The plight of the Mau Mau: A lesson in imperial brutality

As some of you know, I've already written extensively on what we'll call here The Torture Issue. Meaning: the allegations of torture, or other prisoner abuse, at American detention facilities like Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

I've hit the U.S. hard on failing to live up to its principles and on engaging in practices that are clearly inhumane:

On the Amnesty International report, see here and here.
On Cheney's defence of Gitmo, see here.
On all the scapegoating, see here.
On "Korangate, see here.
On Dick Durbin, see here.

And I've even called for an apology from the enablers of torture (i.e., those in the Bush Administration who have created the culture of torture and who therefore need to be held accountable for prisoner abuse by America's hand, under America's watch, and with America's blessing): see here.

BUT: I've also criticized what I see as an effort to equate the United States with the true perpetrators of brutality, both the current insurgents in Iraq and the totalitarian regimes of the last century. Durbin, in my view, didn't make this argument for moral equivalency -- he was misrepresented and thus should not have had to apologize; indeed, he and his nuanced argument should have been taken more seriously -- but there are those on the left who seem to think that Gitmo is in fact a gulag or a concentration camp and that the United States is in fact akin to Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. This, in my view, is both wrong and insulting. America may have committed a number of gross injustices throughout its history, and it may be committing injustices today as part of the war on terror, but there is no excuse for maligning it so unjustifiably.

Criticize what's going on at Gitmo, if you will, as I have done repeatedly, but don't mistake Gitmo for America. To do so is like mistaking a malignant tumor for the entire body. You do what you can to rid the body of the tumor, but you don't rid the body of the tumor by destroying the body in its entirety. What would be the point? For just as the tumor doesn't define the body, so does torture not define America. Torture is America's tumor. Get rid of it and America will be healthier.

If I may return to today's L.A. Times for a second straight post, check out Max Boot's column on the Mau Mau, Kenyan insurgents opposed to British rule. Boot goes too lightly on America's prisoner abuse, but the story of the Mau Mau and their brutal destruction at the hands of the British puts even the worst allegations of that prisoner abuse into perspective. America has a lot to answer for, yes, but it's important to ask the right questions.

Iraq: A massive blunder, a more sober America?

Check out Timothy Garton Ash's review of Bush's Fort Bragg speech in today's L.A. Times. There's so much bluster coming from all sides on Iraq, but Ash brings a welcome perspective with his detached, non-partisan moderation:

Bush's speech once again presented Iraq as part of the Global War on Terror -- the GWOT. He mentioned the Sept. 11 attacks six times; weapons of mass destruction, not once. We have to defeat the terrorists abroad, he said, before they attack us at home. As freedom spreads, the terrorists will lose support. Then he made this extraordinary statement: "We will prevent Al Qaeda and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban -- a safe haven from which they could launch attacks on America and our friends."

Consider. Three years ago, when Bush started ramping up for war in Iraq, Afghanistan had recently been liberated from both the Taliban and the Al Qaeda terrorists who had attacked the U.S. Iraq, meanwhile, was a hideous dictatorship under Saddam Hussein.

But, as the 9/11 commission concluded, Hussein's regime had no connection with the 2001 attacks. Iraq was not then a recruiting sergeant or training ground for jihadist terrorists. Now it is. The U.S.-led invasion and occupation has made it so. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark put it plainly: "We are creating enemies."

And the president says: Our great achievement will be to prevent Iraq becoming another Taliban-style, Al Qaeda-harboring Afghanistan! This is like a man who shoots himself in the foot and then says, "We must prevent it turning gangrenous, then you'll understand why I was right to shoot myself in the foot."

Whether or not the invasion was a crime, it's now clear that -- at least in the form in which it was executed -- it was a massive blunder. And the American people are beginning to see this. Before Bush spoke at Ft. Bragg, 53% of those asked in a CNN/Gallup poll said it was a mistake to go into Iraq...

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is right. It would be suicidally dumb for any European to think, in relation to Iraq, "the worse the better." Jihadists now cutting their teeth in Iraq will make no fine distinctions between Washington and London, Berlin or Madrid. Any European tempted to luxuriate schadenfreudishly in the prospect of a Vietnam-style U.S. evacuation from Baghdad may be awoken from that reverie by the blast from a
bomb, planted in Charing Cross tube station by an Iraq-hardened terrorist.

But it is a fair and justified historical observation that U.S. policy has gotten better -- more sober, more realistic -- at least partly because things in Iraq have gone so badly. This is the cunning of history.

Maybe. Although I supported the war, at first, I certainly acknowledge that, all in all, it has become "a massive blunder," not least because Bush didn't plan at all effectively enough for the war's aftermath: the rise of the insurgency, the training of Iraqi police/military forces, the support and cooperation of the international community, the development and long-term viability of liberalization/democratization, declining popular support at home, etc. It will take sustained sobriety to fix that multi-pronged blunder, but, thus far, I have seen nothing to suggest that Bush is sober enough to pull off such a feat.

Ash rightly points to signs of a turn to realism as a replacement for neoconservative idealism, but the recent performances of Cheney and Rumsfeld, not to mention Bush's speech at Fort Bragg, indicate that the powers-that-be at the White House and the Pentagon are still either unable or unwilling to take responsibility for their own mistakes and to follow through with a comprehensive approach to Iraq that could, if properly executed, reverse what seems more and more to be a continuing downward trend, if not an out-of-control spiral, into irreversible failure.

The status quo clearly isn't working, but a full-scale, Vietnam-style withdrawal would only signal defeat, cowardice, and irresponsibility, leading to anarchy and a haven for jihadists bent on taking the war directly to America. No, the U.S. must be accountable, and it must finish the job it started. Which is why, all other issues aside, Bush never should have been re-elected last year. He's just not the right man to fix his own mess. He doesn't even seem to know where to begin.

America may indeed be a more sober place with respect to Iraq, and to the world in general, but its leaders are still drunk on idealism and self-delusion.

How do we deal with that problem?

Proud to be a Canadian: A victory for same-sex marriage

As I mentioned back on June 2, Canada was set to become only the third country, after Belgium and the Netherlands, to legalize same-sex marriage. And that's precisely what's happened.

After the near-demise of Prime Minister Paul Martin's minority Liberal government last month -- the government only survived because the (Liberal) Speaker of the House, according to precedent, broke a tie on a confidence vote by voting with the government -- Tuesday's vote marks an extraordinary milestone in Canadian history, and Martin deserves much of the credit for ensuring its success. Opposition (and Conservative) Leader Stephen Harper has vowed to continue to fight the legislation (and same-sex marriage in general, now that it's become his wedge issue to secure the support of social conservatives), but there is no doubt that the long battle has finally been won. The Globe and Mail reports here:

Canada is on its way to becoming the third country in the world to legalize marriages between couples of the same sex after the House of Commons gave its final approval last night in a 158-133 vote.

The vote capped an intense and divisive two-year Commons battle that maintained its political drama to the end, as Liberal minister Joe Comuzzi resigned from cabinet yesterday because he could not support his government's move...

In the end, 32 Liberals voted against the government and five were absent. On the other side of the House, three Conservatives voted for the same-sex marriage bill.

When the final vote was taken, one side of the visitors' gallery erupted into applause...

The passage of the same-sex legislation also brought the curtain down on one of the most tumultuous sessions of Parliament in recent history.

