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By Weldon Berger, on April 30th, 2007
George Tenet’s effort to absolve himself from blame for the Iraq fiasco is running into trouble. Critics of the the former CIA director’s role in promoting the war, including those who point to his new book as confirmation that the Bush administration, in particular Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, came into office determined to invade Iraq, say he had a responsibility to go public with the manifest doubts he now claims he had about the wisdom of the venture. Supporters of the war say he’s revising that role now that the invasion is viewed by most Americans as a mistake. Several prominent former CIA officials — Larry Johnson, Michael Sheuer and Ray McGovern, among others — accuse Tenet not just of failing to speak out against the war but of actively participating in the twisting of intelligence used to make the case for it, damaging the agency in consequence.
The most peculiar of Tenet’s claims, at least as used in his own defense, is that his famous remark that the intelligence on Iraq’s banned weapons was a “slam dunk” was taken out of context by the administration officials who used it to support their own claims that “everyone got it wrong.”
Tenet first said he didn’t remember making the remark. Now, he says that he didn’t mean the intelligence was unassailable; only that it could be used to make an unassailable public case for undertaking an invasion that he says was in his view at the time highly problematic if not doomed. He seems to have thought of himself not as an independent, honest broker of intelligence but more as the head of a PR firm whose responsibility was to provide his client, the White House, with what they needed to market their product even though he harbored private doubts about the utility of it. It’s as if Ralph Nader were making Corvair ads at the same time as he wrote Unsafe At Any Speed.
Continue reading Tenet’s case for absolution on Iraq is not a slam dunk
By Weldon Berger, on April 28th, 2007
People do stupid things all the time, but most people aren’t the Director of Central Intelligence and the things aren’t stuff like forgetting to write an intelligence assessment on a country you don’t think is much of a threat but that your employers seem intent on invading. So when George Tenet says that’s what he did, I suspect he’s painting himself as a moron to avoid being painted by others as something worse: a coward. I don’t think it’s working; I think he’s just coming off as a cowardly moron, someone who failed to protect his country from the Doctors Strangelove in the White House and was stupid enough to try to rationalize the failure in print.
Brent Budowsky suggests that Tenet’s book tour should be conducted under oath, a reference to the recent invitation extended Tenet by House oversight committee chairman Henry Waxman. It’s a good idea. The first few paragraphs of a Washington Post story about the book offer enough self-contradicting or nonsensical excerpts to guarantee riveting, if not expository, theater.
The most obvious flaw in the narrative as described by the Post story arises from Tenet’s unsurprising revelation about the administration’s early focus on invading Iraq. Tenet says that he never questioned the threat posed by Saddam, only whether or not it was imminent, but he also says that whatever threat Iraq posed was so far off the radar that it wasn’t even mentioned in the CIA threat briefings provided to the incoming administration in November and December of 2000. He says that although the administration, in particular Dick Cheney, signaled before they even took office that invading Iraq was a serious priority, he, Tenet, didn’t think updating the National Intelligence Estimate on the country was necessary until Congressional Democrats demanded it before the October,2002, vote on authorizing the invasion, nearly two years after he recognized the administration’s determination to pull the trigger.
Continue reading The George Tenet edition of “Why don’t their heads explode?”
By Weldon Berger, on April 27th, 2007
Matt Taibbi’s Boris Yeltsin obit in Rolling Stone is essential reading for anyone harboring romantic notions about the saviour of Russia. The basic theme is that Yeltsin was a drunken, vicious sot who stole Russia rather than saving it, but the treat is in the details. A sample:
[T]he Yeltsin family lived in a workers’ barracks where men, women, children and the elderly slept on top of each other like animals and fought, literally fought with fists and lead pipes, for crusts of bread, or a few feet of space upon which to sleep at night. The communist government found its leaders among the meanest and greediest of the children who survived and thrived in places like this. Boris Yeltsin was such a child. As a teenager he only knew two things; how to drink vodka and smash people in the face. At the very first opportunity he joined up with the communists who had liquidated his grandfather and persecuted his father and became a professional thief and face-smasher, rising quickly through the communist ranks to become a boss of the Sverdlovsk region, where he was again famous for two things: his heroic drinking and his keen political sense in looting and distributing the booty from Soviet highway and construction contracts. If Boris Yeltsin ever had a soul, it was not observable in his early biography. He sold out as soon as he could and was his whole life a human appendage of a rotting, corrupt state, a crook who could emerge even from the hottest bath still stinking of booze, concrete and sausage.
