652 About the Strategic Significance of Bin Laden’s Execution, and the Road Not Taken

Author: Fabius Maximus  ·  May 5th, 2011  

Summary:  The capture and execution of bin Laden was a powerful act of grand strategy.  Did it advance or damage our national interests?  There was an alternative to his execution, another of the roads not taken by America since 9-11.  Bin Laden borrowed from the ending of Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor”. We could have borrowed the ending from “The Sum of All Fears”.  This is a follow-up to A brief note about the death of bin Laden.

Contents

1. Was bin Laden a high priority goal?
2. Why does it matter?  Because strategy trumps tactics.
3. The missed opportunity
4. For more information

(1)  Was bin Laden a high priority goal?

Did we seek to capture/kill bin Laden?  Or was he more useful as an excuse for invading Afghanistan and Iraq?  There is evidence that regime change in the Middle East was the objective – and justice for bin Laden was secondary.  That was and should be primarily a decision about strategy not (as Machiavelli explained) a moral choice.  We can debate its effects another day.  Here’s some of the evidence.

(a)  Bush’s response to 9-11

As explained by the 9-11 Commission. From page 332, Chapter 10 — Wartime:

The State Department proposed delivering an ultimatum to the Taliban: produce Bin Ladin and his deputies and shut down al Qaeda camps within 24 to 48 hours, or the United States will use all necessary means to destroy the terrorist infrastructure. The State Department did not expect the Taliban to comply. Therefore, State and Defense would plan to build an international coalition to go into Afghanistan.

Both departments would consult with NATO and other allies and request intelligence, basing, and other support from countries, according to their capabilities and resources. Finally, the plan detailed a public U.S. stance: America would use all its resources to eliminate terrorism as a threat, punish those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, hold states and other actors responsible for providing sanctuary to terrorists, work with a coalition to eliminate terrorist groups and networks, and avoid malice toward any people, religion, or culture. (State Department memo, “Gameplan for Polmil Strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan,” 14 Sept 2001)

President Bush recalled that he quickly realized that the administration would have to invade Afghanistan with ground troops.

(b)  Bush’s response to the Taliban’s offers

From ”Bush rejects Taliban offer to surrender bin Laden“, The Independent, 15 October 2001 — Excerpt:

After a week of debilitating strikes at targets across Afghanistan, the Taliban repeated an offer to hand over Osama bin Laden, only to be rejected by President Bush.  The offer yesterday from Haji Abdul Kabir, the Taliban’s deputy prime minister, to surrender Mr bin Laden if America would halt its bombing and provide evidence against the Saudi-born dissident was not new … Mr Kabir said: “If America were to step back from the current policy, then we could negotiate.” Mr bin Laden could be handed over to a third country for trial, he said. “We could discuss which third country.”

But as American warplanes entered the second week of the bombing campaign, Washington rejected the Taliban offer out of hand. “When I said no negotiations I meant no negotiations,” Mr Bush said. “We know he’s guilty. Turn him over. There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt.”

Another offer by the Taliban immediately followed:  ”New offer on Bin Laden – Minister makes secret trip to offer trial in third country“, The Guardian, 17 October 2001 — “”Now they have agreed to hand him over to a third country without the evidence being presented in advance”.  the US ignored both offers.

(c)  Operation Tora Bora in December 2001

SecDef Rumsfeld overruled his senior military leaders and allowed bin Laden to escape.  For details see “Tora Bora Revisited: How we failed to get bin Laden and why it matters today“, report to by the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 30 November 2009.  There are numerous other sources that confirm this, such as “CIA Commander: U.S. Let Bin Laden Slip Away,” Newsweek, 15 August 2005 – quoting Gary Berntsen, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora.  Also see Bernsten’s book Jawbreaker (2005) and “Into Thin Air“, Newsweek, 2 September 2007.

We were invading a large nation with a small force.  The SecDef decided to focus on the big goal.  Wisely, as diversions have lost many wars.

(2) Introduction:  strategy trumps tactics (an expensive lesson to forget)

“To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War, circa 500 B.C.

The tactical brilliance of our officers and the daring of our special operations forces means little unless utilized for long-term advantage.  As the German’s proved in WWII, tactical excellence cannot overcome strategic errors.  How does the pursuit, capture, and execution of bin Laden fit into our long war against the jihadists?

Looking to our history for guidance, many of America’s greatest military victories have come from sophisticated grand strategies in which we gained the moral high ground.

• In The Revolutionary War this meant showing that we were fighting for our rights as Englishmen — weakening the solidarity of our opponents (John Adams defending the soldiers after the Boston Massacre was as important as most of Washington’s few battlefield victories).
•  The Confederacy lost the Civil War largely because the British would not support a nation founded on slavery.
• The geopolitical regime we built after WWII lasted so long due to its strong moral foundations.

A well-executed grand strategy is the supreme force multiplier.  The late American strategist John Boyd (Colonel, USAF) said that “occurs when we live by the codes of conduct or standards of behavior that we profess, and others expect us, to uphold.”  The opposite, of course, is moral isolation, which manifests itself as, e.g., a diminishing level of cooperation by allies abroad and the public here at home.   A grand strategy focused our actions — political, economic, and military — so as to:

• Increase our solidarity, our internal cohesion.
• Weaken our opponents’ resolve and internal cohesion.
• Strengthen our allies’ relationships to us.
• Attract uncommitted states to our cause.End conflicts on favorable terms, without sowing the seeds for future conflicts. — From Patterns of Conflict, slide 139.

