Hope vs. Fear

The Bush campaign has an especially tough sell this election season. The standard sales pitch of pointing to the incumbent’s accomplishments just isn’t working.
 
President Bush cannot point to great successes in Iraq. None of the public rationales given for the invasion (huge WMD arsenals, an al Qaeda connection, an implied 9/11 connection, etc) have turned out to be true, we have earned the hatred of the world, and American soldiers are dying daily for no apparent purpose.
 
He cannot point to great successes in the war against al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, the group is still planning and carrying out terrorist attacks, it’s still active in Afghanistan because Bush pulled American troops away from the hunt to go fight in Iraq, and new recruits are signing up because of the Iraq invasion.
 
He cannot point to great successes with the economy. The nation is still millions of jobs down from 2000, newly-created jobs pay so little that workers can barely afford life’s necessities (if they’re lucky), bankruptcies and foreclosures are at an all-time high, and a sizable budget surplus has been frittered away, leaving us with a gigantic deficit.
 
With no real accomplishments to tout, the Republicans have no choice but to fall back on that time-tested standby, fear. If you can’t convince someone to vote for your guy because he’s genuinely the better choice for the job, then you’ve got to scare the pants off them. Tell people that if they don’t vote for your candidate, evil monsters will come in the middle of the night and eat their children.
 
While that is not exactly the revised Bush sales pitch, there is little doubt that the Republicans have turned to the politics of fear to win this election. All you have to do is listen to the rhetoric that dominates a typical Bush stump speech: 

“Certain regimes, often with ties to terrorist groups, seek the ultimate weapons as a shortcut to influence... They seek weapons of mass destruction to kill Americans on an even greater scale... It’s not possible to guarantee perfect security in our vast, free nation... We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take... Terrorists planned attacks, with little fear of discovery or reckoning... We remain a nation at risk, directly threatened by an enemy that plots in secret to cause terrible harm and grief...”

Not to be outdone, Vice President Cheney turns up the fear volume in his speeches: 

“Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength. They are invited by the perception of weakness... The leader who sits in the Oval Office will set the course for the war on terror... Today’s enemies send trained killers to live among us and attack civilians from within our own borders. They strike us not with tanks, but by taking the tools of everyday life – aircraft, trucks and cars – and turning them into weapons to kill innocent men, women and children... We face a threat today unlike any our nation has ever known... Thousands of terrorists remain at large, and they are intent on gaining access to increasingly powerful weapons... We cannot allow men like those who recently beheaded American and Korean hostages to acquire the tools that will allow them to kill tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in a few minutes... Terrorists remain determined and dangerous... More violence can be expected in the days and weeks ahead... Nearly three years now have passed without another attack on our soil, yet the terrorist threat to America remains...”

The implication is clear: vote Republican and stay safe, or vote for the other guy and – well, it’s been nice knowing you. And yet Bush and Cheney look positively restrained next to some other Republicans. An outfit called the Authentic GOP sells buttons and T-shirts proclaiming, “10 Out of 10 Terrorists Agree: Anybody But Bush.”
 
The reality, as much as the GOP may hate to admit it, is that the Bush Administration has bungled the War on Terror. By abandoning the hunt for bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders, by bogging our military down in the Iraq quagmire and by handing al Qaeda a gold-plated recruiting poster, Bush has ensured that anti-American terrorism is not going anywhere. (The comic strip Doonesbury did a satirical but scarily insightful take on this.)
 
By now, you’re probably at the window waiting for a bomb-laden jetliner to crash into your house, and you can’t wait until your absentee ballot arrives so you can vote for Bush. But let us now take a look at what the Democratic candidates are saying. To nobody’s surprise, they have a very different take on the world situation. In his speeches, Senator John Kerry says: 

“I will be a president who truly is a uniter, not one who seeks to divide our nation by race, riches or any other label... Making life better for the working poor is part of my vision for a stronger America... We have the means to give all our children a first-rate education... We can do better, and we will... Values mean creating opportunity and fighting for good paying jobs that let American families actually get ahead... Health care is a right for all Americans... In our Administration, we’ll never go to war because we want to; we’ll only go to war because we have to... What we are fighting for is an America where all of us truly are in the same boat...”

 
Senator John Edwards is equally upbeat:

“I am speaking to you today for one simple reason: I love my country... I believe that every American deserves the same chance that I had no matter where they live, who their family is or what the color of their skin... Middle-class families will be able to rest assured that [we] will look out for their interests, restore corporate responsibility, and put our economy back in line with our values... [We] will keep [America] safe and build a strong military, and lead strong alliances, so that young Americans are never put in harm’s way because we needlessly decided to go it alone... As president, [Kerry] will lead this world, not bully it... These are the kind of values we need in a President – somebody who has strength, courage and determination and will never leave any American behind...”

But wait a minute! Does that mean the Democratic ticket is made up of America-hating terrorist-lovers who want us to get rid of our military and watch helplessly as terrorists blow up Disney World and throw a burqa over the Statue of Liberty? Of course not. Nobody is seriously saying that we should not defend ourselves, nor that we should not be vigilant.
 
But there is a very large difference between seeing the world as one big threat requiring us to attack recklessly anyone who might become a problem someday, and seeing it as a possibility for a brighter future in which nations band together to defeat a common enemy.
 
One campaign is appealing to your hopes.
 
The other is playing to your fears.

The choice is yours.

Amend This!

It’s an election year, so it’s time for the wedge issues to be dragged out and plopped onto the national stage. You know, the supposed “issues” that sound good when bludgeoning your opponent, but in the long run don’t mean a thing, not even if you’ve got that swing. In 1988, the first George Bush smacked the hapless Michael Dukakis around with Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance. He tried the same thing in 1992 with “family values” and a “culture war,” but that time it didn’t work. In 1996, Bob Dole asked “where’s the outrage?” when the American people failed to rise up over the GOP-manufactured “Clinton scandals.” The second George Bush gave us a campaign in 2000 based on “integrity,” then went on to preside over one of the most unethical Administrations in American history, one that made the Bill and Monica Show look like Howdy Doody.

And now we have yet another threat to Civilization As We Know It, and this time it’s called gay marriage. Or, as the Washington Times and other hard-right media outlets call it, “homosexual ‘marriage.’” But whatever you call it, it’s gotten the Republicans in a full-blown, frothing-at-the-mouth frenzy, to the point where the GOP introduced a constitutional amendment to chisel prejudice into the Constitution by barring gays and lesbians from marrying in America, now and forever. (Yes, these are the same Republicans who scream about how the Constitution is sacrosanct and can never be interpreted or amended in any way other than ways that would fit right into the 18th century.) The amendment was solidly defeated, not even getting a majority vote, much less the two-thirds needed to advance in the process.

I’m not sure what President Bush and the Republicans were thinking when they put so much political capital into pushing the amendment for a floor vote in the Senate. Perhaps they thought they could tap into that supposedly vast undercurrent in American society which still fears gays as “queers” and “faggots.” This only goes to prove that they have yet to discover that this is in fact the 21st century, and that many Americans have come to realize that gays and lesbians are actual human beings, not so different from the rest of us.

Meanwhile, our allegedly secular President has apparently taken on the role of Defender of the Faith as well, judging from his radio address last week. “If courts create their own arbitrary definition of marriage as a mere legal contract,” he said, apparently unaware that when you get right down to it, marriage in a civil society is a legal contract, “and cut marriage off from its cultural, religious and natural roots, then the meaning of marriage is lost, and the institution is weakened.” He also lashed out at the Massachusetts Supreme Court for calling marriage an “evolving paradigm.”

What nonsense. Of course marriage has evolved over the years and centuries. The original Christian Church wanted no part of marriage at all, seeing it as purely a secular and even anti-religious institution. Wives were seen as literally their husbands’ property, with no rights of their own at all. Indeed, it was only recently that a husband could be held legally accountable for raping his wife. And let us not forget the numerous laws preventing marriages between black slaves, and between people of different races and religions.

But all this has changed. Why? Because marriage and our concept of marriage have evolved.

President Bush and the GOP see marriage as “a union of a man and a woman.” Nothing more, nothing less. But if that were the case, Britney Spears would not have annulled her Las Vegas marriage two days after traipsing down the aisle. Anyone who takes their marriage seriously knows that it’s based on a whole lot more than just gender. It’s based on love and affection, trust and support. And it’s based on two people who are dedicated to sharing their lives together.

If two men or two women find that all-too-rare special someone in each other, then I say bravo; true love and happiness don’t happen enough in this day and age. But Bush and the GOP have bent over backwards to make gay marriage into a cultural Waterloo, that “traditional families” (whatever they are) will somehow be damaged if two men or two women are allowed to get married.

Now, I can’t pretend to know how strong Bush’s marriage is, or the marriages of any of the GOPers leading this particular charge, but I have to wonder how strong they can possibly be if they can be threatened by two people of whom they’ve never heard getting married. It brings to mind a scenario of a Grant Wood-ish farm couple, looking sadly at each other over the kitchen table. “Maw,” the husband says gloomily, “them queers is gettin’ married over at the town hall. Looks like this is it for us. You keep the cow, I’ll keep the pig.”

This is, of course, complete twaddle. No one’s marriage will be affected in the slightest if two men or two women get hitched, and from the widespread public yawning over the Republicans’ latest attempt to turn Americans against each other, quite a lot of people already know that.

And when you think about it, after months of bloviating, nobody has really explained just how gay marriage would “undermine” or otherwise harm marriage as a whole. It seems the Republicans are simply exploiting people’s tendencies to fear anything unfamiliar.

