Entries Tagged 'groupmind' ↓

On Friday, April 14, the CNN program, “Your World Today” had as a guest Retired US Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, speaking about US options in Iran. Gardiner, a former lecturer in military strategy at the National War College, has specialized in war games focusing on decision-making at the Presidential advisor level.

Speaking about military options towards the Iranian nuclear threat, Gardiner said, “I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way.” When asked to explain why, he pointed to the recent New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh as one reason — indicating that Hersh’s unnamed source is known to the New Yorker‘s editors who will have verified that he made the statement. He continued:

…the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year. I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, “Hey, I hear you’re accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units.”

He said, quite frankly, “Yes, we know they are. We’ve captured some of the units, and they’ve confessed to working with the Americans.”

The evidence is mounting that that decision has already been made, and I don’t know that the other part of that has been completed, that there has been any congressional approval to do this.

My view of the plan is, there is this period in which some kinds of ground troops will operate inside Iran, and then what we’re talking about is the second part, which is this air strike.

This is the same pattern used by the military in our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. CIA and Special Operations Forces were first on the ground in Afghanistan, gathering intelligence, making contacts with opposition parties and providing targeting information for airstrikes. In Iraq, there were reports that Special Forces and CIA were operating inside Iraq as early as August of 2002, three months before the Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force, and seven months before the war officially began.

While planning and preparation are vital to the success of a military campaign, the similarity to our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to indicate that we are approaching this potential conflict in a manner that may not be appropriate to this situation. Iran has four times the land area and three times the population of Iraq. It has missile technology capable of delivering a chemical, biological or nuclear warhead as far as southern Europe or Western India. It is also much further along in its nuclear weapons development program than Iraq was in 1981 when Israel destroyed the French-built Osirak reactor outside of Baghdad. All indications are that Iran has learned from the action against Osirak and has both scattered and hardened its nuclear development facilities.

Although it has discussed plans to do so, Israel is unlikely to undertake a mission against Iran similar to the Osirak mission due to the much longer distance to Iran and the necessity of traversing either Saudi Arabian airspace or Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi airspace. Another big difference is that Osirak was one target, while Iran has 14-20 nuclear development facilities. During the 1981 raid against Osirak, Israeli fighters flew over Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis have much more sophisticated air defenses today, including AWACS planes purchased from the US in late 1981. If Israel were to fly over Iraqi airspace, that would indicate to Iran and the rest of the world US complicity and approval in the attack, therefore the US is most likely putting great pressure on Israel to stand down. In return for Israel’s self-restraint, the US has promised support, as Bush made explicit in Cleveland on March 20, 2006, when he said,

“I made it clear, and I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel…”

Although, unlike in Iraq, it is clear that the case for Iranian possession of WMDs is beyond dispute, the problem with our current situation is that, as Gardiner showed in a war game he designed and ran for The Atlantic magazine in 2004, that there is no good scenario for an attack on Iran. Any attack on their nuclear facilities would certainly spark reprisal actions which could cause great difficulties for us and our allies. Our forces in Iraq have benefited from Iran’s lack of strong participation in the insurgency; were Iran to act, they could easily incite the Shi’ia in the relatively quiet southern part of the country, with whom they have strong cultural and religious ties. With the current price of oil over US$60 per barrel, any disruptions in the flow of oil could easily send the price up over US$100 per barrel. By blockading the Straits of Hormuz or curtailing their own flow of oil — 4 million barrels per day — Iran could easily wreak havoc on the US and world economies. Then there are the known ties between Iran and Hezbollah, as well as recently reported ties between Iran and al-Qaeda, and other reports which claim that Iranian groups are signing up potential martyrs for attacks against British and American interests worldwide. As Richard Clarke and Steven Simon, former counterterrorism coordinator and senior director for the NSC say in today’s New York Times:

Iran could use its terrorist network to strike American targets around the world, including inside the United States. Iran has forces at its command that are far superior to anything Al Qaeda was ever able to field. The Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah has a global reach, and has served in the past as an instrument of Iran. We might hope that Hezbollah, now a political party, would decide that it has too much to lose by joining a war against the United States. But this would be a dangerous bet.

