The reasons for the colossal, insurmountable, life-draining mess that is today’s Iraq is right there in front of our faces. We really did have a windown of opportunty. Whether we could ever have “won” along the lines of Bush’s original promises (a cost-free and easy-to-implement beacon of democracy, Sunnis and Shiites living and working in partnership, the end of torture and oppression, etc.) remains highly questionable. But there was no reason it had to result in the total meltdown we are wtnessing today. You can trace the meltdown to various key decisions made by our war-time president, namely the shock-and-awe approach based on using few forces armed with star-wars weaponry; the abrupt dissolution of the Iraqi army and with it any means to maintain order (not to mention creating immeasurable ill will); Bremer’s delay of elections, the decision to focus on oil pipelines over drinking water and electricity – well, we all know the list by now.

But there’s another factor that isn’t as widely discussed that should go at the very top, and that is Bush’s choice to put all rebuilding operations in the hands of hacks and cronies, the very least capable people. This strategy was exposed in regard to Katrina, but the world has yet to understand just how lethal the same process proved to be in Iraq. It literally guaranteed our failure. This is so appalling.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans — restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O’Beirne’s office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O’Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn’t need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What they needed to be was a member of the Republican Party.

O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

Many of those chosen by O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration’s gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation that sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people.

Digby writes a powerful post about this relatively unknown story today, and I wish there were a way I could force every independent and on-the-fence Republican to read it.

The Republicans are telling us that they should be re-elected because the Democrats aren’t serious about national security and only they can be trusted to keep the terrorists from killing us in our beds.

But the way the administration went about creating the CPA illustrates everything you need to know about the childlike sciolism of these so-called grown-ups. They insisted on invading a well contained country of 25 million people, ripped its society to shreds, and then put a bunch of low level cronies and inexperienced schoolkids in charge of creating a Club for Growth wet dream in the desert. And they spent billions and billions of dollars failing to do anything but lay the groundwork for civil war. I don’t know if it’s possible to screw up on a grander scale than that.

Here’s the question for the American people. Let’s, for the sake of argument, say that you don’t like Democrats. You have the vague feeling in the pit of your stomach that they just don’t have the cojones to do “what needs to be done.” You can’t get over the feeling that they aren’t serious enough.

But if you are a thoughtful person of any political persuasion who is concerned about national security or the economy, you simply cannot read that story above and have even the slightest faith that such people can be trusted to continue to run the government with no oversight.

Well, it’s true, but the key word in that last graf is “thoughtful.” Thoughtful people aren’t the ones to worry about, but rather the naive, the blindly faithful, the poorly educated, those who see Bush as the Second Coming, those who take Karl Rove seriously, those who get their news from FrontPage – and tragically, that’s a hefty chunk of the population.

Which brings me to my latest fear. As long as Karl and Karen wage an ingenious propaganda war that the Dems cannot effectively counter, none of us is safe and the GOP may well surprise us all once again in November. We will see the same strategy as 2004, when Rove gave up on independents and focused only on the base – the herd animals who can be manipulated with slogans and smears and Swift Boat Veterans and 15-second character assassination commercials. I want to think that 2006 has to be different, because Bush has so alienated so many Americans. But look at all he’s gotten away with to date, with nary a word of criticism for such obscene misdeeds as jamming the effort to buiild Iraq with Heritage Foundation flunkies. And I really fear he might still get away with it again.

Time to match Karl and Karen’s wave of propaganda with a wave of our own. You’d think we’d have learned something after 2000 and 2004, but the Dems never cease to amaze me with their political imbecilities. All the evidence is on the table; the article above exposes the sheer incompetency and stupidity that is the effort to rebuild Iraq. How can Rove use a piece of nonsensical, irrelevant, 30-year-old innuendo like “Christmas in Cambodia” and destroy the Democratic Party, while the Democrats can’t use red-hot, huge smoking guns like this to put even a nick in the infamously thick skin of the GOP? If we can’t win in November with all the devastating tools the Republicans have handed us on a Tiffany silver platter, then I have to give up on the Dems, maybe forever. It means we are destined to live in a GOP world, maybe for the rest of our lives. And that is scarier than hell.

There’s another sublime essay over at China Daily Watch, this time on the way the erstwhile rag covered (and didn’t cover) the 30th anniversay of Mao’s death. I don’t agree with all the points he makes in this lengthy post, but his criticisms of the paper are to die for.

With every SOE that comes crashing down, every foreign company that invests, every administrative process that becomes incentive-based, every new shop that opens and every personal blog that gets written, China moves away from Mao. This conformist society is moving away from the collective to the personal. It is replacing communism with nationalism, the Red Detachment of Women with the Rolling Stones. Surely there is something positive that can be taken from this? Surely even in this time of giddy advance there is a moment to catch one’s breath and look back at where the country has come from?

