Conservatives Grow the Same No Matter Where They're Planted

Imagine you were Iraqi and had the right personality to join Saddam's military in 1985, just before it engaged in actual genocide against other Iraqis, and rise through the ranks for 18 years until, by the time the U.S. invaded in 2003, you were a lieutenant colonel.

But then suddenly you're transplanted to America. Where would someone with your background and personality end up on the political spectrum here?

As [Muhanned al-Kusairy] ascended to the 19th floor of a downtown building on a Baghdad-hot afternoon, his hands trembled, his face flushed, and his stomach, he remarked, felt as if it were “filled with mice, not butterflies.” He was heading to see a man he had come to idolize since moving to Arizona three years ago, a man who he hoped would fulfill his American dream.

“Mr. Sheriff!” Muhanned exclaimed. “It’s a huge honor to meet you.”

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose hard-line approaches to illegal immigration have drawn nationwide attention, embraced the fawning Iraqi immigrant. “Tell me about yourself,” he said…

“My dream is to be a deputy sheriff,” he told Arpaio. “I want to work for you...Ever since I arrived here, I’ve wanted to wear a uniform with the American flag on it.”...

He and his family must wait two more years to become citizens — “it feels like two centuries” — but that has not dissuaded him from trying to be what he deems American. He covers his bald pate with a black Stetson, sports a stars-and-stripes sticker on the tailgate of his Tahoe, listens to country star Alan Jackson’s greatest hits and spouts off on politics when wedged in traffic on I-17.

“We have too many illegals here,” he said soon after picking me up from the airport last month. It was three days before his meeting with Arpaio. He went on to rail about how many immigrants receive state-funded health care and food stamps. “And they don’t pay taxes,” he groused. “They’re stealing from both my pockets.”...

“I came legally, and I pay my fair share in taxes,” he said. A few miles later, he returned to the topic. “I wish I was in charge of the Department of State. Anyone who doesn’t love the United States, I’d deport him to Mexico.”…

Muhanned has spent more than 40 hours in evening classes, learning how to use a two-way radio, process detainees and conduct a traffic stop. He is moving on to intermediate-level instruction this summer — “They will teach me to use a Taser!” — and he hopes to earn his certification to carry a sidearm and a posse badge by the end of the year….

He is unmoved by criticism that the squad of 3,500 civilians, some of whom are armed, has not been properly screened or trained. “Don’t believe everything you read in the media,” Muhanned said.

“We,” he told me, referring to the United States in the first person, “should have sent the sheriff to Iraq in 2003 instead of Paul Bremer,” the White House envoy who ran the initial U.S. occupation. “We needed someone tough like him.”

As this shows, no one's political perspective has much to do with ideas or the structure of their country's government or history or whatever. It's just about their personality. Some people like this guy Muhanned al-Kusairy just love taking orders from whoever's more powerful than them, while kicking the crap out of everyone less powerful. It doesn't matter who's giving the orders or why – it could be Saddam or Joe Arpaio or Vladamir Putin or General Zod or whoever. The important thing is just that someone is in charge and telling him what to do, and that this includes hurting other people while wearing a costume.

This would happen in the other direction, too. America's native-born worshippers of Joe Arpaio, at least the competent ones, would have loved being in Saddam's army if they'd been born Iraqi. And they would have all have patriotically massacred other Iraqis, just as they'll patriotically massacre other Americans if they ever get the chance.

Contrast

What does Joe Biden think of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks?

That he's akin to a "high tech terrorist."

What does Joe Biden think of Hashim Thaçi, the Prime Minister of Kosovo and — according to a 2010 report by the Council of Europe – the head of a "mafia-like" organized crime ring which murdered prisoners of the Kosovo Liberation Army so they could sell their organs?

That he's, as Biden said when Thaçi visited the White House, "the George Washington of Kosovo."

Interesting fact: Biden said that about Assange on December 18, 2010, literally the same week that the Council of Europe report on Thaçi was released. A long New Yorker story here covers the Thaçi allegations in much more detail, including the murder of potential witnesses and a campaign of death threats against others.

