If you've never had the chance to hear Justin King, I highly recommend it if he ever plays in your locale. That said, the John Butler Trio, traveling this summer with G.Love, gives Justin a good run for his picking money... observe
Friday, May 30, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Friday, May 09, 2008
Authenticity... can it exist in American politics?
I was having a conversation with my Mom a few months ago about candidates and was struck by her comment that Obama hadn't really put out any "hard proposals". I've let the thought roll around in my head ever since, and while I'm not convinced that I would feel better if he did have "solid proposals" for the major issues (because I basically don't believe that without being in the position and the spending quality time of qualified individuals on understanding the root causes of problem that it is really meaningful), I was struck by why my reaction to Obama was so much more powerful than to any other politician I've witnessed in my life. I was still rolling that around when I came across this article this morning from an author I'm not overly familiar with, but it does move into what I feel motivates me to participate in Obama's campaign... (hey, I just realized I'm starting my own three dot lounge...)
Flawed Messengers and Wooden Soldiers: Why Obama Beat Clinton -- and Why He'll Beat McCain, Too by John Eskow
Despite the endless pontificating on TV, in the end it didn't come down to sideshow jive like the Reverend Wright Imbroglio or the Great Sniper Fire Lie. It didn't come down to micro-demographics, or gas prices, or the war in Iraq. Incredibly enough, it didn't even come down to the issues of race and gender. No -- in the end, I believe, it all came down to a hard-to-pinpoint, rarely discussed, but desperately important matter: the personal authenticity of two human beings.
Let me digress for a second, though it's not really digressing. The impetus for this piece actually came this morning, as I tried to keep my eyes open watching John McCain on TV. I do not recommend this as a morning regimen. Try it. You'll feel an overwhelming desire to crawl back under the covers. To the degree that you can force yourself to watch him sleepwalking around the dais and spouting empty syllables, you'll find yourself wondering about peripheral issues. Like: why does a man who seems to be simmering with rage use the phrase "my friends" so compulsively? What's the real skinny on that lacquered blond lobbyist? And how did they finesse the payoff he got from the Keating Five? Somehow, the man himself is just...not there.
He's a Wooden Soldier.
But that's the thing about McCain. It's not just that his so-called "straight talk" is obviously badly-bent nonsense. Stylistically as well as politically, he's everything wrong, everything wooden, everything false. Like Clinton, he seems to be missing a core, and that lack of authenticity makes every word he says immediately forgettable (unless it's so dumb as to lodge sideways in the mind, like the Hundred Years War threat or his Bomb Iran joke.)
Unfortunately for Clinton, she campaigned as a Wooden Soldier, too.
By the seventeenth time she claimed to have found, or re-found, or re-re-found her true "voice" -- first she was the Imperious and Inevitable One, then she was the nice-nice I'm-So-Honored One, followed (a day later!) by the Hateful Vicious Shame-On-You One, and still later the Weirdly Sarcastic The Skies-Will-Open One, and then the Shot-and-a-Beer Working-Class One, so dang down-home that you expected the next photo-op to show her smoking crystal meth in a trailer park -- until finally, with the Gas-Tax-Holiday Fake Populist One, she exhausted all the possibilities -- and exhausted the patience of America, too.
Meanwhile, Obama remained Obama. Quiet when called for, inspiring when given the chance, and once in a while a little obnoxious (remember when he told Hillary "you're likable enough?" I mean, admittedly she kind of asked for it, but it was pretty gratuitous.) In short: a human being. For me, a pivotal moment--unremarked-on by the robotic pundits on TV -- came in Obama's second Reverend Wright speech. I'm paraphrasing here, but he said it was crucial to remember the core meaning of his campaign, "even if the messenger is flawed."
Even if the messenger is flawed.
Here's a game that's zany fun for the whole family: try to imagine Senator Clinton saying such a thing.
That's right: never happen -- unless...
Unless Mark Penn told her that polling showed there was some kind of Flawed-Messenger Demographic out there yet to be milked for votes.
And here's zany family game #2: try to imagine Obama getting in front of the TV cameras on a night that gutted his entire campaign, pasting a transparently phony smile on his face, and crowing "it's on to the White House!" as Michelle and the kids fought off tears on the podium behind him...
Never.
I think people relate deeply to the concept of The Flawed Messenger, because who among us is not one--in our family-life, our work, our spiritual pursuits? Being a Flawed Messenger is innately heroic (the Messenger part) but also deeply humbling (the Flawed part) -- all in all, a perfectly respectable thing to be. And I believe that on some psychic level, people torn between Clinton and Obama felt more comfortable voting for a man who confessed to being a Flawed Messenger -- not just in the speech, but in the way he carried himself.
Clinton's ultimate gift, among many, to Obama was obviously the Gas Tax Holiday. It nailed down her credentials as a Wooden Soldier -- the epitome of the old-fashioned, say-anything, 20th-century politician. She went once too often to the voters-are-dullards well, and it finally pissed them off.
It's a mistake McCain will make, too, because like Clinton he just can't help it. Part of it is generational. Clinton and McCain came of age in a Nixonian universe -- and there has never been a more Wooden Soldier than Nixon. (In my own personal dictionary, when you look up Wooden Soldier, there's a photo of Nixon doing his ghoulish two-handed V-For-Victory salute.) And part of it is a choice, based on an outmoded belief that voters want an Impregnable Persona instead of a genuine human being.
But, in the early part of the 21st Century, that choice is dead wrong. The Democratic runoff proved it -- and (you heard it here, folks!) it will be proved once again, thank God, in November, when Obama defeats John McCain and becomes our next president.
NOTE: An earlier version of this piece contained a description of McCain's unique microphone-style that some readers took to be mockery of his war-related injuries. While obviously that was not my intent, and I would never do such a thing, I've removed it anyway because I don't want to derail the real conversation. Some remaining comments may refer to the earlier version.
Flawed Messengers and Wooden Soldiers: Why Obama Beat Clinton -- and Why He'll Beat McCain, Too by John Eskow
Despite the endless pontificating on TV, in the end it didn't come down to sideshow jive like the Reverend Wright Imbroglio or the Great Sniper Fire Lie. It didn't come down to micro-demographics, or gas prices, or the war in Iraq. Incredibly enough, it didn't even come down to the issues of race and gender. No -- in the end, I believe, it all came down to a hard-to-pinpoint, rarely discussed, but desperately important matter: the personal authenticity of two human beings.
Let me digress for a second, though it's not really digressing. The impetus for this piece actually came this morning, as I tried to keep my eyes open watching John McCain on TV. I do not recommend this as a morning regimen. Try it. You'll feel an overwhelming desire to crawl back under the covers. To the degree that you can force yourself to watch him sleepwalking around the dais and spouting empty syllables, you'll find yourself wondering about peripheral issues. Like: why does a man who seems to be simmering with rage use the phrase "my friends" so compulsively? What's the real skinny on that lacquered blond lobbyist? And how did they finesse the payoff he got from the Keating Five? Somehow, the man himself is just...not there.
He's a Wooden Soldier.
