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Being caught up in the 'chat fun' of blogging, in addition to this also being perhaps the calm before the storm, Monk hasn't been informing his blog of the news. Here are a couple of nice pieces overviewing both the domestic and the international scenes for this grand republic. Interestingly, neither is very positive for Dubya, or for us for that matter (except possibly in the sense of making November a bad month for the Bush White House).
___ ___ ___
Domestically...
The factors that make President Bush a vulnerable incumbent have almost nothing to do with his opponent, John F. Kerry. They stem directly from two closely linked, high-stakes policy gambles that Bush chose on his own. Neither has worked out as he hoped.
The first gamble was the decision to attack Iraq; the second, to avoid paying for the war. The rationale for the first decision was to remove the threat of a hostile dictator armed with weapons of mass destruction. The weapons were never found. The rationale for the second decision -- the determination to keep cutting taxes in the face of far higher spending for Iraq and the war on terrorism -- was to stimulate the American economy and end the drought of jobs. The deficits have accumulated, but the jobs have still not come back.
If Bush can win reelection despite the failure of his two most consequential -- and truly radical -- decisions, he will truly be a political miracle man. But as his own nominating convention approaches, the odds are against him.
Why call these decisions radical? From World War I right through the Persian Gulf War, the United States had never initiated hostilities or invaded a major country without the provocation of an attack from that country on this nation or its allies. Bush changed that by announcing a new doctrine of "preemptive war" and applying it first to Iraq. Iraq was a military dictatorship with a horrible record of human rights abuse and a well-earned reputation as an international malefactor that had attacked its neighbors.
But the urgency that Bush cited for moving against Saddam Hussein was the threat he posed by his possession of chemical and biological weapons and his pursuit of nuclear arms. "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant," Bush said in his major domestic speech justify- ing the war. "If we know that Saddam Hus- sein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?"
Long after Hussein was defeated and captured, the American forces occupying Iraq have found no evidence of the supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The rationale for a war that has taken nearly 1,000 American lives, caused several thousand American casualties and cost well over $100 billion does not exist.
Linked to the decision to go to war was the decision not to do what every other wartime American president has done -- raise taxes to pay for the cost of hostilities. Instead, in the face of growing annual deficits, Bush continued to press a compliant Republican Congress for more and bigger tax cuts. In 2003, when he asked Congress for $87 billion for Iraq, Bush said, "I heard somebody say, 'Well, what we need to do is have a tax increase to pay for this.' That's an absurd notion. You don't raise taxes when an economy is recovering. Matter of fact, lower taxes will help enhance economic recovery. We want our people going back to work."
Despite the triple dose of stimulus -- tax cuts on top of historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve Board on top of a huge increase in federal defense and domestic spending -- the recovery from a not-very-severe recession during the first year of Bush's term has been painfully weak. Especially when it comes to his No. 1 goal of producing jobs.
As a result, Bush finds himself defending the loss of more than 1 million jobs during his tenure -- the first president, as Democrats love to point out, since Herbert Hoover to suffer an actual job loss in office. The 32,000 jobs added to the economy in July were the smallest number this year, raising fears that the recovery proclaimed last spring may be losing steam.
Just before the new numbers came out, the president was bragging to campaign audiences, "When it comes to creating jobs for America's workers, we've turned the corner, and we're not turning back." Democrats are making that phrase as famous -- or infamous -- as the "Mission Accomplished" sign on the aircraft carrier Bush visited in a premature celebration of the end of major fighting in Iraq.
The president has suffered other blows to his credibility -- a survey of seniors earlier this month showed major doubts about his touted Medicare prescription drug plan. But they pale in importance compared with Iraq and the economy. In The Post's polls every month since January, more voters have voiced disapproval of his performance on those two issues than approval.
Time is short for changing people's minds. Bush is dragging two huge weights -- and he has no one to blame but himself.
-- David Broder for The Washington Post
Internationally...
On Oct. 23, just 10 days before the election, the war in Iraq will have lasted as long as the 584-day U.S. involvement in World War I, from the April 6, 1917, declaration of war to the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice. And probably in late September or early October the number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq will pass 1,000.
The war already has lasted longer than the Spanish-American War (230 days), and on Dec. 9, 42 days before the next president is inaugurated, the war will be longer than was the war with Mexico (630 days). It will not last as long as the war against Philippine insurgents (4,000 U.S. and 200,000 Philippine dead) that followed U.S. annexation and festered intermittently for 14 years. The annexation was defended in 1901 by the president of Princeton University:
"The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will it or not; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples who have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened and to be made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas."
Such thinking was already a U.S. tradition. In 1846, on the eve of the war with Mexico, a New York poet, whose optimism did not exceed the Polk administration's, said that Mexicans would be chanting, "The Saxons are coming; our freedom is nigh." But "Death to the Gringos" is what Mexican schoolchildren were chanting in April 1914, in response to President Woodrow Wilson's dispatch of U.S. troops to Mexico, pursuant to his belief that "every nation of the world needs to be drawn into the tutelage of America." Yet by 1918, regarding post-revolution Russia, he declared:
"My policy regarding Russia is very similar to my Mexican policy. I believe in letting them work out their own salvation, even though they wallow in anarchy for a while."
