I agree. in a democracy, no one should get away with saying, "You can't have an opinion." or "This topic is too sensitive to be discussed."

FIX requests:

don't require that Ilogin daily to leave a comment.

Ads are one thing, these damn animated ads suck down CPU cycles and slow refresh in addition to just being annoying. I can remember you gettting upwards of 500 comments daily, now between 100 and 200. think about it.

I'm glad you do what you do. Without your analysis, we progressives would not have the same acute understanding of these issues. You and digby and Emptywheel are among the best voices in themovement.

I don't think war with Pakistan is at all inevitable, but if you want to explore that, I'll argue it with pleasure. And, we will be furthering the goals of GG's post by talking foreign policy while being public. (similar to driving while black, or flying while Muslim)

Maybe I didn't phrase myself quite correctly? If nothing is done to stabilize that part of South Asia, and nothing is done to end Pakistan's cross-border infiltrations and insurgencies, and nothing is done to end the resultant training and export of people with global terrorist reach, there will be war there. Maybe we won't start it, maybe we won't even be in it initially, but it will start to suck in the rest of the world in a way that's worse than the way the Middle East currently does. And it has potential to expand to all of South and Southeast Asia.

Before that happens, there is a lot that can be done that isn't military and doesn't involve strikes. But if nothing is done, Pakistan's problems will not solve themselves. Nobody keeps track here, but the cross-border insurgency into India has claimed 80,000, the Afghan civil war, a large part of which was Gulbaddin Hekmatyar and the Taliban, was 400,000, 3 million refugees, and so on.

Some stuff is really cheap in that part of the world, the price tag the world balked on for Afghanistan was only $25 billion (delivered uncorruptly of course). Telling Saudi Arabia to quit exporting radical imams to madrassas might also be cheap. Rebuilding Pakistan's corrupt society? I don't know, but it's got to be cheaper than a war. For sure, bribing one corrupt government after another, which is the State Department plan for the next 100 years, is a failure. For sure, making deals with "moderate" ISI guys or "moderate" Taliban leaders, is a failure. For sure, a surgical strike against the current terrorists will solve the problem only until the next ones arrive (they are actually probably already there). All of Pakistan's neighbors (possibly excepting China) would like the situation changed.

Courtesy of, who else, authoritarian shill Hugh Hewitt.

Anyway, the transcription is over at Talk Left; Armando is in heaven.

Go read:

http://www.talkleft.com/story/2007/8/8/215313/3125

For all the talking Petreaus and all the generals have been doing over the last few weeks, the September Report is going to be completely anti-climactic, expectations have already been managed to a fare-thee-well.

Nonetheless, Colmes does home in on some issues, such as the unaccounted-for weaponry, the deals with Sunni militias, the various and sundry previous reports the General made declaring ever so much "progress" and so on.

Many of these are issues Glenn wants to get into with His Generalship, I believe.

Good luck tomorrow, please tell us good news. I chanted.

Without subscribing to obscure magazines such as Foreign Affairs or spending days in a university library, one pretty much needs to find a local peace activism group to learn the core principles of non-proliferation. You're certainly not going to learn about it in the MSM.

Most advanced non-proliferation theory taught even in places such as the Pentagon reads like a pacifist manifesto. E.g. Avoid policies of Regime Change, Avoid characterizing foreign heads of state in public as illegitimate, Avoid unilateral aggression, Reserve the privileges of non-proliferation treaties to signator nations, etc.

It'd even help if Americans understood the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, such as the restriction that those with nuclear weapons will not use them against signator nations that do not have nuclear weapons.

As Glenn points out, however, the foreign policy crowd holds its shifting, inconsistent cards close to its chest. That's unfortunate for our public debate, since these principles and theories are among the most important domestic and international policy decisions of our age.

Actually, it's an excerpt from a much longer poem, circa 1925, called Villon. I highly recommend the whole thing. It really is magnificent, as full of music and good sense as the best of Shakespeare.

(I'm glad you liked it.)

My last belongs on the previous thread. My apologies to all.

The New York Times; Sunday, December 14, 2003

War and Never Having To Say You're Sorry
By SAMANTHA POWER

[...] In ''The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara,'' opening Friday, Errol Morris [...] has given Mr. McNamara a big-screen chance to reflect upon a career of watching fallible human beings like himself make decisions that imperil or extinguish human lives.

