The fight for the Presidency

Howard Dean in his Meet the Press appearance of 04/27/08 not only did a good job of preventing Timmy Russert from turning it into 30 minutes of trivia and "gotcha" points, but also did a good job of discussing the Democratic Party Presidential campaign from a partisan perspective but not taking the side of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Definitely worth a look.

Also addressing the intra-party issues and the analogy to the 1972 election is someone who knows quite a bit about that election, former Senator George McGovern, in a Huffington Post interview reported by Sam Stein in George McGovern: Still Backing Clinton, But Going Way Off Script 04/25/08.

I've tried to step back and look at the state of the race in a bit of a new light myself. My own basic preferences haven't changed since the California primary, when I sent in my absentee ballot for John Edwards about two days before he dropped out of the race. Between Clinton and Obama I'm marginally more in favor of Clinton. Obama has a better position on pulling out of Iraq and Clinton's health plan is more likely to achieve universal coverage, which is essential.

When either of them is elected President, the Democratic base will have to keep the pressure on them over both the Iraq withdrawal and the health care plan because they will face powerful opposition to both, despite the very unpopular nature of the Iraq War. The peace movement will also need to bring pressure to make sure that the new President makes a full withdrawal of American troops, which neither has clearly committed to doing.

And also to avoid continuing the escalation of the Afghanistan War - which both are saying should be done - and instead find a near-term solution to that situation so that NATO troops (including US troops) can leave. Pulling out of Iraq but escalating in Afghanistan could destroy the Democratic Presidency because the Republicans will howl in outrage about every problem that occurs in both places and blame it all on the deficiencies of the Democratic administration.

But for that problem to arise we have to get a Democratic President instead of 100-Years-War McCain.

Obama is slightly ahead in the delegate count right now. But for all practical purposes Clinton and Obama are tied at this point. I think Dean in his Meet the Press appearance made very reasonable points about the outstanding delegate controversies. On the question of the superdelegates, he made a good point that even though they aren't elected in primaries or caucuses, almost every one of them are elected officials who are there precisely because they won actual general elections as Governor, Member of Congress, or other office, and they were selected as superdelegates by their state parties. The whole idea of the superdelegates is that they are not required to simply ratify the decisions of the primary and caucus delegates. They are supposed to make their own choices based (in theory) on their best judgment. Good or bad, that's the rules the Party is operating under this year. As Dean put it, "My personal belief is they're going to vote for the person they think ... can beat John McCain, which is what I think a lot of these voters [in the primaries and caucuses] are voting for."

On the question of the Florida and Michigan delegations, it doesn't make sense to simply allow the delegates elected in those primaries to be seated. The state parties knew, and the Presidential candidates knew, that the Party would not recognize the results of those elections because they were in violation of the Party rules. He reminded the viewers of the reason for the problem:

For the - this year, for the first time, we balanced the early primaries with ethnic and geographic diversity. We included a state from the South and a state from the West, because we think we can win there now. And we included states with significant numbers of minority groups who the Democrats can't win without, and those folks ought to be allowed to say early on who they think should be the president.

That was why the Michigan and Florida primaries were disallowed by the national Party. Dean goes on to say, "I believe Michigan and Florida should be seated in some way because it was their - their voters did not cause this problem. This was caused by a political problem, not the voters' problem." No doubt this is a sticky problem. But the eventual resolution is probably going to be providing some representation to Florida and Michigan so that they are totally disenfranchised at the convention but not to seat the full delegates as elected in the illegitimate primaries.

A couple of comments on the Jeremiah Wright issue. I was happy to see the report that Clinton is reaming the bold Maverick over the Floyd Brown ad against Obama featuring the most inflammatory of the controversial Wright snippets.

Salon's Joan Walch blogged her reaction to Wright's appearance with Bill Moyers in Why Jeremiah Wright is so wrong 04/27/08. But after more research, she posted I was wrong about Wright 04/28/08. But the latter isn't a more generous evaluation. She says she's going to blog more about ways Obama can deal with the issue.

It seems to me that his best response is to keep responding that he's made his disagreements with Wright clear, to remind everyone that they don't agree with everything their own pastor says, and to use it as an opportunity to jam McCain on his association with the warmongering radical cleric John Hagee and others like him.

But nobody should be under any illusions that we won't see sleaze like this and worse slung by the Establishment press and the Republicans from now through the fall election. I'll bet there's rightwing bloggers who have already typed up the accusation that Clinton's attacking McCain over the Floyd Brown ad with Wright in it shows that she, too, wants God to damn America.

