Even as you point to the destruction of secularism in Iraq, please note that in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US was supporting religious fundamentalists seeking to oust the progressive secularists supported by the Soviet Union. This eventually led to the religious fundamentalist Taliban that supported the religious fundamentalist Al Qaeda organization.

George Bush himself is a religious fundamentalist, so maybe he is much more comfortable putting religious fundamentalists in charge of governments?

Steve-great post. I had to give the Sanger piece a second read to appreciate your take on his tone. I guess in this age of "he said, she said" reportage one gets used to having the opposing viewpoints stacked up against each other like dominoes.

By the way, isn't GWB a direct descendant of Franklin Pierce through his mother's side of the family?

I kind of think it's a mistake to focus on Bush's obviously subaverage mental powers. We can live with dumb. It's his arrogance that has us in trouble. A good dumb president would find some really smart people to work in key areas. What Bush has around his are a bunch of shady people with a lot of crackpot ideas, little experience, and no capacity or interest in reining him in. He's put together a coalition of fools who believe their own thoughts and each other's. It's a lose-lose group from any angle...

"George Bush himself is a religious fundamentalist, so maybe he is much more comfortable putting religious fundamentalists in charge of governments?"

Oh please, Bakho. He has religious fundamentalists manipulating him and his policies, but Bush has neither the intelligence nor the strength of conviction to be considered a "religious fundamentalist". I think we give Monkey Boy far too much credit for this God damned mess. He is a less than average man, a failure at everything he has ever attempted. He has NEVER been held accountable, from his alchohol related arrests to his DESERTION from his TANG duties. Bush's sole "asset", that placed him in the White House, is his absolute malleability, and the Bush name. A crafty recruiter could enlist Bush to ANY CAUSE. David Koresh or Charles Manson would have had Monkey Boy signing on in a flash.

And the current Shiite control of Iraq??? Israel cannot, and will not, allow a Shiite theocracy to blossum next door to them. Just ain't a gonna happen. So you can rest assured that we are there for the long haul, because Israel will be actively stirring the pot with false flag assasinations, "terror attacks", and fabricated intelligence. It is the way they do business, and the currency is the blood of OUR soldiers, and your and my tax dollars.

A quick search of America's worst presidents...

I think Bush will in fact be fighting it out for least effective president with William Henry Harrison, who died a month after his inauguration.

Bush says he is willing to take the risk of being judged a poor president now, confident that he will be judged a great president after he is gone to his maker, that we cannot judge the issue now. But that is a complete cop-out because the harm he does damages millions of real people now and will damage the nation's interests for a generation.

So, in other words, Dubya is a legend in his own little pea brained head.

Harking back in time a tad, to the day he gave us all THE FINGER, just before he recess appointed Revoltin' Bolton, I would like to suggest that this was the truest expression of his feelings toward, We, the People, and our Constitution. The rest is fiction, reeeely bad stuff to too.

Steve-great post. I had to give the Sanger piece a second read to appreciate your take on his tone.

Well could you help me gain an appreciation for that that tone Susan? I have read the article a couple of times now and missed all the "stinging" that is supposed to be going on. Perhaps I lack subtlety, and the ability to register those discreet ironical cracks in the general Washington conformity. But it all seemed fairly conventional and bland to me. In sum:

* Bush and his administration are worried about their historical legacy;

* That legacy is likely to depend largely on the eventual outcome of the Iraq war, on the overall response to 9/11, and on some domestic matters as well.

* The verdict of some professional historians at this point is "not so good";

* The verdict of some other professional historians is "too early to tell"

Wow! That's really letting him have it!

[The U.S. occupation] has undermined secularism in Iraq and should have always kept that door open.

They thought they had that secular option covered, by way of installing Chalabi.

But who can imagine they really believed that? Count the many ways in which the occupation undermined secularism from the invasion on:

- funding and favoring exile sects and their militias (which were tolerated throughout and eventually incorporated into the 'Iraqi' police and army)
- preventing early locally based elections
- sweeping antiBaath firings, purges
- dismantling the military
- continuous and escalating counterinsurgency tactics against Sunni towns and neighborhoods (fire on / raid and sweep / hold and torture / bomb), culminating in the destruction of Fallujah.
- setting up format of elections certain to put Shia religious in power
- turning blind eye to sectarian militia death squads and sectarian control of local police and Iraqi security forces

I've read TWN since the beginning, and this is one of the best posts in its history. Synthesizes many themes SC has written about.

bob h - you hit it exactly. Now that the 'accountability moment' has passed, we're in 'fuck all' mode. It seems as if GWB has never believed he could make a wrong decision - in his mind the reelection proved his point and gave him a complete coverage insurance policy for the second term.

There was a news piece about him reading a book on T. Roosevelt's post-presidency over this ranch vacation. I'm on the fringe believing that we should not take a two-term-only Bush presidency for granted, but assuming I'm nuts, what does it say about this president that his top agenda item in 2005 is the post-presidency?

Harry Reid put this correctly - Bush can continue to go inward like Nixon or or clean house like Reagan. The choice and consequences are Bush's alone.

On Dubya's relationship to Franklin Pierce, if memory serves, according to the Bush book by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, the Bush clan are related to no less than NINE previous presidents in one way or another. (See: The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, generally a positive tilt to the Bush family). Good WASPs you know... I suspect you'd find nearly as many in John Kerry's line.

