Osama's Islamism and Saddam's Baathism are somewhat alike

Osama's Islamism and Saddam's Baathism are somewhat alike

Just as our government has ill-served the American people by habitually failing to explain its reasoning, then it is all the more important that journalists and intellectuals build constructively on each other's work to articulate and understand difficult and complex ideas. Regardless of the historical connections between Islamism and Arab nationalism, it's possible to make a very good argument against the administration's conduct of the war on terror—but it's hard to see the virtue of making one based on a faulty understanding.

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Factual, insightful, persuasive. If only we had a leadership that was able to think rationally.

Cognitive Dissonance and the electorate

KRT Wire | 10/21/2004 | Poll finds reality gap among Bush supporters

There may be another reason, Kull said. Asked whether U.S. forces should have invaded Iraq if U.S. intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not making WMD or providing support to al-Qaeda, 58 percent of Bush supporters said no.

"To support the president and to accept that he took the United States to war based on mistaken assumptions is difficult to bear, especially in light of the continuing costs in terms of lives and money," Kull said.

"Apparently, to avoid this cognitive dissonance, Bush supporters suppress awareness of unsettling information...

... The survey also found that Bush supporters have "numerous misperceptions" about the president's positions. Majorities incorrectly believe that Bush backs the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the treaty banning land mines.

A majority of Bush backers (57 percent) also believe most people in the world favor Bush's re-election, contrary to the findings of several polls.

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This is a variant on the 92% number -- the percentage of Americans who feel terrorism is our number one problem who support George Bush.

Bush supporters oddly enough have many of the same preferences as non-supporters. They favor various treaties, want to protect the environment, want to deal with global warming, don't want to go to war without sound reasons, etc. The problem is, they think Bush supports their positions. They even think the rest of the western world suporters George Bush!

In other words, the electorate is a bit balmy. Was it always this way? I can't imagine a point in my lifetime when so many people were so disconnected from fact. These aren't matters of opinion -- Bush vetoed the treaties his supporters think he favored!

The article ends with the sort of peurile pseudo-balanced comment that's common in modern journalism. I won't bother quoting it, but we do need to rewire journalism schools.

There are days when I think Ayn Rand might be have been right after all.

Bush: they hate us for our freedoms

Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide (washingtonpost.com)

Most officials interviewed said Bush has not devised an answer to a problem then-CIA Director George J. Tenet identified publicly on Feb. 11, 2003 -- "the numbers of societies and peoples excluded from the benefits of an expanding global economy, where the daily lot is hunger, disease, and displacement -- and that produce large populations of disaffected youth who are prime recruits for our extremist foes."

The president and his most influential advisers, many officials said, do not see those factors -- or U.S. policy overseas -- as primary contributors to the terrorism threat. Bush's explanation, in private and public, is that terrorists hate America for its freedom.

Sageman, who supports some of Bush's approach, said that analysis is "nonsense, complete nonsense. They obviously haven't looked at any surveys." The central findings of polling by the Pew Charitable Trust and others, he said, is that large majorities in much of the world "view us as a hypocritical huge beast throwing our weight around in the Middle East."

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Interesting that Tenet does focus on what's important. I cannot fathom Bush, is he mad?

Open Source Jihad

Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide (washingtonpost.com)

Marc Sageman, a psychologist and former CIA case officer who studies the formation of jihadist cells, said the inspirational power of the Sept. 11 attacks -- and rage in the Islamic world against U.S. steps taken since -- has created a new phenomenon. Groups of young men gather in common outrage, he said, and a violent plan takes form without the need for an outside leader to identify, persuade or train those who carry it out.

The brutal challenge for U.S. intelligence, Sageman said, is that "you don't know who's going to be a terrorist" anymore. Citing the 15 men who killed 190 passengers on March 11 in synchronized bombings of the Spanish rail system, he said "if you had gone to those guys in Madrid six months prior, they'd say 'We're not terrorists,' and they weren't. Madrid took like five weeks from inception."

Much the same pattern, officials said, preceded deadly attacks in Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, Morocco and elsewhere. There is no reason to believe, they said, that the phenomenon will remain overseas.

Such attacks do not rely on leaders as the Bush administration strategy has conceived them. New jihadists can acquire much of the know-how they need, Sageman and his counterparts still in government said, in al Qaeda's Saudi-published magazines, Al Baatar and the Voice of Jihad, available online.