—Jon Schwarz

Two Political Leaders Who Were Also Scientists

Erik Erikson, editor of RedState.org, current Fox contributor and former CNN contributor, and creator of the 'We Are the 53%' blog, on TV in 2013:

When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it's not antithesis, or it's not competing, it's a complimentary role. We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families, and it's tearing us apart.

Saddam Hussein, famous Iraqi dictator and moustache-haver, in a 2000 speech:

Saddam then discusses the virtue of honesty and courage by men. He says the tank looks beautiful when its canon is pointing forward, and a man looks great when he fights while looking ahead and when he is truthful. Citing the example of sheep and chicken, Saddam says that the male species has always been charged with fighting and protecting the female.

Erick left out the beautiful tank part, but I think it's implied.

—Jon Schwarz

Michael Kinsley Can't Recall Michael Kinsley's Words of Wisdom

This is one of the key things everyone should understand about politics, by a great writer named Michael Kinsley in 2008:

When you hear the presidential candidates carrying on about democracy and freedom, do you ever wonder what they would be saying if they had been born into societies with different values? What if Mitt Romney had come to adulthood in Nazi Germany? What if Hillary Clinton had gone to Moscow State University and married a promising young apparatchik? What if Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, like his father, where even now people are slaughtering one another over a crooked election? Which of them would be the courageous dissidents, risking their lives for the values they talk about freely—in every sense—on the campaign trail? And which would be playing the universal human power game under the local rules, whatever they happened to be?

Without naming names, I believe that most of them would be playing the game. What motivates most politicians, especially those running for President, is closer to your classic will-to-power than to a deep desire to reform the health-care system.

This is some dumbass thing advocating budget cuts aimed at the middle class, by some dumbass named Michael Kinsley in 2013:

…[Paul Krugman] considers briefly, but seriously, that [my] problem might be simple “sadism,” but retreats from that daring charge to an only slightly more plausible conspiracy theory: that austerians don’t want the economy to recover until they’ve had the chance to use bad times as an opportunity to shred the social safety net. Either that or a psychological variant: they need bad times to continue in order to justify their status and their speaking fees. Amidst these far-fetched possibilities, let me propose one more: maybe austerians really, sincerely want what’s best for America and the world, and really believe that theirs is the better path than Krugman’s. Maybe austerians—poor, deluded creatures that we are—actually think that their path will result in less pain, not more.

How is it possible that Kinsley could write both of these things?* My theory – which has never been successfully disproven – is that there is an anvil in Washington, D.C., and all prominent American pundits are required to have it dropped on their heads once every six months. Kinsley actually has sustained less brain damage than most of them.

*In theory, there's no contradiction between the two things Kinsley wrote. As he says, powerful people are all motivated by "your classic will-to-power," rather than a burning desire to improve the general welfare of their nation. But human beings, including powerful ones, also have a need to believe that they're good. So all powerful people persuade themselves that they are motivated by a burning desire to serve their nation.

For instance, Saddam Hussein saw himself as Iraq's greatest patriot. He sincerely believed that him being in power was best for Iraq, and the occasional torture and massacres and genocides that that required would result in – as Kinsley puts it – "less pain, not more."

So sure, the austerians sincerely believe that slashing Social Security and Medicare – which will coincidentally mean they can pay lower taxes and be more powerful, since other Americans will be more desperate – is sadly necessary.

But obviously this isn't the point Kinsley is making. Despite what he wrote five years ago, he somehow believes the sincerity of the austerians has some significance. It's like someone saying that Saddam sincerely believed that dropping sarin gas on Hallabja was the best for Iraq. Of course he did. Who the fuck cares?

P.S. I don't want my praise for Michael Kinsley in the first sentence to distract anyone from the fact that he is a truly terrible person.