As to Franklin Pierce specifically, the relation is through Babs:

Barbara PIERCE Bush 1925- is a fourth cousin four times removed (4C4R) of President Franklin PIERCE 1804-1869
(from one of the many geneological web-nuts out there see: www.bearhaven.com/family/cousin/barbara.html)

I once worked in an very legitimate historical archive with records (wills, bibles, land records etc.) dating from early colonial (Maryland & Virginia) period (1609 onwards). where many geneologists traveled from the world over to make just such tenuous connections to kings and princes. There hope of course is to affirm their blue blood. Nine times out of ten,you'd find the records proving a connection, THEN you could go read in the sources what scoundrels they REALLY were. The court and gaol records were usually FULL of references to whoring, adultery, perversions, theft, horse stealing, drunkenness and much more. Good stuff. Sure there's plenty on both the Bush and Pierce side of Dubya's family since the fruit rarely falls too far from the tree.

Steve, a great post.

Given Bush's sagging credibility, and his refusal to take obvious steps to restore that credibility (firing Rumsfeld as just one example), talk of a legacy is somewhat ludicruous.

Like Susan, I had to give the Sanger article a second read. Sometimes, when I leave the blogosphere and read the conventional media and particularly people like Sanger, I have to remind myself I'm back in the land of nuances.

I don't know about Bush's mental powers, but Mickey is right about the arrogance and the kind of people Bush surrounds himself with.

If we throw in Bush's obstinance, we have a president pursuing a war in Iraq we did not need while neglecting a range of foreign and domestic issues. That isn't going to be much of a legacy.

At the beginning of 2006, it would be a good time just to review the things that are being neglected or that are unresolved.

I'll mention just two. First, for all Bush's talk, our relationship with Russia needs closer attention; things have been slipping there for some time. Second, while it's bad enough that we don't have a domestic energy program worthy of the name, it's becoming obvious that Bush lacks the diplomatic and negotiating skills to give us a global energy strategy that protects our economy and our security; this is an area where military posturing and unilateralism are too often of limited value.

The other thing that Japan had going for it was a homogeneous society without the social, political and religious infighting that is threatening to tear Iraq apart. The two couldn't be more different.

Bush is an idiot for even mentioning the two in the same breath.

Like Susan, I had to give the Sanger article a second read. Sometimes, when I leave the blogosphere and read the conventional media and particularly people like Sanger, I have to remind myself I'm back in the land of nuances.

I'm still too dense to get it. Could somebody spell it out for me like I'm a four-year old?

The total number of Japanese and Germans killed in the bombing campaigns vs how many Iroqis were killed in this war do not compare. I belive that part of the Axis's lack of resistance to being reengineered after WW II was the total defeat of those nations--that's what FDR's total surender war aim was about.

Bush's main legacy will be the restructuring of our society by his tax cuts for the extreme wealthy, and the loss of trust in the US by the rest of the world. I don't think this will be to his credit, except by books by those who will be the economic winners. The loss in trust in us will haunt us for many decades.

A new National Security Act is a good defensive action, but could we get off this purely defensive strategy? Back to the drawing boards, and this time we want MORE freedom and liberty than was expressed over 200 years ago by the negotiators of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This idea of Democracy has yet to be fully realized, and now is the time to begin thinking about renegotiating our inalienable rights of freedom and liberty. That's what I think. Could we have a new constitutional convention?

I believe the comparison of Iraq with Japan will look increasingly idiotic to historians as time passes.

For one thing, Japan surrendered. That is, the government of Japan surrendered to the United States and delivered their people and armed forces to the will of the victors. The fact that a government can bring a conflict to an end, and deliver a still-unified state to their opponents is a sort of miracle when you think of it. How can it happen? Well, for one thing you need a firmly established national state, with deep roots in history, and a rich and powerful national culture. The state must be able to retain the loyalty of its people, even in defeat.

Although Saddam had made some efforts to build such a national culture in Iraq, drawing on themes related to Babylon, Mespopotamia, the Abbasid dynasty, etc. the state itself was a modern innovation with shallow roots. It also exists in a region in which nationalism itself has had very indifferent success in taking hold, and competes with a more diffuse, but universal religious culture.

But beyond that, the United States itself had spent more than a decade seeking to tear the Iraqi state apart! Kurdish and Shiite separatism and rebellion were actively promoted in an effort to weaken that state, to isolate its titular leaders and their power base, to diminish their ability to govern territory outside the region associated with that power base, and in effect to dismantle the state. How in the name of all that is rational could anyone have expected that the disintegrating and destabilizing forces that had been unleashed and intensified by the first Gulf war, and then by deliberate US policy, were suddenly going to reverse themselves in favor of an iraqi nationalist movement?

Even if Saddam had surrendered in a solemn show to US forces, it is doubtful that he could have delivered a unified state to the occupiers. The Kurds were determined to go their own way no matter what. For them the only issues all along have been those of tactics and timing in achieving independence.

And I think we are fooling ourselves if we think that the sectarian process in the South could have been avoided by running a "smarter occupation" aimed at promoting "secularism". Where are these alleged Shiite secularists upon which to build a new order? The only politically significant and organized Shiite groups with power bases inside Iraq were the religious groups Sciri, Da'wa and the Sadr movement. The main secular Shiites were a handful of expatriots with no sizeable following inside the country. Of course, they did do a fine job in gathering a following at Washington think tanks and cocktail parties.

There were scattered secular Shiites in Iraq, in the Basra region for example. But they hardly seem to have constituted any sort of committed political movement. They were just worldly business poeople pursuing their own interests. The only secular movement in the Arab parts of Iraq itself were the Baathists! And even the Baathists were becoming an increasingly Islamized movement in response to the political drift of the region.