The only votes the GOP will get out of trying to demonize gays and lesbians will be the ones they had in the first place. After all, does anyone really believe that someone who says that “sodomites” will burn in hell would vote Democratic? To the rest of us, such blatant pandering to intolerance and hatred reveals an ideology firmly rooted in the politics of fear. The Republicans really should quit while they still can.

The Speech That Should Be

When Vice President Cheney takes to the campaign trail to lash out at the all-but-official Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, one of his favorite points is that Kerry voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq and then voted against the $87 billion appropriation to pay for the continuing occupation. How, Cheney asks, could Kerry oppose a war after he supported it?

Determined to “play nice,” Kerry has largely ducked the issue, but he should meet it forcefully and head-on. After all, the GOP campaign is operating in full gloves-off mode, so why should the Democrats handicap themselves?

Kerry should say something like this:

My fellow Americans,

When I voted to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq, like my colleagues in the Senate and the House I depended on information from the White House and our intelligence services, particularly the CIA. We were told over and over again that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that he had a lot of them, and that he was an imminent threat to the security of our nation.

We now know that information was false. We now know that months before 9/11, the Bush Administration had already decided in secret to invade Iraq. In pursuit of that goal they pressured CIA analysts, professionals who have dedicated their careers to keeping us safe, to tell them only what they wanted to hear. Whenever the analysts told the truth – that Iraq was not armed to the teeth, that Saddam was not a threat, and Iraq was not in league with al Qaeda – they were ignored.

And the ideologues in the Administration took everything else – every unsubstantiated rumor, every outdated tidbit, every damaging morsel – and passed it on to the American people as if it were verified fact.

You see, it is standard practice in this Administration that if the facts don’t fit the ideology, it’s the facts that have to go.

So when the CIA released its National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002 telling the American people that Iraq without a doubt had all these terrible weapons, they actually had two versions: a public version and a classified version, which reserved for senior Administration officials only. And it just so happened that the classified version was far more doubtful, far more equivocal, than the version given to the rest of us. The Administration knew the truth. The rest of us were told nothing but lies.

But we didn’t know that what we were getting from the CIA was what the White House told them to say. We didn’t know about the professional analysts who were outraged over this blatantly political interference with their work.

And when that information proved to be false, when more than a year of searching Iraq, interviewing weapons scientists, and interrogating the Iraqi leadership, failed to find any of the mass arsenals or al Qaeda connections we were told existed – well, the President just blamed it all on the CIA.

Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee backed up the President, reporting that there were no demands to deliver only the “right” kind of analysis and that all the responsibility for the inaccurate intelligence rests with the CIA. But the committee’s dissenting report said there was plenty of evidence of political pressure and that it was pushed aside to whitewash the President and the Republican Party in this election year.

Some people say, “Well, we got rid of Saddam, and that’s a good thing.” Yes, that is a good thing. But since when do the ends justify the means? Doing so many wrong things to accomplish an otherwise worthy goal does not magically transform them into right things.

Did I vote for this war? Yes, and it is a vote I deeply regret, because we now know this war was based on false pretenses. And the Bush Administration knew it was false, because they had accurate information which they did not share with the rest of us. They preferred to let us believe the other version, the scarier version. If I knew then what I know now, I never would have voted for war.

And afterwards, when the White House presented Congress with a bill for $87 billion for an occupation we had been told over and over again would pay for itself, and when they finally said there was no end in sight for our occupation of Iraq, I saw many things in such a shameless request.

I saw utter arrogance from people secure in the knowledge that having put our armed forces in harm’s way, they could make Congress do whatever they wanted in the guise of “supporting the troops.” I saw complete fiscal irresponsibility from people who squandered a record budget surplus and turned it into a record deficit, and then adding even more to it. And I saw sheer desperation from people who thought that the reality of post-invasion Iraq could easily be brought into line with their pre-invasion propaganda.

I voted against the appropriation, and I am proud of having done so. Having gone to war under such disgraceful circumstances, we should not have prolonged it into an endless occupation, draining our nation in terms of money and blood. We have too many needs at home to throw so much money into this foolhardy adventure, and I will continue to vote against wasting any more of our tax dollars on it.

And as your President, at the first opportunity I will turn Iraq over to a truly multinational force, and bring our men and women home.

So who do you hold accountable in such a situation? Do you blame the person who was manipulated into doing what you want, or do you blame the person who did the manipulating in the first place?

One of my opponent’s bumper stickers features the slogan, “Leadership, Integrity, Morality.” Considering the choices this Administration has made in the War on Terror, it’s an ironic slogan at best.

When you all but abandon the fight against the enemy which attacked us on 9/11 to pursue a vendetta against someone who did not pose a threat to us, and when you pressure people into telling you only want you want to hear and then use them as scapegoats, that’s poor leadership.

When you use phony data and exploit people’s fears to scare them into supporting your already-made decision to go to war, and when you unleash your political hatchet men to smear as unpatriotic anyone who expresses any doubts, that’s the very opposite of integrity.

And when that war, which did not have to happen, kills hundreds of American men and women, and untold thousands of Iraqi civilians – well, there is no word for it other than “immoral.”

I stand before you here today to tell you that I will never send your sons and daughters into harm’s way unless it is absolutely necessary and all other options have been exhausted. I will never send our troops into danger for the sake of a grudge. I will never discard facts and viewpoints provided by our dedicated public servants because they do not fit a politically mandated ideology. And I will never deliberately frighten you into supporting my policies.

To do anything else is unethical, dishonorable, and unworthy of a President of the United States.

America deserves better. You deserve better. And on November 2nd, you can do something about it.

Thank you all, and God bless America.

Now that would be a good response.

No Self-Defense Allowed

When the United Nations’ International Court of Justice in The Hague agreed to provide a nonbinding advisory opinion on Israel’s security fence, being built roughly along the Green Line separating Israel proper from the West Bank, everyone knew the ruling would go against Israel. The ICJ is stacked with judges from countries hostile to the Jewish state, and because Israel is barred from full membership in all regional UN groups, no Israeli judges are allowed to serve. The Israeli government, fully aware they would not receive anything even resembling a fair hearing, announced in advance that construction would continue anyway.

Now the Court has made its ruling, and to nobody’s surprise, the Jews got all the blame. In its blunt language, the ICJ said that “construction of the wall and its associated régime cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order.” (Presumably, the corpses of hundreds of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism just aren’t enough.) And in what can only be called chutzpah, the judges blithely added that “construction of the wall [is] not the only means to safeguard Israel’s interests against the peril invoked.” This after the UN condemns Israel with dreary regularity for taking any action at all against terrorism.

So let me get this straight: Not only is Israel not allowed to defend itself by going on the offensive against terrorists with armed force, it is not allowed to defend itself nonviolently by preventing attackers from slaughtering its citizens in the first place.

This is so absurd it would be right at home in the works of Dr. Seuss:

You cannot do it with a wall,
You cannot do it big or small,
You cannot do it post-close call,
You cannot defend yourselves at all!

The ruling was a legal and political farce, plain and simple. The ICJ never made any secret of its political leanings in the case, and made it very clear from the outset which way they would rule. The opinion completely ignored the daily threat of terror under which all Israelis live, relegating it to the footnotes, and took the Palestinian position on every point. It would all be great material for late-night comics were it not so scornfully tragic.

It would be hard to come up with a harsher indictment of the contempt with which the world sees Israel and the Jews. In the eyes of the rest of the world, Israel’s defined role is to be the global whipping boy, the scapegoat for everyone else’s problems. Israel’s only permissible response to bus bombings and restaurant massacres is to do nothing at all. And the only permissible solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is for Israel to destroy itself.

The Palestinians have shown over and over again that they are not interested in a genuine peace with Israel no matter what. Like it or not, the only realistic response to such an intolerable situation is to pull out and let the Palestinians run their own affairs while protecting Israeli citizens against relentless terrorist attacks. That requires a way to block terrorists from entering Israel and wreaking havoc.

And that requires a strong, defensible barrier.

Israel is doing the right thing. If the rest of the world doesn’t like the idea of Jews actually defending themselves instead of meekly letting themselves be slaughtered, too bad.

So Much for Voting Rights

After three and a half years, it’s pretty obvious that the Bush Administration is not a wellspring of brilliant, well-thought-out ideas. But this latest one takes the cake. Newsweek says that the White House is looking into ways of postponing the November presidential election if an al Qaeda attack occurs.

Such consideration was doubtlessly triggered by the Spanish elections earlier this year in which, three days after a believed al Qaeda attack, the government which backed the American invasion of Iraq was voted out of office and replaced by one which promptly pulled out. Afterwards, comments flew about how al Qaeda had supposedly influenced the election and how the spineless Spaniards had played right into their hands.

Even if such a take is accurate, it doesn’t take a raving paranoid to see the potential for abuse here. For how long would elections be postponed? A day? A week? A year? For that matter, who says the elections only have to be postponed? Why not just cancel them outright until the security situation becomes more settled? If that isn’t for five or ten years, well, we were told this is a new kind of war. And why wait for an attack to actually happen? Why not postpone or even cancel the elections preemptively, just in case they’re thinking of trying something? (That’ll show ’em!) Besides, you don’t want the terrorists to win – or do you?

This is quite possibly one of the dumbest ideas ever to come out of the Bush Administration, and that’s really saying something. The very cornerstone of American democracy is regular elections to choose the people who (at least theoretically) represent our interests in government. As Senator Dianne Feinstein pointed out, “We hold elections in the middle of war, in the middle of earthquakes, in the middle of whatever it takes.” Our democracy is strong enough to withstand whatever al Qaeda and their ilk can throw at us, despite what some in the White House seem to believe.

