Friday, October 12, 2007 – choose your news. So Al Gore won the Noble Peace Prize – it changes nothing. The right thinks he’s a worthless fraud and the left knows he won’t run for president. It’s interesting, but there’s no “carry forward” news in that. More interesting was that the US-Russia missile defense talks failed – Russian President Vladimir Putin warned President Bush’s top two Cabinet officials on Friday to back off our missile defense plans for Eastern Europe. In fact, Putin criticized Bush’s pet project and threatened to pull out of a Cold War-era treaty that limits intermediate-range missiles - “We may decide someday to put missile defense systems on the moon, but before we get to that we may lose a chance for agreement because of you implementing your own plans.” Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates, State and Defense, sat there and took it. The Pentagon plans to install ten missile interceptors in Poland, linked to a missile tracking radar in the Czech Republic, and says the system will provide some protection in Europe and beyond for long-range missiles launched from Iran. Russia believes the system is a step toward undermining the deterrent value of its own nuclear arsenal. And they will have none of it. And Putin also threatened to suspend Russian adherence to another arms control treaty – the Conventional Forces in Europe pact, the one that limits deployments of conventional military forces. This is all bad news.
There was some commentary. Robert Farley notes the apparent lack of any real strategic rationale for this system that doesn’t even work –
The utility of a missile defense system has to be evaluated based on its value added over a basic deterrent posture. At least one reason (and not the only reason) that nobody launches missiles at us now is that we would respond by destroying the offending state. The missile defense assumes that deterrence will fail, but its advocates offer no compelling reason for why it would fail; apart from indefensible claims about the suicidal tendencies of the North Korean or Iranian leadership, or very tendentious arguments about terrorists acquiring ICBMs (seriously, if Al Qaeda had a nuke, why would they bother to put it on an ICBM?), there’s just not much there. The most sensible case is the “hostage” argument; North Korea might invade the South, then attempt to deter US intervention by aiming a nuke at the West Coast. It’s the best argument they have, but it doesn’t amount to much; it still requires the North Korean (or Iranian, or whomever) leadership to be suicidal. But even if the argument were compelling, the missile defense would have to be 100% effective; what President would act if she seriously believed that there was a 10% chance an American city would be destroyed?
Matthew Yglesias says Farley’s thinking on this lacks imagination –
Nobody will quite articulate it in this manner, but the purpose of NMD, it seems to me, is to facilitate American first strikes– either nuclear or conventional depending on the adversary. The basic logic of the right’s hegemonist worldview is that the United States needs to maintain the ability to effectuate “regime change” anytime and anywhere. Only NMD can really make that possible.
So you see, Putin may have a point. We’ll set up the system anyway. This does not bode well, but people will talk about whether Al Gore matters any longer.
And the same day Turkish anger with us was becoming a bit of a problem –
Amid widespread calls for revenge after the killing of some 30 Turkish soldiers and civilians in two weeks by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – and the failure of US and Iraqi forces to curb the attacks from bases in Iraq – the Turkish parliament is expected next week to authorize cross-border operations into northern Iraq.
Turkish warplanes and artillery are reportedly already targeting PKK camps, but an incursion could destabilize the one area of Iraq that has been relatively peaceful since the US invasion in 2003.
And complicating the situation is a US congressional committee’s approval Wednesday of a resolution calling the 1915 massacres by Ottoman Turks a “genocide.” Turkey called the decision “unacceptable,” after warning that the vote could jeopardize US access to a military airbase crucial to resupplying US troops in Iraq.
Say, who else can we piss off?
On the other hand, the same day we got good news. It seems that scientists can now explain chocolate cravings – a study links the type of bacteria living in people’s digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Some people have the wrong bacteria, or the right bacteria. That’s good to know.
What’s not good to know is that another ex-general was letting it rip, saying Iraq a “nightmare” for the United States. Actually he said Iraq is a “nightmare with no end in sight” because of political misjudgments, and not military decisions. It was the source that was the news, of course.
This was retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded all coalition troops for a year beginning June 2003. He was the highest-ranking Hispanic in the United States Army when he retired on November 1 2006, and at the time of his retirement he called his career a casualty of the Abu Ghraib scandal – that was on his watch. But he had a good career. On July 10, 2001, Sanchez became commanding general of V Corps’ 1st Armored Division, and he held that position for nearly two years before assuming command of the entire corps on June 14, 2003, the day he became commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq. He’s no fool.
And he says we just cannot win now. We did too many things that messed up the situation beyond hope – disbanding the Saddam-era military and failing to cement ties with tribal leaders and quickly establish civilian government after Saddam was toppled. And he called our current strategies – including the surge of 30,000 additional forces earlier this year – a “desperate attempt” to make up for years of misguided policies in Iraq. It seems he thinks that the civilian leadership was the problem – he said it became clear during his command that the mission was “severely handicapped” because the State Department and all the rest were not “adequately contributing to a mission that could not be won by military force alone.” They didn’t get it, and they don’t get it now – “There is nothing going on today in Washington that would give us hope” that things are going to change. On the other hand he said a full-scale withdrawal was not an option. In short, we’re screwed. We’re doing the wrong thing, cannot seem to understand it would be wise to change things, and using up the military for no good reason he can see. Other than that, things are fine.
Of course there are minor problems, as Newsweek reported at the end of the week with this odd tale –
The colonel was furious. “Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers.” He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head of another private security company. Asked to address this and other allegations in this story, Blackwater spokesperson Anne Tyrrell said, “This type of gossip has led to many soap operas in the press.”