Not at China Daily there isn’t.

The paper had one short piece on the 30th Anniversary of the death of Chairman Mao, placed on the bottom of Page 1. (There was no editorial, no opinion piece, and not even a Features story.)

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2006-09/09/content_684952.htm
Quite frankly it was repellent twaddle.

‘Time passes,’ was the opening sentence, and somehow it got worse from there. The reporter interviewed several ‘experts,’ none Chinese, who opined such gems as: ‘I didn’t know it was the anniversary on Saturday. Mao is a hero, but in a very vague sense.’ Why print that? If he doesn’t know it’s the goddam anniversary, what the hell can he say that is of any importance? Also the writer made a major mistake, which somehow the editors failed to catch, that ‘Seek Truth From Facts’ was a Mao Zedong slogan. No it wasn’t! Sure, it’s an expression that has been around for long time and may well have been used at some stage, but it is above all a Deng slogan. It’s like saying Deng would accuse people of being ‘left in form but right in essence!’ Truly shocking.

And then he really rips into China Daily. Funny, smart and written with the acerbic wit that I hitherto thought only I myself possessed. Damn, competition.

This is from last week, but it just came to my attention. It’s written by Jonathan Zimmerman, a history professor at my alma mater NYU, who fears Chinese language courses for US college students may have embedded propaganda in their curricula, a trick used by Mussolini back in the 1930s. China’s government developed the Adanced Placement course for Chinese language and culture to be administered by the US college board, and Zimmerman’s not happy about that.

The same regime that has brought us public executions, forced labor camps, and Internet censors will soon be funding a language and culture class in a school near you.

…The regime, I suspect, will probably follow Mussolini’s model and try to use the new AP course to play up China’s economic achievements and play down its crimes. But if any Chinese citizens protest, they’ll risk prison, or worse.

So it’s up to the rest of us to monitor the program. Any school district offering this course should also make its textbooks and lesson plans available in English, so parents and other concerned citizens can read them. What, if anything, will the texts – officially, written by the College Board – say about the Tiananmen Square massacre? About the jailing of Chinese journalists? The abuse of psychiatric patients? We have the right to know.

Of course, American students desperately need to study non-English languages. Everyone who cares about our national future should consider this appalling fact: Less than half of American high school students even take a foreign language. Compare that with almost every other developed nation, where foreign-language study is compulsory. Our problem is especially embarrassing when it comes to Chinese, which is spoken by 1.5 billion people around the globe – and studied by fewer than 50,000 Americans. More than 1 million American students study French, by contrast, while only 70 million people in the world speak it.

So yes, absolutely, more Americans should take Chinese. Our economy, our cultural life, and our national security all demand it.

But we should study the subject on our own terms, making sure that it also reflects our best civic language of freedom, open discussion, and democracy. Now, more than ever before, it’s a tongue that we all need to speak.

Mandarin on OUR terms. I like that. (Is there a copyright infringement here?)

I have no idea if Zimmerman’s claims have any merit or if he is a chest-thumping Cold Warrior who still thinks the Commies are trying to compromise “our precious bodily fluids.” But I’d love to have a look at the curriculum to make my own judgement.

Update: As a side note, this is a most unusual blog I stumbled upon while searching for what other blogs are saying about the Zimmerman column. And you think I have issues with the CCP?

He is one of the best writers I know of, and he was a speechwriter for GHW Bush and a staunch Republican. You have to read Buckley’s exquisite column, of which I will snip only a brief portion.

I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. In 2004, I could not bring myself to pull the same lever again. Neither could I bring myself to vote for John Kerry, who, for all his strengths, credentials, and talent, seems very much less than the sum of his parts. So, I wrote in a vote for George Herbert Walker Bush, for whom I worked as a speechwriter from 1981 to ’83. I wish he’d won.

Bob Woodward asked Bush 43 if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq. The son replied that he had consulted ‘a higher father.’ That frisson you feel going up your spine is the realization that he meant it. And apparently the higher father said, ‘Go for it!’ There are those of us who wish he had consulted his terrestrial one; or, if he couldn’t get him on the line, Brent Scowcroft. Or Jim Baker. Or Henry Kissinger. Or, for that matter, anyone who has read a book about the British experience in Iraq. (18,000 dead.)

Anyone who has even a passing personal acquaintance of Bush 41 knows him to be, roughly speaking, the most decent, considerate, humble, and cautious man on the planet. Also, the most loving parent on earth. What a wrench it must be for him to pick up his paper every morning and read the now-daily debate about whether his son is officially the worst president in U.S. history. (That chuckling you hear is the ghost of James Buchanan.) To paraphrase another president, I feel 41’s pain. Does 43 feel 41’s? Does he, I wonder, feel ours?