—Jon Schwarz

We Are So Disappointed With the Corrupt Afghan Government

I'm sure it's tough for many reasons to work for the Sulzbergers and Carlos Slim at the New York Times. But I'd have an especially hard time coming into the office every day and being forced to write paragraphs like this in today's story about Afghanistan:

American and NATO officials in Kabul…said that [development] aid would continue, although the amounts given were likely to be reduced over time. And the Afghan government would have to live up to its commitments to battle corruption and run a more open government for the aid to keep flowing.

It's not just that the New York Times itself uncovered the story of the CIA giving the Karzai government millions in bags of cash one week ago. It's that the bags of cash article was written by the same reporter, Matthew Rosenberg.

Yet here he is today, faithfully passing along the news about how anonymous American officials sincerely want Karzai to be less corrupt. It's like breaking the Eliot Spitzer prostitution story, and then quoting him a week later explaining how he's going to continue paying Ashley Dupré as long as she lives up to his longstanding demand that she be less of a prostitute.

(I have much more sympathy for the payee in both situations. In Karzai's case, he likely remembers that after the Soviets left, their last puppet was castrated, dragged through the streets of Kabul behind a jeep, and then publicly hanged. So you can understand if he wants to keep some cash on hand.)

P.S. Last October Glenn Greenwald and Kade Ellis has a long exchange on twitter with Rosenberg in which he finally acknowledged that the U.S. government may not be 100% trustworthy. Read it to see how resistant Rosenberg was to answering basic, straightforward questions.

P.P.S. It's also hard to be a reporter at the Washington Post.

Several years ago, think tank couple Fred and Kimberly Kagan worked for David Petraeus in Afghanistan. Then they came back and told the world about how we had to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely.

It turns out that, according to great reporting by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Kagans were paid nothing by the Defense Department. Instead, they continued to get their salaries from their think tanks, which in turn are largely funded by defense contractors that profit from indefinite war.

Yet Chandrasekaran had to write this without acknowledging that it was funny in any way at all:

Petraeus called them his “directed telescopes” and urged them to focus on the challenge of tackling corruption and building an effective government in Afghanistan, a task they addressed with gusto.

I guess in this case it would be like Spitzer seeing a second prostitute and paying her extra to look into the issue of why Ashley Dupré was such a prostitute.

But the best part is that after having the Kagans look into the issue of how the Afghan government could get less corrupt, David Petraeus went on to become director of the CIA. Maybe he flipped through their report whenever he needed a break from stuffing cash into the plastic bags.

—Jon Schwarz

Reminder: The U.S. Government Lies About the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Mideast

Obviously I have no idea whether any chemical weapons have been used in Syria, and if they have who's responsible. But this is a good time to remember that, even beyond the bogus case for the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. government has a long history of lying about this subject.

This is from last week:

In a letter to key lawmakers, the White House said U.S. intelligence agencies "assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin."

Now Carla Del Ponte, a member of the UN Commission on Syria, says they have "strong, concrete suspicions" that chemical weapons were used in Syria, but that they were deployed not by the Assad regime but by Syrian rebels. (Del Ponte was the lead prosecutor of Slobodan Milošević‎; earlier she barely escaped assassination when Sicilian organized crime attempted to blow up her house with 1000 pounds of explosives.)

And this is from March 1988, about Saddam Hussein's notorious gassing of the Iraqi city of Halabja back when Saddam was our ally:

The U.S. State Department said both Iran and Iraq had used poison gas in the fighting around Halabja and called on both nations to desist immediately.

"This incident appears to be a particularly grave violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical weapons. There are indications that Iran may also have used chemical artillery shells in this fighting," department spokesman Charles Redman said in Washington.

He declined, however, to say what evidence the United States had to implicate the Iranians.

Seventeen years later, investigative reporter Joost Hiltermann wrote about declassified State Department cables instructing U.S. diplomats to muddy the water by claiming that both Iraq and Iran had used chemical weapons around Halabja and "to dodge the 'What’s the evidence' question with the stock 'Sorry, but that’s classified information' response...In the final analysis, the only evidence for the convenient claim that Iran used chemical weapons during the war is that the US government said so."

