Moral choices

Great column THE GHOST OF TET - Like Vietnam, Iraq was never the media’s to lose.
by Matt Taibbi refuting conservative arguments that Americans are spineless losers.
Let's get something straight. The people who marched against the Vietnam War were not holding signs that said, 'We Can't Win!' They called for withdrawal, both before and after Tet, because they came to believe that the war was wrong. [emphasis mine] They protested not because our saturation bombing of the North and our Phoenix assassination programs and our toxic defoliating campaigns in the South were ineffective. They protested because they were effective, because they killed so many people so efficiently . . . .America would never have considered giving up after Tet if Vietnam had been a moral war. We would have fought to the last man no matter what setbacks came our way. We would do so now in Iraq."
For some mindsets, a war is neither moral nor immoral, its just winnable or not. Winning, in this way of thinking, is a justification in itself for the war. Taibbi is pointing out that Americans are capable of making a moral judgment about a war regardless of how many soldiers are dying.
When the history of this war is written, I hope the behaviour of the US commands in Fallujah, Najaf and Sadr City will be shown for the act of humanity I think it was. Now, this is my evaluation from thousands of miles away, only reading news stories, but it appears to me that the US soldiers who could have "conquered" these cities decided that killing thousands of Iraqis to do so would be an immoral act, a crime against humanity --and indeed history would have seen it that way. In pulling back they ultimately put their own soldiers at risk, because these cities are now "free zones" where resistance fighters prepare more bombs and attacks. The Marines, I think, knew this would happen, but they negotiated a settlement and pulled back anyway because the alternative was too horrible for a moral person to stomach.
I wonder what these soldiers think of the Pentagon chickenhawks who write quibbling memos justifying torture -- of course, it isn't them or their children who are at risk of being tortured in return, it is these young men who are now fighting this war for them in Iraq, and who are making the hard choices that the Pentagon and administration leadership are apparently too chicken-hearted to make.

What you see is what you get

So much for the "hidden" agenda.
If Canadians elect Harper as Prime Minister, it won't be because they don't know what he will do. Council of Canadians chair Marg Barlow quote from several recent Harper speeches in Harper, a Bush in Tory clothing and concudes "Stephen Harper is a pro-American hawk . . . Under a Harper government, Canada would lose the right to set its own labour, environmental and security standards. Most disturbing is his proposal to negotiate international trade agreements with the very superpower whose corporations want to come to Canada and deliver our public services on a for-profit basis. Stephen Harper has also called for a continental energy strategy . . "
So lets add it up:
1. Harper supports aligning our security, military, and immigration standards with the Bush administration (the ones who think the president can ignore US laws if he thinks there is a bogeyman under his bed.)
2. Harper wouldn't stop his caucus from making it more difficult for women to have abortions
3. He will let his caucus change the law so that discrimination based on sexual orientation is OK
4. He will withdraw the gay marriage law from the Supreme Court and possibly end up using the notwitstanding clause to outlaw gay marriage
5. Again, if his caucus pushes it, he would allow changes to the Official Languages Act,which will alienate Quebec.
All of this is now quite clear, thanks to the verbal slip-ups of Conservative MPs and Harper's own speeches.
And, as is also quite clear, he's not much of a leader -- he cannot or will not control his caucus no matter what outrageous, hurtful, divisive things they say.
So if Canadians vote for him now, they know exactly what they will get.
The tragedy is, maybe this is what they want.

Bush, have you no shame?

NOW do you get it? Now do you see why the bloggers listed on this page, joined by other bloggers from all over the world, have been ranting and raving about the Bush administration? The DOJ memos turn the American constitution inside out in attempting to provide so-called legal cover to justify government by presidential decree and justice by torture.
The Washington Post editorial Legalizing Torture thunders "There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments.(emphasis mine).
It continues " Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of 'national security.' For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy . . . "
The "bad apples" are in the Department of Justice and in the White House.
UPDATE -- I changed the headline from "America" to "Bush", when comments rightfully pointed out that more than half the country voted AGAINST this guy, and millions of Americans are working hard to get rid of him. Go for it, people!