Obama needs to keep the discussions around focused on his own positions and the destructive positions of 100-Years-War McCain, so he doesn't need to defend Wright. Wright is not his running-mate.

Having said that and being clear that Wright does not speak for Obama and vice versa, I did like a line that Wright used at the National Press Club Monday when asked if he was patriotic. "I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?"

I'll say it again. In every Presidential race since 1964, the Republicans have been running again black people. It's what they do. As Dean said:

Republicans have scapegoated minority groups for a long time. First they pointed the fingers at African-Americans by calling what - affirmative action as a quota system. Then they pointed the finger at gay Americans with an anti-gay marriage stuff on all the ballots where gay marriage was already illegal anyway. Now they're pointing the fingers at immigrants and, by extension, Hispanic and Asian-Americans.

If we lived in one of those alternative universes where the Republican Party hadn't absorbed the values of Southern segregationists and didn't support torture and had enough decency not to constantly attack the patriotism of the Democrats, then we could reasonably hope to have a campaign free of that. Assuming that universe also has a national press corps that practices actual journalism. But that's not the universe we live in.

So I don't like the blame-the-victim approach of, oh, Obama should have foreseen this and done something to prevent it. Walsh writes, "Clearly it was bad judgment [for Obama] to stay with the church, given Wright's divisive views, once Obama knew he had national political ambitions." But she at least goes on to acknowledge that such an observation is water under the bridge now.

Yes, we probably all regret that we didn't foresee the problem that something we were doing would cause us problems in the future. But there is no way Obama or Clinton is going to avoid being accused of being somehow unpatriotic or associated with scary black people. Both are poisonous accusations. But a party that supports the Cheney-Bush torture policy is poisoned. They have to hit back against race-baiting and radical-baiting and throw it back in the Republicans faces. There is no way to prevent the Reps from making the charges. That's who they are. That's what they do.

Also on Meet the Press (see link above), Timmy Russert (not carrying water for the Republicans, you understand; yeah, right) referred to a Nation piece by Tom Hayden, who Timmy called "the former radical from the '60s", Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream 04/22/08, in which he notes that Clinton also was in the same room at times with people who had views with which she might not agree with every word, then or now. I don't think Hayden was carrying water for the Reps, though he is an Obama partisan and I wouldn't word everything he says in his article that way, this is a valuable observation:

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists?

That's why it's good to see Clinton taking a different tone on the Wright issue, criticizing McCain over sleaze-slinging politics. Neither of them can avoid these kinds of attacks. But they shouldn't be saying things now about each other that would partially validate the inevitable Republican and press corps versions. As McGovern says, "I don't want to see Hillary or Barack giving McCain ammunition in the general election. It is more important that we not have another four years of Bush government."

Tags: barack obama, hillary clinton, howard dean, jeremiah wright, tom hayden

Good on them

The Democratic National Committee just rolled out their first ad targeting the bold Maverick over his Iraq War.



The WATBs at the Republican National Committee are whining that it's illegal. Sorry, Reps, it'll take you at least one more Presidential term to make it straight-up illegal to criticize your Party leaders.

Howard Dean did a good job on Meet the Press today, including defending this ad when Timmy Russert made the Maverick's campaign's argument for them:

MR. RUSSERT: Now, Senator McCain's campaign is saying that you take those words totally out of context. Here's how Senator McCain explained what was actually said at the town hall: "It's dishonest because anyone who looks at the entire transcript of the exchange that I had at a town hall meeting with a man who came there, who had a legitimate point of view that he was against the war and asked--we went back and forth about how long, quote, America would be there, and I said, `Well,' he said, `How many years?' I said, `Could be a hundred.' But the case is, it's after we've won the war. And I immediately said it's the same as we have troops in South Korea, we have troops in Japan, we have troops in Germany, depending on the security arrangement that we have.

"No one could have interpreted that exchange as me saying that we're going to be in a war for a hundred years."

DR. DEAN: First of all, we're not arguing that he's going to be at war for a hundred years. We don't think we ought to be in Iraq for a hundred years under any circumstances. Think of the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being spent in Iraq, which we need right here at home right now to preserve American jobs. That's the first thing.

Secondly, if Senator McCain believes that you can occupy a country like Iraq for a hundred years without having a long war and violence and our troops being hurt and, and killed, I think Senator McCain is wrong.

