The Nation
The Agony of Iraq—And Its Lesson for Syria
An Iraqi military helicopter flies over Shi'ite pilgrims in Baghdad. Reuters/Stringer
On the tenth anniversary of the April 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein’s secular, nationalist government, Paul Wolfowitz – a neoconservative and key architect of the American invasion of Iraq – wrote a lengthy apologia for the war. In it, he concluded: “It is remarkable that Iraq has done as well as it has thus far.” Besides Wolfowitz, various other members of the George W. Bush administration have similarly weighed in, insisting that the unprovoked, illegal war against Iraq was the right thing to do.
Many Iraqis would disagree.
Since that April anniversary, thousands of Iraqis have been slaughtered in sectarian and political violence. In May, more than 1,000 Iraqis were killed in a relentless wave of bombings, suicide attacks, assassinations, and other violence, according to the United Nations, and nearly 2,000 have been killed since April. No doubt, those totals understate the true scope of the killing.
Some of the violence is a spillover from the civil war in Syria, where a panoply of Islamist militias, some directly linked to Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), are waging a battle against the secular, authoritarian government of Bashar al-Assad. In Iraq, the AQI forces may or may not be allied with remnants of the old Iraqi order, including Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, the top Baathist official still active in the armed resistance to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government. Duri, who reportedly still is living underground in Iraq, has set up a group called the Naqshbandi Order, led by ex-Baathists. Both AQI and Duri’s forces draw strength from Iraq’s complex web of Sunni tribes, and – although most of the people killed by Sunni-ked violence in Iraq are Shiites or supporters of Maliki – many of the dead are Sunnis who are cooperating with Maliki or are neutral.
In the following, The Nation has compiled a partial list of the major incidents of mass killing since the tenth anniversary of Saddam’s fall:
April 5: 20 dead, 55 wounded in two bombings in Baquba, Diyala province. Eyewitness: “It was like a red pondPeople were running over the dead ones. The place was full of blood.”
April 15: 37 dead, 140 wounded in 20 separate attacks, “mostly car bombings, in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Hilla, Fallujah, Nasiriya and Tikrit.”
April 15: At least 15 candidates assassinated in local election races.
April 18: 27 dead, dozens wounded by suicide bomber in a Baghdad café.
April 23: 44 killed in clashes between Sunni protesters, government forces.
May 20: 86 killed, 250 wounded in 9 car bombings and a wave of suicide attacks in Baghdad, Basra, Hilla, Balad, and other Iraqi cities.
May 21: 40 dead in another wave of bombings and suicide attacks.
May 27: 53 killed and 100 wounded in wave of bombings in Shiite areas of Baghdad. “Eight car bombings hit Shiite neighborhoods, including Huriya, Sadr City, Baya, Zafaraniya and Kadhimiya.”
May 30: 30 dead, dozens wounded in another bombing wave.
June 10: “Insurgents attacked cities across Iraq on Monday with car bombs, suicide blasts and gun battles that killed more than 70 people in unrest that has deepened fears of a return to civil war.”
June 16: 33 killed, 100 wounded in car bomb attacks in five southern Iraq provinces and two of Iraq’s major northern cities, Tikrit and Mosul.
There are many more such horrific incidents.
Much of the recent violence stems not from the war in Syria but from the April 23 clash between peaceful Sunni protesters, who object of Maliki’s increasingly authoritarian rule, and Maliki’s heavy-handed security forces. As Michael Knights described it:
On April 23, the federal military miscalculated when its raid on a protest site in the northern town of Hawija turned into a bloody firefight, and scores of civilians were killed. This event has the potential to become an iconic rallying call for insurgent groups such as al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the neo-Baathist Naqshbandi movement, which can fit it into its calls for ongoing resistance against a "Safavid occupation" of Iraq -- a reference to the Persian dynasty that evokes Sunni Arab fears of the Shia-led government in Baghdad.
Anthony Cordesman, a conservative military strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, usefully points out that Iraq, not Syria, is the pivotal nation in the Middle East, and that its unraveling could become catastrophic. Still, it would be folly for the Obama administration to reengage in Iraq, and even Cordesman notes that the United States “has limited cards to play”:
The U.S.-Iraqi Strategic Framework Agreement exists on paper, but it did not survive the Iraqi political power struggles that came as the United States left. The U.S. military presence has been reduced to a small U.S. office of military cooperation at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and it is steadily shrinking. The cumbersome U.S. arms transfer process has already pushed Iraq to buy arms from Russia and other suppliers. The U.S. State Department’s efforts to replace the military police training program collapsed before they really began. The United States is a marginal player in the Iraqi economy and economic development, and its only aid efforts are funded through money from past years. The State Department did not make an aid request for Iraq for FY2014.
