Bush Wars on the radio

Last Saturday I did half an hour or so on the phone with Chuck Mertz of WNUR, which is Northwestern University's radio station. Yesterday it was posted to their archive, and if you really have nothing better to do, you can listen here. (Advance the Real Audio slider to roughly the 1 hour and 48 minute mark.)

Plus: Will BW readers prove to be the avatars of a Draft Michael Moore movement?

There was fairly passionate response to the question I posed about whether the Greens should run a presidential candidate in 2004. If I have a chance later today I'll post some of the reader comments; meantime the poll broke down this way:

Yes, run: 15
No, stay out this time: 8
Fuck you, stay out every time: 1
I just wish someone would listen to me: 3

But today's prize goes to reader Mickey Z. for being first to suggest the Green candidate someone is bound to bring up sooner or later: Michael Moore. (Nice subject line, too: Moore or Lesser?)

I'd send you a t-shirt, Mickey, but the truth is we don't have any. Still, don't be surprised if at some point today you notice a striking abundance of positive energy flowing your way. That'll be me.

So, phase two of the Bush Wars Greens in '04 poll:

Draft Michael Moore?

Email me your thoughts at sperry@citypages.com.

Finally, I got a long letter from the chair of the Michigan Green party, Marc Reichardt, which you can read here.

It's TGIF Stone Friday here at Bush Wars...

"It's just wonderful to be a pariah. I really owe my success to being a pariah. It is so good not to be invited to respectable dinner parties. People used to say to me, 'Izzy, why don't you go down and see the Secretary of State and put him straight.' Well, you know, you're not supposed to see the Secretary of State. He won't pay any attention to you anyway. He'll hold your hand, he'll commit you morally for listening. To be a pariah is to be left alone to see things your own way, as truthfully as you can. Not because you're brighter than anybody else is -- or your own truth so valuable. But because, like a painter or a writer or an artist, all you have to contribute is the purification of your own vision, and add that to the sum total of other visions. To be regarded as nonrespectable, to be a pariah, to be an outsider, this is really the way to do it. To sit in your tub and not want anything. As soon as you want something, they've got you!"

And this:

"The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got be willing -- for the sheer fun and joy of it -- to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it." 

Steve, 

While I certainly appreciate the more measured response than most other journalists (real or posers) are normally willing to accord us, I think you're misunderstanding a couple things about the USGP.

Sincerely,
Marc Reichardt,
Chair,
Green Party of Michigan

Those who are saying it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it -Chinese proverb
O Bailan Todos O No Baila Nadie- El Tupamaros.

Roadmap to Nowhere: great column on the Israeli deal by Alex Cockburn.

So Sad About Baghdad: The New York Times breaks the news to the chattering classes--the US needs more troops and more money in Iraq.

Jessica Lynch's family is keeping mum about her daring rescue by US troops who, the night before, had fired on an Iraqi ambulance that was trying to return her to the Americans.

Iran tries to placate the US in re al-Qaeda, but the Bushmen won't take yes for an answer.   

Yesterday, in mulling over the Greens, I cited Studs Terkel's argument that Henry Wallace's third-party run in 1948 helped Harry Truman and the Dems win the election. Afterward I got this note from Richard Winger, who runs the Ballot Access News website.

You talked about 1948, and you were right. However, it was Samuel Lubell, pollster turned political scientist, who first made the point about 1948. And it wasn't theoretical. His polling data showed that 2,000,000 mostly Catholic, conservative Democrats had voted for Dewey in 1944, because they were so disgusted that the Communist Party in 1944 had endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt. But those 2,000,000 voters came back to the Democrats in 1948, because the Communist Party in 1948 was busy attacking Truman and boosting Progressive Party nominee Henry Wallace. So although Truman lost 1,100,000 votes that went to Wallace (that was Wallace's national total), he gained 2,000,000 votes away from Dewey, which was far more valuable to him. He couldn't have won without them. He carried California, Ohio and Illinois by the squeakiest of margins, and if Dewey had carried those states, Dewey would have had a majority in the electoral college.

The American Greens--to the extent they even exist as a national organization--are up in arms over whether to run a candidate in the 2004 presidential race. A great many Greens, understandably, are putting "Beat Bush" first on their agenda and wondering whether the party should opt out this time. But there are those who oppose sitting out 2004, on the grounds that abdicating now would mean abandoning the party's recent gains in major party standings from state to state. In any case, the names bandied about so far as Green candidates include the perennial Nader, deposed Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney, and a couple of party unknowns, David Cobb and Paul Glover.

