Reading, ‘Riting, and . . . Oops.

Rick Perry couldn’t name the three cabinet agencies he planned to eliminate. It’s a fair bet that Josh Mandel, the GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio, wouldn’t be able to tell you what the third “R” stands for in the old phrase about “reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic.” (Evidently it’s not “Republican.”)

Introducing Mitt Romney at a rally in Beallsville on Tuesday, Mandel inveighed against the administration’s energy policies and the Democratic incumbent:

These people who are out of touch with Ohio – Barack Obama and Sherrod Brown — have waged a war on coal. They think coal is a four-letter word. I’ll tell you this afternoon, for any of these folks trying to stand between us and affordable, reliable, dependable energy, we have four words for them: over our dead bodies.

C-O-A-L. That’s one, two, three . . . . .

Oh, good Lord.

*****

In other intelligence news, we have this anti-Obama ad from a new 501(c)(4) group, “Special Operations Opsec Education Fund,” the 2012 version of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Made up of former military and CIA officers with connections to the Tea Party, the group hits the president for supposedly leaking national security secrets and taking too much credit for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. In one portion of the 22-minute video, someone purporting to be a Navy SEAL says,

Mr. President, you did not kill Osama bin Laden. America did.

Leaving aside the fact that Obama has never claimed to have personally killed bin Laden, the idea that “America” killed the terrorist is just as ridiculous as the idea that the Commander in Chief himself wielded a gun in Abbottabad. If the Opsec folks want to get so specific about it, Uncle Sam didn’t kill Bin Laden; Anonymous Navy SEAL #41 did. Who exactly does the angry dude in the video think pulled the trigger — this guy?

The real bin Laden killer?

Word[s]count – A Trove of Troves

The Times’ “After Deadline” column, which features the highs and lows of newspaper writing, often points out words and phrases that are being sorely overused. The term “aging dictator” — as in, “the Arab Spring is holding aging dictators accountable to their people” — comes to mind, but the biggest offense in the past few weeks has to be the word “trove.” First we had the trove of documents recovered from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. It was almost always a trove, and almost always likened in size to “a small college library.”

From the Los Angeles Times, less than a week after Bin Laden’s death:

“U.S. intelligence agencies are racing to exploit a trove of documents and computer files that U.S. Navy SEALs collected from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan before other Al Qaeda groups or leaders can change their communication methods or move their safe houses.”

A few days and several hundred references later, the Washington Post chimes in:

“Osama bin Laden was preoccupied with attacking the United States over all other targets, a fixation that led to friction with followers, according to U.S. intelligence officials involved in analyzing the trove of materials recovered from the al-Qaeda leader’s compound.”

Proving that it’s never too late to call a trove a trove, the word pops up again in an AP article from a few days ago:

“In an attempt to rebuild the relationship, the Washington and Islamabad have agreed to form a joint intelligence team to track down militant targets inside Pakistan, drawing in part from the trove of records taken from bin Laden’s personal office during the raid. “

The joys of “trove” extend beyond bin Laden to Sarah Palin, whose e-mails from her time as governor of Alaska were released last Friday. The Times wrote:

“Released in hard copy and covering most of Ms. Palin’s months in office, the vast trove will take days to read and decipher. “

This vast trove turned out to be vastly boring, and the crowdsourcing methods of the Times and the Post ended up garnering almost as much media attention as the e-mails themselves. (Bristol Palin’s tanning bed, anyone?) The AP at least didn’t mince words, calling the dollies of paper boxes, which set each media outlet back a cool $726, a “dump“:

“Drawing on methods used by both Wikileaks and social networks, traditional news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post used the Palin email dump as an experiment in new media techniques.”

FYI, the thesaurus also suggests the following: hoard, collection, aggregation, cache, stash. Try one of ’em. It won’t hurt, I promise.