George & Me

Michael Moore is many things. He is outspoken, unafraid of taking on the powers that be, and willing to do anything to get his point across. Roger & Me documented the economic collapse of his hometown of Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed all its assembly plants there. Bowling for Columbine examined America’s culture of weaponry against the backdrop of continual gun violence. And now, Fahrenheit 9/11 is nothing less than an indictment of the White House of George W. Bush.

The film has triggered reactions all the way from “Michael Moore is a genius and he hit the nail right on the head” to “Michael Moore is a traitor who hates America and who is only helping our enemies.” As is usually the case, the truth lies somewhere in between. (Personally, I believe that Moore loves America but hates what the Bush Administration is doing in America’s name.)

In a little over two hours of film time, Moore makes too many accusations against Bush and the War on Terror to cover individually, but they basically boil down to these:

1. The Republicans stole the 2000 election with the help of Bush's brother (the Governor of Florida) and Bush's cousin (the head of Fox News' election desk).
2. The Bush family’s commitment to putting America first is doubtful because they are in business cahoots with the bin Laden family.
3. The Bush family’s commitment to putting America first is doubtful because they are in business cahoots with the Saudi royal family.
4. Bush ignored pre-9/11 warnings because he was lazy and never thought al Qaeda would attack the United States (see point 2 above).
5. Bush whitewashed possible Saudi involvement in 9/11 to protect his friends in the royal family (see point 3 above).
6. Bush ordered a purely-for-show war against al Qaeda and the Taliban to secure space in Afghanistan for a natural-gas pipeline.
7. The Bush Administration uses vague and hazy warnings of possible terrorist attacks to keep the American people in a permanent state of fear and thus politically acquiescent.
8. The Bush Administration exploited Americans’ post-9/11 fears to (literally) scare up public support for the invasion of Iraq.
9. The war in Iraq is a bloody quagmire and its sole accomplishment is making the rest of the world hate us.

Some of Moore’s points, particularly those about the Bush family’s business connections and hence their loyalties, are a stretch at best, and bring to mind the endless accusations against Bill Clinton back in the 1990s. You know, the ones that said because Clinton knew someone who knew someone else who knew someone else who was once busted for something shady, he was a murdering, dope-smoking, Chinese-loving sleazeball. And Moore doesn’t help his case by making the Afghan gas-pipeline claim; that threatens to make him look like some conspiracy-theory wacko.

But most of Moore’s other points are dead-on. Bush did sit quietly in a Florida classroom and do absolutely nothing for seven agonizing minutes after he was told of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. (A pro-Bush friend of mine once asked what I would do in such a situation. I replied that as President, it was Bush's duty to respond to the crisis immediately rather than continue with a feel-good photo op.) He did fight the congressional and independent 9/11 investigations tooth and nail until he was publicly shamed into allowing them. He did order 28 pages of the congressional 9/11 report, reportedly examining official Saudi connections with al Qaeda, blacked out. He did allow the Saudi government to fly dozens of Saudi nationals, including many of Osama bin Laden’s relatives, out of the country with only perfunctory examination while the rest of America was grounded. And he most definitely did play to our fears of another 9/11-type attack to manipulate public opinion into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

And speaking of playing to our fears, am I the only one who finds it just a tad suspicious that scary terrorist warnings tend to be announced whenever the White House gets into trouble over a particularly odious revelation or threatens to get upstaged? Has anyone else noticed that these “warnings” are almost always so ridiculously vague as to be useless? Personally, I think most of it is that they’re going overboard trying to keep their butts covered and not look as inattentive as they did before 9/11. But from Moore’s standpoint, however, the warnings are anything but useless if their real purpose is to keep the public in a constant state of fear and thus more likely to go along with whatever the Administration says.

The film is not, however, perfect. Disturbingly, there is no mention at all of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial cruelties, Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in the 1980s, or the struggle over United Nations weapons inspections – all of which are essential to understanding the present conflict and putting it in context. The only footage of pre-war Iraq shows smiling families flying kites and enjoying themselves, giving the impression that Iraq was a happy paradise before we got involved. But this was hardly the case, and while Moore has never claimed the film to be a "fair and balanced" examination of the war, these troubling omissions only undermine the film and give ammunition to his critics.

Most of the aid-and-comfort criticisms of Moore derive from his use of unflinchingly graphic footage of the war and his showing soldiers asking why they are fighting in Iraq. Here is war in all its gory glory, with amputated limbs, children screaming in pain, bloated corpses, and everything else we never see on the network news. Anyone who has ever been in combat will testify that war, in the words of William T. Sherman, is hell. The closest the rest of us will ever come to the horror of war is probably the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan. But does that mean that the home front should be protected with sanitized coverage?

Will bringing the realities of war into America’s living rooms result in an evaporation of public support for the war? Will showing American soldiers as people who can question their leaders instead of just supporting the war blindly and without a second thought really embolden America’s enemies? Moore leaves us to ponder these questions for ourselves.

Fahrenheit 9/11 has generated a lot of heat from all points of the political spectrum, from Michael Moore’s most devoted fans to his most ferocious detractors. But whatever your opinion of the war, of Bush, and of Moore himself, one undeniable fact about the film is that he makes us think for ourselves about what America is doing and forces us to consider the possibility that our leaders might not always do what’s right. And whether you agree with him or not, thinking for ourselves is always a good thing.

Desperate Times

These are truly desperate times for the Bush Administration. After saying over and over again that the “handover of sovereignty” in Iraq would magically solve all our problems, the handover came and went – and everything pretty much stayed the same. It was business as usual with more bombings, more fighting, and more deaths. I can just imagine President Bush sitting in the Oval Office, scratching his head at how all these Iraqis could be so ungrateful, even after we handed token power over to some handpicked figureheads, and wondering what the next step could possibly be.

With their one and only plan (actually, it was more of a wish) for getting us out of the Iraq mess not working, the White House is starting to show real anxiety. Bush’s blatantly made-for-public-consumption “let freedom reign” scribble went over like a lead balloon. (Note to Karl Rove and other Administration image-meisters: Doing something that obvious is guaranteed to backfire and make you look stupid as well as reckless. Next time, think subtle.)

Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney is still insisting that Iraq and al Qaeda were partners in crime despite all the evidence to the contrary. In a speech he gave yesterday in New Orleans, Cheney said that “in the early 1990s, Saddam [Hussein] had sent a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service to Sudan to train al Qaeda in bomb-making and document forgery.” There is, however, one minor problem with this: intelligence services say such an event never happened, it was just a rumor.

Cheney also insisted that Iraq and al Qaeda were pals because alleged al Qaeda deputy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lived in Baghdad. Not only is there no evidence of any collaboration between the Iraqi government and Zarqawi, but by that logic, the United States and al Qaeda are pals because the 9/11 hijackers lived in America before the 2001 attack. He also accuses Baghdad of having refused to turn over Zarqawi to the US, conveniently forgetting to mention that with a constant pattern of threats, bombings and accusations going back to the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq would be loath to do anything Washington asked.

And once again he dragged out the matter of the allegedly al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Islam group in northern Iraq, once again neglecting to point out that (a) it was located outside Saddam’s control in the northern no-fly zone, and that (b) far from being allied with Saddam, Ansar was dedicated to overthrowing him.

(In response to Cheney’s speech, a 9/11 commission spokesman stood by the report issued two weeks ago, which said there was no operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and said they have seen no information since then to make them change their findings.)

Cheney then took a new and different tack: it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault. Apparently, Clinton did not “respond very forcefully” to such attacks as the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the African embassy attacks in 1998, and so on. “Our enemies took lessons from this experience,” Cheney went on to say. “They concluded that our country was soft... Terrorists were emboldened by years of being able to strike us with impunity.”

This, of course, turns history on its ear. Saudi intelligence dragged its feet and refused to aggressively investigate the Khobar Towers attack, much to Clinton’s disgust. He ordered attacks on al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan after the embassy bombings, and Congressional Republicans pounced on him – not for using too little force but for using too much. They also accused him of launching the attacks solely to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky ruckus. To claim that Clinton did nothing to strike against al Qaeda, as the GOP is now doing, is a gross distortion of history. And to explain away Bush’s failures by putting all the blame on the previous occupant of the White House is not only wrong politically, it insults the memory of the Americans who have died because of this Administration’s incompetence.

By now, this is to be expected from the Bush Administration; it’s standard procedure to present rumors as facts, to keep on with the same sales pitch even after it’s discredited, and to ignore anything which doesn’t fit into the official ideological matrix.

Each time Cheney opens his mouth and proclaims the existence of a phantom Iraq-al Qaeda connection, he makes himself look more and more like a fool who is so blinded by his own ideology that he simply cannot see anything else. And each time Bush lets himself be part of a ham-handed scheme to put a happy face on a crumbling situation, he reveals himself to be either hopelessly naïve or just plain hopeless.

Not Following the Script

President Bush’s ardent defenders like to complain about how roughly he’s supposedly treated by that classic conservative bugaboo, the Liberal Media. In fact, Bush is apparently so scarred by all these terrible media types that he brags about not reading newspapers or watching the news.

Of course, the reality is that the White House press corps tends to be so farcically deferential to the President that they refuse to call him on even wildly bizarre or false statements. Watch Bush’s next press conference and you’ll see how the supposedly Bush-hating press corps tosses softballs instead of actual questions.

It is therefore particularly instructive to take note of the White House’s reaction to Bush’s June 24 interview with Radio and Television Ireland. Irish reporter Carole Coleman, you see, apparently committed the sin of wanting actual answers instead of scripted responses.

