From GI's; we aren't winning, aren't wanted and can't win in Iraq

With the Republican Party being led by Cheney and Bush saying that we won't lose 'the war' in Iraq unless we decide to leave, the question goes back to what does it mean to win? Seven sergeants soon to return to the U.S. after a 15 month tour in Iraq with the 82d Airborne Division offer there view. The New York Times published it as an OpEd Aug 19, 2003.

They started with a definition of Counterinsurgency and presented its prospects for success in Iraq.

...a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched.

They make the point that they see the debate regarding the Iraq War in the American Press as being surreal. It is focused on what Americans inside America want and what will benefit the American political players.

...we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day.

So what do they see in Iraq itself?

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense. [Snip]

Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

In short, the Shiites needed the American invasion to remove Saddam and the Sunnis from control of Iraq - where the Sunnis had been placed by the British before they left Iraq.

Now the Sunnis are out of power, and the next problem for the Shiites is to form an effective Shiite government and remove the Americans so that they can deal with the Sunnis. Jerry Bremer and the CPA screwed up big time by ordering de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government, but the Shiites approve of those results. Now that set of eggs is broken, and the Shiite government of Maliki is not going to even try to fix the mistakes for the U.S. His problem is to get us out of Iraq before we train and equip too many Sunni militia troops and make it harder for the Shiites to crack down when we leave.

The U.S. is not going to change those political realities. The relationship between Iraqi prime ministeral-Maliki and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and getting closer. (See Iranian Leaders Pledge Support For Iraqi PM (Thu, Aug 09, 2007) and Ahmadinejad may visit Iraq (Sun Aug 19, 2007) for examples.)

Then the 82d Airborne soldiers continue:

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

Consider that statement ""Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence.""

There is no rational disagreement with that truth. Nor is there anything that the U.S. military can to to change any of it. "Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers."

Note that at no time did the OpEd mention terrorists. That's because the U.S. is the occupying power in Iraq and attempting to fight a counterinsurgency war in which our purpose had to be to gain the control and support of a population. But we cannot control the population and the conditions for daily life in Iraq is now so much worse for everyone there that we cannot win that element either. Control will go to the Shiite government, which will be allied with the Shiite government of Iran.

Leaving Iraq isn't losing there. Leaving is as near winning as we will get. The U.S. needs to find a quick, face-saving approach to withdrawal that creates a minimum of disruption (there is no hope that it will avoid military domination of the Sunnis by the Shiites) and we need to leave Iraq.

Then maybe we can start rebuilding the Army and Marine Corps that Bush and Cheney have destroyed while we focus on chasing terrorists who really threaten America instead of the Iraqi insurgents we created.

Fed puts politics over economics; credit bubble results

The current international credit crisis is a creation of the central banks, and primarily Alan Greenspan. Greenspan gave the sellers of high-risk high-return an essential guarantee that if they borrowed money to leverage the profits from the risky investments, he would bail them out by lowering interest rates if the market went against them.

Here is Bill Fleckenstein at MSNBC Money on the subject:

"The global credit bubble is bursting. This bubble is primarily leverage financing for owning risky assets. The people who were responsible for what happened played with other people's money, marketed arcane financial products with false promises of fat profits, but stuffed their own pockets with big bonuses. Neither these masters of the universe nor their greedy but naive investors deserve to be bailed out. They deserve what is coming to them.

"The central banks should focus on price stability, not financial market stability, and should provide liquidity only to contain the multiplier effect of the bubble bursting on the economy. Nor should central banks stimulate to avoid recession at any cost. Business cycles are not bad. Excesses must be followed with cleansing. . . .

"Markets have been taking more risk than they should because they believe that central banks will come to their aid during times of crisis, like now. The penchant of Alan Greenspan, former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman, to flood the market with liquidity during financial instability is the genesis of this 'central bank put.' As long as this expectation remains, financial bubbles will occur again and again. Now is the time to act. Let the crooks go bankrupt. Central banks should bury the Greenspan 'put' for good."

Why would Greenspan do this?

Simple. Electing the Republican George Bush was more important to him than was rationally managing the money supply for the American economy.

Wait to see if the Fed bails out the speculators. That will tell us of Ben Bernake is continuing Greenspan's practice of protecting the speculators.

Nourial Roubini makes the point that there is a difference between being illiquid and being insolvent. A debtor in illiquid if they could pay back their debts over time if their creditors would give them time by restructuring the debt. A debtor is insolvent if they cannot repay their debts over time even if they were given the time by their creditors.

An illiquid organization is in a temporary cash crunch but is an otherwise economic viable organization. Chrysler was in such a situation several decades ago. They could not pay their debt at the time, but with a bailout they were able to completely pay off their debts without costing those who bailed them out anything. Enron was not an economically viable organization. it was insolvent. It could not be bailed out. With that in mind, consider:

Insolvent and bankrupt households, mortgage lenders, home builders, leveraged hedge funds and asset managers, and non-financial corporations. This is not just a liquidity crisis like in the 1998 LTCM episode. This is rather a liquidity crisis that signals a more fundamental debt, credit and insolvency crisis among many economic agents in the US and global economy. Liquidity runs can be resolved by the liquidity injections by a lender of last resort: in the cases of the liquidity crises of Mexico, Korea, Turkey, Brazil that international lender of last resort was the IMF; but in the insolvency crises of Russia, Argentina, and Ecudaor the provision of the liquidity by the lender of last resort – the IMF – only postponed the inevitable default and made the eventual crisis deeper and uglier. And provision of liquidity during an insolvency crisis causes moral hazard as it creates expectations of investors’ bailout.
[Emphasis mine - Editor WTF-o]

I would not at this time predict an insolvency crisis, but it should be very clear that Alan Greenspan was papering over problems in the economy in order to reelect George Bush in 2004. By doing so he made the current problems deeper and uglier. The only question is how severe the underlying economic problems - other than merely illiquidity - really are. The central bankers really don't want the level of the problems to be seen. If it all comes out at once right now there is a chance that the credit markets would simply shut down for a period of time. So they want to try to talk nice while they are secretly cleaning up the mess in the background.

