So it’s been six years since the US Senate voted to authorize the president to invade Iraq.  It’s worth reviewing that time right now.  It was then that Congress – with many Democrats joining the Republican push – relinquished much of their power and played an essential role in establishing an imperial presidency.  As we well know any dissent was ignored or attacked as anti-American and unpatriotic.  Those were fearful times indeed.

Bill Moyers recently covered what was happening at the time.  Watch his video essay on the subject:

Technorati Tags: Bill Moyers, Democrats, Iraq, Iraq war authorization, Journal, war

So the big story today is the uproar over Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account being hacked and a couple emails subsequently being leaked to the internet.  It appears nothing terribly damaging will likely come of the affair.  The McCain campaign released a statement calling the hacking “a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of law.”  It certainly was an illegal act for which the perpetrators should be prosecuted.  But as usual, Glenn Greenwald does a masterful job exposing the outrage being expressed by the Right as little more than self-righteous sanctimony.  I recommend reading his article on the matter in full, but here are a few excerpts:

[I]t’s really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years — put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans’ telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown — all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.

[. . . .]

As despicable as I personally find the Palin hacking to be, it pales in comparison to the Bush crimes, because when someone runs for President or Vice President, they voluntarily cede vast amounts of their personal privacy, which is why they’re required to disclose things like their medical records, tax returns, assocational history, and other financial documents — all information that private Americans, at least in theory in the pre-Bush era, had the right to keep private. Those subjected to Bush’s illegal surveillance programs have done nothing to cede their privacy — other than live in a country which has decided to abolish most privacy protections.

Technorati Tags: civil liberties, Election 2008, Republicans

Obama points out the tactics and goals of the Republicans during this election: anything but issues.

Technorati Tags: Democrats, Election 2008, Lipstick on a Pig, Republicans

While the mainstream media devote hours of analysis to lipstick-gate, they continue to accept without question the Bush and McCain claim that the surge in Iraq has been a success.  One doesn’t have to look far to find example after example of this being put forward as a self-apparent truism.  The logic behind the reporting is little more than, “Look, the violence is down, therefore the surge has worked.”  Forget the over-arching goal of the surge was to bring about political reconciliation between the conflicting groups in Iraq.  In reality, the political situation is worse than ever.  As Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress writes:

The greatest myth promoted by Bush in his speech [at the National Defense University] was found in this line: “Political reconciliation is moving forward, and the Iraqi government has passed several major pieces of legislation.” By overstating the meagre steps taken by Iraq’s leaders in barely passing a few relatively insignificant laws in their parliament, Bush’s statement ranks right up there with his 2003 “mission accomplished” speech and vice-president Dick Cheney’s assertion that the insurgency was in its “last throes” in 2005.

Katulis continues:

The surge has frozen into place the accelerated fragmentation that Iraq underwent in 2006 and 2007 and has created disincentives to bridge central divisions between Iraqi factions. Moreover, rather than advancing Iraq’s political transition and facilitating power-sharing deals among Iraq’s factions, the surge has produced an oil revenue-fuelled, Shia-dominated national government with close ties to Iran. This national government shows few signs of seeking to compromise and share meaningful power with other frustrated political factions.

So much for political reconciliation.  Rather than furthering steps toward some form of power sharing, the surge has solidified the divisions unleashed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq.  But McCain, Bush, and the media will inevitably make the case that at least the surge has reduced violence.  This is the core of the “surge worked” hypothesis, yet it rests on a basic logical fallacy.  Just because Y came after X, it doesn’t follow that X caused Y.  Professor Juan Cole recently pointed this out with regards to media commentary on the surge.

The reality is far more complex than this simplistic narrative.  An important factor to declining levels of violence was the so-called Sunni Awakening movement in Anbar province in which the US allied with, armed, and paid Sunni insurgents to fight Al-Qaeda.  But this began before the surge, and there is no reason to believe this strategy required an increased troop level.  Cole agrees:

In al-Anbar Province, among the more violent in Iraq in earlier years, the bribing of former Sunni guerrillas to join US-sponsored Awakening Councils had a big calming effect. This technique could have been used much earlier than 2006, indeed, could have been deployed from 2003, and might have forestalled large numbers of deaths. Condi Rice forbade US military officers from dealing in this way with the Sunnis for fear of alienating US Shiite allies such as Ahmad Chalabi. The technique was independent of the troop escalation. Indeed, it depended on there not being much of a troop escalation in that province. Had large numbers of US soldiers been committed to simply fight the Sunnis or engage in search and destroy missions, they would have stirred up and reinforced the guerrilla movement.

An additional reason for the reduced violence in Iraq has been the unilateral cease-fire of the Mahdi Army ordered by Moqtada al-Sadr.  Gen. Patraeus even admits this fact, stating that the “Sadr trend stands for service to the people,” and that he hopes Sadr’s organization will become “constructive partners in the way ahead.”  While Patraeus would like to see the cease-fire as a result of the surge, the reality is again more complicated.  Cole sees the successful ethnic cleansing of Baghdad – in which it has become a mostly Shiite city with almost no mixed communities and others separated by walls – as an important reason for the Mahdi Army’s cessation of hostilities because this was one of their major aims.  As well, their pro-Iranian Shiite rivals, which include the Iraqi state, were becoming much more powerful militarily in relation to Moqtada al-Sadr’s organization.