Since al Qaeda probably exists only as a ghost of its former self (see details here), killing bin Laden accomplishes little.  It  provides a satisfying vengeance.  It provides political gains for Obama and DoD, valuable in the absence of any fruits of victory from Iraq and lack of progress in Afghanistan.  It is another step in the degradation of the reputation of our special operations forces from elite warriors to assassins, paid killers of unarmed people whom the US government wants hit.

It also provides an opportunity for AQ to replace the sick bin Laden with a competent and vigorous leader.  It provides jihadists with a martyr.  It gains no sympathy for America, gains no friends, builds no respect among the people of the Middle East and Muslims everywhere.

At an early intergovernmental meeting on the importance of psychological warfare, one of {General} Harkins’ key staffmen, Brigadier General Gerald Kelleher, quickly dismissed that theory. His job, he said, was to kill Vietcong.  But the French, responded a political officer named Donald Pike, had killed a lot of Vietcong and they had not won. “Didn’t kill enough Vietcong,” answered Kelleher. — From The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam (1972)

(3)  The missed opportunity

We could have tried him as we did the Nazi and Japanese war criminals after WWII.  There was another course of action we might have asked for, which if successful would have been a major strategic victory.  From  Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears, following capture of terrorist mastermind who attempted to destroy Denver with a nuke.  Excerpt from Chapter 44 – The Breeze of Evening:

They flew to Riyadh abroad Prince Ali’s aircraft.  There would be no indecent haste in the administration of sentence.  There had to be time for prayer and reconciliation, and no one wanted to treat this any differently from a more pedestrian case.  It also gave people time to sit and reflect …

The executions were at noon on Sunday, six days after the bomb exploded.  The people gathered, Ghosn and Qati were led out into the market square.  they were given time to pray.  … “The world will learn from this” Prince Ali said.  “This is justice happening.  That is the lesson.”

… Even though Qati knew it was coming, it didn’t matter.  As with so many things in life, it was all controlled by reflex.  a soldier prodded his side with a sword, barely enough to break the skin.  Instantly, Qati’s back arched, his neck extended itself in an involuntary flinch.  The Captain of the Saudi Special forces already had his sword moving.  The head was removed with a single stroke as deceptively powerful as a ballet master’s.  Qati’s head landed a meter or so away, and then the body flopped down, blood spraying from the severed vessels.  The blood pumped out in a steady rhythm as Qati’s heart continued to work, striving to preserve a life already departed.  Finally that too stopped, and all that was left of Qati were separated parts and a dark stain on the ground.  The Saudi Captain wiped the sword clean on a bolt of silk, replaced it in the golden scabbard, and walked into a path the crowd made for him.

The crowd did not exult.  In fact, there was no noise at all.  Perhaps a collective intake of breath, a few murmured prayers from the more devout among those present; for whose souls the prayers were offered only they and their Gold could say.  At once those in the front row began to depart.  a few from inside the crowd who’d been denied a view came to the fence line, but they stayed there for only a moment before going about their business.  After the proscribed interval, the body parts would be collected and given a proper burial in accordance with the religion that each of them had defiled.

The men who started a war executed like criminals in the market square, Jack thought.  Not a bad precedent.  Maybe it will make people think twice before the next time.

“In all our countries” Ali said, “the sword is the symbol of justice.  An anachronism from a time when men acted as men.”

Some will say that this was impossible.  But the Saudi Princes have long fought Islamic terrorists (see this list of incidents on Wikipedia), and cherish their central role in Islam.  Asking would have cost nothing, and a war crimes trial for violation of the “law of nations” (as mentioned in Article I, section 8 of the Constitution) remained an option.  Also, is the ending of Sum of All Fears less probable than the ending of Debt of Honor?

More importantly, we need imagination and vision in our strategy — not just killing.  More use of our minds, less of drones and special ops assassinations.  The creation of international organizations after WWII — especially the UN and WTO – was considered by many an idealistic and unlikely to succeed project.  We tried anyway, with great success.  We could try another large project and hope for similar results.

Or we could continue down our current dark path, alienating friends and multiplying our enemies, trusting to the strength of our weapons and spurning the strength of our beliefs.

“You know you never defeated us on the battlefield” ”That may be so,” he replied, “but it is also irrelevant.” — Conversation on 25 April 1975 in Hanoi between Colonel Harry G. Summers, Jr. (Chief of the U.S. Delegation, Four Party Joint Military Team) and Colonel Nguyen Don Tu (Chief, North Vietnamese  Delegation), from Introduction to On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War by Harry G. Summers Jr. (1982)

(4)  For more information

Links to posts about bin Laden and al Qaeda are given in the earlier post A brief note about the death of bin Laden.

Posts about grand strategy:

1. The Myth of Grand Strategy , 31 January 2006
2. America’s Most Dangerous Enemy , 1 March 2006
3. Why We Lose at 4GW , 4 January 2007
4. One step beyond Lind: What is America’s geopolitical strategy? , 28 October 2007
5. ABCDs for today: About Blitzkrieg, COIN, and Diplomacy , 21 February 2008
6. How America can survive and even prosper in the 21st Century – part I , 19 March 2007; revised 7 June 2008
7. How America can survive and even prosper in the 21st Century – part II , 14 June 2008
8. America’s grand strategy: lessons from our past , 30 June 2008  – chapter 1 in a series of notes
9. America’s grand strategy, now in shambles , 2 July 2008 — chapter 3
10. America’s grand strategy, insanity at work , 7 July 2008 — chapter 4
11. Justifying the use of force, a key to success in 4GW , 8 July 2008 – chapter 5
12. The King of Brobdingnag comments on America’s grand strategy, 18 November 2008

---

This post originally appeared at Fabius Maximus and is reproduced here with permission.

