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Bernard Weiner's Blog
November 11, 2004
The Falluja Fallacy/The Alberto Gonzales Insult
While the U.S. was preoccupied with the presidential election and the attendant fallout, the Bush Administration was readying its Fallujah warplan and now is in the midst of its unfolding. That warplan reveals all that we need to know about why the U.S. adventure in Iraq is such a thorough military disaster, why it is losing the political battle there, and why the situation is only going to get worse.
First, there was the long advance buildup required by the huge American military force making the assault on Fallujah -- whereas guerrillas are free to pick up and move in an instant. So it's no surprise that the main body of insurgents wasn't in Fallujah when the U.S. forces entered; instead, insurgent attacks were widespread throughout Iraq against U.S. troops and the Iraqi security forces. (Reminds one of how the U.S. entered Iraq a year ago, rushing toward the military objective of taking Baghdad, but neglecting to guard the abandoned ammo dumps all around the country.)
The Americans seem to see everything in Iraq through a military lens -- that use of its huge technological/firepower advantage is the answer to most everything -- even though the military aspect of this war is only one, and perhaps the least important, component. In Wednesday's New York Times, we read:"American and Iraqi officials approved the Falluhah invasion with the understanding it could provoke political problems."
The key here is that word "could." If U.S. civilian and military authorities didn't see or understand what was about to happen -- didn't realize that they were playing with political fire and that invading Fallujah was like pouring gasoline on that blaze -- then there is little hope for a realistic policy in Iraq in the slightest.
SEEDING THE INSURGENT GARDEN
The Americans, and their few Iraqi troops, wanted to "take" Fallujah as an object lesson to other insurgents in the Sunni Triangle, and so large sections of the city were leveled (remember the U.S. major in Vietnam who said they were "destroying the village in order to save it"?). This will happen to your town as well, the U.S. wants other insurgents to know, so give in now before it's too late.
The exact opposite will occur, of course. More nationalist rebels will join the battle against the American Occupiers.
And now the Sunni political leadership has pulled out of the central government coalition, and the Sunni religious leadership has announced that it will boycott the scheduled January elections. In short, again, the exact opposite of what was hoped for by the U.S. planners.
YOU CAN "TAKE," BUT CAN YOU "CONTROL"?
Two things, both reminiscent of the same deficient thinking of U.S. leaders in the Vietnam War:
1). The U.S. continues to believe that, at bottom, this is mainly a military war and military force will prevail. And, as in Vietnam: most military men don't know much about Iraqi social/cultural/religious history, or know the language.
2). "Taking" a city doesn't mean you "control" it once you leave -- especially since the bulk of the insurgents disappeared from Fallujah days before the invasion of the town. Since the U.S. is stretched way too thin in Iraq to control every city (or ammo dump) it "takes," the logical conclusion is that the insurgent forces will return later.
Those insurgent forces will re-establish its old use of the city as a refuge. The local Iraqi "friendlies" left in charge -- the Iraqi police and guards as well as local officials put into power by the U.S. military -- will be attacked and bombed and, within a short time, Fallujah will once again be what it was.
BUSH DOESN'T "DO" MISTAKES
The madness. The madness.
But Bush doesn't admit mistakes. He and his generals are rolling all the Iraq-war dice on Fallujah, as they are rolling all the Middle East dice on Iraq. The U.S. will fail in both cases, because its policy does not match reality on the ground, and thousands of dead bodies, of U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians, will wind up in shallow graves, and perhaps over time even more will wind up in amputation wards in hospitals.
But Bush doesn't admit mistakes. It's full steam ahead, straight over the cliff. And, unless a miracle occurs -- the smoking gun conclusively proving electoral fraud -- this man will remain our Commander-in-Chief for another term. Four more wars. Makes one want to retch at all the death and destruction and social mayhem that are heading our way.