The neoconservatives, having promoted and launched the war in 2003, have lately turned against the very Iraqi government they installed. Back in 2003, the Bush administration and the folks at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) happily made common cause not only with Ahmed Chalabi, the Shiite activist who, it turned out, had close ties to Iran, but with a whole array of Iranian-linked Shiite groups, including the aptly named Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Maliki’s Dawa Party. Now that those selfsame Shiites are working closely with Iran, the neoconservatives have turned sharply against Maliki, and they’ve released a long series of reports condemning his rule. Consider, for instance, the recent report by the neoconservative-led Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Back in 2003, the neocons bitterly assailed the Sunnis of Iraq, and they called for the United States to adopt the “80 percent solution,” that is, to ally with Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds, who together makeup about 80 percent of Iraq’s population. Now, the ISW says:
The political participation of the Sunni Arab minority in Iraq is critical to the security and stability of the state. At present, they are functionally excluded from government, with those that do participate coopted by the increasingly authoritarian Shi‘a Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Without effective political representation, the Sunni in Iraq are left with few alternatives to address their grievances against the Maliki government. The important decisions lie ahead on whether to pursue their goals via political compromise, federalism, or insurgency.
Just as in the civil war in Syria, in which many neoconservatives can’t find “good guys” to support – because Assad’s government has been demonized and the rebels are shot through with Al Qaeda types – in Iraq they have the same problem. They don’t like Maliki, because he is more and more allied with Iran, as evidenced by the fact that Maliki is allowing Iran to airlift arms and ammunition to Damascus over Iraqi airspace. On the other hand, the neocons – and the Obama administration, too, it appears – can’t ally themselves with the Sunni-led Iraqi resistance, since it also has Al Qaeda connections. Indeed, the Iraqi and Syrian Sunni-led rebels tied to Al Qaeda have announced that they are in fact a single organization.
The lesson here: the Middle East is a very complicated place. Invading it, occupying it, and changing its ethnic and sectarian balance should be avoided at all costs. President Obama, who opposed the war in Iraq, should heed that lesson and stay out of Syria ten years later.
The Peeping Press: Understanding the Male Media Gaze
There comes a point in most women’s lives when you realize that you’re perceived as public property. Maybe it’s the first time you’re catcalled, or maybe it’s when a teacher tells you to cover up. The experience can come in an infinite number of iterations; the only sure thing is that the first time is never the last time. Walking around in a female body means you are constantly reminded that your value exists in the way that other people—men, especially—look at you.
Stranger still, this being noticed or touched or commented upon is framed as a compliment—it’s not enough that women are meant to endure the neverending objectification, we’re actually supposed to enjoy it. Women are taught to be eager to please not just in our demeanor but in our appearance, and everyday harassment is presented as friendly conversation: “Why don’t you smile?!”
Recently it occured to me that the expectation that women enjoy male attention in all forms may be behind the many unfortunate media profiles of influential women. Whether a rocket scientist’s beef stroganoff or a White House counsel’s high heels—when it comes to covering successful women, the media prefers palatable over powerful. Articles like these are not always written by men, but they always seem to be written for them.
The most recent—and perhaps one of the most egregious—examples comes from The Daily Beast, where the site’s first piece on President Obama’s pick for CIA deputy director Avril Danica Haines is headlined: “New CIA #2 Pick Used to Read Anne Rice Aloud at Her Bookstore’s Erotica Night.”
The article’s premise alone is sexist—would the racy reading habits of a male appointee ever be fodder?—but the content is even worse. A neighbor is interviewed about Haines, “reminiscing about when when she would rehab her apartment in ‘jeans or a pair of shorts’” and reporters Ben Jacobs and Avi Zenilman inexplicably include an explicit Anne Rice excerpt that Haines may have read. They paint a picture that rivals Penthouse Forum:
[The event] at the bookstore featured a room lit with red candles where guests held chicken tostadas, waiting to eat as Haines read aloud the opening pages of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, by Anne Rice writing under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaire, which features passages such as:
‘He mounted her, parting her legs, giving the white inner flesh of her thighs a soft deep pinch, and, clasping her right breast in his hand, he thrust his sex into her.
He was holding her up as he did this, to gather her mouth to him, and as he broke through her innocence, he opened her mouth with his tongue and pinched her breast sharply.’
What possible purpose would including such an explicit passage serve other than to present a very sexual visual of Haines?
When taken to task on Twitter (by me and many others), Zenilman defended the piece by tweeting that the article “makes clear that her openness was refreshing,” and that the storyline was “appealing.”
But appealing to whom?
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When the presumed audience is always male, women’s objectification becomes the norm. A woman’s humanity, her intellect, talent and substance pale in comparison to how “appealing” she can be to men. And the danger of the male gaze is that it does tangible harm. When the media focuses on powerful women’s sexuality, their credibility is undermined. Research shows when female politicians have their appearance covered—even favorably—she pays a price at the polls. And in everyday life, the assumption that women’s appearance must meet male approval isn’t just burdensome—it’s harassing. This is especially true for young women who bear the brunt of the male gaze everywhere from school to the airport.
In a media landscape where sexist hit pieces on powerful women are common, “appealing” profiles are especially insidious. But objectification is not a compliment, even when well-intentioned. Old habits die hard for men who have been raised to believe what they think about a woman is the most important piece of information they can relay. But ogling isn't journalism, and until some men learn as much, we're going to be stuck with a media that's more Peeping Tom than press.
Former Obama campaign staffers are protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. Read Zoë Carpenter's report here.
Game Six: The Sequel
LeBron James. (Photo courtesy of Flickr user Keith Allison. Licensed under Creative Commons.)