While Mr. McNamara uses the film to propagate the ''lessons'' of his six decades in public life, Mr. Morris has another agenda: to raise questions that are moral, timeless and rarely broached with such subtlety. How do decent men commit or abet evil acts? And once they have done so, how should they interact with their victims, live with their consciences and pass along their insights? It is the indefatigable relevance of these questions that keep Americans at once enthralled and repelled by Robert S. McNamara. And it is the long-standing aversion of American decision-makers to address past mistakes that has helped undermine the American standing around the world and has hindered our ability to learn from history.

Mr. Morris [...] has released the film at a time when war and quagmire are very much on the mind of Americans. Revisiting Vietnam and the images of sprightly young G.I.'s so eager to serve, one is reminded how soldiers can be led astray by reckless ideology, shoddy intelligence and liberal hubris.

[...] But Mr. Morris is less interested in policy than in metaphysics. In a recent interview in New York, where he was promoting the film, he said he first became interested in Mr. McNamara because of an ''endless fascination'' with the extent to which ''people who engage in evil believe in some real sense that they are doing good.'' Mr. Morris seems reflexively drawn to the gray zones of human morality. If ''real Iagos'' permeated the planet, the filmmaker rightly notes, life would be simpler, and in the end, probably safer. But the story gets more complicated when a man like Robert McNamara -- who is not only debonair, but introspective and self-critical -- comes along. ''If evil is somewhat more ineluctable, it also becomes somewhat more problematic,'' Mr. Morris observes. ''What is it? Where is it? Is it in some of us? Is it in all of us?''

And under what circumstances, he might have added, can we rationalize it? The most stirring scenes in ''The Fog of War'' surround America's firebombing of 67 Japanese cities in World War II, during which time Mr. McNamara was working under Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force. Mr. Morris unearthed spine-curdling government reports showing the raw calculus undertaken to speed America's victory. ''In order to do good,'' Mr. McNamara says, articulating the film's ninth lesson, ''recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil.'' In a single bombing raid, he recalls, ''We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo -- men, women and children.'' Some 900,000 Japanese civilians were killed overall. Was he aware this would happen? ''Well, I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it,'' Mr. McNamara tells Mr. Morris. ''Lemay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He -- and I'd say I -- were behaving as war criminals.''

[...] Today he declines comment on Iraq [...] But Mr. McNamara's views can be inferred from the film. ''What makes us omniscient,'' he asks, rhetorically. ''Have we a record of omniscience?'' He concludes, ''If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our case, we better re-examine our reasoning.''

Re-examining our reasoning is not something that has come naturally to American statesmen. In fact, Mr. McNamara is one of very few senior American government officials ever to admit major error without being forced to do so. In an interview last month, I asked him why. ''People don't want to admit they made mistakes,'' he said. ''This is true of the Catholic Church, it's true of companies, it's true of nongovernmental organizations and it's certainly true of political bodies.

[...] By now, Mr. McNamara has learned how to speak about the trauma in his past in much the same way one learns to speak of the death of a loved one: by rote. In our conversation, he often repeated verbatim what he had said on camera. If a question probed tender territory, he pivoted, transitioning skillfully to one of his policy causes, like nuclear nonproliferation or the International Criminal Court. But despite all his best efforts, Mr. McNamara still broke down several times during the filming of ''The Fog of War'' -- ''a sign of weakness,'' he told me, embarrassed. On camera, he remains stoic as he says that his wife and son got ulcers when he was secretary of defense, and that his wife, who died in 1981, ''may even ultimately have died from the stress.'' Mr. McNamara's emotions get the better of him when he goes on to say something he must know to be untrue. ''But,'' he insists, waving his pen for emphasis, ''they were some of the best years of our lives and'' -- here the tears start -- ''all members of my family benefited from it.'' He quickly masters the lump in his throat, and proclaims, unconvincingly: ''It was terrific.'' In our interview, Mr. McNamara's eyes filled with tears at precisely the same moment. Though some politicians are known to muster tears as a ploy for sympathy, in the case of Mr. McNamara, who is famously controlling, they seemed anything but calculated; rather, they offered evidence that his public poise is outmatched by his personal demons. [...]

- - Samantha Power

And if Ms. Power wielded real power, would she herself be "led astray by reckless ideology, shoddy intelligence and liberal hubris"?