Tomgram

Presidential stunt man: Falling without a parachute

Posted on

[Editor’s Note: We aim to please. From time to time, small improvements are being added to the Tomdispatch site. You can now forward a dispatch elsewhere by clicking on “email to a friend” at the bottom of any dispatch. Soon there should be a print “button” to click on as well, for those of you who prefer your reading on paper, not on screen. I’ve also updated my links to other sites (to be found to the right of the main screen), adding a new set of places I find especially useful including Mother Jones (which offers some of the best online reportage around and carries at least one Tomdispatch a week); Cursor (whose almost daily commentary/recommendations for reading shouldn’t be missed); AlterNet (a goldmine of articles); Asia Times (a window onto viewpoints you’re unlikely to see in the American press); and openDemocracy (with geopolitical analyst Paul Rogers, Hugh Brody, and other writers of merit). On any day, with the fourteen links now there, you can take a truncated tour of my internet universe. In addition, particularly if you’re a new visitor to Tomdispatch, you might visit “older posts” (also to the right of the screen).

Finally, under my bio, the links, and the older posts, you can visit the Shameless Plug Department and consider my latest book and first novel, The Last Days of Publishing. Available to you are blurbs, reviews, the first pages of the book itself, and a link to Amazon, should you (hint, hint) have the urge to read more. I thought I might just to give you a taste of the most recent round of reviews (assessments largely dependent on prior attitudes toward our transnational entertainment universe). Business Week of all places did a group review and said (Novel Looks at the Publishing Biz):

“Three new novels set in [publishing] consider the ethics of writers and industry executives, and ponder the question of artistic production in an age of conglomerate ownership. The best of these is veteran book editor Tom Engelhardt’s The Last Days of Publishing — an engaging, at times bitterly funny lament for what he sees as an endangered industry.

“Amid antic doings, a certain melancholy envelopes Engelhardt’s work. ‘Like light from a distant star,’ he reflects, a publisher’s catalog describes books ‘signed up long ago by editors laid off by a management no longer in place for a house that, in all but name, may no longer exist’ But Engelhardt finds hope in the durability of the book, ‘an object that inspires such residual awe and resists so many reports of its own imminent demise.’

“The very nature of these novels seems to confirm the negative diagnosis of book publishing. How else could it be that a turkey like The Storyteller would be picked up by Doubleday and get a nice-size print run of 25,000, not to mention the benefit of a muscular distribution apparatus, while the stimulating Last Days of Publishing finds a home only at a relatively weak university press and a print run of 4,000?”

The Village Voice found two different books to group it with and commented (Marc Holcomb, Write What You Know):

“The latter question is addressed in The Last Days of Publishing, Tom Engelhardt’s wistful requiem for old-style publishing that’s savvy enough to avoid a definitive answer. Engelhardt finds little to praise in his erstwhile vocation. This presumably semi-autobiographical novel of personal and professional apocalypse begins on the day that editor Rick Koppes leaves his job at tiny Byzantium Press, which, in the latest of the imprint’s demoralizing buyouts, has been absorbed by German megacorporation Multimedia Entertainment. Koppes clashes with one of the conglomerate’s soulless ‘copyright oligarchs,’ which leads to his career-killing decision.

“Amid antic doings, a certain melancholy envelopes Engelhardt’s work. ‘Like light from a distant star,’ he reflects, a publisher’s catalog describes books ‘signed up long ago by editors laid off by a management no longer in place for a house that, in all but name, may no longer exist’ But Engelhardt finds hope in the durability of the book, ‘an object that inspires such residual awe and resists so many reports of its own imminent demise.’

“The very nature of these novels seems to confirm the negative diagnosis of book publishing. How else could it be that a turkey like The Storyteller would be picked up by Doubleday and get a nice-size print run of 25,000, not to mention the benefit of a muscular distribution apparatus, while the stimulating Last Days of Publishing finds a home only at a relatively weak university press and a print run of 4,000?”

