Playing the credit game fairly

Somewhere I saw an editorial cartoon showing a bullet's trajectory towards Osama bin Laden. It had 95% of the trajectory labelled as "Bush" and 5% as "Obama".

Equally or even less generously, climate denier/coal magnate David Koch said Obama "didn't contribute much at all."

Moving beyond these in-depth analyses, is there any fair way to analyze it? We could try by assigning credit and blame before you know the outcome, as in what I wrote on January 22:

The Obama responsibility period began this week

With exactly two years since Obama's inauguration having passed, I'm somewhat arbitrarily picking this as the time where his administration bears greater responsibility for anything done well or poorly by the executive branch than any previous administration. Credit and blame can be adjusted on a case by case basis - for example, Bush bears more responsibility for 9/11 than Clinton because he downgraded counter-terrorism efforts - but as a general matter this makes some sense to me.

Of course, the president with the next most responsibility is Bush, without adjusting on a case by case basis.

So on with the adjustments! For Bush, we have screwing up Tora Bora by not committing enough troops and trusting allies he shouldn't have, and generally pulling CIA assets out of Afghanistan and into Iraq, and the small matter of his share of blame for letting 9/11 happen at all. To Bush's credit, there's eventually relying on the patient intelligence gathering game that Obama continued through another 2-plus years.

Obama gets credit for warning in the campaign that he would go after Osama in Pakistan, despite criticism from McCain and Hilary. Obama also gets credit for a manned ops instead of bombs. Bombs may have killed Osama just as well, but there'd be no body, no intel from captured material, much more collateral damage, and massive outrage from Pakistan unleavened with the current mix of outrage plus embarrassment. And Obama reconstituted the CIA bin Laden unit that Bush had demobilized.

Finally, we've got torture. Bushies like to point out that the people they had tortured gave the initial intel that eventually led to Osama. Far fewer of them realize that the captives held out during the torture sessions and only gave up the info months later during standard interrogations. I don't think this particular set of info is entirely clear, but I'd tend to score it against Bush and the pro-torture wing of the Republican Party.

I won't attempt to make a definitive adjustment for the credit game, but qualitatively I'd start off with my initial preponderant share of credit to Obama, adjust upward for his decisions, and mostly adjust downward for Bush's choices.

David Koch, in the end, can add one more facet to his denialism.

Perception and reality of counterinsurgency war

This is what a chickenhawk perceives counterinsurgency warfare to be (first three minutes is all you need):



Counterinsurgency war:

As Glenn Greenwald said, the issue here isn't the soldiers who did the shooting, it's about running a counterinsurgency war in a foreign country.

Yoo and Bybee escape from justice isn't entirely complete

I've been reading various reactions to the overruling by the Department of Justice of the recommendation to refer pro-torture Professor John Yoo and Appellate Judge Jay Bybee to bar association disciplinary committees (the hundreds of pages of info can be found here, and the first two links at that cite are the most important).  Basically the argument is that the failure to provide objective and reasonable advice is insufficient grounds for sanctions.  DOJ concludes that the legal arguments for torture are nonsense, but Yoo actually believed it, and Bybee didn't bother to look at it very closely and some other folks told him it was okay.  Balkin explains that reasoning in all its glory.

Three points:

1.  I've only skimmed the DOJ memo, but what I've seen fails to focus on the duty to respond to arguments contrary to the attorney's conclusion.  This is the key issue in my opinion.  It doesn't matter whether Yoo thinks he's right - he failed to discuss precedent that limits the power of the president, even in wartime.  Even if he thinks that precedent isn't controlling, any lawyer worthy of practicing has to respond to the best contrary arguments.  As for Bybee, he's either in charge or he isn't.  A lawyer of all people has to know the consequences of signing something.

2.  As for the "you're all forgetting the atmosphere of 9-11" issue, you can forget that argument.  The memos were from August 2002, eleven months later.  There's enough time for people to think clearly again after a year, plenty of reasons by then to know that America hadn't been brought to its knees, and to know that we clearly weren't facing a threat as significant as we had several times before in conventional wars against great industrial powers.

3.  It's not over, entirely. Jonathan Zasloff points out that the Pennsylvania and Utah bar associations don't need a referral from DOJ - they can act independently, and they should given the information in front of them.  Similarly, UC Berkeley can independently use the information to determine whether someone acting this incompetently, crazily, or dishonestly meets the standard of a law professor.  I can't say I'm extremely hopeful of this happening, but the option exists.


UPDATE:  Kudos to Mike Potemra for fighting torture in the web pages of the National Review, of all places.  Posts like that help me believe that there's still hope.

Democrats are blowing it, and they need to learn from Bush

I promise to let go of this soon, but I can't handle the Democratic foolishness.

While the Republicans had terrible policies with horrible results that earned them their current, out-of-power position, they were good at getting those policies enacted. So how did the Bush Administration react when the entire national electorate kicked Republican butts out? They offered one sacrifice - Rumsfeld - and then doubled down on their policies with the surge in 2007. And while the surge was a worse policy choice than initiating a drawdown as Bush agreed to in 2008, it was better than the status quo and somewhat improved Republican electoral outcomes in 2008.