Read the whole thing. Follows a few of my favorite bits.
Continue reading The definitive Boris Yeltsin obituary
By Weldon Berger, on April 27th, 2007
The Iraqi government is waiting out the insurgents, the insurgents are waiting out us and we’re waiting out the Iraqi government. Symmetry is nature’s perfect gift to man.
We’ve been told often enough that US troops will remain in Iraq until Iraqi ones are capable of securing the country; that Iraqi troops will never be capable of securing the country so long as they’re reliant on US troops; that the Iraqi government must take the necessary steps to bring about a political resolution to the nation’s woes (theirs, not ours) because a military solution is impossible; that a political resolution is impossible without security; that security is impossible without US troops.
You can see the problem here: all of the prospective conditions for ending the conflict are either mutually exclusive or part of an endless feedback loop and, by the administration’s own piecemeal accounts, none of them exist in full anyway.
Continue reading Iraq Victory edition of “Why don’t their heads explode?”
By Weldon Berger, on April 27th, 2007
In a perfect world, the brains of politicians and pundits who say utterly contradictory things from one day to the next would spontaneously combust. This would occur often enough to create yet another serious climate change threat, but America is a great and innovative country that could meet the challenge head on, as it were, and create a solution. Electing serious politicians and eschewing moronic pundits would be a start.
A few days ago Washington Post columnist David Broder attacked Senate majority leader Harry Reid as “a continuing embarrassment” to Democrats equivalent to Alberto Gonzales for Republicans(and drew some choice words in response). Reid’s proximate sin? Candor, specifically in saying that the war in Iraq is lost.
Today, in an attempt to resuscitate the Straight Talk Express, Broder congratulates John McCain for calling the Bush administration “a bloated, irresponsible and incompetent government” and saying that the US should not have attacked Iraq without “a realistic and comprehensive plan for success” and that the administration “did not meet this responsibility initially.” Broder lauds McCain for recognizing that Bush — toward whom Broder’s behavior would by Broder standards have warranted impeachment, if the columnist were an Oval Office intern — has become electorally toxic: “After years of cozying up to the man in the White House, and emerging (for better or worse) as the most eloquent defender of Bush’s current strategy in Iraq, McCain this week reverted suddenly and dramatically to his 1999-2000 role as the leading Republican critic of politics as usual … for John McCain, there must be at least some relief now in being able to speak his own mind — whatever the consequences. Candor, even belatedly, becomes him.”
Continue reading McCain/Broder edition of “Why don’t their heads explode?”
By Weldon Berger, on April 25th, 2007
Paul Wolfowitz runs not the slightest risk of death by extrajudicial hanging or crucifixion, but I want to call dibs on the search terms “Wolfowitz,” “crucify,” “lynch” and “leftists” now because it’s only a matter of time until defenders of the World Bank president and Iraq war architect start throwing them around.
It may be his romantic and nepotistic relationship with former Bank employee Shaha Ali Riza that officially does him in, but that’s not what will prompt the cries of outrage; our hip, modern conservatives don’t regard extramarital affairs as a deal-breaker these days — hence the front-running status of GOP presidential candidate, cross-dresser and serial adulterer Rudy Giuliani — but it isn’t something they’re comfortable promoting as a positive virtue, at least not yet. Wolfowitz, however, is also under fire in connection with efforts by one of his top aides to squelch climate change and family planning as considerations in World Bank programs and reports, and those are ideological things, and ideological things are the stuff of which martyrs are made.
Another potential rallying point is the Bank’s anti-corruption campaign, of which Wolfowitz is both the chief proponent and the poster child bad example. His supporters will claim that attacks on his credibility as a reformer are the result of entrenched, corrupt interests reacting to his flaming sword, and I’ll lay odds that someone, somewhere, will argue that he’s been set up by Riza and unnamed inimical interests (or maybe named ones, who knows).
Continue reading The lynching, crucifixion and rape of Paul Wolfowitz
By Weldon Berger, on April 23rd, 2007
During his two terms as president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin managed to cut the country’s economy almost in half. He invaded Chechnya, leading to the worst human rights abuses in the brief post-Soviet history; he dissolved the Russian parliament — in fact he attacked it with tanks — and he allowed friends and associates . . . → Read More: I’d raise a glass to Yeltsin if he’d left anything to drink
By Weldon Berger, on April 22nd, 2007
Michael Chertoff says you should be afraid, very afraid. He’s right. Why? Because he’s our Homeland Security chief and he’s deranged.