…What have they done to my party? Where does one go to get it back? One place comes to mind: the back benches. It’s time for a time-out. Time to hand over this sorry enchilada to Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid, who has the gift of being able to induce sleep in 30 seconds. Or, with any luck, to Mark Warner or, what the heck, Al Gore. I’m not much into polar bears, but this heat wave has me thinking the man might be on to something.

It gets better and angrier, with each line. Remember, this is Christopher Buckley, a conservative Republican, a speechwriter for Bush Senior. This isn’t MoveOn.org talking. I think we’re going to see a swarm of independents making a beeline away from Bush in November. If this is where conservative Republicans are, what about the independents? At the risk of creating bad luck, I can’t see how the Dems can possibly lose this time (although, trust me, I won’t put anything past the Dems when it comes to political ineptitude).

Long ago, before anyone was reading this blog, I wrote about how China’s media loved to show how happy the Chinese people are. Just bubbling with mirth. Now we have further proof: they’re actually going to quantify the people’s happiness level, providing a new and valuable measurement tool for economists. Say hello to The Happiness Index.

China will formulate a new “happiness index” this year to include living conditions, the environment and salary, state television said on Wednesday.

“The Happiness Index will include ordinary people’s feelings towards their own living conditions, such as their income, employment, social welfare and the natural environment,” China Central Television cited statistics chief Qiu Xiaohua as saying.

“The more they feel satisfied about their lives, the higher the index will be,” he said.

Indices for “innovation” and “social harmony” would also be added, it said.

The report did not make clear if the happiness index would be incorporated into an existing indicator, or stand on its own.

Can you hear the reporter snickering as he typed that out? That last line is a classic example of stone-faced humor.

Thanks to the reader who emailed this to me.

Update: Here’s more, via the aforementioned email; not sure exactly which media it’s from, but it’s definitely from a Chinese pub.
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This year, China’s National Bureau of Statistics will include a new figure in its reports — the “happiness index.” National Bureau of Statistics chief Qiu Xiaohua explained that the “citizen happiness index” is an indicator of the populace’s overall satisfaction with a number of everyday factors, including income, employment, social security, and the environment.

(more…)

Who knew?

The story and discussion can be found here. And they accuse other countries of doctoring their textbooks? Lots of good links in the comments.

I make no secret of how I feel toward Karen Hughes: I thoroughly loathe her. She is the female version of Karl Rove, and while Karl is the master of the smear, Karen is the master of the deceptive talking point. Universally despised by every reporter for her maddening insistence on “staying on-message” even when everyone knows she is lying, Karen’s game was best summarized by right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson after he held a BS interview with her.

I’ve obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness.

Which brings us to today’s story. Karen is upset that we aren’t all going crazy enough over the nightmare of terrorism, even though so many of us now look with dread and suspicion on all things Moslem, even though we are throwing people off of planes because of T-shirts with arabic writing, even though we are indulging in non-stop grieving (understandably so) over 911, which the president raises at every possible moment. No, none of this is enough. We must do more, each and every one of us, making terrorism our No. 1 obsession. Where, oh where, Karen mournfully asks, is all the outrage??

Terrorism threatens all of us. It targets the very foundations of a free society. Yet where are the mothers organizing against terrorism as American mothers did against drunken driving? Where are the fathers promising to teach their sons to choose to live rather than choose to die? Where are the religious clerics and congregations of all faiths arguing that no just and loving God would call on young men and women to kill themselves and others in the name of religion?

….So why aren’t more of us doing more to stop the terror?

First, I believe most of us hope that terrorism is an aberration. Unfortunately, I do not believe it is true. Part of my job is to look at the propaganda being spread on Internet sites and TV sets around the world. It is chilling. Bombings are depicted as acts of glory. Children are being taught the language of hate. Thousands of people have been trained in terror training camps, convinced the only way to defend their faith is to kill all others who have a different point of view.

She honestly believe we need Mothers Against Drunk Driving-type programs to curb terrorism? She really thinks each of us should be actively engaged in fighting terrorism? I hate to tell her this, but there is more to our human existence than terrorism. Yes, it’s evil and bad and we should be vigilant and cautious and protect the airports and maintain security standards, etc., etc. But if we allow 18 men with box cutters to turn us into a nation of crazed paranoiacs existing only to think about terrorism, then Osama will have won by a landslide. (And he already has.)

All of that propaganda she’s seeing, all the gleeful exuberance over acts of terrorism, all the threats – they’ve been with us for a very long time, and we won’t stop Jihadists in Pakistan from committing their atrocities with cookie sales in America to boost terrorism awareness. Outrage isn’t the solution. (Maybe a more practical solution would be taking seriously reports written from terrorism authorities titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack within the United States.”) There’s a time for outrage and we deserve to feel outrage for years to come over 911. But to demand that we keep it top of mind at all times and live a life dedicated to “standing up to terrorism” (whatever that means) is, again, a sign that we lost to Al Qaeda. Osama has turned us inside out. He has made us irrational. We live in the shadow of his fear, and that fear is Osama’s victory.