Look, our folks don't want, I--our folks, our country--70 percent of our country does not want to be in Iraq for a hundred years under any circumstances. Senator McCain is wrong. He is out of step with the American people, and he is wrong.

MR. RUSSERT: He is saying it's analogous to Germany or to Japan or to Europe.

DR. DEAN: And South Korea. I have the same quote that you have right here.

MR. RUSSERT: Where you have troops there, but they're not involved in conflict.

DR. DEAN: That is correct. Now, does anyone think, who's watching this show, that if you keep our troops in Iraq for a hundred years, people won't be attacking them and won't be setting off suicide bombs and won't be having militias go after them? I don't think so. And most Americans don't think so. What Senator McCain is saying doesn't make any sense. We cannot be in Iraq for a hundred years. Those dollars belong in America. We're in trouble in this--in, in America. And, frankly, the Bush-McCain economic program has put us in trouble in America. That money needs to be here in America.

MR. RUSSERT: The Republican Party in Virginia has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission saying that your previous ad and no doubt this one, they will insist, is being coordinated with the Obama and Clinton campaigns, it's all anti-McCain, and that it violates the election rules.

DR. DEAN: Yeah, that is a joke. There's no evidence for that whatsoever, and it's plain untrue. Neither one of the campaigns ever saw this ad or knew anything about it before we put it on. (my emphasis)

Tags: howard dean, iraq war, mccain

Civilian-military relations

My goodness, no, I don't care what the public or the Congress or the military think, I run things around here

I wouldn't describe myself as a pessimist when it comes to political affairs, but more as a guarded optimist.

But the recent news that the Military Times newspapers (Army Times, etc.) were coming out with an editorial this Monday calling for Rumsfeld's resignation got me thinking again about the state of military-civilian relations. Those papers are not government-owned or run; they are published by a subsidiary of the Gannett Co. But the editorial bases its argument in part on the claim that "when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads." It's understandably assumed that the editorial reflects a widespread sentiment in the armed forces (Newspapers for troops call for Rumsfeld's ouster by Matthew Stannard San Francisco Chronicle 11/04/06):

The editorial will run in the 250,000 copies of Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times and Air Force Times. The newspapers are published under the umbrella Military Times Media Group by Gannett Co. Inc., not by the U.S. military, and have been popular among American forces since World War II.

"It is extremely widely read and influential for the professional military," said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland.

The relationship goes two ways, said Segal. "I think it would be safe to say if the Army Times is saying that, it is something they are hearing from senior officers in the Army," he said.

It has been somewhat counterintuitive during the Cheney-Bush administration that it has been the civilian neocons and nationalists like Dick Cheney who have been the "hawks", while the uniformed military has tended to call for restraint and caution when it comes to adventures like the Iraq War. During the 1950s and 1960s, the situation had been the reverse.


The Democrats have been happy to seize on criticism of Rummy and the Cheney-Bush administration more generally that has come from military figures like retired generals. Party Chairman Howard Dean said on the PBS Newshour on Friday 11/03/04:

But we need to be out of Iraq, and we need a plan to get us out of Iraq. And we expect the president to listen to the military about how we can do that.

It's hard to fault the Democrats for wanting to counter the Republicans' martial and often just plain militaristic rhetoric with a defense of the allegedly pragmatic generals against the bumbling, incompetent Bush Republicans.

But it's also been obvious since early 2005 that the generals were positioning themselves to duck criticism for what was already an obvious failure in the Iraq War. The neoconservatives who were the intellectual godfathers of this disaster are also now bravely scrambling to find excuses for why their ideas put into practice turned out to have created possibly the worst failure in the history of American foreign policy with the Iraq War. And their favored excuse of the moment is that it was the incomptence of the Cheney-Bush administration in executing their preventive war that is to blame.

But our infallible generals shouldn't be allowed to skate on this one, either. They aren't entirely to blame. But they certainly share in the blame, for instance in their counterinsurgency strategy which responds to sniper fire in urban combat by calling in artillery and air strikes. Those tactics have multiplied the civilian casualties and were a major factor in turning Iraqis against the American presence. But we haven't seen a lot of retired generals denouncing those failures on the part of our unassailable generals.

We've also seen and heard throughout the war that the President and Rummy say over and over and over that they're giving our infallible generals everything they say they need to win the Iraq War. And that they're letting the military control the military operations in Iraq without any interference from the civilians. And the serving military officers back them up.

Now, we know they're lying. The military always tries to have it both ways in such situations, publicly endorsing the course of the Executive but laying the groundwork to alibi themselves for possible failure later.

