country. Republicans are fiscally conservative and historically support invariably vote for lower taxes and lower deficits (star wars notwithstanding!) (Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits notwithstanding!). By framing it as an act of patriotism and sacrifice, Bush could have persuaded the $200,000+-a-year earners to defer the tax cut in light of the domestic economic slowdown, homeland security needs, and the unfinished war in Iraq. If the deferrment was framed as an act of patriotism, it would have had a unifying effect on the nation--rather than promoting more rancor and class warfare urges--and approached on that basis, I suspect Warren Buffett and Bill Gates Sr. wouldn't have been the only millionaires to sign on. "Ask not what America can do. . .Ask what you can do for your country" comes to mind.  Now that's leadership! Bush and Rice seem to be incapable of moderating between opposing viewpoints, making a final decision, and preventing opposing departments from going off on their own open-loop and negating or interfering with what another department has done. This is grist for a future Harvard case study on mismanagement writ large. Personally, I've never cared for the "trust me" style of government. It's not what democracy is supposed to be about, and decisions are usually better when there is input from a broad range of sources. When governments start hunkering down, closing off criticism and using the "trust me" mantra, I generally want to lock up the silver.  And after the California energy and Iraqi war fiascos, why, pray tell, would I even consider trusting these incompetents? C.I.A. analysts felt pressured to make their intelligence assessments of Iraq conform with the administration's policy objectives. This was after 911--perhaps the worst intelligence failure in US history. Why not make a serious stab at fixing Intel--rather than further politicizing it? Rumsfeld  and other Bushies maligned other countries. French fries became freedom fries. Given that these countries are democracies, they ran the risk of not just insulting the leaders of these countries (who tend to be pragmatic), but also their voting publics.  Even if Chirac wants to support us in future, his struggle to get the voters to go along has become much more difficult because of the disrespect U.S. leadership exhibited toward the French. In the case of Turkey, US leadership actually trashed the Turkish government for listening to and carrying out the will of its people.  Our country, which presumably stands for democratic institutions, disrespected the fledgling Turkish parliament, which was showing that it takes democracy seriously. But how surprising is that, after all, in light of our 2000 electoral travesty? I find myself "looking for communists under the bed," and I don't generally fancy conspiracy theories, nor do I enjoy that role. Rather than rebut scientific reports or point out the downside and tradeoffs of environmental versus economic concerns, the government produced expurgated versions of the reports. People may not like what they read in the news pages of the Wall Street Journal, but they depend on the reporters' honesty to help them make informed business decisions and avoid costly mistakes. Expurgating scientific papers is like controlling the news. Entrepreneurship, good business management and learning from one's mistakes are competitive-advantage tools. Take them away, and you run the risk of having a Soviet-style economy, where everybody realizes things aren't working, but you're not allowed to say so and thereby set the winds of change in motion. They treat their critics like enemies of the state. Why else would you blow a CIA agent's cover--unless that agent and her spouse were traitors? The administration has made the US look like a weak, muscle bound giant that can't  fight terrorism, can't achieve alliances, may lose some of its economic clout if it angers consumers of other nations, and is losing its power to persuade by example. Prior to the Iraqi freedom runup, the US was perceived as the world's economic and military giant that was the envy and role model of the world. After 911 we had the sympathy of that world--and we squandered all that goodwill. Our soft power--the power to influence, persuade and be admired for our cultural and democratic institutions--is on the wane. America-as-impotent-giant was the image we gained during the hostage crisis in the Carter administration. It transformed a lot of democrats into Reagan republicans. Rather than make America look strong, this administration is exposing our soft underbelly, our lack of knowledge and caring about the outside world, our hypocrisy, and the limits to American power. This administration is squandering the country's environmental resources and failing to develop a policy that supports a greater level of energy independence. Crony capitalism has supplanted the silicon valley entrepreneurial model as the economic flavor of the decade. It's not what you know but who you know--not who you are, but who your parents were. It's not about merit, it's about privilege. It's about going along to get along. America, which thrives as a country of immigration, entrepreneurship, daring and imagination, is falling for crony capitalism. Free markets, entrepreneurial ventures and free societies thrive on openness--not secrecy. In a risk-taking environment of unconventional ideas and conflicting points of view, mistakes are made--but the odds of them being tweaked and corrected are way better than zero. A minority staff report issued last month by the House Government Reform Committee investigating scientific research found 21 areas in which the administration had "manipulated the scientific process and distorted or suppressed scientific findings," including the president's assurance that there were more than 60 lines for stem-cell research when there were actually only 11.  If this sort of thing continues, we will compromise our scientific and research stature as a nation. From the Arab world's point of view, it looks like the main outcome of Operation Iraqi Freedom is to give the Israelis a free hand to colonize the West Bank, forestall permanently a viable Palestinian state, and attack its Arab neighbors at will. That's a sure-fire recipe for breeding more terrorism. We still don't know why the Iraqi war was fought. People argue that oil was behind it, that intelligence pointed to wmds poised to destroy us, that we were losing bases and reliable allies in saudi arabia, that halliburton and bechtel were hungry for contracts, that we wanted to create a friendlier neighbor for israel, that we wanted to set a democratic example and thus ignite a positive domino effect in the middle east, that we had a plan to invade several countries in an aggressive quest for empire. . .the list goes on. When the reasons still seem so murky (at least with Vietnam, you could say it was related to cold-war orthodoxies), how can we trust this government? Bush has no exit strategy for Iraq. Bush appears to be ignorant and lazy. The buck doesn't begin or even appear--let alone stop here. Forget about accountability. With this president, the out-of-the-loop defense seems downright plausible. Guantanamo Bay prisoners have no access to lawyers. 7:41:31 AM