As a two-time Nader supporter and a consistent champion of any political gesture that serves to discredit or to embarrass the Republicrat duopoly, I am--so far--agnostic on this one. Two reasons: There's a better-than-usual case to be made that the venal, threadbare "lesser evil" argument that Democratic apologists trot out every four years actually contains some merit when the greater evil is George W. Bush and the boys.

I despise nearly all the clowns in the Democratic field this time--but I think I would vote for any of them (except Joe Lieberman, who's not going to get the nomination in any event) in lieu of Bush. This is not because I have any illusion that Democratic President Fill-in-the-Blank will undo what Bush has wrought; it's because the Bushmen are the most radical claque to rule the US in this century, and for once it's probably right to say that virtually anyone else would do less damage going forward.

My second reservation about the Greens in '04 is that they are just so fucking dumb when it comes to concerted national action. They don't know how to do a national campaign, in part because many of them are opposed in principle to the idea of a prominent or powerful national Green party hierarchy. Say what you will of Nader's past campaigns; I like Ralph. But one thing you cannot say is that he was running to win in either 1996 or 2000. He was running to make a point, and a worthy one as far as it went, about the rigged game that is American politics. This gave his candidacy a stuffy, didactic air. Nader's profile is more that of the traveling lecturer than the political evangelist; he articulates important truths but he's no fire-starter.

Personally, I still believe that a serious third-party effort by the Greens could help to beat Bush. The great Studs Terkel has argued that Henry Wallace in 1948 performed exactly that service for Harry Truman and the Democrats in 1948. By dragging the centrist Truman toward more populist/liberal campaign themes, and energizing an untapped segment of the public--or so Terkel reasoned, plausibly--Wallace and his third-party candidacy actually helped propel Truman to a win.

Could 2004 be analogous to 1948? I doubt it. I don't think yet another run by Nader or any of the other likely suspects would bring new voters into the mix in any great numbers--Cynthia McKinney may be the sole exception, but she stands to alienate a great many as well--and I also do not think the modern Democratic party can be induced to move left except as a matter of the occasional rhetorical gesture. If beating Bush is really the paramount issue this time, it's hard to see how a Green party that has neither a national organization nor a charismatic leader is going to help matters. 

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This is all a first-blush reaction. Meantime tell me your thoughts on the matter. Greens in or out in '04? Email me at sperry@citypages.com, and thanks. 

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Related press clips 

 MSNBC: Greens may back Dems in '04.

washpost: Greens weigh their options.

Studs Terkel: Truman, Wallace, and the lesson of '48

And thanks for the memories, even though you probably don't remember them

What sort of war blog would this be if I failed to note that it's the 100th birthday of the undead Bob Hope, avatar of war and entertainment and war entertainment? Steve Monaco over at Couch Pundit has just the tribute that Bob deserves.  

The world's most infamous terror group: global conspiracy, or just good friends?

Ten days ago you couldn't dip your toe in the world press without encountering fervid proclamations that the terrorist bombings in Riyadh and Casablanca were a) certainly connected and b) proof positive that a new wave of al-Qaeda bombings was imminent. 

So far, though, no more bombs. Why? Off the top I can see three or four possibilities:

1) There was in fact no significant connection between the attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, the latter having been undertaken by a local outfit that may or may not have been acting in concert with larger al-Qaeda goals. Remember one thing: None of the evidence popularly cited so far amounts to a definitive case that there is a new al-Qaeda-sponsored offensive in the offing. We're only supposing.

2) There was a connection between the Riyadh and Casablanca bombings, and the promised al-Qaeda offensive simply has yet to unfold.

3) The SA and Morocco bombings were intended as the kickoff of a new wave of attacks, but intervening events have disrupted the plan. According to one theory, al-Qaeda is regrouping now because of blowback in the Arab world after the Riyadh and Casablanca attacks. According to this line of thought, they may be shifting course from destabilizing US allies in the Middle East (a tricky business in itself) toward the safer and less complicated course of attacking the US directly. Conversely, the situation in Iran may be dictating al-Qaeda policy. It's possible, if unlikely, that the Iranian government really does control the movements of several key al-Qaeda operatives and has put the clamps on them since the US kicked up a fuss. (I emphasize that this is unlikely--according to a Washington Post dispatch quoted here a few days ago, it's probable that the Iranian government has no means of tracking, much less controlling, the handful of operatives in the north of Iran.)

There's another possibility lurking beneath all these, which is that US intelligence services have ever had only the vaguest sense of what al-Qaeda is and what they are or aren't up to.

