The Dish

Michael Brown resigns as head of FEMA. He wasn’t fired. And his reason for resigning was to take the media’s heat off the president. Not because he’d screwed up.

“I’ve got an idea for our Pentagon planners. The day I can land at the airport in Baghdad and ride in an unarmored car down the highway to the Green Zone is the day I’ll start considering withdrawal from Iraq.” – John McCain, telling it like it is. The one silver lining from Katrina – apart from the very heartening possibility that many fewer lives may have been lost than was feared – is that once we have seen incompetence exposed somewhere, we may be less intimidated from pointing it out elsewhere. I was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq and still am, but from the very beginning, I began to worry about how it was being conducted. I still am. When more conservatives and Republicans stop drinking the Rove Kool-Aid, or bravely looking the other way, maybe we’ll have a chance to get things moving in a better direction. The troops deserve a winning strategy. We don’t have one.

Why cannot the Bush administration answer a simple question with regard to its prisoner detention policies in the war on terror? Jackson Diehl tried to get an answer from Alberto Gonzales. He cannot get one. Money quote:

During a meeting at The Post late last month I asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a pretty simple question: Is it the policy of the Bush administration not to subject the foreign prisoners it is holding to “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment? The phrase I quoted refers to abuse falling just short of torture. It is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified a decade ago by the Senate.

Gonzales started to reply, then hesitated. Then he said he wasn’t sure, and would have to get back to me with an answer.

The answer, however, is obvious. This administration practices, condones and supports a policy that allows for “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of detainees in its custody. They just won’t admit it. Why? The answer to that question tells you a great deal about what this administration is fundamentally about.

A native New Orleanian’s take.

Not just the Bushies, of course.

“KIND OF FUN”: I got emails relaying this story before and I ignored them, thinking that it was just too crazy to be true. Apparently, it isn’t. Tom DeLay really is that big of an idiot.

This cocky, sequestered president simply didn’t know what was going on as Katrina hit:

When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn’t act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority.

His own command-structure of craven loyalty and cronies insulated him from the facts. Rumsfeld – surprise! – opposed sending troops to stop the looting. At least he’s consistent. Newsweek elaborates:

There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed.

His staff was terrified of having to tell him to cut his vacation short. On Wednesday, Blanco was not permitted to get through to the president for hours. She asked for 40,000 troops. She didn’t get them. In the end, it was Nagin who laid down the law:

According to Sen. David Vitter, a Republican ally of Bush’s, the meeting came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of “who’s in charge?” Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush, “We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have a more-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let’s do it.”

It took a city mayor to tell the president to do his job. But Blanco balked. And Bush dithered, while more lives were lost. When you get a senior Bush aide describing the White House bunker as “strangely surreal and almost detached,” you know we have a problem. Now if only we had an Iraqi version of Nagin: someone who can tell this president a truth he doesn’t want to hear.

“There’s nothing good about big-government conservatism. It’s an iron triangle of politicians, lobbyists and industry wallowing in the spoils of government contracting and favoritism linked to campaign contributions. The recipient of big-government liberalism is likely to be a 90-year-old who can’t get out of bed, or a pregnant teen in need of pre-natal care. The recipient of big-government conservatism is a Halliburton executive or someone who lobbies on Halliburton’s behalf. The owners of Lenco Industries certainly did well when the $180,000 Lenco BearCat assault vehicle landed in La Crosse.” – a local columnist discovers what the Bush era is about.

Canada voids Islamic religious “justice.”

GOOD NEWS IN MOSUL: A soldier looks on the bright side. There has been some success at Tal Afar as well. But this is the underlying reality:

But as with previous battles, like those in Falluja and Qaim, a western city near Syria, a large number of insurgents also escaped the fight. That makes the battle, at least in some measure, the latest example of one of the most nettlesome problems faced in the war, what one marine in Anbar Province recently described as “punching a balloon”: American forces attack with overwhelming firepower only to have some insurgents leave and then return, or move on to fight elsewhere.

One year ago, Tal Afar was the scene of a major offensive to oust entrenched insurgents. After the battle, American commanders said the city was safe. But the military, stretched thin by demand for troops elsewhere, left fewer than 500 soldiers in Tal Afar and a surrounding area twice the size of Connecticut. Predictably, American officers said, the insurgents returned in force and were largely undisturbed until May, when Colonel McMaster’s unit, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, was reassigned from south of Baghdad to take back the region from insurgents.

As long as Rumsfeld refuses to provide enough troops to do the job, or dramatically alters strategy, we will fail in Iraq.

THE PALESTINIAN REALITY: From anti-Christian pogroms on the West Bank to the torching of synagogues in Gaza, you get a glimpse of what basis there is for a tolerant, pluralist Palestinian state.

The proposed constitutional amendment in Massachusetts – to take back marriage rights and replace them with identical but re-named “civil unions” – looks like it will never make it to the voters. More “judicial tyranny”? Nope. A legislature, answerable to voters, has decided to punt on it, it seems. The voters don’t want it; every incumbent who opposed the amendment last year was re-elected; some of those who supported the amendment lost their seats. But what’s interesting is that a second amendment is emerging that will try again. But this time, it will be an honest reflection of the base of the anti-gay marriage position. Their view is that gay couples deserve no rights whatever. So their amendment will strip gay couples of marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships and any legal protections (just as the federal one would). The vote would not take place until 2008. Public support for removing all protections from gay couples in Massachusetts is not a majority now, and public opinion in Massachusetts has moved toward favoring gay marriage over the year it has been in force. And so the theo-conservative right hits a democratic wall. As it happens, I went to another wedding this past Saturday. I can’t report much of it since I was bawling through most of it. I’m a terrible softy at straight weddings. But to see two friends marry after eight years of sharing each other’s life and after two millennia of cruelty, oppression and stigma was a little much. And with each such moment, the movement for a wider human family builds.

An interesting 1995 story about reform of FEMA in the Clinton years. History might eventually judge that the 1990s was the high water-mark for a certain kind of conservatism – smaller but more effective government. Ironic it happened under a Democratic president.