For example:

COLEMAN: Mr. President, you’re going to arrive in Ireland in about 24 hours’ time, and no doubt you will be welcomed by our political leaders. Unfortunately, the majority of our public do not welcome your visit because they’re angry over Iraq, they’re angry over Abu Ghraib. Are you bothered by what Irish people think?

BUSH: Listen, I hope the Irish people understand the great values of our country. And if they think that a few soldiers represents [sic] the entirety of America, they don’t really understand America then. There have been great ties between Ireland and America, and we’ve got a lot of Irish Americans here that are very proud of their heritage and their country. But, you know, they must not understand if they’re angry over Abu Ghraib – if they say, this is what America represents, they don’t understand our country, because we don’t represent that. We are a compassionate country. We’re a strong country, and we’ll defend ourselves – but we help people. And we’ve helped the Irish and we’ll continue to do so. We’ve got a good relationship with Ireland.

COLEMAN: And they’re angry over Iraq, as well, and particularly the continuing death toll there.

BUSH: Well, I can understand that. People don’t like war. But what they should be angry about is the fact that there was a brutal dictator there that had destroyed lives and put them in mass graves and had torture rooms. Listen, I wish they could have seen the seven men that came to see me in the Oval Office – they had their right hands cut off by Saddam Hussein because the currency had devalued when he was the leader. And guess what happened? An American saw the fact that they had had their hands cut off and crosses – or Xs carved in their forehead. And he flew them to America. And they came to my office with a new hand, grateful for the generosity of America, and with Saddam Hussein’s brutality in their mind. Look, Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, against the neighborhood. He was a brutal dictator who posed a threat – such a threat that the United Nations voted unanimously to say, Mr. Saddam Hussein –

COLEMAN: Indeed, Mr. President, but you didn’t find the weapons of mass destruction.

BUSH: Let me finish. Let me finish. May I finish? He said – the United Nations said, disarm or face serious consequences. That’s what the United Nations said. And guess what? He didn’t disarm. He didn’t disclose his arms. And, therefore, he faced serious consequences. But we have found a capacity for him to make a weapon. See, he had the capacity to make weapons. He was dangerous. And no one can argue that the world is better off with Saddam – if Saddam Hussein were in power.

COLEMAN: But, Mr. President, the world is a more dangerous place today. I don’t know whether you can see that or not.

BUSH: Why do you say that?

COLEMAN: There are terrorist bombings every single day. It’s now a daily event. It wasn’t like that two years ago.

BUSH: What was it like September the 11th, 2001? It was a – there was a relative calm, we –

COLEMAN: But it’s your response to Iraq that’s considered –

BUSH: Let me finish. Let me finish, please. Please. You ask the questions and I’ll answer them, if you don’t mind. On September the 11th, 2001, we were attacked in an unprovoked fashion. Everybody thought the world was calm. And then there have been bombings since then – not because of my response to Iraq. There were bombings in Madrid. There were bombings in Istanbul. There were bombings in Bali. There were killings in Pakistan.

COLEMAN: Indeed, Mr. President, and I think Irish people understand that. But I think there is a feeling that the world has become a more dangerous place because you have taken the focus off al Qaeda and diverted into Iraq. Do you not see that the world is a more dangerous place? I saw four of your soldiers lying dead on the television the other day, a picture of four soldiers just lying there without their flight jackets.

BUSH: Listen, nobody cares more about the death than I do –

COLEMAN: Is there a point or place –

BUSH: Let me finish, please. Please. Let me finish, and then you can follow up, if you don’t mind. Nobody cares more about the deaths than I do. I care about it a lot. But I do believe the world is a safer place and becoming a safer place. I know that a free Iraq is going to be a necessary part of changing the world. Listen, people join terrorist organizations because there’s no hope and there’s no chance to raise their families in a peaceful world where there is not freedom. And so the idea is to promote freedom, and at the same time protect our security. And I do believe the world is becoming a better place, absolutely.

(The interview and a transcript are available online.)

Horrors! How dare Coleman take her job as a journalist seriously and refuse to swallow unquestioningly what the President deigns to allow her to have? How dare she disrespect the leader of the free world by actually seeking answers to her questions instead of being satisfied with canned responses?

The White House reacted swiftly, canceling a planned interview Coleman was going to have with Laura Bush and generally acting like a spoiled brat.

But wait, there’s more: Coleman was required to submit her questions in advance. Bush refused to give the interview at all unless he knew exactly what she was going to ask. He fully expected her to simply roll over as do so many American reporters so infuriatingly, and was completely unprepared when she acted like a real journalist instead of a stenographer.

We now know this is standard operating procedure for the Bush Administration. In The Price of Loyalty, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill revealed that Cabinet meetings are scripted down to the last detail, with White House political apparatchiks telling participants in advance what they will talk about, what position they will take, for how long they will speak, and so on. Any deviation from the script was frowned upon most severely.

Take a moment to consider the implications of the President of the United States – the most powerful man in the world – being utterly unable to function without a script.

Every week or two, C-SPAN broadcasts Prime Minister’s Questions from the British House of Commons, where the Prime Minister is required to answer questions from other Members of Parliament. Whenever Tony Blair is shown thinking on his feet, without resorting to evasion, stock comebacks or double-talk, it becomes painfully obvious that Bush wouldn’t last ten seconds in there. Likewise, the European media would never let a national leader get away with the sort of drivel that the American media so exasperatingly allows from Bush.

In the meantime, I have a request for Coleman: please quit your job in Ireland and come to work in America. We desperately need a journalist on the White House beat who actually practices journalism.

The Rule of Law

Almost, but not quite, lost in the hoopla over yesterday’s “transfer of sovereignty” in Iraq from the United States to a handpicked interim government (whose Prime Minister was incidentally a CIA asset in the 1990s and reportedly helped orchestrate a bombing campaign in Baghdad) was a pair of Supreme Court decisions reminding us that government’s wartime powers are not infinite.

One case concerned the 600-odd detainees at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who were accused of being connected with al Qaeda or the Taliban, while the other concerned an American citizen arrested in Afghanistan. All were declared “enemy combatants” by the Government and locked away without charges, without a trial, and without any access to an attorney. (A third case, concerning an American citizen arrested in Chicago and declared an enemy combatant, was punted back to the lower courts on procedural grounds. The case of Jose Padilla is not over.) President Bush, through the Justice Department, claimed the unilateral and unlimited power to lock up anyone at any time as part of the “War on Terror,” and told the courts to butt out by barring detainee access to judicial review.

But whoa! Not so fast, the Court said. Even in wartime, even under military jurisdiction, defendants have the right to their day in court. The Court rejected the Administration claim that detainees have no access to American courts as Guantanamo Bay is not in the United States, pointing out that the Government has “complete jurisdiction and control” over the base. So from a legal standpoint, detainees at the base are in the US and thus have access to the courts.

The Court, however, reserved its sharpest rebuke for the case of an American citizen arrested in Afghanistan and locked up as an enemy combatant. By an 8-1 vote, the Court ruled that Yaser Esam Hamdi cannot be held indefinitely without a fair opportunity to rebut the charges against him. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that “a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens.” Even Justice Antonin Scalia, not normally known for being a strong advocate of individual rights against government power, said that “the very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.” Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, saying that “this detention falls squarely within the Federal Government’s war powers, and we lack the expertise and capacity to second-guess that decision.” (In other words, we should trust the Administration with blind faith and shut up, despite the fact that most thinking adults have a problem with “because I say so” reasoning coming from the President.)

Some may scream that the Court has blocked the ability of the President as Commander in Chief to conduct war operations. But what the Court has actually done is remind us that when anyone is accused of wrongdoing, the Government has to prove its case in a public trial; it cannot just declare someone guilty and lock them up without any chance for the accused to challenge it. Even in wartime – especially in wartime – our basic freedoms do not go out the window, and for the Administration to claim the unlimited power to toss anyone into a legal black hole shows a frightening arrogance. After all, Americans have historically held a dim view of a President who claims the unchecked power to do anything without answering to anyone.

“It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation’s commitment to due process is most severely tested,” the Court said in its ruling, “and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad.” Well put.

Prove It

Last week, the 9/11 commission released a report saying in plain English that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, especially on 9/11. Since this was one of the Bush Administration’s favorite propaganda lines, the report simply could not go unchallenged, and the White House promptly marshaled its media allies to hammer away at the commission’s findings.

Said hammering is taking three forms:

1. This conclusion was reached by lower-level staffers and not the commissioners themselves. This one didn’t fly for very long; after all, one would think that said staffers would be unable to release a paper under the commission’s name and on the commission’s website without the commissioners’ approval.

2. 9/11 connection? We never said there was a 9/11 connection. Oh, please – don’t insult our intelligence. For months before and after the invasion of Iraq, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others said ad nauseum that Iraq and al Qaeda were two peas in a pod, and repeatedly insinuated (and sometimes more) that Iraq was behind 9/11. For example:
a. “You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.” (Bush, 9/25/02)
b. Invading Iraq “is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” (Bush’s official war notification letter to Congress, 4/19/03)
c. “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally of al Qaeda.” (Bush, 5/1/03)
d. “If we’re successful in Iraq, we will have struck a blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” (Cheney, 9/14/03)
e. “Saddam was a danger in the region where the 9/11 threat emerged.” (Condoleezza Rice, 9/17/03)

3. All right, so maybe Iraq wasn’t involved with 9/11, but they were still involved with al Qaeda. This one doesn’t wash either. The commission release clearly said that Baghdad ignored al Qaeda’s repeated attempts to procure training camps and weapons from Iraq.