Let's all hope that Ben Bernanke practices economics as a central banker rather than politics as a Republican like Greenspan did. Oh, and let's hope that there is a reasonable chance remaining after Greenspan's economic mismanagement for the repairs to work.

See my prior posts

• More mortgage loan problems
  August 12, 2007
• Credit crunch spreads outside U.S.subprime markets to the rest of the world.
  August 10, 2007

Rich Lowry - NRO editor, rancid wingnut

If you wonder where the conservatives get those blow-dried "little boy look" spokespersons with a soft voice espousing extremism, take a look at Rich Lowry.

Sadly, No! takes a close look at who Lowry is and where he came from.

GOP Congressmen giving up on retaking House

Greg Giroux at CQ Politics has posted an article that Democrats will find enjoyable. The recent announcements by Dennis Hastert (R-Ill), Debra Pryce (R-OH), and Chip Pickering Jr. (R-MS) along with two earlier retirement announcements (Ray LaHood (R-IL) and Duncan Hunnter (R-CA))makes it five Republicans leaving the House. Speculation is that more Republicans, looking at their continued minority role in the House in the future, can be expected to join those five.

Hastert and LaHood had to announce their retirements this early because the Illinois Primary was moved to February 5, 2008, the earliest Congressional Primary in the U.S. ever. The very early filing deadline requires them to have already begun distributing filing petitions which are due November 5. If the party is going to nominate someone else of those two seats, LaHood and Hastert are forced to get out of the race now. Other states have filing deadlines as late as January, so we may well be seeing additional Republican retirements.

On the Democratic side of the Aisle, only two congressmen have announced that they are not running for reelection. Mark Udall (D-CO) and Tom Allen (D-ME) both are leaving the House to run for Senate. The Colorado Senate seat is open and the Maine seat is held by Republican Susan Collins who is facing an increasingly Democratic electorate, so both Senate campaigns have realistic possibilities. The only Republican who has announced that he is not running for reelection so that he can run for higher office is Duncan Hunter. Rep. Hunter's run for the Presidency has never been anything more than a tremendous long shot.

In the Senate, only Wayne Allard (R-CO) has announced his retirement. No Democrats have made an announcement. This might be because the Senate is so close to parity right now that Republicans think they might have a chance to return to the majority, so they aren't ready to give up before the 2008 election. However, of the 33 Senate seats up for election in 2008, 22 are held by Republicans and only 11 by Democrats. That makes the Republicans more vulnerable to a net loss of Senate seats.

2008 is already shaping up to be an interesting election year. As of right now, it certainly looks like it will be more fun for Democrats than the recent decade has been.

Fed takes action to improve market liquidity

Bondad reports on the market reaction to the Federal Reserves 1/2% decrease in the discount rate.

What is "the discount rate?"

US banks use a fractional reserve system. All this means is a bank much have x% of its total assets on hand at any given time. However, in a banks usual business affairs their reserves may dip below this percentage amount. When this happens, banks must borrow short-term money from somewhere. Usually, they go to other banks. The interest rate banks charge each other is the Federal Funds rate. In addition, a bank can go directly to the Federal Reserve and borrow money. The Fed will charge the bank the discount rate. Going to the Federal Reserve to borrow money is a last resort and is usually considered a sign of weakness. Therefore, lowering the Discount rate is largely a symbolic gesture because it isn't used nearly as much as the Federal Funds rate.

Go read Bonddad's report on what the market did as a result. He posts neat tech analysis charts.

Voles plague central Spain

A plague of voles is attacking agriculture in north central Spain. Voles are small, mouse-sized rodents which resemble lemmings. There has been a sudden unexplained massive surge in the number of voles in central Spain. They are eating the crops, and do not stop until they eat the roots. Grapes, beets and potatoes are all threatened.

The problem is so bad that the European Union has approved the rarely-permitted tactic of burning the fields. Burning has begun in the Valladolid area of Castilla-Leon region and is expected to begin soon in Avila, Palencia and Segovia.

In spite of the similarity in the name, the plague of voles is not known to be related to the recently well publicized battles with Voldemort. Besides, Voldemort was reptile, not rodent. Still, one needs to ask the real question today on a cat-blogging Friday - where in Hell are Spain's cats?

A massive increase in mouse-sized rodents would appear to be a major picnic for cats in any country. So where are the Spanish cats?

Those of us with a house cat at home know that cats consider themselves to be aristoc[r]ats, but have they gone Republican on us and quit working for a living? Are they all indoors laying around waiting for the next refilling of the cat-food bowl? Purring for their kibble and stroking instead of doing honest work?

I know that good mousers have to be trained as kittens by the mother cat. Is there a shortage of mother cats training kittens? Does the European Union need to declare total war on voles, then draft some mother-cat mousers as drill sergeants and send Europe's draftable kittens to them for basic training on a mass basis?

Where in Hell are Spain's cats when their country and their farmers really need them? It would be more than just patriotism. More than just every cat at the service of his or her country in its time of need. It would also be cat-appropriate fast food.

Or should we just give up on cats? Are they useless as anything except fat purring status objects for households with bloggers and cat-lovers?

If the latter is the case, then my suggestion is that we draft terriers. My White West Highland Terrier (Westie) didn't even need to be trained to 'remove' the mouse he trapped on our kitchen floor. Two-steps, a quick muzzle-snap-and-a-shake and he presented a limp, dead mouse. No blood. No bait needed, either.

And pleased? That terrier was so proud of himself that for nearly two weeks he would present his head for petting if you even looked at him. Why bother a bunch of aloof, lazy fat cats? Terriers were bred for the job and they love it.

Spain needs to quickly raise and organize an army of terriers.

---

See also:

• Rodent ruining crops in Spain agriculture
  AP Thu, Aug. 09, 2007
• Spain wields weapons on rodent plague
  AP Tue, Aug. 14, 2007

Insiders suggest that Barney considering leaving position as first dog

Think Progress reports that Tony Snow on the conservative Hugh Hewitt Show

...signaled that he will not stay until the end of the term. He also mentioned that there are “probably a couple” of other high-level resignations “coming up in the next month or so.”

Most of the key players in the Bush White House are gone or stepping out the door.

Can Barney be far behind?

