Salon editorial fellow Aaron Kinney watches as David Brooks goes back to the basics.
For a group that has for the past few years been defined by a remarkable degree of uniformity, conservatives have reacted in a variety of ways to the recent troubles of President Bush and the Republican Party. For Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the president’s nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was the occasion first for a bout of refreshing honesty — he announced that he was “disappointed, depressed and demoralized” — and second for a period of denial, when he suggested last week that Bush will withdraw the nomination. Michael Barone, however, remains sanguine about Bush’s prospects.
For New York Times columnist David Brooks, incidents such as the Tom DeLay imbroglio, which have by now derailed the president’s second-term agenda, are an occasion for him to dive deep into the pool of bromides, vague assumptions and illogic that form the basis of his political philosophy.
For Brooks, it is time to put aside the sordid news of the day and return to basics, to the reasons he grew interested in politics in the first place, to “the tradition of Hamilton, Lincoln and the Bull Moose,” Teddy Roosevelt. The social mobility these men represented, Brooks wrote in his column Sunday, is why he “love[s] globalization.”
“I love the fact that American businesses are going to be improved via competition with Chinese and Indian rivals,” Brooks wrote. “I love the fact that to compete we are going to have to reform our lobbyist-written tax code into something flatter and fairer.”
That last sentence elicits a flurry of questions, not the least of which are: How will a flatter tax make the U.S. more able to compete internationally? And who is the victim of the tax code’s unfairness? The wealthy, after all, have received massive tax breaks under the Bush administration.
Regarding the competition from China, Brooks is in a sunny mood: “Americans are the hardest-working people on earth … China isn’t going to bury us. It’s going to make us better and richer; it’s going to open more opportunities than it closes.”
See, you naysayers out there? It’s just that easy! Forget America’s mind-boggling trade deficit with China. The U.S. will come out on top through the sheer force of optimism.
Brooks later delivered these two non sequiturs: “I know, having learned it from Lincoln and Roosevelt, that individual initiative should always be tied to national union,” and “I know we need to protect the natural heritage that defines us.” Aside from an irrelevant reference to the Civil War, we have no idea what the first statement means. As for the second, if Brooks is talking about protecting the environment, then he could start by devoting a column to critiquing the effort by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., to gut the Endangered Species Act.
Brooks concluded by declaring that it is “time for an insurrection,” but against whom and by whom, he doesn’t say. For someone who claims Democrats are “completely bereft of ideas,” Brooks himself is rather lacking in specific ideas for how the Republican Party is going to shift away from cronyism and rigid ideology toward efficacy and pragmatism. If he thinks the GOP of George W. Bush, Karl Rove and Tom DeLay is going to change its tune or relinquish its grip on power, he is sorely mistaken.
Salon editorial fellow Aaron Kinney looks at the latest news from Iraq.
As usual with Iraq, it’s a mixture of good and bad news, with bad outweighing good. While British forces in Basra announced the arrest Thursday of 12 Iraqi police officers suspected of ties to violent militias, six U.S. soldiers were killed in two roadside bombs in western Iraq near the Syrian border.
The Basra arrest, while a positive development, only underscores how tenuous the security in that region of the country is. Last month, British forces plowed into a Basra jail with an armored vehicle in an effort to rescue two British soldiers who were held there. The soldiers, who had been arrested while operating undercover by Iraqi police officers, were in danger of being turned over to one of the several religious militias that hold considerable power there, British military officials claimed.
In western Iraq, 1,000 U.S. soldiers are scouring towns in the region in an effort to root out insurgents in advance of the constitutional referendum Oct. 15. According to Reuters, the mission near the Syrian border killed about 50 insurgents in six days.
Salon editorial fellow Aaron Kinney ponders recent calls for U.S. energy consumers to conserve gas.
We’re getting mixed messages when it comes to oil supplies and prices this hurricane season. The Wall Street Journal (“In Praise of ‘Gouging,’” Sept. 7) and ABC News’ John Stossel have opined that price gouging is a good thing because it prevents gas suppliers from running out of their product, ensuring that there’s enough to go around for everybody. Greed, in other words, is good. By pursuing their own interests, individuals wind up benefiting society.
Meanwhile, President Bush on Monday joined the chorus of people calling on American consumers to conserve gas by avoiding unnecessary trips.
“We can all pitch in by using — by being better conservers of energy. I mean, people just need to recognize that the storms have caused disruption and that if they’re able to maybe not drive when they — on a trip that’s not essential, that would helpful.”