As one aspect of the Administration’s PR counterattack, the arch-conservative Washington Times trumpeted an unconfirmed – and very obviously planted – allegation that a senior official in Saddam’s militia was also a member of al Qaeda, but the story fell apart just hours later with the realization that there were actually two different people with similar names. Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to help out by claiming he personally warned Bush soon after 9/11 that Saddam was planning terrorist attacks within the US, but that also went nowhere when the White House sheepishly admitted that the story was groundless and no such warning was ever given.

Most ludicrously, Cheney was trotted out on CNBC Thursday night to mutter darkly that the White House “probably” held back evidence from the 9/11 commission proving that Saddam collaborated with al Qaeda and that – again – he just might have had a hand in 9/11 after all.

Putting aside the question of whether or not the Administration deliberately withheld very relevant facts from the commission, I say to Cheney: Prove it. Release your evidence. If it supports what you claim, then you should have no problem with making it public. After all, your Administration has in the past leaked sensitive information for political purposes, so this shouldn’t be such a big deal. (Remember Valerie Plame, the CIA operative whose cover was blown in retaliation for her husband publicly saying the African uranium story was a crock?) But it seems infinitely more likely that if there were such a smoking gun, it would have been loudly publicized long before now. Instead, it seems that any new “evidence” would be just more of the same: more rumors, more conjecture, and more speculation.

The Administration ideologues, hell-bent on war with Iraq no matter what, saw only what they wanted to see and took unsupported allegations to be gospel truth. They ignored everyone who told them it wasn’t true. They knowingly poured deceptive garbage into the public consciousness to scare Americans into going along with their schemes. And now that they’ve been caught red-handed, they are completely incapable of doing anything other than spouting the same nonsense. How pathetic.

Don’t Bother Me with the Facts

It has become standard operating procedure in the Bush Administration that if the facts don’t jibe with the ideology, one just ignores the facts and keeps plowing on straight ahead. Such is the Administration’s response to the 9/11 commission’s discrediting of one of its favorite canards: that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were partners in mayhem, that the invasion of Iraq was part of the War on Terror, and there was no substantive difference between Iraq’s secular dictatorship and al Qaeda’s theocratic terrorism.

“We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States,” the commission reported in direct contradiction to the standard Administration line. “Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded.”

In any other Administration, it would quickly be realized that this particular dog no longer hunts and a proven-wrong sales pitch would be abandoned. But after three years of this Administration, we know better.

Proving himself to be utterly unable to step outside his ideological box, President Bush responded to the report by flatly denying it and just repeating the same thing. “There was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” he insisted somewhat peevishly. (In his defense, perhaps he was never told of the commission’s findings. After all, he has bragged on the record that he doesn’t bother to keep up with world events from any independent sources, preferring instead to be spoon-fed by his staff.)

Not content simply to give the impression of being disconnected from reality, Bush went on to deliver a real whopper: “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

Oh, really? That will be a surprise to millions of Americans who were intentionally deceived by White House rhetoric, both specific and general, into thinking just such a connection existed. Vice President Cheney kept mentioning the mythical Prague meeting between lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent long after it was debunked by American and Czech intelligence. Other officials, including Bush himself, were a little more careful, choosing instead to use buzzwords such as “Saddam,” “September 11” and “al Qaeda” endlessly in the same sentences to plant the impression of a connection without actually saying so. Either way, Bush’s statement comes off as either shamelessly dishonest or utterly idiotic.

Some say that the White House’s staying “on message” no matter what shows resolve and steadfastness. But when you keep on using the same lines long after they’ve repeatedly been exposed as false, that’s not resolve, that’s arrogant stupidity. Whether it’s deliberate or delusional, the thought of such blatant deceit coming from the most powerful people in the world is not a comforting one.

Once More, with Feeling

How many times must it be said?

Iraq was not involved with al Qaeda.

Iraq was not involved with al Qaeda.

IRAQ WAS NOT INVOLVED WITH AL QAEDA!

For two years, an unvarying drumbeat of misinformation has poured out of the White House claiming that Iraq and al Qaeda were thick as thieves. Combined with the constant insinuation that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks, it was a major selling point in the campaign to scare Americans into supporting the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. This was done over the protests of State Department and CIA analysts pointing out that no such connections have been shown to exist, and the secular Saddam Hussein and the Islamist Osama bin Laden were well known to loathe each other. Since the fall of Baghdad, no evidence of such a link has been discovered.

This minor inconvenience has failed to slow down the propaganda machine in any way. Indeed, as recently as this week, Vice President Cheney claimed that Hussein “had long established ties with al Qaeda.” President Bush dutifully backed him up, saying that the alleged post-invasion presence in Iraq of al Qaeda deputy Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi constitutes “the best evidence of [Iraqi] connection to al Qaeda affiliates and al Qaeda.” The conservative media, especially William Kristol’s Weekly Standard magazine and the NewsMax.com website, have valiantly attempted to flog this particular dead horse, insisting that Hussein and bin Laden were bosom buddies.

Now the 9/11 commission, aided by testimony from senior FBI and CIA analysts, has added its weight to this debunking, having failed to uncover any credible evidence of Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration. While finding that al Qaeda did make overtures to Iraq (among other countries, including Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan) asking for training camps and weapons, those overtures were ignored. The supposed and much-ballyhooed April 2001 meeting in Prague between lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent never happened. Iraq was not involved with 9/11 in any way.

So a central pillar of the Bush Administration’s argument for invading Iraq has been discredited – again. Every time Bush or Cheney insists, in the face of all logic and facts, that Hussein and bin Laden were partners in jihad, they are further exposed as self-deluded liars who are utterly unable to deviate from a proven-false party line. The rationales to justify the war and the chaos which followed have grown fewer and fewer. But don’t expect any realization of that fact in the White House.

Remembering Reagan

When Ronald Reagan left the White House and retired from public life back in 1989, it was well known that at 78, he would not be as active an ex-President as others, from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter. When he announced in 1994 that he was suffering from the disease sadly nicknamed the Long Goodbye, Alzheimer’s sprang to the forefront of the public consciousness. And now that he is gone, we find ourselves looking back collectively.

Known as the Great Communicator, Reagan brought an almost royal classiness to the White House unseen since the days of JFK. Everything was white-tie, the finest china, the fanciest guest list. Reagan’s cheerful what-me-worry optimism was a decided change from Jimmy Carter’s often dour seriousness. He could always be counted upon to deliver a stern face or a comforting expression when called for, and as we are constantly reminded, he made America "feel good about itself again."

Unfortunately, that's not all he did.

Reagan also brought an air of selfishness and utter insensitivity to many issues. Whether it was declaring that ketchup was good enough as a vegetable for school lunches, announcing on Thanksgiving Day that unemployment benefits would be taxed, or never offering anything close to a balanced budget then blaming Congress for fiscal excess, the Reagan Administration too often displayed the uglier aspects of the “Me Decade.”

Reagan ignored the early years of the AIDS epidemic while cutting social spending to the bone and beyond, crippling health care, education, housing and other public services. His tax policies recklessly redistributed wealth upwards, increasing the number of families below the poverty line by a full third. His mania for deregulation paved the way for the savings and loan scandal, the bill for which you and I are still paying through our tax dollars.

He brought about an end to the Cold War by embarking on an uncontrolled arms race, forcing the Soviets to bankrupt their economy in a vain effort to keep up – and it was revealed only after the Soviet Union collapsed that its military was nowhere near the fearsome beast he claimed it was.

For someone who claimed to champion freedom across the globe, it should be noted that Reagan winked and said nothing when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians -- the very same atrocities which George W. Bush exhumed fifteen years later to justify invading Iraq. He was Our Man in Baghdad at the time, you see, and thus could do no wrong. It will be interesting to see how the commentators who now rush to heap posthumous praise on Reagan handle this little matter...but it's more likely that it will be simply ignored.

His anti-Communist “evil empire” rhetoric made its way into the popular culture of the 1980s, emerging in such gratuitously Soviet-bashing movies as Red Dawn, Invasion USA and Rocky IV as well as the TV miniseries Amerika. (It’s not like this was new to him. Back when he was head of the Screen Actors Guild, he was an FBI informer, ratting on his fellow thespians at the first hint of any political thought deemed unorthodox.)

But Reagan’s most lasting impact may well be not the tripling of the national debt nor the relentless government-is-the-enemy GOP mindset, but rather the transformation of the Presidency into an endless PR campaign. His handlers knew all too well that since Reagan the man was a genuinely nice guy, looked good on TV and could deflect inconvenient questions with a smile and a wave, Reagan the President could get away with almost anything. And so Reagan the President was able to push through policies that hurt children, the disabled, the sick, and the elderly – people who were usually incapable of fighting back – while Reagan the man stood above it all, untouchable.

Reagan was the Teflon President; nothing stuck to him. No matter how many policy disasters came about, from the secret wars of El Salvador and Nicaragua to the constitutional morass of Iran-Contra, he personally was never held accountable for anything. As House Speaker Tip O’Neill recounted in his memoirs, a constituent whose disability benefits had been cut came to him for help. As they discussed the problem, the constituent told O’Neill he was being too tough on Reagan and asked him to lay off. “Who do you think is cutting your benefits?” O’Neill asked, stunned. “It’s not him,” came the confident reply, “it’s the people around him.”

Reagan was the perfect figurehead President, delegating the actual responsibility to his staff while reserving the TV appearances for himself. No one else could have gotten away with blundering his way through a press conference with one misstatement and gaffe after another; no one else could have gotten away with looking strongly into the camera and blaming other people for his own mistakes.

And because of his personal appeal and charisma, he got away with it all. Once, in an inadvertently aired microphone test, he chose to quip, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” In the face of queasy public reaction, Reagan’s response, instead of admitting that nuclear annihilation might not be such a laughing matter after all, was to blame the media for reporting it in the first place. And people agreed, brushing it off as a tempest in a teapot rather than as a disturbing insight into the most powerful man on Earth.

