Reading notes

My primary grievance against prevailing Republican doctrine is that it thrives on and promotes nonthinking and worse, anti-thinking. It’s damned embarrassing to me to see smart people fall for it.

Note that “prevailing Republican doctrine” does not equal “true conservative values.” True conservative values — like smaller government, fiscal responsibility, hell, any kind of responsibility — are often thoughtful, reasonable, sane. Prevailing Republican doctrine isn’t.

Just watch Crossfire, for example: the commentators “from the Right” spout fallacy after false inference after non sequitur, exhibiting the kind of flabby thinking and erroneous reasoning that would get them an F on every high school- or college paper I’ve ever had to write.

We’re all susceptible to faulty reasoning. But to put in software terms, seems to me that for left-leaning folks crappy thinking is a bug to be identified and fixed, whereas for right-leaning folks — especially those in charge — it’s regarded as a feature.

There are plenty of Republican people who can think exceedingly clearly but who, in this particular case, apparently haven’t thought about how thoroughly they’ve been surrounded by deliberate dimwits.

Wake up, wake up, all of us! We can do better than this. Let’s use the brains God gave us.

Gov. Howard Dean M.D. writes —

I write this week’s column as a physician.

The Bush administration has declared war on science. In the Orwellian world of 21st century America, two plus two no longer equals four where public policy is concerned, and science is no exception. When a right-wing theory is contradicted by an inconvenient scientific fact, the science is not refuted; it is simply discarded or ignored.

What does it possibly gain us to not only disobey God — as we are when we wage unjust wars, for starters — but to also disdain his gift of intelligent thought?

See also Bush Misuses Science (WaPo) and Science Friction (Washington Monthly).

I submit that the human costs of Bush’s War have been incalculable, the monetary costs exorbitant and ongoing, and the benefit? — a net loss of stability in the Middle East and an increase in terrorism’s motivation and execution. Katrina puts numbers to my submission:

Now more than at any time since Bush invaded Iraq, journalists need to give Americans a clear assessment of the mounting costs of this war. This is a great opportunity for the media to redeem itself for malpractice in the run-up to war when, as Washington Post ombudsperson Michael Getler wrote this month in a tough rebuke to his own paper—-and the larger media world, “…the press, as a whole, did not do a very good job in challenging administration claims…Too many public events in which alternative views were expressed…were either missed, underreported or poorly displayed.” …

In human terms, seven hundred US servicemen and women have died since Bush declared “the end of major combat” in his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech in May 2003, while more than 5,000 soldiers have been wounded since the war began. Many of them, as Michael Moore documents in his provocative new film Fahrenheit 911, have lost arms and legs.The cost to the Iraqi people has also been tragic. Up to 11,317 Iraqi civilians have died in the conflict so far—many of them children whose only crime was to be caught living in the middle of a war zone.

In financial terms, the costs to the American taxpayer are massive. The US has already spent $126 billion on the war, costing every American family approximately $3,400 each.

IOW, if your family’s “Bush tax relief” was less than $3,400, well then, you’re in the red. And it’s all credit-card debt; we have not yet begun to pay.

Joe Klein at Time provides a rousing overview of the “long, hot summer of investigations and exposes that will last deep into the campaign season.” Seems kind of like a 1+-page print sidebar addendum to Fahrenheit 9/11. Very accessible.

The Vulcans — a campaign 2000 nickname for George W. Bush’s hawkish national security team — went Krakatoa last week. Dick Cheney erupted on the Senate floor, deploying the F word against Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, who had been belaboring the Vice President over the no-bid deals that Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, had scored in Iraq. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suffered a meltdown in a House Armed Services Committee hearing, blasting the press for “sitting in Baghdad” and “printing rumors.” (He later apologized.) And the White House was forced to acknowledge that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved, at least for a while, the use of dogs, nudity, stress positions — that is, torture — against enemy combatants.

Investigations, exposes, subpoenas, indictments, trials, convictions? — It’s only logical.

There is also some rustling among the brass about General Tommy Franks’ memoir, to be published in August. Bob Woodward reported that Franks once called Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, who was charged with postwar planning, “the [Cheney expletive] stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” and some defense experts are wondering if Franks, who has a reputation for candor, will elaborate on that.

I bet Doug isn’t happy about Franks’ description. I mean, I don’t know the man, but every time his name comes up, I automatically think, Oh, yeah, the [Cheney expletive] stupidest guy on the face of the earth.