Game Six. The Miami Heat were done. Trailing by five points to the San Antonio Spurs with twenty seconds to go, the notoriously repugnant Miami Heat fans were abandoning their $2,000 seats and heading for the exits. The championship stage had already been pushed courtside. The trophy was out of the case. David Stern, ready for his close-up, was perhaps checking his teeth for spinach. Snarky tweets about Heat MVP LeBron James were in full force. It was over.
"King James," after a fourth quarter of dragging his team back on offense and guarding the quicksilver Tony Parker on defense, was running on fumes. The game was done, but then the Spurs cracked. They missed free throws, they missed rebounds and the league’s most disciplined defensive team left Heat shooters open. For example, up three points, they didn’t guard the best three-point shooter ever, Ray Allen. Allen hit a three sending the game into overtime and the Heat escaped 103-100. This combination of unbelievable self-belief on one side and a haunting collapse on the other has only one historical comparison. It hit me in the throat through my television because I was there.
Game Six. My dad scored tickets for game six of the 1986 World Series in the first row behind the Mets dugout. I still have the ticket stub (list price $40!). The events of that night have been over-discussed to death, so what’s one more time? It was 5-3 in the tenth inning, and the hated Red Sox were on the verge of winning it all. The Series MVP would be Boston pitcher Bruce Hurst. Clubhouse attendants had even hung plastic in the dugout to prevent clothes from getting soaked in the champagne.
I'll never, ever forget Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez, my boyhood idol, lining to center for out number two. As he walked to the dugout, a guy next me, through choked tears said, “It was a great season Keith.” Hernandez, who hadn’t made eye contact with us all game, looked up and shot lasers through the guy, Sure enough, the Mets kept getting on base until a ground ball by Mookie Wilson went through the legs of Sox first baseman Bill Buckner and the team from Queens was alive for game seven.
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As people danced on the dugout and sprayed beer all over me, I remember being less thrilled than unnerved. (Granted, that could have been the cop on horseback ten feet away on the field with his nightstick over his shoulder.) My Mets had succeeded, but partially because Bill Buckner had failed. The Spurs, a team incredibly easy to root for, “Bucknered” this game and unless you are diehard Miami Heat fan (and really, who would admit to such a thing?), this game should leave you feeling thrilled at the competition but a little queasy about just how victory was earned.
There is still a game seven where the Spurs can make every emotion they’re feeling right now go away. It's also a game seven for LeBron James and the Heat to show yet again that they deserve all the hype. As for Buckner, in game seven of the 1986 World Series, under unimaginable pressure, he had one of the most under-appreciated clutch games in history, going 2-4. He was arguably the only Sox player that day who was big enough for the moment. But his team didn’t win, so game six became his legacy. Winning, in this peculiar universe of sports, eternally cures all blemishes. Whether it's the the over-hyped Heat or the choking Spurs, someone is getting dipped in Lourdes on Thursday night. And that's why we'll watch.
Journalist Michael Hastings, 33, died in a car crash yesterday. Read Greg Mitchell's obituary here.
Journalist Michael Hastings, 33, Dies in a Car Crash
Michael Hastings. (AP Photo/Blue Rider Press/Penguin)
The prolific and courageous journalist Michael Hastings, formerly of Newsweek, more recently of Rolling Stone and Buzzfeed, has died at the age of 33 in an auto accident in Los Angeles, Buzzfeed reported tonight. Via Twitter and other online outlets, hundreds of fellow journalists expressed shock and sadness. Watch Rachel Maddow’s personal tribute tonight.
Piers Morgan on his CNN show asked guests Glenn Greenwald and Dan Ellsberg to comment—they agreed it was “a tremendous loss to journalism,” and then Morgan offered his own tribute. Jay Rosen tweeted: “A glitch in the operating system of the American press allows realism to output as deference. Michael Hastings didn’t have that.” Even novelist Walter Kirn responded: “I am so sad to hear of the death of Michael Hastings, a fine, brave reporter who made a difference and will be missed terribly by all.”
Rolling Stone has just added its own obit. The LA Times speculates on the accident—and carries details and photo of the site—but they’re not sure that’s really it. Local TV covered the same crash and seems more certain.
Much will be written about Hastings in the hours and days to come, and I’ll have more below. But for now, I don’t have much to add, except recalling that we exchanged several e-mails back in the days before he made such a fuss with his Stanley McChrystal scoop.
It was maybe six or seven years ago, and he was just back from Baghdad; I was editing Editor & Publisher and writing almost daily stories on Iraq and the media and my book So Wrong for So Long, and he needed some advice about a projected book. Relatively few know about his first book, about his courtship and life with a woman (who worked for Air America). They both ended up in Iraq, where she lost her life. The book was I Lost My Love in Baghdad, and it was pretty much ignored until his later fame. So that’s a reminder.
Hastings’s final piece for Buzzfeed, I believe, hit Democrats for defending the scope of NSA surveillance. From the obit by Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson:
A contributing editor to Rolling Stone, Hastings leaves behind a remarkable legacy of reporting, including an exposé of America’s drone war, an exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at his hideout in the English countryside, an investigation into the Army’s illicit use of “psychological operations” to influence sitting senators and a profile of Taliban captive Bowe Bergdahl, “America’s Last Prisoner of War."