Filed under: Geostrategy, United States

651 Special report: In search of a winning movement! PART 1—GREGORY FAILS (permalink): Life can be sweet at NBC News! David Gregory was apparently being paid $2 million per year before he took over at Meet the Press.

For that kind of scratch, you’d think a nation could at least get minimal competence.

At a minimum, a Sunday host should challenge gross misstatements of fact. But alas! That didn’t happened when a gross misstatement was made on Sunday’s program.

The statement was made by Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, one of Gregory’s pundit guests. Castellanos uncorked a major groaner about the fate of Medicare:

CASTELLANOS (5/29/11): Republicans have a much better hand [for the 2012 elections], I think, than we're giving them credit for...We just got a heads-up on Medicare. And here's what I think Republicans are going to say: “You love your Medicare, seniors, don't you? You count on it. It helps you sleep good at night. Good. Did you know it's $35 trillion in debt? Our economy's going broke and dragging Medicare along with it. In a little over three thousand days, CBO says your Medicare's going to end.”

Sorry. Three thousand days is about eight years—and the CBO hasn’t said that Medicare “is going to end” at that time. In fact, the CBO hasn’t said anything dimly resembling that statement.

Gregory should have challenged Castellanos—but he just kept going, like nothing had happened. But then, NBC’s money-man also stared into air when David Brooks uttered the following:

BROOKS: I mean, this is a test of national character. Do the American people understand that Medicare is going to be bankrupt on its current trajectory, and can elites like McConnell and Schumer actually create a deal? I didn't see much hope today, from what the two were saying. I saw a little movement, maybe on both sides, but obviously a long way still to go.

Is Medicare “going to be bankrupt on its current trajectory?” Castellanos’ misstatement was wilder. But “bankrupt” can be a highly misleading term—and Brooks’ statement piggy-backed on the earlier claim that Medicare would be gone in eight years.

Welcome to the wonderful world defined by Millionaire Pundit Values! In large part, we started THE DAILY HOWLER in reaction to the press corps’ bungled discussion of Medicare issues back in the mid-1990s. At that time, pundits struggled with a sematic puzzle: Was the Gingrich Congress proposing “Medicare cuts?” Or would its proposal simply “slow the rate at which the program would grow?” For two years, hapless pundits floundered and flailed with this fiendish conundrum. The press corps was completely overmatched by this basic question.

Today, Medicare has come center stage again. Once again, major pundits don’t seem to be up to the challenge of conducting a clear discussion.

Let’s be clear about the problems dogging this new discussion:

Let’s be frank. One the one hand, our millionaire pundits just aren’t very smart. Ineptitude is always part of the equation when they attempt to discuss major issues. In this case, how well could Gregory and his guests explain what the CBO has actuallysaid? In fairness, we’ll guess that most of our major pundits really couldn’t explain such a matter, any more than they could handle that semantic debate long ago.

On the other hand, ineptitude isn’t the only problem. Mainstream pundits also tend to be in thrall to prevailing views of Medicare which have emerged from well-funded right-wing spin tanks over the past thirty years. The frameworks these spin machines have churned infest most mainstream discussions. That may explain why Ruth Marcus said the following on Sunday’s program, even though she was booked on the show as a center-left guest.

Please note: Gregory’s question didn’t exactly make sense. But Marcus got the gist:

GREGORY: So Ruth Marcus, what wins here? Bold leadership on Medicare and the argument that the Democrats won't do something courageous, or the Democrats who say, “Hey, those guys want to take away my Medicare?”

MARCUS: I regret to inform you that I think it's the latter. And I think when you were asking Senator McConnell if Medicare was the new third rail of American politics, I think the question was wrong in a sense because it's the old third rail of American politics.

GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MARCUS: This play has been run time after time. If you go back and look at the quotes from President Clinton back when he needed to win re-election [in 1996], they sound a lot like the quotes from Democrats today about “Don't let those Republicans take away your Medicare.” The difference is that the debt is bigger, the deficit is bigger, the gap is bigger, and the, the situation is more dire. But I think that, sadly, the lesson of New York 26 is "Mediscare" works.

For unexplained reasons, Marcus was “sad” to see the Democratic argument work in that recent House election. To Marcus, the sad lesson of that campaign is that “Medi-scare” always works. Beyond that, she plainly implied that President Clinton engaged in “Medi-scare” tactics in the mid-1990s. Rather plainly, she implied that Clinton, not Gingrich, had been the agent of bad faith in that endless, press-bollixed debate.

Within the “mainstream press corps,” that’s the way the “center-left” thinks about issues like Medicare.

In fact, no one corrected Castellanos’ howler on Meet the Press this Sunday. David Gregory didn’t speak, but neither did Marcus, and neither did Brooks and neither did Harold Ford. Groaning misstatements about Medicare were the norm in the mid-1990s. Today, the program has come center stage again, and misstatement remains the norm.

Gregory failed to do his job. But all week long we’ll be asking a question:

What about liberals and progressives? Sure, we screech and yell a lot. (We didn’t do that in the mid-1990s.) But when it comes to topics like this, have we ever done our jobs over the past twenty years?

