Libertarian Leanings

Respectful debate

This must be the part of Rumsfeld's speech that has the Democrats all riled up.

We hear every day of new plans, new efforts to murder Americans and other free people. Indeed, the plot that was discovered in London that would have killed hundreds — possibly thousands — of innocent men, women and children on aircraft flying from London to the United States should remind us that this enemy is serious, lethal, and relentless.

But this is still not well recognized or fully understood. It seems that in some quarters there’s more of a focus on dividing our country than acting with unity against the gathering threats.

Well as they say, when you pitch a rock into a pack of dogs the one that yelps is the one that got hit.

"It is a dangerous business to accuse those who disagree with you of moral and intellectual confusion," Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said. "Debate in our democracy is based upon respect, not vilification."

Old Ike from Missouri might have a point, except that we have a track record of Democrats leading by example as they respectfully carry on their debate.  Here's prominent Democrat John Kerry's idea of debate based on respect, from his 2004 campaign for the presidency.

"Let me tell you, we've just begun to fight. We're going to keep pounding. These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen."

Sure, we'll just look to the Democrats to elevate the level of debate.

The information war

The Bush Administration appears to have learned the lessons of Vietnam, contrary to what certain prominent critics might think.  The Vietnam War was lost on the battlefield of public opinion.  Confirmation that the Administration understands this comes in a Washington Post article by Walter Pincus under the headline, Positive Press on Iraq Is Aim of U.S. Contract.

U.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq.

[...]

A public relations practitioner who asked for anonymity because he may be involved in a bid on the contract said that military commanders "are overwhelmed by the media out there and are trying to understand how to get their information out.

[...]

In a speech before the American Legion on Tuesday, Rumsfeld said that a search of leading newspapers revealed that a soldier punished for misconduct was written about "10 times" as often as the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in anti-terrorism efforts.

Mr. Pincus, to his everlasting credit, refrained from any characterization of the public relations effort as propaganda.

On energy independence

Power Line offers this food for thought in a post on the viability of Bill Frist as a presidential candidate.

Energy independence is not just a desirable economic goal, it is a national security mandate. Hundreds of millions of dollars are needlessly being poured into the coffers of terror-supporting states because the Democratic Party blocks every effort to develop our own energy resources.

Plame conspiracy

According to today's feature article at Opinion Journal, now that we know that it was Richard Armitage who leaked the Plame name, not I. Lewis Libby, the President should simply put an end to the case by pardoning Mr. Libby.  I would offer a qualified agreement.  The case against Libby doesn't deserve to continue but ending it would resuscitate the media's now desperate theory that someone in the White House outed Valerie Plame in an act of revenge.  Besides, there's still a conspiracy to consider.

At a minimum, there appears to be a serious question of disloyalty here. By keeping silent, Messrs. Powell and Armitage let the President take political heat for the case, while also letting Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby and other White House officials twist in the wind for more than two years. We also know that it was the folks in Mr. Powell's shop--including his former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson and intelligence officer Carl Ford Jr.--who did so much to trash John Bolton's nomination to be Ambassador to the U.N. in 2005. The State Department clique that Mr. Bush tolerated for so long did tremendous damage to his Administration.

As for Justice, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the case in an act of political abdication. That left then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey in charge, and he also presumably knew by October 2003 about Mr. Armitage's role as the leaker who started it all. Yet if the book's account is correct, he too misled the White House with his silence. Mr. Comey is also the official who let Mr. Fitzgerald alter his mandate from its initial find-the-leaker charge to the obstruction and perjury raps against Mr. Libby that are all this case has come down to. Remind us never to get in a foxhole with either Mr. Comey or the Powell crowd.

It may be that Libby should be pardoned, but I'll be disappointed if the rest of the crowd gets off the hook.  I was really hoping to see media luminaries Tim Russert, Andrea Mitchell, and Nicholas Kristof take the witness stand, along with Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame herself.  I'd like hear what they have to say about that other conspiracy -- the one hatched by Wilson, Plame, and rogue CIA elements, aided and abetted by the media and other players.  Why did so many seemingly responsible people buy into Joe Wilson's lame story to begin with?

Update:  In another Opinion Journal article, this one about A.Q. Khan's nuclear technology network, Gabriel Schoenfeld mentions a little known fact about the carreer of Joe Wilson.

Alas, the U.S. intelligence services at the time, although supposedly devoted to preventing nuclear proliferation, were almost completely in the dark about the biggest proliferation racket going. Their analysts were aware that Pakistan was importing nuclear technology. They failed to grasp that such purchases were often intended for re-export.