"Great reporters exude a certain kind of electricity,” says Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana, “the sense that there are stories burning inside them, and that there’s no higher calling or greater way to live life than to be always relentlessly trying to find and tell those stories. I’m sad that I’ll never get to publish all the great stories that he was going to write, and sad that he won’t be stopping by my office for any more short visits which would stretch for two or three completely engrossing hours. He will be missed.”
Hard-charging, unabashedly opinionated, Hastings was original and at times abrasive. He had little patience for flacks and spinmeisters and will be remembered for his enthusiastic breaches of the conventions of access journalism. In a memorable exchange with Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines in the aftermath of the Benghazi attacks, Hastings’ aggressive line of questioning angered Reines. “Why do you bother to ask questions you’ve already decided you know the answers to?” Reines asked. “Why don’t you give answers that aren’t bullshit for a change?” Hastings replied.
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Marc Ambinder at The Week put it this way: “Michael Hastings was the type of national security reporter I didn’t have the guts to be. A dick? I guess—well, yes. A dick. A dick to those in power. Fearless. Someone who didn’t care what others thought of him.” Democracy Now! linked to its many interviews with Hastings. Dave Weigel offered his own memories at Slate.
Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed posted a photo of Hastings from his high school yearbook, labeled “Most Outspoken,” and recalled that Hastings lost his class president position when he said “shagadelic” over the school’s PA.
Is immigration reform a good reason to scrap the debt ceiling deal? Read George Zornick's take here.
Immigration Reform Is a Great Reason to Scrap the Debt Ceiling Deal
President Barack Obama gestures while speaking about immigration reform, Tuesday, June 11, 2013, in the East Room of the White House. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
The Congressional Budget Office released a report late Tuesday afternoon detailing the economic and budgetary impact of the comprehensive immigration reform bill as it currently stands in the Senate.
The top line of the report is that the immigration reform legislation will increase spending by $262 billion over ten years, but also increase revenue by $459 billion, for deficit reduction of $197 billion. It does so by the taxes, fines and economic growth produced by adding 10.4 million permanent US residents and 1.6 million new temporary visa holders.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but I just want to flag one thing—what the CBO says about immigration reform and the Budget Control Act of 2011, colloquially known as the debt ceiling deal.
As you may recall, in the summer of 2011 President Obama—fully enthralled with deficit reduction, and fearful of a debt ceiling default caused by congressional Republicans—agreed to a deal that set hard budget caps over the next ten years. Then, sequester cuts were set in motion over the same period because the super-committee couldn’t agree on a deficit plan. This made the budgetary straightjacket even tighter.
But, as the CBO notes, this was done in the context of a notably smaller official population than what we’d see if immigration reform passes. The projections used to set these caps (specifically, the funding levels in CBO’s 2010 baseline) didn’t take over ten million new Americans, that can join a variety of federal programs, into account: the total amount of discretionary funding is currently capped (through 2021) by the Budget Control Act of 2011; extra funding for the purposes of this legislation might lead to lower funding for other purposes.
So, the $262 billion in extra spending will have to be jammed in under the spending caps: to use the popular DC metaphor of a family’s budget, this is like setting strict spending limits for your household, and then sticking to them even though you have another kid.
The CBO report muses that this will crowd out other funding, but of course there’s another solution—just raise the caps, or scrap them entirely.
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This has been almost unspeakable in the Beltway debate since the debt ceiling deal, despite the very real pressures the budget caps are already putting on the budget. But immigration reform provides two good justifications—not only the sensible need to adjust the caps due to unforeseen spending (that both parties seem to agree is necessary) but also all the extra revenue and deficit reduction it provides on the backend.
At the very least, this is an elegant solution to offsetting the sequester cuts, which both parties want to do. But even then, the budget caps are a very real problem that will need to be fixed.
Journalist Michael Hastings, 33, died in a car crash yesterday. Read Greg Mitchell's obituary here.
On Glenn Greenwald and His Fans
Glenn Greenwald, a reporter for The Guardian, speaks to reporters at his hotel in Hong Kong Monday, June 10, 2013. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu) “
Shorter @rickperlstein ‘server,’ does not mean ‘server.’ How much did Big Data pay u to play Judas? Regret buying 1 of ur books.”
The message, from tweeter @runtodaylight, came Friday, in quick reaction to my response to Glenn Greenwald’s piece “On PRISM, Partisanship, and Propaganda.” Yesterday I received what a friend described as a “condolence” note about the abuse I’ve been getting from Greenwald fans—but no condolences are necessary. Luckily, for whatever reason, stuff like this has next to no emotional effect on me. The way I look at it, the work I’m blessed to be able to do affords me a cascade of privileges—attention, respect and a middle-class income; all that for safe, dry, indoor work; the grace of spending my days honoring the wellsprings of creativity churning inside me; near-constant affectionate avowals from strangers who trust that the things I tap out on my laptop have afforded them some measure of meaning, pleasure or understanding; that the small quantum of stupid stuff that comes my way never much penetrates. Thanks to this thick skin, I read all my comments. A lot of writers don’t. They talk about how the anonymity of the Internet licenses shallowness and cruelty. Eh, whatever. I’m never entirely sure that whatever I write is correct or clear or useful or profound or not, so a lot of stuff others consider straight-up trolling I often welcome as contributions to what I’m trying to accomplish. Which, after all, is a collective, not personal, project—for if I’m not reaching people and persuading people, I’m not doing anything at all. It’s good to know when people are not being reached or persuaded. So I listen and strive to respect my friendly and unfriendly interlocutors both, as best I can, for they are my lifeblood. What else can I do?