But that's the thing about McCain. It's not just that his so-called "straight talk" is obviously badly-bent nonsense. Stylistically as well as politically, he's everything wrong, everything wooden, everything false. Like Clinton, he seems to be missing a core, and that lack of authenticity makes every word he says immediately forgettable (unless it's so dumb as to lodge sideways in the mind, like the Hundred Years War threat or his Bomb Iran joke.)
Unfortunately for Clinton, she campaigned as a Wooden Soldier, too.
By the seventeenth time she claimed to have found, or re-found, or re-re-found her true "voice" -- first she was the Imperious and Inevitable One, then she was the nice-nice I'm-So-Honored One, followed (a day later!) by the Hateful Vicious Shame-On-You One, and still later the Weirdly Sarcastic The Skies-Will-Open One, and then the Shot-and-a-Beer Working-Class One, so dang down-home that you expected the next photo-op to show her smoking crystal meth in a trailer park -- until finally, with the Gas-Tax-Holiday Fake Populist One, she exhausted all the possibilities -- and exhausted the patience of America, too.
Meanwhile, Obama remained Obama. Quiet when called for, inspiring when given the chance, and once in a while a little obnoxious (remember when he told Hillary "you're likable enough?" I mean, admittedly she kind of asked for it, but it was pretty gratuitous.) In short: a human being. For me, a pivotal moment--unremarked-on by the robotic pundits on TV -- came in Obama's second Reverend Wright speech. I'm paraphrasing here, but he said it was crucial to remember the core meaning of his campaign, "even if the messenger is flawed."
Even if the messenger is flawed.
Here's a game that's zany fun for the whole family: try to imagine Senator Clinton saying such a thing.
That's right: never happen -- unless...
Unless Mark Penn told her that polling showed there was some kind of Flawed-Messenger Demographic out there yet to be milked for votes.
And here's zany family game #2: try to imagine Obama getting in front of the TV cameras on a night that gutted his entire campaign, pasting a transparently phony smile on his face, and crowing "it's on to the White House!" as Michelle and the kids fought off tears on the podium behind him...
Never.
I think people relate deeply to the concept of The Flawed Messenger, because who among us is not one--in our family-life, our work, our spiritual pursuits? Being a Flawed Messenger is innately heroic (the Messenger part) but also deeply humbling (the Flawed part) -- all in all, a perfectly respectable thing to be. And I believe that on some psychic level, people torn between Clinton and Obama felt more comfortable voting for a man who confessed to being a Flawed Messenger -- not just in the speech, but in the way he carried himself.
Clinton's ultimate gift, among many, to Obama was obviously the Gas Tax Holiday. It nailed down her credentials as a Wooden Soldier -- the epitome of the old-fashioned, say-anything, 20th-century politician. She went once too often to the voters-are-dullards well, and it finally pissed them off.
It's a mistake McCain will make, too, because like Clinton he just can't help it. Part of it is generational. Clinton and McCain came of age in a Nixonian universe -- and there has never been a more Wooden Soldier than Nixon. (In my own personal dictionary, when you look up Wooden Soldier, there's a photo of Nixon doing his ghoulish two-handed V-For-Victory salute.) And part of it is a choice, based on an outmoded belief that voters want an Impregnable Persona instead of a genuine human being.
But, in the early part of the 21st Century, that choice is dead wrong. The Democratic runoff proved it -- and (you heard it here, folks!) it will be proved once again, thank God, in November, when Obama defeats John McCain and becomes our next president.
NOTE: An earlier version of this piece contained a description of McCain's unique microphone-style that some readers took to be mockery of his war-related injuries. While obviously that was not my intent, and I would never do such a thing, I've removed it anyway because I don't want to derail the real conversation. Some remaining comments may refer to the earlier version.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
On the Health of the Republic
The embarrassment that passes for investigative journalism in the United States tried as hard as it could to bury the Pentagon Papers on the Iraq war. In case you missed, and you would have if you received your news from any of the major outlets, the Pentagon planted and paid for a number of former brass to sound off in support of Gen. Petraeus' last act before Congress to push the idea that the tide truly was turning. In a concerted effort, across all the major and minor networks, the Pentagon had paid agents acting as network "experts" to talk about their view of the Petraeus hearings and what they meant about how well things were progressing in Iraq. There are several good stories on this, but this one really chronicles the arc of deception exercised by this administration and connects the dots on an orchestrated campaign that makes Goebbels look like an amateur. T
Here are a few others, just so you get an idea of the scope of the negligence of our once mighty press, now co-opted and co-conspirators:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/316086/clinton_obama_finally_slam_pentagon_propaganda_mccain_silent
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/washington/26analyst.html?ex=1366948800&en=6a36ee3881246be7&ei=5124&partner=digg&exprod=digg
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/20/AR2008042002131.html
http://archive.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/22/analysts/index.html
Update: great read here on what this means to the Republic.
Here are a few others, just so you get an idea of the scope of the negligence of our once mighty press, now co-opted and co-conspirators:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/316086/clinton_obama_finally_slam_pentagon_propaganda_mccain_silent
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/washington/26analyst.html?ex=1366948800&en=6a36ee3881246be7&ei=5124&partner=digg&exprod=digg
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/20/AR2008042002131.html
http://archive.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/22/analysts/index.html
Update: great read here on what this means to the Republic.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
RFK, Jr gives the next President some excellent advice
I've read a half-dozen articles by RFK, Jr. over the last year or so and he reliably demonstrates a razor focus on the issues he covers. This one is no exception and represents the most level-headed approach to the energy crisis this country has nursed these last 40 years.
The Next President's First Task [A Manifesto]
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Vanity Fair
May 2008 Issue
Last November, Lord (David) Puttnam debated before Parliament an important bill to tackle global warming. Addressing industry and government warnings that we must proceed slowly to avoid economic ruin, Lord Puttnam recalled that precisely 200 years ago Parliament heard identical caveats during the debate over abolition of the slave trade. At that time slave commerce represented one-fourth of Britain's G.D.P. and provided its primary source of cheap, abundant energy. Vested interests warned that financial apocalypse would succeed its prohibition.
That debate lasted roughly a year, and Parliament, in the end, made the moral choice, abolishing the trade outright. Instead of collapsing, as slavery's proponents had predicted, Britain's economy accelerated. Slavery's abolition exposed the debilitating inefficiencies associated with zero-cost labor; slavery had been a ball and chain not only for the slaves but also for the British economy, hobbling productivity and stifling growth. Now creativity and productivity surged. Entrepreneurs seeking new sources of energy launched the Industrial Revolution and inaugurated the greatest era of wealth production in human history.
Today, we don't need to abolish carbon as an energy source in order to see its inefficiencies starkly, or to understand that this addiction is the principal drag on American capitalism. The evidence is before our eyes. The practice of borrowing a billion dollars each day to buy foreign oil has caused the American dollar to implode. More than a trillion dollars in annual subsidies to coal and oil producers have beggared a nation that four decades ago owned half the globe's wealth. Carbon dependence has eroded our economic power, destroyed our moral authority, diminished our international influence and prestige, endangered our national security, and damaged our health and landscapes. It is subverting everything we value.
