The Commentariat -- May 20, 2012

My column in today's New York Times eXaminer is on "Willard's Whoppers." The NYTX front page is here.

** David Sanger of the New York Times on the evolution of President Obama's thinking on Afghanistan. This is an adaptation of part of a book by Sanger & really is a must-read. CW: Main takeaway: Obama agreed with reasonable peaceniks all along. I'd love to read your reactions. Secondary takeaway: it looks to me as if the military was able to snooker Obama in a way it ultimately lost to Kennedy's better judgment in the Cuban missile crisis.

New York Times Editors: "Racial discrimination in voting is 'one of the gravest evils that Congress can seek to redress,.' Judge David Tatel wrote in a crucial ruling on Friday upholding the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act."

Maureen Dowd: "... it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. Rather than all-embracing, the church hierarchy has become all-constricting."

In comments to yesterday's Commentariat, P. D. Pepe mentioned a book review by Prof. David Greenberg, writing in The New Republic, of a Dwight Eisenhower biography by Jean Edward Smith. Here's the link. 

Jessica Silver-Greenberg & Nelson Schwartz of the New York Times: the cause of the now-$3 billion JPMorgan Chase loss -- Lyme disease! CW: if you read this story, keep in the back of your mind James Kwak's observation that JPMorgan was simply regressing toward the mean. The two theories -- the Times' and Kwak's -- are not necessarily mutually exclusive. ...

... Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post: "Aside from the embarrassment and the short-term financial hit, the real damage to JPMorgan is that it exposed how the big Wall Street banks were planning to get around the new Volcker rule....: The way JPMorgan traders constructed their "hedges" "has very little to do with hedging and a lot to do with gambling.... What useful social or economic purpose do [credit default swaps/derivatives] serve?" Actually, the CDSs cause a lot of damage -- for instance, the 2008 financial crisis. "Banking and finance have become too detached from the real economy they were meant to serve."

Dan Eggen & T. W. Farnam of the Washington Post: "Conservative interest groups have dumped well over $20 million into congressional races so far this year, outspending their liberal opponents 4 to 1 and setting off a growing panic among Democrats struggling to regain the House and hold on to their slim majority in the Senate."

Presidential Race

Nancy Cohen, writing in Rolling Stone, on the many, many reasons "President Romney" would be a disaster for women.

Jodi Kantor of the New York Times: Mitt's policies are Mormon policies, but none of his friends can figure out how Romney rationalizes his untruthful attacks on his political opponents. P.S. He used to pray for Bain Capital!

Right Wing World

It Depends upon What the Meaning of "Entitlement" Is. Jed Lugum & Josh Israel of Think Progress: Joe Ricketts was ready to spend $10 million to smear President Obama, but after members of the press & the public criticized that plan, Ricketts has decided instead to put the money into a superPac he controls called "Ending Spending Political Action Fund." Yet he has asked taxpayers to spend hundreds of millions on him and his family. When it comes to spending on his interests, however, Ricketts sings a different tune. CW: read the whole post.

News Ledes

Rolling Stone: "Robin Gibb, one-third of the Bee Gees, died Sunday after a long battle with cancer, his spokesperson has confirmed via a statement. Gibb was 62 years old."

Washington Post: "Republican leaders doubled down Sunday on a renewed push to secure spending cuts as part of any deal to increase the national debt limit, drawing a sharper line in an emerging fight over the issue."

Reuters: "The former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people has died, his brother said on Sunday. He was 59. Abdel Basset al-Megrahi died at home after a long battle with cancer. His health had deteriorated quickly overnight, his brother Abdulhakim told Reuters."

AP: "World leaders weary of war will tackle Afghanistan's post-conflict future -- from funding for security forces to upcoming elections -- when the summit opens Sunday." ...

... New York Times: "The United States and Pakistan are not expected to secure a deal to reopen supply lines to Afghanistan before a NATO summit begins on Sunday, casting a pall over talks that are to focus on winding down the alliance’s combat role in the Afghan war, American officials said." ...

... AP: "Protesters gathering in Chicago for the NATO summit were gearing up for their largest demonstration Sunday, when thousands are expected to march from a downtown park to the lakeside convention center where President Barack Obama and dozens of other world leaders will meet."