The notion that the United States could build a political culture in Iraq, designed to its own specifications, headed up by a leader of its choosing, is an arrogant symptom of DC think-tankism, and bespeaks a collosally insolent and patronizing colonialist attitude toward Iraqis, and Arabs generally. The Washington brats apparently think Iraqis are mere children. All you have to do is pull down a few statues, manufacture a scary "shock and awe" smoke and light show, and pass out some magic juju beans - that will be enough to impress the infantile natives. Some of the liberals are apparently no better. They think the failure was just that there weren't enough juju beans passed out in the right spots to the right savages.

But let's return to the most fundamental difference between the Iraq situation and Japan. Iraq's government never surrendered! If you chop off the head of the government before it surrenders, or just lock it up, what happens? Well those who are loyal to that government continue to fight, because their leaders and state apparatus never gave up. They believe the war is still going on. So how can we be surprised that the Sunni Arabs continue to fight? A large component of their resistance consists of forces that were broadly loyal to Saddam's regime, including both Baathists, and also moderately and conservatively Islamic Sunni Arabs who enjoyed the benefits of Sunni Arab domination of Iraq.

Imagine what would have happened if the United States had invaded Japan, locked up Hirohito, and pulled down a few staues, but the government had never surrendered.

For what its worth, Rawstory is reporting that Bush will request no more money to rebuild Iraq....

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Bush_wont_seek_additional_funds_for_0101.html

if true, this suggests that Bush sees Iraq like one of the failed oil companies from his youth. He's in for something of a shock, however, when nobody wants to takeover Iraq at top dollar because his daddy is George HW Bush...

Steve,
Talk to me aout the new year. I have a hell of alot to say about the new year. A hell off a lot to say about the "common good". Something this country has forgotten abourt. DJ

Back to the drawing board? But who holds the pencil? I'd be wary of bringing such questions under debate at a time when the mechanisms of debate are so broken as they are now.

Legacies do not fall like manna from the sky. Nor are they tailor-made of an original design. They are made by "wearing" for long the hard course of action that will ultimately shape and give birth to the legacy. Moreover, its creator is not one person, but a set of intelligent human beings, who however, are always "escorted" by the jumpless shadow of fallibility and serendipity, which inevitably take their toll, but without which no great achievement can be accomplished in human affairs.

The Bush administration despite some serious mistakes in its strategy (which must creatively and imaginatively be criticized, but not by doomsayer scenarios-which regretably some readers on this blog are incapable of making a distinction between imaginative critics and doomsayers),is still on the right strategy, both in realizing the prowess of the enemy and how to confront him. To compare, as Sanger does, this prowess of the terrorists, whose lethal actions have the great potential of becoming a ceaseless series of successess, with the one off bombings of anarchists, is historically ludicrous. Secondly, to compare the fate of democracy in the Philippines in 1898, with the fate of democracy in Iraq in the age of TV and of the Internet, when most people in oppressed countries can see how other people live in democratic countries and can virtually breath the air of freedom that emanates from these countries, is to compound this incomparable inanity of Sanger. Also, John Dower's proposition, "that people know what victory looks like", as he deems Bush's victory to be a fabrication, is overtly contradicted by the polls which showed Bush's ratings for the war jumping from 36% to 46%, after the President's intense campaign to explain the war to the American people. Lastly, David Donald's seemingly poignant statement, about Bush's comparison of the spying intrusions to the "sleeping partners" of the terrorists, with Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, that there was an uproar and a "lot of people believed it wasn't necessary", why is this so surprising, did he expect a unanimous agreement by the American people about such a fundamental, but necessary, reversal of rights even in times of war?

The Administration's strategy in Iraq was to establish an Archimedean point from which it could turn the terrorist's world and its sponsors upon their own heads. By defeating Saddam and the current insurgency, it can defeat by PROXY, as Libya has shown, all other rogue states, and hence expedite the defeat of global terror. History has not as yet passed its verdict. But the chances are that the Bush administration will accomplish this historic task, and prove wrong all its doomsayers and shallow, unimaginative critics.

The claim that it is Bush's invasion of Iraq that is responsible for Qadhafi's decision to give up unconventional weapons is still widely repeated by administration apologists. As a corrective for mistake this I recommend the article: "Libya is not Iraq: Preemptive Strikes, WMD and Diplomacy" from the Summer 2004 issue of The Middle East Journal. Here is the summary of the article:

The Bush administration quickly claimed full credit for Libyan leader Mu‘ammar al-Qadhafi’s decision to renounce unconventional weapons, suggesting this reversal in long-standing Libyan policy was a by-product of the war in Iraq. On the contrary, the role of the current administration was one of successfully implementing policies discussed for more than a decade and finally initiated in the latter days of the Clinton administration. The welcome decision of the Qadhafi regime to disarm should thus be seen as a win, not for a strategy of preemptive strikes, but for traditional methods of combating nuclear nonproliferation.

I wrote:

"As a corrective for mistake this I recommend..."

which should have read:

"As a corrective for this mistake this I recommend..."

St John's article is not a cure for all mistakes, just one particularly egregious mistake.

Con George-Kotzabasis,

If you think the anarchist bombing on Wall Street was a one-off affair, you need to instruct yourself about the history of anarchist violence during the last decades of the 19th and early decades of the 20th century. The anarchists were very fond of bombing, as well as other instruments of violence. They actually succeeded in killing several heads of state, including one US president.