These excavations from America's rhetorical record are from John Judis's new book, "The Folly of Empire," a sobering read during Iraq's current wallow. Iraq's condition is not quite anarchy, but it does point to a double peril of producing democracy.
Democracy, loosely -- very loosely -- defined as government responsive to gusts of public passions, might fail. Or it might succeed ruinously. A government that is all sail and no anchor might produce popular choices that lead through anarchy to civil war, or national fragmentation, or fragmentation forestalled by Bonapartism, Francoism or some other variant of authoritarianism.
The Bush campaign is pelting John Kerry with dead cats because of his promise to wage a more "sensitive" war on terrorism -- Democrats tend to think in the vocabulary of the therapeutic society and its "caring professions." But the Bush administration is simultaneously struggling to balance the competing imperatives of economizing American lives and waging a war sensitive to the religious sensibilities at stake in the struggle for control of Najaf.
In all this, the concept of sovereignty is being pounded shapeless. Preemptive war was waged, in part, to notify enemies of the United States that U.S. sovereignty could not be paralyzed by world opinion or the noncooperation of international institutions. And one measure of progress in Iraq was the June 28 transfer of sovereignty.
But in a New York Times story from Najaf, readers learn, regarding the problem of Moqtada Sadr and his militia, that a Marine spokesman says, "We'll continue operations as the prime minister [Ayad Allawi] sees fit." And readers learn that U.S. commanders "curbed a broader national amnesty proposal announced by Dr. Allawi earlier this week, limiting its terms to exclude any rebels who have taken part in actions killing or wounding American troops."
So does sovereignty reside with the prime minister whose will evidently commands U.S. commanders? Or with those commanders who curb the prime minister's will?
A house so divided cannot stand. If it is the prime minister's will, or that of Iraq's embryonic democratic institutions, to conduct with insurgent factions negotiations that strip the Iraqi state of an essential attribute of statehood -- a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence -- the U.S. presence will become untenable.
Untenable even before what may be coming before November: an Iraqi version of the North Vietnamese Tet offensive of 1968. To say that the coming offensive will be by "Baathists" is, according to one administration official, akin to saying "Nazis" when you mean "the SS" -- the most fearsome of the Nazis. Such an offensive could make Sadr's insurgency seem a minor irritant. And it could unmake a presidency, as Tet did.
-- George Will for The Washington Post
Being caught up in the 'chat fun' of blogging, in addition to this also being perhaps the calm before the storm, Monk hasn't been informing his blog of the news. Here are a couple of nice pieces overviewing both the domestic and the international scenes for this grand republic. Interestingly, neither is very positive for Dubya, or for us for that matter (except possibly in the sense of making November a bad month for the Bush White House).
___ ___ ___
Domestically...
The factors that make President Bush a vulnerable incumbent have almost nothing to do with his opponent, John F. Kerry. They stem directly from two closely linked, high-stakes policy gambles that Bush chose on his own. Neither has worked out as he hoped.
The first gamble was the decision to attack Iraq; the second, to avoid paying for the war. The rationale for the first decision was to remove the threat of a hostile dictator armed with weapons of mass destruction. The weapons were never found. The rationale for the second decision -- the determination to keep cutting taxes in the face of far higher spending for Iraq and the war on terrorism -- was to stimulate the American economy and end the drought of jobs. The deficits have accumulated, but the jobs have still not come back.
If Bush can win reelection despite the failure of his two most consequential -- and truly radical -- decisions, he will truly be a political miracle man. But as his own nominating convention approaches, the odds are against him.
Why call these decisions radical? From World War I right through the Persian Gulf War, the United States had never initiated hostilities or invaded a major country without the provocation of an attack from that country on this nation or its allies. Bush changed that by announcing a new doctrine of "preemptive war" and applying it first to Iraq. Iraq was a military dictatorship with a horrible record of human rights abuse and a well-earned reputation as an international malefactor that had attacked its neighbors.
But the urgency that Bush cited for moving against Saddam Hussein was the threat he posed by his possession of chemical and biological weapons and his pursuit of nuclear arms. "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant," Bush said in his major domestic speech justify- ing the war. "If we know that Saddam Hus- sein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?"
Long after Hussein was defeated and captured, the American forces occupying Iraq have found no evidence of the supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The rationale for a war that has taken nearly 1,000 American lives, caused several thousand American casualties and cost well over $100 billion does not exist.
Linked to the decision to go to war was the decision not to do what every other wartime American president has done -- raise taxes to pay for the cost of hostilities. Instead, in the face of growing annual deficits, Bush continued to press a compliant Republican Congress for more and bigger tax cuts. In 2003, when he asked Congress for $87 billion for Iraq, Bush said, "I heard somebody say, 'Well, what we need to do is have a tax increase to pay for this.' That's an absurd notion. You don't raise taxes when an economy is recovering. Matter of fact, lower taxes will help enhance economic recovery. We want our people going back to work."