The Village Voice found two different books to group it with and commented (Marc Holcomb, Write What You Know):

“The latter question is addressed in The Last Days of Publishing, Tom Engelhardt’s wistful requiem for old-style publishing that’s savvy enough to avoid a definitive answer. Engelhardt finds little to praise in his erstwhile vocation. This presumably semi-autobiographical novel of personal and professional apocalypse begins on the day that editor Rick Koppes leaves his job at tiny Byzantium Press, which, in the latest of the imprint’s demoralizing buyouts, has been absorbed by German megacorporation Multimedia Entertainment. Koppes clashes with one of the conglomerate’s soulless ‘copyright oligarchs,’ which leads to his career-killing decision.

Last Days maintains a detached, bemused tone throughout, ultimately making the loss at its center all the more bitter. Engelhardt’s unflashy observational style and rueful lit-geek koans (“To be a good editor has . . . nothing more to do with being a good person than saying ‘Polly wants a cracker’ does with being a good parrot”) are a treat for bookish types, and his Armageddon fixation is sure to strike a chord with middle-aged readers. For those young enough to wonder if Engelhardt is being too dire in his assessment, there is a note of hope.”

On the other hand, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, who proudly believes “books are widgets” and that I should wake up and smell the bracing air of reality, wrote (When selling out can be a good thing):

“I am reading Tom Engelhardt’s new novel, The Last Days of Publishing, and hating it. Perhaps for the wrong reasons. Not because it is a bad book, although I fear that it is; there is much maundering through vaguely expressed nostalgia for the ”movement,” the 1960s, etc. No, I hate it because it is a didactic message book, and I think the message is trite, fatigued, and wrong.”

As an editor at a publishing house, responsible for blurbs on the back of any book I published, I always used to dream of getting angry, negative ones (“All grit, no truth” — John Wayne). I always thought those would sell books just as well as the predictable sunny ones. Anyway, on to the day. Tom]

A view of things to come:

Peter S. Canellos of the Boston Globe offered a fascinating peek into the near future yesterday in a piece entitled, The next round: Polls key for a battered Bush). He began by pointing out that the President’s polls have, as we know, essentially hit the Florida election watermark, that 50% dividing line, reproducing the split nation that “elected” him. White House political strategist Karl Rove evidently believed, even when the President was flying high, that this remained a 51%-49% nation and that a future election would have to be fought accordingly. (Hence that $200 million campaign fund.) Canellos adds that all Washington is now eyeing the next round of polls, because

“Rove did not say what happens to his theories if the arrow continues trending down — if Bush keeps falling like a 2001 high-tech stock [T]he next round of polls will show definitively whether the president is merely experiencing a soft landing on a solid base of support — or whether he’s free falling without a parachute. Most political professionals will be surprised if it’s the latter.”

Canellos next suggests that the political process is now working in an unexpected way (though one that will be no surprise to readers of these dispatches):

“There’s another surprise in the numbers. For all the voters who overwhelmingly say that the economy is their most pressing concern, Bush’s approval ratings have fluctuated based on the news from Iraq, not Wall Street. The conventional wisdom is that problems overseas can strengthen a president, but problems at home will always come home to roost. It may be that the opposite is true with this president: Voters believe that the economy is largely out of the White House’s control, but this particular war is wholly owned and operated by Bush.”

That the administration and Canellos now see eye to eye is obvious, given the White House’s most recent move — an Iraq/Afghanistan “shakeup” that involves the creation of the wonderfully named “Iraq stabilization group.” Despite all the glowing adjectives about good tidings in Iraq (Bush: “Sometimes it’s hard to tell it when you listen to the filter [the media]. We’re making good progress.”), Iraq is still a place in need of “stabilization.” What’s in a moniker? Reality, it seems.