ThinkProgress has compiled a list of some of the key resignations:

• White House Senior Political Adviser Karl Rove
• White House Counselor Dan Bartlett
• White House Budget Director Rob Portman
• White House Counsel Harriet Miers
• White House Political Director Sara Taylor
• White House Director of Strategic Initiatives Pete Wehner
• White House Deputy National Security Adviser J.D. Crouch
• Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty
• Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer
• Justice Department White House liaison Monica Goodling
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
• Army Secretary Francis Harvey
• Joint Chief of Staffs Chairman Peter Pace
• Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson
• U.N. Ambassador John Bolton
• USAID Director Randall Tobias

With so many key staff departures, the AP reports that “Bush has decided he might get more done in his final months by going it alone,” making increased use of executive orders and veto power.

Can you say "Lame Duck President?"

Beltway wisdom reflects imaginary past elections.

Yesterday Digby focused on the discussion between Michael Duffy (Time Magazine) and Chris Matthews (MSNBC - Hardball) on how the Democrats have somehow dissed "Christians" for 25 years, to their political disadvantage. She provides a transcript of their TV discussion and then explains how absolutely out of contact with reality it is. (Media Matters also provided some analysis.) The degree to which "Christians" and people of faith have been dissed is highly questionable, and even if true, the amount of political damage that has resulted for Democrats in Presidential elections is questionable.

Suffice to say that the inside the beltway common wisdom may be common, but it can't be wisdom when it is completely wrong. It is, however, powerful right-wing propaganda, and totally bought into by the inside-the-beltway media.

Today Digby has found a really good political analysis by Lance Mannion of the effect of so-called religious voters on national elections since 1980.

Very briefly, what happened with a significant number of religious voters was that in 1980 the mostly Southern evangelist voters came out to vote while the older conservative reactionary Catholics in the North Eastern U.S. switched to vote for Reagan in reaction against the social changes of the late 50's, the 60's and the 70's. Though they voted nationally for Reagan as President, they also voted for Democrats for lower level offices.

The inherent conflict between the reactionary Northeast Catholic voters and the (anti-Catholic) Southern protestant religious voters was papered over by the Catholics ignoring the fact that the evangelists do not consider Catholics to be Christian. Those groups were a nationally important voting block in the elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988, but decreasingly so ever since.

Manion points out that the religious right has not been the deciding factor in Presidential elections at least since 1988. The Republican candidate has lost three of the last four Presidential elections (including 2000) and may have lost in 2004 except that Rove was able to both suppress a number of key Democratic votes while stealing the election in other key locations. But let me quote him:

Reagan Democrats were not moved so much by their religious beliefs as by a reaction to trends of the 60s and 70s, one of which included Roe vs. Wade. Their motivations were also economic---times were tough and Jimmy Carter didn't seem to be helping or have a clue how to---and "patriotic"---they hated the anti-war movement which they confused with the counterculture in general; they accepted the cant that Democrats were soft, not just on defense, but on crime, drugs, and bad behavior by uppity women, uppity black people, uppity college kids, and uppity gays.

In short, Reagan Democrats were reactionaries, angrily at odds with the times. But times always change, and with them so do people's attitudes. Reagan Democrats have been disappearing from the political landscape since the middle of Reagan's second term. Many have died, many have gotten used to the changes they used to hate and fear, and many have just come to realize that, mad as they were at the "Liberals," the Republicans are not on their side, economically, culturally, or even spiritually---the Religious Right is anti-Catholic, after all.

Meanwhile, the evangelicals have allowed themselves to be used as tools for the Republicans' Southern Strategy, which has always been racist not religious. Piety is just the mask for the the racial animus of a great many white male voters.

The racism that has undergirded Republican victories for the last four decades has never figured in Beltway Insiders' analysis of the political scene. Republican Presidential candidates make the pilgrimage to Bob Jones University every four years because they like the food in the dorm cafeterias.

To the degree that the evangelical vote has been actually a vote of religious conviction, it has been an anti-abortion, anti-evolution, anti-gay, anti-feminist vote.

How Democrats are supposed to win that vote, or why they'd want to, just by talking more about God and Jay-sus, I don't know.
[Emphasis mine - Editor WTF-o[

Manion's evaluation is extremely insightful. He goes on to explain why the inside-the-beltway crowd does not understand the real impact of religious voters, and he points out that they refuse to factor in the fact that the Republicans are depending on the (aging and declining in numbers) racist voters.

The key point Manion makes is that the religious voters are of steadily declining importance in Presidential elections.

Besides, the Evangelists and Biblical Inerrantists are Christian fundamentalist extremists. They don't just reject Democrats. They also reject most other christian denominations, partly by claiming that they are not Christian since they don't follow the Biblical Inerrantists catechisms. They are not a growing political movement. They are powerful in the South, but even there they are coming under effective attack in the urban areas.

The key to the 2008 election is not going to be Southern religious fundamentalist (largely rural) voters. It is going to be suburban voters in suburbs of major cities, and they are increasingly moving towards the Urban Democratic voters. Americans vote their pocketbooks before they vote their religion.

Beside, Jerry Falwell is dead, Ralph Reed has been proven to be a corrupt politician, the Rev. Ted Haggard has publicly admitted that he is a homosexual and Pat Robertson is a nut job calling for the assassination of Hugo Chavez. Oh, and Mitt Romney is a Mormon, not a Christian, while Rudy Giuliani is a transvestite Roman Catholic who has been married three time, the more recent two times to the mistress he had while married to the previous wife. What unites the Republican Religious Right behind any Republican candidate for President?

The Middle East now and tomorrow

Steve Clemons provides a short summary of how bad the situation in the Middle East currently is, and where it might go.

What I see evolving in the Middle East today is a regional Cold War manifested through regional contests between Iranian and Saudi proxies with hot moments.

Even though Israel is a regional nuclear and conventional superpower, it has little long term viability unless it either comes to terms with its moderate Sunni Arab neighbors or convinces the US or Europe or other major security patrons to fully and politically acquire Israel as one of their own domestic states.

I spent Monday in Los Angeles and met an insightful next generation Arab-American thinker, Sama Adnan, who told me he believed that there was something like a mathematical equation in the Middle East that few Americans -- Democrat or Republican -- understand. He said that democracies or more self-determining populations in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East were impossible as long as the Palestinian-Israeli standoff over Palestine's state status remained unresolved.