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Microsoft's dominance and power created open source solutions. Natural selection, operating in the world of economics, produced an entity that monopolistic abuses could not eliminate.

In the much more brutal domain of state and non-state conflict, Bush's strategy created a new entity, call it open source jihad. Fueled by donations from Saudi Arabia and Syria, trained by widely distributed manuals, inspired by Al Jazeera, powered by nihilism, hatred, despair and xenophobia. Bush's response is to keep killing them until they are all gone.

And 92% of Americans consider this an effective strategy?

The opportunity cost of invading Iraq

Afghanistan, Iraq: Two Wars Collide (washingtonpost.com)

At the peak of the hunt for bin Laden and his lieutenants, in early 2002, about 150 commandos operated along Afghanistan's borders with Pakistan and Iran in a top-secret team known as Task Force 5. The task force included a few CIA paramilitaries, but most of its personnel came from military 'special mission units,' or SMUs, whose existence is not officially acknowledged. One is the Army squadron once known as Delta Force. The other -- specializing in human and technical intelligence operations -- has not been described before in public. Its capabilities include close-in electronic surveillance and, uniquely in the U.S. military, the conduct of 'low-level source operations' -- recruiting and managing spies.

These elite forces, along with the battlefield intelligence technology of Predator and Global Hawk drone aircraft, were the scarcest tools of the hunt for jihadists along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. With Bush's shift of focus to Iraq, the special mission units called most of their troops home to prepare for a new set of high-value targets in Baghdad.

'There is a direct consequence for us having taken these guys out prematurely,' said Leverett, who then worked as senior director for Middle Eastern affairs on Bush's NSC staff. 'There were people on the staff level raising questions about what that meant for getting al Qaeda, for creating an Afghan security and intelligence service [to help combat jihadists]. Those questions didn't get above staff level, because clearly there had been a strategic decision taken.'

Task Force 5 dropped in strength at times to as few as 30 men. Its counterpart in Iraq, by early 2003, burgeoned to more than 200 as an insurgency grew and Hussein proved difficult to find. Late last year, the Defense Department merged the two commando teams and headquartered the reflagged Task Force 121 under Rear Adm. William H. McRaven in Baghdad.

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An exceptional article in the Washington Post. Bush's 75% captured/killed statistic is bull feces.

Signs of the end-time

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: My Name Is Frahnk-en-steen

Prosthetic hippocampus. Organic computation.

And so it goes.

The astonishing number: 92%

The Washington Monthly

92% of Americans for whom terrorism is their major concern plan to vote for George Bush

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I am stunned. I wonder if North Koreans, famed for their isolation and media control, are really any more ignorant of the world than we Americans.

The Herald-Palladium's scoop on the Tenet speech: demographics, HIV and CIA failures

The Herald-Palladium

This off-broadway Tenet speech can be spun many different ways. He doesn't address the extent to which the Bush administration bent the CIA to give them the answers they demanded. That's the ongoing question of interest. He does say the CIA failed, but that's only step one of the picture.

He does say some interesting things about demographics and HIV. Shades of the "yellow hordes". I wonder what he means by "maintain its [our] position". Emphases mine.

BTW, it's interesting to read spin-free coverage of a speech.

BENTON TOWNSHIP -- Although he emphasized that the Central Intelligence Agency boasts 'tremendously talented men and women,' former CIA Director George Tenet said it 'did not live up to our expectations as professionals' regarding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the search for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

'We had inconsistent information, and we did not inform others in the community of gaps in our intelligence,' Tenet said. 'The extraordinary men and women who do magnificent work in the CIA are held accountable every day for what they do, and as part of keeping our faith with the American people, we will tell you when we're right or wrong.'

Tenet called the war on Iraq 'wrong' in a speech Wednesday night to 2,000 members of The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake Michigan College's Mendel Center. He did not elaborate...

... He said the United States is 'winning the war on terror' due to the CIA's efforts to 'capture or kill' three-quarters of al-Qaida's leaders, pinpointed before 9/11. He expects to see Osama bin Ladin captured.

... 'Demographics and distribution trends are something we also need to keep an eye on,' Tenet said. 'The developed world is not reproducing at levels to maintain its position, while developing nations who cannot afford it, mostly Muslim ones, are exploding.'

