The Republican Strategy: Straight from Sesame Street

For some time, I have been meaning to post a couple of thoughts I had after reading The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. At the time, I was worried that the book would launch a wave of attacks similar to those that hit Kerry in 2004. Thankfully, that didn't happen--largely due to prompt responses by the Obama campaign and supporters. The media has since moved on to other things (e.g., Palin-mania), but I wanted to get my points out there anyway.

The book epitomizes two of the things that trouble me deeply about politics today, particularly as it is played by the core of the Republican party (aka, the "religious right"). First is the abuse of science and academics to prop up completely bogus claims. "Dr. Corsi," and others in his camp, attempt to mimic the methods of scientists and academics but ignore the most critical aspects of those disciplines (such as refutability in science), in a blatant attempt to support their own views rather than to discover the truth. Second, there is a subtextual campaign to divide the world into "us" and "them," with McCain-Palin in the "us" camp and Obama belonging to "them." You remember the Sesame Street song that goes, "One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong ..."? That about sums up the theme of The Obama Nation, and for that matter the entire Republican strategy this election season. (Though in all fairness, I don't think that's the message that the Cookie Monster was promoting.)

A Gaffe That Draws Blood

I have to concede, I am really quite pleased that John McCain started running his mouth about the Anbar Awakening. Before he did, the Conventional Wisdom on the Surge was so firmly established as to appear immovable. Everybody knows, the Surge worked. The fact that there is very little evidence to support that assertion really never came up. And if anyone tried to bring it up, they were scoffed at (as Obama was in the USA Today editorial above). Now that McCain has brought to the fore the fact that the Anbar Awakening, one of the most critical elements of our recent success in Iraq, was unrelated to the Surge, we can start to revisit the Conventional Wisdom.

What I think we'll find is that the real root cause for the turnaround in violence in Iraq had less to do with the additional 20,000 troops than with a change in tactics of which the Anbar Awakening was one element. The dramatic rise of David Petraeus marked the military's final grudging acceptance of the need to engage in actual counterinsurgency operations. After several disastrous years fighting the insurgency, it dawned on the Pentagon that their only real successes came where officers like Petraeus and H.R. McMaster eschewed the major operations that were up to that point the mainstay of the Iraq occupation and adopted classic counterinsurgency tactics. Hell, Petraeus wrote the book on the topic. Petraeus's ascension and this shift in tactics is what made the Anbar Awakening and the later success of the Surge possible.

This is a fairly important distinction, for a couple of reasons. First, is its obvious political impact. McCain has staked much on the fact that he supported the Surge when few others did, and the apparent success of the Surge is supposed to justify any number of prior errors of judgment with respect to Iraq (note how the USA Today article asks Obama to admit he was wrong about the surge, but it doesn't ask McCain to admit he was wrong about invading). If the Surge was not the answer, what does McCain have left to hang his hat on? Even if McCain did back counterinsurgency tactics, and it's not clear he did, that wouldn't be a terribly unique position. This humble blogger criticized the major ops approach to fighting the insurgency as far back as 2003, called for the implementation of counterinsurgency tactics in early 2004, and praised the military's movement in that direction in late 2005. Where was McCain all that time? I could have used his help back then.

Aside from the 2008 election, this debate has other long-term implications. Crediting the Surge for all that has gone right serves the right-wing's ever-popular Green Lantern Theory of Foreign Policy. According to the Green Lantern Theory ("GLT") any military failure is caused by a lack of willpower, and any military objective is achievable given a sufficient reserve of willpower. A corollary to the GLT is that any domestic criticism of either the decision to engage in a military conflict or the conduct of such conflict is a direct attack on the one resource necessary to win such a conflict (willpower) and thereby equivalent to treason. Proponents of the GLT have long scorned concepts such as nationbuilding, the exercise military restraint, respect for local culture, winning of hearts and minds, and, indeed, just about every other element of a traditional counterinsurgency operation. Not only are such things considered to be pointless, but they might weaken our resolve and are therefore deemed harmful to the cause.