We know that nations that "decarbonize" their economies reap immediate rewards. Sweden announced in 2006 the phaseout of all fossil fuels (and nuclear energy) by 2020. In 1991 the Swedes enacted a carbon tax - now up to $150 a ton - and as a result thousands of entrepreneurs rushed to develop new ways of generating energy from wind, the sun, and the tides, and from woodchips, agricultural waste, and garbage. Growth rates climbed to upwards of three times those of the U.S.
Iceland was 80 percent dependent on imported coal and oil in the 1970s and was among the poorest economies in Europe. Today, Iceland is 100 percent energy-independent, with 90 percent of the nation's homes heated by geothermal and its remaining electrical needs met by hydro. The International Monetary Fund now ranks Iceland the fourth most affluent nation on earth. The country, which previously had to beg for corporate investment, now has companies lined up to relocate there to take advantage of its low-cost clean energy.
It should come as no surprise that California, America's most energy-efficient state, also possesses its strongest economy.
The United States has far greater domestic energy resources than Iceland or Sweden does. We sit atop the second-largest geothermal resources in the world. The American Midwest is the Saudi Arabia of wind; indeed, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas alone produce enough harnessable wind to meet all of the nation's electricity demand. As for solar, according to a study in Scientific American, photovoltaic and solar-thermal installations across just 19 percent of the most barren desert land in the Southwest could supply nearly all of our nation's electricity needs without any rooftop installation, even assuming every American owned a plug-in hybrid.
In America, several obstacles impede the kind of entrepreneurial revolution we need. To begin with, that trillion dollars in annual coal-and-oil subsidies gives the carbon industry a decisive market advantage. Meanwhile, an overstressed and inefficient national electrical grid can't accommodate new kinds of power. At the same time, a byzantine array of local rules impede access by innovators to national markets.
There are a number of things the new president should immediately do to hasten the approaching boom in energy innovation. A carbon cap-and-trade system designed to put downward pressure on carbon emissions is quite simply a no-brainer. Already endorsed by Senators McCain, Clinton, and Obama, such a system would measure national carbon emissions and create a market to auction emissions credits. The supply of credits is then reduced each year to meet pre-determined carbon-reduction targets. As supply tightens, credit value increases, providing rich monetary rewards for innovators who reduce carbon. Since it is precisely targeted, cap-and-trade is more effective than a carbon tax. It is also more palatable to politicians, who despise taxes and love markets. Industry likes the system's clear goals. This market-based approach has a proven track record.
There's a second thing the next president should do, and it would be a strategic masterstroke: push to revamp the nation's antiquated high-voltage power-transmission system so that it can deliver solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable energy across the country. Right now, a Texas wind-farm manager who wants to get his electrons to market faces two huge impediments. First, our regional power grids are overstressed and misaligned. The biggest renewable-energy opportunities - for instance, Southwest solar and Midwest wind - are outside the grids' reach. Furthermore, traveling via alternating-current (AC) lines, too much of that wind farmer's energy would dissipate before it crossed the country. The nation urgently needs more investment in its backbone transmission grid, including new direct-current (DC) power lines for efficient long-haul transmission. Even more important, we need to build in "smart" features, including storage points and computerized management overlays, allowing the new grid to intelligently deploy the energy along the way. Construction of this new grid will create a marketplace where utilities, established businesses, and entrepreneurs can sell energy and efficiency.
The other obstacle is the web of arcane and conflicting state rules that currently restrict access to the grid. The federal government needs to work with state authorities to open up the grids, allowing clean-energy innovators to fairly compete for investment, space, and customers. We need open markets where hundreds of local and national power producers can scramble to deliver economic and environmental solutions at the lowest possible price. The energy sector, in other words, needs an initiative analogous to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which required open access to all the nation's telephone lines. Marketplace competition among national and local phone companies instantly precipitated the historic explosion in telecom activity.
Construction of efficient and open-transmission marketplaces and green-power-plant infrastructure would require about a trillion dollars over the next 15 years. For roughly a third of the projected cost of the Iraq war we could wean the country from carbon. And the good news is that the government doesn't actually have to pay for all of this. If the president works with governors to lift constraints and encourage investment, utilities and private entrepreneurs will quickly step in to revitalize the grid and recover their investment through royalties collected for transporting green electrons. Businesses and homes will become power plants as individuals cash in by installing solar panels and wind turbines on their buildings, and by selling the stored energy in their plug-in hybrids back to the grid at peak hours.
Energy expert and former CIA director R. James Woolsey predicts: "With rational market incentives and a smart backbone, you'll see capital and entrepreneurs flooding this field with lightning speed." Ten percent of venture-capital dollars are already deployed in the clean-tech sector, and the world's biggest companies are crowding the space with capital and scrambling for position.
The president's final priority must be to connect a much smarter power grid to vastly more efficient buildings and machines. We have barely scratched the surface here. Washington is a decade behind its obligation, first set by Ronald Reagan, to set cost-minimizing efficiency standards for all major appliances. With the conspicuous exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger's California, the states aren't doing much better. And Congress keeps setting ludicrously tight expiration dates for its energy-efficiency tax credits, frustrating both planning and investment. The new president must take all of this in hand at once.
The benefits to America are beyond measure. We will cut annual trade and budget deficits by hundreds of billions, improve public health and farm production, diminish global warming, and create millions of good jobs. And for the first time in half a century we will live free from Middle Eastern wars and entanglements with petty tyrants who despise democracy and are hated by their own people.
Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-governmental organization that promotes clean water throughout the world.
The Next President's First Task [A Manifesto]
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Vanity Fair
May 2008 Issue
Last November, Lord (David) Puttnam debated before Parliament an important bill to tackle global warming. Addressing industry and government warnings that we must proceed slowly to avoid economic ruin, Lord Puttnam recalled that precisely 200 years ago Parliament heard identical caveats during the debate over abolition of the slave trade. At that time slave commerce represented one-fourth of Britain's G.D.P. and provided its primary source of cheap, abundant energy. Vested interests warned that financial apocalypse would succeed its prohibition.
That debate lasted roughly a year, and Parliament, in the end, made the moral choice, abolishing the trade outright. Instead of collapsing, as slavery's proponents had predicted, Britain's economy accelerated. Slavery's abolition exposed the debilitating inefficiencies associated with zero-cost labor; slavery had been a ball and chain not only for the slaves but also for the British economy, hobbling productivity and stifling growth. Now creativity and productivity surged. Entrepreneurs seeking new sources of energy launched the Industrial Revolution and inaugurated the greatest era of wealth production in human history.
Today, we don't need to abolish carbon as an energy source in order to see its inefficiencies starkly, or to understand that this addiction is the principal drag on American capitalism. The evidence is before our eyes. The practice of borrowing a billion dollars each day to buy foreign oil has caused the American dollar to implode. More than a trillion dollars in annual subsidies to coal and oil producers have beggared a nation that four decades ago owned half the globe's wealth. Carbon dependence has eroded our economic power, destroyed our moral authority, diminished our international influence and prestige, endangered our national security, and damaged our health and landscapes. It is subverting everything we value.