Any comparison of Iraq to post WWII Japan is brain dead ignorance. In Japan, the US kept the emperor who supported the US occupation. In Iraq we threw out Saddam and his entire government. In Japan, we kept in place the local officials and the local police forces. In Iraq we dismissed them all. In Japan, there was no violent effort to force the American troops out. Surrender was complete and signed off in a political ceremony. In Iraq, there has never been a surrender, there has never been a political agreement, in fact there has never been a complete taking of Iraq by the US military. In Japan, the structure of the military was kept intact and the munitions were not looted and spread throughout the populace. In Iraq, munitions dumps were left ungarded for a long time and looted by the insurgents. The IED are made from explosives raided from these munitions dumps. The Japanese civilian populace was not armed with advanced weaponry. In Iraq prior to invasion, civilians were heavily armed, the closest you could get to an NRA paradise. In Japan, the troops surrendered and were always under command and control. In Iraq, the command and control was destroyed and the Iraqi army was dismissed (and they took their weapons with them). Japan was a far more developed country than Iraq prior to invasion. Back then, economies were less dependent on electricity than they are today.

GWB's legacy ?

"Mayberry Macchiavellians" was posted by some blogger ( didn't catch the name) and it so perfectly sums up what we are living through and how this gang will be remembered

George W. Bush turns out to be a bold president, willing to take huge risks and make tough judgment calls

Don't give him too much credit. He likes to make big bets with other people's money and lives, but that's not too "bold."

And where are his tough judgment calls? Domestically his call is "borrow trillions, never pay for it." In foreign policy, don't give him too much credit for the call of invading Iraq, he thought it would be easy to take over the country, he had no idea what he was getting into.

The Administration's strategy in Iraq was to establish an Archimedean point from which it could turn the terrorist's world and its sponsors upon their own heads. By defeating Saddam and the current insurgency, it can defeat by PROXY, as Libya has shown, all other rogue states, and hence expedite the defeat of global terror. History has not as yet passed its verdict. But the chances are that the Bush administration will accomplish this historic task, and prove wrong all its doomsayers and shallow, unimaginative critics.

Posted by Con George-Kotzabasis

Whatta buncha horseshit.

Mayberry Machiavellians, Love it.

Once again, Con George-Kobatasis gets it completely wrong. It seems a penchant for baroque metaphors and obscure allusions is no substitute for hard thinking. Shall we take a few tidbits?

- At 46% support after months of hard core propaganda, it seems that Bush has hauled his water. Lies, lies and more lies are not making the deal.

- There's no discernible link between Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Al Quaeda. I've canvassed the issue of the lack of support for connections between Islamic Fundamentalism and rogue states. Con George is, at this point, being dishonest.

On the other hand, Con George is admitting that Bush has made lots of mistakes and very serious mistakes. And he's admitting that the verdict ain't in yet. This is the functioning portion of Con George's brain screaming desperately at him that he's gotten it totally wrong and he must retreat at all costs.

I assume when its all over, Con George will be announcing that he knew it all the time, that he never trusted Bush and that he ceaselessly criticized the ongoing disaster. Cause deep down, he knows how its going and he knows how its going to end. His ideology can't save him from reality...

The fault isn't with the National Security Act.

It's with the Congress. The majority GOP members have collectively betrayed their oaths of office.

Steve, I'd disagree that the Busheviks haven't tried to tip the scales away from anti-American parties in Iraq, even at this late date.

The nonsensical Legislative apportionment rules for the last election demonstrate that. The rules with the apportionment not being based upon population, but on election registration numbers, an the use of proportional list voting, seems designed to boost the pro-US Kurds and pro-US exile communities beyond the representation they would have in a US-style system.

Did Chalabi's party get enough votes for a seat? Well if you go by the numbers for the proportionalist list system, probably not {which is a shock, given how low the bar is set with this voting system}, but then there are the obscurantist compensatory seats. Chalabi might have not have received more than a handful of popular votes and he might still end up as the US' guy running the Oil Ministry.

Dan

When you read my posts you need to use your imagination. Of course there were a multiplicity of anarchist attacks in the 19th century that killed many politicians and a US president as you remind us. But in comparison, these random individually perpetrated bombings (I used the word in the plural in my previous post deliberately, not as you do in your post in the singular), to the ideologically and politically, laden with religious fanaticism, organized terrorist attacks of our era, they were "one off events", not to mention the fact that they were not attacking civilians.

Do you really believe that if Bush's strategy succeeds in Iraq , it will not have domino effects upon all rogue, or failed states, to use Den Valdron's more benign term for rogue states?

I would suggest to you Den to go to my blog for some answers.

Blog: NEMESIS http://congeorgekotzabasis

Con,

The anarchist movement was international; it had global reach; it was ideologically motivated; it attracted many millions of adherents; it lasted for several decades; it had both violent and non-violent components; its violent adherents were often quite passionate and fanatical about their beliefs; its attacks were usually planned locally by local cells; and its attacks were no more or less random than the acts of Islamist terrorists. So in most ways the anarchist movement is quite comparable to the Islamist movement. As long as we continue to take reasonable precautions to keep the latter movement in check, and use our intelligence and covert and special forces capabilities to prevent the terrorists from achieving really major successes, then the movement will ultimately die out in the same way the anarchist movement did. It will exhaust itself in futility and boredom.