He said that if true democracies governed in any of these states, then those democratic movements would focus on their outrage that Israel was continuing to illegally occupy Palestinian territory. The more totalitarian governments in the region are bulwarks against a popular will that is focused on grievances involving Israel. The only way to create a more liberal and stable order in the Middle East, according to this young observer, is to deliver on Palestine -- develop an effort towards regional confidence building between Israel and other states -- and then try to encourage incremental change in the region.
[Emphasis mine - Editor WTF-o]

The right-wing Israeli Likud demands the kinds of military right-wing control to prevent the predations of Palestinian terrorists. That demand for control was what instigated last year's (failed) attack on Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon more than any specific incident just as the demand for military control is behind the constant attacks on terrorist leaders (with the attendant and politically counterproductive collateral damage.) The Wall between Israel and the West Bank is another such soon-to-be-proven-a-failure right wing effort to control their enemies instead of talk to them ans work with them. If those efforts at control were going to work, Israel would still have troops in Gaza and still be in control there.

Not that the Palestinians would be easy to work with. They also have a lot of grievances to work out, and no reason to trust Israelis. Without mutual trust, there will be no solution. Military attacks and walls do not build mutual trust.

If the problems were only located in those sad lands of Palestine and Israel the rest of us might just wash our hands of the idiocies those people are perpetuating on each other. But it isn't so limited. The problems in Israel/Palestine are either the source of the problems festering out into the rest of the Middle East or they prevent the resolution of major international problems in the Middle East. If the Middle East were not siting on top of large pools of oil that the short-term thinkers running our government thinks we need, we could still ignore the problem. In the long term, however, the problems in the Middle East have to be solved.

Clinton came very close to resolving the worst of the Israeli-Palestinian problems, so naturally the Bush people refused to go near those issues,probably for fear of being seen to be less competent that Clinton. Now that we know for a fact that the Bush administration is not only less competent than Clinton (and every other Presidential administration the U.S. has ever had,) what's the bushies remaining excuse for not attempting to do something about the problem?

Even incompetents can try.

Sen. Dodd proposes a rational Cuba policy

Sen. Chris Dodd provides a short essay on what a workable Cuba Policy should look like.

It is my opinion that most of the problems that Castro has caused for the U.S. resulted from his efforts to defend himself and Cuba from American predation. Castro's revolt against the Batista and American Mafia dominated dictatorship in the late 1950's was a very rational response to an extremely nasty government.

It is also my opinion that Castro adopted Communism primarily because the Soviet Union was the only powerful government willing to help him protect his revolution from American forces. The Bay of Pigs invasion was proof of how dangerous the American government was to the Cuban Revolution, but it was only the most obvious of many similar efforts to destroy Castro's government. Without the threat from the U.S. he might have been Socialist, but most of the governments of Europe have been Socialist at one time or another. None of those have become authoritarian in the way that the USSR was - or Argentina, Chile, the Philippines and Peru have been.

Does Castro head an authoritarian government? Sure he does. Such governmental extremism is a natural response to a major outside threat - as the Bush administration's response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on America has proven. No, that is not the only cause of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but it is an extremely important one. But the United States has been the single most powerful threat faced by the Cuban government for 46 years. Do they dare ease up on efforts to control their own population as long as the government of the United States wants to overthrow their government? I wouldn't if I were Castro.

As an aside - At least the threat to Castro is actually existential. The U.S. if not prevented would easily overthrow the Castro government, eliminated the health and education benefits available to every Cuban as a matter of human Right and give the hotels and Casinos in Havana back to the previously (mostly Mafia) owners. Does anyone really think that any small group of religious fanatics (other than Christian ones) could possibly take control of America and the American government? The Shiite extremists could never have taken control of Iran if the Shah hadn't run one of the most brutal regimes in the Middle East - and he was doing that primarily out of fear of being overthrown.

Castro is on the way out through the normal process of aging. American right-wingers are salivating at the chance to get back into Cuba and exploit that nation economically. Cuba needs to protect itself from those people, but reenter the global economy to rebuild the economy of Cuba. The U.S. government should begin to put policies into place that ease that transition, at the same time recognizing that the American forms of free market economics are likely to be damaging to the Cuban people.

Sen. Dodd's proposal is an early version of the needed American policy. "Staying the course" leaves America on the sidelines as a stable Cuba with a well-educated workforce builds its economy only 90 miles off our coast. We are their natural best customer, just as Cuba offers real opportunities for our business people. We need to begin engagement now, without demanding that Cuba change to suit us. They have spent 46 years proving that they reject such demands.

We need to get them to want to accommodate America, not obey America. Our sales people will succeed where our CIA and military forces have failed for over four decades.

Bush admin September spin games

Nine months ago the Bush administration installed Gen. Petreaus as the new, improved Commander of the troops in Iraq with a new, improved tactic for 'winning' the Iraqi occupation. Even then it was recognized by every rational commenter that there could not be a military solution to the problems in Iraq. At best the military could help to create conditions that allowed the Iraqi politicians to create a stable and peaceful nation. It was just going to take nine months, and in September Gen. Petreaus was going to announce the successful operations he had conducted in Iraq. That is next month.

The first thing we learn about the report Gen. Petreaus' was to make is that he won't be writing it. It "is actually going to be written by the White House, with "input" from "officials throughout government."

Apparently that doesn't provide enough control for Bush, Cheney and Rice. Now we hear the next modification of the promised "Petreaus Report.. He won't be giving it himself.

"...the White House is pushing to have the general's increasingly nominal report delivered by Condi Rice and Bob Gates, with Petraeus relegated to a "private congressional briefing"

Jesus! How bad is the situation in Iraq really? Let's look at what current reports say.

Last fall the U.S. looked to military solutions over diplomatic ones. Facing an Iraq with increasing violence and an American military in which the ability to find more troops to send or resend and a lack of equipment to provide them with, the surge was a promise that if we robbed Peter early and refused to pay Paul on time we could send enough troops with better counterinsurgency training and tactics to temporarily dampen the violence in Iraq.

But dampening the violence wasn't going to win the Iraqi Occupation. Even if it worked, it couldn't last. We don't have the troops to keep the increased numbers in country for long.