The discussions and plans for an attack against Iran, Gardiner believes, will, despite the experience in Iraq, call for regime change. The feasibility of such an action is near zero, due to many of the factors ment
ioned so far. But supporters and former members of the government seem not to have learned anything from the difficulties faced in Iraq due to too-optimistic planning. Richard Perle, leading neo-conservative and former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, said at the 2006 AIPAC Policy Council Middle East security roundtable discussion on March 5:

Those of you who see The Washington Post will have seen in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago a map laying out the critical facilities in Iran that are supporting their nuclear weapons program. I trust we know where we are. If we don’t know where they are, what should we think about a diplomatic solution? So, either we know where they are, or we don’t, and if we know where they are, let me tell you that with six or eight B-2 aircraft… those facilities could be eliminated in a single evening, and I hope we are making it clear to the Iranians and to our European allies and to others that if the choices between standing by and watching Iran become a nuclear weapon state, and the President commanding B-2 aircraft to eliminate those facilities, we will not hesitate to eliminate the facilities. Finally, when I say I hope it doesn’t come to that, I hope that before that becomes necessary, we will see a regime change in Iran, and the best way to do that is to support the millions of Iranians who want to see the regime change. We haven’t been doing it… it took a year from last year to get the announcement the other day that we’re going to invest $75 million in supporting the opposition. It should be a lot more money and it should be spent with enthusiasm—not by a bureaucracy that’s not eager to undertake the task.

The danger to our mission in Iraq, the danger to the safety of our people and institutions around the world, the likelihood of financial crisis if oil prices skyrocket, the danger of increased terrorism and instability in the Middle East and in Islamic enclaves around the world, the uncertainty about the number and position of likely targets — all these factors make military action unwise. The probability that any such attack will increase Iran’s resolve to rebuild its nuclear program quickly, more secretively, and with the intention to use it before it can be pre-empted again, makes military action not only unwise, but ultimately futile and self-defeating. At the end of his war game exercise in 2004, Gardiner distilled the lessons of the exercise into advice for the Administration, which he still subscribes to today:

When I finished the wargame for the Atlantic Monthly, I summarized what I had learned in the process. “After all the effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers. You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work.” I have not changed my mind.

When US policymakers say the military option is on the table. I don’t think it’s rhetoric. I don’t believe US policymakers understand the military option won’t work.

(Crossposted from my column at Newsvine)

Technorati Tags: attack, clarke, enrichment, gardiner, hezbollah, iran, israel, military, news, perle, richard-clarke, richard-perle, sam-gardiner, terrorism, uranium, war, world-news

I received a snail-mail solicitation yesterday from Senator Robert Byrd’s re-election committee, Friends of Robert C. Byrd. As an elder statesman and one of those Democrats from a state which you’d expect to be red, I’d normally send him a couple of bucks. After all, he’s the guy who carries his copy of the Constitution in his pocket and can cite from it like some lawmakers [think they] can cite the Bible. His solicitation sounds good, and there’s this quote underneath a picture of him holding up his pocket Constitution:

I make only one promise – the same one I swore before my God and my country nearly half a century ago: To preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Of course, Senator Byrd can be excused a slight lapse in memory due to his advanced age, but, if he is re-elected, he’ll be reminded that the oath he quotes here is actually from the oath of office taken by the President and mandated in Article II of the Constitution. The oath taken by Senators is:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

Nonetheless, he is sworn to defend the Constitution. And as he says in his solicitation letter: “Nowhere in that oath did it say that I had to give my automatic or obedient approval to any nominee whom the President of the United States nominated for a place on the federal bench.” Strong words and absolutely true. That’s what Senator Byrd is known for. He continues on in his letter:

More recently, the Senate has been all but paralyzed by the belief that it should rubber stamp Presidential nominations, even lifetime appointments to the judiciary.

“Advice and consent” are the Constitution’s words. The White House seems to think that means “roll over and obey.” At the mere suggestion of resistance, the Republican Party has tried to shred the traditions of the Senate and suppress free debate.

He’s dead on. Except, that it is deeds, not words that show a man’s true character. For all his strong talk of resistance, of defending the Constitution, of being “the conscience of the Senate“, Senator Byrd is about to betray everything he is asking me for money to defend.