But still, this all raises some important questions. By statute, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are the primary military advisers of the President and the Secretary of Defense. Their role was defined as such in the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 (Part 1 and Part 2).

Paragraph 151 says the following:

... in presenting advice with respect to any matter to the President, the National Security Council, or the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman shall, as he considers appropriate, inform the President, the National Security Council, or the Secretary of Defense, as the case may be, of the range of military advice and opinion with respect to that matter. (my emphasis)

Now that "as he considers appropriate" means that the JCS Chairman would be free to ignore any part of the "range of military advice and opinion" that he chooses. But it was clearly the intent of Cogress that a broad range of options would be presented not just to the Defence Secretary but the President, as well.

The following parts of the same paragraph, though, don't include a loophole for the JCS Chairman:

A member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (other than the Chairman) may submit to the Chairman advice or an opinion in disagreement with, or advice or an opinion in addition to, the advice presented by the Chairman to the President, the National Security Council, or the Secretary of Defense. If a member submits such advice or opinion, the Chairman shall present the advice or opinion of such member at the same time he presents his own advice to the President, the National Security Council, or the Secretary of Defense, as the case may be. ...

After first informing the Secretary of Defense, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff may make such recommendations to Congress relating to the Department of Defense as he considers appropriate. (my emphasis)

So this means that the other members of the JCS - Army Chief of Staff, Chief of Naval Operations, Air Force Chief of Staff, and the CommCommandant of the Marine Corps - all had the statutory option to submit dissenting opinions on military advice to the President and to Congress. And if they had good reason to know that the plans for the Iraq War were excessively risky, did they not have some kind of moral obligation to make their dissents known? If any of them come out after retirement and say they opposed the JCS Chairman's recommendations, then they should also explain why they did not exercise their option to make a dissent known to Congress.

There are a number of actions, laws and precedents that give the military a level of authority in civilian governmental affairs that are not necessarily healthy for a democracy, or other kind of civilian government. Lt. Col. Charles Dunlap, Jr., used a futuristic scenario to look at some of those in The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 by Lt. Col. Charles Dunlap, Jr. Parameters (US Army War College) Winter 1992-93.

In this fictional scenario, it's 2015, then 20 years in the future. A military junta has taken power by a coup in the United States. And the article is in the form of a letter from a "senior retired officer of the Unified Armed Forces, known here simply as Prisoner 222305759" who "is one of those arrested, having been convicted by court-martial for opposing the coup".

Here are some of his points, keeping in mind that anything after 1992 is imagined:

Congress became their unwitting ally. Because of the popularity of the new military programs - and the growing dependence upon them - Congress passed the Military Plenipotentiary Act of 2005. This legislation was the legacy of the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Among many revisions, Goldwater-Nichols strengthened the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and mandated numerous changes intended to increase "jointness" in the armed services. Supporters of the Military Plenipotentiary Act argued that unity of command was critical to the successful management of the numerous activities now considered "military" operations. Moreover, many Congressmen mistakenly believed that Goldwater-Nichols was one of the main reasons for the military's success in the First Gulf War. They viewed the Military Plenipotentiary Act as an enhancement of the strengths of Goldwater-Nichols.

In passing this legislation Congress added greater authority to the military's top leadership position. Lulled by favorable experiences with Chairmen like General Colin Powell, Congress saw little danger in converting the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff into the even more powerful Military Plenipotentiary. No longer merely an advisor, the Military Plenipotentiary became a true commander of all US services, purportedly because that status could better ameliorate the effects of perceived interservice squabbling. Despite warnings found in the legislative history of Goldwater-Nichols and elsewhere, enormous power was concentrated in the hands of a single, unelected official.

He points to the idolization of the American military that was already well advanced under the Reagan administration and Old Man Bush's administration (though he doesn't emphasize the significant role that the Christian Right played in this process):

America's societal malaise was readily apparent in 1992. Seventy-eight percent of Americans believed the country was on the "wrong track." One researcher declared that social indicators were at their lowest level in 20 years and insisted "something [was] coming loose in the social infrastructure." The nation was frustrated and angry about its problems.

America wanted solutions and democratically elected government wasn't providing them. The country suffered from a "deep pessimism about politicians and government after years of broken promises." David Finkle observed in The Washington Post Magazine that for most Americans "the perception of government is that it has evolved from something that provides democracy's framework into something that provides obstacles, from something to celebrate into something to ignore." Likewise, politicians and their proposals seemed stale and repetitive. Millions of voters gave up hope of finding answers. The "environment of apathy" Janos characterized as a precursor to a coup had arrived.