This move clearly puts more power in the hands of National Security Advisor Condi Rice (though, since World War II, cutting down the Pentagon’s power has always proved a daunting task). Amusingly, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who swears up and down that nothing has changed, also claims that, according to the British Financial Times (Rumsfeld ‘not told’ of postwar shakeup),

“he had not been told by President George W. Bush or the National Security Council that the White House was to restructure the handling of postwar Iraq before the media were briefed on the plan by NSC officials In an interview with the Financial Times and three European news organisations, Mr Rumsfeld insisted that the new NSC role appeared to be no different from the policy-coordinating structure that had existed for more than a year.

“He said he did not know why Ms Rice, Mr Bush’s national security adviser, had felt it necessary to send a memorandum about the new organisation to cabinet officials or brief the New York Times about the move But people close to the Pentagon said on Tuesday that Mr Rumsfeld’s account appeared to be at odds with that of Ms Rice who told the New York Times that she had devised the new structure with Mr Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, the secretary of state, and Dick Cheney, the vice-president.”

In an editorial today, the British Guardian adds the following on Rumsfeld’s tenure (Washington’s warlord):

“Mr Rumsfeld blames diehard Ba’athists, al-Qaida terrorists, Syria, Iran, the French, the UN, anybody, for Iraq’s current woes. But if he wants to nail one of the main culprits, he need only look in the mirror.

“The Pentagon has long been a notoriously badly run agency. It cannot even lock people up in Guantanamo Bay without making a mess of it. It wastes taxpayers’ dollars on an epic scale. It buys pork-barrel weapons systems nobody needs; it often simply cannot account for its spending; it hands out jobs-for-the-boys to people like Iran-Contra’s John Poindexter. Now it emerges that it has been blithely selling surplus biological weapons equipment on the internet. Why anybody ever imagined that the Pentagon, of all organisations, was competent to manage Iraq is a great mystery of our time. Why Mr Rumsfeld is still US defence secretary is an even bigger one.”

Of course, the Bush pols can read the polls. Like Canellos, they can see that Iraq now has one hand on the steering wheel of state as evidently does Governor Schwartznegger. (Actually, I think I remember this scene from Terminator 3 and the result was mayhem.) Both the Iraqi resistance and the California resistance represent repudiations of politics as usual — not necessarily the best combination either for the Bush men or for the Democrats as presently constituted. As Tom Lewis, formerly in New York State Democratic Party politics, wrote today in one of his periodic email missives to friends and acquaintances:

“The decisive recall vote and the stunning Schwarzenegger victory are massive repudiations of government as usual and of the Democratic Party, locally, nationally, any way you want to look at it. The hapless Grey Davis was turned out of office by an 8 point spread. Schwarzenegger took 49% against 33% for Bustamante with the balance to the horde of other candidates on the ballot. The very conservative Republican Tom McClintock took ~13 points from Schwarzenegger. Does this offer any hints about 2004?… In a sense, it will be California vs. Iraq in the 2004 election here in the homeland.”

So Iraq is to be tidied up – fast. There’s only one problem. As Ehsan Ahari points out in a pithily headlined piece, If all else fails, reorganize in the Asia Times:

“For the third time in the past six months or so, the White House announced on October 6 a new regrouping or reorganization in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as if the problem is not due to failed policies in those countries, but is merely of an administrative nature The fact of the matter is that the massive regrouping or reorganizing efforts in Washington do not go to the heart of the problems in Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan has been a political and economic basket case before the US carried out its military campaign in 2001, and is likely to remain so Now Iraq resembles AfghanistanThe recent news that Turkey might send its peacekeeping troops to Iraq promises to add one more group to the ongoing death and mayhem.”

“[A]s long as young GIs are dying, and Iraqis of all walks of life are making it their national pastime to cause injury to the occupiers of their country. Even the current attempt to reorganize the US mission in Iraq is akin to saving a sinking ship by appointing a new leader of the crew whose mission is to bail the rising level of water. Instead, the objective of the US ought to be to bail out while it still can.”

Senator John Edwards, buried in the Democratic presidential pack, nonetheless put the matter clearly the other day:

“Almost two years after the fall of the Taliban and nearly six months after the fall of Baghdad, the White House is finally organizing itself to deal with the realities of postwar Afghanistan and Iraq,” said Senator John Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat who is running for president. “It’s about time President Bush tried to get his bureaucracy in order, but rearranging flow charts is no substitute for leadership.”