Gone with the Wind

Back in March, I proposed a reissue of Young Frankenstein starring our favourite gang of Washington idiots.
Now, our election campaign is starting to remind me of Gone with the Wind (which just about describes the Liberal majority, I think) -- and how about this casting:
Stephen Harper as Scarlett: "As God is my witness, I'll never be seatless again."
Paul Martin as Gerald: "Do you mean to tell me that . . . land doesn't mean anything to you? Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin' for, worth fightin' for, worth dyin' for, because it's the only thing that lasts." (and remember, Gerald was the one who fell off his horse while jumping a fence.)
Jack Layton as (I just can't resist it) Miss Prissy: "Lawzy, we got to have a doctor. I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies."
And how about Duceppe as Ashley: "Dreams, dreams, always dreams with you, never common sense."
Who else but Chretien as Rhett Butler: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
Now, the one I'm stuck on is who should play Mammy: "It ain't fittin'... it ain't fittin'. It jes' ain't fittin'... It ain't fittin'."

"Event management"?

Bada bing, bada boom Well, it was a satisfying last episode, many loose ends wrapped up -- this MSNBC story hits most of the high points, except one -- Tony and Carm's reaction to the idea of AJ going into "event management" as a career.
This subtle scene was just so typical of what parents of teenagers go through. Over several AJ fuck-up episodes, they've come to grips with the fact that AJ likely won't achieve the conventional professional career they imagined (and, little do they know, but darling Meadow isn't quite the angel they think she is, either; both AJ and Meadow have demonstrated an inborn ability to follow their father's footsteps.) Then they find out he actually earned $300 organizing a slightly-illegal party. Tony's initial reaction to the event management idea is that maybe its 'kinda gay, isn't it?' But finally, as they ruefully agree, at least he's interested in SOMETHING, maybe its not so bad after all, yeah, OK, I guess -- and both heir faces show the perfect combination of befuddlement and hope that all us parents feel when our children turn out to be the kind who march to their own drummer.
All in all, a satisfying season-ender.

Strike Three (or maybe four)

A week ago was Strike Two -- the double-barreled day when Conservative MPs said the languages act should be repealed and women's access to abortion should be hampered. Now here comes Strike Three -- Conservative MP slips on party's hate law view with Gallant saying that hate speech about sexual orientation should not be a crime. (Maybe its actually Strike Four, because I missed the remark from a conservative candidate about bringing back capital punishment, though in this case, the remark was not made by a sitting MP)
And once again, her party is saying its nothing, really, we didn't really mean it, just ignore it, no problem here -- "A party spokesperson said Gallant's comments were incorrect, and the Conservatives were not planning to move to repeal the act. Conservative House leader John Reynolds told CTV's Question Period that Gallant was expressing her own beliefs, which she is free to do. "During a campaign, candidates are going it make comments. These things happen," he said. "Candidates will say things for whatever reason in their own riding. But it's not a major issue with our party." Reynolds added that the party does not intend to seek to repeal the law."
Now the question has to be -- how much of a leader are you, Mr. Harper, when the members of your caucus can keep telling reporters what laws they intend to pass if they are elected, and these apparently aren't the laws that you yourself support?

We hardly knew ye

I've been thinking about the thousands and thousands of US war casualties, lying in Walter Reed hospital or at home trying to put their lives back together, hearing all the D-Day coverage.
And I was reminded of this song, one of the great anti-war songs from Ireland. Click on the link and then on the song title to hear the music.
Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye

While goin' the road to sweet Athy,
hurroo, hurroo
While goin' the road to sweet Athy,
hurroo, hurroo
While goin' the road to sweet Athy,
A stick in me hand and a drop in me eye,
A doleful damsel I heard cry,
Johnny I hardly knew ye.

Chorus:
With your guns and drums and drums and guns,
hurroo, hurroo
With your guns and drums and drums and guns,
hurroo, hurroo
With your guns and drums and drums and guns,
The enemy nearly slew ye
Oh my darling dear, Ye look so queer
Johnny I hardly knew ye.