Tomorrow—part 2: Schumer was really quite clear 

650 IN SEARCH OF A WINNING MOVEMENT! Gregory failed to do his job. What about libs and progressives? TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2011

Outlook journeys to Harvard again: On Sunday, Outlook did it again! It turned to a lauded Harvard professor for a hot steaming pile of pure bullshit.

In this case, the professor was Elaine Kamarck. Kamarck is best known for her years as a policy guru with the Clinton administration and the Gore campaign. But in 1997, she migrated to the Kennedy School of Government, where she serves as a Lecturer in Public Policy.

As such, she is expected to offer fatuous pap to serve the needs and reinforce the frameworks of the press elite. In Sunday’s Outlook, she served that purpose, just as Sissela Bok had done one week before.

Kamarck’s pap concerned the way we go about picking a president. As she started, she rolled her eyes at the way those stupid “voters” proceed. We include the Post’s headline:

KAMARCK (5/29/11): The serious GOP candidates are in. Will voters get bored?

After some weeks of hand-wringing over the need to have a “grown-up” in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, we now have a field of them. The contest is “settling,” the party establishmentarians said after lead grown-up Mitch Daniels announced that he wouldn’t run. It is settling down, settling in, for the long haul to Iowa.

But with eight months to go before the Republican primaries, will voters be content with this group of boring guys or go looking for someone more exciting? What, exactly, does being a grown-up mean? And, more important, do grown-ups win?

“The voters” don’t seem to like the grown-ups! It seems that “the voters” get bored. As she continued, Kamarck let us know that she herself is much better:

KAMARCK (continuing directly): Not always. I should know. If the grown-up in the race is the one with the best policy credentials, the one who finds the mistakes in the briefing book before he opens it, the one who knows the name of the Nepalese prime minister and can even pronounce it—that’s my man (or woman; Hillary Clinton fit the bill in 2008). Over the years I’ve always fallen for and worked hard to elect the grown-up, only to learn the hard way that, as often as not, everyone else finds him boring and sometimes sort of irritating.

Like the late David Broder, whose “Broder primary” winner was always the wonkiest, I’ve learned that the grown-ups often lose.

Poor Kamarck! She always favors the grown-ups—but over the years, she has learned that the great unwashed often don’t. Her choice of Broder as a soul-mate is amazingly bogus, of course (see below). But within the culture we are critiquing, academic elites will always peddle garbage like this on behalf of elites in the press.

How absurd was her choice of Broder? Soon, Kamarack was letting us know how bad the rubes’ conduct can get:

KAMARCK: None of this is very new. Take the 2000 election. Al Gore, who could pronounce not only the multisyllabic names of foreign leaders but also the multisyllabic names of environmental pollutants, ended up losing to a guy who said, “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

Thinking back to that race, the contrast hardly seemed to matter. The nation was rich, we had a budget surplus, unemployment hovered at just above 4 percent, and our soldiers weren’t getting shot. Americans went for the guy they’d rather have a non-alcoholic beer with.

Thinking back to Campaign 2000, Kamarck takes a silly snide shot at Bush, then blames the voters—“Americans”—for the unfortunate outcome. “Americans” went for the guy they’d rather have a beer with, the professor snarkily says.

Sorry. Presumably, many voters cast their votes on a fairly silly basis. But it wasn’t voters (“Americans”) who drove the years of inane complaints about the dullness of Candidate Gore—it was the elite mainstream press. Beyond that, it was the elite mainstream press which pushed the silly framework Kamarack cites: Who would you rather have a beer with? Was it the “voters” who kept getting bored? Here was Broder describing Gore’s convention address, in one of the most mindless columns ever put into print:

BRODER (8/20/00): In tone and substance, Vice President Al Gore's acceptance speech on the final night of the Democratic National Convention was like nothing I have heard in 40 years of covering both parties' quadrennial gatherings.

Usually these acceptance speeches are attempts to take you to the mountaintop and show you the future. Gore's was more a request to step inside a seminar room, listen closely and take notes.

Never has a candidate provided more detailed information on his autobiography and the program initiatives he plans.One more paragraph and he would have been onto the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

[…]

He mentioned only three aspects of what was, in fact, a significant record in the House and Senate—his work on the environment, welfare reform and arms control.

But, my, how he went on about what he wants to do as president…

On some of the headline proposals—for Medicare prescription drug benefits or a patient's bill of rights—Gore humanized his presentation by pointing to specially invited families in the audience who would have benefited directly from the programs he is promoting. But I have to confess, my attention wandered as he went on through page after page of other swell ideas, and somewhere between hate crimes legislation and a crime victim's constitutional amendment, I almost nodded off.

Broder openly mocked Gore for discussing so many “swell ideas.” In fact, the speech was so goddamned boring that Broder almost fell asleep, The Dean disgracefully said.

That said, how did “voters” respond to the speech? You know, those pathetic “Americans”—the ones who screw everything up? On MSNBC, Republican pollster Frank Luntz conducted a focus group during Gore’s speech—and starting that very night, Luntz repeatedly called the speech a “home run.” In Newsweek, Ana Figueroa adopted the rave as she described those voters’ reactions:

FIGUEROA (8/20/00): Al Gore hit a home run with his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night. In fact, he hit it out of the ballpark—at least according to a focus group of undecided swing voters who recorded their reactions to the veep's big night.

The 36-member group from the metropolitan LA area, sponsored by MSNBC and Luntz Research, met each night of the convention on a sound stage a few miles from the Staples Center. Each of the 12 moderate Republicans, 12 moderate Democrats and 12 independents has some college education, voted in the 1996 election and plans to vote in November. As they had done nightly, each participant held a device to register and tabulate their reactions to the speeches...

