McCain's Blunder Encapsulates the Problems

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, at a press conference in Jordan, after his tour of Iraq; he comments here on his concerns about Iranians:

"taking Al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back." Asked about that statement, McCain said: "Well, it's common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That's well known. And it's unfortunate."

There are so many things wrong in just those few words, that it is almost too hard to tell where to begin.

1. al Qaeda is a Sunni group, spawned from the Wahabbi strain of the Sunni faith. One of the Wahabbi core beliefs is that Shia Islam consists of false believers at best. Iran is a Shia Islam nation.
2. Wahabbism has been given its biggest boost by Saudi Arabia. The ruling Saudi sheiks justified their rule by buying of Wahabbi imans - making them the official state religion; funding their schools; spreading their tracts - while all the while living a life that pays lip service to the tenets of that faith.
3. 15 of the 19 hijackers on 11 September 2001 were Saudi's - al Qaeda members schooled in the Wahabbi faith.
4. Saudi Arabia has been funding the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. And why would they not? They cannot allow a productive, democratic Shia Islam nation to arise on their border. How then would they contain their own Shiite countryment? Sure, Iran is a Shia nation, but they are also a Persian nation too.

For John McCain to mis-speak on this point - from just steps away from the border of both Iraq and Saudi Arabia - is to highlight the false consciousness that defines this foolhardy expedition in the first place.

These things matter.

These definitions and distinctions are important.

And just as they were "misunderestimated" by George W. Bush, they are apparently also unknown to John S. McCain.

One cannot win a war against an opponent one does not understand.

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Not This TIme

I am not very familiar with James Carney, but I do like his analysis of the speech Barack Obama gave yesterday. I can already tell that I will be spending many more months pulling gems from this one. I appreciate how James pulled out the choice that Barack left the voters with as it was - unlike most offered by politicians - that really asked the voters to make a decision on where we want our nation to go.

I learned something from Barack yesterday. For the life of me, I could not understand what the fuss was with these comments from his former pastor; I have heard more incendiary words and I bet I have expressed some equally or harder in my day. I was raised to say what I feel and let the chips fall where they may - and a portion of that raising took place in the Black Church (and we always capitalize it just like that).

Still, Barack pointed out something to me - as he always does - he said: "We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America — to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality."

It is that last phrase that caught my ear first when he was talking and then when I went back to read the speech later on this evening: "to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality."

That really speaks to me.

I told you that I was an electrical engineer in college, no? Regardless, one concept that I loved when I first learned it in EE was about communication signals. What we do to transmit a radio wave through the air or a telephone signal across a wire is the same thing we do in a room when one person talks to another or to an assembled group.

We amplify it.

Oh it could be just the "projection" of the speaker as he attempts to reach those folks in the back row (or it could be the projection that my Mother used when she could see that I was not listening to her) or it could be an augmented amplification with a microphone and speaker setup that connects through a soundboard with levelers and the whole nine yards - but it is the exact same thing.

Every form of human communication has some degree of amplification.

We not only use amplification, we need it. But that does not mean there cannot be too much of a good thing. In fact - and anyone who has had to replace the speakers in their car can tell you this - amplification needs to be modulated or it will go from being a constructive force to a destructive one. I have replaced my share of tweeters and woofers to know that for a fact.

Amplification distorts reality.

But although I was aware of that fact in a very real way, I did not often think of how my own words - hyperbolic and at times bouncing off the top end of the volume charts - could transform the truth - as I saw it in my heart - into a distorted, crashing crescendo of noise that was unintelligible to the audience.

Fascinating.

Amplification that distorts reality.

I am going to ponder this for quite some time. Thanks for reading these rambling thoughts; you can see I wonder without having someone to act as a guide.

Anyway, it was a great speech. But do not take my word for it; watch it/read it for yourself.

You do have a choice in this election; choose wisely.

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Give a (candidate) his props

Not sure on what this post The Root is basing it's argument. Too little, too late? Why - because there are still some unrepentant racists who will never vote for Obama?

Did we not know that already - speech or no speech? Barack need not convince every American to vote for him. He is already inspiring a new generation of voters who do not have the time-worn wounds of generations of fighting like the rest of us do. He already has convinced an overwhelming number of African-Americans that he understands our causes and has proved to our satisfaction that he will be an advocate for us. So to these groups, he needs to add enough whites, latinos and asians of all sorts to defeat the Republican candidate - who will be running on a platform of more war and more of the same economic pain that has brought us to where we are today.

Sounds like a winner to me.

This speech was good; good enough to convince anyone of an open-mind that Obama is who he has always said he was. He never had the vote of those with closed minds in the first place.

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What a colossal collection of self-deluded idiots (These are our "best and brightest"?)

This week's upcoming five-year anniversary of our exploits in the country formerly known as Iraq is spawning a whole host of retrospectives - sort of the public policy version of "where are they now?". Typically, these features commonly include gauzy reflections on the past, brought to us by the people who led us down this primrose path.