Where are your eyes that were so mild,
hurroo, hurroo
Where are your eyes that were so mild,
hurroo, hurroo
Where are your eyes that were so mild,
When my heart you so beguiled
Why did ye run from me and the child
Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye

Where are your legs that used to run,
hurroo, hurroo
Where are your legs that used to run,
hurroo, hurroo
Where are your legs that used to run,
When you went for to carry a gun
Indeed your dancing days are done
Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye

I'm happy for to see ye home,
hurroo, hurroo
I'm happy for to see ye home,
hurroo, hurroo
I'm happy for to see ye home,
All from the island of Sulloon;
So low in flesh, so high in bone
Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye

They're rolling out the guns again,
hurroo, hurroo
They're rolling out the guns again,
hurroo, hurroo
They're rolling out the guns again,
But they never will take our sons again
No they never will take our sons again
Johnny I'm swearing to ye

Good for the Anglicans

Its not the complete endorsement it might have been, but the Anglican Church took a bold stop forward by recognizing the "integrity and sancity" of same-sex relationships - Anglican measure recognizes same-sex alliances This took courage. Good for them.

Cutsey headline, boring story

More gonzo journalism. This cutsey headline Liberal team running out of gas? is followed by this so-called news story:
Reporters used to kicking up dust around the prime minister were left sputtering in dust of their own Sunday. Two media buses accompanying Paul Martin through France were at the tail end of a motorcade going 150 kilometres an hour, accompanied by gendarmes on motorcycles. They were on the way from Juno Beach to Caen, the military base where reporters were to catch a plane back to Ottawa. But the second bus couldn't keep up. It had to pull out of the motorcade and into a gas station when the fuel light indicator came on. Reporters had been with Martin on the beaches of Normandy to commemorate Canada's contribution to D-Day.
That's it -- the whole story. Whenever did reporters get the idea that, on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, Canadians deserved a story about how a bus full of reporters ran out of gas -- well, it didn't actually run out of gas, just had to stop FOR gas. And this was in France, not in Canada, but we need to blame the Liberals for it anyway though it wasn't even their bus. But what's the difference when a headline is at stake?

Some questions about the Conservative platform

Here is the Liberal Platform, and here is the ConservativePlatform Its hard to make comparisons because the Liberal platform provides 10 times the detail, including lengthy discussions of policy frameworks within which the liberals have already developed legislation and initiatives, and say they will develop more.
As for the Conservatives, their platform is a series of bullet points, which give short shrift to a series of regional and national issues, but which sometimes highlight bizarre specifics ("natural health products"?) Its unclear the extent to which these promises are meaningful because the overall framework within which the Conservative would implement these ideas sometimes hasn't been articulated.
For example, the Conservative platform says things like this:
• Ensure fairness in party nomination and leadership races [where did this come from and what does it mean? Surely the parties can do what they will in this regard.]
• Support Canada’s farmers, fishers, and forestry workers. [Seven words -- no other mention of agriculture, fishing and forestry. Why are all of these lumped together? Are farmers, with hundreds of thousands invested in land and machinery, and fishermen, who also have thousands invested in their equipment and licenses, actually the equivalent of forestry workers? And I could find no other reference to agriculture anywhere in the platform.]
• Improve access to new drugs and natural health products. ["Natural health products?" why would this be a national priority?]
• Work to improve economic and social conditions for aboriginal Canadians. [Other than these 10 words, I could find no other reference to First Nations in the platform.]
• Become an environmental world leader by focusing on clean air, clean water, clean land, and clean energy. [no specifics, just this 17 word sound bite - and what the heck is "clean land"?]
• Protect our children by eliminating legal loopholes for child pornography. [what loopholes? this panders to the base but doesn't actually mean anything]
• Build a more constructive partnership with our major allies and trading partners
and enhance the North American trade relationship. [The Globe said this means some kind of customs union - does it?]
• Implement a Made in Canada foreign policy. [what do these seven words mean? What have we had up to now? Its the Liberals who kept us out of Iraq, when Harper would have supported Bush.]