ASHCROFT "OVERSTATES" JUST A TAD ON HIS LEGACY
Good news: Ashcroft has resigned. And, as is typical in this administration, delusion holds sway over reality. Ashcroft claims that as a result of his tenure, "the objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." What is that guy smoking? With Panglossian dementia, he truly believes we're free from crime and terrorism, and this is the best of all possible worlds. And he managed to make it happen.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Ashcroft has set back at least 20 years a decent respect for Constitutional protections of due process, civil liberties and civil rights.
Bad news: Bush, giving no quarter to the half of the country he did not win, is steamrolling ahead with his extremist nominations. He's chosen White House counsel ##Alberto Gonzales, a Bush toady for decades, to succeed Ashcroft.
In his remarks after Bush announced the nomination, Gonzales sounded more like a puppet pledging fealty to The Leader than an Attorney General who will divorce himself from politics and administer a Justice Department based on respect for the Constitution.
"SETTING ASIDE" THE CONSTITUTION
This is the same White House Counsel who devised sneaky, and clearly unconstitutional, rationalizations for incarcerating suspected "enemy combatants" at Gitmo, with no recourse to the courts. (His point of view was harshly slapped down by the U.S. Supreme Court). This is the same White House Counsel who in a memo described the Geneva Conventions on protection of prisoners of war as outdated in a time of terrorism, "quaint," to use his famous adjective. This is the same White House Counsel who came up with legal rationales that would give Bush dictatorial powers whenever he says he's acting as "Commander in Chief" during "wartime."
This guy is bad news and deserves to be verbally pilloried during his upcoming hearings, for his willingness, indeed eagerness, to do his boss' unconstitutional bidding whenever BushCheney snap the whip. He should be bounced from consideration forthwith, and perhaps be the subject of a civil suit for sacrificing the Constitution on the altar of political expediency.
The larger issue that needs to be debated: Time after time, the appointment of an Attorney General beholden to the President yields bad law and bad politics. Yes, I know how great Robert Kennedy was under his brother Jack. But think of John Mitchell under Richard Nixon, Ed Meese under Ronald Reagan, John Ashcroft under George W. Bush. The only way one can get fair and impartial justice, for all Americans, is to name an independent Attorney General who has his own power base and is not dependent on presidential largesse for his job.
November 9, 2004
Kerry to "Unconcede" If Vote-Fraud Evidence Is Overwhelming?
(Updated November 11,2004)
It was about 2:30 p.m. Election Day on the West Coast. My pulse started racing when I read the early exit polls on the internet pointing to a clear Kerry victory. Then I read the final Zogby survey, which paralleled those exit polls, and which predicted 300+ Electoral College votes for Kerry. Then, I kept hearing about the expected high-turnout, between 115-120 million, including millions of young voters. Oh, this was going to be good!
As I was cruising around the tube, I caught interviews with Ralph Reed (former head of the Christian Coalition, now Bush-Cheney chair in the Southeast) and George W. Bush, at an airport stop on his way to yet another rally.
Both looked very uncomfortable and very depressed. They spouted their positive spin points, but their body language and demeanor said otherwise, that they knew they were going down to defeat. Obviously, their internal polling during the past several days had revealed the trouble they were in, and this exit-polling information was hard-to-take confirmation. Karl Rove was saying nothing.
So when all those red Southern states started popping up on the screen a few hours later, as returns started coming in, I wasn't that upset. This was to be expected. Kerry just needed to take Pennsylvania and one other big state, either Ohio or Florida. He got Pennsylvania, but Jeb Bush made sure (again) that his brother kept Florida. So it came down to this year's Florida, Ohio -- once again with a rabid Bush supporter, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, in charge of elections.
By the time everyone at my house went to sleep last Tuesday night (1:30 a.m. West Coast time, 4:30 back East), Kerry had said he would make no statement that night but would see how Ohio and the other undecided states looked in the morning. John Edwards' statement said that the campaign would fight for the concept of all votes being counted. I felt encouraged that the Dems weren't going to do another Gore capitulation on Election Night. They had the guts and they were ready to slug it out.