One participant, Rosalba Rodarte, was moved to tears. The others on the panel burst into spontaneous applause at the end of the speech. Some confided that they too, were almost overcome with emotion at various times. (The evening's prime tear-jerker moment: the appearance of Ian Malone, the ailing baby whose parents were urged to put him up for adoption because their HMO initially refused to pay for his nursing care.)

Said Luntz: "This speech got a great reaction. I've held over 500 focus group sessions like this one. I've never had anyone cry after a political speech." Rodarte, 38, a moderate Republican, said the speech struck an emotional chord with her because she works with disabled people. "They need help, and they don't get it. I see a lot of moms with broken hearts. Gore said to them, 'I'm going to help you out.' The speech really touched me. I believe he's speaking from the heart."

[…]

Many Republicans on the panel described the speech as positive, uplifting and passionate, and praised Gore for tackling unpopular issues. Republican Barbara Mora, 58, said she was "hopeful." "If he gets in, I would be comfortable." Other members of the panel were downright effusive. "He showed incredible leadership. I believe this man. I'd like to see him president for two terms," said Diana Cuevas, 40, a moderate Democrat.

"It blew my mind. It was much more than I expected. He came across on everything... The speech will push him in front of George Bush," said Elsie McClenon, a 54 year old apartment manager who is registered as an independent.Nearly everyone on the panel agreed that Gore met the challenge of stepping out from the shadow of President Bill Clinton. Said Luntz: "Everyone expected him to bore us to tears.”

[…]

Luntz believes Gore has plenty of reason to celebrate. "Gore said the very phrases people wanted to hear," he said. "I think the Gore people are probably popping champagne bottles after this speech. Down in Texas, I'm not sure how happy they are."

That’s how the great unwashed reacted—the people whom Kamarck denigrates. But as she denigrates the great unwashed, she kisses the ass of David Broder—the man who made a point of saying he almost fell asleep.

“Everyone expected him to bore us to tears,” Luntz said about Gore’s speech. Can we talk? He was describing the expectations which had arisen from years of brain-dead propaganda by the likes of Broder.

For the record, Broder was also bored to tears by the long-winded speeches of Hillary Clinton, another of Kamarack’s grown-ups. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/25/06.

Kamarck should be ashamed of herself. On the bright side, you can see one pattern quite plainly in her mindless column. Simple story: Academic elites like Karmarck kiss the ass of the mainstream press elite. In this way, they win better coverage for themselves—and they extend a long campaign in which the great unwashed get mocked and everyone gets disinformed.

These are very bad people. They aren’t very smart and they aren’t very honest. And they’re easily bored.

Kamarck should try reading Ashburn: Presumably, average people cast their votes for all kinds of reasons. But if it’s sheer inanity you enjoy, you have to turn to the empty minds of the mainstream press.

Here’s Lauren Ashburn, in the Daily Beast, trying to finger Newt Gingrich’s jewels. Given the sweep of their vacuous culture, press elites don’t even feel the need to hide their vast inanity:

ASHBURN (5/28/11): Since Callista and I frequent the same downtown D.C. hair salon, I can attest to the fact that she likes to look good. She is what women call a "girly girl" a la Cindy McCain. Her hair is a pale blonde masterpiece sculpted by an "artiste," her clothes immaculate, and it's obvious by her size that she knows her way around a treadmill or two. I mean, a make-up artist travels with her, for goodness sake.

So it was hardly shocking to learn that she also likes nice jewelry. But $500,000 worth over two years? Whoa. The price tag makes even a jewelry lover like me blanch. Knowing Newt's history with women and affairs, an obvious question leapt into mind: What did Newt do to necessitate such a huge "I'm sorry" tab?

[…]

In our society, men have a longstanding tradition of begging forgiveness through jewels. Look at NBA star Kobe Bryant. In 2003, Colorado prosecutors announced that he was being charged with raping a 19-year-old. The next day he walked his wife, Vanessa, and their 6-month-old daughter, into an exclusive jewelry boutique in Santa Monica. The couple walked out hand in hand with an 8-carat purple diamond ring worth a cool $4 million. Maybe that's why they're still married after the charges against Kobe were dismissed, though he denies it was an apology gift. (Note to Newt: Good thing you don't play basketball.)

In the absence of facts, it is always easy to jump to conclusions; to find bread crumbs and assign a malevolent purpose. Maybe Newt simply loves his wife and enjoys buying lots of bling. Or maybe it's part of the marriage contract.

So was the New York Times right to put Tiffanygate on the front page, with a picture of a beaming Callista sporting a necklace estimated to be worth $45,000? And shortly after an earlier Page 1 piece about Callista's journey from Other Woman to adoring wife always by his side? True, the country's future undoubtedly rests more heavily on its $14-trillion debt. But what American women—okay, this woman—really want to know is what Newt bought and what he thought he was buying in return. And no amount of campaign glitz is going to distract us from getting the answers.

It’s hard to get much dumber than that, but the Ashburns will continue to try, even as the Kamarcks keep trashing the voters. For the record, we don’t think anyone has established how much jewelry Gingrich actually bought. But people like Ashburn will rarely get distracted by something like that.

We’ve seen a few of Ashburn’s cable appearances. She’s very good looking—and she has absolutely nothing to say. Her Daily Beast tag line says this: “Lauren Ashburn is a 20-year journalist and former managing editor for USA Today and Gannett Broadcasting.”

We have one question: Why?