Leadership

In response to comments on my previous post, I wanted to do a follow-up on my thinking about leadership.
First, I think of Reagan now exactly the same way I thought of him when he was alive -- death doesn't deify someone. He got elected because America blamed Carter for the hostages being held in Iran. And previously, Carter got elected because America was ashamed of Ford, who pardoned Nixon -- and Nixon got elected because America was mad at Johnson and the Democrats over Vietnam.
Actually, looking back on it, the elections of Kennedy, Bush the Elder, and Clinton were the only ones in the last half-century where the candidate was elected primarily on his own merits, not as a reaction to the foul-ups of the previous administration.
But I digress . . . my point is this:
Leaders of countries, however they come into power, absolutely have to understand their leadership role. When they don't, bad things always happen.
The role of an elected leader is to decide what is important and to focus on it. Exerting leadership day-to-day is a balancing act between belief and reality -- the leader has to have goals in which he believes, but also has to adjust to the situation in which he finds himself. This means he sometimes has to jettison a goal if he cannot convince his electorate to support it. The leader must attract and hire people who are smarter than he is, and give them enough authority to do their best work. But he still has to provide enough supervision and direction that they will respect his agenda and not replace it with their own.
Kennedy understood this, and so did Bush the Elder and Clinton. They let their cabinet and military and White House aides do much of the decision-making. But if these people started to swerve off the rails, the president knew enough about each decision that he could step in and get the train back onto the tracks. Perhaps, come to think of it, it was this inherent leadership ability that enabled these men to get elected on their own merits in the first place.
Reagan didn't have it -- he surrounded himself with people who were supposedly smarter than he was, who did all sorts of bad things to enrich themselves and their friends because he wasn't paying attention. Carter didn't have it either -- he didn't trust anyone in Washington, having run as a populist, and so he tried to do everything himself and buried himself in detail. Johnson let the joint chiefs run Vietnam while he focused on doing good for America, but the bad decisions they made on Vietnam ran his presidency into the ground. Nixon was reelected by allowing his aides to develop a culture of dirty tricks, an approach that showed his basic disrespect for the American people -- an attitude which became, ultimately, his downfall. Their stories are instructive.
Bush the Younger is now in trouble because he believed his own press clippings, which told him that he was a moral beacon of light for America but so ignorant of government and foreign affairs that he needed older, supposedly wiser heads to tell him what to do. Well, they did. And what a mess they have made of it. Now, as Joe Klein writes in Time, Bush is too ensnared by his own ideology to accept this or to deal with it. Klein writes "The world might have more confidence in the judgment of this President if he weren't always bathed in the blinding glare of his own certainty."