Ethnic cleansing in Iraq points to a darker aspect of the surge, in which what so many call “success” is the result of brutality and violence.  Robert Parry also makes this point:

With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.

But this dark side of the “successful surge” is excluded from the U.S. political debate. As during the pre-invasion period, the Washington press corps acts more like Bush’s propagandists than anything close to skeptical journalists.

Instead media commentators waste our time with meaningless questions and speculation about what Barack Obama actually meant when making a comment about lipstick on a pig.  Well all I can say, at least there are alternatives to the he-said-she-said style of reporting that passes for journalism and analysis.  The following video is a commentary by Aijaz Ahmad from TheRealNews.com.  It was originally broadcast following Bush’s State of the Union address in early 2008.  Ahmad covers some of the issues I mention above and provides compelling reasons to question much of the conventional wisdom.

Technorati Tags: Election 2008, George W. Bush, Iraq, Iraq surge, media, propaganda

Nice video from the Daily Show:

Technorati Tags: elections, George W. Bush, media, Republicans, The Daily Show

Updated below

Rick Davis, a long-time Washington lobbyist and currently John McCain’s campaign manager, recently told The Washington Post, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” It was a somewhat rare and candid admission by a high level party operative to how the political process actually operates in the United States. While Davis’ comments might seem specific to this election, both major parties have for years preferred to avoid real issues – universal health care, the militaristic state, corporate crime and domination, a growing prison-industrial complex, to name a few – instead choosing to emphasize the personal qualities and style of candidates, especially when it comes to presidential elections. As in advertising, which permeates American’s consumerist culture, the PR surrounding political campaigns is more about feelings and emotions, faith and brand identity than it is about the issues most important to the public.

Mainstream media coverage plays right along with the charade. In fact, it is the perfect vehicle for the branding of hollow political figures. Talk mostly revolves around questions like “Did he or she win over the public with this or that speech?” “How was the presentation?” “Does he come across as an elitist?” And on and on. It’s simple pundit-driven “journalism,” easy to produce, providing the illusion of substance while serving corporate masters.

When public opinion conflicts with elite interests, the public is silenced. Those seeking office know who their paymasters are, and if any issue supported by large portions of the population but opposed by corporate power gets through media filters, it is framed in such a way to be stripped of any substance. For example, take universal health care. For years large majorities of the American public have been in favor of it. So large in fact it can’t be ignored or easily swept under the rug. Ever since Bill Clinton – who was elected in large part for proposing universal coverage – eventually bowed to the insurance industry and HMOs and failed to make the necessary changes, any and all subsequent reform proposals, if even made, only give lip service to the idea of health care for all while doing everything to avoid making the real changes necessary.

Such is politics and democracy in America, a corporate friendly environment indeed.

UPDATE:

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has a slightly different take on this subject than I do.  Where I see the depoliticization of politics as a much more bipartisan issue, he points to the Republicans as the main culprits:

Ever since Ronald Reagan’s election, this is what the Republicans do every four years. They render issues irrelevant and convert campaigns into cultural wars and personality referenda. They converted our elections into tawdry reality shows long before networks realized their entertainment value. And every four years, Democrats seems shocked and paralyzed by all of this and desperately delude themselves into believing that mean-spirited “negativity” and nastiness will alienate voters, while the media swoons at the potency of these attacks.

While he certainly is correct in his assessment of the GOP’s approach, it seems to me one of the reasons the Democrats cave in is because they are unwilling to push a truly democratic, issues-based politics to the fore.  Basically limited to rhetorical promises at best, Democrats are easily exposed as the hollow populists most of the country sees them to be.  You see, they play the corporate game as well, which limits the depth and reach their campaigns can actually go.

Greenwald takes the stance of a “realist,” which is understandable.  He knows that “cultural tribalism, resentment and alienation are very powerful influences in how people think.”  This is certainly true, but is the most effective response more tribalism, more attacks, an increased focus on qualities and style?  I doubt Greenwald thinks so.  But it’s not so clear what he proposes the Democrats should do.  He rightly deplores the empty, personal attack strategy of the GOP, and calls for a more combative (defensive?) approach:

Democrats have clearly decided (yet again) to cede that lowly playing field to the GOP and are hoping (yet again) that those personality and cultural issues are not enough to outweigh the country’s dislike of Republican policies…. If John McCain remains — even from the mouths of Democrats — the Honored, Honorable, Principled, Heroic Maverick, the GOP chances will be as high as they can be.

As I see it, what is needed to win is not more attention to personality and qualities, but rather a greater focus on the fundamental changes we know are needed.  But the liberal wing of the corporate power structure will never be able to go that far.

Technorati Tags: debate, Democrats, Election 2008, elections, media, politics