Using obscure procedural manoeuvres and even a direct appeal to the public, Prime Minister Paul Martin managed to keep his government afloat in spite of a persistent attempt by the Conservatives and Bloc to force an election over allegations of corruption exposed by the Gomery inquiry into the sponsorship scandal.

All that remains for the same-sex bill to become law is debate in the Senate, where Liberals vastly outnumber the
opposition Conservatives and are expected to pass the bill early next month.

Belgium and the Netherlands are the only two countries to have legalized same-sex marriage, but Spain is on the verge of passing a similar law that will soon be put to the King for final approval.

Well done, Prime Minister. As I've said before, this makes be incredibly proud to be a Canadian.

(For more on the issue of same-sex marriage and gay pride, I invite you to check out my recent posts on Toronto Pride (here) and the anti-pride policies of Hillsborough County, Florida (here). Through those two posts, some of my readers have been carrying on an incredibly intelligent discussion on this admittedly sensitive topic (especially at the latter post). Check out the posts and the comments, and, if you feel so inclined, please weigh in with your own views -- either about a particular topic or about sexual orientation, gay rights, and same-sex marriage in general. Or just bring the discussion over to this newer post and keep it going. I look forward to reading and responding to more of your comments.)

More on Darfur...

For the latest from the Coalition for Darfur, a non-partisan blog of which The Reaction is a member, see here (and, in particular, this recent post).

400,000 deaths is genocide. Period. And something must be done about it.

(For my own previous posts on Darfur, see here and here.)

On climate change, they know the truth in Tuktoyaktuk

Much of the evidence may be anecdotal, but those who live close to the land and sea know that things are changing. Up in Tuktoyaktuk, in Canada's Northwest Territories (see maps here), well above the Arctic Circle, the signs of climate change are all too obvious -- and all too worrying:

It's not just the rising water and more frequent storms. The ice breaks weeks earlier, and much faster, than it used to in spring, and forms more slowly each fall. The weather is less predictable. These are hazards for the many residents who still go out on the land to hunt seal, polar bears, muskox and caribou. The wind blows from the south more often. Long-time residents see grizzly bears, ravens, white-throated sparrows, chickadees and other creatures that never used to venture this far north. Shrubs are poking up beyond the tree line. Permafrost is starting to melt.

Tuktoyaktuk means, in the western Arctic language, "resembling a caribou." The animals are a major food source. The longer growing season produces more vegetation for them to eat. But the early thaw slows their trip to summer calving grounds on the Arctic coast, and calves born during migration are less likely to survive. Local researchers say one of the two local herds, the Porcupine, has dropped by 3 per cent a year for the past decade.

(For more, see the full Toronto Star piece here.)

So much of the discussion of climate change (a better term than global warming) takes place in the abstract, in the world of theory, with computer modelling taking inconclusive (or at least circumstantial) data and projecting perceived trends into a distant future that is difficult to grasp. And it doesn't help that the world's superpower refuses to do much about it, at least officially. The Bush Administration -- the defining characteristic of which seems to be a self-delusional veil of ignorance on a whole range of issues, from Iraq and the economy to social security and stem-cell research -- has pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol and has more or less refused even to discuss the problem, even as Tony Blair, one of America's only allies with any clout, has publicly stated that climate change is "probably, long-term, the single most important issue we face as a global community". (See my post on Bush-Blair here.) Things aren't all that much better here in Canada, and economic booms in China, India, and Brazil are likely to contribute to a worsening of the situation.

It is difficult to deny the results of both scientific research and computer modelling -- unless, of course, you live in a faith-based reality and refuse to acknowledge such factual objectivity. But those of us who live in the real world know that the problem is real and that something needs to be done to reverse the slide into global catastrophe. We have the science to point us in the right direction, and we have bad movies like The Day After Tomorrow to arouse some popular interest in an overlooked issue, but it also helps to have those on the front lines of climate change, those who live with it on a daily basis, those whose lives are profoundly affected by it, to tell us their stories.

Now it's up to us to listen to them. And to do something about it.

What's French for nuclear fusion?

An interesting story in the Times: "France won an international competition today to be the site of the world's first nuclear fusion reactor, an estimated $12 billion project that many scientists see as essential to solving the world's future energy needs."

It's not so much that France won the competition that matters -- however galling (De Gaulling?) that may be to those of us with Francosceptic inclinations -- but rather the fact that the six members of the international consortium (U.S., Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and the E.U.) have finally put aside their differences (and their bickering) to launch what could turn out to be a revolutionary development in energy generation -- and a long-term solution to many of the world's most pressing problems. It may take several decades for nuclear fusion to achieve anything in the way of commercial success, but it certainly makes sense for the international community to cooperate with an eye to that future.

I love the smell of desperation in the morning...

In my last post, I suggested that Bush would resort to desperate measures to try to boost his sagging approval ratings. Well, forget desperate measures. Now it's just desperation, plain and simple. As Steve Soto reports at The Left Coaster, Cheney "has resorted to taking shots at Chuck Hagel," one of the only Republicans who has any sense on Iraq (and, unlike the warmongers in the Bush Administration, someone who's seen actual combat). Bush will try to pull himself up with a televised speech on Tuesday at Fort Bragg, against another "Mission Accomplished" backdrop, but it seems unlikely that such a staged event will turn public opinion back in his direction. With rising casualty numbers coming out of Iraq and more or less bad news across the board, the American people are finally coming to see just what they've got in the White House. And they don't much like it anymore.

And the Democrats? "All Democrats have to do in response to Bush's speech tomorrow is point to the CIA's own report that shows Bush's bungling has accomplished something that Saddam couldn't: make Iraq into a terrorist threat."

Maybe -- just maybe -- we're witnessing the last throes of the Bush presidency. He's got a few more years, and that's an awfully long time in politics, but it's hard not to conclude that, at the moment at least, he's running on empty.

Bush's (dis)approval ratings: The tanking of a president

Over the weekend, I mentioned that Bush's approval rating among independents now stands at 17%, one point lower than among Democrats (see here). And now there's more bad news for Dubya. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released today (see here), Bush's approval rating stands at 45%, the lowest of his entire presidency (tied with a late-March rating). Looking at the numbers from the other side, his disapproval rating stands at 53%, the highest of his entire presidency. The eight-point gap is also the largest of his entire presidency. Bush has an approval rating over 50% on only one issue, terrorism, where his approval-disapproval rating stands at 55-41. I can only explain this by repeating that Bush has maintained support on this issue largely by alternately playing on fear and encouraging Americans to go shopping instead of paying too much attention to what he's up to (and not up to). Other disapproval-approval ratings (listed by level of disapproval):

Social Security: 64-31
Health care: 59-34
Iraq: 58-40
The economy: 55-41
Energy policy: 53-36

Those are significant numbers. I'm rarely one to pay much attention to polls, and I object to what has become the American pollocracy, but is there any denying that Bush's support among the American people is collapsing? We're talking spreads of at least 14 points on five key issues. Finally, perhaps, the American people are collectively catching on to the disaster that has been the (G.W.) Bush presidency.

It now remains to be seen both what Bush does to try to pick himself back up (I'm thinking desperate measures) and what Democrats do to try to fill the vacuum.

Update: See Kevin Drum's brief take here, along with a fascinating chart of the decline.

Is Gonzales Spanish for Souter?

