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Specter: ‘We Have To Face The Fact’ That Iraq Is A Civil War

By ThinkProgress on Oct 23, 2006 at 12:37 pm

This weekend on CNN’s Late Edition, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) made the case that U.S. troops in Iraq are “being sucked slowly into a civil war with disastrous consequences.”

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) was asked if he agreed with Reed’s view that Iraq is in a civil war. Specter flatly said “yes” and added, “I don’t think there’s any point, Wolf, in hiding the facts. I think we have to face the facts.” Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/10/speciraq.320.240.flv]

Specter’s view mirrors that of many of Iraq’s leaders, U.S. troops in Iraq, and seven in ten Americans.

Full transcript: Read more

Yglesias

The Easy Way Out

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 23, 2006 at 11:58 am

I guess I’m a little bit agnostic on the Drum versus Black dispute about the utility of canvassing one’s support or lack thereof for past wars as a guide to foreign policy wisdom. It seems to me that this has some value, but I agree with Atrios that its value tends to be overstated. My biggest problem with this way of looking at the world, however, is that it winds up discounting people’s views on wars that didn’t happen. Since 2001, for example, various Weekly Standard articles I’ve read have advocated that the US send more troops to Afghanistan, that we send more troops to Iraq, that we go to war with Sudan over Darfur, that we go to war with Syria, that we go to war with Iran, and that we go to war with North Korea.

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Media

Lancet-go-round

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 23, 2006 at 11:46 am

Tim Lambert easily dispenses with criticism of the Hopkins/Lancet study of “excess deaths” in Iraq grounded in the divergence between their estimate of Iraq’s pre-war death rate and the UN’s estimate. The UN’s estimate turns out to have just been a kind of guess with no real methodological grounding at all. Lambert’s countercriticism of the “main street bias” line of attack doesn’t seem quite as airtight to me (it’s a little bit unclear based on the description exactly how this survey was done), but that was always a fairly speculative criticism (in that nobody really knew whether or not such a bias even existed, and other elements of the survey were biasing the death count in the other direction) so what the Hopkins team did still seems like by far the best estimate available. Better, certainly, than the “these numbers are very high so I choose to ignore them” method preferred by many.

Obviously, if the American and British governments — or conservative think tanks and media outlets — genuinely feel that the Hopkins team’s methods were unsound, there’s an obvious solution available to them: Design a method for a different comprehensive study of Iraqi mortality and fund its implementation. This is a sufficiently important question, and sufficiently difficult to pin down precisely, that it would make perfect sense for several different studies to be conducted.

Security

REPORT: Bush Officials Were ‘Rooting’ For North Korea to Test Nuclear Weapon

By Guest Blogger on Oct 23, 2006 at 11:21 am

Condoleezza RiceSenior Bush administration officials wanted North Korea to test a nuclear weapon because it would prove their point that the regime must be overthrown.

This astonishing revelation was buried in the middle of a Washington Post story published yesterday. Glenn Kessler reports from Moscow as he accompanies Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

Before North Korea announced it had detonated a nuclear device, some senior officials even said they were quietly rooting for a test, believing that would finally clarify the debate within the administration.

Until now, no U.S. official in any administration has ever advocated the testing of nuclear weapons by another country, even by allies such as the United Kingdom and France.

One of these officials may have been Rice herself, Kessler hints. Rice, he reports, “has come close to saying the test was a net plus for the United States.” Rice has been trying to counter the prevailing view that the test was a failure of the Bush administration’s policy.

A factual timeline of the North Korean program traces how policies of containment and engagement slowed and stopped the program, while threats of regime change increased the dangers. The two key failures were the choice to focus on overthrowing the government in Pyongyang rather than stopping the nuclear program, and the invasion of Iraq which distracted U.S. attention from the real nuclear dangers and propelled both North Korea and Iran to accelerate their programs.

The revelation that some officials secretly wanted North Korea to test their nuclear weapons is evidence of how the administration’s national security policy has become completely divorced from reality.

– Joe Cirincione

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Politics

Abramoff gets a desk at the FBI.

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 23, 2006 at 10:46 am

U.S. News reports that fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff “spends up to four hours a day detailing his shady business to agents eager to nail more congressmen in the scandal. And when cooperative witnesses spend that much time inside, they get a desk.” Federal officials are also hoping to place him in a nearby prison after he is sentenced.

Yglesias

Blackburn on Truth

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 23, 2006 at 9:56 am

Just last week, I was saying to myself “how come TNR doesn’t publish Simon Blackwell anymore?” And — bam! — here’s a Simon Blackburn article reviewing Harry Frankfurter’s On Truth and defending a somewhat postmodernist take against the now-fashionable slanders of Frankfurter and his ilk right there in The New Republic. Blackburn’s Ruling Passions defending a kinda sorta “moral relativism” (not a good term, but most people would probably understand the view he supports as relativism) and Essays in Quasia-Realism are two of my major philosophical touchstones.

Politics

Bartlett: ‘It’s Never Been A Stay The Course Strategy’

By Judd Legum on Oct 23, 2006 at 9:42 am

On CBS this morning, White House Counselor Dan Bartlett claimed that the administration has “never” had “a stay-the-course strategy.” Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/10/bartlett.320.240.flv]

President Bush made the same claim over the weekend. It’s not true. For years, the White House has repeatedly described their Iraq policy as “stay the course.” Here’s the video evidence:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2006/09/bush_stay.320.240.flv]

Digg It!

Transcripts: Read more

Yglesias

Two Sides to a War

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 23, 2006 at 9:34 am

I’m fairly certain I don’t grasp the full complexity of the situation, but it continually strikes me that enthusiasts for military intervention in Darfur, insofar as they’re not just poseurs eager to use the corpses of thousands as fodder for cheap UN-bashing (see also), are oddly in denial about the fact that there’s an actual war happening with multiple sides. A feasible intervention against the government, it seems to me, would have to be an intervention on behalf of the rebels and their political agenda.

This is a course of action that nobody actually wants to explicitly endorse. Perhaps that’s wrong. Perhaps Darfuri independence is a cause we should get behind. I’m skeptical that re-drawing all the lines on the map is the solution to Africa’s problems — seems more like a Pandora’s Box to me — but maybe someone can make that case. This other idea that an intervention could somehow proceed without us taking sides seems a bit daft.

Media

Surprising Support for Impeachment

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 23, 2006 at 9:22 am

Via Brad DeLong, talent show Greg reads a Newskeek poll indicating that 51 percent of the public would like to see George W. Bush impeached, whereas just 44 percent is opposed. Or, as Newsweek puts it, “Other parts of a potential Democratic agenda receive less support, especially calls to impeach Bush: 47 percent of Democrats say that should be a ‘top priority,’ but only 28 percent of all Americans say it should be, 23 percent say it should be a lower priority and nearly half nearly half, 44 percent, say it should not be done.”

Impeachment — a process which, if leading to conviction, would result in Dick Cheney becoming president of the United States — lacks a great deal of appeal to me as an agenda item.

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