Imagination obviously has its role in understanding, but must be well-tempered by reason. I have indeed read several posts on your blog, and judge them to be full of hysterical and delusional fantasies, with little grounding in either empirical evidence or logical argument - a veritable case study in a paranoid imagination run wild. This loose grip on the lineaments of the real world, and the oppressive atmosphere of persecution and cosmic crisis that is built out of the nightmares of your overstimulated imagination, are in my opinion the psychological roots of the fascistic doctrines you are lead to espouse.

"Do you really believe that if Bush's strategy succeeds in Iraq , it will not have domino effects upon all rogue, or failed states, to use Den Valdron's more benign term for rogue states?"

Posted by Con George-Kotzabasis

Time for you to fess up to the fact that you are slinging crap, Georgie baby. Allow me to help you.....

Describe, in specifics, Bush's "strategy in Iraq".

Dan

Life is too short! You won't have too many opportunities to use intellectual effort to make-up your arguments. But I understand. What you don't have you cannot use. And I guess, by hurling aspersions and abuse at your opponents, since this seems to be an ingrained proclivity of your nature, you will not be totally waste your semi-thinking life.

And from your instructed history, it's obvious that like the Bourbons, "you have learnt nothing and you have forgotten nothing", to quote the great Talleyrand.

It's been a while but I agree on this post.

S Brennan

Life is too short! You won't have too many opportunities to use intellectual effort to make-up your arguments. But I understand. What you don't have you cannot use. And I guess, by hurling aspersions and abuse at your opponents, since this seems to be an ingrained proclivity of your nature, you will not be totally waste your semi-thinking life.

I actually did present a bit of an argument for the conclusion that turn-of-the-century anarchism and militant Islam are quite similar, by listing several features they have in common. You didn't respond to it. I did that before hurling the abuse.

Hurling abuse is not one of my proclivities, as a matter of fact. I'm not one of those lefties who goes around yelling "fascist" at every little instance of authoritarian or militarist behavior. But when I find real fascism I don't play nice. Life is too short, as you say.

And since fascists don't rely primarily on reason and evidence, but instead seek to persuade through hate-filled and nightmarish works of the imagination, and spread the spirit of violence and paranoid xenophobia by a kind of imaginative infection, rather than rational argumentation, it is not sufficient to repel them by mounting arguments and giving evidence alone. Their discourses must be held up to ridicule, their pseudo-intellectual pretensions mocked, and the ugly face beneath the mask must be exposed, in order to deprive their dreamwork of its power.

Oh of all the idiotic....

"Failed state" is not a synonym for "rogue state" you simpering ninny.

A failed state is one where the apparatus of governance has completely broken down and the state ceases to function or operate in substantive meaningful ways.

Somalia is a failed state, a nation so badly plagued by civil war and breakdown that its parliament meets *outside* the country. Afghanistan is another failed state. Pakistan is on the borderlines of being a failed state as its military government fails to control its own territory and fails to deliver on governmental functions. Columbia may be drifting towards being a failed state. Africa has a few likely candidates, notably Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Congo.

A failed state is not an international threat in the conventional threat, simply because it has no meaningful foreign policy, to projects no force, it has no meaningful military or economy, merely vultures and warlords feeding on the carcass.

A 'rogue state' as described by the Bush Administration and in your fevered dreams is quite a different creature. 'Rogue states' are identified as North Korea, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba.

Are these failed states? Obviously not. They all have (had) functioning governments, controlled their territory and their population, they provide normal services and functions of government, from police and security, to military and foreign policy, regulate trade, impose taxes, construct public works and provide for some social functions.

The hallmark of a 'rogue' state is one which is antithetical to American interests, whose government or foreign policy is contrary to American wishes. One could go for a larger definition and suggest that a rogue state is one which is so disconnected from and out of step politically and economically with its neighbors that it poses a worldwide security risk. This latter criteria is doubtful, since many 'rogue' states pose little to no security risk for their neighbors. A further criteria might be support of terrorism, but then the match ups are quite random.

Failed states are a breeding ground for certain forms of terrorism because they are unable to control their own territory.

Rogue states control their own territory.

Al Quaeda operated out of a failed state.

The absolute failure to grasp simple distinctions here appalls me utterly.

More calmly,

Con, this is how it works. The terms 'rogue state' and 'failed state' are not synonyms, but two materially different sorts of entities. Because they are materially different sort of entitities, they may not be treated as interchangeable, and proscriptions which work on one may not work on the other. Each pose unique problems and issues. In particular, it is a gravely dangerous mistake to attribute a problem coming out of one sort to the other. Errors of fact create very basic errors of policy. Errors of policy result in the failure of those policies.

Con, you accept and focus on some collective entity which you describe as 'rogue states.' In your posts, you see a direct linkage between 'rogue states' and 'international terrorism.' This view, in my considered opinion is obsolete and painfully wrong. It represents a paradigm or considered opinion which was in circulation in the Bush administration from January 2001 to September 2001. This paradigm exploded traumatically in September 2001, and is, I believe, no longer endorsed by serious thinkers.

The notion of 'rogue states' itself is an artificial one perpetuated by the United States in the post-cold war era. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the commercial and diplomatic raprochement between the US, Russia and China, the principle security threat vanished overnight. The US then re-evaluated its security priorities, attempting to determine the next principle worldwide security threat.

This was determined to be 'rogue states' who threatened to destabilize their neighbors and who were not part of international diplomatic and economic circles recognized by the United States. A number of states were specifically identified as 'rogues' post-1989.