We know that nations that "decarbonize" their economies reap immediate rewards. Sweden announced in 2006 the phaseout of all fossil fuels (and nuclear energy) by 2020. In 1991 the Swedes enacted a carbon tax - now up to $150 a ton - and as a result thousands of entrepreneurs rushed to develop new ways of generating energy from wind, the sun, and the tides, and from woodchips, agricultural waste, and garbage. Growth rates climbed to upwards of three times those of the U.S.
Iceland was 80 percent dependent on imported coal and oil in the 1970s and was among the poorest economies in Europe. Today, Iceland is 100 percent energy-independent, with 90 percent of the nation's homes heated by geothermal and its remaining electrical needs met by hydro. The International Monetary Fund now ranks Iceland the fourth most affluent nation on earth. The country, which previously had to beg for corporate investment, now has companies lined up to relocate there to take advantage of its low-cost clean energy.
It should come as no surprise that California, America's most energy-efficient state, also possesses its strongest economy.
The United States has far greater domestic energy resources than Iceland or Sweden does. We sit atop the second-largest geothermal resources in the world. The American Midwest is the Saudi Arabia of wind; indeed, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas alone produce enough harnessable wind to meet all of the nation's electricity demand. As for solar, according to a study in Scientific American, photovoltaic and solar-thermal installations across just 19 percent of the most barren desert land in the Southwest could supply nearly all of our nation's electricity needs without any rooftop installation, even assuming every American owned a plug-in hybrid.
In America, several obstacles impede the kind of entrepreneurial revolution we need. To begin with, that trillion dollars in annual coal-and-oil subsidies gives the carbon industry a decisive market advantage. Meanwhile, an overstressed and inefficient national electrical grid can't accommodate new kinds of power. At the same time, a byzantine array of local rules impede access by innovators to national markets.
There are a number of things the new president should immediately do to hasten the approaching boom in energy innovation. A carbon cap-and-trade system designed to put downward pressure on carbon emissions is quite simply a no-brainer. Already endorsed by Senators McCain, Clinton, and Obama, such a system would measure national carbon emissions and create a market to auction emissions credits. The supply of credits is then reduced each year to meet pre-determined carbon-reduction targets. As supply tightens, credit value increases, providing rich monetary rewards for innovators who reduce carbon. Since it is precisely targeted, cap-and-trade is more effective than a carbon tax. It is also more palatable to politicians, who despise taxes and love markets. Industry likes the system's clear goals. This market-based approach has a proven track record.
There's a second thing the next president should do, and it would be a strategic masterstroke: push to revamp the nation's antiquated high-voltage power-transmission system so that it can deliver solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable energy across the country. Right now, a Texas wind-farm manager who wants to get his electrons to market faces two huge impediments. First, our regional power grids are overstressed and misaligned. The biggest renewable-energy opportunities - for instance, Southwest solar and Midwest wind - are outside the grids' reach. Furthermore, traveling via alternating-current (AC) lines, too much of that wind farmer's energy would dissipate before it crossed the country. The nation urgently needs more investment in its backbone transmission grid, including new direct-current (DC) power lines for efficient long-haul transmission. Even more important, we need to build in "smart" features, including storage points and computerized management overlays, allowing the new grid to intelligently deploy the energy along the way. Construction of this new grid will create a marketplace where utilities, established businesses, and entrepreneurs can sell energy and efficiency.
The other obstacle is the web of arcane and conflicting state rules that currently restrict access to the grid. The federal government needs to work with state authorities to open up the grids, allowing clean-energy innovators to fairly compete for investment, space, and customers. We need open markets where hundreds of local and national power producers can scramble to deliver economic and environmental solutions at the lowest possible price. The energy sector, in other words, needs an initiative analogous to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which required open access to all the nation's telephone lines. Marketplace competition among national and local phone companies instantly precipitated the historic explosion in telecom activity.
Construction of efficient and open-transmission marketplaces and green-power-plant infrastructure would require about a trillion dollars over the next 15 years. For roughly a third of the projected cost of the Iraq war we could wean the country from carbon. And the good news is that the government doesn't actually have to pay for all of this. If the president works with governors to lift constraints and encourage investment, utilities and private entrepreneurs will quickly step in to revitalize the grid and recover their investment through royalties collected for transporting green electrons. Businesses and homes will become power plants as individuals cash in by installing solar panels and wind turbines on their buildings, and by selling the stored energy in their plug-in hybrids back to the grid at peak hours.
Energy expert and former CIA director R. James Woolsey predicts: "With rational market incentives and a smart backbone, you'll see capital and entrepreneurs flooding this field with lightning speed." Ten percent of venture-capital dollars are already deployed in the clean-tech sector, and the world's biggest companies are crowding the space with capital and scrambling for position.
The president's final priority must be to connect a much smarter power grid to vastly more efficient buildings and machines. We have barely scratched the surface here. Washington is a decade behind its obligation, first set by Ronald Reagan, to set cost-minimizing efficiency standards for all major appliances. With the conspicuous exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger's California, the states aren't doing much better. And Congress keeps setting ludicrously tight expiration dates for its energy-efficiency tax credits, frustrating both planning and investment. The new president must take all of this in hand at once.
The benefits to America are beyond measure. We will cut annual trade and budget deficits by hundreds of billions, improve public health and farm production, diminish global warming, and create millions of good jobs. And for the first time in half a century we will live free from Middle Eastern wars and entanglements with petty tyrants who despise democracy and are hated by their own people.
Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-governmental organization that promotes clean water throughout the world.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Read it twice
This is one of those articles - straight from a real, old time newspaper - that really makes you pause and wonder what on earth is going on. In a world where the number one target of forward-looking speculators is water, this is amazing:
Water's trip to your glass is complicated
Nestle came into Florida and managed to pull off quite the coup.
By Ivan Penn, Times Staff Writer
Published Saturday, March 15, 2008 3:16 PM
The company got a permit to take water belonging to Floridians — hundreds of millions of gallons a year from a spring in a state park — at no cost to Nestle.
No taxes. No fees. Just a $230 permit to pump water until 2018.
Nestle bottles that water, ships it throughout the Southeast — much of it to Georgia and the Carolinas — and makes millions upon millions of dollars in profits on it.
The state granted Nestle permission to draw so much water against the strong recommendation of the local water management district staff. Because drought conditions were stressing the Madison Blue Spring, the staff said the amount of water drawn on the permit should be cut by more than two-thirds.
So while Florida is in a bitter dispute with its state neighbors over water use, it's giving its water away to a private company that bottles and ships it to those very same states.
Nestle says Floridians should be grateful. Its bottling plant has generated taxes and created jobs. "You're talking about millions and millions of dollars in tax benefit,'' said spokesman Jim McClellan. "It's a very good deal for the state of Florida.''
• • •
In northernmost Florida, Madison County runs right up to the Georgia border, mostly vast stretches of rolling farmland. The entire county is home to about 20,000, with a claim to fame that the late, great rhythm-and-blues singer Ray Charles lived here as a child.
In a wooded area between Interstate 10 and the Georgia line flows the deep, cavernous Madison Blue Spring. Locals frolic in its year-round, 70-degree waters; divers troll its narrow underwater caves.
Anna Bruic of the small town of Lee owned 65 acres surrounding the spring that she was looking to develop. In 1998, Bruic received a permit to bottle water from Madison Blue. She never used the permit.
