Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Dennis Perrin has returned from his panel at YearlyKos with Juan Cole with the exactly the kind of high quality malcontentment you might hope for:

I found the registration area and went to formalize my arrival. The woman at the counter confirmed my place on the afternoon panel, gave me my personal plastic badge, along with a YearlyKos tote bag filled with all kinds of crap. Now I was part of the scene, though I immediately noticed a blue ribbon adorning my badge that read “Speaker.” Looking around, I saw different colored ribbons on various badges. Orange was for attendees, bloggers who were not on panels. Green was for the media. And, naturally, blue was for we “experts” who would shed light and wisdom from our various perches.

From the jump, I was pissed off and dismayed. Why the fuck was there color-coded distinctions at a supposedly “democratic” convention? I thought the whole point to blogging was to democratize political expression, to allow people who didn’t attend an Ivy League school or had friends in the corporate media to reach a wide audience with their views and concerns.

You may read it all.

The ACLU is right we should be calling Congress right now (even if you’ve done so already) to tell them to vote no on a modification of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act:

The FISA “modernization” bill is actually an administration power grab — expanding the National Security Agency’s access to all of our international telephone and email communications — regardless of any known connection to terrorists.

The House might even vote this afternoon, so call them now.

A country that can’t keep its bridges from collapsing is not going to be running the world very much longer. That’s the interesting thing about the standard historical trajectory of imperial elites…at a certain point they either (1) forget the power they can wield outside their country ultimately derives from a healthy society beneath them, or (2) understand that but decide they’d rather be comparatively more powerful within a poorer society and less powerful outside.

To understand choice #2 it’s useful to look at an extreme example, like Saudi Arabia. Certainly it has the natural wealth to be able to oppose Israel effectively. And you’d assume their elites want to do that, given that they’re always screeching about it. But effective opposition would require Saudi society to be internally far more democratic, educated and egalitarian. So the Saudi princes have decided they’d prefer their country to be a weak, poor backwater if that’s what’s required for them to each own nine palaces. As William Arkin said about our new $20 billion arms sale to the Saudis:

U.S. officials say the United States will seek assurances from Saudi Arabia that it will not store its new Joint Direct Attack Munitions — the satellite-guided bombs — at northern air bases, where they could threaten Israel.

Israel needn’t worry. The Saudi military is even less dangerous than the gang who couldn’t shoot straight…it’s not just incompetence when it comes to the Saudi military. The Saudi monarchy has methodically focused its military on pomp and equipment and spiffy uniforms, ensuring that it not acquire any real offensive capacity or the ability to operate as a coherent force. It does not want a competent, independent military contemplating a coup.

The same thing is true in the rest of the Arab world. For instance, at the beginning of the Six Day War in 1967, as Israel was bombing Egyptian airfields, the Egyptian air defense system was actually turned off. The Egyptian government had done this because they were more worried about internal enemies than Israel—they thought some rebel Egyptian military forces might be trying to shoot down the plane of the Defense Minister, and didn’t want the rebels to be able to find out where it was.

Egyptian elites could have avoided this kind of internal conflict by having a democratic country with civilian control of the military, but who wants that? Far more enjoyable to be autocrats who turn off their air defense system RIGHT WHEN THEY’RE BEING BOMBED.

America’s elites are, at heart, the same way. They’d prefer to be emirs and kings running a shambling catastrophe of a country than moderately rich men in Sweden.

MORE ON THE BRIDGE COLLAPSE: From Rick Perlstein here and here, and from LeanLeft here.

Democrats.com is holding a contest for the best video comparing Dick Cheney and Richard Nixon and making the case for impeachment, with a $1000 prize going to the winner. All you have to do is make it and upload it to YouTube by noon ET on Thursday, August 9th—the 33rd anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation. More information here.

Kenneth Pollack, writing an op-ed for the New York Times with Michael O’Hanlon today:

A War We Might Just Win

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with…

[T]here is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.

Kenneth Pollack, writing in The Threatening Storm in 2002:

Saddam has a twenty-eight year pattern of aggression, violence, miscalculation, and purposeful underestimation of the consequences of his actions that should give real pause to anyone…

Even when Saddam does consider a problem at length…his own determination to interpret geopolitical calculations to suit what he wants to believe anyway lead him to construct bizarre scenarios that he convinces himself are highly likely.