On the Execution of Saddam Hussein

I'll let Josh Marshall speak for me:

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur -- phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

[snip]

This is what we're reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do. Hang Saddam Hussein because there's nothing else this president can get right.

What do you figure this farce will look like 10, 30 or 50 years down the road? A signal of American power or weakness?

[A: Weakness]

Oh, right - before I forget: SUPER HAPPY NEW YEAR!

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has had some more time to sift through additional details since this execution was first clearly imminent. After examining some additional details supplied in the New York Times, Glenn has an updated take on Josh's quip that this execution is the one thing this Administration "can get right"; in fact, Glenn's take is quite the opposite:

We can't even get a hanging right. With all of the world watching, we yet again were the primary authors of a violent, uncivilized, and primitive act which -- no matter how justified in some ultimate moral sense -- was carried out in the most thuggish, wretched, inept, and (we now learn) patently illegal manner.

It really is striking, and a potent sign of just how absurd is our ongoing occupation, that the "Iraqi Government" which we are fighting to empower could not even conduct this execution with a pretense of legality or concern for civilized norms -- the executioners were not wearing uniforms but leather jackets and murderers' masks, conducting themselves not as disciplined law enforcement officers but as what they are (death squad members and sectarian street thugs).

And the most revealing, and most disturbing, detail is that Saddam's executioners -- in between playground insults spat at a tied-up Saddam -- chanted their religious-like allegiance to Moktada Al Sadr, the Shiite militia leader whom we are told is the Great Enemy of the U.S., the One We Now Must Kill. This noble and just event for which we are responsible was carried out by a brutal, murderous, lawless militia. Freedom is on the march.

Look for 2007 to be just as fun as 2000-2006! Who knows? We may be "celebrating" this event and its aftermath through most of this century!

Not Dead Yet

According to American Conservative Magazine, it appears I spoke a little too soon in my tentative praise for George W Bush for helping to usher in the death of the neo-conservative movement.

Sadly, I have to agree with Scott McConnell of AmConMag:

This election season ends with neoconservatism widely mocked and openly contemptuous of the president who took its counsels. The key policy it has lobbied for since the mid-1990s—the invasion of Iraq—is an almost universally acknowledged disaster. So one can see why the movement’s obituaries are being written. But the group was powerful and influential well before its alliance with George W. Bush. In its wake it leaves behind crises—Iraq first among them—that will not be easy to resolve, and neocons will not be shy about criticizing whatever imperfect solutions are found to the mess they have created. Perhaps most importantly, neoconservatism still commands more salaries—able people who can pursue ideological politics as fulltime work in think tanks and periodicals—than any of its rivals. The millionaires who fund AEI and the New York Sun will not abandon neoconservatism because Iraq didn’t work out. The reports of the movement’s demise are thus very much exaggerated.

McConnell is correct in positing that neo-conservatives have many more lives to burn through, before their (ironically) near-sighted ideology has run its course. They are masters at denying culpability -- too eager to align themselves with any next power base that can (or will) further their cause. McConnell rightfully points out their history in latching onto either Party -- Democratic or Republican -- in order too further the implementation of their worldview. Indeed, their history proves it, despite that it may not always have been a cakewalk:

Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson was the archetype, a "labor" Cold War Democrat and the man who originally brought Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz to Capitol Hill. A force in the Senate, Jackson could delay or even thwart policies he opposed, and he (and aide Richard Perle) did a brilliant job of tying Henry Kissinger’s détente policy in knots in the mid-1970s. But that was the power to negate, not create. Jackson induced sleep on the stump, as his two presidential bids revealed. Replacing him as the great hope for the neocons was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York-born Harvard professor who was, in the 1960s and ‘70s, a flamboyant and often brilliant intellectual. But once elected to the Senate in 1976, Moynihan proved a disappointment, turning out to be not remotely as hawkish as neoconservatives expected.

For the older neocons, with backgrounds as Democrats and even socialists, embracing the Republican Party always seemed a date on the wild side. But not so for those now under 60, who came of political age under Reagan. Republican ties were natural. And as the experience with the Clinton transition demonstrated, crossing the floor to the Democrats will not be easy.

But if Bush has failed them, what options remain? Joe Lieberman has less national appeal than Henry Jackson did, and once you have been embedded in the Pentagon and the vice president’s office, forays from the Senate will seem a weak brew. John McCain is another matter, and if Americans can be persuaded that the solution to their Middle East, terrorism, and other diplomatic dilemmas lies in more troops and invasions, neoconservatism will have springtime all over again.

What's most ironic about this chameleon-like political agility and Party-hopping is that for all of their self-proclaimed moral clarity and 'noble' long-term vision of an American-style global peace, the practical application of their approach means more day-to-day emphasis on political self-preservation than on long-term planning to achieve their lofty goals. Hence the failed war in Iraq, back-stabbing, and relentless continuation of smearing political opponents.

This last point -- that neocons are adept masters at the all-too-effective political smear machine -- is also partly why their alliance with Bush/Rove made so much sense to their political opposition despite the historical, perceived political differences noted above:

What won’t be dropped is the neoconservatives' attachment to Israel and the tendency to conflate the Jewish state’s interests (as defined in right-wing Israeli terms) with America’s. So one can look forward to neoconservative agitation on two fronts: a powerful campaign to draw the United States into a war to eliminate Iran’s nuclear potential and an equally loud effort in support of maintaining Israeli dominance over the West Bank and denying the Palestinians meaningful statehood. Those who argue effectively for a more even-handed American policy towards Israel and Palestine will risk the full measure of smears linking them to historical anti-Semitism.

Example? Look no further than last week.

Could someone please find a way to permanently kill these things?

That GAO Enemy-Initiated Attack Trendline Is Seriously Harshing My Mellow

From Justin Rood at TPMMuckraker:

[This chart] was produced in December, but it's missing data for the months of September, October and November of this year -- a period of increased violence, according to news reports. What gives?

[Rood] called Joseph A. Christoff, the GAO official who produced the document. "I have all [the Pentagon's] data" for those months, he told [Rood]. But the military stamped it classified, he said. And despite making weeks of phone calls, he can't convince anyone there to declassify the numbers.

"They give conflicting reasons," Christoff [said]. "For some reason, they haven't gotten through their bureaucracy."

Could that "some reason" be similar to this?

Middle East analyst Flynt Leverett, who served under President Bush on the National Security Council and is now a fellow at the New America Foundation, revealed today that the White House has been blocking the publication of an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times. The column is critical of the administration’s refusal to engage Iran.

[snip]

According to Leverett the op-ed was "all based on stuff that Secretary Powell, Secretary Rice, Deputy Secretary Armitage have talked about publicly. It’s been extensively reported in the media." Leverett says the incident shows "just how low people like Elliot Abrams at the NSC [National Security Council] will stoop to try and limit the dissemination of arguments critical of the administration’s policy."

That is, politics trump policy.

Dissension is such a buzzkill...

WaPo: He's the Worst Ever

I have certainly mused this indisputable fact...but has a major traditional media source -- until now?

Historians are loath to predict the future. It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history.

This question has certainly been posed before, but never has a traditional media source such as the Washington Post dared to commit this conclusion to print.

I know, I know...the Post has a "well-known liberal bias" (ha!) - but so does The Truth, as the saying goes...

I think we'll find history will agree, and with overwhelming consensus.