AP: "Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia are backing Montana in its fight to prevent the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision from being used to strike down state laws restricting campaign spending. The states led by New York are asking the high court to preserve Montana's state-level regulations on corporate political expenditures, according to a copy of a brief written by New York's attorney general's office and obtained by The Associated Press ahead of Monday's filing."

AP: "The western United States and eastern Asia will be treated this weekend to a rare solar spectacle when the moon slides across the sun, creating a 'ring of fire.' The solar spectacle will first be seen in eastern Asia around dawn Monday, local time.... Then, the late day sun (on Sunday in the U.S.) will transform into a glowing ring in southwest Oregon, Northern California, central Nevada, southern Utah, northern Arizona and New Mexico and finally the Texas Panhandle." Use protective eyewear.

AP: "Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg updated his status to 'married' on Saturday. Zuckerberg and 27-year-old Priscilla Chan tied the knot at a small ceremony at his Palo Alto, Calif., home, capping a busy week for the couple."

Priscilla Chen & new hubby.

Comments

[Jack Mahoney]

Marie, a quick note of thanks for posting Roy Zimmerman's brilliant new song. I have shared it with the willing and the unwilling alike.

Also, I have a few bones to pick with Dowd, who keeps noticing the trees but apparently can't see the forest. The Catholic Church is a striking example of how something good (the words of the character Jesus) can be bastardized by those with control issues.

On a similar topic, I have nothing but disdain for those who profess "belief" long after their childhood religious trance has been disspelled. It's the non-believing believers that give the Bring Back the Inquisition crowd the idea that they're the popular kids.

Anyway, beautiful Sunday here in Brunswick, Maine. Hope all is well with you.

[PD Pepe]

After reading Sanger's piece, I was reminded of LBJ's foreign policy advisors, all of whom had been Kennedy's men––telling him to stand firm, that Vietnam could not be lost and thinking many months ago that I imagined Obama was getting the same advice about Afghanistan and Pakistan. The former a long slog toward something resembling a country that would take years to save from itself; the latter a corrupt country that houses nuclear weapons and is on tinder hooks for all-out war if one of the terrorist groups attack India again.
Our military history is fraught with bad decisions and horrible outcomes. Truman and the bomb is one of the greatest, Vietnam one of the worst (I'm not even going to mention Iraq). Early in 1963 during a NSC meeting the only person that disagreed with our remaining in Vietnam and the only person who had any deep experience with that country was Paul Kattenburg, forty one, who had spent the 1950's in Vietnam as a young Foreign Service officer. Now he had just returned from Saigon where he had gone to inspect as chairman of the State Dept.'s Vietnam task force. His report was dismal, Diem was finished,etc., we need to disengage––the whole U.S. policy, he decided, "was just nonsense." Kattenburg later recalled with considerable bitterness, "There was not a single person there that knew what he was talking about...They didn't know Vietnam. They didn't know the past. they had forgotten their history. They simply didn't understand the identification of nationalism and communism...I thought, God, we're walking into a major disaster."
Kattenburg, by the way, was dismissed from the VTF in 1964 largely at the insistence of Bill Bundy who charged that his pessimism was "a disservice."

So it gives me comfort that we have a president who appears to stand his ground and comes to some sensible, albeit contrary to some, conclusions. I think we have an example of someone who has learned a great deal while serving this country––evolving in more ways than one, you could say.

[Jack Mahoney]

The Sanger article describes a man in a position of limited power who has considered his options and picked one that may be achievable (as opposed to the options his Predecessor (in the words of M. Romney) chose, which were inchoate and based on an unfounded sense of omnipotence.

I predict, however, that this article will form the basis for the Fox News-led attack that "Obama was never committed to winning in Afghanistan," as if being "all in" would have made a whit of difference. Let's spend our money building a nation that just might stay built.

[Marvin Schwalb]

"Mitt's policies are Mormon policies, but none of his friends can figure out how Romney rationalizes his untruthful attacks on his political opponents". I can. His god has given him permission to lie in order to achieve the higher aim and I am pretty sure that Mitt is not the first person to use that excuse. When that sort of behavior is done by criminals it is called sociopathy. When it is done by others it is called religion.
If you read the article, you will come away seriously scared. But it represents an interesting context with Maureen Dowd's piece. She reminds us of the difference between religion as a moral belief and religion as a business for the church. And that is the game from the beginning of time. In Mitt's case, he uses his magic as an excuse and so does the Vatican.
P.S. I was surprised but pleased to see the NAACP in favor of gay marriage. I have always wondered how the descendants of slaves could use the words from their bible as an excuse for anything.