The 'Surge' was supposed to take the pressure off the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government long enough for them to reach out and convince the Sunnis, Kurds, and other minorities to work with the government to bring Peace to a newly unified Iraq. Key to that effort was to be making the Sunnis and the Kurds feel they had a stake in the new Iraqi government, in part by:

• setting up an agreement that the profits from the Iraqi oil wells would be shared equally with all Iraqis regardless of Sect;
  
• creation of an effective Iraqi police corps and military forces; and
  
• disarming and disbanding the many sectarian militias which, under cover of the very high general level of violence, were carrying out ethnic cleansing of various neighborhoods of Baghdad and other towns.

There has been no progress in any of those efforts. Rather than creating an effective Iraqi government with an Iraqi police and military, the militias have become more powerful and various members of the government have been using both militias and portions of the government troops to fight each other.

There has been some reduction in the violence in Baghdad in recent months, but this is as likely to be a result of the success by the sectarian militias in ethnic cleansing of the Baghdad neighborhoods as it is of any improved effectiveness by U.S. troops. The outside groups fighting a proxy war in Iraq and the inside groups who think they are losing if Peace breaks out are moving the violence out of Baghdad to where targets are less well protected. The U.S. has 160,000 troops in Iraq as well as God knows how many contractors and mercenaries, and they cannot stop the violence with military power. There is no military solution to the Iraq occupation. There has to be a political solution similar to the one that finally ended the terrorism in Northern Ireland.

The reduction in violence in Baghdad has done nothing to facilitate political solutions by the Iraqi government. Instead the members of the Iraqi Parliament threw up their hands and adjourned for the month of August. Most of the members of Parliament are enjoying their vacation in the relative peace of Amman Jordan.

Another set of problems revolve around groups in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia which are actively working to use proxies in Iraq to fight wars for them. Those groups have an invested interest is preventing a successful Iraqi government from coming into being. Any attempted to find a solution which does not have active support of the governments of those nations will be sabotaged in order to permit those proxy wars to continue. The refusal of the Bush administration to even talk to the governments of Iran and Syria prevents any efforts to stop problems out of those nations. Cheneyesque threats against those countries cause them to oppose American efforts in general. They do nothing to get the required cooperation of those governments in suppressing groups who are working out of Iranian and Syrian territory to fight their proxy wars. So the Bush administration refuses to even try diplomacy.

Since the Bush administration has never demonstrated any capacity for diplomacy, that is not surprising. What is surprising is that they have been so diplomatically inept that they have been unable to get the ostensibly friendly Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to clamp down on support provided by individual Saudis to Sunni insurgents and extremist groups like al Qaeda or al Qaeda in Iraq.

Needless to say, the 'Surge' has not succeeded in bringing the violence in Iraq down, and rather than making political progress, the political situation in Iraq is in fact worse than it was at the end of 2006.

Now we are one month short of the much publicized report that Gen. Petreaus was to have given Congress on the progress of the 'Surge' and its related shift to counterinsurgency tactics. As explained above, there is little to indicate that any progress has been made in creating a more stable Iraq. So what will the Bush administration do?

Spin! Spin! Spin!!

AT&T really doesn't like anti-Bush speech

Several days ago it was reported that AT&T had censored the rock band Pearl Jam when

the following lyrics were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" but were cut from the webcast:

- "George Bush, leave this world alone." (the second time it was sung); and

- "George Bush find yourself another home."

AT&T apologized. It was a single low-level employee acting against company policy.

Yeah, Right. Sensible people didn't believe it then. Now there is more evidence that the low-level employee was following company policy. From Timothy Karr at Huffington Post"

AT&T redeployed its hacks with a "modified" public position:

"It's not our intent to edit political comments in webcasts," said AT&T spokeswoman Tiffany O'Brien Nels. "Unfortunately, it has happened in the past in a handful of cases. We have taken steps to insure that it will not happen again."

Then on Monday a crew member involved with AT&T's webcasts came forward, telling Wired News that he had been issued instructions to "shut it down if there was any swearing or if anybody starts getting political."

Sounds like a censorship policy to us.

AT&T is the problem, and they don't want us to know that Net Neutrality solves a lot of the problem.

This is precisely the behavior ... Net Neutrality advocates have been warning about for almost a decade," Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig wrote about the Pearl Jam incident. "And not just (or even most importantly) in this explicit form. Much more important are the games played more subtly, to push innovation and content in the direction that benefits AT&T."

Internet Service Providers "believe they have the absolute right to control the content/application on those lines," Lessig writes. If allowed to proliferate, this attitude "will be deadly for Internet innovation."

AT&T's censorship, whether a "mistake" or corporate policy, is a rallying point for the Internet freedom movement. The great promise of the Internet shouldn't be left in the hands of those who confuse telling the truth with spinning for political and economic gain.

But AT&T can still make good on its promise to "never, ever" censor the Web by backing off its multimillion-dollar campaign to kill Net Neutrality.

No one who has watched AT&T business practices believes that they will stop fighting Net Neutrality.

Wait until the Progressives get back into position to apply Sherman Anti-Trust to the phone company - again. They are really making the case for it.

There is no left-wing, right-wing or center, just Progressives and Authoritarians

George Lakoff gets it (mostly) right. The idea that there are political left-wingers, political right-winters and political centrists is a fiction, created by People who do not understand people or politics. The apparent linear spectrum is a creation of ignorant people who want unrelated things to be related.

There are two systems of values and modes of thought -- call them progressive and conservative (or nurturant and strict, as I have). There are total progressives, who use a progressive mode of thought on all issues. And total conservatives. And there are lots of folks who are what I've called "biconceptuals": progressive on certain issue areas and conservative on others. But they don't form a linear scale. They are all over the place: progressive on domestic policy, conservative on foreign policy; conservative on economic policy, progressive on foreign policy and social issues; conservative on religion, but progressive on social issues and foreign policy; and on and on. No linear scale. No single set of values defining a "center." Indeed many of such folks are not moderate in their views; they can be quite passionate about both their progressive and conservative views. [Snip]

Get rid of the very idea of the right and the left and the center. American ideas are fundamentally progressive ideas -- the ideas this country was founded on and that carry forth that spirit. Progressives care about people and the earth, and act with responsibility and strength on that care.