In fact, the likelihood — given that L. Paul Bremer and General Abizaid are still supposed to report to the White House through the Pentagon — is that an extra layer of bureaucratic intramural infighting has simply been layered over the mess that now passes for planning in Washington and Iraq. And in the meantime, in Iraq itself, new layers of mess are about to be layered over old ones — including those Turkish troops. Americans desperately want them there, not only to relieve American forces but to put some — any — Muslim troops on the ground. And Muslims are Muslims, aren’t they? What matter that the forces at hand are hated by the Kurds in the north and for many other Iraqis bring to mind historical memories of being ruled by the Ottoman empire.

The BBC today pointed out that the Turkish troops would be based in the “Sunni Triangle,” where the worst fighting has been taking place (Debate over Turkish troops plan),

“and not in the northern Kurdish areas. This is apparently on the premise that the Arab population would be more prepared to accept Turkish soldiers on their streets. But BBC Arab affairs analyst Magdi Abdelhadi says the American-led administration appears to have once again underestimated regional and cultural sensitivities in Iraq.

“Although the vast majority of Iraqis are Muslims, he says, this does not necessarily mean they would welcome troops from neighbouring Muslim countries any more than those from far afield. Our correspondent points out that Arab nationalism in Iraq emerged partly in response to what many there saw as the oppressive rule of the Ottoman Turks during the 19th century.”

But who has time these days for fine distinctions. At least they’re not Iranian or Syrians soldiers. It should be noted that even our hand-picked Governing Council, made uneasy by the idea of Turkish troops occupying parts of Iraq, has been protesting vigorously — or (another interpretation) they’re faking it. So suggests Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, and one of what seem to be tens of thousands of former CIA agents, analysts, Nocs, and other creatures of the silent night, who suddenly make up the majority of the chattering classes on the op-ed pages of America. Fuller writes on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page (Defiant Iraq Council May Be Just Playing Its Part):

“Call me a conspiracy theorist who’s spent too many years in the Middle East, but doesn’t it seem that the growing ‘confrontation’ between Washington and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council is actually just magnificent theater with deceptively clever goals? If it isn’t intentional, it should be, because such a confrontation is about the only way Washington is going to get any kind of moderate Iraqi government in place

“So what better way to help legitimize these moderates than to have them stage their own ‘revolt’ against Bremer? This is probably the only way that they can upstage the bloody guerrilla struggle being led today by the SunnisAt least, let’s hope this indeed is a clever political charade.

“If it isn’t, the Governing Council is headed for the dustbin of history and the truly radical and violent forces are poised to claim the mantle of Iraqi dignity and independence, over the dead bodies of Americans.”

It’s as Plame as your nose what is is:

Meanwhile back in Washington’s Sunni Triangle, the President under heavy sniping has reassured us that no leaker is ever likely to be found in the Joseph Wilson/Valerie Plame affair. The problem seems to be that there are just so many darn “senior officials.” Every cubbyhole has one. As he put it,

“I mean this town is a — is a town full of people who like to leak information. And I don’t know if we’re going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there’s a lot of senior officials. I don’t have any idea. I’d like to. I want to know the truth. That’s why I’ve instructed this staff of mine to cooperate fully with the investigators — full disclosure, everything we know the investigators will find out. I have no idea whether we’ll find out who the leaker is — partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers. But we’ll find out.”

“Rather short of dead or alive,” comments Josh Marshall of Talkingpointsmemo.com.

All the President and his closest buds know is that they didn’t do it. As Reuters’ Randall Mikkelsen reports (White House Rules Out Three Aides in Leak on CIA):

“The White House on Tuesday ruled out three top aides [Karl Rove, Lewis Libby, and Elliot Abrams] as the source of a news leak identifying an undercover CIA officer whose husband was critical of Bush administration Iraq policy.”