In pursuit of fairness, I’m working on taking that thought off autopilot. On the upside, competition’s getting fierce; someone else may legitimately relieve him of the title soon.

The Sunday editorial page of the LA Times addresses the folly and tragedy of The Bush Doctrine:

The Iraq war was intended as a monument to his new Bush Doctrine, which also posited that the U.S. would take what help was available from allies but would not be held back by them. It now stands as a monument to folly. …

It will take years for widely felt hostility to ebb, in Iraq and other countries. The consequences of arrogance, accompanied by certitude that the world’s most powerful military can cure all ills, should be burned into Americans’ memory banks.

Preemption is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster. The U.S. needs better intelligence before it acts in the future. It needs to listen to friendly nations. It needs humility.

Indeed. The Bush Doctrine of preemption always was and ever shall be the height of destructive false statemanship. IMO no one involved with its declaration or its attempted execution in Iraq should ever be allowed to hold public office again.

[via Digby]

Another big, hopeful “Thank God!” from me on today’s Supreme Court decisions (and elsewhere).

As quoted by Marty, Justice Stevens writes in Padilla —

At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society. Even more important than the method of selecting the people’s rulers and their successors is the character of the constraints imposed on the Executive by the rule of law. Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber. Access to counsel for the purpose of protecting the citizen from official mistakes and mistreatment is the hallmark of due process. … If this Nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.

Is this not a brilliant understanding of the situation? Yes. Thank you, Justice Stevens.

And thanks, Marty, for shedding knowledgeable light on these decisions’ implications.

A little later, I see that Lyle Denniston, also writing at SCOTUSBlog, says —

Amid all the writing by the Justices in today’s three historic rulings, no sentence stands out as vividly as this one, “A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens.”

Hope abides. Of course, OTOH, IANAL, so it may abideth somewhat less vigorously than my first-glance enthusiasm purports.

[via Atrios and Daily Kos]

I’ve been waiting for the truth-telling contained in this article for a very long time. The Bush Doctrine, aka the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” invites Hell on Earth.

The occupation of Iraq has increasingly undermined, and in some cases discredited, the core tenets of President Bush’s foreign policy, according to a wide range of Republican and Democratic analysts and U.S. officials.

When the war began 15 months ago, the president’s Iraq policy rested on four broad principles: The United States should act preemptively to prevent strikes on U.S. targets. Washington should be willing to act unilaterally, alone or with a select coalition, when the United Nations or allies balk. Iraq was the next cornerstone in the global war on terrorism. And Baghdad’s transformation into a new democracy would spark regionwide change. …

“Of the four principles, three have failed, and the fourth — democracy promotion — is hanging by a sliver,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council staff member in the Reagan administration and now director of regional strategic programs at the Nixon Center. …

As a result, Bush doctrine could become the biggest casualty of U.S. intervention in Iraq …

The Bush Doctrine stone-cold dead would be the primary, maybe the only, benefit of this ill-begotten crusade.

The most controversial tenet of Bush doctrine was also the primary justification for launching the Iraq war. In the president’s June 2002 address to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Bush said deterrence and containment were no longer enough to defend America’s borders. The United States, he said, had the right to take preemptive action to prevent attacks against the United States. …

Iraq showed the “pitfalls of the doctrine in graphic detail,” said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

Preemption has been “damaged, if not totally discredited,” and the outcome in Iraq may prove to be “an inoculation against rash action” by the United States in the future, Carpenter said.

The administration is working overtime to reduce the sense of alarm that Washington is posed “on a hair trigger” to launch a new offensive against governments it does not like, said James F. Hoge Jr., editor of Foreign Affairs magazine.

The surest outcome of a doctrine of preemption has always been that other nations will ramp up their defenses, including nuclear, to guard against the U.S. “preemptively” setting yet another nation in their sights. When I say the Bush team exhibits little foresight, this is an example of what I mean.

Thanks, Robin, for this analysis.

For more on the Bush Doctrine — the “National Security Strategy of the United States” — see Wendell Berry for a brilliant response written soon after the White House published the doctrine in September 2002.

2004-07-02 update: I like how Martin van Creveld words a particular consequence of preemptive doctrine (via Melanie):

Now that the U.S. has proved it is prepared to fight anybody for no reason at all, [Iranians] should be forgiven if they redouble their efforts [to acquire nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles to match nuclear-capable American forces surrounding them].