The progressive view of government is simple. Progressive government has two aspects: protection and empowerment. Protection is far more than the military, police, and fire departments. It includes consumer protection, worker protection, environmental protection, public health, food and drug safety; social security, and other safety nets. It also includes protection from the government itself, and hence a balance of powers, openness, fundamental rights, and so on.

Empowerment include roads and bridges; public education; government-developed communications like the internet and satellite communications systems; the banking system; the SEC and institutions that make a stock market possible, and the court system, mostly about contracts and corporate law. Progressive government makes business possible. No one makes any money in this country without the progressive empowerment by government. A progressive foreign policy is not based solely, or even mainly, on the state -- about the "national interest" defined as our military strength and GDP. Progressive foreign policy focuses on individual people's interests as well as national interests: on poverty, disease, refugees, education, women's and children's issues, public health, and so on.

These are simply American values. The progressive movement is a patriotic American movement. People who call themselves "centrists" share progressive views on important issue areas, but have conservative views on other major issue areas. The areas vary from person to person. There is no single moral perspective, no single set of agreed upon issues.

I disagree with Lakoff that there are progressives and conservatives. There are actually progressives and authoritarians. Progressives want to empower other people. Authoritarians, operating from fear of those who are different from them or who are not under their power, want to control and tyrannize others.

People who cannot understand comedy are authoritarians. Authoritarians cannot accept the ambiguity that is the bedrock of good comedy. They base their decisions and actions on fear of being wrong or of losing something, or on fear that someone else will get something they don't have. Authoritarians demand certainty and control of those near them. That's why the authoritarians like Tom DeLay have removed the progressive Republicans from their Party.

We Democrats have strayed too far from Progressivism. Instead of fear, progressivism is based on respect for others, curiosity regarding the unknown and a tolerence for ambiguity (assuming that it will be resolved in its own time.) It is time to return to the roots of America.

Petreaus will soon announce results of the surge

Gen Petreaus is due to tell us the nine-months result of the Iraqi "surge." We already know that it will be ghost written by the White House. Atrios points out that even as late as last Spring a decision in the middle of August or September seemed like a reasonable timetable.

But that was the timetable on which the Republicans expected to find the pony in the room full of pony excrement. They are still looking, and somehow the pony hasn't checked in for an apple or a sugar cube yet. What we are going to get instead of an announcement of success is going to be a statement that goes something like this:

We had hoped for more progress. Things are not as good as we wanted, but there are real signs that success is just around the corner. We are just going to have to give the effort a little more time.

In essence they will pull out the old speeches from the Vietnam era and change the statement "There is light at the end of the tunnel!" to something more modern.

Something like "Elements of progress - blah blah Blah - just a little more time and effort."

There is one real problem. The war on Iraq was won when our troops reached Baghdad. The Occupation of Iraq is unwinnable.

The presence of our troops in that country is the motivation for at least half the killing and fighting, and nothing those troops do will change that. We destroyed the last effective government Iraq had and we cannot replace it with one that works. Nor can we government that country.

If the Republican definition of losing in Iraq is accepted (we do not lose until we leave and give up) then the question is not whether we lose but when. We will leave Iraq. The only question is when.

In the meantime, remember: "There is light at the end of the tunnel."

---

In the meantime, the Gulf News of Dubai reports that the Iraqi government is expected to undergo a significant shakeup.

Whatever government structure that results will have to be acceptable to the people of Iraq. The recent elections in Lebanon resulted in the defeat of the expected candidate, primarily because the Bush administration supported him. Currently American support for a Muslim politician is the kiss of death at the polls. The results of any summit called at the request of the Americans will get the same negative result.

That's part of what it means to say that the presence of the Americans motivates much of the fighting in Iraq. We aren't liked in the Middle East, and the Bush/Cheney administration has worked hard to make that even more true than it used to be.

[h/t to Laura Rozen.]

Cheney's push to war with Iran is succeeding

Will bunch at Daily News Attytood explains how the war hawks in Cheney's office are winning the internal power struggle in the White House.

Where are the funny Republicans?

Digby reports the demise of FNC's Half Hour News Hour.

Lesson: If someone is funny, he or she is NOT Republican.

Rudy Giuliani offers the bipartisan foreign policy establishment a challenge

Kevin Drum points out that Rudy Giuliani is either lying about what his foreign policy as President would be, or he is bat-shit insane.

Any review of what he has presented as foreign policy will demonstrate that those are the only two choices. The question really is whether "the bipartisan foreign policy community" will treat his proposals as suggestions to be seriously considered and even compromised with, or will they publicly admit that they are insane.

My bet is that we will hear statements that compare Giuliani's foreign policy idiocies to the excretions of flying rodents are the extremists and that anyone practicing bipartisanship will compromise with his proposed policies.

Republicans don't let the Constitution interfere with their corruption

We know that Congressional Republicans are a corrupt bunch. That's why Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Bob Ney are both serving time in federal prison today and several other Republican Congressmen have resigned or announced that they were not running for reelection.

But when most of those crooked politicians sold their votes to the highest bidders they at least followed the procedures written in the U.S. Constitution to conduct their payoffs to their bribers. Not Alaska's only Congressman, Don Young.

When Republican Rep. Young didn't like the way the earmark he was paid off to insert in a transportation bill was written in the bill already passed by both the House and Senate, Don Young blithely went in and changed the language to what he had promised his briber after the bill was passed but before the President signed it. Substantive changes in the language of a bill that has already been passed by both the House and the Senate and is awaiting the Presidents signature is clearly Unconstitutional.

Go watch the video at Talking Points Memo for a clear explanation of Republican Rep. Don Young's Unconstitutional behavior.

An overall view of the Rove phenomenon.

Karl Rove really has had a remarkable career. He is largely responsible for the degree to which Texas politics shifted from control by the Democrats to control by the Republican party. Had he left it at that, his reputation would be assured. But he moved on to the national scene and failed to get the support he needed there. Today his reputation is in tatters, particularly within the Republican Party. Here's the story.