Tenet said a developing nation's low per capita income, high unemployment among young men and high infant mortality rate strongly increase its likelihood of becoming a 'terrorist safe haven.'

'In 2010, 100 million people outside of Africa will be infected with HIV,' Tenet said. 'The secondary implications of this are staggering.'

James Oberg on NASA and errors

Murphy's Law and NASA

Space observers recall the NASA announcement in 1999 that one of its Mars probes had crashed into the planet because workers had mixed up metric and English units of measurement. The story was a real howler, and had elements of truth to it — but it was fundamentally a cover-up and a diversion.

It did turn out that engineers who built the Mars Climate Orbiter had provided a data table in "pound-force" rather than newtons, the metric measure of force (about equivalent to the downward weight of an apple in your hand). NASA flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had used the faulty table for their navigation calculations during the long coast from Earth to Mars.

Upon arrival, the probe did not skim the upper atmosphere, as it had been aimed. Misled by the wrong numbers, guidance computers set it on a course that actually hit the atmosphere — where it burned up.

The easy answer — "blame the stupid contractors" — was actually a NASA public-relations gimmick to duck ultimate responsibility for the disaster. In order to promote the image of a faster-better-cheaper space program extolled by the Clinton administration, previously used checks and balances had been canceled. And reportedly, when space navigators intuitively developed a feeling that there was something wrong with the navigational database, they were told to hold the present course until they could prove something was wrong.

By then it was too late. The proper attitude should have been that in case of doubt, steer more safely, and take the corner at Mars farther out. NASA’s mismanagement, not a worker-bee foul-up, doomed that Mars probe...

...But with the Genesis accelerometers, apparently the approved design allowed either direction of installation. From the NASA report, it seems that the accelerometers had to be X-rayed to determine the internal up-down orientation of their sensors, which reportedly were described incorrectly in the technical drawings...

... In September 2003, a quarter-billion-dollar observation satellite was heavily damaged in a hangar when it moved without bolting it to its support frame. A review board recently attributed this to “lack of discipline in following procedures [and] complacent attitudes [and] poorly written or modified procedures.”

In 1998, a LockMart Titan 4 booster carrying a billion-dollar LockMart spy satellite exploded shortly after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Fla., due to frayed wiring that apparently had not been inspected. The following year, the expensive LockMart Milstar 4 satellite was placed into a useless orbit by a LockMart Titan/Centaur upper stage, because of erroneous calculations fed into the Centaur guidance system. (Explanation: “Engineers were traumatized by the Columbine shootings.")...

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Oberg attacks the "better, cheaper, faster" theme of his successor. Presumably he'd advocate a lot more review and redundancy. I suppose the alternative is to do more cheap probes and accept a higher failure level. I suspect there's a reasonable trade-off somewhere in there.

Foreign Affairs is shrill -- and against Bush

Brett Marston: A GOOD WAY TO SPEND 9 BUCKS THIS MONTH (13 IN CANADA)

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By Brett's telling, Foreign Affairs sounds pretty shrill.

Another Republican (former Senator) now voting for Kerry

'Frightened to death' of Bush

'Frightened to death' of Bush
By Marlow W. Cook
Special to The Courier-Journal

I have been, and will continue to be, a Republican. But when we as a party send the wrong person to the White House, then it is our responsibility to send him home if our nation suffers as a result of his actions. I fall in the category of good conservative thinkers, like George F. Will, for instance, who wrote: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and having thought, to have second thoughts."

I say, well done George Will, or, even better, from the mouth of the numero uno of conservatives, William F. Buckley Jr.: "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

... I hope you all have noticed the Bush administration's style in the campaign so far. All negative, trashing Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John Edwards and Democrats in general. Not once have they said what they have done right, what they have done wrong or what they have not done at all.

Lyndon Johnson said America could have guns and butter at the same time. This administration says you can have guns, butter and no taxes at the same time. God help us if we are not smart enough to know that is wrong, and we live by it to our peril. We in this nation have a serious problem. Its almost worse than terrorism: We are broke. Our government is borrowing a billion dollars a day. They are now borrowing from the government pension program, for apparently they have gotten as much out of the Social Security Trust as it can take. Our House and Senate announce weekly grants for every kind of favorite local programs to save legislative seats, and it's all borrowed money.

