Been watching the amazing caveman race-to-the-bottom that is election 2008, have you? Probably more than you like. In a way, it reminds me of that classic board game, Clue, where there are three groups of cards – suspects, weapons, and locations – and at the start of the game one card from each group is taken out and secreted away; ultimately the winner is the first one to surmise which cards they are. Colonel Mustard did it in the Parlor with the Candlestick Holder, right? Well, particularly on the Republican side, you’ve got maybe three issues that all the major candidates demagogue about, based on G.O.P. polling data – say, immigration, detainee abuse, and the broader “war on terror”. So Rudy, Mitt, Fred, and Huck range about trying to guess what the winning positions will be. (Hmmm…. the Undocumented Mexican Gardener did it in the Anbar Awakening Council with Stress Positions.) They try to outdo each other to the point where it gets pretty ugly. Thus are major national policies born.

Take torture (please). Now I ask you, what is more lame than Romney’s comment that, yes, he’s against torture, but he will not discuss specific techniques because he doesn’t want “the people we capture to know what things we are able to do and what things we are not able to do”? This is essentially the same line Bush has been handing out for a couple of years, and it amazes me still. Does anyone anywhere believe that the people we identify as terrorists have never heard of waterboarding or any of the other methods our interrogators so gleefully employ? There’s nothing new about torture, particularly… just variations on a theme. And enough people have been in and out of U.S. custody over the last few years for word to get around, trust me. (Let alone the fact that many of these detainees come from countries where torture is routinely applied on detainees, such as U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.) Mitt and some of the others on that stage are signaling that the current regime will continue, quite probably get worse on their watch. Their reassurance to the concerned among us? Trust us.

Mitt’s crib on this topic comes from Cofer Black, former C.I.A. official and head of counter terrorism at the Agency (for 3 years, not 30, as Jeremy Scahill has usefully pointed out), now top management at Blackwater International, the mercenary army that has been benefiting very richly from lucrative contracts proffered by the Pentagon, the State Department, Homeland Security, and more. Black is a nasty piece of work – a fact amply reflected by his career choices – and there appears little doubt that he is serving as an important part of Mitt’s virtual brain on national security matters. One can imagine Black playing an important role in a Romney administration, perhaps assuming a major cabinet position. (I can already see him taking softball questions from the Pentagon press corps – maybe they’ll make a sex symbol out of him, as they attempted to do with Rumsfeld early on…… yes, Rumsfeld…). The problem is much bigger than Mitt, though. Every administration sets precedents. Torture has long been a part of our foreign policy (domestic policy too – see Chicago, New Orleans), but Bush has made it a much more open option. If this is seen as tolerated by the majority of Americans, that will be bad in a whole lot of ways.

Stand up, folks – get out of that stress position and tell these idiots that we won’t tolerate torture, no matter how they define it.

luv u,

jp

I’m not sure if it was Bush’s intention to come off like a paranoid lunatic last Tuesday when he commented on the national intelligence estimate on the non-existent nuclear (or “nuke-you-ler” in Dubya speak) threat posed by Iran, but he certainly succeeded in doing so. Iran “will be dangerous, if they have the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon,” he opined, giving a shrug of clueless arrogance that so eloquently expresses the inner workings of his tiny mind. Facts don’t matter – this much we know. And the facts have been problematic for our president and vice-president as they have tried to nudge the American people ever closer to the brink of another optional war. But they were just as problematic with respect to Iraq, remember – the administration had nothing and was working overtime to provoke some kind of confrontation, without success (to their quite visible frustration).

They’ve been working up an alternative to the nuclear scenario for some time now, as Seymour Hersh reported a few months back – certainly the basic facts in this new NIE have been known to Bush and his advisors since at least last summer. But no Iranian nuclear program certainly does not mean no war. Lord knows the administration and members of both parties in Congress have been ratcheting up the rhetoric on alleged Iranian “interference” in Iraq all year long. I know I’ve been over that ground before, so I won’t repeat myself. Suffice to say that our political leaders can always find a reason to send others into battle – that is certainly not unique to this age – and with the fiasco in Iraq now running at a steady simmer again instead of the rolling boil it reached a few months ago (providing you don’t count the corpses we’re generating), I’m sure they all feel as if we have one arm free. (Ask not for whom the dope shrugs… he shrugs for thee.)

So what’s next? We know the WMD gambit doesn’t work so well anymore. And the Iranian infiltrators toting E.F.P.’s story doesn’t seem to be getting sufficient traction, perhaps because only a handful of the “foreign” (i.e. non-U.S.) fighters captured in Iraq have proven to be Iranians. (Many more Saudis in that group, actually. Why doesn’t Bush want to invade Saudi Arabia? Friends there… many friends.) That leaves only the ever-useful fallback argument that we’re saving the Iranian people from their tyrannical government. The “liberation” of Iran – has a familiar ring, doesn’t it? Of course, that’s the kind of rationale you don’t hear much about until after the invasion… an appeal designed to make you feel guilty about saying you’re against dropping bombs on people. We’re bombing them to freedom! Trust me, when the Iraq war started, I was handed lame apologetics by otherwise reasonable people, and their rhetoric wasn’t much more rational than that. That was before full-blown ethnic cleansing occurred in Iraq, with more than 2 million exiles living in Syria and Jordan, 2 million more internally displaced, and the Iraqi government (and U.S. military commanders) reluctant to bring them back for fear that it may begin again. So, no… that dog probably won’t hunt, as the saying goes.

Nevertheless, Bush wants to invade some country that starts with “I”, and it’s obvious our pusillanimous Congress members won’t stand up to it. Guess it’s up to us.

luv u,

jp