A little less than a month ago, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a scathing Washington Post op-ed piece taking the Bush administration to task for parlaying the genuine national distress immediately following 911 into a perpetual, artificial climate of fear which they’ve used to justify the regime’s excesses, including the invasion of Iraq and various assaults on the Constitution. His focus was the “War on Terror;” not just the presumed execution of it but the phrase itself, which he rightly says is inherently meaningless and into which, because it’s so amorphous, can be fitted almost any activity. He also notes the use of strained historical anologies — the conflation of al Qaeda with Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union — and the associated demonization of political opponents.
The administration has finally issued a formal response, via Chertoff, and it’s fabulous: Chertoff demonizes Brzezinski, makes a strained historical analogy ‘twixt the war on terror and those 20th century exercises against enormous, heavily-armed totalitarian states, and variously distorts Brzezinski’s comments and lies about them.
Continue reading Zbigniew Brzezinski is oh so wrong to be not afraid
By Weldon Berger, on April 21st, 2007
Slate’s John Dickerson is offering a trenchant analysis of a Move On ad targeting John McCain’s Weird Al Jankovic treatment of the Beach Boys classic tune, “Barbara Ann,” in which McCain substituted “Bomb Iran” for the eponymous intro. Move On’s take is that McCain’s little joke bespeaks a potentially reckless president. Dickerson’s take is that the Move On ad “backfired” by driving otherwise skeptical Republicans into McCain’s arms because “a Republican struggling to court conservatives could probably not ask for a better gift than to be attacked by Move On.”
Dickerson’s assumption appears to be that Move On is attempting to dissuade Republican voters from supporting McCain in the GOP primaries. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the organization’s message is aimed at Democrats and independents who may still be suffering from the McCain crush that has its origins in the elegiac coverage the senator enjoyed for years from Dickerson and his colleagues; McCain’s only chance of winning the general election in the exceedingly unlikely event that he survives the primaries is to garner a significant chunk of independent and Democratic voters, and ads like Move On’s are designed to chip away at whatever’s left of the uncritical centrist lust for the erstwhile maverick. In order for the ad to backfire, it would have to subtract money and votes from the Democratic field and deposit them in the McCain camp. Is that going to happen? Nuh uh, even if we weren’t a year out from the primaries.
Continue reading How Move On catapulted John McCain to the presidency
By Weldon Berger, on April 19th, 2007
My friend Bill emailed me a few days ago about a piece of legislation pending in the Texas house of Representatives that would require high schools to offer a class on the Bible if 15 or more students requested it. The Los Angeles Times story relied heavily on a Texas watchdog group called the Texas Freedom Network, which is concerned by the measure because it includes no guidelines for the curriculum other than to say that the course must be taught in “an objective and nondevotional manner,” and no qualifications for the teachers.
What most worries the group is that a survey of similar courses turned up some less than academically sound instructional practices.
A study conducted for [Texas Freedom network] by Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, found that of Texas’ 25 public school districts with a Bible course, 22 districts’ offerings had a Christian slant … one teacher showed students a PowerPoint presentation titled “God’s Road Map for Your Life.” Included was a slide called “Jesus Christ Is the One and Only Way.” Another teacher taught students that NASA had found a missing day and time that corresponded to a biblical story of the sun standing still. One school showed “VeggieTales” videos, which feature computer-animated Christian vegetables that talk.
I’m familiar with the VeggieTales series, which features mildly cautionary morality tales delivered by a collection of articulate anthropomorphic produce, one of which has a voice reminiscent of Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor, which is itself a multi-layered morality tale. Inexplicably, the series has not been translated into French.
Continue reading What our schools need is more Christian vegetables
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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I’d raise a glass to Yeltsin if he’d left anything to drink
During his two terms as president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin managed to cut the country’s economy almost in half. He invaded Chechnya, leading to the worst human rights abuses in the brief post-Soviet history; he dissolved the Russian parliament — in fact he attacked it with tanks — and he allowed friends and associates . . . → Read More: I’d raise a glass to Yeltsin if he’d left anything to drink