In October 2000, she sold 38 acres to the state. The spring, which bubbles up to a limestone basin on the west bank of the Withlacoochee River, became Madison Blue Springs State Park.
Months later, she sold 2 acres of her land and her water-bottling permit to Blue Springs LLC, owned by Bill Blanchard of Tampa. He in turn negotiated to sell the land and the permit to Nestle.
To those pushing economic development in Madison County, an international corporation wanting to build a huge manufacturing plant there was a dream come true.
Since 1972, the only major manufacturing operation was a meat-packing plant operated by Winn-Dixie. Smithfield — which produces sausage, hot dogs and lunch meats — bought the plant in 2004, the same year Nestle opened its bottling facility, promising hundreds of new jobs and an economic windfall.
Rural, small towns are almost a signature for Nestle's bottling operations, which include 21 plants in the United States and two in Canada.
The Swiss company holds about one-third of the bottled-water market in America. When Nestle made overtures to come into Madison County, it already had bought up many of the nation's major water brands, including Arrowhead, Ice Mountain, Ozarka and Deer Park.
Nestle initially planned to produce the Zephyrhills spring water brand at the Madison plant, but the company changed up. It made Deer Park, a brand originally from western Maryland, the focus in Madison, with Zephyrhills a smaller component.
But by the time Nestle was ready to close its deal with Blanchard, the staff at the Suwannee River Water Management District, which oversees the Madison Blue Spring, recommended several permits related to the spring be revoked or changed.
Part of the concern was about speculation on selling permits for big money, and part of it was about drought.
In a memo dated Nov. 15, 2002, the water management district staff recommended reducing the amount of water Nestle could draw under the permit it would obtain from 1.47-million gallons a day to 400,000 a day.
Historically, the average flow of the spring is 55-million gallons a day, but it was down to 34-million gallons a day.
"The current drought has reduced the flow of Madison Blue Springs to record lows," Jon Dinges, director of resource management, wrote to the water management district's governing board. "The drought has become severe since the permit was issued, thus requiring a reduction of the (average daily withdrawal) to ensure resource protection."
In January 2003, the governing board — gubernatorial appointees who make final decisions about water use — heard Nestle's pitch to continue the permit as originally approved.
The company promised to invest $100-million in the plant over seven years and create 300 jobs — but only if the permit remained as it had been when first approved for Bruic.
"The volumes and all of that are critical to Nestle's long-term investment," S. Austin Peele, a Lake City lawyer representing the company, told the governing board.
Nestle had a key ally at the meeting: the state of Florida, in the form of the economic development entity, Enterprise Florida Inc.
"We have been working with representatives of the company for about two months, in trying to secure 300 jobs that will be present at this facility upon build out," Bridget Merrill of Enterprise Florida told the board. "It is with certainty that the company has to proceed."
To the disappointment of those working to protect the springs, Nestle got its wish.
Jim Stevenson, chairman of the Florida springs task force, said that with the staff recommending against the permit, the governing board should have made some adjustments.
"I would side with the staff," Stevenson said. In protecting the springs, "the responsibility lies with the water management district. They're the ones that have to ensure that our springs remain healthy.
"Once you get up to the board, these are political appointees," he said. "The step up from that is governor, in that he appoints the board members for the water management district."
Jeb Bush, who was governor at the time, did not respond to questions about Nestle's Madison County operations.
• • •
The state did much more than fight to get Nestle the right to pump as much water as possible from the spring.
As an added incentive for Nestle, the state approved a tax refund of up to $1.68-million for the Madison bottling operation. To date, Nestle has received two refunds totaling $196,000 and requested a third tax refund.
Nestle had promised to create 300 jobs over five years. The most people it has ever employed was about 250. The number dropped to 205 late last year, 46 of them from Georgia, which Nestle defends as common for a work force along a state line.
The state estimated that the plant, which has a payroll of $6.5-million, would bring some $12-million a year in direct economic benefit to the county and the region.
The state says its work on behalf of Nestle was well worth it because the county was dealing with the shuttering of its other major economic engine, the meat-processing plant.
"This project was very important to the economic health of this rural county as the community recently suffered the closure of a major private-sector employer with the resulting loss of several hundred jobs," Page Bass, spokeswoman for the state Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development, said this month.
The Nestle plant opened in 2004. The Smithfield meat plant closed in 2006.
• • •
Nestle touts the 470-acre, "eco-friendly'' plant in Madison as its premier water bottling facility in America. Under the permit that started with Anna Bruic, the company will receive for free the product it sells, through 2018.
"Everybody owns the water," said Tim Sagul, assistant director of resource management for the Suwannee River Water Management District.
In essence, the government never charges for water. For tap water, the charge is essentially a processing and delivery charge, but not a water charge. Agriculture, which uses the most water, is not charged, either.
McClellan, the Nestle spokesman, said bottled-water companies should not be singled out.
"Treat us like any other user," he said. "People do not take bottled water and wash their dog. They do not wash their car with it. They drink it. That's the highest and best use of water."
Stevenson, the state's spring expert, says to look at the big picture. "As I see it, a real problem is the public thinks of water as limitless and valueless. ... The less water you pull out of the ground, the better for the spring,'' he said.
"The bottled water companies serve as a lightning rod for those concerned about water because they're located near the spring.
"Yet we're all robbing water from those springs. Our springs are silent. They've got no voice."
Times researchers Shirl Kennedy and Carolyn Edds contributed to this report. Ivan Penn can be reached at ipenn@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2332.
Water's trip to your glass is complicated
Nestle came into Florida and managed to pull off quite the coup.
By Ivan Penn, Times Staff Writer
Published Saturday, March 15, 2008 3:16 PM
The company got a permit to take water belonging to Floridians — hundreds of millions of gallons a year from a spring in a state park — at no cost to Nestle.
No taxes. No fees. Just a $230 permit to pump water until 2018.
Nestle bottles that water, ships it throughout the Southeast — much of it to Georgia and the Carolinas — and makes millions upon millions of dollars in profits on it.
The state granted Nestle permission to draw so much water against the strong recommendation of the local water management district staff. Because drought conditions were stressing the Madison Blue Spring, the staff said the amount of water drawn on the permit should be cut by more than two-thirds.
So while Florida is in a bitter dispute with its state neighbors over water use, it's giving its water away to a private company that bottles and ships it to those very same states.
Nestle says Floridians should be grateful. Its bottling plant has generated taxes and created jobs. "You're talking about millions and millions of dollars in tax benefit,'' said spokesman Jim McClellan. "It's a very good deal for the state of Florida.''
• • •
In northernmost Florida, Madison County runs right up to the Georgia border, mostly vast stretches of rolling farmland. The entire county is home to about 20,000, with a claim to fame that the late, great rhythm-and-blues singer Ray Charles lived here as a child.
In a wooded area between Interstate 10 and the Georgia line flows the deep, cavernous Madison Blue Spring. Locals frolic in its year-round, 70-degree waters; divers troll its narrow underwater caves.
Anna Bruic of the small town of Lee owned 65 acres surrounding the spring that she was looking to develop. In 1998, Bruic received a permit to bottle water from Madison Blue. She never used the permit.