649 Lt Commander Jeff Huber, ret, Our National Treasure - Don't drink milk while readying his columns!

Preview: Obama's Patriot Games

May 31, 2011

by Jeff Huber

Harvey Korman and Mel Brooks
test prototype "autopen."

Young Mr. Obama signed an extension to the Patriot Act on May 26, minutes before a midnight deadline.  Or rather, he robo-signed it.  Obama was in France meeting with that country’s president Nikolas Sarkozy.  The Patriot Act Extension was somewhere in Washington, presumably in the Oval Office.  “The White House” told AP’s Jim Abrams to tell us that, “the president used an autopen machine that holds a pen and signs his actual signature.”  Talk about distancing yourself from your actions. 

One supposes that now involves Obama pushing the “enact” button on his 3G iPad II and sending a signal across the web to the iPen on his desk.  Do you think he has a customized Executive Overreach app that controls all that business?  One rather wonders if he read the bill with one of the sundry eBook apps available for iPad before he eNacted it, though one rather doubts that he did. 

One can safely risk a shiny new iLlinous quarter that darned few people who ever had anything to do with making the USA Patriot Act law actually read it.  One could also wager that even fewer people know that the law is a god-forsaken acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”  I bet it took as many true believers to trance up that tortured title as it took to transcribe the act itself. 

You should have read
the fine print!

It’s little wonder that so few people have read the Patriot Act; it is unreadable.  I regularly read Joyce, Proust, Faulkner and Clausewitz and enjoy them all immensely, but I can’t make hide nor hair of the Patriot Act.  They might as well have titled it Remembrance of Legislation Past, because it is a compendium of amendments to laws already on the books that are themselves unreadable because they’re incomprehensible and/or classified and/or don’t even exist as far as anyone really knows.  About all one can glean about the Patriot Act is that it made the Bill of Rights as obsolete as decency among Republicans and conviction among Democrats.   

In 2007, Yahooligans from both sides of the aisle howled like Sergeant Fury’s Commandos at the release of an inspector general report that revealed abuses of the Patriot Act by the FBI.  "It shows just how this administration has no respect for checks and balances” squealed Democrat Chuck Schumer.  Republican Arlen Specter growled that Congress might "take away some of the authority which we've already given to the FBI, since they appear not to be able to know how to use it."  But in the end, nothing really changed and everybody in the FBI lived to molest the Constitution another day.

This time around, the extension was passed over “bi-partisan resistance” that amounted to little more than a road bump on Obama’s road to establishing an executive branch so plenary as to make Julius Caesar revolve in his grave and Dick Cheney jealous.  At the end of the day—or rather a minute before that—Barry the Kid had signed a law that allows his minions to write their own search warrants and listen in on dirty phone calls ‘til they tickle themselves dry.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a leading imperialist, said that provisions of the Patriot Act "have kept us safe for nearly a decade and Americans today should be relieved and reassured to know that these programs will continue."

Sure, Mitch.  All that executive trumping of the Constitution allowed us to catch that panty bomber who couldn’t even blow his on tallywhacker off and the car bomb klutz who locked himself out of the bomb car and his get away car and his apartment, both of whom Inspector Clouseau could have caught a coma Patriot Act or no Patriot Act. 

And after all the fuss, Congress passed the extension by a landfill—the vote went 72-23 in the Senate and 250-153 in the House, showing you that your representatives are far more committed to revoking your rights than to providing you with health care.  It’s also another indicator that Congress has completely abdicated its war-making powers to the executive. 

But as indicators go, the rubber-stamping of the Perpetual Patriot Bill is eclipsed by The Kid’s merry derision the War Powers Act of 1973.  Days not weeks of our Libya lollapalooza have turned into months, which means the O’bombardier’s 60-day deadline for engaging in hostilities not approved by Congress has come and gone like a goose’s breakfast with no Congressional approval, and aside from a few voices like Dennis Kucinich and crying in the Constitutional wilderness, nobody’s all to upset about it. 

Representative Howard Berman of California, a Democrat and enthusiastic consumer of Obama’s precious bodily fluids, gargles, “There are no black-and-white answers here.”  Yes, there are black and white answers, here, Dennis, written in black ink on white paper in the War Powers Act: s-i-x-t-y space d-a-y-s.  Lamentably, though, Berman’s bleat reflects the singular sad truth about the American mutation of the rule of law theory, namely that laws only mean what they say if they say what the rulers want them to mean. 

I got mine!

The White House says it has all the authority it needs to keep on fighting in Libya, but declines to explain what law gives them that authority or even bother to make a flimsy legal argument to that effect.  That’s probably because there is no argument, flimsy or otherwise, that says what Obama is doing in Libya is legal. 

But Obama is a law unto himself, isn’t he?

As an aside, I loved how Obama makes cutesy appearances like his Memorial Day photo op at Arlington National Cemetery as his outgoing Secretary of War Bob Gates is telling folks like the inner warmongery at the American Enterprise Institute that we’ll need to reduce defense spending by cutting military pay and veteran’s benefits.

Support the troops, huh Uncle Bob?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

648 Special report: Any given Sunday! EPILOGUE—WHAT TO DO WHEN A NAZI KNOCKS (permalink): In many ways, 1996 was a very bad year.

Yes, Bill Clinton won re-election, but the mainstream press corps was already starting to transfer its enmity to his vice president. (Just this month, Jonathan Chait bravely explained where this enmity led.) Meanwhile, the crackpot wars against Clinton were still going strong, election results be damned.