[Akhilleus]

The other night I watched a Frontline report on the state of forensic investigatory methods. It was not merely eye opening. It was eye popping. Here’s the gist of it. The basic forensic tool in place for over 100 years has been fingerprint analysis. I don’t know about everyone else, but the official documentation I’ve always read indicates from sources such as (actually, predominantly) the FBI, that fingerprint identification is 100% accurate, can’t fail, never miss, never wrong.

This turns out, spectacularly, to be not the case at all. I won’t go into detail about it, but let’s just say that what we’ve been given to believe is pure science is more like “Yeah, I think this is the guy. Sentence him to life.”

In a test, fingerprints were re-submitted to the exact same analysts who made their 100%, can’t miss, never wrong findings.
6 out of 10 came to different conclusions the second time around.
Why bring this up in a discussion of foreign policy decisions? Because bad advice has been peddled by so-called can’t miss, 100% always right “experts” to presidents for the last generation or more. At least since most of us were kids (I’m making a general age assumption based on the comments I’ve read for some time now).

It seems since before Kennedy, no president has been immune to or able to effectively counter bad to terrible advice. Let’s tick it off. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs. We have to do it, it can’t miss. Next scene, Cuba state television shows Castro’s troops rounding up, arresting and jailing or executing most of the participants. Egg on face.

Kennedy AND Johnson encouraged—no, bullied—into a deepening commitment to the Viet Nam swamp. Anyone who has seen Errol Morris’ “Fog of War” and listened open-mouthed, to Robert MacNamara beat his breast about how wrong they all were even when they were promising that they were 100% right, can only shake their head in amazement at the hubris of it all.

Nixon and Kissinger. Need I say more?

Reagan, Iran Contra. Ditto.

Bush and the Straussian Neo-con masters of the universe. Again.

Obama?

It seems that presidents are typically taken advantage of in their first terms when it doesn’t matter how much experience they’ve had, it all goes to shit when faced with a room full of stern faced 100%-ers encouraging them to take at face value their every assumption and guess as complete fact.

One president notoriously bullied into a terrible foreign policy blunder that we are still paying for was Eisenhower. One would think that a supreme commander with his experience could tell a prick like John Foster Dulles to go fuck himself when Dulles and the British came to him and demanded that that he allow the CIA to deep six Iranian president Mossadegh and install a vicious, greedy, murdering megalomaniac like the Shah. But he didn’t. They waved the “Communists Will Take Over” flag and he surrendered without a fight. Prior to that, the US was considered a reasonably stable force for good in the world who, if not exactly an ally, was not an enemy either. Because of Dulles, the Brits and Eisenhower, we are still considered the Great Satan by millions in the Mideast. And trusted about as much as you would trust a child abuser with your kids.

So I bring up this idea of absolutism because it’s such a staple of right-wing ideology. “We are absolutely right, all the time, no matter what” is the kind of thinking that will get us killed, and has killed, maimed, and displaced millions in that region since George (I don’t make mistakes) Bush listened to the Cheneys, Wolfowitzes, and the University of Chicago epigones of Leo Strauss who convinced him that they were superior mortals whose duty it was to lie to the American public in order to institute their version of world dominance. Why? Because they were 100% right. Always.

I don’t know what the answer is but I’m pretty sure Romney will not be the first to break the cycle of presidents victimized by their own lack of balls in the face of advisors who have been there for decades and who all have their own world views and axes to sharpen. And use.

And like outcome of problems with forensic analysis, too often the innocent are sentenced to hard time and the guilty go free.