Well, that's apparently what some Republicans think. See Slate's excellent review of eight of the top candidates for the Supreme Court -- with Rehnquist and/or O'Connor set to resign in the days or weeks to come. I don't have too much to add here, but see my recent post on the subject (which, yes, got a mention at The Guardian). Also see Jonathan Turley's thoughtful take at USA Today (here), plus other reviews of the leading candidates at USA Today (here) and the L.A. Times (here).

A friend of mine suggested today that this is similar to the recent papal election. Perhaps. There's already a lot of idle (and likely ill-informed) speculation out there, but no one's quite sure how Bush will handle his first Supreme Court nomination. Would he go with a conservative to replace Rehnquist? That would maintain the current balance on the Court. Would he nominate a new chief justice from the outside, or would he nominate a current justice, like Scalia? Obviously, that would also maintain the current balance, but Scalia is not without the stink of controversy, and Democrats could object fiercely. Would he break new ground and nominate a Latino, either Gonzales or Garza, to shore up more of the Latino vote for the Republicans (but also, with Gonzales, to contribute to his own legacy by appointing a trusted friend)? Would he go with a conservative to replace O'Connor? Given O'Connor's swing credentials, such a move could tip the balance significantly to the right. And two new conservative justices, such as Luttig and Roberts, along with Scalia as chief justice, would be a serious threat, in my view, to the very foundations of the liberal state in America. Finally, how are Democrats going to respond to Bush's picks? Will they stand united and filibuster with confidence, as they've done so far on Bolton, or will they cave in and give up on the Supreme Court for years and years to come?

Okay, so it's getting to be like the papal election -- to a point. For now, all I'll say is that seven of the eight candidates in the Slate piece are profoundly conservative, with Gonzales the lone exception. Perhaps we should expect nothing else from a president who is all about pandering to his right-wing base, just as we shouldn't have expected anything else but a conservative's victory in the conclave. Was Ratzinger a surprise? Hardly. Would either Luttig or Roberts be a surprise. Not at all.

This leaves me rooting for Gonzales... ouch, that was tough to write. Am I rooting for him? Well, maybe. On the one hand, his lack of experience could be a problem, but what worries me more is his long career of pro-Bush partisan hackery. He sucked up to Bush in Texas, and he's spent the past four-plus years, both as White House counsel and now as attorney general, sucking up to him in Washington. Perhaps a seat on the Supreme Court would unleash his independence, but I wonder if his political partisanship wouldn't continue to taint his legal opinions. On the other hand, the right has already come out against him. Robert Novak, duschbag extraordinaire, notes that Gonzales is opposed by "anti-abortion activists" and "organized conservative lawyers". (Hey, maybe Gonzales wouldn't be so bad, if we judge him by his enemies.) In addition, he suggests (rightly, I think) that "Senate Democrats may have expunged anti-Gonzales bile from their system and be willing to support somebody who is markedly less conservative than any other nominee".

Yes, Gonzales would likely face a relatively easy confirmation battle. Given Bush's current problems, that could be what gets him the nomination. (For now, that's what The Reaction is hoping for. Another Souter wouldn't be so bad, would it?)

Stay tuned.

(For more on this, with regular updates, see The Supreme Court Nomination Blog, from Goldstein & Howe.)

From pride to disgust: Hillsborough County (Florida) shuts out gays and lesbians

It's now official. Florida is certifiably insane. (If there are any Floridians reading this, I urge you to explain just what's going on down there. Please. Add your comments. I (we) need to know.)

Yesterday afternoon, I wrote what one commenter called an "intimate and positive" post on Toronto's extraordinary Pride festivities, a fantastic week-long celebration that culminated in Saturday's Dyke March and Sunday's Pride Parade. If I may put it this way, Toronto Pride makes me proud to be a Torontonian. And proud to be a Canadian -- a same-sex marriage bill will soon be passed in the House of Commons.

But now, thanks to that same commenter, I've learned of the utterly stupid actions of the Hillsborough County Commission in Florida (the Tampa area):

The Hillsborough County Commission has enacted a policy banning county agencies from acknowledging gay pride events, despite several impassioned pleas from gay rights advocates.

Civil rights groups threatened to sue and called for a town hall meeting on the ban, which requires the Hillsborough County government "to abstain from acknowledging, promoting or participating in gay pride recognition and events." The board passed the proposal 5-1 on Wednesday.

Hillsborough Commissioner Ronda Storms, who recommended the policy, followed up with a second proposal, that commissioners can only repeal the policy on a 5-2 super majority vote that follows a public hearing.

Angry yet? Here's more:

The vote comes a week after a book display recognizing Gay and Lesbian Pride Month was taken down at West Gate Regional Library after some library patrons complained. Library officials have said the exhibit at West Gate was removed due to a misunderstanding and was later moved to a less prominent area in the fiction part of the library.

Details of the ban, such as whether any display about gay issues would be banned at libraries, were unclear. After the vote, Storms would only say that she feels the language is clear.

But when asked about whether gay student groups would be allowed to meet at a county library or another meeting space, Storms said they would.

"We're not saying that because of your sexual orientation you can't come into the library," she said.

Thanks for the clarification, Ms. Storms. But let me ask you a few questions: Do you just hate gays and lesbians in theory, or is it personal? What is it about them that worries you so? What's so wrong with "gay pride" that your government -- you know, the one that allegedly represents the people (all the people) of Hillsborough County -- shouldn't be allowed to have anything to do with it? And would you be happier if they had their own libraries? You know, separate but equal, or something like that? Is that next?

I'd like some answers, because, try as I might, I just can't figure out where the hell you're coming from -- unless it's just a simple matter of bigotry.

I'm in the "last throes" of my patience

Kevin Drum takes on Rumsfeld (and his defence of Cheney's inane assertion that the Iraqi insurgency is in its "last throes) at Political Animal -- see here. Needless to say, Drum is right:

These guys still can't face the reality of what's happened to their lovely little war. They willfully ignored the advice of the uniformed military officers who had actual experience in fighting modern wars, and because of that they didn't know what they were getting into before the war, they didn't know what they were up against after the war, and they're apparently still clueless about what to expect in the future. It's long past time for George Bush to either find someone who's serious about winning this war or else someone who's serious about getting out. Rumsfeld is neither.

As one who (reluctantly, given the irreversible build-up) supported the war before it began, largely based on Blairite humanitarianism and false (or politicized) intelligence, I cannot but agree*. Whether you supported this war or not, whether you support it today or not, whether you think the U.S. should pull out or double its efforts to see the job done, it is a fact, if I may be so blunt, that the handling of the occupation, which began back with the pre-war planning (or lack thereof, from what the British tell us), has been a disaster. How many more people will die as a consequence of such failure?

No, I don't have much patience left, if any, but the insurgency still has a long, long way to go -- perhaps 12 more years, according to Rumsfeld himself. (And whom do you trust more to speak the truth, Cheney or Abizaid? Exactly.)

* See a lengthier post on Iraq here, with an explanation of my shifting views from invasion to occupation.

Calling Cardiff!

If you're in need of a fun (and funny) break from the gravitas of your life, check out the "Welsh or Gibberish" quiz over at the Dominion Wine and Cheese Society.

(Not that there's anything wrong with being and/or speaking Welsh, of course. It's just that speaking Welsh obviously releases an inordinate amount of phlegm and may or may not require regular laryngial check-ups.)