Meanwhile, the real truth is Hughes just wants to make us all hysterical before the November elections. After that, she couldn’t give a flying fuck. Like her counterpart Karl, she lives for one thing and one thing only, protecting Boy George, and everything she advocates is always and inevitably tied to Bush’s political standing. Never believe a single syllable she says. There’s a reason she’s the most detested woman in Washington. (Sorry if I sound a tad harsh, but I’ve had issues with this lady for years and years.)

The following is a guest post by my friend Bill Stimson, whom I finally had the plesure of meeting this past weekend. The views of this post do not necessarily reflect those of the site owner.
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Are China’s Rulers Illegal?
by William R. Stimson

Once again China’s government lurches wildly and unpredictably in the diametrically opposite direction to the one everybody agrees it should rationally be headed in during these times. Not unlike a ward of psychopaths intent on blocking out reality, the country’s leadership has abruptly announced that, effective immediately, it is further restricting foreign news within its borders.

What makes this current measure of particular interest is its exact wording. Among the categories of news to be made illegal is anything that may “endanger China’s national security, reputation and interests.” It’s common knowledge that what most endangers China’s national security, reputation and interests around the world today is the banning of information and the censorship of news within China. So are we to infer from this that China’s Communist Party and its state-run New China News Agency have now effectively been made illegal?

Or, in the same way China considers all discussion of Taiwan’s status to be an internal affair, i.e., a matter not subject to discussion – is it perhaps also the case that it considers the endangerment of its own national security, reputation and interests to be an internal affair, i.e. something that can be allowed to go on unimpeded as long as it is perpetuated by Party leaders themselves?

Although this may seem irrational to those unfamiliar with China’s form of government, the fact is that China’s rulers define their own security, reputation and interests to be what is good for China. Since, other than them, no one else in China has a voice, they are free to get away with this. Insofar as they are making it increasingly difficult for outside news to penetrate the country, it’s not hard for them to win over the Chinese people to their way of seeing things.

So, even if now, according to these new measures that have been put into effect, China’s rulers are, in fact, illegal – nobody in China except the rulers themselves will have any way to find this out. It’s understandable why it’s so important to them to keep it this way. We can expect further crackdowns in the future on all kinds of news media, the arresting and harassing of even more journalists, a further tightening of the regulations governing Web sites and online forums, the mobilization of many tens of thousands more government workers to screen and block Web content, and the continued firing of editors in publications that resist official control.

In this one area, China is back to something like a Cultural Revolution. This looks bad, which is yet another reason why its leaders are scrambling to cover it all up, no matter how much harm this does to China and the 1.3 billion Chinese.

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William R. Stimson is a writer who lives in Taiwan. More of his writing can be found at www.billstimson.com

I am, despite angry emails and comments, discontinuing the pasting of newspaper columns, as it’s become more trouble than it’s worth and it’s not what I want this site to be about. Exceptions will be Frank Rich and, when I think they’re super-relevant must-reads, Krugman and Friedman and the occasional MoDo. Usually I would skip Brooks and Tierney, but when Brooks writes a column like today’s, where you can feel his disillusionment with Bush and his despair over the war in Iraq, I’ll offer it. It isn’t immediately clear where Brooks is going with all this, and suddenly, when getting down to the specifics of Iraq, he lets it out. Be sure to read to the end.

Ends Without Means
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 14, 2006

A leade’s first job is to project authority, and George Bush certainly does that. In a 90-minute interview with a few columnists in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Bush swallowed up the room, crouching forward to energetically make a point or spreading his arms wide to illustrate the scope of his ideas – always projecting confidence and intensity.

(more…)

After providing a lengthy translation of a newspaper report on the story and how public opinion affected the investigation and ultimately dictated its terms, eswn notes,

This is one of those sea changes in China that you would not recognize while it was happening bit by bit. Ten years ago, the case would never hit the light of day, whether or not mass incidents occurred. This time, the police were fully aware of the public opinion wave while their investigation was going on. When they announced their findings, their worst nightmare was realized with two major mass incidents. This may trigger a national-level investigation in order to mollify public opinion. What is the difference between now and ten years ago? Would you believe — the Internet?

A sea change, indeed. It’s a great story, and one can only wonder how long the government can hold back the ire of its people when it comes to other injustices. In the US, the Internet famously led to the downfall of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and the resignation of NYT editor in chief Howell Raines. Is the day far off when we won’t see similar trials of leading figures by netizens in China? I don’t see how the government can push back the groundswell of public opinion, no matter how many filters and firewalls they implement, no matter how many journalists and Internet essayists they imprison. If they had the power to stem the tide, the Rui’an riots would never have happened, would they?