Before Rove became a force in Texas politics the ground was being prepared by John Tower and George H. W. Bush. After them Rove hit his stride. His effect on Texas Republican political campaigns was nothing less than phenomenal. He was the right man at the right time. Things were ready for him, he understood what could be done and he pulled together the resources and won elections.

Then he went with George W. bush to Washington, where his campaign skills remained powerful, but his lack of policy and administration skills together with Bush's inattention to governing has led to results for the national Republican Party that are shaping up to be as remarkably bad as Rove's early campaign and political efforts were successful. Each of those periods will be discussed here.

Texas Republicans - pre-Rove

The Texas I grew up in during the 1950's and 1960's was all Democratic Party. Conservative, racist, but Democratic in organization. Political battles were fought out in the Democratic Primary between conservative Democrats and liberal Democrats.

That began to change when Lyndon Johnson ran for both Vice-President and for his Senate seat in 1960 and won both. When he took the Vice-President job, the Senate seat was opened up for a special election in 1961, and an obscure college government teacher from Wichita Falls named John Tower won the Senate seat - as a Republican!
The next Senate election was 1964, and the Republican nominee was a politically well-connected oil executive, George H. W. Bush. He lost to the Democrat, but in 1966 won a seat in the House which he held for two terms. Nixon convinced him to give up that seat in 1970 and run for Senate, but he was defeated by Democrat Lloyd Bentsen.

This was really where the takeover of Texas by the Republican Party started. John Tower, as the Texas Republican with a state-wide office, spent his time in office (1961 until 1985 when he retired, to be replaced by Phil Gramm) building the Texas Republican Party both financially and institutionally.

Rove and the Republican take-over of Texas

John Moritz, staff writer at Fort Worth Star-Telegram wrote yesterday about the Rove-inspired Republican takeover of Texas.

Before Karl Rove was the architect of the George W. Bush presidency, he was the chief designer and construction manager of the Republican takeover in Texas, allies and adversaries of the outgoing White House chief political strategist agreed Monday.

"He was absolutely the driving force dating back to the late '70s and early '80s when he helped recruit candidates and hone the party's message," said Reggie Bashur, a Republican operative in Austin who has known Rove for more than 20 years. "He clearly saw the inflow of population to the suburbs of Texas, and recognized early on that that population would be inclined to vote Republican."

Democratic strategist Kelly Fero agreed that Rove, who drew the blueprints for Bush's two successful bids for Texas governor and for both campaigns for the White House, helped cement the GOP's lock on Texas politics.

"He certainly deserves a lot of the credit," Fero said after Bush announced the departure of his longtime friend and aide. "But it's remarkable how big a genius you can appear to be when your timing is good."

Implicit in Fero's reaction was the notion that Texas was ripe for partisan makeover as the old-line Democrats began fading from the scene and leaving the largely conservative Texas voters more at home with the new breed of Republicans who were eager to show them the door. But Bashur said that Rove's vision and determination had helped to accelerate the demise of the Texas Democrats.

"It's one thing to see it coming," Bashur said. "It's another to develop a plan, articulate a message and find the candidates."

Rove then went on to manage a number of key political campaigns in Texas:

The first was Dallas oilman Bill Clements' first run for governor in 1978, Eppstein said. At the time, no Republican had occupied the Governor's Mansion since Reconstruction, but Clements won a narrow victory by running as a plain-spoken outsider with business sense.

Eppstein said that Rove's next shrewd move came in the early 1980s when then-Democratic congressman Phil Gramm, a College Station conservative, fell out of favor with the more liberal party leaders in Washington. Rove helped persuade Gramm to resign his seat, switch parties and run to regain his seat as a Republican. The gambit worked, and the notoriety helped put Gramm in a position to run for and win a U.S. Senate seat in 1984.

Although Clements lost his bid for re-election in 1982, Rove helped him recast his crusty image as a more friendly grandfatherly type for his successful comeback in the 1986 governor's race.

With Democrats still in solid control of Texas politics in 1993, Rove signed on with Kay Bailey Hutchison, then the state treasurer, when the other U.S. Senate seat was vacated by Democrat Lloyd Bentsen's move to become U.S. treasury secretary. In a special election, Hutchison routed the Democrat appointed to replace Bentsen.

Rove's next big campaign came when Bush challenged popular Democrat Ann Richards in the 1994 governor's race. The former president's son followed a highly disciplined campaign that seldom strayed from his core message. [Snip]

Jim Moore, a former broadcast journalist in Austin and the co-author of two books about Rove, said that while the high-profile races received the most attention, it was Rove's efforts on behalf of candidates farther down the ballot that ensured his enduring clout.

"It got so that nobody who was a Republican in Texas who ran for office didn't seek the counsel of Karl Rove," Moore said.

"And by the time Karl left for Washington, D.C., there wasn't a Democrat left standing under the Texas sky."

Rove's years in Washington.

James Carville wrote an article (published in the Financial Times) entitled "How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans."

Mr Rove picked up seats in what was an almost historically impossible context in 2002. Then in 2004, he engineered one of the most remarkable feats in American politics. He got Americans to re-elect a president who they really did not want to re-elect. Even the Republican defeat in 2006 was predictable and well within the range of historical norms so, by this sport’s standard of winning and losing, there is still no black mark on Rove’s record. [Snip]

There is no doubt that Mr Rove won elections. He has perhaps one of the most remarkable win-percentages in modern American politics. [Snip]

If only things were so neat and simple. The evidence is now pretty conclusive that Mr Rove may have lost more than just an election in 2006. He has lost an entire generation for the Republican party.

A late July poll for Democracy Corps, a non-profit polling company, shows that a generic Democratic presidential candidate now wins voters under 30 years old by 32 percentage points. The Republican lead among younger white non-college-educated men, who supported President George W. Bush by a margin of 19 percentage points three years ago, has shrunk to 2 percentage points. Ideological divisions between the Republican party and young voters are growing. Young voters generally favour larger government providing more services, 68 per cent to 28 per cent. On every issue, from the budget to national security, young voters responded overwhelmingly that Democrats would do a better job in government. [Snip]

The March poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 50 per cent of Americans identify as Democrats while only 35 per cent say they are Republican. The June NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed 52 per cent of Americans would prefer a Democratic president while only 31 per cent would support a Republican, the largest gap in the 20-year history of the survey.