Pinning all success in Iraq to the Surge is a perfect narrative fit for the GLT. Just when everyone else wanted to discuss withdrawal, George W. Bush rode the rescue with bulging reserves of willpower and not only refused to withdraw, he upped the ante as a tangible demonstration of his generous endowment of resolve. And lo, victory was achieved. If this is the narrative that comes out of the Iraq war, we will all live to regret it. The United States and Iraq alike paid a painful and bloody price to learn the lessons that the GLT proponents hope to obscure in a haze of Surge-o-philia.

In truth what we learned this time around are a lot of the lessons we should have learned from Vietnam. Indeed, Robert McNamara basically did learn those lessons. It is no coincidence that so did David Petraeus and H.R. McMaster. Petraeus wrote a doctoral thesis at Princeton titled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam." McMaster also wrote a doctoral thesis on the mistakes of the American military in Vietnam. The lessons were there to be learned, but few among conservative policymakers and the Pentagon brass did, enamored of the GLT as they are. Will we walk away from Iraq with the public and policymakers learning all the same wrong lessons so that the next time around we will, at terrible cost, have to rediscover the right ones all over again? I surely hope not. And I hope that McCain's gaffe will open the door to a more robust public dialogue on this topic.

The Alternate Reality of the Right

In considering the "fighting them there so they won't come here" argument, Matthew Yglesias points out the obvious conflict between symbolism (retreating from Iraq makes us look weak) and reality (staying in Iraq causes us to actually be weak). He seems perplexed by the Right's tendency to "view national security policy as something that takes place entirely at the level of symbolism". This is, I think, not so difficult to understand. American conservatives live in an alternate reality, unable to distinguish between symbolism and reality. To them, symbolism is reality. If you listened to enough conservative radio and watched enough Fox News you'd live in that alternate reality too. Never was this more clearly illustrated than in Ron Suskind's famous discussion with an undisclosed White House official (Andrew Card, perhaps?) about how the Bush administration was in a constant process of creating its own reality. This was never a matter of the Bush administration being able to fundamentally alter the state of the world directly through their pronouncements and news releases, but rather an expression of the belief that if they can control news cycles and assert a concept of reality strenuously enough, everyone else would have little choice but to accept it as real, and the world would adjust itself to the White House's vision. It was Wag the Dog transformed from satire into official state policy. They could reshape reality through symbolism by convincing people that what they thought was true actually wasn't.

Obviously this doesn't work. There are too many competing sources of news and reality does eventually trickle in to displace this fictional presentation. The reality-based community inevitably gets the last laugh, as Suskind pointed out. This is why the administration and their supporters were always so furious about the media reporting on bloodshed in Iraq and missing the "good stories"; the media was deconstructing the administration's carefully constructed alternate reality.

But it's not hard to see why conservatives got suckered into this belief, and why they still can't seem to let go of it. Most conservative news sources are mere propaganda outlets. Witness the old Pew study finding that the more people watched Fox News the more likely they were to believe that we had found WMD's in Iraq or that Saddam was behind 9/11. Or this more recent Pew study that shows that while liberals see Republican presidential candidates in exactly the same way conservatives themselves view them, conservatives, by contrast, see all of the Democratic candidates as raving left-wing lunatics. American conservatives have replaced their own reality with symbolism, so why wouldn't it be natural for them to think the same is true for everyone else? Their own echo-chamber media has relegated them to a world that only exists in their own minds.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

See ya later, Rick.

A Government That Doesn't Believe In Government

One of the defining contradictions of the Bush administration and the current Republican Congress is that they have tried to accomplish so much through government while simultaneously not believing in the efficacy of government (a rhetorical holdover from the party's former libertarian streak). How else can the immense patronage system that they've assembled over the past 8 years be explained? Michael Brown, the K Street Project, and now this remarkable story of the Iraq reconstruction team. I don't know that the reconstruction could have worked under any circumstances, but it certainly doesn't help to staff key positions with young party apparatchiks with no experience or education in the subject areas they are managing. Instead of creating stability and law and order and a functional constitutional structure they were busy instituting a flat tax, privatizing government assets, running an anti-smoking campaign, and modernizing Iraq's stock exchange. They turned the Green Zone into a luxury resort while the country went to hell around them. This whole mess is going to go down as a disaster of epic proportions...