OH NO, THIS IS NOT A SATIRE
The next morning, out of the corner of my eye on the internet, I saw a headline that said that Kerry had called Bush and congratulated him, and would be delivering his concession speech shortly. I thought that headline was a satire of some sort.
Kerry's concession speech was pretty awful, disconnected fragments, containing no larger vision, no rousing call to continue the struggle in other ways. Just let the healing begin and unite behind Bush as our president. I couldn't believe my ears. The war hero who had not backed down in the face of an enemy assault, the guy who had so criticized George W. Bush for "rushing to war" without having all the facts in hand was "rushing away from war," the battle to preserve the integrity of the presidential voting process.
True, he said he was conceding because his staff had crunched the numbers and told him that even if he won a high percentage of the outstanding provisional ballots in Ohio, he could not take that state. And without Ohio, he could not win.
KERRY RETHINKING HIS CONCESSION CALL
So he called it quits, even while late vote-counting in Florida and Ohio and several other states was still in process. Unlike Florida in 2000, there was no need to rush, there was no immediate deadline forcing a decision. Without doing major damage to the electoral process, a few more days easily could be taken, to see how things were shaking out -- and, most importantly, to get a clearer sense of the enormity of possible voter fraud around the country.
There were increasing reports of such fraud in a wide variety of states. Bush inexplicably was racking up thousands of votes in key precincts and districts that didn't seem to accord with either political logic, historic expectations or the exit-polls. For example, there appeared to be tampering with the optical-scanner voting machine tabulations. (See Ernest Partridge's blog about a possible smoking-gun, from "The Squanderer.")
A "concession" by one candidate to the other has no legal binding force. It is a traditional courtesy call. If the final vote counts proves otherwise, the concession means nothing.
Five days after Kerry's concession call to Bush, with more and more evidence of vote-tampering, voter suppression, dirty tricks and other potential crimes against democracy, comes a letter from an attorney friend of John Kerry's brother, Cameron, saying the Dem candidate is willing to consider "unconceding" the election if enough solid evidence is produced to justify such a move.
That letter, from D.C. attorney Cynthia Butler, which supplied Cam Kerry's email address, went all over the internet -- including here in our Crisis Papers Blog -- and Cam Kerry's law office was swamped with stories of voter intimidation, fraud, suppression and so on.
Without commenting on the Butler letter per se,* Cam Kerry got the word out on the internet to all those trying to reach him through his law office to instead contact the Voting Rights Institute ( >>vri@dnc.org << ), a legal arm of the Democratic National Committee, and supply that legal team with all the election information.
(Shortly after receiving the Butler letter, I contacted Cam Kerry's office to try to find out if the Butler letter was accurate and that he was indeed accepting such citizen reports. His mass-mail reply the next day was to urge folks to write the VRI, and we and other internet writers later removed Cam Kerry's email address and supplied the correct VRI one.)
Whether the Democratic Party and its VRI legal team are interested in pursuing the matter into the courts, or in demanding recounts in Ohio and Florida and elsewhere, is unknown at this stage. But it doesn't look good; there isn't a large amount of energy and publicity being put into this information-gathering campaign, at least not from the DNC.
In short, it looks like Kerry's concession will not be rescinded. But you never know.
Other actions are being taken by other candidates (Nader and Cobb, among them), by members of Congress, and by citizen action groups, to try to get to the bottom of the vote-fraud issue. So the slight possibility of overturning the announced November 2 election results still exists, though the clock is running, with not much time left. Stay tuned.
*Note: This story has taken all sorts of twists and turns in the past day or two, including some speculation that the Cynthia Butler letter may have been a GOP hoax, to create a "denial of service" snafu at Cam Kerry's office. But the original Butler letter appears to be genuine. At least as of Thursday night, November 11 2004.
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