You might ask how the White House knows. Well, Scott McClellan asked, that’s how, and scout’s honor, they swore they didn’t do it. No kidding. The Justice Department can just go home. They’re innocent.

“White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he had talked to each of the aides ahead of a 5 p.m. deadline on Tuesday for officials to turn over information in a Justice Department probe of the leak ‘I’ve spoken with each of them individually,’ he said. ‘They were not involved in leaking classified information, nor did they condone it.'”

Here’s how Julian Borger of the Guardian parses the situation (Anatomy of a scandal):

“The White House’s main line of defence seems to that even if these two senior officials had conversations with journalists about Plame, either they did not know that Plame was undercover and therefore did not deliberately expose her, or that they got involved after Bob Novak had already published his story, in which case the name was in the public arena. The fact that they were encouraging journalists to write about Plame may then be slimy, but it is not technically illegal.

“Yes, the president that promised to ‘restore honour and integrity’ to the White House is retreating to the thickets of legal technicalities. As one administration staffer commented wryly to a Washington journalist ‘I did not have conversations with that man’. That is a line with unmistakable syntax for anyone who has covered Washington sleaze. It evokes Clinton’s most infamous denial: ‘I did not have sex with that woman.'”

Scratching the unilateral itch:

And then, in the push-me, pull-you world of Washington politics, there’s that unbearable unilateralist itch. It just manifested itself again at the UN where an American resolution meant to paper over all Security Council differences, while bringing in troops and money, seems to have fallen afoul before the urge to give up nothing that matters in the least.

Unilateralism as policy is now a kind of neocon spectacle. A Pavlovian twitch that can’t be stopped. The presidency may, for the first time, feel under siege; the American people in poll after poll may indicate their preference for sharing the burdens and goodies around, but at the beating heart of the world’s only hyperpower, unilateralists still win the arguments and so unilateralism reigns (or do I mean “rains”) supreme.

For instance, you may have forgotten about that obsessive administration campaign to force countries worldwide to reach bilateral agreements that would abrogate the power of the new International Criminal Court ever to try an American for anything; but as Jim Lobe reports, they haven’t (And justice for all?, Asia Times):

“On July 1, the administration of US President George W Bush cut some $30 million in military aid to 32 friendly countries – most of them democracies – because they refused to sign deals with Washington. Among them were a number of new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe, some of which have contributed troops to bolster the US-led occupation in Iraq. Brazil, Costa Rica, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, South Africa and a number of other Latin American and African countries, were also on the list. .. Critics of the administration’s campaign against the ICC have pointed out that most of the countries penalized by the ASPA sanctions are young and emerging democracies that have generally backed US interests and values, making Washington’s position counter-productive.

“This is the first sanction in US diplomatic history targeted exclusively at democracies, said Heather Hamilton of the World Federalist Association.”

And yesterday, of course, the President with neocons visibly at his elbow seconded the right of Israel to strike anywhere, any time in whatever Ariel Sharon defines as Israel’s or his party’s or simply his own unilateralist interest. (“The prime minister must defend his country — it’s essential,” Bush said. “This is a country which recently was attacked by a suicider that killed innocent children, and women — people that were celebrating in a restaurant.”) Clearly a number of administration Likudniks still imagine that an assault on Syria may represent a path out of the Middle East tangle and are urging Sharon on.

Meanwhile, the President is in a box. With everyone watching those polls, he can’t let himself be outflanked on his Christian right over Israel. And yet if it does turn out in the next couple of months that he’s entering freefall, he might still have to brace himself for the sort of amateur challenge from the right in New Hampshire – say by John McCain – that, from the left, once embarrassed another sitting president way back in 1968.