Rightly or wrongly, my notion about al-Qaeda from the start has been that the American media and (so far as we can say from public signs) American intelligence has completely and willfully misunderstood the nature of the so-called network. They have approached it as though it's a single entity with a command/control structure analogous to the sort we're most familiar with--the top-down hierarchy of US corporations and the American military.

It always struck me as more ad hoc and opportunistic than that. I've always suspected that what we call "al-Qaeda" is really just the most prominent node in an emerging, loosely confederated network of insurgent anti-imperialist/anti-US cells the world over. If you want a more American frame of reference, say that they are one venture capital firm in a growing industry, rather than a company. This is certainly the tenor of what we've been hearing about the "new" al-Qaeda in recent weeks (see Asia Times, 5/17 and 5/20, a pair of accounts by Syed Saleem Shahzad that describe the radical decentralization of what had been known as al-Qaeda). 

I bring this up now because of a very interesting and little-noted interview with Syrian President Bashar Assad that appeared the other day at the GOPUSA site. Assad had this to say on the subject of al-Qaeda:

"Is there really an entity called al Qaeda? It was in Afghanistan, but is it there anymore?" Assad asked....

"We blame everything on al Qaeda but what happened is more dangerous than bin Laden or al Qaeda. We're talking about a certain ideological bloc. The issue is ideology, it's not an issue of organizations," Assad said regarding the recent terror attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco.

"Such an ideology cannot live without a certain social base. It has to convince people and strengthen its presence. Dealing with this issue should be through a social approach not through security," he added.

Read the rest.

First, let's be clear what he is not saying. Assad obviously does not mean that there is no such thing as an element that calls itself al-Qaeda; he doubts whether it exists in the sense ceaselessly touted by the West, as the head of the octopus. And I suspect he's entirely right.

This is not to say that there is no such thing as communication and planning between disparate groups. Rather, it suggests that their ranks are more varied and spotaneous, and their connections more fleeting and provisional, than the Bush administration has painted them to be. One corollary is that they are much harder to track than the US lets on; another is that even if you succeed in tracking down particular individuals, you will usually accomplish little by taking one factor out of the equation. Hunting the US's many enemies through intelligence ops is a little like trying to track particular drops of water through a roiling pool.

Related press clips

NYT: US presses Iran to hand over al-Qaeda suspects.

BBC: Iran rejects US pressure.

Newsweek (Isikoff et al.) on al-Qaeda's summer plans.

Lugar, Bush, and the permanent war in its first throes of crisis 

Now we begin to see what synergy is all about. There's bad news for the Bush administration from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel. Late last week Richard Lugar, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publicly scolded the Bushmen and warned them that their victory in Iraq was "at risk." But Lugar pulled what might have been his most effective punch when he rather delicately pointed out that continued failure in Iraq would create "an incubator for terrorist cells and activity." The incubator Lugar alludes to is more like a factory, and it has been pumping out product since the invasion of Afghanistan. You have only to look to the waves of foreign volunteers who streamed into Iraq to wage jihad against the Americans at the outset of the war--more than 10,000, according to the European press. And events since then have no doubt galvanized countless more.        

Lugar is promising an investigation of the Bush administration's planning for post-war Iraq. We'll see. Lugar is one of the few people in the entire government who could singlehandedly do serious damage to Bush next year, but only at the cost of making himself a lifelong pariah in Republican circles. He's really not the type. Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch, an expert in all things Hoosier, says this of him:

As I've written before, I believe the US entered Iraq with the sole intention of staying as long as possible and insinuating itself as deeply as possible in the fabric of the economy and of such government as exists there. So in that sense the Bushmen's current predicament cannot be altogether a surprise to them. But even if this was their "plan," there's no question that they did a wretched job of thinking through the contingencies. There is no sense in which it's in the administration's interest to have this level of anarchy in Baghdad, and yet they are only now awakening to the fact that it's probably not a good idea to occupy the city with combat troops. A larger force will be required in any case, and meanwhile Britain has been quietly and steadily withdrawing troops from the occupation force.   

Bush and his people are now more than ever at the mercy of events beyond their control, though it's clear they don't see it that way. Their latest response to the growing fiasco in Iraq is to fire yet another warning shot in Iran's direction. Even as things sour around him, Bush, like Osama, remains anxious to carry the war on terror forward. The pretext need not be substantial (what follows is from the WashPost article linked in this paragraph):   

Perhaps it's because the war on terror is not really a war on terror, as our failure to do anything about Saudi Arabia attests.

Tomorrow--assuming, as always, that nothing else blows up in the meantime--I'll try to post something about a few other key players in the current drama: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, North Korea.