Now we have one Democratic state rejecting one Democratic candidate who ran a lousy campaign, where the only clear fact is that the electorate supports the in-state version of health care that's planned nationally, and the Ds can't decide what to do.

The policy choices seem to me to be either pass the Senate bill unchanged combined with a possibility of improvements in separate legislation, or alternatively to work for a slight possibility of a few piecemeal reforms instead. How anyone can hesitate in light of those choices is beyond me.

The politics seem clear too - the Democrats need this achievement to have something to run on in November.

I'm not the political expert - maybe I'm missing something. But the Obama Administration, the Democratic party leadership, and any Democratic congressional member who doesn't push for it, all seem to me to be screwing it up.

There's some quote about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory that Lincoln might have said (I couldn't confirm). I think the Democrats are half way to doing it now. I still hope and think they can fix it.

Investigating Bush and the political valence of retribution

One of my few shifts to the political right in recent years came from accepting retribution as an appropriate purpose for criminal punishment. I don't accept it as a way of achieving justice, but as a way of making the victims of crime feel better, whether the victims are specific individuals or society as a whole.

So the political valence of investigating Bush Administration members for crimes is interesting when it comes to retribution. Conservatives would normally think retribution is a fine reason to go after someone, while liberals might not. Now though, conservatives shrink at the idea that people would want revenge for the crimes committed in our name and with our tax dollars. They might want to think about how strongly retribution should influence punishment in all crimes then, not just for rich people drunk on political power. I suppose liberals might consider the same question for other crimes, too.

Finally, conservatives might argue that no retribution is needed, because the crimes weren't "wrong." That would be the most shameful reasoning, I think.

(A side note - if it's true that the Bushies ordered the forgery of evidence of WMDs and Al Qaeda in Iraq to keep the war going, we can likely add another war crime, a war of aggression, to Bush's list. Forging evidence seems to me to be a different category from simply withholding evidence that cuts against their argument for continuing the war.)

Set your betting and expectations on the last Bush pardons

TPM points out the pardon clock is really ticking now for the Bushies. If no political pardons are announced, I'll be surprised and will have to slightly raise my estimation of the failed presidency. If they only pardon Scooter and maybe some nobodies, that fits the terrible estimation I have of them. If they issue broad pardons of many individuals or even sweeping pardon statements that are designed to protect everybody, including Bush and Cheney, it will show how that presidency will be remembered for the ages.

Here's their last chance to do something, anything, better than Clinton did. We'll see in a few days.

UPDATE Jan. 19: Atrios has a good point, "Pardoning the people below him would remove any 5th amendment reasons to not testify," although subordinates also lose the incentive to inform on others. Looks unlikely to happen now other than two small bones thrown to the right wingers. Bush has slightly exceeded my expectations on this issue, but not enough to matter much.

Who Bush pardons next month, and whether Obama can (and will) reverse the pardons

An interesting dustup from Bush's latest pardon attempts - after it was publicly revealed that one recipient's father gave almost $30,000 to the Republican party, Bush is trying to take the pardon back, and one 140-year-old case suggests he might be able to do it. If the pardon has been issued but not delivered and accepted, then it remains revocable.

I've been wondering whether Bush will try and push the envelope of the pardon power next month, issuing a blanket pardon without names attached to anyone involved in any capacity with extraordinary rendition and authorized interrogation techniques. I've thought he'd do it without naming names not just to exempt as many underlings as possible, but also in order to pardon himself and Cheney without doing so expressly. The problem comes with the old case at the link above, that "A pardon is a deed, to the validity of which delivery is essential, and delivery is not complete without acceptance, and a pardon by an outgoing President may be revoked by his successor before delivery."

I'm not sure if the concepts of delivery and acceptance still operate today, or how they worked for Carter's blanket pardon of draft evaders. To the extent they still work though and allow Bush to revoke his pardon, Obama could do the same thing.

Something Obama may have to think about.

UPDATE: See the comments, and also here for whether Bush really can revoke the pardon. I think that insofar as the legal question is open, Bush would have estoppel problems if he claimed that Obama couldn't revoke pardons that Bush himself gave but had not "delivered." I also think Obama would likely duck the issue, though.

A question for Bob Woodward

If this new, supersecret counterinsurgency technique is so game-changing in Iraq, why hasn't it been used in Afghanistan, where things have been deteriorating for over a year?

Maybe I'm too hard on Woodward, but he seems to be the David Broder of confidential sources. Broder takes the conventional wisdom on any subject and pronounces it like an amazing revelation, or possibly something he claims to have heard from a local yokel somewhere. Woodward's books on the Iraq war does the same thing with confidential sources whose information just mirrors conventional perception of whether the war's going well or badly, whether Bush is a good or bad leader, etc.

The utility of either journalist is limited. Maybe a slight edge for Woodward in providing sources for historical analysis, long after the fact.