The New York Times today presents a set of these anniversary apologia and what is striking about this collection is how none of the participants appears to have learned a damned thing during the last five years. From top to bottom, these nine epistles are self-serving and at the same time blind to the cold, hard truths with which the rest of America has been doused. Let's take them in the same order presented by the Times:

Former colonial governor L. Paul Bremer, finds himself lamenting the lack of a plan; a quick read of the five-paragraphs he has produced here shows no indication that he in anyway felt it was up to him to develop such a plan. Of course, who would expect an "Ambassador" to develop a plan for running a foreign country (although - in fairness - when that self-same ambassador takes it upon his shoulders to pen said nations constitution, one might feel entitled to have higher expectations for such an ambassador). His paragraph is at once one that lauds his own work in predicting the terrible threats of terrorism "fifteen months before the attacks of September 11th", while simultaneously expresses his bewilderment that the "American government was not adequately prepared to deal with the growing security threats". Prescient enough to see the threat but incapable of seeing what needs to be done to adequately deal with the threat: sad.

The strongest war booster of them all, Richard Perle, is equally adept at piecing together half-truths into whole cloth. He is the first to allude to the Iraq/Iran war of the 1980s, but he comes no where near mentioning that the US supported Saddam Hussein in that war (and no one ever mentions that it was Donald Rumsfeld, Special Envoy to President Reagan, who was hobnobbing with Hussein on how best to target the waves of child soldiers Iran had lined up against the artillery we shipped over to Iraq). Perle goes the farthest in mentioning the chemical and biological attacks Hussein launched during that war, but he never talks about from whence those weapons came. At the end, he does a brilliant pirouette and attacks Colin Powell and Condolezza Rice for all of the strategic blunders of this war and leaves his old buddy Rumsfeld without a mark. Which only makes sense as why not blame the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor for the troubled war policy, instead of the Secretary of Defense? I mean just because the position Rumsfeld held was called the Secretary of War right up through WWII, does not mean that war policy was his responsibility.

In fairness, I have to leave Anne-Marie Slaughter outside the coterie of idiots, within which I decried her cohorts to be the original gangsters. Her piece, which focuses tightly on the looting of the Iraqi National Museum, does properly encapsulate the dimwitted vision that is still held by other onlookers of Iraq. In just a few short paragraphs, she highlights how the core of a nation is contained within the cultural touchstones that relate to all of its citizens and she points out that without a central organizing concept, it is hard for the parts to remain whole.

But that brief respite from the foolhardy world is then broken by the next piece, this time from Kenneth Pollack. Mr. Pollack "only wish(es) he has understood before the invasion what was the reckless arrogance of the Bush administration". Indeed, if only there had been some sign. If only there had been members of the administration who had belonged to some sort of group - a cabal, perhaps - that long before the attacks of 11 September 2001 had called for a war in the Middle East, a war to reshape that region underneath the aegis of a larger American Empire. And if only that group had some sort of catchy name, like the Project for the New American Century. Yeah, if only.

I suppose someone had to challenge Richard Perle when it comes to percent of delusional rhetoric and it is Danielle Pletka who picks up the cudgel. She begins by berating the antiwar left - as though being properly opposed to this tragic and useless war from the start was someone the wrong position to hold - and goes on to rehash tired, old arguments that many other people were wrong about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein too. This is an argument that I find truly inexplicable: just because other people thought the world was flat does not make it so. But the real whole in this argument is that when the inspectors were let back into Iraq to go to all of the places, "around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat" where the US supposedly knew the weapons to be stored - not a single popgun was found. The icing on this cake of lies comes when the auther assails the Iraqi people for not having the "freedom gene" she believed them to hold and wishes we had spent more time teaching the Iraqis the building blocks of "civil society". What tripe. What exactly is civil about attacking a country that poses exactly no threat to your own?

Nathaniel Flick attempts to answer the question posed by the Times, "what have we learned" but in doing so he too chooses to take a narrow view of the conflict: "I wish we would have known Saddam did not have biological or chemical weapons". Here is a tip: not only was that known - it was reported by the recently re-introduced inspectors - acknowledging that would not have helped us fight a better war, it would have obviated the rationale for war in the first place. It was the lust for war by a president who finds it romantic (especially when it costs him nothing) that swept that knowledge under every available rug.

The next example presented to us by the Times is the classic one of CYA. Herein, as Major General Paul Eaton blames a non-operational Congress - and a Republican one at that - for not providing the oversight tasked to them by the authors of our Constitution. Why didn't Congress defend our troops, he asks? The better question is what in God's name made him think they would? Surely no one knows better than the Army that Congress has not declared war since 1941. No, in the nuclear age the questions of life and death are too thorny for these soft souls to tussle with in any level of detail. Since the war to end all wars (or was that the First World War?), Congress has preferred to overlook that penny-ante constitutional article that assigns to the Legislative branch alone the power to declare war (I was going to link to just that particular one, but read the whole damn thing; it's not that long). Oh - I should add that in blaming a "Republican-dominated Congress", General Eaton absolves his Democratic patron - Hillary Clinton - and all of the Democratic Senators and Representatives who supported this war of their responsibility. I seem to recall one of my civics teachers telling me something about how Senators can prevent a vote on any bill by holding a filibuster; might have been nice if at least one of those Democratic Senators had taken to the floor to oppose this worthless endeavor.