There also was a bit of good news: In 1996, Gene Lyons described the journalistic corruption behind the Whitewater pseudo-scandal in his book, Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater.

Predictably, there wasn’t a lot of press coverage for Lyons’ book. When you write a book attacking the press, they’ll disappear what you say every time.

(Fools for Scandal was published by Harper’s magazine, one of our great publishing entities. Harper’s promoted the book for years. Even with that kind of backing, the book got disappeared.)

Sad! We recall how pleased we were when Lyons turned up on C-Span’s Washington Journal, sharing time with conservative Ben Wattenberg in July 1996. (To watch the program, just click this.) It was hard to find coverage of Lyons at all. We were thankful for what we got.

Meanwhile:

In academe, the royals were dozing. To this day, Sissela Bok seems to have no idea about the way Lyons and Joe Conason tore apart James Stewart’s heralded but execrable book, Blood Sport, during those war-torn years (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/27/11). But then, what else is new? The press had its story lines down cold—and the professors were sleeping soundly, sometimes in France. In the process, the public was pretty much told to go hang. As far as people like Bok were concerned, they could untangle the riot of political deception all by themselves!

At this point, let’s offer an obvious observation. On a personal level, we feel quite sure that Sissela Bok is a thoroughly good, decent person. But what kind of “philosopher” is the professor? Beyond that: As a ranking academic, how has she discharged her duties as a high-ranking, near-royal citizen?

For years, we’ve been asking a basic question: Where have the professors been as our political discourse has become more and more illogical, distorted, bizarre? Bok’s peculiar review of James Stewart’s new book brought all those questions to mind.

Let’s return to the very bad years when the crackpots were chasing Bill Clinton around—when the coming attacks against Candidate Gore were starting to take their form. What was Bok pondering during those years, when she should have been knee-deep in these matters? To consider the general worthlessness of the rest home once known as academe, consider the radio interview Bok did in the fall of 1997.

Ever since 1978, Bok had been the nation’s go-to academic expert on the subject of lying. You’d think she might have been intrigued by the endless claims that President Clinton, and Candidate Gore, were the world’s biggest known liars. But alas! In the modern world, our ranking professors don’t dirty their hands with such matters, which simply stink of the-things-in-themselves. Instead, Bok was off on some very thin clouds, discussing some vacuous “theory.”

What were professors thinking about in the late 1990s? What is the stuff of “philosophical” work? Why did so few of these lofty beings intervene in the nation’s political wars? On October 26, 1997, Bok did a 30-minute radio interview with philosophy professor Hugh LaFollette, host of the weekly program, “Ideas and Issues,” on WETS-FM. To listen to the full session, click here. We thought you should see the things Bok was thinking about as the war against Clinton rolled on, as the war against Gore was starting.

Sissela Bok is an expert on lying! She’s also a world academic royal—by birth, by marriage, by reputation. About ten minutes into her radio session, LaFollette asked this question:

LAFOLLETTE (10/26/97): Would this be fair to say, that you are not an absolutist, that is, you do not believe that lying is always wrong? On the other hand, what you do believe is that we lie far more often than is justified? Is that a fair assumption?

Lying isn’t always wrong? Was LaFollette trying to stump her?

Bok went on to explain her non-absolutist views. In the process, she showed us the soul of the academic elite which has relentlessly failed to serve the public in the past thirty years. Lying isn’t always wrong? As Bok began to explain her stance, she noted one type of exception:

BOK (continuing directly): Yes, I think that is a fair assumption. I would argue that there are some exceptional categories when saying what you don’t mean in order to mislead other people may be justified, but that they are very narrow categories and the whole impulse when we are in the perspective of the person thinking about telling a lie, the whole impulse is to expand those categories and to think up new excuses for ourselves and to imagine that we’re not doing very much harm.
One kind of case that I took up is the same case that many philosophers have, most famously Immanuel Kant, discussed, namely: What do you say to someone who is coming to kill, intending to kill your friend? Your friend is hiding in your house, or you know where your friend is, and here comes the person who is going to try to kill him. And it’s an innocent person, your friend, also. In our days, it might be a Nazi—people often have used that example—looking, hunting down Jewish families and you are hiding them in your house. So should you lie to them? Kant said, even then, you must not do it.
My argument and probably most peoples’ argument is yes, you can, in those, under those circumstances. It is too important to protect the person, to protect the innocent human life and therefore a lie would be all right.

Interesting! According to Bok’s “argument,” it’s OK to lie to a Nazi who wants to murder your friend! But for minds of high academic distinction, such matters will rarely be that simple. As Bok continues, we see the problem under which we’ve all struggled for lo, these many years.

Yes, she really said this:

BOK (continuing directly): However, I would say also that if you could do something else, if you could bore the person to tears, for instance, so that he forgot altogether that he was hunting a victim that would obviously be better. I believe also actually that Kant, being so brilliant and so articulate, would probably have detained this supposed murderer for so long that the friend would have managed to escape and hide. Kant wouldn’t have had to lie. But I do feel that most of us are not up to that kind of, that kind of delay tactic.
So that is one exception.

According to Bok, it would be better to bore the Nazi to tears, making him “forget altogether” that he was trying to murder your friend. (Kant himself could have done this with ease! His friend could have escaped, then hidden!) Question: Might this Nazi become suspicious when you behave in such oddball ways? When you stage a puppet show, let’s say, in lieu of a simple denial? Not to the lofty minds of academe—the lofty minds who avoided the political wars which have, by now, produced death and destruction in many parts of the world.