Herr Hitler goes to Washington

That is, his name and his party have been trotted out and invoked with glaring stupidity recently -- not least by one of The Reaction's least favourite politicians, Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. The Post's Dana Milbank reviews the "bull market in over-the-top rhetoric" here. I still think that Senator Durbin was grossly misrepresented -- such is the cost of rhetorical nuance, I suppose -- but there's really no excuse for all the childish name-calling, let alone the references to Hitler, on Capitol Hill.

When it comes to trust and confidence in elected officials, politicians tend to be their own worst enemies. These days, when scoring political points trumps working together for the common good, and when bickering and squabbling get in the way of legislating properly for the American people, many are letting tendentious partisanship get the better of them, and all this insult-laden rhetoric has brought American political discourse (or what passes for it) to yet another low.

It's too bad none of it comes as much of a surprise, given our already low expectations of Congressional behaviour.

Pride in Toronto: A celebration of identity and connection

Toronto's Pride Parade -- the culmination of a week of festivities that brings over a million people to the city -- is going on as I write, not too far from where I live. It's the 25th anniversary of Pride in Toronto, and ours is now one of the largest in the world, an extraordinary celebration that the city embraces every year. The event speaks for itself, not least as Canada is set to legalize same-sex marriage before Parliament's summer recess, and the organizers have done another incredible job, but allow me to single out my good friend Leon Mar, who does media relations for Pride Toronto (and who is quoted here). Well done, Leon. Tomorrow will be a well-deserved day off. For more on today's Parade, see here, and on yesterday's Dyke March, see here. There are many great reasons to love this city -- my own favourite is the Toronto International Film Festival, the second most important in the world after Cannes, held every September -- and this is certainly one of them.

See also AmbivaBlog's excellent post on sexual identity:

And I'm thinking what a monoculture the straight world is, how conformist really. There are so few straight gender archetypes to embody, and most people try to squeeze into one or the other even when it's a poor fit, or just boring. My friend Sharon got fed up with trying to grow her hair, so she shaved it off. So there she is with a bald, fuzzy skull and a sexy thong. It just busts up all your categories, and maybe that's the real reason why many people find it so existentially threatening. The freedom to define yourself is dizzying.

I don't mean to idealize the dyke counterculture, though. There's something sad about how separate a world it is. That separateness wasn't originally gay people's idea; it was forced on them, and now some of them are perpetuating it, with a defiant provocativeness -- "you wouldn't accept us even if we didn't go to extremes." I guess what I am groping towards is the realization that the relative regimentation of most straight life and the flaunted bizarrerie of some gay life are mirror images of each other. What's sad is the obscuring of how much they really have in common. Underneath the warring uniforms of hetero conformity and outcast chic are just people, loving, craving, needing, longing, and if they're lucky, finding someone with whom to become one flesh and share a life.

Both "the relative regimentation of most straight life" and "the flaunted bizarrerie of some gay life" alarm me, just as extremism of any kind alarms me. Even a liberal society requires some social order, but the problem often comes down to trying to balance out the competing claims of the individual and the collective. Given the inflamed passions that come from identity politics (and from sexuality in particular), both the "straight life" and the "gay life" seem to have entrenched themselves in opposition to one another. It's just a shame that we can't seem to understand that we're all looking for the same thing, that, straight or gay or something else entirely, we're all human beings trying to find meaning in a world that seems at times to be beyond our grasp. "Only connect," E.M. Forster implores us at the beginning of Howards End. Yes, that's what we're all trying to do, in our own all-too-human ways.

Brief comments on Rove and Machiavelli

Over here, Echidne draws a connection between Machiavelli and Karl Rove. Given that "The Prince is supposedly bedtime reading for our administration," we need to analyze Rove's comments the way we do Machiavelli's esotericism, or at least we need to analyze them through Machiavelli's prism. Fair enough. As a Straussian -- even a liberal one -- I'm all for the careful reading of the great works of political philosophy and literature. Rove's speech to the New York Conservative Party, however, doesn't qualify. For its motives seem to me to be fully transparent (and a reflection of current political climate, where Bush's approval ratings are collapsing and Republicans are desperate). Cesare Borgia may have left the people of Romagna "satisfied and stupefied" (see Chap. 7: clearly, this was how Bush won in 2004, satisfying the far right with moralistic wedge issues like same-sex marriage and stupefying everyone else with colour codes and hollow rhetoric of war and terror), but Rove just leaves me pissed off and more eager than ever to defend liberalism against its enemies on the right.

(And as a long-time student and teacher of Machiavelli, let me suggest that he wouldn't be too pleased with the current theocratic leanings of the American right (nor Bush's reckless foreign/military policy; if anything, he wanted religion to serve politics, not vice versa), given that The Prince is very much the handbook for bringing down theological-political power (i.e., the Church, back then) in the name of new modes and orders that, under Hobbes and Locke (both much indebted to Machiavelli), would become the foundations of liberal political philosophy and of modern political liberalism generally.)

So there.

Now let me add a few comments on just why Rove said what he said, an addendum to my earlier post on his speech (see also Seeing the Forest, an excellent blog that has just kindly added The Reaction to its blogroll, which chimes in here):

Rove may or may not be the evil genius the left makes him out to be, but he doesn't do things by accident. He's not a politician who just made some imprudent remarks. His speech was carefully calculated to contribute to the current political climate -- and to try to rescue Bush from the mess he's in (see my previous post on his approval ratings).

Republicans have no interest in discussing the issues because they know they're on the wrong side of public opinion on almost all of them (including Iraq). So the strategy is to divide Democrats (and liberals) and to shift the discussion over to the discussion of the discussion. You know, a sort of meta-discussion. Talk about the talk. That's what the Durbin flap is all about. No one on the right is really engaging Durbin on what's really going on at Gitmo -- because that would mean focusing on all the prisoner abuse itself. Much better to attack the messenger.

So, too, here. Rove went after Democrats (and liberals, more specifically, though he obviously equates the two, as he does Republicans and conservatives) to bait them. Get them to respond. There's little unity among Democrats on Iraq, or indeed on many of those issues he mentioned. Democrats will be all over the place condemning Rove's remarks, but that only means that they won't be discussing the issues themselves. See? Because Rove becomes the issue. Isn't that what you do when you're down in the polls? Divide and conquer, by any means necessary.

I would add that the flag-burning amendment is another such distraction. Remember that playing the patriotism card is usually a sign of desperation (the last refuge of the political scoundrel). And the Republicans are desperate. Behind Rove's arrogant condemnation of liberalism, America's founding political philosophy, lies a good deal of anxiety.

Rove may be something of a Machiavellian, broadly speaking, but Machiavelli himself would hardly approve of his transparent cowardice.

Bush and the independents

We all know that Bush's approval ratings are collapsing, but a new poll reveals that among independents his job approval rating is down to... 17%. (That's one point lower than among Democrats!) Extraordinary. Not surprising, mind you, but still enormously significant. The Moderate Voice responds here, Andrew Sullivan here. Sullivan, an independent himself:

The disapproval levels of Independents and Democrats are now indistinguishable, but the Republican bloc is solid. This strikes me as a direct result of the Rove strategy of brutal partisanship, Christianist pandering, and general fiscal and military fecklessness. Some readers have said that my criticism of the administration makes me sound like a liberal these days. Well, from these results, I'm not the only one being pushed by right-wing extremism into opposition.