It was a weakly phrased plea, but a plea nonetheless. The president’s sentiments echoed those of Red Cavaney, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, the trade association for U.S. oil and gas companies. Cavaney released a statement last Thursday urging conservation:
“My message today is that shutdowns of industry facilities could impact the flow of gasoline and other fuels, and we ask for your help. At times like this, actions by individual consumers can make a big difference for the good.”
“Plan your trips to conserve fuel. Do not to fill up your gas tank unless needed. Lower your top speed by 10 mph. Avoid jack-rabbit starts. Minimize use of your car’s air conditioning Look to mass transit when available. And conserve energy in your home.”
So, in essence, Cavaney wants consumers to make their decisions not for their own benefit but for the greater good of society. But why shouldn’t consumers just do whatever they feel like? According to the logic espoused by Stossel and the Wall Street Journal, energy consumers, as market actors, should burn as much fuel as they want to.
We’re not suggesting that Bush and Cavaney are being hypocritical. Neither of them has said that price gouging is a good thing. But we would like to see some consistency from right-wing pundits. Are they going to come out in opposition to Bush’s and Cavaney’s calls for conservation? Or are only businesses, not consumers, allowed to act without regard for the interests of others?
Salon editorial fellow Aaron Kinney reacts to some surprising news.
You can’t keep a good man down. Or rather, you can’t keep a member of the Bush patronage machine from getting a job he’s not qualified to do.
In this case, however, the audacity of the hire is no less than astounding: According to Raw Story, CBS News reported today that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is reenlisting disgraced former director Mike Brown — not to run the agency again, mind you, but to act as a consultant charged with helping the government figure out why FEMA bungled the national response to Hurricane Katrina. In other words, Brown will help investigate what went wrong with the agency that he himself ran in circles while tens of thousands withered for days in festering conditions in New Orleans after the storm struck.
Brown resigned from his job on Sept. 12 after news reports exposed his less-than-glowing professional credentials prior to taking the top FEMA post. He may be eminently more qualified for his new investigative role in terms of understanding the primary evidence involved. We can only hope his team leaps into action more quickly this time in getting to the bottom of the disaster of a federal response to Katrina.
Salon’s Aaron Kinney follows up on an incident involving British soldiers and Iraqi police.
Iraqi outrage continues to grow in the southern Iraqi city of Basra over a raid by the British military to free two undercover soldiers who got into a gunfight with Iraqi policemen. On Wednesday, the Basra provincial council voted to stop cooperating with British forces until they receive an apology for the raid, while an angry armed crowd that included Basra police officers demonstrated in protest.
Many questions remain about the incident, which we described earlier this week. Why did the two British soldiers fire on the Basra traffic officers who stopped them? Why, as Reuters reported, were they carrying an antitank missile? Were the soldiers, as the British military alleges, handed over to a Shiite militia?
What’s not in question is the fact that Basra is largely under the control of these Shiite militias, including the followers of firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Basra’s police force is filled with men whose primary allegiance is to Shiite authorities and not to the coalition forces. And in the past two months, two journalists who reported on these phenomena have been executed.
The first to die was Steven Vincent, who published one of his dispatches on Basra in the July 31 edition of the New York Times. Vincent wrote that one Iraqi journalist told him, “No one trusts the police.” He also described how “self-appointed monitors” patrolled the city’s university campus unchecked, making sure that “women’s attire and makeup are properly Islamic.”
Most disturbing, Vincent reported that an Iraqi police lieutenant confirmed for him the rumor that a small group of police officers were “perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations that take place in Basra each month.” Vincent said the lieutenant told him there was “even a sort of ‘death car’: a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment.”
Vincent later learned, according to the London Times, that the Toyota had been replaced by a “brand new white Chevrolet pick-up without registration plates but with the word ‘Police’ written on it.” On Aug. 3, just three days after his article appeared in the New York Times, Vincent was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds to the chest after he and his translator were abducted off the street by five men in a police car. (Vincent had also generated enmity in Basra for his reported plans to marry his female Iraqi translator, who appeared in public with her head uncovered, in order for her to gain U.S. citizenship.)
The death of the other writer, Faiker Haider, coincided with the onset of the recent crisis. Haider was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head on Sept. 19, the same day the raid by British forces took place. The mission to free the undercover British marines, which reportedly allowed 150 prisoners in the facility to escape, occurred during a period of unrest following the arrest by British authorities of two close al-Sadr associates.
