"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding," – Justice Brandeis, 1928.
"Men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." Who does that remind you of?
I’ve aired this viewpoint before – and it is, at least, something practical that might be done, while we are stymied from effective action or a competent executive for the next two years. From a reader:
There is another alternative: redeploy in Kurdistan, as Galbraith suggests. The US troops are wanted there, you can access the large oil fields of Kirkuk, and you’re still close enough with the troops to act as a genuine deterrent to both a meddling Iran or the Sunni cesspool in Baghdad. It will be like enforcement of the no-fly zone, except with more muscle because they’ll still be troops on the ground, who will not be preoccupied with minding their backs in the midst of a civil war; things are relatively calm in Kurdistan. The peshmerga can still retain the job of internally policing Kurdistan, whilst the US can keep an eye on what’s going on in the rest of the region. It would be easy enough to deploy troops quickly in the event that Iran blockaded the Straits of Hormuz, or the Islamists seized the Saudi oil fields, or Israel was attacked by Iran and/or Syria (and their Hezbollah minions). This strikes me as the most elegant solution to a very messy problem right now.
Better than "whack-a-mole" because Rumsfeld won’t allow us to win.
The latest revelation that Donald Rumsfeld actually threatened to fire any subordinate who tried to come up with a post-invasion occupation plan makes me feel a little less crazy. Among the few posts airing theories about the bizarre decision-making by the Bush administration before I went on vacation, there was this one:
Some in the administration and among Bush-supporters, like me, believed in democratization as well as WMD-removal as twin pillars of the war. But the war-plan proves that this was not what Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush really had in mind. The most plausible interpretation is that they expected the discovered WMDs to provide complete justification for the war – and then wanted to get out as fast as possible, with a friendly exile like Chalabi installed. They wanted merely to send an intimidating signal.
For this and other attempts to make sense of Bush incoherence, I was described as demented, paranoid, etc. Of course, anyone who has read "Fiasco," or "Cobra II" will be less surprised. Fire. Rumsfeld. Now.
You can either fight a war on drugs or fight an effective war on terror. You can’t do both in Afghanistan. Johann Hari shows how the drug war brought the Taliban back from the near-dead. Money quote:
Over the past five years, with British and American military support, a sinister corporation called DynCorps has been going to the fields of the poorest farmers in Afghanistan and systematically destroying them. This is because they are growing opium poppies, used to make heroin that is freely bought on the streets of the West. Emmanuel Reinert, the Executive Director of the Senlis Council, explains, "The Taliban revival is directly, intimately related to the crop eradication programme. It could not have happened if the US was not aggressively destroying crops. It is the single biggest reason Afghans turned against the foreigners."
My take on the president’s bid to keep his military tribunals, enshrine torture in law, and use the issue – and the 9/11 families – as his electoral ace card. My Sunday Times column is here.
Elanora, Australia, 7 am.
More doubt is shed on the veracity of the president’s account last week. The best I’ve read is in Ron Suskind’s "The One Percent Doctrine."
Mean Girls: a Cartoon fantasy about a future campaign between Condi Rice and Hillary Rodham-Clinton.
Next week, I’m informed via troubled White House sources, will see the full unveiling of Karl Rove’s fall election strategy. He’s intending to line up 9/11 families to accuse McCain, Warner and Graham of delaying justice for the perpetrators of that atrocity, because they want to uphold the ancient judicial traditions of the U.S. military and abide by the Constitution. He will use the families as an argument for legalizing torture, setting up kangaroo courts for military prisoners, and giving war crime impunity for his own aides and cronies. This is his "Hail Mary" move for November; it’s brutally exploitative of 9/11; it’s pure partisanship; and it’s designed to enable an untrammeled executive. Decent Republicans, Independents and Democrats must do all they can to expose and resist this latest descent into political thuggery. If you need proof that this administration’s first priority is not a humane and effective counter-terror strategy, but a brutal, exploitative path to retaining power at any price, you just got it.
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)
"Among all the governments in the world, the only legitimate government endorsed by the Almighty is the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic is an extension of God, its Leader is appointed by God, its Revolutionary Guard is God’s Army, and all its citizens are members of the Party of God (Hezbollah)," – Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Meshkini, Iran’s President of the Assembly of Experts, that selects key government posts. Some consider him the second most powerful figure in Tehran.
The Dish 