In October 2000, she sold 38 acres to the state. The spring, which bubbles up to a limestone basin on the west bank of the Withlacoochee River, became Madison Blue Springs State Park.
Months later, she sold 2 acres of her land and her water-bottling permit to Blue Springs LLC, owned by Bill Blanchard of Tampa. He in turn negotiated to sell the land and the permit to Nestle.
To those pushing economic development in Madison County, an international corporation wanting to build a huge manufacturing plant there was a dream come true.
Since 1972, the only major manufacturing operation was a meat-packing plant operated by Winn-Dixie. Smithfield — which produces sausage, hot dogs and lunch meats — bought the plant in 2004, the same year Nestle opened its bottling facility, promising hundreds of new jobs and an economic windfall.
Rural, small towns are almost a signature for Nestle's bottling operations, which include 21 plants in the United States and two in Canada.
The Swiss company holds about one-third of the bottled-water market in America. When Nestle made overtures to come into Madison County, it already had bought up many of the nation's major water brands, including Arrowhead, Ice Mountain, Ozarka and Deer Park.
Nestle initially planned to produce the Zephyrhills spring water brand at the Madison plant, but the company changed up. It made Deer Park, a brand originally from western Maryland, the focus in Madison, with Zephyrhills a smaller component.
But by the time Nestle was ready to close its deal with Blanchard, the staff at the Suwannee River Water Management District, which oversees the Madison Blue Spring, recommended several permits related to the spring be revoked or changed.
Part of the concern was about speculation on selling permits for big money, and part of it was about drought.
In a memo dated Nov. 15, 2002, the water management district staff recommended reducing the amount of water Nestle could draw under the permit it would obtain from 1.47-million gallons a day to 400,000 a day.
Historically, the average flow of the spring is 55-million gallons a day, but it was down to 34-million gallons a day.
"The current drought has reduced the flow of Madison Blue Springs to record lows," Jon Dinges, director of resource management, wrote to the water management district's governing board. "The drought has become severe since the permit was issued, thus requiring a reduction of the (average daily withdrawal) to ensure resource protection."
In January 2003, the governing board — gubernatorial appointees who make final decisions about water use — heard Nestle's pitch to continue the permit as originally approved.
The company promised to invest $100-million in the plant over seven years and create 300 jobs — but only if the permit remained as it had been when first approved for Bruic.
"The volumes and all of that are critical to Nestle's long-term investment," S. Austin Peele, a Lake City lawyer representing the company, told the governing board.
Nestle had a key ally at the meeting: the state of Florida, in the form of the economic development entity, Enterprise Florida Inc.
"We have been working with representatives of the company for about two months, in trying to secure 300 jobs that will be present at this facility upon build out," Bridget Merrill of Enterprise Florida told the board. "It is with certainty that the company has to proceed."
To the disappointment of those working to protect the springs, Nestle got its wish.
Jim Stevenson, chairman of the Florida springs task force, said that with the staff recommending against the permit, the governing board should have made some adjustments.
"I would side with the staff," Stevenson said. In protecting the springs, "the responsibility lies with the water management district. They're the ones that have to ensure that our springs remain healthy.
"Once you get up to the board, these are political appointees," he said. "The step up from that is governor, in that he appoints the board members for the water management district."
Jeb Bush, who was governor at the time, did not respond to questions about Nestle's Madison County operations.
• • •
The state did much more than fight to get Nestle the right to pump as much water as possible from the spring.
As an added incentive for Nestle, the state approved a tax refund of up to $1.68-million for the Madison bottling operation. To date, Nestle has received two refunds totaling $196,000 and requested a third tax refund.
Nestle had promised to create 300 jobs over five years. The most people it has ever employed was about 250. The number dropped to 205 late last year, 46 of them from Georgia, which Nestle defends as common for a work force along a state line.
The state estimated that the plant, which has a payroll of $6.5-million, would bring some $12-million a year in direct economic benefit to the county and the region.
The state says its work on behalf of Nestle was well worth it because the county was dealing with the shuttering of its other major economic engine, the meat-processing plant.
"This project was very important to the economic health of this rural county as the community recently suffered the closure of a major private-sector employer with the resulting loss of several hundred jobs," Page Bass, spokeswoman for the state Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development, said this month.
The Nestle plant opened in 2004. The Smithfield meat plant closed in 2006.
• • •
Nestle touts the 470-acre, "eco-friendly'' plant in Madison as its premier water bottling facility in America. Under the permit that started with Anna Bruic, the company will receive for free the product it sells, through 2018.
"Everybody owns the water," said Tim Sagul, assistant director of resource management for the Suwannee River Water Management District.
In essence, the government never charges for water. For tap water, the charge is essentially a processing and delivery charge, but not a water charge. Agriculture, which uses the most water, is not charged, either.
McClellan, the Nestle spokesman, said bottled-water companies should not be singled out.
"Treat us like any other user," he said. "People do not take bottled water and wash their dog. They do not wash their car with it. They drink it. That's the highest and best use of water."
Stevenson, the state's spring expert, says to look at the big picture. "As I see it, a real problem is the public thinks of water as limitless and valueless. ... The less water you pull out of the ground, the better for the spring,'' he said.
"The bottled water companies serve as a lightning rod for those concerned about water because they're located near the spring.
"Yet we're all robbing water from those springs. Our springs are silent. They've got no voice."
Times researchers Shirl Kennedy and Carolyn Edds contributed to this report. Ivan Penn can be reached at ipenn@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2332.
Monday, April 07, 2008
McCain is simply full of shit on the subject of Iraq
With all the narratives being propagated about the fighting in Iraq, it is amazing how often the basic facts elude those responsible for keeping the facts straight. The one thing I really like about Frank Rich is that, agree or disagree, he sets the record straight more times than not. This is worth reading if for no other reason than the fact that the "up is down, left is right" crew is going to be spinning heavy this week (the telegenic GENERAL is in town after all) and we should do our collective best to keep the facts straight - this includes our candidates most especially!
(The version on the NY Times is fully annotated, so if you want the sources, I recommend that you get them here.)
Tet Happened, and No One Cared
By FRANK RICH
REALLY, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain. As a growing chorus reiterates, their refrains that Mr. McCain is “willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq” (as Mr. Obama said) or “willing to keep this war going for 100 years” (per Mrs. Clinton) are flat-out wrong.
What Mr. McCain actually said in a New Hampshire town-hall meeting was that he could imagine a 100-year-long American role in Iraq like our long-term presence in South Korea and Japan, where “Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” See for yourself on YouTube.
But Mr. McCain shouldn’t protest too much about the Democrats’ bogus attack. For him, this sideshow is a political lifeline, allowing him to skate away from his many other, far more worrying canards about Iraq. If anything, that misused quote may be one of his more benign fairy tales. How delightful to fantasize that staying the Bush-Petraeus course will transform Iraq into pacific postwar Japan. Iraq’s sects have remained at each other’s throats since their country was carved out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Perhaps magical thinking can bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians, too.