After he left office, the conservative movement transformed him from a mere mortal into a full-fledged political saint, determined to name monuments and buildings after him in all fifty states, even trying to get his face added to Mt. Rushmore. The invocation of his name and memory was so powerful that when the conservative media pounced on rumors that CBS’ planned miniseries The Reagans was insufficiently worshipful, the network was scared into yanking it.

Reagan’s death has hastened this transformation, and the current media coverage tends to overlook the dark side of his Administration. Part of this is simply what normally happens when anyone dies: accentuate the positive while glossing over the bumpy parts. But we should not let this prevent a full and honest appraisal of his Presidency, no matter who it offends ideologically.

Back to the Gulag

In the bad old days of the Soviet Union, the Communist government maintained the Gulag, a network of prisons and labor camps across the country (but mainly in the frozen tundra of Siberia) to hold anyone even remotely suspected of insufficient support for the Revolution, having the wrong ethnic identity, and other supposed offenses. (For a vivid depiction of life in the camps, from the endless cold and hunger to the helpless dread one felt at falling into this legal nowhere, I recommend Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.)

A half-century after Josef Stalin’s death, the United States is in grave danger of creating a Gulag of its own. Not in terms of below-freezing prisons in Alaska, but in terms of a legal black hole.

Two years ago, an American citizen and former gang member named Jose Padilla was arrested by federal agents after stepping off a plane in Chicago. In tandem with the White House, the Justice Department said he was an al Qaeda agent, unilaterally declared him to be an “enemy combatant,” and ordered him locked up in a Navy brig in North Carolina. Since then, he has been forbidden to see anyone, from his family to his lawyers, and has been under deep interrogation. He was never charged with any crime and was never put on trial for anything. He was just pronounced guilty and was made to disappear. (It takes a wry sense of irony to note that Padilla’s arrest and enemy-combatant designation was demagogically announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft in, of all places, Moscow.)

Now, the Justice Department has defended its handling of the Padilla case for the first time, and the way in which it has done so is astonishing. Deputy Attorney General James Comey held a press conference the other day at which he announced that Padilla planned to blow up apartment buildings and commit other crimes. Anticipating reporters’ questions, Comey freely said that if Padilla had been put on trial instead of being declared an enemy combatant, “he would very likely have followed his lawyer’s advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right. He would likely have ended up a free man, with our only hope being to try to follow him 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and hope – pray, really – that we didn’t lose him.” He also ominously said that “we’ll figure out down the road what we do with Jose Padilla.”

So the only way to deal with an American citizen who may or may not have been in league with al Qaeda was to make him disappear, that the right of any accused person not to be forced to testify against himself is little more than a technicality, and that Padilla would probably have been acquitted had he claimed that right? To me, this sounds an awful lot like an admission that a court case would likely have been painfully weak. But having invested a lot of political capital in proclaiming him to be a terrorist – especially by blaring accusations in a full press conference without ever bothering to give him any chance to respond – the Justice Department cannot now back away from it.

This is not, of course, to say that Padilla is without doubt an innocent victim of circumstance, blameless and pure. Far from it; we do not know for sure whether he actually committed any of the offenses of which he has been accused. All we have is the government’s claims that he did – and they refuse to put those claims to the test in court.

The American system of justice is based on the notion that anyone accused of wrongdoing is entitled to a fair trial at which the government would have to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Dispensing with all that and just declaring someone to be guilty without even charging him with anything is, quite simply, un-American. The concept that the government has the unchallengeable power to take anyone, particularly an American citizen, and throw them in jail without charges, without a trial, and without end is nothing short of scary.

After two years in a legal limbo, Jose Padilla deserves a trial. If he is found guilty of being an al Qaeda terrorist-in-training, lock him up and throw away the key. If he is found innocent, set him free and allow him to get back to his life. But we will never know the truth unless the government is willing to make an actual case instead of just announcing him to be guilty. Doing anything else is a mockery of justice, plain and simple.

Busted!

Two months before America invaded Iraq last year, a particularly massive contract to rebuild the Iraqi oil infrastructure was awarded to Halliburton by the Army Corps of Engineers. The award was under most unusual circumstances: there was no competitive bidding and no ceiling to the payment amount, both of which were contrary to the usual process. In a nutshell, a multi-billion dollar contract was simply given away.

By a staggering coincidence, Halliburton’s CEO had left the company in 2000 to become Vice President of the United States. Despite Dick Cheney’s repeated denials that he had anything to do with the deal, there has always been more than a whiff of cronyism about it. (It did not help that since becoming Vice President, Cheney has annually received hundreds of thousands of dollars in “deferred compensation” from Halliburton.) It was blatantly obvious that Halliburton could never have gotten the contract under such conditions in a million years without its former boss now being VP, but it could never be proved.

Until now.

Time is now reporting that Cheney, far from keeping his old company at arm’s length, actively coordinated the sweetheart deal. The magazine obtained a copy of an internal E-mail message, dated March 5, 2003 and written by a Corps of Engineers official, saying that the contract had been approved and that the White House would be officially informed the next day.

“We anticipate no issue,” the message goes on to say, “since action has been coordinated w[ith] VP’s office.”

Cheney’s spokesman Kevin Kellems responded to the article by claiming the E-mail was just “a heads-up...in anticipation of controversy over the award of a sole-source contract to Halliburton.” This does not, however, sound like much of a heads-up to me. Rather, it says loud and clear that the deal was engineered to benefit Cheney’s old cronies, ethics be damned.

Anyone else would instantly recognize that it’s just plain wrong for a government official to be actively involved in the awarding of a contract to one’s former colleagues. The fact that the contract was awarded under such ludicrously favorable terms makes it all the more clear that Cheney simply doesn’t get it. Does he really believe that the rules don’t apply to him, that the normal ethics laws are, to steal a phrase from Leona Helmsley, “for little people?”

As the fiascos keep piling up with no end in sight, Cheney has become a major liability to the Bush re-election effort. But since this Administration never holds anyone in power accountable for anything, don’t expect any consequences.

It's Just a Movie

Much ado has been made about 2004’s first big-scale “blockbuster” film, The Day After Tomorrow. The movie has all the usual hallmarks of a summer popcorn flick – standard cookie-cutter characters, cheesy dialogue, some good solid destruction, and a ton of money spent on special effects. In short, it’s supposed to be a nicely diverting time-waster.

Directed by Roland Emmerich, who made Independence Day as well as Godzilla (you win some, you lose some), the film is about a new Ice Age triggered in only a week or so by global warming. The result is typical summer-movie death and disaster, with the trailers showing some very exciting-looking shots of twisters demolishing downtown Los Angeles and a tsunami drowning New York. (Of course, trailers are notorious for showing only the best parts of the movie, but that’s beside the point.)

Some environmental groups have glommed onto the film, pronouncing it to be a sort of wake-up call to the dangers of global warming. (It’s not like that hasn’t been done before. Look at Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. Actually, don’t look at it; it’s not very good.) Al Gore, the Ben & Jerry guys, and others have gone on record saying that the premise is rooted in accurate (if highly exaggerated) science and that basically everything in the movie is George W. Bush’s fault.

On the other side, detractors claim the film is little more than pseudo-science tree-hugging propaganda, and have compared it to the 1983 TV film The Day After, in which the Americans and Soviets annihilate each other in a nuclear war. They also point out that the film is “inspired” by a book written by alien-abduction claimant Whitley Streiber and conspiracy-theory radio host Art Bell, insinuating that a movie based on anything from these guys can’t possibly be taken seriously.

For their part, executives at 20th Century Fox are reportedly thrilled about the free publicity they’re getting from all this commotion.

But far from being some heavy-handed political polemic, it appears that The Day After Tomorrow is really just a summer disaster movie. No more, no less. (After all, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.) It’s a throwback to the sensational disaster flicks of the 1970s just as Independence Day was a throwback to the alien-invasion movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Like TV shows which breathlessly describe their plots as “ripped from today’s headlines” to bring in audiences, the screenwriters used global warming for the film’s hot topic (ha!).

The reviews are starting to come in, and like movies in general, some are good, some are bad, and some are average. But many say that people who get into screaming matches over the film’s supposed message are missing the point; that it’s just a big, splashy spectacle of a summer movie. So don’t make such a big deal about it, and if this kind of flick is your cup of tea, enjoy.

Too Little, Too Late

Throughout the last thirteen months of warfare in Iraq, a common criticism is that the Bush Administration had no plan and no strategy for dealing with the chaos. It was as if the White House and the Pentagon were in a permanent holding pattern, praying that they could keep the situation relatively under control until the magic date of June 30, scheduled to be the supposed “handover of sovereignty” to Iraqis. After that, whatever happens can be passed off as somebody else’s problem.

This endless dithering, based primarily on the hope that things would eventually get better, has taken its toll. Polls routinely show that a clear majority of Americans oppose President Bush’s Iraq policy, and indeed it is painfully clear that there is no policy, just stalling for time. After weeks in which he has largely let his staff do the talking – and after months in which the situation in Iraq disintegrated into a truly catastrophic quagmire – Bush himself went before the cameras last night to lay out his long-awaited plan for getting us out of this mess.

The address can be summed up in four words: too little, too late.

In his speech, with one eye firmly fixed on Election Day, Bush outlined his “five steps” to handing over power to Iraqis and getting out. As he put it, “We will hand over authority to a sovereign Iraqi government, help establish security, continue rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, encourage more international support, and move toward a national election that will bring forward new leaders empowered by the Iraqi people.” In the midst of the cheerleading, listing the accomplishments while glossing over the setbacks, it is interesting to note that while Bush laid out goals, he did not in any way mention the process in making them happen aside from the vaguest of generalities. It’s as if all these things are expected to happen by themselves.