... I am not enamored with John Kerry, but I am frightened to death of George Bush. I fear a secret government. I abhor a government that refuses to supply the Congress with requested information. I am against a government that refuses to tell the country with whom the leaders of our country sat down and determined our energy policy, and to prove how much they want to keep that secret, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Those of you who are fiscal conservatives and abhor our staggering debt, tell your conservative friends, "Vote for Kerry," because without Bush to control the Congress, the first thing lawmakers will demand Kerry do is balance the budget.

The wonderful thing about this country is its gift of citizenship, then it's freedom to register as one sees fit. For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction.

If we are indeed the party of Lincoln (I paraphrase his words), a president who deems to have the right to declare war at will without the consent of the Congress is a president who far exceeds his power under our Constitution.

I will take John Kerry for four years to put our country on the right path.

The writer, a Republican formerly of Louisville, was Jefferson County judge from 1962-1968 and U.S. senator from Kentucky from 1968-1975.

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I'm convinced a large number of thoughtful Republicans want Clinton back - with a Republican congress. They don't dare to say it, but they know deep down that Kerry is basically Clinton with more discipline.

How can Boston fans take this punishment?

Sports News Article | Reuters.com: Rallying Red Sox Edge Yankees to Force Decider The Red Sox seem determined to inflict maximum agony on their fans. It looked like they would give their fans a quick and painless oblivion, but now they're back inflicting agonizing torments. Boston, we feel for you.

Update: I actually watched the 9th inning. I didn't want to watch too much, I was sure I'd jinx the Sox. My sister-in-law is the Sox fan, not me -- but like most of the universe I was hoping for a miracle.

Now I believe Kerry can win.

Smallpox and Influenza

Smallpox - where did the money go?

I googled on "smallpox and influenza" and came up with this 2003 article. It's a good starting point for a question that no-one ever asks (except, every few months, me). Maybe, given the influenza debacle of 2004, this might come up again.

In the build-up to the Iraq invasion there was much mention of the Iraqi smallpox program, and the evil and nefarious "Dr. Germ" (who is, by most accounts, a pretty nasty woman). There was a heck of a lot of press on this. The usual suspects (Rumsfeld, Condy, Cheney, Bush) raised the specter of bioterrorism and a smallpox attack. They made a persuasive case. Persuaded me anyway!

A big prevention program started up. Physicians and nurses were immunized. Some had nasty side-effects. I think at least one person died from an idiosyncratic reaction to Vaccinia (an odd virus that acts in some people like a "mild" case of smallpox).

Then came the invasion of Iraq. The immunization program was quietly dropped. (Later data suggests Americans are probably still protected by the immunizations of the 1960s -- but that wasn't known when the program was dropped.) It staggers on with a low level of funding and no political support.

So was the program always a fraud to provide support for the invasion? If so, that was one hell of a game to play. I suspect the persons injured in the vaccine testing might not feel happy about that.

Or was the fear genuine, but the Bush administration decided that meeting the challenge could pose an electoral risk -- so they decided to ignore the problem? That doesn't reflect well on them either. I wonder if that's the same kind of reasoning they applied when they were warned about the influenza vaccine problems.

It was when I realized that there was no good answer to the smallpox scam that I recognized what kind of government we had. Until then I was willing to give Bush a bit of trust.

Maybe they just figured that the power of their Will would defeat nature. Just like in that movie.

PS. I suspect Dr. Germ will only be released after the election is done. If she were released before November 2nd, she might stir some unwanted memories.

Triumph of The Will -- The Bush Story

Faughnan's Notes: Bush - American Calvinist -- more quotes from the NYT Magazine Suskind article

I was trying to remember what was so familiar about the quotes in the Suskind article. Then it came to me. Similar expressions were a part of a famous movie: Triumph of The Will.

Yes, that was a movie Karl Rove would understand very well.

Update: This has occurred to a few other people.

Bush suppresses CIA 9/11 report

Secret CIA 9/11 Report Names Names | The Regular

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From the LA Times. The CIA apparently finds negligence and a failure of accountability in the Bush administration. Sounds like it may confirm Richard Clarke's account -- and more. It's become known to anyone who cares that the CIA now serves the President - not the nation. I think this bothers some patriots in the CIA.