We know—you think we invented that passage. You think that no one has ever said such strikingly silly-bill things. But you can hear the whole interview here.

Now, for Bok’s second exception:

BOK (continuing directly): Another exception that isn’t really an exception is when you’re involved in circumstances where everybody indeed is saying what is not true, let’s say some kind of card game, like Bluff. Well of course it’s all right to lie in that kind of game, or poker or something like that, because that’s what’s expected, those are the rules. And I see no problem about that. However, I don’t really think that what’s going on there is deceptive in the same way.

It’s OK to lie to a murderous Nazi—and when you’re playing cards! Of course, our modern professors think long and hard. Bok had a third exemption:

BOK (continuing directly): A third category might be when there is literally nothing at stake at all, a truly white lie, so-called. But that I think is actually rather hard to find, and there I think very strongly that we have to try to use our imagination to think of things to say that are not deceptive. People often say, “Well, what are you supposed to say when your spouse comes and asks, ‘How do you like my necktie or my hat?’ ” And there I think there are all kinds of humorous things you can say, or imaginative things. You don’t have to lie at all. That example is often brought up.
So there are those three, then. The first being some extreme crisis, the second being some practice or game in which it is accepted that you lie or try to mislead the other people, and the third, a totally innocent, innocuous white lie. All of them however I think are such that, all those three categories are such that it is very important to lean over backward not to believe that you are in one of them.

“All those three categories are such that it is very important to lean over backward not to believe that you are in one of them!” Question: When’s the last time you mistakenly thought a Nazi was trying to murder your friend?

At any rate, there you have it. You can lie about your husband’s necktie—although it’s better to say something humorous. You can lie while playing cards, or if a Nazi is trying to murder someone. Bok was focused on these concepts as the wars against Clinton rolled on—as voters were told about Bill Clinton’s murders, as a rioting mainstream press corps recited a blizzard of lies.

Beyond that, those thoughts help explain why Sissela Bok was asked to review James Stewart’s new book about perjury. In the crackpot world in which you live, such thoughts establish lofty professors as high-ranking experts on truth.

Can we talk?

No Nazis knocked at the Harvard president’s home while Sissela Bok was in residence. But Jerry Falwell knocked on everyone’s door a few years later, telling wild tales about Bill Clinton’s murders. The New York Times landed on Bok’s front steps, including Jeff Gerth’s front-page reports inventing the Whitewater “scandal.” Dan Burton shot pumpkins in the back yard, showing that Vince Foster surely must have been killed.

And James Stewart wrote a garbage-can book, Blood Sport, which Lyons and Conason were soon debunking. Soon after, Rich and Dowd started making up lies and pretending that Gore had said them.

Where was Bok while these doors were knocked on? When she reviewed Stewart’s new book, she praised his bungled 1996 book about the Clintons even as she noted the comically awful blunders in his latest offering. She seemed to have no earthly idea that there was a history here.

For years, we’ve complained about the moral absence of the nation’s professors. Where are the logicians, we’ve asked, noting the comically bollixed logic of our ludicrous public debates.

Bok is a high academic royal—and she’s an expert on lying. But uh-oh! Last Sunday, she showed no sign of knowing about the wars of the Clinton-Gore years. In fairness, she managed to notice Stewart’s latest damn-fool blunders. But she seemed to have no earthly idea that this had all happened before.

Where were you in 1996? How about in 1997? Lyons was trying to get whistles blown. But like the bulk of her royal class, Sissela Bok was off in the clouds, offering massively vacuous thoughts. She was living on very thin air, on massively swollen tuitions.

By now, the detachment of this fatuous class has enabled many knocks on the door. Or do we still agree to pretend that we don’t know how we got to our current mess? Do we agree to keep disappearing Fools for Scandal, and The Hunting of the President? Do we agree to keep playing it dumb about the war against Gore?

Do we agree that Blood Sport was “riveting” work? That Dowd and Rich didn’t do what they did? It’s a pretty world when we play it that way.

Many elites just keep playing that way. The professors are sleeping in France.

647 WHAT TO DO WHEN A NAZI KNOCKS! Where were you in 1997? One professor was living on air: SATURDAY, MAY 28, 2011

Did Carter really say that: We were intrigued by the highlighted part of Rick Perlstein’s op-ed column in praise of Hubert Humphrey:

PERLSTEIN (5/27/11): [A]t a time when other liberals were besotted with affirmative action as a strategy to undo the cruel injustices of American history, Humphrey pointed out that race-based remedies could only prove divisive when good jobs were disappearing for everyone. Liberal policy, he said, must stress ''common denominators—mutual needs, mutual wants, common hopes, the same fears.''
In 1976 he joined Representative Augustus Hawkins, a Democrat from the Watts section of Los Angeles, to introduce a bill requiring the government, especially the Federal Reserve, to keep unemployment below 3 percent—and if that failed, to provide emergency government jobs to the unemployed.
It sounds heretical now. But this newspaper endorsed it then, while 70 percent of Americans believed the government should offer jobs to everyone who wanted one. However, Jimmy Carter—a new kind of Democrat answering to a new upper-middle-class, suburban constituency, embarrassed by industrial unions and enamored with the alleged magic of the market—did not.
''Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy,'' President Carter said in his 1978 State of the Union address, a generation before Bill Clinton said almost the same thing, cementing the Democrats' ambivalent retreat from New Deal-based government activism.

Did Carter really say that? Intrigued, we looked it up.

By the way: When did Clinton “sa[y] almost the same thing?” More on these questions next week.