Month: May 2006

Last Chance in Iraq

John Burns writes the definitive, desperate plea for sustaining some sort of hope. More evidence of the Bush administration’s staggering incompetence in trying to fight a critical war on the cheap and on the fly can be read here. This passage from another NYT story today chilled me:

Mr. Awad said he was bracing for more violence. Iraq, deeply damaged during the years under Mr. Hussein, is simply not yet ready to calmly accept democracy, he said. "For a period of time, things need to burn," he said, seated on a mat in the house of his dead relatives in Sadr City on Friday. The deaths left a family of 11 women without men. "We have to pass through this period," he continued. "Forgive me if I speak in a sectarian way, but this is the reality."

Increasingly, I fear it is.

Lose-Lose

The immigration debate is tearing the Republican party apart. The GOP is unable to please its base, and yet its base has succeeded in alienating increasing numbers of Hispanic voters. Money quote:

Ken Strasma, a Democratic strategist who specializes in using demographic data to target potential voters, and the Hispanic Voter Project at Johns Hopkins University conducted a study concluding that, if past voting patterns hold, the growing Hispanic population means that Democrats will increase their 2004 vote totals by nearly half a million votes in 2008.
"The impact is even stronger farther out in the future, as Hispanic vote growth would move two Southwestern battleground states — Nevada and New Mexico — into the Democratic column by 2016, and add Iowa and Ohio by 2020," the study said … A third study of all voters found that conservative white Republicans are the most adamantly opposed of all political and demographic groups to what Bush calls his "rational middle ground" policy toward allowing more undocumented workers to become legal and eventually to become citizens.

And so the Republicans fall into the chasm between the two groups. The Rove strategy of a new Republican coalition is slowly being exposed as a fantasy.

The Great Wall Of America

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My take here. Money quote:

Maybe Karl Rove will set up a photo-op in October. The president could come to the Arizona border, assemble a crowd of anti-illegal immigrant activists and declaim, in reverse-Reagan mode: "Presidente Fox, build up this wall!"

I must say even I was taken aback by Pat Buchanan’s new book title: "State of Emergency : How Illegal Immigration Is Destroying America." In person yesterday, at Book Expo, I recall him describing the subtitle as: "The Colonization and Third-World Take-Over" of the United States. Maybe he’d had a little too much Starbucks.

(Photo: Denis Poroy/AP.)

We Torture

A fascinating exchange in the Senate yesterday between Senator Feinstein and the new CIA director nominee, Michael Hayden. You may recall that a law was passed last year by veto-proof margins banning all "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of military detainees. It was the McCain Amendment. You may also recall that the president, in signing the amendment into law, issued a statement saying he didn’t have to obey it. I don’t think any serious person can define "waterboarding" as anything but torture; but even those who reserve such a term for applying electricity to people’s testicles will concede that waterboarding is "cruel, inhuman and degrading" under the plain meaning of those words. It involves strapping a human being to a wooden board, tipping the board so that the victim’s face is at a lower level than his feet, putting a cloth over his mouth and nose and pouring water over it to simulate drowning. It was a technique used by the Japanese in the Second World War and, famously, by the French in Algeria. In the old days, before Dick Cheney became vice-president, American soldiers found guilty of such a practice were court-martialed. No longer. Here’s the money quote from a Washington Post editorial today:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asked the nominee a simple question: Is "waterboarding" an acceptable interrogation technique? Gen. Hayden responded: "Let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail." That was the wrong answer… [W]hy couldn’t Gen. Hayden say clearly that the technique is now off-limits?

I think we know the answer. The executive branch views itself beyond the law, is committing war-crimes, has endorsed and practised torture and abuse, and refuses to change. I don’t see how any senator can vote for a nominee who can defend that position.

Iran’s “Yellow Stars”

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I’ve now read enough to feel confident in saying that the Canada National Post story about Jews in Iran being forced to wear yellow badges is almost certainly bunk. The Jewish delegate in Iran’s pseudo-parliament denies it. A Human Rights Watch activist who has studied the legislation in question writes the following:

[The law] includes only generalities with regard to promoting a national dress code and fashion industry that should be subsidized and supported by the government. It is a troubling development; its main target is most probably Iranian women. But there is absolutely no mention of religious minorities. If the people behind the National Post article have some insider knowledge of how this legislation will be implemented, they should note their sources. Otherwise the legislation itself has nothing in it relating to what is being reported about mandates for religious minorities.

Was this active disinformation? If so, who was behind it? And for what purpose? That seems to me to be the next salient question.

(Photo: Lynsey Addorio/Corbis.)