These were: Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Syria, Libya, North Korea and Serbia. By happy coincidence, these were all states that the US was already engaged in diplomatic or economic warfare with. The list of course, is hardly definitive - Iraq was not considered a rogue state until the invasion of Kuwait. Nicaragua would have been considered a rogue state by the US in the 80's. Venezuala may be on the verge of being characterized as a rogue state. Sudan has been considered to be a rogue state, but that characterization is erratic. Pakistan was also subject to characterization as a rogue state, largely because of its nuclear program, though whether it was a rogue state depended on who you were asking or what day of the week you were asking them.

As to what makes a state 'rogue', once you get past America's Ire, there is very little in the way of common thread. Most are dictatorships, though arguably Venezuala and Nicaragua are and were not. Most have deplorable human rights records, but there are many states, such as Uzbekistan, with execrable human rights records who are not considered rogue. Some argument may be made that rogue states pose threats to their neighbors and potentially to world peace. Certainly North Korea rumbles constantly, Iraq had invaded two of its neighbors, and both Cuba and Libya engaged in military adventures in Chad and Angola during the 80's. Syria had occupied Lebanon with American consent to quell the ongoing civil war there, and had clashed frequently with Israel. There were allegations in the 80's that Nicaragua was exporting revolution to other central american states, although these allegations seem spurious.

Indeed, through the 90's and the early 21st century, we saw most 'rogue' states moving away from being potentially troublesome. Cuba withdrew its troops from Angola, it had only been a russian proxy in any case. Libya abandoned its adventure in Chad. North Korea entered a treaty with the US. Several states, particularly Libya, Iran, Sudan and Syria made overtures to the United States and the world community, overtures that included intelligence cooperation. Despite these overtures and a generally more placid international climate

In the post-cold war era, there was very little evidence for regional destabilization. With the exception of Israel, their neighbors and the arab and non-arab states of the region, did not consider their security threatened by Syria, Iraq, Iran or Libya, for instance. At an assembly of Arab states immediately prior to the invasion of Iraq, the nations of the region said that explicitly, Iraq was not considered a threat.

Ironically, it appeared that rogue states were not being allowed to come in from the cold. That the designation of 'rogue state' once applied, trumped any positive actions or behaviour.

In the modern era, the big question is Rogue states affiliation with terrorism. The problem here is that 'terrorism' is not a monolithic movement, but a kind of catch all category for widely varying actors and behaviours.

North Korea, for instance, is designated as a state supporter of terrorism. However, it has no connections with any recognized terrorist groups. North Korea's connection to terrorism appears to relate to North Korea's intelligence and covert operations divisions own actions in terms of assassination, sabotage, kidnapping and spying.

Palestinian terrorism, though international in scope from the 60's through the 80's, was intensely secular in nature, and rooted in the single issue of the Palestinian's forced diaspora and occupation. It received support from many arab states, rogue and non-rogue, but little elsewhere.

The United States tacitly supported terrorism in Ireland, most of the guns and money used by the IRA in northern Ireland was from the United States. Though not diplomatically sanctioned by the US, it appears to have been tolerated on some levels. It was not until the Bush administration that the US repudiated the IRA's civilian representatives. The US also supported anti-government terrorism in Afghanistan in its opposition to the Russian occupation, supported terrorism and death squads in central America, in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador, and supported states including Pinochet's Chile and Argentina's Galtieri which practiced terrorism through covert death squads both inside and outside their borders. Admittedly, all of this took place in the 1980's. This does not go towards characterizing the US as a rogue state, but rather, to show the difficulty of the problem.

Iran arguably supported Shiite extremism in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, principally through the 80's. With the exception of supporting Hezbollah, its own supporter in Lebanon, Syria has no particular involvement with terrorism. Iraq's prior history with terrorism is itself fairly nebulous.

The connection between 'Rogue States' and 'terrorism' breaks down completely when we consider a particular type of terrorism - International Islamic Fundamentalist Sunni terrorism... ie, the sort of stuff that Osama Bin Laden, Al Quaeda and related organizations are up to. More particularly, 9/11, the Bali Bombing, the Spanish rail bombing, the London Subway bombing, Jihad etc. etc.

There is no connection whatsoever between this brand of terrorism and any known 'rogue state'. In fact, the results are quite opposite. Libya has executed Islamists and was the first to issue a warrant for the arrest of Osama Bin Laden, Syria purged its Islamists and fought a bloody uprising, Syria and Sudan have shared their intelligence information, Shiite Iran has no truck with Sunni terrorists, the last letter written by Saddam Hussein while he was still at large warned his followers not to associate with fundamentalists. In short, the Muslim rogue states have no connection to this brand of terrorism and are in fact generally highly antithetical.

This is for a good reason, as the secular Sunni rogue states are targets themselves, of an ideology which would prefer to sweep them away and replace them with a fundamentalist theocratic superstate. Opposing Al Quaeda is for them a simple matter of survival. Of course, for non-muslim 'rogue states', International Islamic terrorism is at best absolutely irrelevant and at worst implacably hostile. So we don't see either Cuba or North Korea jumping on the Al Quaeda bandwagon.

Hence, attacking rogue states is pretty much irrelevant to the war on terror. At best, it represents a costly and pointless side trip, a diversion of resources and time. In this regard, we can credibly argue that the need to set aside resources for invading Iraq was Al Quaeda's biggest weapon in Afghanistan. It shortchanged American forces and abilities in Afghanistan, and allowed both the Taliban and Al Quaeda, and particularly Osama Bin Laden to escape capture and remain a major threat.