Glenn Greenwald, I’ve been learning, is different. Here’s what he said out of the box about my argument that he may have made a mistake in his claim about how PRISM works: that it turns “the eagerness of Democratic partisans to defend the NSA as a means of defending President Obama.” I’m one of the propagandists referred to in his piece’s title. Not correct. Not clear. Not profound. But most of all and most importantly, not useful. Let me say a bit as to why.
For one thing, I couldn’t care less about defending Barack Obama. I think he sucks at most parts of his job as I understand it—tactically, strategically, ideologically, rhetorically, intellectually, ethically—but I’m not going to get caught in a pissing match establishing my bona fides on the subject. Should I link to this so that I’ll maybe “win” the argument? I’d rather not. Too late, because I just did—the temptation of intellectuals to make this “about us” is too great. We’re human. We have egos. (“If you’re reduced to implying that Rick Fking Perlstein is overly solicitous of this administration, it’s time to lose all the fanboys and come back to the pack a little”: Thanks, Charlie Pierce!) But I wish we didn’t, because ultimately, it’s not about us. Our power to unmake a president, or bear him aloft with the sheer power of our prose if that’s what we prefer, is nugatory anyway. All we can do it try to tell the truth as we understand it, without fear or favor.
I feel incredibly fortunate to be have been allowed to do so without trimming my sails or looking over my shoulder, which is a good thing, because I have no idea how I’d survive if I had to change how I wrote to please a patron. My writing brain, for good or ill, just isn’t built that way. Some readers will look at my work and say that isn’t possible, pointing to all the ways I fall short of some abstract standard of anti-institutional purity. It’s an unfortunate logical fallacy on the left: that you can weigh a writer’s “radicalism” on some sort of scale, and from that arrive at a surefire calculation as to whether his or her heart is for sale (“How much did Big Data pay u to play Judas?”). Some simply can’t believe that “liberals”—even centrists!—might arrive at their positions through independent thought.
Now, am I “Democratic partisan”? Maybe a little bit, sometimes. In the final analysis, yes, Rick Perlstein prefers a strong Democratic Party to a weak one. That said, I think I understand more clearly than most the corporate corrosions that make it such a pathetic vehicle for those who aspire to justice. Unfortunately, given the rules of the American political game, people who try to participate by self-righteously refusing to identify with one or the other of the two parties are like people who say they love to play baseball but refuse to join a team. The name of this game—a loooooong game—is ideological civil war for the soul of each party. And one you can’t win if you don’t play. I don’t write that because I’m a partisan, or because I prefer a two-party system. I write that because I think it’s true.
But that’s all a digression. And one that has nothing to do with whether Greenwald is wrong or right about PRISM (he’s wrong, by the way) and why that matters. Ultimately, in a debate like this, the best thing a politically engaged intellectual can do is write in a way that does not short-circuit thought. And my, oh, my, does Greenwald’s style of political discourse short-circuit thought—with a fierceness. You see it in the way both his supporters and his critics (even The Nation has turned against him! The national security state has been vindicated) respond to his work.
Read another tweet:
“NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants cnet.co/1agOFCy via @CNET What say you, @RickPerlstein ?”
I think we can detect here an accusatory tone, especially given the way the tweeter, “therealpriceman,” fawns over Glenn Greenwald generally. (Though you can never be sure on the Internet, and besides, why do people pursue political arguments on Twitter anyway? I’ll never understand how, for instance, “When u talk gun violence lk in mirror PA here we cling to guns-apologz to PRES O”—another tweet directed my way, apparently somehow meant to respond to this—could possibly contribute anything useful to our common political life.) I detect in this message: even the NSA says you’re wrong about Glenn Greenwald, so when are you going to apologize? And if I’m reading right, that’s some really smelly stupidity. Because the whole point of my original post was that there was plenty Greenwald had “nailed dead to rights” in his reporting. What I had in mind when I wrote that (I should have specified this, I think) was the stuff on Verizon turning over metadata to the NSA. And yet what therealpriceman links to is an article suggesting something that Greenwald has not (yet?) claimed, and which still remains controversial and undetermined: that the NSA has acknowledged that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a claim sourced to Representative Jerrold Nadler, which Nadler based on a classified briefing he and other Congressmen received, but which it has since been established Nadler probably just misunderstood.
The bottom line is that there’s an attitude out there that anything bad anyone says about the NSA must be a priori true, and that anything bad anyone says about the NSA must have already been said by Glenn Greenwald, and that anyone who questions Greenwald about anything must be questioning Greenwald about everything, and thus thinks the NSA (and its boss Barack Obama) is swell.
And where might someone get that idea? By thinking like Greenwald, actually.