More recently, a senior U.S. official explained the general principle about this kind of thing: "The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass. Whereas other countries that don't cooperate, we ream them as best we can."

P.S. Charles Redman, the Reagan State Department spokesman who lied about Iran using chemical weapons in 1988, was later rewarded by Bill Clinton with the Ambassadorship to Germany. He then cashed in by becoming a senior vice presidential at Bechtel. Thanks to Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks you can read here about Redman flying to Tripoli to try to get Bechtel into business with the Qadhafi family.

—Jon Schwarz

We Ream Them As Best We Can

It's almost always bogus when newspapers like the Washington Post give government officials anonymity, but this is certainly a legitimate use of it:

The Pentagon is deepening its military involvement across Africa as it confronts an expanding array of terrorist movements and guerrilla groups. In doing so, the U.S. government has become dependent on several countries with checkered democratic records. That in turn has lessened Washington’s leverage to push those countries to practice free elections and the rule of law...

“The countries that cooperate with us get at least a free pass,” acknowledged a senior U.S. official who specializes in Africa but spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. “Whereas other countries that don’t cooperate, we ream them as best we can.”

The official said the administration of former president George W. Bush took the same approach in Africa. Many U.S. diplomats and human-rights groups had hoped Obama would shift his emphasis in Africa from security to democracy, but that has not happened, the official added.

“There’s pretty much been no change at all,” the official said. “In the end, it was an almost seamless transition from Bush to Obama.”

—Jon Schwarz

Bill Clinton to Condoleezza Rice in 2003: Invading Iraq Would Be Morally Right Thing to Do

Last week Glenn Greenwald interviewed Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, who both were National Security Council staffers during the Bush administration. At one point Hillary Leverett describes how "the entire American political apparatus," including Bill Clinton, supported the invasion of Iraq:

LEVERETT: It wasn't just ideologically-driven people, individual actors within the Bush administration, that were driving us to war. It was the entire American political apparatus. In a lot of ways, we thought, it was essentially tough to have checks and balances, to ask hard questions, when the United States was pursuing policies that could end up killing a lot of people and really do serious harm to our interests.

We saw the Bush administration, of course, make very bad decisions, but even more disheartening for us, even more disturbing to us as professional political analysts and policy-makers, was the opposition, the Democrats. We remember when Condi Rice came back from going to meet with – she was my boss at the time – going to meet with Bill Clinton, and she recounting how he put his arm around her, and told her that what the Bush administration was doing in gearing up for this invasion of Iraq, was not just the correct thing to do strategically but it was the morally right thing to do.

This was from the leader of the Democratic opposition, in a sense. The leading Democratic senators in Congress, the media, they were all not just supporting it, but hyping information that we didn't see – to read in the New York Times that there was this case of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that we didn't see with our top secret security clearances in the White House, was a really jarring experience on the negative side.

This isn't the first time Leverett has said this about Clinton and Iraq. In 2007, when Bill Clinton was campaigning for Hillary, he claimed he had "opposed Iraq from the beginning," which irritated Leverett so much she spoke to the Washington Post about it:

Hillary Mann Leverett, at the time the White House director of Persian Gulf affairs, said that Rice and Elliott Abrams, then National Security Council senior director for Near East and North African affairs, met with Clinton several times in the months before the March 2003 invasion to answer any questions he might have. She said she was "shocked" and "astonished" by Clinton's remarks this week, made to voters in Iowa, because she has distinct memories of Abrams "coming back from those meetings literally glowing and boasting that 'we have Clinton's support.' "...

She recalled being told that Clinton made it clear to Rice and Abrams that they could count on his public support for the war if it was necessary.

And Clinton didn't just support the invasion of Iraq privately; as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting pointed out in 2007, he supported it publicly too. The day before the war started he wrote an op-ed for the Guardian headlined "Trust Tony's Judgement." And in 2004 he told Time Magazine "I supported the Iraq thing."