And that's more or less how I feel at this point, too. I'm certainly more liberal than Sullivan, and, unlike him, I would say that I'm a Democrat (a Canadian Democrat?), but Republican extremism is pushing us all further to the left. The question is, can the Democrats capitalize on this?

It's time for the real apology

On Tuesday, I posted a lengthy piece (which I cross-posted on both my Reader Blog and the 2006 Elections Table at TPM Cafe -- see here) defending Dick Durbin and arguing that he needn't have apologized for stating the obvious: that the abuse of some prisoners in American detention facilities like Gitmo resembles similar (but, on the whole, much worse) abuse inflicted by the most grotesque tyrannies of the last century. The purpose of this post is different, however:

WHAT I'M CALLING FOR HERE IS FOR THOSE WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT ABUSE -- THE ENABLERS OF TORTURE -- TO APOLOGIZE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE (AND TO THE REST OF THE WORLD THAT LOOKS TO AMERICA FOR GUIDANCE AND INSPIRATION) FOR DEEPLY TARNISHING AMERICA'S IMAGE AND FOR DEGRADING THE VERY IDEA OF AMERICA AS A NATION COMMITTED TO LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL.

I won't get into the details of my defence of Senator Durbin. Suffice it to say here that he was right to suggest that when you hear about a man chained to the floor in the fetal position with no food or water, wallowing in his own urine and feces, in extreme heat, you don't think of America. You think of far worse perpetrators of torture. And that list includes Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia. But, no, it is America, at least the America of Gitmo. Note that Durbin didn't say that Gitmo is a gulag or a concentration camp, nor did he say that there is any moral equivalency between America and the genocidal totalitarian regimes of the last century. That's what the right would like everyone to believe -- but, of course, the right is lying and misreading and spinning in order to avoid a serious discussion about the real issue.

And that real issue is the torture itself. As one of the commenters to my post at TPM Cafe put it, "talking about the torture isn't the problem, the torture is the problem". Exactly. It's time for America's leaders, those at the top who enabled torture under America's watch, to apologize. Their rhetoric may speak to America's highest ideals, but at a time when wars are being fought and lives are being lost, they have brought America down into the gutter.

No one is saying that America is on par with Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia -- at least no one sensible -- but that doesn't mean that America is beyond reproach, not least when its leaders (and I'm talking to you Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Gonzales) have so sullied its lofty ideals and hampered the very noble goal of spreading liberty and democracy around the world.

It's time for some accountability. It's time for those in power to take some responsibility. And it's time for an apology.

(Not that I'm expecting one. Not from this crowd.)

Is Karl Rove an evil genius? Or just a partisan idiot?

It's been a late night at The Reaction after some rather prolific days of writing, but I won't be able to rest until I post this. You're all familiar with the Durbin story -- a senator thoroughly misrepresented by the right and essentially forced to apologize (I wrote about it all here). To me, the outrage should be directed at the enablers and perpetrators of torture -- more on that in my next post -- not at those with a dissenting opinion who dare to raise the important questions (and to demand answers) about what's really going on in places like Gitmo. The torture is the outrage, not Durbin's subtle remarks.

But now we have a truly obnoxious example of partisan rhetoric that deserves our outrage. And it comes from Karl Rove, the Dr. Evil of the Republican Party. The Carpetbagger reports here (and includes the full transcript of Rove's comments). Please give it a read. Those of us who oppose the Republicans need to know as clearly as possible just what it is we're up against.

Key passages from Rove's speech to the Conservative Party of New York (along with my brief comments):

• "Four decades ago conservatism was relegated to the political wilderness -- and today conservatism is the guiding philosophy in the White House, the Senate, the House, and in governorships and state legislatures throughout America. More importantly, we have seen the great rise of a great cause. Conservatives have achieved a tremendous amount in the past decades -- but there is more, much more, that remains to be done." [My comments: A scary thought, given the havoc they've already wreaked. But is conservatism really the "guiding philosophy" all over America? Uh, no. And it's certainly not Bush's big-government, fiscally-irresponsible, unilateralist, moralistic brand of conservatism, which isn't really conservatism at all.]
• In the 2004 election, President Bush placed all his chips on the table. There was no trimming on issues, no 'campaign conversion,' no backing away from Social Security and tax code reform. The President persistently made the case for an 'ownership society'; championed a culture of life; defended the institution of marriage; stood with the people of Iraq in their passage to liberty; remained committed to spreading democracy in the Middle East; and continued to aggressively wage and win the war on global terrorism. President Bush showed himself as he is. He wanted a referendum on what he has accomplished -- and most importantly, on what he hopes to achieve." [My comments: A referendum on all that? Really? To me, Bush ran on fear and managed to play to his radical base even as he persuaded enough moderates to buy into his rhetoric in a time of war. Americans didn't re-elect him to institute some radical right-wing agenda (which he conveniently shrouded behind all that "war president" rhetoric). Oh, and have the Iraqis already undergone the "passage to liberty"? Did I miss something?]
• "We are seizing the Mantle of Idealism. As all of you know, President Bush is making a powerful case for spreading human liberty and defending human dignity. This was once largely the preserve of liberalism -- but Ronald Reagan changed all that. It was President Reagan, you'll recall, who said the policy of the United States was not simply to contain Soviet Communism, but to transcend it. And we would, he argued, was because of the power of liberty. President Bush has built on those beliefs -- and he is committed to something no past President has ever attempted: spreading liberty to the broader Middle East. President Bush's eventual goal is the triumph of freedom and the end of tyranny in our world. This vision, which will require the concentrated work of generations, is consistent with the deep idealism of the American people -- and it is an idealism whose importance is being confirmed by history and events." [My comments: Idealism isn't conservatism. Somewhere, Burke and his noble followers are furious. Bush may have a vision of global democracy that smacks of end-of-history Hegelianism, but that's all it is: a vision backed up by rhetoric. Rice said some nice things in Egypt and Saudi Arabia the other day, but isn't it interesting that all this talk of democracy -- none of which was there in 2000 -- has taken over from WMDs as the justification for the Iraq war? How convenient.]
• "[O]ur movement's growth has made us Agents of Reform. Edmund Burke, one of the most important figures in the history of conservatism, was known as an advocate of reform. He understood the essence of conservatism is applying timeless principles to changing circumstances, which is one of the keys to political success." [My comments: Oh, please. Do stop. You just look stupid(er).]
• "Conservatives have long known that political liberty depends on a healthy social and moral order. And so the President is committed to strengthening society's key institutions -- families, schools, communities, and protecting those mediating structures so important to our freedom, like our churches, neighborhood and private groups - the institutions that inculcate virtues, shape character, and provide the young with moral education." [My comments: By vilifying gays and lesbians. Or at least by allowing them to be vilified by his bigoted base. And by working to tear down the separation of church and state. How un-American.]