As I noted on Friday, Greenwald writes in “On PRISM, Partisanship, and Propaganda,” “Rick Perlstein falsely accuses me of not having addressed the questions about the PRISM story”; but I didn’t accuse him of not having addressed “the questions” but instead a single question—whether Internet companies give the National Security Agency “direct access” to all their data as opposed to carefully controlled access to a very limited amount of data—a question he still did not address, including in the interview he linked to in order to claim he had addressed it “at least half-a-dozen” times.
He also wrote this: “I know that many Democrats want to cling to the belief that, in Perlstein’s words, ‘the powers that be will find it very easy to seize on this one error to discredit [my] NSA revelation, even the ones he nailed dead to rights.’ Perlstein cleverly writes that ‘such distraction campaigns are how power does its dirtiest work’ as he promotes exactly that campaign. But that won’t happen. The documents and revelations are too powerful.”
He’s right, and he’s wrong. So far Greenwald has been lucky, and because he has been lucky, everyone who cares about fixing our puke-worthy system of “oversight” of the American state’s out-of-control spy regime has been lucky too. Yes, clowns like Peter King and irrelevant throwbacks like Dick Cheney cry treason and call for death squads or tumbrels or whatever. But the bottom line is that for whatever reason (reasons I think will only become clear in the light of later history), the American establishment seems ready to think about this story—ready to give a hard look at what our surveillance state has become. The evidence is there in thoughtful and detailed reporting and analysis on how PRISM might actually work, for instance in this Associated Press piece (which is far more usefully critical than the typical piece on the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq’s claimed weapons of mass destruction in 2003, which the American establishment was not ready to think about), and this analysis by technologist Ashkan Soltani—both of which sort through the available evidence far better than Glenn Greenwald does, but also would not exist without what Greenwald and Edward Snowden courageously did, however flawed Greenwald and Snowden might be as messengers. Life can be complicated that way.
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But about the the flaws of those messengers: what I wrote, about how established power deals with revelations it’s not ready to confront, is not that clever at all. It’s just a banal observation. Greenwald seems to believe that preserving his credibility to keep on doing this work is not something he needs to actively worry about—the “documents and revelations are too powerful.” Bullshit. I wish I had the certainty of Glenn Greenwald—about lots of things. But I don’t—constitutionally so. What I do have, a bit, is some historical perspective. And given that perspective, I would love to know why Glenn Greenwald thinks the establishment cannot do to him, a relative flyspeck in the grand scheme of things, what they did to Dan Rather, a towering giant of Washington reporting going back to Watergate. Which is: consign him to the outer darkness, where the only people who care about what he has to say are the likes of my good friends @therealpriceman and @runtodaylight.
If that’s good enough for Glenn, well, then, fine. Me, I’d rather not see him discredit himself. And that’s what’s happening. It’s happening even among those who want to be his supporters. As one of them wrote on Facebook, “Here’s the thing: I suspect Perlstein, Charles Pierce, Dave Niewert and I—to mention the commenters here I’ve actually met—could have a spirited exchange about these issues, maybe even change each others’ minds somewhat. That can’t happen with Greenwald, whom I’ve never met, becuase the FIRST thing he does out of the box is accuse anyody who disagrees with him of bad faith. That not only makes him a poor advocate, it weakens one’s trust in his reporting.”
He’s losing friends. Soon, his friends, and his luck, may run out.
Former Obama Campaign Staffers Protest Keystone XL Pipeline
Activists in Chicago. (Photo by Kira Mardikes.)
Elijah Zarlin, who worked as a senior e-mail writer at Obama campaign headquarters in 2008, was back in Chicago yesterday—in the First Precinct jail, following a peaceful sit-in in protest of the Keystone XL pipeline.
“It felt strange,” Zarlin said, “to be getting arrested in order to send a message to the president that he needs to make good on his commitment to fight climate change.”
Twenty-two people were detained in front of the Metcalfe Federal Building, where the State Department keeps an office. Protestors ranged in age from a high school student to a grandfather. Many wore T-shirts that read, “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” a pledge on climate change that Obama made during this year’s State of the Union address.
But action has yet to materialize, and supporters are getting impatient. “The president has said over and over that he wants to do something big on climate,” said Andrew Nazdin, 24, who worked as a deputy training instructor for Organizing for Action (OFA) in Virginia in 2012 and protested yesterday. “The president has a tremendous opportunity to reject this pipeline, since the decision sits with him. But we are going to need to continue to push him.”
The administration will make a decision on the pipeline in the next few months, pending completion of a State Department environmental review. A draft released earlier this year, which the EPA criticized as “insufficient,” found no compelling reason to reject the pipeline.
Fear that the State Department findings will grease the skids for approval is creating a rift between Organizing for Action, the former campaign army now tasked with promoting the president’s agenda, and other activists and donors who are frustrated with the administration’s reticence not only on Keystone but also on a range of climate change actions.
Organizing for Action stated clearly last month that it will not support grassroots activism against Keystone right now. “Organizing for Action’s mission is to support President Obama’s agenda,” reads the first in a list of talking-points for volunteers. “The Keystone XL pipeline is still under review, and OFA supports and respects the process as it is currently underway.”
The global warming campaign unveiled by OFA in May skirted the president’s timid record on climate by asking supporters to call out climate change deniers in Congress via social media.