See, barring an ever more unlikely filibuster by the Senate Democrats, on Tuesday, January 31, 2006–just in time for the President’s State of the Union address that evening–the Senate will vote on the confirmation of Samuel J. Alito to the United States Supreme Court. Samuel Alito, with his radical right, out-of-the-mainstream views on everything from church/state separation, privacy rights, and reproductive rights, to environmental protections, gay rights and civil rights, will work hard to enact the complete radical conservative makeover of the United States into a nation our founding fathers would not recognize.

Perhaps most dangerously, Alito is a supporter of the “unitary” executive theory of government, which claims (here, greatly simplified) that the President is the Executive Branch of government, and therefore, as a co-equal branch, neither Congress nor the Judiciary can dictate how the Executive operates. This is not at all what the Founders had in mind. As James Madison writes in The Federalist Papers, No. 47:

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

In light of that theory, Alito’s record and the potential danger to the future of our consitutional government at stake, you would be certain that such a lion of democracy, such a true believer in the truth of the US Consitution as Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, senior member of the US Senate, would be adamantly opposed to the nomination of Samuel Alito. You’d be wrong.

Sen. Robert Byrd broke with a majority of his fellow Democrats Thursday to say he will vote for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito.

Byrd said he believed Alito is an honorable man with a sharp legal mind who will follow the U.S. Constitution and keep presidential power in check. Other Democrats have said they don’t think Alito is independent enough to rule against the Bush administration.

At 88 years old, Byrd may not live long enough to see the consequences of his support of Alito and the subsequent dismantling of the Constitution he claims to love, but those of us with a lot more life ahead of us will be living in that world. Senator Byrd’s career started off ignominiously, but with his principled stand against all aspects of the Iraq war, he seemed to redeem himself in many eyes. With his decision to “roll over and obey”, he has re-acquired all his shame. If he is defeated in the fall elections, it probably won’t make any difference anyway, since his beloved Senate will soon be rendered superfluous in the newly made dictatorship he will have helped cement in place. Nice legacy, Bob. And, when it comes to soliciting me: save your stamps.

Technorati Tags: byrd, senate, alito, supreme_court, unitary_executive

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that business and the Democratic party are necessarily on opposite sides of the fence, but… don’t basic Democratic party ideals value the interests of working folk above the interests of business owners? Isn’t that the reason the Democratic party has historically been the party of organized labor? Isn’t that the reason the Democrats have been (not always to their benefit) traditionally protectionist? Weren’t the Democrats the ones who were responsible for the Civil Rights reformsand Voting Rights legislation? I mean: there have to be some basic values which define the party, don’t there?

Well, then why did Harris Miller step down from his role as president of the Information Technology Association of America in order to run for the US Senate from Virginia as a Democrat? Does this sound like a guy who is on the side of the working stiff:

As recently as October, Miller chastised the feds for making it too cumbersome for ITAA members to hire foreigners. “The current H-1B visa cap makes it increasingly difficult for U.S. companies to compete in global markets,” he said. As for outsourcing, another bogeyman that trade unions, some legislators, and Lou Dobbs say will have all of us flipping burgers at McDonald’s, Miller thinks it’s a good thing. “Global sourcing continues to be a net positive for American workers and the U.S. economy,” he said in an October release.

Now that we’ve already shipped all our high-paying manufacturing jobs off shore, he believes we should follow by sending our high-tech jobs in the same direction. Who does this benefit other than the same people who’ve benefited from Bush’s tax cuts for the top income brackets? Doesn’t sound like a Dem to me. Neither does this:

“We oppose the idea of a voter-verified paper trail,” says Harris Miller, president of the trade group Information Technology Association of America. Introducing paper into the mix, he says, defeats the improved efficiency and reliability e-voting promises. “There was never a golden age when paper ballots were accurately counted,” Miller says.

Makes sense when you realize that Miller has been a paid lobbyist for Diebold. But it doesn’t make sense for a Democrat. And these aren’t the only troubling positions: there’s his attitude toward data mining (gung-ho!) and personal privacy (overrated). Greg Priddy has a much deeper discussion of his positions over at TPM Cafe.