P.S. In a recent slam of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's book and TV series The Untold History of the United States, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz sneered at them for portraying "liberal anticommunism [after World War II] as virtually indistinguishable from – indeed, as complicit with – the anticommunism of the right." After all, if Untold History convinced viewers that was true, they might also begin to believe something even nuttier, like that liberal foreign policy today is virtually indistinguishable from conservative foreign policy. Wilentz is good friends with Bill Clinton, and they probably spend lots of time together shaking their heads sadly about people crazy enough to think that.

—Jon Schwarz

Thanks, Blood and Iron Lady

A few people may still remember that Margaret Thatcher (who in 1981 privately wrote she was "very pleased" to sell as many British weapons as possible to Iraq) played a key role in the first Gulf War:

Thatcher Reminds Bush: 'Don't Go Wobbly'

On Aug. 2, 1990, the morning after Iraq occupied Kuwait, Mr. Bush told reporters: "We're not contemplating intervention. I'm not contemplating such action.

Then he flew to Aspen, Colo.

There he met Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister. They talked for hours.

That afternoon, at a joint press conference, Mr. Bush condemned "naked aggression" and said he was considering "the next steps needed to end the invasion."

But what essentially no one remembers today is that, in a weird way, Thatcher also played a key role in the Second Gulf War:

According to [favored Bush family biographer Mickey] Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."

Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."

Beyond that, Thatcher also directly called for the invasion of Iraq in a July 17, 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Don't Go Wobbly

Saddam must go...It is clear to anyone willing to face reality that the only reason Saddam took the risk of refusing to submit his activities to U.N. inspectors was that he is exerting every muscle to build WMD.

—Jon Schwarz

Not Johnny's Theorem

By: Aaron Datesman

I have my Geiger counter on, sitting on the desk next to me. The number it displays varies a little but remains around "0.14". (Since it's from Ukraine, I'm unsure what the units should be. It might be microSieverts per hour, but I don't read Cyrillic very well.) It beeps in an interesting non-pattern: not frequently, occasionally with a few beeps spaced pretty close together, then sometimes silent for a long while. It's perfectly distracting, actually, so I think I'll turn it off.

In physics class, they'll teach you that the spacing of the beeps is perfectly random, that there is no underlying pattern or structure of frequency. Engineers think of the string of beeps as a signal, calling a signal of this type "white noise". Professor Y. Yamamoto of Stanford, who in 2011 taught a course titled "Fundamentals of Noise Processes", no doubt is such an engineer. After the fold I have reproduced a couple of pages from the notes to his course, available on the web here.

The first figure shows the derivation of a result known as Carson's Theorem, which is a generalized version of Schottky's result for shot noise in electrical circuits. The second figure, in my handwriting, shows the few steps required to apply Carson's Theorem to find the decay power generated by a dilute system of radioactive contaminants.

The result is not difficult to obtain. I feel reasonably certain that the NRC, DOE, IAEA, National Academy of Sciences, US government or a neighborhood troop of Girl Scouts could have figured this out if they had just asked somebody.

— Aaron Datesman

* Readers with a bit of technical education will note that this result is easy to derive because all that's required is the substitution E->q. This changes the random pulse train from representing current, i(t), to power, P(t). The energy delivered via radioactive decay is the integral of P(t), which correctly yields the number of decays times the energy of one decay E.

The power in a random signal is not immediately calculable from P(t), which after all is perfectly random and cannot be known. The treatment outlined in the derivation of Carson's Theorem must be utilized instead. Because the linear dose model does not employ this widely-known (within the engineering and physics communities, at least) and fundamental knowledge, the linear dose model is incorrect.

Lastly, the chemical state of the interaction volume is directly related to the power because of the conservation of energy. When an unstable nucleus decays, the energy released has nowhere to go except to be stored in the chemical potential of broken bonds. So that's where the decay power goes, immediately, without delay.