By the close of the 1990s, the CIA started to scrutinize Khan's activities and travels, still without realizing their full importance. One of the more curious details in Mr. Corera's book is that the agency turned to Joe Wilson, the husband of CIA officer Valerie Plame, to investigate some of Khan's African visits. To this end, Mr. Wilson traveled to uranium-rich Niger in 1999, a full three years before he went there to investigate Saddam Hussein's possible attempts to buy "yellowcake" uranium. Mr. Wilson found nothing worrisome in Niger either time.

Even though the CIA was "almost completely in the dark about the biggest proliferation racket going," the Democratic party and the mainstream press are still quite satisfied with Wilson's findings and still quite happy to conclude that Saddam Hussein posed no threat.  Iraq is a distraction from the War on Terror, don't you know.

COTV #206

My good friends over at Lil Duck Duck are hosting the 206th Carnival of the Vanities.

Cool shades, eh?

Senior moments

An elderly couple had dinner in the home of their elderly friends, and after eating, the wives left the table and went into the kitchen while the two gentlemen stayed at the table talking.  One said to the other, "Last night we went out to a new restaurant and it was really great. I highly recommend it."

"Oh, yeah?  What's the name of it?"

The first man paused a moment, then said, "Oh let me think now... what's the name of that flower you give someone you love? You know... red with thorns?"

"You mean a rose?"

"Yeah, that's the one," replied the man. He then turned towards the kitchen and yelled, "Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?

Armitage: Oops

Yesterday the New York Sun reported:

A top State Department official, Richard Armitage, disclosed the identity of a CIA officer, Valerie Plame, to at least two prominent reporters and failed to tell prosecutors about one of those contacts for more than two years, according to an account in Newsweek magazine.

Today's Washington Post chips in with confirmation from an unidentified former colleague that the disclosure of CIA agent Valerie Plame's covert identity was really an inadvertent slip by Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State at the time.  You may recall that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald charged Scooter Libby, Vice President Richard Cheney's former chief of staff, with lying and obstructing his investigation of that disclosure. 

The leak of information about an undercover CIA employee that provoked a special prosecutor's investigation of senior White House officials came from then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, according to a former Armitage colleague at the department.

Armitage told newspaper columnist Robert D. Novak in the summer of 2003 that Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent critic of the Iraq war, worked for the CIA, the colleague said. In October of that year, Armitage admitted to senior State Department officials that he had made the remark, which was based on a classified report he had read.

And how about this for a fine bit of understatement:

Armitage's involvement in the matter does not fit neatly into the assertions of Bush administration critics that Plame's employment was disclosed as part of a White House conspiracy to besmirch Wilson by suggesting his Niger trip stemmed from nepotism at the CIA. Wilson and Plame have sued top administration officials, alleging that the leak was meant as retaliation.

The Post is being too kind here.  Administration critics accused the White House of deliberately revealing Plame's identity and imperiling her life in an act of revenge against her husband Joseph C. Wilson because of his lame story about a trip to Africa.  What the Post euphemistically calls "a conspiracy to besmirch Wilson" was in reality the ordinarily acceptable practice of pointing out when a critic is utterly full of BS, as the partisan Joe Wilson is.  The real conspiracy here involves the press and the CIA in a war on the White House in which anything goes, and sensitive national security information is just another weapon in the fight.

Nasrallah: "Oops"

Third story from the top on the Washington Times front page:

"We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 ... that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not," he told Lebanon's New TV station.

Is the Sheik feeling a little heat, maybe? 

Since the Aug. 14 cease-fire, Sheik Nasrallah has declared a victory in the war, and he has become a hero throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

But yesterday's admission of a serious miscalculation reflects a need to shore up domestic support for Hezbollah and deflect criticism for starting the war, Israeli analysts said.

"It means that [Sheik Nasrallah] needs to settle the score in the Lebanese domestic arena," said Oded Granot, the Middle East affairs commentator on Israel's public-run Channel 1 news station. "[He] needs to provide welfare for the residents of the south, and he needs to rehabilitate his standing."

Protesting the wedding

Yesterday about 700 anti-war protesters turned up at a seaside church in Kennebunkport, Maine where President Bush attended the wedding of his second cousin.  The protest was said to be affiliated with peace activist Cindy Sheehan, who was apparently not on hand.  No details of her affiliation were offered.

"People wanted to speak truth to power," said Jamilla el-Shafei, 53, a business owner in Kennebunk who helped organize the march.

Isn't it the rage these days, speaking truth to power.  Ever since John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, every time you turn around somebody is speaking truth to power.  And since truth, like beauty, so often turns up nowhere but in the eye of the beholder, speaking it comes easy, particularly in America. 

Contrast this notion of speaking truth to power to what anti-American bloggress Riverbend is faced with in Iraq.