And then, there’s the problem of ethics. As Howard Dean showed Wolf Blitzer on Saturday, the recent lobbying scandals are not a Democratic party problem. And, we’ve gotta stay above reproach on this. Going from government to being a lobbyist has some serious potential for ethical violations, but nothing compared to the dirtiness involved in going from being a paid shill for an industry to being an actual legislator.

If this guy wants to run for Senate, let him. It’s still (sort of) a free country where any kid (with the surname ‘Bush’) can grow up to be a Governor or a Senator or a President. But he shouldn’t be doing under the banner of a party whose basic tenets he opposes. Otherwise, we’ve put the final nail into the coffin of the two-party system.

John at Americablog has a scary story about how your landline or cellphone records may be being reviewed right now. And, no, it’s not by the NSA, the FBI, the CIA or any other government agency. Instead, it may be your wife trying to find out if you’ve been calling your girlfriend. Or it may be your boss checking to see if you’re talking to any other companies about a job. Maybe its your mother wondering if you’ve been calling Planned Parenthood.

It’s simple, really. All you need is the person’s cellphone number and $110, then you go to locatecell.com and within a couple of hours — a day maybe — you can have a list of all calls made from or to that number. It doesn’t seem to be illegal, or else those entities which would pursue it if it was illegal — police, FBI — would be pursuing, right?

Turns out according to a story in the Chicago Sun-Times, that the FBI and the Chicago Police Department know all about it and have even warned their officers that their records may be available to people who shouldn’t see them. And what kind of people might those be? Hmmm… who might want to know the people a cop or a reporter is talking to?

And, if George Bush wanted to, here’s yet another way he could have legally obtained phone information on US citizens. If the FISA courts are too slow, locatecell.com is very fast.

Technorati Tags: privacy, cellphones, wiretaps

I grew up in Suffolk County, Long Island, a suburb of New York City. Although they were liberal-minded, my folks moved us there from the city during the ‘white flight’ of the late 60s. A massive welfare housing project opened next-door to our apartment building, and suddenly there was vandalism and grafitti and a huge fence around our building; suddenly, I was the only white kid in my 3rd-grade class and I was mugged several times walking the 2 or 3 blocks home from school. It bothered them to leave the city, but they felt they had to.

So, I grew up in a very white, middle-class neighborhood of wide streets, green lawns, cars, and a complete lack of anything that could be called “culture.” No museums, no galleries, no place to meet people except the mall or the 7-11. There was a black family on our block, but the kids were jocks, and I was a brain and a druggie, and other than saying cordial “Hi”s to each other, there was no real contact. There were no Hispanics in my classes, as far as I can recall, no Asians, no Native Americans; when it came to minorities, I was it… the token Jew.

My family spent many years striving for some inclusion, fighting to have the school system recognize that, at the very least, I shouldn’t be penalized for missing a test given on Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur (the Jewish High Holy Days), or that maybe the winter choral concert could have one number about Hannukkah — or at least one number without Christ — or that perhaps if history class was going to refer to the religious foundations of the dominant Western civilization, they could refer to it as “Judeo-Christian” heritage, instead of just “Christendom”, or that if the luchroom was going to serve ham that day, they should also have an alternative I could eat: not sausage pizza. And their efforts paid off; there’s now some sensitivity towards other cultures in those schools. (There are also catalogues of the ridiculous extremes to which political correctness can be taken, but…)

Because of my experience, I thought of Long Island as a kind of blandly tolerant place. I moved away from there permanently in 1995, although I visited regularly, since my parents lived there until just a couple of weeks ago, my sister still lives there, and we have a bunch of friends still living on the Island. My image of the place has stayed frozen in that sweet light of childhood.

Suffolk County, alas, has not remained frozen. An article in today’s New York Times details some of the nastiness directed at the recent influx of Hispanic immigrants.