And here's where it gets truly disgusting:

• "Conservatives believe in lower taxes; liberals believe in higher taxes. We want few regulations; they want more. Conservatives measure the effectiveness of government programs by results; liberals measure the effectiveness of government programs by inputs. We believe in curbing the size of government; they believe in expanding the size of government. Conservatives believe in making America a less litigious society; liberals believe in making America a more litigious society. We believe in accountability and parental choice in education; they don't. Conservatives believe in advancing what Pope John Paul II called a 'culture of life'; liberals believe there is an absolute unlimited right to abortion. But perhaps the most important difference between conservatives and liberals can be found in the area of national security. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to submit a petition." [My comments: It's not that simple, Karl. Conservatives (of the Bush mold) have run up a massive deficit that will bind future generations (hardly a Burkean thing to do), waged class warfare through tax cuts that favour the rich and a bankruptcy bill that will punish those who most need help, done everything possible to free up businesses to act abusively without fear of recrimination, taken extreme views on a wide range of moral issues (including stem-cell research, which the vast majority of Americans support, and abortion, which most Americans want to remain legal), and led America into a war in Iraq without anything in the way of a plan for post-war reconstruction -- how many Americans have died? how many Iraqi civilians? Needless to say, I could go on and on. (I would also add that liberalism, America's founding political philosophy, is more than just Moveon.org -- that's like saying that conservatism is nothing more than Pat Buchanan.]
• "Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said: we must understand our enemies. Conservatives see the United States as a great nation engaged in a noble cause; liberals see the United States and they see Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia. Has there been a more revealing moment this year than when Democratic Senator Richard Durbin, speaking on the Senate floor, compared what Americans had done to prisoners in our control at Guantanamo Bay with what was done by Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot -- three of the most brutal and malevolent figures in the 20th century?" [My comments: Yet further misrepresentation of Durbin, who didn't say anything like that. Remember that playing the patriotism card is always a sign of desperation (the flag-burning amendment, anyone?)]

Okay, that's enough. Read the whole thing. Read it again. And get angry. Angry at the lies, the spin, the misrepresentation, the stereotyping. And speak your outrage.

And if you're a liberal, be proud. Liberalism is America's political philosophy -- in fact, much of today's conservatism is just co-opted liberalism -- not Rove's radical idealism.

The Reaction at The Guardian

I was pleasantly surprised to learn today that I was mentioned (and quoted) at The Guardian's website. See here. Needless to say, it's quite an honour, especially for a newer blogger like me. As many of you know, The Guardian is one of the world's best and most respected newspapers, and I'm in the Newsblog section, where a short article on a specific topic is followed up with a round-up of various blogs that have addressed that topic. In this case, it's my recent post on likely successors to Chief Justice Rehnquist -- one of my shorter posts, and one that I wrote rather quickly, but, hey, it's great they liked what I had to say.

It hasn't taken me long to learn that it's tough to get noticed out here in the blogosphere, but in the almost three months I've been doing this I've met some wonderful people, and some excellent blogs now link to me in their blogrolls (see my own blogroll, right sidebar). And quite a few -- like Liberal Oasis, War and Piece, and AmbivaBlog -- have even linked to and/or commented on specific posts at The Reaction. Plus, I post regularly over at Centerfield (where I'm one of the group-bloggers), maintain a Reader Blog at TPM Cafe, and comment regularly at The Decembrist, Political Animal, The Carpetbagger Report, The Moderate Voice, and a few other of my favourite blogs. And that's really what the blogosphere is all about: blogs linking to other blogs, bloggers communicating with other bloggers, all within a virtual community. What I, for one, long for most is a link from the likes of Andrew Sullivan or Kevin Drum or Daily Kos or Instapundit or one of the other major players. But seeing my name (and my blog) at The Guardian's website is quite something, too.

I do apologize for the self-congratulatory nature of this post, but, well, I do need to pat myself on the back every now and then. Given how much work I put into this blog -- hours and hours a day, truly a second job -- it's nice to be rewarded with that kind of recognition.

Is it time to give Condi her due?

Well, maybe. Hear me out.

I was one of those who were not impressed with Rice's performance as national security advisor. She may have had the ear of the president, but she was clearly outgunned by Cheney and Rumsfeld, and one wonders just how much influence she had in terms of both the war on terror and the Iraq war. And I worried that her appointment to Foggy Bottom would only solidify the unanimity that seemed to plague Bush's foreign policy team. At least Powell had independent stature, after all, and at least he could provide some sort of counterweight to the rest of that team. Or so I thought. In the end, was Powell all that effective? Did he balance out his opponents in the administration? Or was he not himself outgunned? As it turns out, Rice seems thus far to be an admirable successor to Powell. But where Powell was the outsider, Rice can balance out the rest of Bush's foreign policy team as an insider. She continues to have Bush's ear, but she now has the relative independence that comes with her position as secretary of state. No longer is she just the president's chief foreign policy advisor. Now she's one of his top Cabinet members. And the results are clear.

To be sure, the apple hasn't fallen too far from the tree. Rice is still on Bush's side, as expected, and she's still representing Bush's interests in the international community. On Wednesday, for example, at a conference on Iraq reconstruction in Brussels, she announced optimistically that ''[t]errorism can be defeated in Iraq, it will be defeated in Iraq... When it is defeated in Iraq, at the heart of the Middle East, it will be a death knell for terrorism as we know it." Okay, but how? Unclear, unabashed optimism is, of course, the way of the Bush Administration generally -- consider Cheney's "last throes" comment -- but it would be nice to hear something other than unsubstantiated claims of hopeful resolution from the secretary of state.

Nonetheless, Rice is proving herself to be a forceful ambassador for democracy and justice, and this, I think, is where ever her harshest critics need to give her her due. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, according to the Times, she "called on Egypt and Saudi Arabia on Monday to embrace democracy by holding fair elections, releasing political prisoners and allowing free expression and rights for women". "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither," she said in Cairo. "Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." And she criticized Iran: "The appearance of elections does not mask the organized cruelty of Iran's theocratic state." But she added, "The United States has no cause for false pride, and we have every reason for humility".

Think about this. A woman. A black woman (neither of which could have gone over too well). In the very heart of the Arab world. Challenging Egypt and Saudi Arabia on their own turf. Addressing Iran and making a firm stand for democracy. Promoting democracy. One wonders what was going through the minds of her audiences. But she got her message across, and, in so doing, proved a capable proponent of liberal principles in an illiberal world, not to mention a fine representative of America's interests.

But that was not all. In recent days, she has met with Sharon and Abbas to help hammer out an agreement for a peaceful Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (see here); told Syria to "knock it off" in Lebanon, where it continues to foment instability (see here); and pressured Pakistan to return Mukhtaran Bibi's passport so that she can travel freely (see here and, for my take, here). That's an impressive record, especially when added to her comments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

This is not to say that all is well with Condi. Iraq continues to be a problem, and no one in the Bush Administration, Condi included, seems at all willing to admit that mistakes have been made and that perhaps the U.S. needs to reconsider its options. Blind optimism -- or, really, blatant denial -- doesn't help.

Regardless, let's give credit where credit is due, and, these past few days at least, Condi has done very, very well.

How Mukhtaran Bibi got her passport back

Mukhtaran Bibi's story -- the story of an extraordinary woman who had the courage to stand up against a society that condemned her to be gang-raped and left her to die (see here and here for my previous posts) -- just got a little better. It is now being reported (see here) that the Pakistani government will return her passport. Although this means that she'll be free to leave Pakistan and travel to the U.S., she has said that he has no immediate plans to do so.

For Nicholas Kristof's most recent column on Ms. Mukhtaran, see here. Her story is, of course, an incredible one, and it seems that it may just end happily. But as Kristof notes, there are too many more just like her in Pakistan:

[M]ost victims in Pakistan are on their own. Earlier this year, for example, police reported that a village council had punished a man for having an affair by ordering his 2-year-old niece to be given in marriage to a 40-year-old man.