Bush claimed that despite the post-June 30 presence of 138,000 American soldiers, with more to come if needed and with no withdrawal timetable of any sort, “the occupation will end and Iraqis will govern their own affairs.” This one is simply laughable. American troops will be able to go where they want, when they want, and will not be answerable to any supposed Iraqi government. So in other words, the occupation will continue, no matter what it’s called. (Indeed, post-speech reaction in Iraq shows that the Iraqi people realize this all too well.) And when you get right down to it, the new Iraqi government will have almost no power to speak of.

The speech contained some moments of unintended humor, such as when he insisted that “at every stage, the United States has gone to the United Nations,” conveniently forgetting that the Administration was dragged kicking and screaming into doing so, finally bypassing the UN entirely when that body refused to provide a blank check for war.

He also attempted to blame the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal on “a few American troops,” and in a desperate effort to just make the whole thing go away, he proposed tearing down the Saddam-era prison in favor of one yet to be built. (It was, indeed, the only tangible proposal in the whole speech.) But the “anything goes” policies emanating from the highest ranks of the Pentagon which formed the basis of the abuse were quietly ignored.

What was not mentioned was quite significant: the never-found WMD arsenal (which, if you recall, was the ostensible reason for the invasion), the fact that the vast majority of Iraqis see us as occupiers rather than liberators, and, of course, the numerous policy failures which allowed the situation to degenerate as far as it has. Then again, Bush is notorious for never, ever, admitting that he or anyone around him have ever been wrong about anything, so that one was probably too much to hope for.

But most depressingly, Bush continued to insist that the Iraqi insurgency is composed simply of a ragtag collection of “terrorists” and Saddam Hussein’s “elite guards,” rather than what it really is – a broad-based nationalist uprising aimed not at bringing back the bad old days but at throwing the Americans out. By doing so, and by seeing the conflict purely in black and white terms rather than as a complex state of affairs, he sows the seeds for more and bloodier failures.

“We must keep our focus,” Bush said, but that focus has been terribly lacking throughout this whole nightmare. The White House and the Pentagon had one goal in mind on invading Iraq: overthrowing Saddam Hussein. But once that was accomplished, there was no plan to deal with what would happen next. We have seen the consequences.

The thing we need right now is a clear sense of direction from the Bush Administration, one based not on phantom deadlines or re-election bids, but on a realistic plan to get us out of the military and diplomatic disaster which threatens to be the true legacy of George W. Bush. Unfortunately, that sense was nowhere on display last night.

The Truth Comes Out

Yesterday, American troops and Iraqi policemen raided the home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi, seeking a dozen of his closest associates on fraud, theft, corruption and kidnapping charges. “Let my people go,” Chalabi thundered into the cameras like some Moses by the Tigris. And in one of the strongest signals yet that we have officially worn out our welcome in Baghdad, he added, “We are grateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq, but it is time for the Iraqi people to run their affairs.”

To understand just why this is a big deal, it should be mentioned that two years ago, Chalabi was the toast of Washington. As the head of the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqis living in exile out of the country, he had a single overriding vision – to overthrow Saddam Hussein and set up shop in Baghdad as the leader of a new Iraq. But he had virtually no support in Iraq, so to accomplish that, he needed some heavy-duty firepower to do the job for him.

So he came to America, whispering seductively into the ears of people high up in the neoconservative establishment that Hussein had a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and others all believed him hook line and sinker. And by a staggering coincidence, all were obsessed with the notion of “finishing the job” left over from the 1991 Gulf War, when the military drive to throw Iraq out of Kuwait refrained from going on to Baghdad. Combining that with the desire to seize control of Iraq’s oil and their grand schemes of remaking the Middle East, they were primed and ready to listen to Chalabi.

The Clinton Administration, which was also the recipient of INC reports, did not trust Chalabi or his cohorts, seeing them as craven opportunists who were more interested in taking power for themselves than anything else. Undeterred, Chalabi provided a couple of defectors who claimed to have worked at Iraqi WMD sites, and their words were splashed all over friendly media outlets. Other defectors (including Hussein’s son-in-law) who reported that all such weapons had been destroyed were ignored.

The fact that Chalabi was convicted of fraud and embezzlement and was a fugitive from justice in Jordan, the fact that he had not been in Iraq in decades, the fact that he had no backing among the Iraqi people – all were disregarded. He was telling people precisely what they wanted to hear, and that was all that mattered.

When George W. Bush became President in 2001, Chalabi’s allies ascended to power, and immediately began planning his long-dreamed invasion of Iraq. All the while, the INC kept feeding fantastic stories to the Administration, to Congress and to the American media, all of which were accepted without question. Secretary of State Colin Powell used the tales as the basis for his now-infamous presentation to the UN Security Council. (He has since disowned his own testimony as being based on “inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading” information.) Career analysts in the CIA and the State Department, who had dealt with Chalabi before and concluded that he could not be trusted, cautioned their superiors against putting so much stock in him, but their warnings were ignored.

When the invasion finally came in March 2003 and Baghdad fell, Chalabi got what he wanted. He was appointed to the handpicked Iraqi Governing Council and was groomed to be the next leader of Iraq.

But as the search for Hussein’s much-ballyhooed WMD dragged on and nothing was found, the relationship began to sour. The highest American ranks finally began to realize that Chalabi just might have fed them intentionally false information in a successful attempt to dupe Washington. (Oh, and those famous defectors provided by the INC? Turns out their supposed bombshells were wrong, they contradicted each other on key details, and in some cases they never worked at the supposed weapons sites at all.) For his part, Chalabi did not help matters when in February he bragged to the London Daily Telegraph that, “As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.”

As a result, he was eased out of power and marginalized. He remains on the IGC, but without authority, and his chances of becoming President of Iraq are now zero. His American funding, amounting to $335,000 a month, has been cut off.

So at long last, the truth about Chalabi finally comes out. He played us like Nintendo for his own purposes, telling people in power exactly what they wanted to hear. He had no compunctions about causing thousands of deaths and widespread destruction to get what he wanted.

This does not, however, let the Bush Administration off the hook. They were obsessed with the notion of “getting” Hussein at any cost and by any means necessary. Didn’t matter how it happened, as long as it happened. And so they willingly let themselves be conned like a backwoods tourist playing three-card monte in New York.

Chalabi said Hussein was bristling with terrible weapons, and he was believed. He said Hussein was in league with al Qaeda, and he was believed. He said American troops would be unconditionally welcomed as liberators, and he was believed. Anyone who pointed out that Chalabi was a power-hungry crook, that there was no evidence to support his claims, or that all might not go according to plan – they were simply ignored.

We are now paying the price for our leaders’ pathetic vendetta. We are paying for it with a sea of budgetary red ink which we are blithely handing off to our children. We are paying for it with our ruined international credibility. And most tragically, we are paying for it with the blood of our dead and wounded soldiers. Any Administration, Republican or Democratic, which allows itself to be so drastically hoodwinked does not deserve to remain in office.

With This Ring I Thee Wed

Earlier this week in Massachusetts, gay and lesbian couples, some of whom have been in committed relationships for decades, started getting married at courthouses and clerk’s offices to the cheers of onlookers. Despite the apocalyptic warnings of gay-marriage opponents, fire and brimstone did not rain down, the earth did not open up and swallow everyone whole, and predatory homosexuals did not whisper into the ears of impressionable children, “Join us, all this can be yours.” When I turned on the news, instead of moral rot and the nation going to hell in a hand basket all I saw were people who love each other very much.

Just look at Tanya McCloskey and Marcia Kadish, who got married in Cambridge shortly after the clerk’s office opened for business Monday morning. They emerged from City Hall to applause and congratulations, their faces radiant and happy, their souls aglow.

Oratory is heard for hours on end as to how gay and lesbian weddings “threaten” marriage, as if straight marriages across the country will magically fall apart if two men or two women get hitched. For his part, right-wing radio personality Michael Reagan went so far as to opine that if gay marriage is allowed, no straight person in America will be allowed to get married without having at least one gay experience first. President Bush also weighed in on the issue, favoring second-class citizenship for gays and lesbians by denying them the right to get married.

The opponents of gay marriage claim that marriage is reserved solely for straight people, one man and one woman. Gays and lesbians are not allowed. If they really want the legal benefits of marriage, they can join in a civil union (if that is allowed in the first place) and hope for the best. The problem with this, of course, is that it treats gays and lesbians as unworthy of the full benefits of marriage. Telling people “no marriage for you, but here’s a civil union instead” contains more than a whiff of the “separate but equal” doctrine used for decades to justify racial segregation. Now it’s used to justify sexual segregation.

Despite what gay-marriage opponents claim, the basis of a successful marriage is not one set of XX chromosomes and one of XY. Just ask Britney Spears or anyone else who gets married in a drunken fog only to get it annulled within hours or days. Nor is it based on the ability to make a baby, as anyone who has ever undergone fertility treatments or adopted a child will testify. A successful marriage, rather, is based on two people who share love, trust, support and a determination to combine their lives.

Finding that special someone with whom you want to share your life is already all too rare. As we are constantly reminded, the divorce rate in America has hovered around fifty percent for the last few years. Is the solution really to bar a specific class of people from getting married in the first place?

No, discrimination is never the answer. Love and happiness, not DNA, is the basis of marriage. Love is in the air in the Bay State, and I for one applaud it. More states should follow Massachusetts’ lead.