Unlike the rest of government the military enjoyed a remarkably steady climb in popularity throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. And indeed it had earned the admiration of the public. Debilitated by the Vietnam War, the US military set about reinventing itself. As early as 1988 U.S. News & World Report heralded the result: "In contrast to the dispirited, drug-ravaged, do-your-own-thing armed services of the '70s and early '80s, the US military has been transformed into a fighting force of gung-ho attitude, spit-shined discipline, and ten-hut morale." After the US military dealt Iraq a crushing defeat in the First Gulf War, the ignominy of Vietnam evaporated.

One of the hopeful aspects of the torture scandals at Abu Ghuraib, Guantanamo and other stations in the Bush Gulag is that after seeing the photos of naked, hooded men stacked in human pyramids and various other disgusting acts of sexual sadism being performed by some of "the troops", is that it slapped the public upside the head with the reality that The Troops are human beings, not all of whom practice "spit-shined discipline" and "ten-hut morale". At Abu Ghuraib, it was more like ten-hooding morale.

Dunlap cites the following quote from Atlantic writer James Fallows in 1991:

According to our economic and political theories, most agencies of the government have no special standing to speak about the general national welfare. Each represents a certain constituency; the interest groups fight it out. The military, strangely, is the one government institution that has been assigned legitimacy to act on its notion of the collective good. "National defense" can make us do things - train engineers, build highways - that long-term good of the nation or common sense cannot.

Dunlap notes that injecting the military into the "war on drugs" was an erosion of the long-standing distinction between civilian and military realms of authority. That process has proceeded much further since then, with the warrantless, illegal spying by the Pentagon's National Security Agency (NSA) being the most dramatic recent example. At the same time, he notes various factors that create a sense of isolation between civilians and the uniformed military:

Furthermore, well-meaning attempts at improving service life led to the unintended insularity of military society, representing a return to the cloistered life of the pre-World War II armed forces. Military bases, complete with schools, churches, stores, child care centers, and recreational areas, became never-to-be-left islands of tranquillity removed from the chaotic, crime-ridden environment outside the gates. As one reporter put it in 1991: "Increasingly isolated from mainstream America, today's troops tend to view the civilian world with suspicion and sometimes hostility." Thus, a physically isolated and intellectually alienated officer corps was paired with an enlisted force likewise distanced from the society it was supposed to serve. In short, the military evolved into a force susceptible to manipulation by an authoritarian leader from its own select ranks.

This line turned out to be sadly prophetic: "What made this all the more disheartening was the wretched performance of our forces in the Second Gulf War."

Dunlap's article goes on to cite some things that he saw as threatening to erode the military's central mission of warfighting. And it's pretty clear he had in mind the conventional-war model of warfighting. Ironically, some of the things he complains about being problems in that sense actually would have helped in the Iraq War if the military had been better and more experienced at them. For instance:

Police organizations are understandably oriented toward the studied restraint necessary for the end sought: a judicial conviction. As one Drug Enforcement Administration agent noted: "The military can kill people better than we can [but] when we go to a jungle lab, we're not there to move onto the target by fire and maneuver to destroy the enemy. We're there to arrest suspects and seize evidence." If military forces are inculcated with the same spirit of restraint, combat performance is threatened.

But, in fact, the mission that the Army and the Marines were given in Iraq in the counterinsurgency war involved a big demand for just those kinds of situations that required "studied restraint". And among an Arab-speaking population for whom tribe-and-clan-based "honor systems" are a key element, i.e., you humiliate or injure one member and all his cousins want to come kill you.

And that is one of the things that the generals can be legitimately criticized for. They structured and trained their forces so that they would be prepared for conventional war, like the Gulf War of 1991, and not for a counterinsurgency war like the one in which they are now mired. Yet when they were given a mission that involved massive counterinsurgency operations, apparently none of the service Chiefs who have the statutory authority to send dissenting recommendations to the Defense Secretary, the President and Congress have chosen to do so.

I'm very happy to see Rummy get some of the criticism he deserved for his performance even during the opening months of the Afghanistan War in 2001-2. But we would also make a big mistake to let our infallible generals off the hook for the disaster known as the Iraq War.

Tags: charles dunlap, goldwater-nichols act, howard dean, militarism, iraq war, rummy, rumsfeld