The “this” they claim to be protesting against is what in other areas and other countries is referred to as the continuing and growing problem of illegal immigration. But in Suffolk County, the leading voices in this anti-immigration crusade say:

It’s an “invasion”. These nasty, dirty, smelly people who talk a different language are invading our communities, infesting our houses, congregating on our street-corners, taking the jobs we don’t want, looking at our women… The Greater Farmingdale Community Association (whose leader, Ray Wysolmierski was formerly head of the Sachem Quality of Life Organization, a disgustingly racist group profiled in the recent film “Farmingville”) is not ashamed to wear its racist Ashcroft-ism on its sleeve, saying:

Others are less in-your-face with their racism, hiding it in seemingly-compassionate concerns, which they claim are “necessary, fair and colorblind. They said they are not singling out Hispanic immigrants, but are trying to break up the networks of overcrowded homes, unlicensed contractors and absentee landlords that exploit day laborers.” So, to save them from exploitation, poor working conditions and poverty, these compassionate folks are seeking to deport these hard-working immigrants to places — mainly Mexico and Central America — where there are no jobs, no money and no future.

Steve Levy, the County Executive for Suffolk, recently stirred up the outrage some more by suggesting that the county police department should be “deputized” by the Department of Homeland Security, to expand their jurisdiction to immigration crimes:

“Your papers, please.” Those should be chilling words to anyone who hears them. To their credit, the Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association‘s president, Jeff Frayler, spoke out against the proposal, saying, “the deputization plan is ill-conceived and will serve only to destroy the hard-won goodwill police have built up with Mexican day laborers in Farmingville and other communities.” And faced with the rising tide of criticism of his plan, Levy has decided to back off, although he is still seeking other ways to deal with the problem.

The most disgusting thing about this whole mess is the transparency behind the lack of any given reason for the anti-immigration tide. If the problem truly is poor-quality housing and abusive landlords, then go after the landlords! If the problem is unlicensed contractors, then go after the contractors, or let the shoddy workers shit where they eat and drive themselves out of business. Is the problem jobs? Are the immigrant workers really taking away jobs from the decent white folk? Are the sons and daughters of the decent white folk really clamoring for the right to harvest the potatoes, clean the offices, mow the lawns, slap together the million dollar tract houses for wages small enough to keep everything affordable for the decent white folk?

No, this isn’t about any economic issue. This anti-immigrant sentiment wouldn’t have been out of place in the Deep South 40 years ago. This is racism, pure and simple. This is “bar the doors before the savages ruin our way of life.” This is, “I moved here 30 years ago to get away from those kinds of people.” This is, “I don’t want my daughter to have to sit next to one of them in school.” This is irrational, all-consuming hatred of the Other. And it’s not any place I ever have a desire to call “Home” again.

From sorryeverybody.com:

So, it’s not profound… except in emotion. Its not deep… except in conviction. The pictures are self-promoting, narcisistic, goofy, touching… whatever. This is a collection of photos of Americans — mainly young, but plenty of old and middle-aged folk, too — apologizing to the rest of the world for the outcome of the presidential election. Over 5000 photos so far, and the site-owners report they’re pushing 350GB/day down the wire. There are plenty of photos of citizens of countries other than the US accepting our apologies. What does it mean, well, as the FAQ says:

Guy’s definitely younger, but sexier? I guess there are some who find a certain attraction to bald heads, but…

Honestly, I’m way excited that Guy has asked to join in on this somewhat moribund site. While he and I have discussed politics for years, I’m looking forward to reading his outsider’s commentary on this most important of elections. I know its a cliché, but with the world becoming smaller, there seems to be no such thing as purely national elections. The US casts such an overbearing shadow on world events, that our domestic politics are of equal importance to Europeans, Middle Easterners, Africans and Asians.

Of course, that influence is still very one-sided. The front page of the Guardian newspaper in the UK has a story on the US Vice-Presidential debates last night, but our paper of record, the New York Times, says nothing of British PM Tony Blair’s historic visit to Sudan, where he may have actually made some progress in alleviating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

And Guy’s presence is already having an effect on me: I’ve made my first post since July. There’s nothing like the thought of not having my opinions voiced to motivate me!

Over at Wampum, they did a little detective work and came up with I was interested in seeing how the proposed cost of the reconstruction of Iraq compared with the annual budgets for different US government agencies. The OMB keeps just such information handy.