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.

I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when you could more or less wear what you wanted if you weren’t going to a public place. If you were going to a friends or relatives house, you could wear trousers and a shirt, or jeans, something you wouldn’t ordinarily wear. We don’t do that anymore because there’s always that risk of getting stopped in the car and checked by one militia or another...

I realized how common it had become only in mid-July when M., a childhood friend, came to say goodbye before leaving the country. She walked into the house, complaining of the heat and the roads, her brother following closely behind. It took me to the end of the visit for the peculiarity of the situation to hit me. She was getting ready to leave before the sun set, and she picked up the beige headscarf folded neatly by her side. As she told me about one of her neighbors being shot, she opened up the scarf with a flourish, set it on her head like a pro, and pinned it snuggly under her chin with the precision of a seasoned hijab-wearer. All this without a mirror- like she had done it a hundred times over… Which would be fine, except that M. is Christian.

If M. can wear one quietly- so can I.

One does not speak truth to that particular power, and everybody knows it.  One does not invite death when it can be so easily avoided by tying on a scarf.  So the world, including the anti-war bunch marching in Kennebunkport, chooses to accept this sort of terrorist intimidation as Islamist militias just doing what they do.  It's only natural and none of our business anyway.  No surprise, but the truth in the eye of Riverbend is, this too is the fault of George Bush.  He, after all, liberated the militias who now demand this outward show of Muslim devotion as the price for breathing in Baghdad. 

Recently a commenter here informed me that "statistically you are way far more likely to die from chronic cardiac disease" than from an act of terrorism, and while that may be true here, it's probably not true in River's neck of the woods.  But as Riverbend's story points up, the fight against terrorism is not simply a matter of avoiding death.  It's the fight for how we would like to live. 

It's not a fight that River can do by herself.

Meanwhile back at the wedding, in typical media fashion of speaking truth to power, the Washington Post, based on nothing, hinted that the incessant protesting must be getting to the President and his family.

If Bush or the family was irked, they gave no public indication.

But others were irked.  Protester sentiment is not universally shared. 

Ednamay E. Taraba of Alfred, Maine, summed up one local sentiment in a posting on the Web site of the Portland Press Herald: "I think it is terrible that people are going to protest the President at the wedding, the couple that are getting married have nothing to do with the presidents [sic] policy, they are just a young couple who happened to be related."

Undaunted, the speakers of truth pressed on.

Organizers rejected that complaint. "An inconvenience for President Bush?" asked Shafei. "My God, the Iraqi people are inconvenienced. The military families are inconvenienced. That's very telling of the self-absorbed culture we're living in that people would be miffed because a bunch of rich Republicans would be inconvenienced."

And so the party continued uninterrupted.  Bravely making a day of it, activists spoke, wrote, and sang truth to power. 

The protesters carried handmade signs with slogans such as "Stop Killing Our Children," "Bring Them Home Now," "We Have Nothing to Fear But Bush Himself," and "Liar, Liar, World's on Fire." In a school field where the group rallied after the march, speakers called for Bush's impeachment and sang specially written songs such as "Where is the Rage?"

Oh, by the way.  Some guy named Walker Stapleton got married to Jenna Bertocchi, whoever she is.

The safety of Baghdad

Mohammed Fadhil of Iraq the Model returned from a seminar for bloggers in Cairo where he found, along with reasons for continued hope, a reminder.  This is the kind of future that he and the rest of the Iraqis hope to escape.

Back in Cairo I was sitting in the hotel's garden reading a book when I was surprised by a man, who reminded me of one of Saddam's security guys, interrupting my quiet afternoon reading and telling me without any introductions "Don't believe them!".
"Who are they?" I asked "those people" he said pointing at the book in my hand and added "we have a very good system that is represented by the government and Islam. Maybe we need some minor improvements but those people want to blow up our culture, history and beliefs".
I could feel that these remarks would be followed by an informal interrogation with questions about my colleagues so I quickly ended the conversation and avoided going into details. However this came as a flashback from the dreadful era of dictatorship that I've forgotten over the past three years.

I could feel eyes following me and walls recording every word I say that for the first time in years I feel I need to watch my mouth in front a simple cleaning worker in the hotel who was cleaning up the conference hall after one of the sessions. He said "if you want to change know that we're on your side" it may sound like a friendly gesture but I got scared and my immediate response was "No, no! this is not about any change!"

I wouldn't worry about talking about a change when I'm in Iraq; pluralism is a fact here and every party is seeking a change of one sort or another but I was afraid to talk about a change in a place where only one opinion rules and dominates everything.

At that moment I felt the difference and wished I could immediately go back to Baghdad.