There is a greater risk to the campaign against rogue states. By undermining and destabilizing such states, the United States opens the door to creating conditions in which Islamic fundamentalism can flourish. This has happened in Iraq. Iraq has now become the worlds terrorist training camp, and techniques developed in Iraq have been showing up as far away as Afghanistan and Malaysia. It is a cause which motivates many towards fundamentalism. The inability to control Iraq means that movements like Al Quaeda can operate with impunity and expand their operations internationally. Destabilizing or destroying Syria, Iran, Libya will simply open the door to rabid fundamentalist movements. One hesitates to imagine the pernicious effects of rabid theocracies in Syria and Iraq, or the effects on their neighbors of runaway fundamentalist terrorist movements. Saudi Arabia, it has been pointed out, is quite vulnerable to instability. In short, attacking a rogue state in the area has so far proved a boon to Al Quaeda, and further attacks will likely do nothing more than create an increasingly destabilized region of failed or vulnerable states in which Al Quaeda and similar organizations flourish and perhaps dominate.

Thus, Con, I must completely repudiate your thesis of rogue states and your prescription for dealing with terrorism by dealing with them. In my view, your concepts are insufficiently clear, lacking causal relationships, and strongly at odds with the facts. Your theory does not accord with reality, but rather, simply reiterates obsolete talking points.

Any effort to deal with international terrorism must first particularize the type of terrorism or movement which it confronts. In this case, as I've noted, Fundamentalist International Sunni terrorism. Having identified the enemy, it is incumbent upon to look clearly at the creature and take appropriate steps. The targeting of rogue states represents a serious, and perhaps lethal misstep.

"Any effort to deal with international terrorism must first particularize the type of terrorism or movement which it confronts. In this case, as I've noted, Fundamentalist International Sunni terrorism. Having identified the enemy, it is incumbent upon to look clearly at the creature and take appropriate steps. The targeting of rogue states represents a serious, and perhaps lethal misstep."

Posted by Den Valdron

Good lord, Den. George is casting purposefully irritating horseshit to bait you, and he offers it with neither ideological conviction nor intellectiual honesty. Your sincere efforts at rebuttal will only bear the fruit of further irritation. Ask the the dithering fraud to attempt to define Bush's so called "strategy" in Iraq, or explain to us what "victory" in Iraq means, and you can expose the insanity of his positions with far less effort than you are expending with your thoughtful essays.

From Con George's Blog:

>the Bush administration .... had to make a swift decision how to confront this enemy (Al Quaeda, or perhaps more generally, Sunni Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism and terrorist organizations) on the basis of reliable evidence and of the indisputable fact that Saddam possessed WMD in the past and had used them against his enemies. As well as having links with many terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda.

I call falsehood here. The effective links with Al Quaeda were nonexistent. This has been acknowledged over and over. There were no operational ties whatsoever.

The references to use of wmd's were twenty years old, and the consensus was that for most of the past decade, Iraq's wmd capacities were nonexistent or dubious. This dances right up to the edge of falsehood and certainly is a mischievious use of facts.

>....Saddam’s link or not with 9/11 was already irrelevant....

Again, Con George is playing a bit fast and loose with the facts. Note his careful phrasing here, designed to leave open the possibility that Iraq *was* involved with 9/11, even as he breezes casually past that issue?

>It was the likelihood of a future 9/11 link that was strategically relevant for imaginative, astute, and resolute policymakers.

There are two ways to take this. Con George could be saying that the invasion of Iraq was justified because someday there might somehow be some future evidence found that links Iraq to 9/11. Given his previous careful phrasing, this cannot be discounted.

It raises the dubious proposition that the invasion was for 9/11, and on grounds which were to be filled in later. Essentially, this is pretty much an endorsement of random military action on the basis that information to support this military action will come along sooner or later. This is obviously lunatic stuff. Harsh words, but then, Con George himself is not afraid to use harsh words like 'puerile' to describe arguments he doesn't like.

The second interpretation, which is at least slightly removed from outright psychosis is that Iraq was invaded pre-emptively, to prevent future 9/11-type events.

This is on slightly, slightly better ground. But this thesis requires a proveable or at least coherent chain of logic, a set of assumptions as to what will be, how particular actors may act and what the outcomes of those actions are.

Con George's logic here, as I understand it is: Saddam Hussein is bad and hates America. Al Quaeda is bad and hates America. Saddam Hussein will build wmd's, because he has built them in the past. These propositions, childish as they are, are at least plausible. Their problem is that they are indeed childish and superficial.

Con George then, as nearly as I can reconstruct, goes on to draw the conclusion: Saddam Hussein will give his wmd's to Al Quaeda to attack America. Well, if you are working with crayons, that's pretty sound thinking.

On the other hand, childish and superficial constructs are quite often wrong, usually because of their inability to take full information into account, and their unwillingness to consider various alternatives.

There were numerous obstacles: The antipathy between Al Quaeda and Iraq's Baathists. The lack of wmd's or wmd capacity of Iraq. The likelihood to Iraq of devastating reprisal. The weak state of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Con George's thesis ignores endless practical issues to resolve itself into a stew of free floating paranoia. In a nutshell, it is this:
Someone, somewhere, somehow may do something, so we have to get them first and fast!

This isn't a sane policy. This is a prescription for endless, disastrous, random military actions.

Y'know, Pissed Off American, I think you've got a point. I'm at a loss as to how to deal with someone who insists on misunderstanding even simple distinctions, and whose argument runs so close to falsehoods and outright lunacy. I might have to give up on Con George.