Despite the triple dose of stimulus -- tax cuts on top of historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve Board on top of a huge increase in federal defense and domestic spending -- the recovery from a not-very-severe recession during the first year of Bush's term has been painfully weak. Especially when it comes to his No. 1 goal of producing jobs.
As a result, Bush finds himself defending the loss of more than 1 million jobs during his tenure -- the first president, as Democrats love to point out, since Herbert Hoover to suffer an actual job loss in office. The 32,000 jobs added to the economy in July were the smallest number this year, raising fears that the recovery proclaimed last spring may be losing steam.
Just before the new numbers came out, the president was bragging to campaign audiences, "When it comes to creating jobs for America's workers, we've turned the corner, and we're not turning back." Democrats are making that phrase as famous -- or infamous -- as the "Mission Accomplished" sign on the aircraft carrier Bush visited in a premature celebration of the end of major fighting in Iraq.
The president has suffered other blows to his credibility -- a survey of seniors earlier this month showed major doubts about his touted Medicare prescription drug plan. But they pale in importance compared with Iraq and the economy. In The Post's polls every month since January, more voters have voiced disapproval of his performance on those two issues than approval.
Time is short for changing people's minds. Bush is dragging two huge weights -- and he has no one to blame but himself.
-- David Broder for The Washington Post
Internationally...
On Oct. 23, just 10 days before the election, the war in Iraq will have lasted as long as the 584-day U.S. involvement in World War I, from the April 6, 1917, declaration of war to the Nov. 11, 1918, armistice. And probably in late September or early October the number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq will pass 1,000.
The war already has lasted longer than the Spanish-American War (230 days), and on Dec. 9, 42 days before the next president is inaugurated, the war will be longer than was the war with Mexico (630 days). It will not last as long as the war against Philippine insurgents (4,000 U.S. and 200,000 Philippine dead) that followed U.S. annexation and festered intermittently for 14 years. The annexation was defended in 1901 by the president of Princeton University:
"The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will it or not; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples who have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened and to be made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas."
Such thinking was already a U.S. tradition. In 1846, on the eve of the war with Mexico, a New York poet, whose optimism did not exceed the Polk administration's, said that Mexicans would be chanting, "The Saxons are coming; our freedom is nigh." But "Death to the Gringos" is what Mexican schoolchildren were chanting in April 1914, in response to President Woodrow Wilson's dispatch of U.S. troops to Mexico, pursuant to his belief that "every nation of the world needs to be drawn into the tutelage of America." Yet by 1918, regarding post-revolution Russia, he declared:
"My policy regarding Russia is very similar to my Mexican policy. I believe in letting them work out their own salvation, even though they wallow in anarchy for a while."
These excavations from America's rhetorical record are from John Judis's new book, "The Folly of Empire," a sobering read during Iraq's current wallow. Iraq's condition is not quite anarchy, but it does point to a double peril of producing democracy.
Democracy, loosely -- very loosely -- defined as government responsive to gusts of public passions, might fail. Or it might succeed ruinously. A government that is all sail and no anchor might produce popular choices that lead through anarchy to civil war, or national fragmentation, or fragmentation forestalled by Bonapartism, Francoism or some other variant of authoritarianism.
The Bush campaign is pelting John Kerry with dead cats because of his promise to wage a more "sensitive" war on terrorism -- Democrats tend to think in the vocabulary of the therapeutic society and its "caring professions." But the Bush administration is simultaneously struggling to balance the competing imperatives of economizing American lives and waging a war sensitive to the religious sensibilities at stake in the struggle for control of Najaf.
In all this, the concept of sovereignty is being pounded shapeless. Preemptive war was waged, in part, to notify enemies of the United States that U.S. sovereignty could not be paralyzed by world opinion or the noncooperation of international institutions. And one measure of progress in Iraq was the June 28 transfer of sovereignty.
But in a New York Times story from Najaf, readers learn, regarding the problem of Moqtada Sadr and his militia, that a Marine spokesman says, "We'll continue operations as the prime minister [Ayad Allawi] sees fit." And readers learn that U.S. commanders "curbed a broader national amnesty proposal announced by Dr. Allawi earlier this week, limiting its terms to exclude any rebels who have taken part in actions killing or wounding American troops."
So does sovereignty reside with the prime minister whose will evidently commands U.S. commanders? Or with those commanders who curb the prime minister's will?
A house so divided cannot stand. If it is the prime minister's will, or that of Iraq's embryonic democratic institutions, to conduct with insurgent factions negotiations that strip the Iraqi state of an essential attribute of statehood -- a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence -- the U.S. presence will become untenable.
Untenable even before what may be coming before November: an Iraqi version of the North Vietnamese Tet offensive of 1968. To say that the coming offensive will be by "Baathists" is, according to one administration official, akin to saying "Nazis" when you mean "the SS" -- the most fearsome of the Nazis. Such an offensive could make Sadr's insurgency seem a minor irritant. And it could unmake a presidency, as Tet did.
-- George Will for The Washington Post
