The NSA Ruling

Jack Balkin agrees with the result, doesn’t much like the reasoning. Money quote:

It is quite clear that the government will appeal this opinion, and because the court’s opinion, quite frankly, has so many holes in it, it is also clear to me that the plaintiffs will have to relitigate the entire matter before the circuit court, and possibly the Supreme Court. The reasons that the court below has given are just not good enough. This is just the opening shot in what promises to be a long battle.

Were the Neocons Conned?

A reader adds to the debate on the real motives for the Iraq war for Cheney and Rumsfeld:

The funny thing about your speculative theory is that it doesn’t really make the duped neo-cons look any better. After all Rumsfeld was quite upfront about the troop strength that would be used. The administration did nothing to free up money for the building of democracy or for maintaining troop strength during lengthy nation building. The neo-cons cannot claim they were lied to. They have to claim that they were told the truth which was unfair because it was unreasonable to expect them to have believed it.

My own guess is that Cheney and Rumsfeld did not care much about whether democracy arose, and certainly had no interest in the nation building required to bring it about. They thought the invasion would make a statement to the world and that is what justified it. That statement included the ability of the US to depose Hussein without great expense or great troop numbers. This was a misguided idea, but in some sense at least coherent. Contrast it with the people who wanted to do things that required great resources and great numbers of troops but supported the war anyway when it was clear that that wasn’t what we were doing. Such people existed both to the right and left. Friedman might be the clearest example of someone who was defending a completely different invasion than the one that was clearly going to be waged.

I plead guilty too. I bought the democratization line and the WMD threat and was passionately pro-war. My only defense is that within days of the invasion, I started to worry about the troop levels, and the dissonance between what I had been told and what was actually being done opened up. Then Abu Ghraib; then the refusal to add more troops; well, you get the picture. The bad news is: in a long, dangerous war of ideas, the Bush administration has somehow managed to muddy the moral high-ground against the evil of Islamism. It will take decades and countless innocent lives for us to recover.

Faith and Incompetence

A reader writes:

I’m entertained by the theory that Cheney and Rumsfeld meant for the war to go this way. Depending on which bad mood I’m in, I’ll now vacillate between this and the incompetence theory. Both work for me. I’m probably still more convinced by the incompetence theory, but not because I believe they’re stupid. They’re not. But they have approached their political theory the same way they have been taught to approach their religious faith: unquestioningly. Once this theory of the domino-effect/wildfire blaze of the spread of democracy/beneficent contagion of western values/etc became ingrained in their own heads, they’ve asked their supporters, just as the great revivalists and zealots of the past and present have, to accept as gospel the righteousness of their mission, the infallibility of the logic, and pre-ordained superiority of the outcome.

I think their incompetence is triggered by a zealous need to believe that their theory is so righteous as to be unassailable. To alter it, or to adjust to circumstances is to be unfaithful. It’s the same godlike worship of the free market, as though that was also some directive from On High. There are similar examples of unquestioned reverence on the left, but I see too many parallels between GWB’s religious faith (I am a Christian too, I should say) and his faith in his more secular principles. I think he sees no distinction. I think the same of Cheney and Rumsfeld. I believe that this is the source of their incompetence, and is indeed the very thing that hamstrings lots of smart and faithful people:  the inability to reconcile one’s heart and mind.

I’m also intrigued by this aspect of what the second chapter of my upcoming book calls the "fundamentalist psyche." I don’t think you can understand the actions of this administration – i.e. make them make internal sense – without understanding the depth of the president’s fundamentalist mindset. He’s a fundamentalist convert and an alcoholic. Faith is the one thing that rescued him from a life of chaos. So fundamentalist faith itself – regardless of its content – is integral to his entire worldview. And fundamentalism cannot question; it is not empirical; it is the antithesis of skepticism. Hence this allegedly "conservative" president attacking conservatism at its philosophical core: its commitment to freedom, to doubt, to constitutional process, to prudence, to limited government, balanced budgets and the rule of law. Faith is to the new conservatism is what ideology was to the old leftism: an unquestioned orthodoxy from which all policy flows.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, however, do not strike me as the same. They’re just bureaucratic brutalists, thrilled to have complete sanction to do as they please because they have the mandate from the leader-of-faith. Bush and Rove provide the fundamentalist voters; Cheney and Rummy get on with the war they want to wage. If they have to condescend to Bush’s recently discovered faith in democratization, they’ll humor him, while they bomb, wiretap and torture along what they think is the only path to security. They are enabled by the Christianist; but they’re just plain old "bomb ’em to the stone-age" reactionaries.