Everything else Mr. McCain has to say about Iraq is more troubling, and I don’t mean just his recent serial gaffe conflating Shiite Iran and Sunni Qaeda. The sum total of his public record suggests that he could well prolong the war for another century — not because he’s the crazed militarist portrayed by Democrats, but through sheer inertia, bad judgment and blundering.
So far his bizarre pronouncements have been drowned out by the Democrats’ din. They’ve also been underplayed by a press that coddles Ol’ Man Straight Talk and that rarely looks more deeply into the “surge is success” propaganda than it did into Mr. Bush’s announcement of the end of “major combat operations” five years ago. The electorate doesn’t want to hear much anyway about a war it long ago soundly rejected.
For the majority of Americans who haven’t met any of the brave troops who’ve been cavalierly tossed into the quagmire, the war is out of sight and mind in a way Vietnam never was. Only 28 percent of Americans knew American casualties in Iraq were nearing 4,000 last month, according to the Pew Research Center. The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that by March 2008 the percentage of prominent news stories that were about Iraq had fallen to about one-fifth of what it was in January 2007. It’s a poignant commentary on the whole war that Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the nonpartisan advocacy group, was reduced to protesting the lack of coverage.
That’s why it’s no surprise that so few stopped to absorb the disastrous six-day battle of Basra that ended last week — a mini-Tet that belied the “success” of the surge. Even fewer noticed that the presumptive Republican nominee seemed at least as oblivious to what was going down as President Bush, no tiny feat.
In Mr. Bush’s telling, Basra was a “defining moment in the history of a free Iraq.” He praised the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and boasted repeatedly that the Iraqi forces were fighting “in the lead.” The Pentagon spokesman declared that this splendid engagement was “a byproduct of the success of the surge.”
It was a defining moment all right. Mr. Maliki’s impulsive and ill-planned attempt to vanquish the militias in southern Iraq loyal to his Shiite rival, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, was a failure that left Mr. Sadr more secure than before. Though some Iraqi armed forces were briefly in the lead, others mutinied. Eventually American and British forces and air power had to ride to the rescue in both Basra and Baghdad. Even then, the result was at best a standoff, with huge casualties. The battle ended only when Mr. Maliki’s own political minions sought a cease-fire.
Mr. McCain was just as wrong about Basra as he was in 2003, when he said the war would be “brief” and be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. Or as he was in the 1990s, when he championed extravagant State Department funding for the war instigator Ahmad Chalabi, who’d already been branded untrustworthy by the C.I.A. (The relationship between Mr. Chalabi and the former lobbyist Charles Black, now a chief McCain campaign strategist, is explored in a new book, “The Man Who Pushed America to War,” by Aram Roston.)
As for Basra, Mr. McCain told Joe Klein of Time in January that it was “not a problem.” He told John King of CNN while in Baghdad last month that Mr. Sadr’s “influence has been on the wane for a long time.” When the battle ended last week, Mr. McCain said: “Apparently it was Sadr who asked for the cease-fire, declared a cease-fire. It wasn’t Maliki. Very rarely do I see the winning side declare a cease-fire.” At least the last of those sentences was accurate. It was indeed the losing side — Maliki’s — that pleaded for the cease-fire.
Perhaps all these mistaken judgments can be attributed to the fog of war. But Mr. McCain’s bigger strategic picture, immutable no matter what happens on the ground, is foggier still. Like Mr. Bush, he keeps selling Iraq as the central front in the war on Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda was not even a participant in the Basra battle, which was an eruption of a Shiite-vs.-Shiite civil war. (Al Qaeda is busy enough in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the actual central front in the war on terror.)
Mr. McCain is also fond of portraying Mr. Maliki’s “democracy” in Iraq as an essential bulwark against Iran; his surrogate Lindsey Graham habitually refers to Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army as “Iranian-backed militias.” But the political coalition and militia propping up Mr. Maliki are even closer to Iran than the Sadrists. McClatchy Newspapers reported last week that the Maliki-Sadr cease-fire was not only brokered in Iran but by a general whose name is on the Treasury Department’s terrorist list: the commander of the Quds force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
So this is where this latest defining moment in Iraq leaves us: with victories for Iran and Mr. Sadr, and with Iraqi forces that still can’t stand up (training cost to American taxpayers so far: $22 billion) so we can stand down. The Baghdad Green Zone, pummeled with lethal mortar fire, proved vulnerable once again. Basra remains so perilous that Britain has had to suddenly halt its planned troop withdrawals. Tony Blair had ordered the drawdown a year ago, after declaring that “the next chapter in Basra’s history will be written by the Iraqis.”
The surge is a success in exactly one way: American forces, by putting their lives on the line and benefiting from a now-defunct Sadr cease-fire, have reduced violence in Baghdad (though only to early 2005 levels). But as the Middle East scholar Juan Cole has written, “the ‘surge’ was never meant to be the objective but rather the means.”
None of the objectives have been met. Remember that “return on success” — as in returning troops — that Mr. Bush promised in January’s State of the Union? We will end 2008 with more Americans in Iraq than the 132,000 at the time the surge began. Even Gen. David Petraeus said last month that there has not been “sufficient progress” on the other most important objective, Iraqi political reconciliation. Mr. Maliki’s move against Mr. Sadr in Basra, done without even consulting Iraq’s “democratically elected” Parliament, was an attempt to take out his opponent by force rather than wait for the October provincial elections.
Not that other metrics are any brighter. At last, oil production sometimes reaches prewar levels. But a third or more of the oil, as The New York Times reported, is siphoned off to the black market, where it finances the insurgency. The projected date for turning over security operations to the Iraqis — first set for the end of 2006 by Iraqi officials, then moved up to the end of 2007 and July 2008 by our own Defense Department — is omitted entirely in the latest Pentagon report.
“We’re succeeding,” Mr. McCain said after his last trip to Iraq. “I don’t care what anybody says.” Again, it’s the last sentence that’s accurate. When General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before Congress again this week — against the backdrop of a million-Iraqi, anti-American protest called by Mr. Sadr — Mr. McCain will ram home all this “success” no matter the facts.
The difference between the Democrats and Mr. McCain going forward is clear enough: They want to find a way out of the morass, however provisional and imperfect, and he equates staying the disastrous course with patriotism. Mr. McCain’s doomed promise of military “victory” in Iraq is akin to Wile E. Coyote’s perpetual pursuit of the Road Runner, with much higher carnage. This isn’t patriotism. As the old saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again and hoping you’ll get a different result is the definition of insanity.
The Democrats should also stop repeating their 100-years-war calumny against Mr. McCain. There’s too much at stake for America for them to add their own petty distortions to an epic tragedy that only a long-overdue national reckoning with hard truths can bring to an end.
(The version on the NY Times is fully annotated, so if you want the sources, I recommend that you get them here.)
Tet Happened, and No One Cared
By FRANK RICH
REALLY, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain. As a growing chorus reiterates, their refrains that Mr. McCain is “willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq” (as Mr. Obama said) or “willing to keep this war going for 100 years” (per Mrs. Clinton) are flat-out wrong.
What Mr. McCain actually said in a New Hampshire town-hall meeting was that he could imagine a 100-year-long American role in Iraq like our long-term presence in South Korea and Japan, where “Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” See for yourself on YouTube.