Logan Murphy here –
As if being trapped in the middle of a bloody civil war by their civilian leadership hasn’t been humiliating enough for our troops, we find out they also have to protect themselves from high-paid thugs from Blackwater - in the Green Zone, no less.
But other than that, things are fine.
Or maybe they’re not. The day also brought the UN report - delayed till after last month’s Congressional debate at the specific request of Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. It’s a bit unnerving. As Andrew Sullivan says, the treatment of prisoners in Iraq is now almost as bad as under Saddam, and it is ultimately America’s responsibility. See for yourself –
Among the most serious issues raised in the report is the treatment of detainees. The U.N. agency found that as of June, 44,325 detainees were in Iraqi or U.S. custody, an increase of nearly 4,000 people since April. Many of them, it said, remained in detention for months without having their cases reviewed or with limited access to legal counsel. The report also expressed concerns about overcrowding and poor hygiene in detention centers, particularly pretrial holding cells run by the Interior Ministry in Baghdad. The agency said it “remained gravely concerned at continuing reports of the widespread and routine torture or ill-treatment of detainees.”
“In addition to routine beatings with hosepipes, cables and other implements, the methods cited included prolonged suspension from the limbs in contorted and painful positions for extended periods, sometimes resulting in dislocation of the joints; electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body; the breaking of limbs; forcing detainees to sit on sharp objects, causing serious injury and heightening the risk of infection; and severe burns to parts of the body through the application of heated implements,” the report said.
Sullivan’s comment –
If any of us who supported the war had been told this would be the result four years later, we would surely have said: not on these terms, not by these methods.
Say, who else can we piss off? Sullivan does point to something about the intermittent stories that come up now and then – internal warfare at the CIA over the order to subject prisoners to treatment that most sentient beings understand, quite clearly, is simply torture. Ken Silverstein in Harpers offers this –
It turns out that a former senior CIA legal official quit in protest over the administration’s use of “enhanced interrogations.” This official, whose name I have promised not to publish, previously worked as a deputy IG for investigations under Frederick Hitz, who served as CIA IG between 1990 and 1998. From there, the official moved on the CIA’s Office of General Counsel.
What’s interesting is that this official was generally known as something of a hardliner. I haven’t been able to pin down the date of his departure, which may have occurred a year ago or more. However, the sources tell me he couldn’t stomach what he deemed to be abuses by the Bush Administration and stepped down from his post.
Ah, some people should be pissed off, not that it does much good.
But then Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal on the Friday in question reported that all is as it should be –
The richest Americans’ share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and underlining the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers.
The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.
The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000.
The IRS data, based on a large sample of tax returns, are for “adjusted gross income,” which is income after some deductions, such as for alimony and contributions to individual retirement accounts.
See “Liza” at Culture Kitchen – Surprise, Surprise: Plutocracy 1, Everybody Else 0 – “This, by the way is not actual wealth. This is just income gap. If we considered actual capital holdings, we the non-wealthy are even more screwed and deeper in the proverbial debt hole than before.”
Also see Ezra Klein –
To think of this a bit more concretely, if you took a representative 100 Americans and split $5 of income between them, here’s how it would look: One guy would get $1.06, forcing the other 99 to split the remaining $3.94, while the bottom 50 would split 64 cents among themselves. The leftover $3.30 would be divvied up among the remaining 49 folks.
Liza – “That’s how fucked up is the neo-con capitalism the trickle down tyranny brought to us by the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush plutocracy.”
She seems angry and cites as article written by Paul Krugman in 2002 –
First, the share of the rich in total income is no longer trivial. These days 1 percent of families receive about 16 percent of total pretax income, and have about 14 percent of after-tax income. That share has roughly doubled over the past 30 years, and is now about as large as the share of the bottom 40 percent of the population. That’s a big shift of income to the top; as a matter of pure arithmetic, it must mean that the incomes of less well off families grew considerably more slowly than average income. And they did. Adjusting for inflation, average family income - total income divided by the number of families - grew 28 percent from 1979 to 1997. But median family income - the income of a family in the middle of the distribution, a better indicator of how typical American families are doing - grew only 10 percent. And the incomes of the bottom fifth of families actually fell slightly.
Let me belabor this point for a bit. We pride ourselves, with considerable justification, on our record of economic growth. But over the last few decades it’s remarkable how little of that growth has trickled down to ordinary families. Median family income has risen only about 0.5 percent per year - and as far as we can tell from somewhat unreliable data, just about all of that increase was due to wives working longer hours, with little or no gain in real wages. Furthermore, numbers about income don’t reflect the growing riskiness of life for ordinary workers. In the days when General Motors was known in-house as Generous Motors, many workers felt that they had considerable job security - the company wouldn’t fire them except in extremis. Many had contracts that guaranteed health insurance, even if they were laid off; they had pension benefits that did not depend on the stock market. Now mass firings from long-established companies are commonplace; losing your job means losing your insurance; and as millions of people have been learning, a 401(k) plan is no guarantee of a comfortable retirement.
Not much has changed in the last five years. And this was the week that the Republican presidential hopefuls, to a man, insisted that the economy is great – we need more tax cuts for the rich, and Americans who feel left behind really have nothing to complain about. On the other hand, the week also brought the the Pew Research Center report – the public isn’t buying that –
Over the past two decades, a growing share of the public has come to the view that American society is divided into two groups, the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Today, Americans are split evenly on the two-class question with as many saying the country is divided along economic lines as say this is not the case (48% each). In sharp contrast, in 1988, 71% rejected this notion, while just 26% saw a divided nation.
As more wealth is concentrated at the very top, everyone else starts to notice. There’s lots to notice in the news, isn’t there?