It isn’t clear to serious activists how tweeting at John Boehner to “stop denying the science of climate change” will have an impact if the people who already acknowledge the real and immediate danger of greenhouse gas emissions, like President Obama, won’t act themselves. “Given that it’s unlikely that the majority is going to change in Congress, and certainly that no action is going to be taken by this Congress on climate, it’s really the president who needs to show leadership,” said Zarlin.
Along with rejecting Keystone XL, there are several options for addressing the causes of climate change that do not require congressional approval, particularly capping emissions from power plants, which are the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. But in April the EPA announced that it was putting a decision to regulate new generating stations on hold indefinitely. According to The New York Times, EPA officials said the rule “would be rewritten to address the concerns raised by the industry.” The delay effectively rules out the possibility that a separate decision to regulate existing plants more strictly will go forward in the near future.
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While the administration dithers, the grassroots climate movement is gaining momentum, with Keystone as the touchstone. “This decision more than any other will signal your direction, your commitment, your resolve,” a group of heavy-hitting donors wrote to the president last month. “It is the biggest, most explicit statement you will make in this historic moment, the moment when America turns from denial to solutions.” More than 62,000 have committed to engaging in civil disobedience should Obama approve the pipeline. Yesterday’s sit-in, organized by CREDO, Rainforest Action Network and the Other 98%, was just one of the many demonstrations that have been planned for the summer.
Former OFA staffers don’t see their colleagues as complacent enough to stay out of the action. “We, as some of his biggest supporters, who put in countless hours—twelve-, fourteen-hour days—to get him elected, are serious about making sure he does the right thing on climate,” said Nazdin, who expects that the disconnect between the president’s slow action and the urgency that many young Americans feel will dampen OFA’s effort to mobilize young volunteers. “Unfortunately, we’re not going to sign up to volunteer and we’re not going to be donating money when we’re getting arrested,” Nazdin said. “We’re organizing to push him on something that right now he’s failing to address.”
Protesters are taking to the streets in Brazil. Read Dave Zirin’s analysis here.
Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen: Building an Off-Ramp for Conflict in Syria
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Days after the White House announced plans to step up military support for Syrian rebels, President Obama met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-8 summit in Northern Ireland. Nation Editor and Publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel and Nation contributor Stephen Cohen joined All In with Chris Hayes last night to take stock of US-Russia relations and demand an “off-ramp” for escalating US engagement in the Syrian conflict.
—Jake Scobey-Thal
A Perilous 'Searching for Monsters to Destroy' in Syria
A member of a rebel group called the Martyr Al-Abbas throws a handmade weapon in Aleppo, June 11, 2013. (REUTERS/Muzaffar Salman)
The Constitution is clear. Written by revolutionaries fresh from a protracted battle against a colonial empire that was forever involving them in wars of whim, the document was designed to assure that the powers of war making and military adventuring would never be concentrated in the hands of a monarch—or a president. So it is that, while the American president has from the founding of the republic been designated as the commander-in-chief, it is the Congress that retains the sole power to declare wars and to set terms for the engagement of the United States in the country in the “attachments and entanglements in foreign affairs” against which George Washington warned.
While it can be argued that presidents have the authority to act unilaterally to repel attacks and defend the country, there is far less justification for the wars of whim and casual military engagements that have come to define the United States in the latter part of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first.
Yet, since 1941, succeeding executives have entered into wars, military engagements and schemes to aid foreign armies without ever seeking or receiving congressional authorization.
Often, the United States has policed the world without the informed consent of the American people, and without any evidence of the popular support that ought to be achieved before any country mingles its destiny with the struggles of distant lands.
Such is the case with the Syrian imbroglio.
That Syria has degenerated into crisis is clear.
That the violence on the ground is atrocious, and horrifying, goes without saying.
But the notion that the Syrian mess is an American problem, or that the United States can or should choose a favorite in the fight, is highly debatable. There is no defense for the actions of the Syrian government, but only the most casual observers presume that the rebels are universally committed to noble and democratic ends.
The American people “get” that the Syrian conflict is complicated, and that any US involvement there had the potential to make untenable demands on this country’s future. Polls by the Pew Research Center and various media outlets have found high levels of opposition to even the most minimal of US engagement with the rebels.
Roughly two-thirds of Americans have consistently said that the United States does not have a responsibility to intervene in the Syrian conflict. Late last year, Pew found that 65 percent of Americans oppose any move by the United States and its allies to provide arms to anti-government forces in Syria.
Since the Obama administration—under pressure from Senator John McCain, R-Arizona, and other hawks—announced this month that the United States would aid the Syrian rebels, opposition to the move has actually risen. Indeed, the latest polling shows that 70 percent of Americans oppose the United States and its allies’ sending arms and military supplies to anti-government groups in Syria. A mere 20 percent favor the initiative.
Yet Obama is taking the next step toward an active US role in the conflict.
Public opinion is not the only measure to be applied in weighing military engagements. But the wisdom of the people ought not be casually dismissed—especially when it comes to questions of whether their country should involve itself in distant civil wars.
If ever there was a time when congressional oversight needed—make that required, if one inclined toward a literal reading of the Constitution—this would seem to be it.
But Congress is disengaged and dysfunctional.