Deeper and Deeper

The Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal just keeps getting worse.

Last week’s high-profile hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee featured numerous instances in which the official line, that the abuses were committed solely by rogue soldiers who kept their superiors in the dark, fell apart in the wake of testimony by said superiors that, well, maybe they did know about it here and there. For his part, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in his Senate testimony earlier this month, repeatedly claimed that he didn’t know any details about the abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges, and he certainly never authorized or encouraged anything like this.

Now we have Seymour Hersh, who originally broke the scandal in last month’s New Yorker, with a new claim of something appalling: that a secret Pentagon program code-named Copper Green “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”

And who signed off on this program? None other than Donald Rumsfeld.

The program, on which President Bush was reportedly briefed, was designed to take away responsibility for prisoner interrogation in Iraq from the CIA and give it to the Pentagon, bringing the environment more into line with the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A former intelligence officer quoted in Hersh’s article described the program as “grab whom you must, do what you want.” (For the record, a Pentagon press release vociferously criticized the Hersh report, calling it “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.”)

According to Hersh, military intelligence officers took over the interrogation process and were given free rein to do whatever they wanted. With so many interrogators, contractors and others walking around Abu Ghraib out of uniform, even the military officer supposedly in charge of the prison, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was unsure who was who. The end result, according to a Pentagon consultant, was one in which “the ends justify the means.”

As for Rumsfeld’s denials, Hersh says the secretary was notified of the abuses just days after military policeman Joseph Darby blew the whistle two months earlier. It may well be that Rumsfeld simply ignored those reports, believing them to be routine interrogation procedures under the new rules. (In the aftermath of the revelations, the Pentagon supposedly revised the interrogation policies to explicitly prohibit such abuses, although it’s far more telling that most of the attention was given to barring photography.)

As if all that wasn’t enough, it was also revealed that the Pentagon program was rooted in a memo by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, written shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in which he claimed that al Qaeda prisoners were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. “In my judgment,” Gonzales wrote, “this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

“Quaint?” The prohibition of torture and other physical pressures is “quaint?”

Then again, the Bush Administration has always claimed that al Qaeda prisoners held at Guantanamo were not subject to the Geneva Convention’s protections. And since the object of the secret Pentagon program was to “Gitmo-ize” the operations at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, we should not be terribly surprised that the situation spun out of control as spectacularly as it did.

In a way, the Abu Ghraib scandal is indicative of the Iraq mess as a whole; the Administration marched us into this situation with ideological blinders firmly in place, refusing to even consider the possibility that all might not go exactly as according to plan. The only response to anything going wrong is a desperate attempt to spin the story into something – anything – less damaging.

But when this spin-proof scandal emerged (after all, it’s kind of difficult to put a happy face on physical and sexual abuse), the White House dug in and refused to hold anyone other than grunt-level soldiers accountable. The problem is that this approach no longer works. It is now public knowledge that these tactics were approved by those higher up the chain of command, and it remains to be seen how (or indeed if) the Administration will react.

Friendless

It had to happen eventually. After ten seasons of the “I’ll Be There for You” theme song, a couple of hundred episodes and enough coffee to set the hardest heart aflutter with caffeine overload, Friends had its grand finale last night. Even with the truly monstrous level of hype with which NBC flogged the upcoming show for weeks, we all knew this particular series could not possibly end on an unhappy note, and we were not disappointed. (Note: If you missed it, here come some spoilers, so you may want to skip this until you do see it. If you did see it, or if you didn’t and don’t care, read on.)

To recap: Monica and Chandler became the proud parents of twins via adoption and headed to their new life in Westchester, Phoebe and her new husband Mike resolved to have kids of their own, and Ross and Rachel finally ended up together. (He really was her lobster after all.) Even Gunther, after pining away for Rachel for most of the series, finally confessed his love only to be shot down. Only Joey did not have a life-changing event in the finale, but take heart -- a spinoff in which he moves to Los Angeles is coming this fall.

Friends gave us quite a few memorable moments over its ten-year run. Ross gave away his first ex-wife when she married her girlfriend in a ceremony officiated by Newt Gingrich’s sister, drove off the second when he mistakenly said Rachel’s name during the ceremony, and then divorced the third one (Rachel herself) after a drunken Las Vegas wedding. Chandler and Monica fell in love, scrambled to hide their relationship, brought it out into the open, got married, dealt with infertility and decided to adopt. (To which one of my son’s favorite babysitters, who was herself adopted, cheered, “Adoption rules!”)

Joey played a doctor on Days of Our Lives until the writers killed him off by dropping him down an elevator shaft, got the lead in a horrendously bad detective show where his sidekick was a robot, and along the way slept with every woman in sight. Rachel became a high-powered fashion executive, hired a hunky assistant solely for his looks (it seems the sexual harassment rules of the '90s never quite found their way into her office), and had a daughter out of wedlock. Phoebe became the surrogate mother for her brother’s triplets, made a music video, and tried to seduce Chandler, all while having the same delightfully ditzy presence through the years.

Me, I’m still wondering how everyone was able to afford those big Manhattan apartments while working as...well, nothing, apparently, as everyone always had time to hang out in a coffee shop in the middle of the day.

The show mirrored trends in the entertainment industry, not always for the better. As TV turned to the anorexic look, Rachel and Monica both changed from perfectly attractive and curvy women who were constantly inundated with men to shrill, bony stick figures who couldn’t get arrested. The allegedly Jewish characters of Ross and Monica always had Christmas trees everywhere with an occasional menorah or Jewish star barely visible in the background. Why couldn’t we see an episode where Ross takes his son Ben to synagogue or Monica has everyone over for a Passover Seder? (Ross did, however, dress up as the “Holiday Armadillo” to teach Ben about Chanukah.)

But, in the end, when you got right down to it, Friends was about six people who always stuck it out through thick and thin, navigating plot points both reasonable and ridiculous, uttering jokes ranging from classic gags to the occasional clunker. And as much as we wanted to smack them from time to time, they ended up being just regular people, with neuroses and bizarre personalities just like everyone else.

So let’s raise a cup of our favorite coffee to Friends. As long as it lives on in syndication, continuing to make the show’s creators and stars filthy rich, it will continue to be part of television history. And I still want to know if that orange couch from Central Perk will go to the Smithsonian.

Not the Way a Liberator Behaves

For a full year, in the face of ferocious international disbelief and skepticism, the Administration has tried to sell the invasion of Iraq as a war of liberation, not of occupation. The Iraqi people, it was said over and over again, were freed from the darkness of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and brought into the light of American emancipation. With a relentless public-relations endeavor, the White House has valiantly attempted to put the best face on an ever-mounting military and diplomatic disaster.

All these efforts have now been destroyed.

The revelation that American soldiers physically and sexually abused Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison (which, in a bitter irony, was the main torture chamber used by Saddam’s regime) has demolished America's image in Iraq and much of the Arab world. We are now seen as torturers, worse than simple occupiers and certainly not liberators. Every photograph showing grinning American men and women posing with naked Iraqis and forcing them into sexual poses is a guaranteed recruiting poster for the insurgency which has wreaked so much havoc on the occupation.

The disclosure that American military brass in Iraq not only knew this was happening but actually approved it merely adds another layer of disgust. Weeks ago, the Pentagon issued a secret internal report detailing the abuse; a few soldiers directly implicated were quietly disciplined and everything was hushed up. It never even reached Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s desk.

Then CBS got hold of the report and the photos, publicizing them on 60 Minutes II. The reaction was immediate, and expected. President Bush declared he was shocked, shocked, that such a thing could happen, but steadfastly claimed that only “a few people” were involved. Fox über-pundit Bill O’Reilly and other conservative media voices, after taking a moment to mumble that yes, it’s terrible, the people who did this should be punished, ripped into CBS for reporting it.

The floodgates are now opening. More and more Iraqis are coming forward to say that they, too, were physically abused by their American captors. Women report rape and/or the threat of rape. Men report frequent beatings as a regular part of interrogation. Amnesty International’s report says that while allegations of such mistreatment are all too frequent, “virtually none...has been adequately investigated by the authorities.” The British newspaper The Guardian reported that when the Red Cross came to visit Abu Ghraib, their inspectors were kept away from the prison facilities. It was only in recent weeks that the American occupation authorities even released prisoner lists, ending months of agony for thousands of Iraqi families who literally did not know whether their loved ones were alive or dead.

Some might say that this is much ado about nothing, that the Iraqis in prison did terrible things and deserve what they get. While there is no doubt that Saddam’s regime did indeed commit heinous crimes against the Iraqi people, the basic truth remains that we are better than this. No self-respecting American soldier should ever take part in such activities, and no officer should ever sanction them. This is not the way a liberator behaves.

It will be very difficult for the American occupation authorities to recover from this blow to its credibility, but it is not impossible. The government should take the following steps, immediately if not sooner:

1. Punish those responsible for these outrages, not just the individuals who committed them but their superiors who allowed them to happen. The accountability should lead as far up the chain of command as needed; nobody should be immune due to their rank or position.
2. Open the prisons to unlimited inspection by human rights groups such as the Red Cross and Amnesty International. The short-term disgruntlement over this will be more than outweighed by being able to prove to the world that the abuses have stopped.
3. Allow prisoners to see their families. Post security guards if needed, but Iraqis need to be able to see that their loved ones are alive and well.

Sunshine has always been the best disinfectant. Once the abuses have been ended and the perpetrators have been disciplined – and get more than just a slap on the wrist – the better chance we have of regaining the trust of the Iraqi people and the Arab world.

Then again, as pretty much everything about the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been exposed as lies, deception, and wishful thinking, it may well be too late.