Month: August 2008

More than six?

Fallows on the suspicious aspects of China’s pomo Triumph Of The Will spectacular:

It turns out — apparently — that the event producers were worried enough about visibility and other practical concerns that they produced computer-graphic simulations of how the timed explosions should look, and then spliced that info into what was shown on the big screen inside the Bird’s Nest and to billions of viewers world wide.

Every four years, someone complains that the Olympics are not living up to their multi-national, we-are-the-world uplift in favor of rank nationalism and patriotism. That someone should listen to Jim Fallows, as he watches Chinese television. This is the way the world is.

Kate Maltby has a smart response to Simon Barnes’s article on doping:

Constant obsession about drugs takes the magic out of sport. The Tour de France, after all, was created precisely as a superhuman contest that no one was ever expected to endure without boosting their performance artificially – in the good old days, long before doping tests, the athletes were all known to be on cocaine, but people still wondered at and lauded them, because their achievements were so unnatural as to be miraculous. Once we accept that we can’t stop people doping, the less active 99.99% of us might just be content to sit back in our armchairs and watch the sheer spectacle of athletes transgressing the frail limitations of this too too solid flesh.

Ron Suskind’s new book has earned buzz because of his arresting argument that the Bush administration actually forged evidence to buttress its case for war. I’ve aired the debate about this, and there are some shrewd skeptics. But part of the book – which is an ambitious attempt to weave all the strands of our current conflict into a unified whole – has received less attention. I’m not sure why, because it’s a more damning and much more plausible revelation. The former head of Britain’s MI6, Sir Roger Dearlove, confirms to Suskind on the record that both Bush and Blair received late-breaking but excellent first-hand intelligence that Saddam was bluffing on WMDs. A James Bond character, British spy Michael Shipster, secured a real line of information from an Iraqi intelligence chief. Blair had tasked MI6 with getting to the bottom of the WMD question. Suskind’s original source, a high-level American intelligence agent, puts it this nway:

"We knew," he says.
"Knew what?"
That there were no weapons in Iraq."

"Sure," I say, "people suspected. Define knew."

Then the story of Michael Shipster, subsequently confirmed by Dearlove. So if we knew there were no WMDs, why did Bush and Cheney go ahead with the invasion? Wouldn’t they have known that the lack of WMDs would retroactively destroy the legitimacy of the war? Here’s Dearlove’s response:

"The problem," Dearlove says, finally, "was the Cheney crowd was in too much of a hurry, really. Bush never resisted them quite strongly enough." His voice trails off as he looks beyond the Old Chruch to the temples o Washington.

"Yes, it was probably too late, I imagine, for Cheney," he says, about stopping the invasion. "I’m not sure it was too late for Bush."

The story of the Bush administration in a single anecdote? Probably, Dick Cheney has a hell of a lot to answer for.

(Photo: the vice president by Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

Last week, I put it with customary diplomacy:

On the Iran question, there can be little doubt that waging a pre-emptive war on the Persian regime is now the principal policy objective of the neocon right. To elect McCain is almost certainly to endorse a new war with Iran within the next four years. Again, this could be justified on the grounds of America’s interests and not Israel’s. But again, the case is getting a little harder to make. The world and the West can live, after all, with a deterred and contained nuclear Iran. Israel cannot.

Yesterday Noah Feldman had basically the same analysis:

The prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran before the next president’s inauguration in January is not just the stuff of airport thrillers. Much of the Israeli military establishment and Israeli public currently believes that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat. This gives Israel a motive for action much stronger than that of the U.S., for whom an Iranian bomb would primarily be a blow to our interests in the gulf region. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or whoever emerges as his successor in September might well be prepared to take risks that would not be worth it for the United States, especially given the vulnerability of our troops in Iraq.

Feldman thinks the potential conflict can be avoided. I sure hope so.

Steven Taylor rains on the neocon parade.

What is a "very clear timeline" if it isn’t the essence of Obama’s Iraq policy for the past two years? Money quote from the Iraqi government:

"We have said that this is a condition-driven process," [Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari] added, suggesting that the departure schedule could be modified if the security situation changed.

But Zebari made clear that the Iraqis would not accept a deal that lacks a timeline for the end of the U.S. military presence. "No, no definitely there has to be a very clear timeline," Zebari replied when asked if the Iraqis would accept an agreement that did not mention dates.

Obama has that sliver of a get-out clause as well: pragmatism will moderate withdrawal’s pace. But the goal of total Iraq independence and the eventual removal of all US troops is the same as Maliki’s, not McCain’s. In contrast, McCain’s no-fixed-timeline, put-down-permanent-roots, neo-imperial option is beginning to look out of touch with reality. We’ll see, of course. But it seems to me that, despite the conventional wisdom, it is Obama who has shown himself more attuned to winning the war in Iraq – which means turning the country over to the Iraqis, not retaining it as a permanent imperial quagmire -not McCain, whose twentieth century roots are showing.

"No doubt the Clinton hating Obama blogs will cluck, cluck, cluck with satisfaction   over this one. Seen as validation, the internal   memos hinted at in Allen’s piece and dished about recently, the subject   of which has been whispered about among political junkies for months, will also likely   spur people on to asking more about Hillary’s campaign and what, exactly, went wrong and who’s to blame. However, many will simply not write this tale until after November.   Most Democrats don’t want to do anything to distract from winning," – Taylor Marsh, not even trying to defend her heroine’s barrel-scraping advisers and flacks.