The House and the Senate choose not, for the most part, to govern. And they are especially resistant to governing when it comes to checking and balancing presidential decisions to embark upon military endeavors that carry with them the prospect of escalation and blowback. Congress relies too frequently on the convoluted and constitutionally dubious War Powers Act as an out for avoiding direct responsibility.
This is deeply unfortunate, not just in the immediate moment but on the long arc of history.
The United States is ill-suited to a career of empire, as former Secretary of State John Quincy Adams reminded the Congress in 1821.
“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” Adams explained four years before he would assume the presidency. “She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
It was an understanding of the many threats that go with the search for monsters to destroy that led the framers to rest the war-making power with the Congress. Now, however, Congress is resistant to taking up the basic work of oversight.
Indeed, its inclination is toward writing blank checks.
During the recent debate over the National Defense Authorization Act, Congressman Chris Gibson, R-New York, and John Garamendi, D-California, submitted a bipartisan amendment that would have removed “Sense of Congress” language—previously added to the NDAA—which might be read as signaling support for US military interventions and engagements in Syria. Only 123 members of the House (sixty-two Republicans, sixty-one Democrats) supported the amendment, while 301 members (168 Republicans and 133 Democrats) opposed it.
Garamendi is generally a supporter of President Obama, as are most of the sixty Democrats who joined him in supporting the amendment. They understand that congressional oversight does not weaken or undermine the executive; rather, it establishes a framework in which presidents, their aides and military commanders can operate.
It is not a matter of partisanship that argues for congressional action. It is a combination of common sense and respect for the Constitution.
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In arguing for the amendment, Gibson made the wise case that “we need to proceed with more caution—having a full and robust debate on the situation in Syria and how and if the United States should be involved. As we saw in Libya—operations I opposed from the start—it is critical we use the utmost caution when involving Americans overseas.”
That was the common sense argument. But it did not prevail.
This is troubling.
It made even more troubling by the fact that the practical argument made by the congressman from New York is, as well, the constitutional argument.
A Congress that cedes its authority to check and balance the military manipulations of the executive branch does not merely diminish its own stature. It undermines the separation of powers that is essential to keeping the United States from involving itself “beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”
No war of whim should ever be embarked upon without a declaration from Congress.
No military endeavor—and that certainly includes the arming of rebels in foreign conflicts—should ever be engaged in without oversight from the US House and the US Senate. That’s a standard that ought to be applied by congressional conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, no matter who sits in the White House.
The new book by John Nichols and Robert McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (Nation Book),explores how big money has made politics and government dysfunctional. Naomi Klein says: “John Nichols and Bob McChesney make a compelling, and terrifying, case that American democracy is becoming American dollarocracy. Even more compelling, and hopeful, is their case for a radical reform agenda to take power back from the corporations and give it to the people.”
The Supreme Court defended voting rights in Arizona, but what part of the bill did the leave intact? Read Aura Bogado’s report here.
What the Supreme Court Didn't Strike Down Yesterday
People protest anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona. (REUTERS/Joshua Lott)
The Supreme Court defended voting rights yesterday when it struck down Arizona’s requirement to present proof of citizenship when registering to vote. But while the decision relieves registrants of an unnecessary burden, the rest of the proposition that brought it into being remains intact. Arizona’s Proposition 200 attacks not only voters but immigrants as well. Despite a win for voting rights yesterday, undocumented immigrants will remain especially vulnerable under the law.
Created twenty years ago, the National Voter Registration Act, also known as Motor Voter, was approved to encourage voters to register—and also mandated that states use a matching federal form in order to keep registrations consistent. About ten years later, Arizona voters passed an anti-immigrant and voter suppression proposition backed by the hate group the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Among other provisions, Prop 200 required voters to issue proof of citizenship in order to register—in violation of Motor Voter. It was that portion of Prop 200 that was struck down in the high court Monday.
But Prop 200 went further in its attack on voting rights—demanding that voters also provide voter ID. It also mandates that those seeking certain public benefits establish their eligibility; if they cannot, then state, county and city workers can be fined $700 for providing services. In Arizona, Prop 200 has meant that immigrants who use certain healthcare services, or even public pools and libraries, can be reported to authorities and find themselves in deportation proceedings.
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Aside from keeping a harmful voter ID provision in place, Prop 200 has also meant that undocumented immigrants who might use public hospitals to test for non-life-threatening services—such as testing for communicable diseases—might be reported to authorities and face possible deportation. Any public service that is not provided by the federal government requires proof of eligibility, which has meant that undocumented immigrants avoid certain services that would keep them healthy in a state in which they, too, work and pay taxes. If they do use those services, they may find themselves separated from their families and from Arizona—a place that, despite its criminalization schemes, they call home.
Yesterday’s victory in the Supreme Court should still be celebrated—but only cautiously so. After all, the same Court may still deal a blow to voting rights soon in another case that challenges the Voting Rights Act. And we should be vigilant, because while it took nearly a decade to strike down a portion of the law that went after certain citizens who vote, there is no current case challenging the other dehumanizing portions of Prop 200, which keep Arizona’s undocumented immigrants in the shadows.
What’s missing in the debate on food stamps? Read Greg Kaufmann’s argument here.
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