In another case this year, an 11-year-girl named Nazan was rescued from her husband's family, which beat her, broke her arm and strung her from the ceiling because she didn't work hard enough.

Then there are Pakistan's hudood laws, which have been used to imprison thousands of women who report rapes. If rape victims cannot provide four male witnesses to the crime, they risk being whipped for adultery, since they acknowledge illicit sex and cannot prove rape.

When a group of middle-class Pakistani women demonstrated last month for equal rights in Lahore, police clubbed them and dragged them to police stations...

And Kristof concludes with a valid comparison:

I've heard from Pakistanis who, while horrified by honor killings and rapes, are embarrassed that it is the barbarism in Pakistan that gets headlines abroad. A word to those people: I understand your defensiveness, for we Americans feel the same about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. But rooting out brutality is a better strategy than covering it up, and any nation should be proud to produce someone like Ms. Mukhtaran.

This is where Ms. Mukhtaran's story needs to be more than just a gripping individual drama with a feel-good ending. She is an example of courage andperseverancee, to be sure, but her story has also brought international attention to the plight of so many other Pakistani women. Although much of our attention has been on this one woman, and rightly so, we also need to remember those other horrors, lest we allow one success to elicit complacency. Awareness, after all, may lead to further action, and other women like Mukhtaran Bibi may yet be saved.

Desperate times, desperate measures: Bush, Bolton, and the new "nuclear option"

Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice has the latest on the possibility of a recess appointment for John Bolton. It will be interesting to see just how Bush handles this. Clearly, the Bolton nomination is stuck in the Senate, at least for now, as the Republicans just don't have enough votes to beat a Democratic filibuster. But what message would a recess appointment send? That a president who claimed to have so much political capital to spend after what he claimed was a decisive victory last November (at least enough of one to give him a significant mandate) needs to circumvent the Senate's "advice and consent" role to appoint his nominee? Well, Bush doesn't have much as much political capital as he thought and certainly nothing like a clear mandate to bully Congress, but doesn't the problem have more to do with Bolton himself? The Senate, after all, has approved Bush's other nominees within the executive branch, such as Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state and Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, without much in the way of opposition. I suspect that it would similarly have approved a less controversial nominee for U.N. ambassador.

I have no idea if Bush would resort to the "nuclear option" in the Bolton case -- that is, a recess appointment. All I know is that it wouldn't look good. Or, as Steve Clemons puts it in his latest update on the ongoing saga, a recess appointment "would be yet another sad commentary on the White House's refusal to take advice from the Senate that this person is wrong for the job and a flawed representative of American interests to the United Nations". Clemons has done an incredible job at The Washington Note following every twist and turn of the Bolton nomination, and, once again, he's right on the mark.

A recess appointment would signal nothing but desperation from a White House that seems to have very little left in the tank and a presidency that is rapidly losing the support of the American people.

Yes, I think it's time for John Bolton to withdraw. He surely needs to spend more time with his family.

Defending Durbin: Courage in a time of cowardice

As many of you know by now, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois recently set off a storm by implicitly comparing allegations of torture at Gitmo with similar practices commonly used by the Nazis and Soviets (as well as other grotesque regimes around the world). The right, which refuses to discuss or debate these torture allegations on the merits -- and, increasingly, the truth about the atrocious treatment of detainees at Gitmo and elsewhere is coming out despite the right's efforts to keep the lies alive -- has predictably spun Durbin's remarks into a vehicle for political gain by playing the patriotism card. How dare Durbin say such a thing? What kind of traitor is he? Comparing the American military to the Nazis like that! He needs to be censured! He needs to be kicked out of the Senate! Am I exaggerating? Hardly. Here's what Hugh Hewitt, hardly a voice of disinterested reason, has said in The Weekly Standard:

Not only did Durbin's remarks injure America's position in the world, provide an enormous propaganda victory to the enemy, and slander the United States military, they also represent an escalation in the political rhetoric of the left, which is designed to undermine the public's confidence in the military, the administration, and the war. The censure resolution will oblige every senator to go on the record about how they view the American military as we enter the long phase of the war.

The outrage over Dick Durbin's comparison of interrogation practices at Gitmo to the Nazi, Soviet, and Pol Pot regimes has deeply injured Durbin's reputation and the reputation of the Democratic party that keeps him in the number two leadership position in the United States Senate.

See what's going on? See the spin? Durbin has injured America. Durbin has aided the enemy. Durbin has slandered the military. Durbin is representative of "the left," which seeks to undermine public confidence (is there any left?). How you stand on Durbin and his treasonous remarks is how you stand on the military (as if Durbin blamed the entire military). Durbin compared American "interrogation practices" to what the Nazis and Soviets did. Durbin has brought low both himself and the Democratic Party.

Really? No. And Andrew Sullivan is right to call this "rank hysteria". Here's what really happened: In his remarks, which the right has conveniently removed from any semblance of context, Durbin was referring to a report by an FBI interrogator who witnessed some of those innocuous "interrogation practices" at Gitmo. For example:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

All Durbin said was this:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

Andrew Sullivan responds in brilliant fashion:

Is Hewitt arguing that the interrogator was lying? Does he believe that the kind of tactics used against this prisoner are worthy of the United States? Does he believe that this happened without authorization? If he were told this story and informed that it occurred in, say, Serbia under Milosevic, would he be surprised? Hewitt should then answer the same question about the 5 detainees which the U.S. government itself has acknowledged were tortured to death by U.S. interrogators, and the scores of others who died in detention during or after "interrogation". Does he deny that this happened? Does he honestly believe that removing the legal restrictions on cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees by our current president had nothing to do with this? Maybe he needs a little refresher on the extraordinary range and scale of the record of abuse that is still accumulating. I'm just amazed that some can view what has happened and their first instinct is to attack those who have criticized it, rather than those who have perpetrated it. It is this administration that has brought indelible shame on America, and it's people like Dick Durbin who prove that some can actually stand up against this stain on American honor and call it what it is. Good for him. Thank God for him.

Absolutely. And this goes for Hewitt and all of Durbin's other critics on the right. Consider how the right is trying to turn Durbin himself into the issue. As Richard Cohen puts it in today's Post:

He has instead come under vitriolic attack by Republicans who would have you think that the Democrat from Illinois likened America to the Soviet Union or the American military to Nazi Germany or disparaged the military in its entirety. In the name of our armed forces, Virginia Sen. John W. Warner asked for an apology. Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, called for Durbin to be censured by the Senate. That would be a more severe penalty than that accorded Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) for praising the late Strom Thurmond's racist 1948 presidential campaign.

Bill Frist, the Republican leader of the Senate, also called on Durbin to apologize -- although he himself did nothing of the sort when his videotaped patient, Terri Schiavo, turned out to be horribly brain damaged and not, as he suggested to the Senate, potentially treatable. Frist has lost the ability to blush, but not to mischaracterize. He said Durbin "called Guantanamo a death camp" -- words that do not appear in the text...

And so:

The contempt the Bush administration has shown for world opinion and international law -- not to mention American traditions of jurisprudence -- is costing us plenty. We are not the Soviet Union and we are not Nazi Germany, and Dick Durbin did not intend to say we are. His detractors have to know that. Their intention, however, is not to answer criticism but to silence a critic.