And he’s not the only one in a box. The administration, the neocons, the Republican Party, and most Washington Democrats as well are inside the same not terribly spacious box and can only imagine solutions that lie within it. So we watch the spectacle of Republicans and Democrats in Congress criticizing the president’s Iraq policy and then nibbling at the $87 billion he’s requested to “stabilize” that country. When they’re done, what will it be? $84.3 billion, some of it in never to be repaid loans? And Iraq won’t have zip codes. Otherwise, there’s no serious debate about, not even an imagining of other paths. I include below an op-ed by James O. Goldsborough in the San Diego Union Tribune in which he says in part:

“We have no choice, we are told. We must pay $87 billion for Iraq now, bringing the total so far to $166 billion, with more to come. All but $19 billion of that is for conquest and occupation, not reconstruction The fact is we do have a choice. We can declare victory and come home, exactly as we should have done in Vietnam before it was too lateThe idea of staying for a generation is anti-American and, based on the Vietnam experience, ahistorical.”

But there are few Goldsboroughs in Washington today, though I did note that Gen. Wesley Clark “launched a high-risk attack on American foreign policy yesterday when he said the Bush administration should face an investigation into possible ‘criminal’ conduct in its drive to war.”

In the meantime, guerrilla war continues in Iraq, while off in distant California another kind of revolt is underway. As has happened since the George Wallace campaign of 1968, just about every populist itch to reject American politics as we know it has meant another lurch rightward. (More on this tomorrow from Mike Davis.) In this context, the onrushing 2004 election remains a conundrum wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a dead fish. Still, I include below two recent pieces on the national-election-to-come that I found interesting. In an essay in the Atlantic magazine, Jack Beatty writes passionately on what it would mean were George Bush reelected, ending in the following fashion:

“For all their worldliness the Founders were naïve to regard property as a shield of incorruptibility or the property-less as inherently corruptible. Their core insight, however, remains valid. A republic can be corrupted at the top and bottom, by leaders and led. The re-election of George W. Bush would signal that a kind of corruption had set in among the led. Our miserable failure as republican citizens would match his as President.”

And Robert Sheer, columnist for the Los Angeles Times (and something of a romantic, it turns out, on General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency in the 1950s), urges another general on us — Wesley Clark. His argument, in essence, boils down to this:

“[C]learly Clark’s main strength is in challenging the neoconservative clique that has brainwashed our naive president into a hare-brained scheme of remaking the world into an American empire. In the process, they have declared war, as Clark noted, “against anyone who expresses dissent, questions their facts or challenges their logic. And just as with Vietnam, where Clark was wounded, Iraq is proving to be a quagmire sucking up massive U.S. resources that prevent us from addressing pressing domestic problems: Social Security, health care, education, jobs, violence.”

I’m an agnostic myself — on Clark certainly but also on what messages will be drawn by Karl Rove and the rest of us from the California recall. Tom

Declare Victory in Iraq and Leave
By James O. Goldsborough
San Diego Union-Tribune
October 6, 2003
(Found at www.commondreams.org)

Americans believe their wars are “good” wars, not like other people’s wars. America goes to war for noble causes, certainly not for glory, booty and conquest. That’s for others.

This skewed view grows out of the world wars, the noblest of wars. Look further, however, and history tells a different story. Most of our wars, from the Indian to the Iraqi, have been fought for glory, booty and conquest.

Just like everybody else.

To read more Goldsborough click here

“A Miserable Failure”
By Jack Beatty
The Atlantic
September 24, 2003

With one phrase Dick Gephardt has defined the issue to be decided next November. Can a “miserable failure” of a president win re-election? Bush’s victory would testify to a civic failure more dangerous to the American future than any policies implemented or continued during a second Bush term. A majority would have demonstrated that democratic accountability is finished. That you can fail in everything and still be re-elected president.

To read more Beatty click here

Let the General Lead Democrats’ Charge
By Robert Scheer
The Los Angeles Times
October 7, 2003

In my reckless youth I briefly sported an “I like Ike” button, which didn’t go over particularly well in my corner of the Bronx, where support of even a moderate Republican represented a betrayal of everything decent.

In hindsight, though, I was right – the genial general-turned-president proved to be a warrior for peace and an important critic of what he saw as a “military-industrial complex” that threatened the very fabric of democracy: “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

To read more Scheer click here