Friendly Fire

The more this Harriet Miers thing goes on, the funnier I think it is. Like this article on Laura Bush rebuffing Miers critics. What could be funnier than this scenario: The White House nominates a lame candidate. Conservatives criticize the candidate. The White House, as it has done a hundred times before, responds to criticism by shooting the messenger. Conservative critics say, "Hey! Wait a second! It's us! Hold your fire. We're not sexist pigs!" Pure comedy.

Tom Delay: Smokin' the Dope

There's just nothing that can be said for this. I laughed 'til I cried...

A Brief Moment for Ethics

I'd like to note how deeply I'm enjoying the Delay scandal. Not just because he's a scumbag and deserves it, but because it makes me happy to see the Congress concerned with ethics, even if they're only doing it to score political points. Already various Congresspeople are rushing to get their records in order. There are a lot of good lobbyists in Washington (take, for example, the Center for Democracy and Technology), but by and large the Congress-lobbyist network is a cesspool of corruption. The Republicans have threatened to retaliate by exposing ethical lapses of Democrats (Nancy Pelosi's name has come up a few times). I say more power to them. Although the partisan infighting of it may be distasteful, I would find bitter partisanship palatable in a contest of ethical purity. It might not make the politicians actually become ethical, but at least forcing them to follow the formalities of ethics guidelines would be a step in the right direction.

The Man of the Hour

Introducing James "If I go down, I'm taking the Republican party with me" Dobson. Leader of the religious right, instigator of the effort to block Arlen Spector from taking over the judiciary committee, crusader against gays everywhere. Democrats need to shine a spotlight on this guy and not take it off until he has driven all moderates from the Republican party or forced Bush to divorce religious right. As long as he sticks to his values, and there is every indication he will, he can only hurt the Republicans.

Securing Their Gains

Newt Gingrich has an interesting column in the Washington Post laying out his strategy to extend Republican dominance.

Secret Codes of the Right Wing

This is truly absurd.. ...but it does make sense.

My take on the debate

"John Kerry went in with a credibility gap, and came out with a credibility canyon."

Ok -- that's not my take. But I bet we'll hear a lot on that tomorrow.

You Call Yourself a Patriot and a Republican?

From this article in today's NYT:

Today, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert was asked about Mr. McCain's view that Congress should not enact tax cuts during wartime because it keeps the public from developing the sense of shared sacrifice that war requires. Mr. Hastert, who was discussing tax cuts, the Republican budget and $50 billion for the war in Iraq, had had enough.

"Who?" asked Mr. Hastert as he heard Mr. McCain's name. "Where is he from? Is he a Republican?"

Then Mr. Hastert really unloaded on Mr. McCain, who sustained lifelong injuries as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

"John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda," Mr. Hastert said. "There is the sacrifice in this country. We are trying to make sure they have the ability to fight this war, that they have the wherewithal to do it. At the same time we have to react to keep this country strong not only militarily, but economically. We have to have the flexibility to do it. That is my answer to John McCain."

According to Noted Now [ABCNews], McCain responded thusly:

"I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility. Apparently those days are long gone for some in our party."

The Republican National Committee Takes Over the IRS & Treasury

John Marshall, the author of Talking Points Memo blog, cues his readers onto a gross abuse of taxpayer funds by the IRS.

Read the following paragraph that appears at the bottom of a US Treasury and IRS press release (dated April 9, 2004):

America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the President's policies are doing; or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation.

Now read this one, from a RNC factsheet (dated April 2, 2004):

America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the President's polices are doing; or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation.

NYT reports that the tax policy statement was included on four separate press releases that were issued that day. The Times also quotes Rob Nichols, a spokesperson for the Treasury department as saying:

Stating our position is appropriate ... . The administration's views on fiscal policy are that lower taxes have helped strengthen the economy and led to an environment of increased job creation.

Fox News reports that the Treasury Department's Inspector General is investigating the matter, along with the IRS's recent analysis of Kerry's tax proposals (you gotta read this IRS press release--it's unbelievable.)

So You're Saying There's a Chance...

Boston Globe's analysis on a McCain nomination can be found here.