Mr Rove's famous electoral strategy – focusing on the Republican base first – is also largely responsible for a shift in international public opinion against the US. It would not be fair to blame Mr Rove for the Iraq war. But it is clearly fair to blame his strategy for the Terry Schiavo fiasco and the Republicans’ adherence to the policies and doctrines of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson. The world and now most of the US are contemptuous of the theocratic underpinnings of the policy Mr Rove ushered into government. [Snip]

Mr Rove was the architect of social security reform, immigration, the hiring and firing of justice department officials and the placement of literally thousands of ideologically driven buffoons throughout the US government. As deputy chief of staff he was also responsible for handling the White House post-Katrina reconstruction efforts. On these actions, history has already rendered its judgment on Mr Rove. And, as we say in Louisiana, “it ain’t pretty”.

Summary of Rove's career

So the Rove story starts with him walking into a changing political climate in Texas which he then took tremendous advantage of. Then he moved on to the national scene with his political creation, George W. Bush. He was expected to live up to his Texas reputation when on the national scene.

However, on the national scene, both Rove's abilities and his weaknesses came into play. An effective President could have used his abilities and prevented his liabilities from damaging the Administration and the Republican Party, but Bush 43 had and has no interest in or understanding of governing. In addition, neither Bush nor Rove really care about the future of the Republican Party. The result of their mutual ineptitudes and disinterests is well described by James Carville.

Rove may have a third, post-bush-Presidency chapter in his career, but whatever degree of success he has from now on will depend on him working for someone who can adjust for his severe weaknesses in policy, administration, and attitudes of cooperation with other politicians. Whether he will work for Fred Thompson or someone else under the kinds of restrictions he needs remains to be seen.

More on Rove - the Republicans don't like him either

David Frum has published an Editorial in The New York Times entitled "Building a Coalition, Forgetting to Rule." David Frum is, of course, and ex-Bush speech writer and a fellow at the Neocon American Enterprise Institute.

AS a political strategist, Karl Rove offered a brilliant answer to the wrong question.

The question he answered so successfully was a political one: How could Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center?

The question he unfortunately ignored was a policy question: What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it? [Snip]

Instead of seeking solutions to national problems, “compassionate conservatism” started with slogans and went searching for problems to justify them. To what problem, exactly, was the faith-based initiative a solution?

This was a politics of party-building and coalition-assembly. It was a politics that aimed at winning elections. It was a politics that treated the problems of governance as secondary. But of course governance is what incumbents get judged on — and since 2004, the negative verdict on President Bush’s governance has created a lethal political environment for Republican candidates.

David explains that Karl Rove practiced "political polarization" rather than "Wedge Politics."

Wedge politics unites a large constituency on one side, while splitting the coalition on the other side. In the 1970s, crime was a wedge issue: pushing white urban Democrats away from their black and liberal New Deal allies. In this strict sense, the only wedge issue Mr. Rove deployed was immigration, and he deployed it against his own side, dividing business donors from the conservative voting base.

Polarization, however, is Karl Rove’s specialty. He united his own base on one side — and united his opponents on the other. Al Gore and John Kerry each won 48 percent, the best back-to-back performance by a losing party since the 19th century. Play-to-the-base politics can be a smart strategy — so long as your base is larger than your opponents’.

But it has been apparent for many years that the Democratic base is growing faster than the Republican base. The numbers of the unmarried and the non-churchgoing are growing faster than the numbers of married and church-going Americans. The nonwhite and immigrant population is growing at a faster rate than that of white native-borns. The Democrats are the party of the top and bottom of American society; the Republicans do best in the great American middle, which is losing ground.

Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle.

In my brief service as a speechwriter inside the Bush administration, I often wondered why it was that skeptical experts on issues like immigration could never get even a hearing for their point of view. We took the self-evident brilliance of our plans so much for granted that we would not even meet, for example, with conservative academics who had the facts and figures to demonstrate the illusion of Rovian hopes for a breakthrough among Hispanic voters. We were so mesmerized by the specious analogies between 1996 and 1896 that we forgot that analogies are literary devices, not evidence.

In 2006, Republicans and conservatives paid the price for this we-know-best attitude. I fear that we will pay an even higher price in 2008.

While I admit that I am personally suspicious of anything that David Frum writes or says, this seems like a pretty straight forward analysis of how Rove has operated and what the results have been.

So why does the Bush White House refuse to gather information from outside experts? The answer is "attitude." They have a bad case of the "Not invented here" attitude. A story told by Dick Armey to NJosh Green (and published by Kevin Drum) demonstrates it.

"For all the years he was president," Armey told me, "Bill Clinton and I had a little thing we'd do where every time I went to the White House, I would take the little name tag they give you and pass it to the president, who, without saying a word, would sign and date it. Bill Clinton and I didn't like each other. He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress. But he knew that when I left his office, the first schoolkid I came across would be given that card, and some kid who had come to Washington with his mama would go home with the president's autograph. I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it."

Armey said that when he went to his first meeting in the White House with President Bush, he explained the tradition with Clinton and asked the president if he would care to continue it. "Bush refused to sign the card. Rove, who was sitting across the table, said, 'It would probably wind up on eBay,'" Armey continued. "Do I give a damn? No. But can you imagine refusing a simple request like that with an insult? It's stupid. From the point of view of your own self-interest, it's stupid. I was from Texas, and I was the majority leader. If my expectations of civility and collegiality were disappointed, what do you think it was like for the rest of the congressmen they dealt with? The Bush White House was tone-deaf to the normal courtesies of the office."

Not only were Bush and Rove not interested in obtaining information from outside the White House as Frum pointed out above, they did not even practice the the normal civilities that ease working together with people they disagree with, and if they treated the conservative Republican Speaker of the House that way, they disagreed with everyone.

For the conservatives who decry the "Bush haters," they need to remember that a person gets back the same behavior he demonstrates towards others. There is nothing in the Constitution that even hints that the President should be treated with a level of respect and civility he fails to demonstrate to others.

Let's not forget that Rove put Bush into the office he now holds, and Rove has also set the standards for how to treat those with whom he disagrees. Bush is responsible for this, the most disastrous Presidency in America's history, but Rove is right up there in line for blame with Bush himself.