This is the reasoned response to the right's trumped-up charges against Durbin. It's possible to be for the war and to support the troops without resorted to the indefensible position of defending torture. No, they're not just "interrogation practices" -- let's call them what they are. But the right, which in the wake of the war's gross misconduct and increasing unpopularity has grown defensive and hypocritical, seems now to equate dissent on any issue, or even the questioning of the war's conduct, as treason. That is nothing if not deeply and profoundly un-American.

If the right wants to defend what's been going at Gitmo and other detention facilities, then, well, it's representatives should come out and be straight with the American people (and the rest of the world). Yes, let's have that debate. I'd welcome it. But what I suspect is that the right knows it would lose. Andrew Sullivan again:

If Durbin had said, as Amnesty unfortunately did, that Gitmo was another Gulag, I'd be dismayed and critical, as I was with Amnesty. There's no comparison in any way between the scale, intent and context of the Soviet gulags and Gitmo. If Durbin had said that what was being done there in the aggregate was comparable to Auschwitz or Siberian death camps, the same would be true. But Durbin said something subtler. Now I know subtlety is not something that plays well on talk radio. But in this case, it matters. Durbin focused on one very credible account of inhumane treatment and abuse of detainees and asked an important question...

So go ahead: answer his implied question. If you had been told that prisoners had been found in this state in one of Saddam's or Stalin's jails, would you have believed it? Of course, you would. In fact, I spent much time and effort before the war documenting the cruel and inhumane conduct of the regime we were trying to destroy - a regime whose cruelty encompassed low-level inhumanity like Gitmos - and, of course, unimaginably worse.

Yes, America once had the moral high-ground (no matter your position on the war), at least with respect to Saddam, al Qaeda, and the fascist jihadists in Iraq and elsewhere. In some ways, it still does, and I continue to reject the notion that there is any kind of moral equivalency here. But these allegations of torture -- no, let's call them what they are: these instances of torture -- perhaps isolated, but more likely part of a larger problem -- have destroyed much of that reputation. The right may spin these stories however they like, and they'll no doubt continue to do so, but the truth is that this prisoner abuse, not Durbin or the various comments of critics and dissenters, has "injure[d] America's position in the world" and "provide[d] an enormous propaganda victory to the enemy". To blame Durbin is to live in denial, but that's precisely where much of the intransigent right -- whether in Congress, the commentariat, talk radio, or the blogosphere -- finds itself today.

Along with Andrew Sullivan and Richard Cohen, Kevin Drum is right: "The 'outrage' over this incident is obviously manufactured and deserves to be treated with scorn." The real outrage should be directed at the perpetrators of torture and their military and political enablers -- and that, ultimately, means President Bush. The buck needs to stop somewhere. The right wants to deflect our attention away from the real issue, but we all know that the buck ultimately stops in the Oval Office. (Not that the occupant of that office is taking any responsibility for anything happening under his watch.)

On Monday, Senator Durbin stood on the floor of the Senate and apologized for "a very poor choice of words," for being unclear, and for possibly "cast[ing] a negative light on our fine men and women in the military". That he did so, and that he needed to declare that he loves America and respects the men and women in the military (as if that really needed declaring), speaks to the volume of the attacks hurled at him from the right. But he needn't have apologized. He said what he said because hearing of a man chained to the floor in the fetal position without food or water and wallowing in his own urine and feces does remind us, those of us who aren't deafened by the noise of partisan rancor, of the worst abuses of the twentieth century. No, Gitmo isn't a Soviet gulag or a Nazi concentration camp, but that doesn't mean that there aren't appalling similarities.

When so many of America's leaders see no evil and hear no evil and continue to live in denial, fiddling while prisoners in America's care are brutally tortured and denied their basic rights as human beings, Durbin's candid remarks reflect courage in a time of cowardice, a moral core in a time of political opportunism. Yes, good for him. We need more like him to step forward and face up to the real outrage that threatens America's standing in the world, indeed, that pollutes America's own moral core.

If America truly stands for liberty and democracy, is it too much to ask that it live up to its own principles?

Bolton vs. the filibuster (the filibuster won)

The Bolton nomination continues to go nowhere, as Democrats stood firm once again on Monday to prevent it from going to the floor for a final vote. The Times reports here:

For the second time in a month, Senate Democrats blocked a vote on Monday evening on the nomination of John R. Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, raising the possibility that President Bush will circumvent the confirmation process and appoint Mr. Bolton when Congress recesses.

The final tally was 54 to 38, six votes short of the 60 required to break a filibuster, the parliamentary tactic that Democrats have used to forestall a final vote on the confirmation.

The vote, a setback for both President Bush and Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, came after the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., made a fruitless attempt to negotiate an end to the impasse with one of Mr. Bolton's chief Democratic opponents, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. With Mr. Biden and other Democrats holding firm in their demand for the White House to release information relating to Mr. Bolton, his future is unclear.

"At this juncture, I think it's a pretty tough climb," said Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, who has tried to broker a deal with Democrats, when asked if he thought Mr. Bolton would eventually be confirmed. He added, "We tried our best and we failed."

The next move, then, is up to the president, who must decide whether to use his constitutional authority to put Mr. Bolton in the ambassador's job when Congress takes a vacation, perhaps as early as the July 4 break...

I'm not getting my hopes up, and I certainly wouldn't put it past Bush to circumvent the Senate with a recess appointment. But at least the Democrats have done everything possible to prevent an atrocious confirmation. The U.S. needs an ambassador to the U.N. who can engage with the international community and present America's interests without alienating those who need to be persuaded that those interests are worth supporting. As I've argued a number of times at The Reaction -- most recently here and here (with links to previous posts) -- Bolton's just not the right man for the job, and the Democrats have every right not to consent.

Weekend update (June 20, 2005)

It's been a busy weekend at The Reaction. From Friday evening through these early hours of Monday morning, there have been nine new posts, not including this one -- all in all, if I do say so myself, a fairly diverse output. The topics (in reverse order):

• Gaza settlements;
• the Supreme Court;
• the Iraqi insurgency;
• Mukhtaran Bibi;
• Tucker Carlson;
• Dick 'n' Jeb;
• religious moderation;
• Katie Holmes-Cruise; and
• the Iraq Culture Smart Card.

As always, I invite you to scroll down and read them all -- the front page of The Reaction contains all posts from the last two weeks (for more, see the archives) -- but I also invite comments on any of these topics (and, indeed, on any of my posts).

One thing I want to stress, now that I've had a couple of months to settle in, is that I'm not here to pontificate. It is not my intention to write under the presumption that I know everything that there is to know about a given topic, and I've learned a great deal from the many comments -- both positive and negative -- that I've already received, so much so that I continually reevaluate what I've written (though I won't go back and edit what I've written -- I'm no revisionist) and reconsider my views accordingly. One good example is a comment by a Pakistani, Babar Hashmi, to my original post on Mukhtaran Bibi. Although I may not agree with a number of his points, he brought a valuable perspective to The Reaction, and his thoughtful comments prompted me to think more deeply about my own views of Ms. Mukhtaran's situation (and of Pakistan more generally). In addition, I am grateful to have a number of excellent contributors who comment regularly on my posts, and I encourage you to read what they have to say.

So feel free to have your say here. I try to respond to each and every comment, and, above all, you'll be taken seriously and respectfully. Just log in (if you have a Blogger account) or sign in with your name/pseudonym (or just as "anonymous," if you prefer), and go to it. In the meantime, that's the weekend, and I'll be back with more posts later today.