It's like destroying all the movies of the D-Day Invasion

That's what destroying the videotaped "interrogations" of Al-Qaeda members amounted to, if you accept at face value the Bush Administration claim that the interrogation methods were ethical and produced valuable information. The tapes were perfect training materials - actual "interrogators" getting actual information from actually resisting enemies. To say they were destroyed to protect interrogator identities is ridiculous - the interrogators' faces and voices could have been easily obscured.

So either it was criminally incompetent to destroy something so valuable if the Bush/Republican approach is justified, or it was criminal obstruction of justice to destroy evidence of governmental interrogators committing crimes authorized high up the chain of command.

Kevin Drum has more on the uselessness of these particular results.

Sandra Day O'Connor pays for her sins

There's a sad irony in that retired Supreme Court Justice O'Connor is one of the people who's paid a higher-than-average price for having Bush as president, ironic in that it's her fault. This has come out in several interviews by Jeffrey Toobin about his new book on the Supreme Court.

O'Connor is famous/infamous for not having a consistent legal philosophy driving her decisions, instead approaching each case separately. The danger in her style is that it's easy to let extraneous factors decide the case, like her belief in 2000 that Bush should win the election and the Florida debacle revolved around lazy and incompetent voters.

So O'Connor makes Bush president as part of the 5-4 majority vote in Bush v. Gore. Then as Toobin says at the link above, she doesn't take long to regret his presidency.

I can't find a link for this, but I also heard Toobin say in an interview that O'Connor had wanted to outlast the Bush administration so another, better president could appoint her replacement. She decided she couldn't do that though when her husband's Alzheimer condition deteriorated. She wanted to spend what remaining time he had with him, and announced her intention to resign. But O'Connor couldn't leave the court though until both she and Rehnquist had been replaced, and due to the Harriet Miers stupidity, it took months. By the time she could actually retire, her husband no longer recognized her and had to be institutionalized.

Had she done the right thing in 2000 and not stood in Gore's way, I expect she also would have tried to outlast the Democratic president. But when she couldn't, her resignation wouldn't have been caught up in a Harriet Miers spectacle, so she could actually leave when she wanted.

Bush cost O'Connor the last meaningful-relationship months of her long marriage. I agree with Toobin that it's a personal tragedy, although thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of others have paid a higher price. In O'Connor's case, the irony is in her responsibility.

The Italian trials are Bush's future

I predict that after Bush leaves office, neither he nor Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft or Gonzalez will visit Western Europe except if sent there as part of a diplomatic mission. The trials being conducted in Italy right now over the CIA kidnappings there a sign of the future on the international level. I might be wrong about this for the first few years, but after a while, they'll remember what happened to Pinochet and stay away.

It's small recompense to the rest of us, but the number of countries these people can't visit will grow over time. And Bush is younger than most of them - 30 years from now, he'll still be around. I wouldn't rule out America being a place where he ultimately gets tried at that point, just as it happened to Pinochet in Chile itself. That'll be worth waiting around for.

Bush Administration just reports - we're responsible for the decisions

The latest in our universally-erroneous tendency to think the Bush Administration supports what it's saying, when anyone can figure out they're merely relaying news items to the rest of us:

So, you remember all that, um, stuff created by Doug Feith's private intelligence shop in the Pentagon back in 2002 and 2003? You know, the stuff about how Saddam Hussein had close ties to al-Qaeda and possessed an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons? The stuff that helped justify a catastrophic preventive war that's still raging four years later?

Yeah, that stuff. Today, Feith tells us what it actually was:

This was not "alternative intelligence assessment." It was from the start a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community, and in presenting it I was not endorsing its substance.

This has been clear for years about the Bush Administration, yet we insist on misinterpreting their words. For example, these ones:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Conservative hero, David Horowitz, understood it well enough:

The British government continued to stand by its report, making the presidential statement literally true.

Chris Mooney actually thinks Bush was expressing an opinion that there was a meaningful debate of global warming when Bush said a debate existed over whether global warming was "manmade or naturally caused." In fact, Bush was just pointing out that people were arguing, and like Doug Feith, was not endorsing the substance of whether it was meaningful. Therefore, the administration is completely consistent in saying that "Beginning in June 2001, President Bush has consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem."

We need to get this stuff straight.

The religious reason for the Bush escalation

1. Bush believes that God wanted him to be President.

2. Invading Iraq was the most important decision that Bush took.

3. God couldn't have wanted Bush elected in order to do something disastrous.

4. De-escalating in Iraq would be basically admitting a disastrous failure, even if it would somewhat limit the consequences of failure compared to staying indefinitely.

5. Keeping the same force level doesn't appear to be working, has no political support, and could lead to de-escalation.

6. God must have made it possible for his chosen President, George Bush, to obtain victory in the most important action Bush took.

7. Neither de-escalation nor keeping the same force level leads to victory.

8. Therefore, God must want Bush to take the only course that leaves a chance for victory, even if it is no more clear to us how that will occur than it was clear to Abraham's wife, Sarah, that at 90 years old she would have her firstborn child, Isaac.

It's not hard to figure out what role is being played by those who oppose the escalation.

I'd also note that someone with more religious sophistication than Bush could question #3 above, but I doubt Bush will.