But Mr. McCain shouldn’t protest too much about the Democrats’ bogus attack. For him, this sideshow is a political lifeline, allowing him to skate away from his many other, far more worrying canards about Iraq. If anything, that misused quote may be one of his more benign fairy tales. How delightful to fantasize that staying the Bush-Petraeus course will transform Iraq into pacific postwar Japan. Iraq’s sects have remained at each other’s throats since their country was carved out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Perhaps magical thinking can bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians, too.
Everything else Mr. McCain has to say about Iraq is more troubling, and I don’t mean just his recent serial gaffe conflating Shiite Iran and Sunni Qaeda. The sum total of his public record suggests that he could well prolong the war for another century — not because he’s the crazed militarist portrayed by Democrats, but through sheer inertia, bad judgment and blundering.
So far his bizarre pronouncements have been drowned out by the Democrats’ din. They’ve also been underplayed by a press that coddles Ol’ Man Straight Talk and that rarely looks more deeply into the “surge is success” propaganda than it did into Mr. Bush’s announcement of the end of “major combat operations” five years ago. The electorate doesn’t want to hear much anyway about a war it long ago soundly rejected.
For the majority of Americans who haven’t met any of the brave troops who’ve been cavalierly tossed into the quagmire, the war is out of sight and mind in a way Vietnam never was. Only 28 percent of Americans knew American casualties in Iraq were nearing 4,000 last month, according to the Pew Research Center. The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that by March 2008 the percentage of prominent news stories that were about Iraq had fallen to about one-fifth of what it was in January 2007. It’s a poignant commentary on the whole war that Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the nonpartisan advocacy group, was reduced to protesting the lack of coverage.
That’s why it’s no surprise that so few stopped to absorb the disastrous six-day battle of Basra that ended last week — a mini-Tet that belied the “success” of the surge. Even fewer noticed that the presumptive Republican nominee seemed at least as oblivious to what was going down as President Bush, no tiny feat.
In Mr. Bush’s telling, Basra was a “defining moment in the history of a free Iraq.” He praised the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and boasted repeatedly that the Iraqi forces were fighting “in the lead.” The Pentagon spokesman declared that this splendid engagement was “a byproduct of the success of the surge.”
It was a defining moment all right. Mr. Maliki’s impulsive and ill-planned attempt to vanquish the militias in southern Iraq loyal to his Shiite rival, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, was a failure that left Mr. Sadr more secure than before. Though some Iraqi armed forces were briefly in the lead, others mutinied. Eventually American and British forces and air power had to ride to the rescue in both Basra and Baghdad. Even then, the result was at best a standoff, with huge casualties. The battle ended only when Mr. Maliki’s own political minions sought a cease-fire.
Mr. McCain was just as wrong about Basra as he was in 2003, when he said the war would be “brief” and be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. Or as he was in the 1990s, when he championed extravagant State Department funding for the war instigator Ahmad Chalabi, who’d already been branded untrustworthy by the C.I.A. (The relationship between Mr. Chalabi and the former lobbyist Charles Black, now a chief McCain campaign strategist, is explored in a new book, “The Man Who Pushed America to War,” by Aram Roston.)
As for Basra, Mr. McCain told Joe Klein of Time in January that it was “not a problem.” He told John King of CNN while in Baghdad last month that Mr. Sadr’s “influence has been on the wane for a long time.” When the battle ended last week, Mr. McCain said: “Apparently it was Sadr who asked for the cease-fire, declared a cease-fire. It wasn’t Maliki. Very rarely do I see the winning side declare a cease-fire.” At least the last of those sentences was accurate. It was indeed the losing side — Maliki’s — that pleaded for the cease-fire.
Perhaps all these mistaken judgments can be attributed to the fog of war. But Mr. McCain’s bigger strategic picture, immutable no matter what happens on the ground, is foggier still. Like Mr. Bush, he keeps selling Iraq as the central front in the war on Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda was not even a participant in the Basra battle, which was an eruption of a Shiite-vs.-Shiite civil war. (Al Qaeda is busy enough in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the actual central front in the war on terror.)
Mr. McCain is also fond of portraying Mr. Maliki’s “democracy” in Iraq as an essential bulwark against Iran; his surrogate Lindsey Graham habitually refers to Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army as “Iranian-backed militias.” But the political coalition and militia propping up Mr. Maliki are even closer to Iran than the Sadrists. McClatchy Newspapers reported last week that the Maliki-Sadr cease-fire was not only brokered in Iran but by a general whose name is on the Treasury Department’s terrorist list: the commander of the Quds force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
So this is where this latest defining moment in Iraq leaves us: with victories for Iran and Mr. Sadr, and with Iraqi forces that still can’t stand up (training cost to American taxpayers so far: $22 billion) so we can stand down. The Baghdad Green Zone, pummeled with lethal mortar fire, proved vulnerable once again. Basra remains so perilous that Britain has had to suddenly halt its planned troop withdrawals. Tony Blair had ordered the drawdown a year ago, after declaring that “the next chapter in Basra’s history will be written by the Iraqis.”
The surge is a success in exactly one way: American forces, by putting their lives on the line and benefiting from a now-defunct Sadr cease-fire, have reduced violence in Baghdad (though only to early 2005 levels). But as the Middle East scholar Juan Cole has written, “the ‘surge’ was never meant to be the objective but rather the means.”
None of the objectives have been met. Remember that “return on success” — as in returning troops — that Mr. Bush promised in January’s State of the Union? We will end 2008 with more Americans in Iraq than the 132,000 at the time the surge began. Even Gen. David Petraeus said last month that there has not been “sufficient progress” on the other most important objective, Iraqi political reconciliation. Mr. Maliki’s move against Mr. Sadr in Basra, done without even consulting Iraq’s “democratically elected” Parliament, was an attempt to take out his opponent by force rather than wait for the October provincial elections.
Not that other metrics are any brighter. At last, oil production sometimes reaches prewar levels. But a third or more of the oil, as The New York Times reported, is siphoned off to the black market, where it finances the insurgency. The projected date for turning over security operations to the Iraqis — first set for the end of 2006 by Iraqi officials, then moved up to the end of 2007 and July 2008 by our own Defense Department — is omitted entirely in the latest Pentagon report.
“We’re succeeding,” Mr. McCain said after his last trip to Iraq. “I don’t care what anybody says.” Again, it’s the last sentence that’s accurate. When General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before Congress again this week — against the backdrop of a million-Iraqi, anti-American protest called by Mr. Sadr — Mr. McCain will ram home all this “success” no matter the facts.
The difference between the Democrats and Mr. McCain going forward is clear enough: They want to find a way out of the morass, however provisional and imperfect, and he equates staying the disastrous course with patriotism. Mr. McCain’s doomed promise of military “victory” in Iraq is akin to Wile E. Coyote’s perpetual pursuit of the Road Runner, with much higher carnage. This isn’t patriotism. As the old saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again and hoping you’ll get a different result is the definition of insanity.
The Democrats should also stop repeating their 100-years-war calumny against Mr. McCain. There’s too much at stake for America for them to add their own petty distortions to an epic tragedy that only a long-overdue national reckoning with hard truths can bring to an end.
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