Haider was abducted from his home early in the morning of Sept. 19 by masked men who identified themselves as police, according to the London Times. The men pulled up to Haider’s house in one police car and one unmarked car and entered his residence brandishing AK-47 assault rifles. The men ransacked the apartment, grabbing cellphones and videotapes, and took Haider with them, leaving his wife and three small children behind, the Times reported.
As the controversy in Basra unfolds, larger questions emerge. How will the new Iraqi government hold together, given the power of regional religious factions? And how will a central Iraqi government maintain security when local militias wield so much authority? At a press briefing at the Pentagon today, George W. Bush assured Americans once again that progress is being made in Iraq, but he also acknowledged that Iraqis are still a long way from being ready to take over. “It’s going to be a while to turn over full control,” he said. “Full control says that the Iraqis are capable of moving around the country and sharing intelligence and they got a command control system that works like ours, and that’s going to be a while.”
Salon editorial fellow Aaron Kinney checks in with a summary of recent news from Iraq.
When a reporter asked him in Mississippi earlier this month if he could provide adequate attention to both the needs of the Gulf Coast and the foreign relations issues that confront him, George W. Bush got a little indignant. “I can do more than one thing at one time,” he snapped. “That’s what — I hope you — by the time I’m finished president, I hope you’ll realize that the government can do more than one thing at one time, and individuals in the government can … And so if I’m focusing on the hurricane, I’ve got the capacity to focus on foreign policy, and vice versa. But I thank you for asking that question.”
Bush is touring the Gulf Coast yet again today, and that got us to thinking about another question for the president — how are things going in Iraq on your watch?
Here’s the news we’re hearing, which includes a mounting death toll and two stranger-than-fiction mysteries.
The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq has moved past the 1,900 mark with the deaths of five more U.S. soldiers: Four were killed by roadside bombs near Ramadi, while a fifth died in an explosion near Baghdad. Four more Americans, a U.S. diplomat and his security team, were killed today in a suicide bombing. Also, an Iraqi freelance journalist who worked with the New York Times was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head on Monday in Basra.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that Iraqi authorities are preparing an arrest warrant for the former defense minister under the Bush-appointed interim government of Ayad Allawi. The minister, Hazim Shaalan, who is “understood to be living in Jordan,” is implicated in what Iraq’s senior anticorruption official calls “possibly the largest robbery in the world” — the bilking of more than $1 billion from the Iraqi treasury. According to the official, Judge Raid al-Rahdi, as much as $2.3 billion has “disappeared” from Iraqi government accounts, in part through multimillion-dollar arms deals, not vetted through proper channels, in which grossly inflated prices were paid for outdated or substandard equipment.
And back in the United States and Britain, television viewers must be puzzling over the reports they’re seeing of British troops in Basra using an armored vehicle to smash into an Iraqi police station. There are conflicting reports, but we know that Iraqi authorities took two undercover British soldiers into custody after they got into a gun battle with Iraqi police that resulted in the death of at least one traffic police officer — a CNN report indicated that the soldiers began “firing on civilians in central Basra,” while British authorities claim the incident began when the undercover soldiers were stopped by the police.
In a statement issued today, British Brigadier John Lorimer explained what happened after the soldiers were arrested. The British soldiers were supposed to be handed over to coalition authorities, but this never occurred, despite the orders of Iraq’s interior minister, Lorimer said. Fearing that the soldiers’ lives were in danger, Lorimer ordered the assault on the police station. The team discovered the soldiers had been moved — the men had been handed over to Shiite militia men, according to the AP — and was able to rescue them at a house nearby.
The raid on the police station produced scenes of Iraqis — who CNN reported were members of the Mehdi Army, a militia controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr — attacking the British forces and of one British soldier catching fire from a burning tank. CNN described “dozens of Iraqis surrounding British armored vehicles and tossing gasoline bombs, rocks and other debris at them.”
The details of the event remain unclear, but it appears that the incident in Basra is an example of the tension in Iraq between military officials who have sworn to serve the Iraqi government and the American-led coalition and militiamen loyal to Shiite clerics, who were unwilling to see the British soldiers’ actions go unpunished.
However all of this plays out — a good first step, in the case of the missing billions, would be for the American media to start reporting on it — these incidents serve as yet another reminder that the situation in Iraq is tenuous and complex, and requires the kind of hands-on and nuanced approach from the U.S. government that President Bush hasn’t found the time to provide.