I suppose we should have expected perennial war booster, Frederick Kagan to put in a piece that says we learned as a nation what he always knew (small-footprint wars are silly). According to ol' Fred, not only have we all learned what he has always known, but even he has learned that the US military is even better at counter insurgency warfare than he ever imagined. Still - and I know this is an opinion piece - but should not a newspaper that professes to contain all the news that's fit to print at least feel some responsibility to challenge the administration - and their talking heads - on the statements like: "precision-guided weapons that minimize collateral damage"? I mean really, which members of our family do we describe as "collateral damage" when a bomb falls through the roofs of their house? How many civilians can be killed due to "collateral damage" and it still be called "minimal"? Why has no one yet - in the history of warfare - given us a metric to use for acceptable levels of the killings of innocents in the pursuit of the "mission"? How does a nation that professes to hold all life sacred even allow such phrases as "minimal collateral damage" to appear in our lexicon? Kagan is beyond delusional, in that he still professes to believe in "victory" in Iraq - as though anyone has any idea of what that means.

Finally, Anthony Cordesman tells us that he never imagined the threat from Saddam Hussein would prove to be a mere mirage, but that what surprised him was the ineptitude of the "A-Team" of national security personnel assembled by this President Bush. One wonders if he was paying attention during the run-up to this war or what made him feel that these men - and it was mostly men - with a long history of being chicken hawks (quick, what is the over/under on five deferments for Dick Cheney?) could possible be competent stewards of war?

Across this chain of fools, perhaps the biggest is the New York Times itself. Perhaps never has a newspaper with such a high opinion of itself be so deluded on what has to be the most serious decision a nation makes: when, where, how and why to wage war?

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This is a new day. This is a new time.

Barack Obama is an amazing politician - and I say that as a 37-year old man who normally reaches new heights of cynicism during this stage of an election cycle. It may seem obvious that a site that is self-described as politics from the Black American perspective would endorse Obama, but it is not for the obvious reason. No, after seeing the Vice-President go down in a bitterly contested election to a one-term governor with absolutely no knowledge of the world outside our borders in 2000; and after seeing a Vietnam war veteran - decorated at that - go down to a draft dodging son of a senator (and a future President too), APAB believes that the only candidate in the race who can take back the White House in 2008 is Obama.

What caused the Democratic Party to lose the office after an eight-year run that included the longest bull market of the 20th century? There are many reasons that have been listed: a poor campaign strategy by Gore that did not even deliver to him his home state of Tennesee; outright voter suppression in the key state of Florida (then governed by the Republican candidates brother); and even the denial of a basic tenet of democracy - counting votes - by a Supreme Court that was packed with judges from the Republican party, including some who were appointed by that same benevolent Dad who once got his son into the National Guard and out of duty to his country in war. So these are all good reasons, but in my old firm, we used to describe conditions like these as "necessary - but not sufficient". No, what was required to make that loss possible was apathy on the part of voters who could reasonably be expected to vote for the Democratic candidate. Sure, they had excuses: Gore was not that inspirational; it seemed obvious that he would win; the difference between him and Bush did not seem that far - but excuses is all they were. When it came right down to election day, people stayed home.

People stayed home.

Ever so slightly more than half of the electorate - 50.5% - voted in 2000. Doctoral thesis are written on the why behind this, but surely the rationale must include a belief on the part of voters that their concerns are not being heard. That their elected representatives are not acting in their interests - and what about our current political processes would cause anyone to believe that?

As poor as this turnout was, it was better than the previous two election cycles that featured Clinton on the ticket and even though Kerry had the fortune to receive more votes for President as a Democratic candidate than anyone in the history of the country, a turnout of just over 60% was not enough to put him in office, as much of the electoral energizing was done that year by Republicans, what with their combining of presidential politics with key state initiatives that spurred their base onward.

So if every election is determined by the turnout, which candidate can best drive the turnout required to win?

Obama is the answer. His candidacy has already shown - in each of the four states that have held primary or caucus votes so far - that he can turn out the traditionally disaffected voters under the age of 30. Also, his candidacy has already shown an ability to attract independent voters - which are key in this age of declining party affiliation. Furthermore, his candidacy has already shown an ability to attract Republican voters - which other Democratic candidate can make these claims?

None.

The article that this post links to from the New York Times states: "Turnout on Saturday (in South Carolina) was estimated at a record 530,000 people, nearly 100,000 more than in the Republican primary a week ago." What they do not include is another key fact of this election, that Obama alone captured more votes in 2008 than were cast for the entire Democratic primary field in 2004. Think about what this means: when the Democratic candidate has been selected, each candidate will implore those voters who gave their support to coalesce around the nominee. That being said, none of the candidates will be able to lay claim to the entirety of the base from their competitors. This highlights the importance of the ability Obama has shown to attract new voters and crossover voters, as he not only expands the base of those who vote for Democrats, but he makes the Democratic Party competitive with Republicans in states that other Democrats have sworn off as Republican strongholds.

In every election, voting matters. In 2008, voting for Obama matters.

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