Reagan's legacy

I seem to have spent today finding great things to quote that other people wrote.
Here's another one: Whiskey Bar: Ronald Reagan Billmon writes about Reagam's foreign policy:
Reagan's foreign policies . . . still make my blood boil. . . His decision to challenge the Soviets on every front - which, given the senility and paranoia of the Breshnev-era Soviet leadership, could easily have led to war - is, of course, relentlessly promoted by the conservative propaganda machine as the masterstroke that ended the Cold War. In reality, it was the end of the Cold War (made possible by Mikhail Gorbachov's rise to power) that headed off the disaster that Reagan's recklessness might otherwise have triggered.
The legacy of Reagan's policies in the Middle East, meanwhile, are still being paid for - in blood. The cynical promotion of Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the alliance of convenience with Saddam Hussein against Iran, the forging of a new 'strategic relationship' with Israel, the corrupt dealings with the House of Saud, and . . . the weakeness and indecision of his disastrous intervention in Beruit - all of these helped set the stage for what the neocons now like to call World War IV, and badly weakened the geopolitical ability of the United States to wage that war.
But all this pales in comparison to Reagan's war crimes in Central America. We'll probably never know just how stained his hands were by the blood of the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of defenseless peasants who were slaughtered in the Guatemalan highlands, or the leftist politicians, union leaders and human rights activists kidnapped and killed by the Salvadoranian death squads, or the torturned in Honduran prisons, or terrorized by his beloved contras. . . Looking back, it's also easy to see the propaganda connections between Reagan's war in Central America and the current Orwellian nightmare in Iraq. There were the same moral oversimplications - pure goodness versus absolute evil - the same flowerly rhetoric about freedom and democracy (to be administred to impoverished campesinos with machine guns and torture chambers.) There was the same lurid hype about the dire danger to the homeland - as when Reagan famously warned that Nicaragua was just a "two-day drive from Harlington, Texas." And of course, we're even looking at some of the same actors - Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, Colin Powell. To a large degree, the Reagan administration's covert wars in both Central America and the Middle East formed the template for how the war in Iraq was packaged, sold and - unfortunately - fought.
. . . The ritual deification of Ronald Reagan has become one of the essential bonds that holds the modern Republican Party together . . . the tremendous conservative nostalgia for Ronald Reagan is a sign of a movement that is, if not in decline, then poised on the cusp of it. It's an implicit admission that the golden age, when a conservative ideologue like Reagan could win the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans (and not just the instinctual cultural loyalty of red state America) has passed away.
The contrast with Bush the younger - desperately scrambling to avoid defeat in a bitterly polarized electorate - is painfully clear. In it's obsessive desire to glorify Ronald Reagan, the conservative movement is retreating psychologically into its own past. It's a sign that the political era that opened the night Reagan was elected may also be nearing its end. To which I can only say: Rest in peace.
My own memory of the Reagan era was that it was on his watch that the US lost its cities -- US cities (New York, LA, Chicago, Detroit, etc) had been fighting economic disaster all through the 70s, and Reagan's policies which withdrew federal support from things like low-income housing, jobs programs, drug rehab, policing, schools and hospitals tipped them over; youth gangs, crime, poverty and despair overwhelmed city governments across the US. It took years for Clinton's policies to turn the cities around.

The end of "the West" as an historical construct

Good column The Decline of the West By Gwynne Dyer
: I usually find Gwynne Dyer's columns perceptive and interesting. This one is a D-Day retrospective about the differences between Europe and the US, now that the Cold War is over. One example of the contrasts -- Europeans see terrorism as a long-term problem that can do considerable damage and must be contained; Americans (or at least those who set the terms of the public debate) see it as an apocalyptic threat that must be destroyed at any cost. This ind-set fed the Bush administration's instinctive unilateralism and provided a saleable political rationale for the neo-conservatives' project of 'pax americana'. The resulting wars have accomplished in three years what might otherwise have taken fifteen: the Western alliance has been gutted, although the shell remains.

Agenda vs mission

Rex Murphy's column Leaders are so-so, so we yo-yoin today's Globe is terrific. I think he hits the nail right on the head
What gains the Tories have made from the Liberal follies and mischief is as much as they are going to make. From here, they have to manufacture new support on their own ground and on their own issues. Which is both an advantage and a threat. Mr. Harper is going to face a real testing. The public in essence will use that testing to answer the question of the election: Should this man and his party be the beneficiary of their anger and disappointment with the Liberals?
It is also the critical point in Paul Martin's campaign. His trip to Normandy for D-Day celebrations will allow for a natural hiatus from the campaign. It will give him the space to start this whole effort anew. Which he has no choice but to do.
He must drop the previous scripts, isolate himself from the campaign mechanics, the dubious artists of spin and campaign management, and speak -- to borrow a phrase -- straight from the heart. Why has he sought this job? What does he, really, want to do with it? Why is Paul Martin running? This is a message that can only come from him.
It is possible for him to earn a second look from the voters, but he has but this one chance to do so. An outburst of authenticity could burn off the smear from the sponsorship mess. It could disentangle him from the McGuinty tax-hike harpoon.
For both leaders, this is the crucial turn of the campaign.
Mr. Harper needs to state his agenda. Mr. Martin needs to state his mission.

Shorter Christie Blatchford

Christie Blatchford"I'm pro-choice, of course, but birth control is so easy to get and pregnancy out of wedlock is not shameful anymore, not like it was when I was a girl, so any woman with an unwanted pregnancy these days must be an ignorant slut who deserves to be hassled about having an abortion."