[PD Pepe]

Akilleus' mention of our little foray into Iran thanks to Dulles, and Kermit Roosevelt during the Eisenhower administration was because of––wait for it––OIL. Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil facilities––well, we can't have that can we? One of the best books on all of this is Stephen Kinzer's "All the Shah's Men." During the Carter administration handling of the Shah's entry into the U.S. to get medical treatment provoked the militants that stormed the U.S. embassy in Teheran who took seventy American hostages after the Shah was admitted to New York Hospital. Another (really) wise man, George Ball (under sec. of state) was proved correct when he warned Carter not to let the Shah enter the U.S., but he was ignored (he was also one that warned about us getting involved in Vietnam). Ball said at the time: "had it not been for Mr. Kissinger and a few others making themselves enormously obnoxious for the administration, trying to force the Shah into this country, maybe we wouldn't have done it, even for reasons of compassion." Bottom line: the U.S. banks made a killing on the hostage crisis.

[Akhilleus]

PD,

I read Kinzer's book on Turkey, "Crescent and Star" a few years ago. An immensely instructive read. Exhaustive research combined with an indigenous feel for the culture only available to one who has lived in that culture. If the Shah book is anything like that it's worth everyone's time.

One other book I have come to consider essential is Robert Fisk's highly readable overview of the last 100 years (mostly the last 30) in the middle east, "The Great War for Civilization." Bush acolytes and right-wingers rip it as biased because it seeks to tell the truth. If there are mistakes, the overall approach is a necessary corrective to the hyper biases of the press and much mainstream journalism over the last decade, stemming from fear of being painted a traitor by the right and supporters of non-stop war and undifferentiated hatred of Islam.

I also wanted to thank you for bringing up George Ball, one of the more interesting and prophetic (in ways good and bad) characters on the international stage over the last 50 years. I recall a memo I first read in the Pentagon Papers that Ball sent to the big mucky-mucks in the mid 60s including McGeorge Bundy and MacNamara and, I think, Dean Rusk, in which he admits that going deeper into Viet Nam was a mistake for which he was partially culpable (an advisor actually accepting responsibility for a bad decision!! Unheard of. Just imagine Wolfowitz stating that he had made a mistake when he pushed Bush to invade a country that had nothing--zero--to do with 9/11. Never happen. Conservatives don't make mistakes. And when they do, they never cop to them.).

He also laid out an excellent exit strategy for extricating ourselves from Viet Nam basing his decision on the lack of any reliable cooperation from the South Viet Nam puppets. Being the only one to point to the dangers of pursuing a course of action based on a discreditable concept (the Domino Theory) was his golden moment. He rightly analyzed the Viet Nam situation as an internal civil war which would take us down and inflict enormous losses in blood, gold, and reputation.

It did.

[Barbarossa]

As a participant in the Vietnam debacle as an infantry company commander, I remember my during my first time there in 1967-68, I thought "We can do this!" During my second time there in 1970-71, I thought "We can't do this!"

In 2003, after the Iraq invasion, I went into deep depression thinking "My God, didn't we learn anything?" I warned my co-workers, none of whom had ever heard a shot fired in anger, that it was going to turn out badly. Being in Georgia, where some thought George W was a messenger from God, I might as well have talked to the nearest wall.
I did have one co-worker who listened to me when I told him "When you bomb people, they hate you."

Since I grew up in the West surrounded by Mormons, I can tell you the American people will seriosly regret it if Romney gets in.

[Victoria]

akhilleus: did you mean allen dulles (cia) or his brother john foster dulles (sec of state)?

[akhilleus]

Victoria,

I did mean John Foster Dulles. Although Allen Dulles was running the CIA, he was not in a position to decide what was essentially a policy decision for the state. Even if AD wanted to instigate the coup, he still had to go through State and get the president's blessing. The British, knowing they could play the Domino Theory card and realizing that the they had a natural ally in the American Sec'y of State, came calling with "information" on Mossadegh concerning various friends of his who seemed like they might have communist connections or at least sympathies. He, he wanted to nationalize Iran's burgeoning oil industry. Can't get much more "socialist" than that, can you? Plus, as PD points out, they couldn't have that. How would they pay the bills? The Americans in turn began seeing Russian bogeymen behind every oil well in the desert. The decision to go to Eisenhower came from State. I have no doubt the other Dulles was involved in the planning of the strategies necessary for removal of a democratically elected leader who then became a Prime Minister who believed Iranians should benefit from the oil in their own country. Operation Ajax went forward and the rest, as they say, is history.