Steve and readers of this blog---

Marty Lederman has an interesting item regarding dubbya's statement when he signed the Def. Auth. Bill on Friday. http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/01/so-much-for-presidents-assent-to.html

Here's some excerpts:

First, with respect to several provisions of the bill, the President signaled his intention to reserve his authority, as Commander in Chief, to ignore statutory mandates. ....

Most importantly, as to the McCain Amendment, which would categorically prohibit cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees by all U.S. personnel, anywhere in the world, the President wrote:

The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President, evidenced in Title X, of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.

Translation: I reserve the constitutional right to waterboard when it will "assist" in protecting the American people from terrorist attacks. [UPDATE: Or, as Matthew Franck eagerly puts it over at the National Review, "the signing statement . . . conveys the good news that the president is not taking the McCain amendment lying down."]

Second, the President unsurprisingly signals that the Administration reads the Graham Amendments to cut off currently pending habeas cases, including most importantly the Hamdan case that's now before the Supreme Court and the Al Odah case (Rasul on remand) that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has under review:
.....

"The likelihood to Iraq of devastating reprisal. The weak state of Saddam Hussein's regime."

This is a reality that is too often ignored when the Bush apologists attempt to justify the actions and rationales of the Bush Administration. Who can doubt, on the heels of incontrovertable proof that a "rogue state" was responsible for an attack of the magnitude we saw on 9/11, that the American people would support and champion bombing said "rogue state" back into the middle ages??? Saddam, no fool, surely realized that ANY attack on the United States would spell doom for both his tenure as Iraq's tin pot dictator, but would also spell doom for his country as well. In fact, towards the end, Saddam did everything in his power to try to ward of the invasion. But to no avail, of course, because Monkey Boy's handlers had a plan, (well, maybe not an actual PLAN, but they THOUGHT they had one, anyway), and they were going to pursue that "plan" come hell or high water.

(Ironic that Bremer got the Medal Of Freedom for completely BOTCHING their "plan".)

The other stupidity of conjobs ravings is the notion of a "terrorist world... [and] global terror" as if some underground lair full of Dr. Eeevils exists sowing terror and anarchy.

All politics is local, george, and that goes for terrorist organizations, who exist for a reason, not for the hell of it. Not to sow "terror" around the world, but for the power to control their own destiny's.

And lastly, it's either a fulcrum or a screw, but it ain't both, and if that's an attempt by you to be clever, it fails.

Dan

I don't waste my time responding to court jester's arguments. Your dying hard comparison of the suicidal fanatic terrorists to the anarchists, is laughable.

You may not use the term fascist very often, as you say. But when you use it, you surely use it with vengeance. Only one week ago, you described my writings in your first post, as having the rudiments of "proto-fascism". But within the same week, I've grown now to a full-blown fascist, whom you feel you will have to expose to your ridicule and vituperation for the good of your "wet dreams". This is not the act of a thinker, but the performance of an intellectual conjuror.

As I said in my first post, with the addition now of one more word, with such moral and intellectual credentials, Plato would never allow you to enter his Academy.

Perhaps we can leave it at that.

I don't waste my time responding to court jester's arguments. Your dying hard comparison of the suicidal fanatic terrorists to the anarchists, is laughable.

Yes Con, this is the second time you have excused yourself from the chore of evaluating the comparison between anarchism and militant Islam by actually presenting evidence against it. My suspicion from reading your weblog is that you are not equipped intellectually to refute it, and have a very weak mastery of the skill of assembling empirical evidence to support or refute a hypothesis, so you must resort to dismissing the hypothesis with a laugh.

It is true that I have vascillated between characterizing your views as proto-fascist and fascist outright. But you haven't bothered to lay out the elements of your political views that actually distinguish them from either full-blown fascism or fascism in germ. Perhaps if you would mention several important differences between your views and fascist views, you could convince me that you are neither a fascist nor a proto-fascist. The elements that stood out for me, when I read the posts on your weblog, and which marked you in my eyes as fascistic, were an extreme xenophobic nationalism, a disdain for liberal culture and a strong affection for militarism and violent, martial imagery.

As I said in my first post, with the addition now of one more word, with such moral and intellectual credentials, Plato would never allow you to enter his Academy.

You seem to be under the impression that this dig hurts my feelings in some way. Personally, my tastes run more toward Aristotle, Hume and Russell than Plato. Perhaps we can compare our respective understandings of Plato and the others at a later date.

But it stikes me that your show of seemingly erudite name-dropping, both in your comments here and on the weblog, without any actual discussion of the authors you cite outside a famous quotation here and there, is a cover for the fact that you are only a pompous, pseudo-intellectual poser, rather than a real scholar.

Dan

This is bravura entertainment! You put the noose of fascism around my neck and you expect me "to lay out the elements of(my) political views" that would convince you that I am not a fascist, while you are pulling the trapdoor under my feet?

Dan,

Give it up. I've toddled on over and taken a look at Con George-Kotzabasis blog, and I've made the mistake of responding to his posts. Con George is not a follower of Plato, but of the Sophists. His stock in trade is dishonest rhetoric, empty wind, and cheap ploys. He shows no command of facts or logic, casually misunderstands basic distinctions like 'rogue' vs 'friendly' states, and avoids arguing facts at every opportunity. It is clear from a careful reading of Con George's writing that he himself is unpersuaded as to his cause. He's wrong, and he knows he is wrong. But for emotional or ideological reasons, he cannot acknowledge it, so he retreats into willful blindness, throwing up a screen of empty rhetoric and insults. To argue with Con George is to wrestle with jello, there is no substance to grapple, merely a formless goo, perpetually slipping away and coalescing into new puddles. Don't even bother.