 

The Lost Decade: a Reevaluation

Thomas Friedman’s column today in the Times offers more food for thought on the Mladic-Bin Laden comparison I made in my last post. Ranking the “evilness” of men like Mladic or Bin Laden in terms of lives lost is necessarily reductionist, and Friedman shows us why: Bin Laden has cost America — and the world — much more than the lives he took on 9/11 or in the bombing of the USS Cole. The crazed actions of one man touched off two wars and a spiraling national deficit, as well as the loss of American moral authority and the good will of Muslims across the world. The price Bin Laden exacted from the U.S. includes an opportunity cost: what we could have achieved in the absence of a war on terror, or what we could have purchased with our treasure and influence if we had not sunk both into the pursuit of Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Friedman enumerates the opportunities America, its allies and its enemies have ceded to Bin Laden:

• Political and social progress in the Arab world. Far from spreading democracy, Bush’s wars created only strange bedfellows. Even today, Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh receives little more than a slap on the wrist, because chaos in the center of the jihadist movement would be even more disastrous than a dictatorship. Friedman writes, “Washington basically gave the Arab dictators a free pass to tighten their vise grip on their people — as long as these Arab leaders arrested, interrogated and held the Islamic militants in their societies and eliminated them as a threat to us.”
• Domestic prosperity. Friedman makes a convincing connection between 9/11 and Bush’s ruinous fiscal policy: “In America, President George W. Bush used the post-9/11 economic dip to push through a second tax cut we could not afford . . . . As such, our nation’s fiscal hole is deeper than ever.”
• Israeli-Palestinian relations. Friedman notes that “the rise of Bin Laden, which diverted the U.S. from energetically pursuing the peace process, gave the Israeli right a free hand to expand West Bank settlements.”

The effects on Europe of the war in Bosnia and Serbia are certainly myriad, and mostly beyond the scope of my knowledge. I realize that the genocidal brutality of Mladic and his ilk have left the former Yugoslavia a tattered mess. But from where I stand in America, my view of the world filtered through the lens of American power and its far-reaching effects, I can’t help but reevaluate my stance on the respective damages done by Mladic and Bin Laden. Friedman calls the past ten years “the Bin Laden decade.” It is in many ways, not just for Eastern Europe but for the entire world, also a lost decade.

Mladic and Bin Laden

I’m struck by how many of the world’s most fearsome men have ended their days in isolation, old and enfeebled, frail shells of the powerful commanders they claimed to be in their prime. Video from Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan shows a thin, gray-bearded man wrapped in a blanket, rocking back and forth as he changes the channels on the television. Ratko Mladic, the Serbian war crimes fugitive, was discovered in his cousin’s home, having been chased from the relative luxury in which began his years on the run. He had only $800 on him when he was captured. Doreen Carvajal and Steven Erlanger of the Times write:

Mr. Mladic was paying close attention, with plenty of time to watch television, according to investigators who described him as a “tired old man.” His face carried some of the story of how he had lived, a frail image that startled close friends and the men hunting him. That image was hard to reconcile with the burly, commanding ex-general whose wanted poster hung in the offices of war crimes prosecutors.

The Times reports that Mladic initially attended soccer matches and dined at restaurants, but “his world steadily shrank.” He was plagued by heart attacks and strokes, much as Bin Laden was rumored to suffer from kidney failure. (He was not, however good a punchline it may have made, on dialysis.)

When the similarities between Mladic and Bin Laden first occurred to me, my initial reaction was something to the effect of, “But Mladic is no Bin Laden.” The leader of al Qaeda has achieved such notoriety in the American mindset that he has become a kind of Hitler figure: someone to whom no one else, no matter how evil, should be compared. Despite the right-wing talking heads that like to compare labor unions to Nazis and the health care overhaul to the approach of Hitler’s armies, equating one of today’s small-fry dictators — Assad in Syria, Mubarak in Egypt — seems laughable. How can any of these leaders be compared to a man who systematically exterminated six million Jews?

But Bin Laden is not Hitler. Yes, he looms large in American consciousness, but 3,000 people (more, if you count victims beyond 9/11) are not six million. The attack on the World Trade Center was horrible, but it was not genocide, and the parallels between Bin Laden and Mladic are far greater than those between bin Laden and Hitler. Mladic stands accused of killing 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, and countless more in the multi-year siege of Sarajevo. His crimes are, if anything, greater than Bin Laden’s. But though they are greater in terms of lives lost, to Americans there is hardly a crime greater than that which we feel Bin Laden perpetrated against us. He made us afraid, he changed our reality. He brought terrorism to the U.S. and gave us a taste of what is experienced daily by people in the Middle East. Most of all, he questioned our exceptionalism; that is, the idea that America was the exception to the rule of violence that is unavoidable in many of the world’s countries.

It is perhaps too much to ask for Americans to think rationally, especially after the specter of Bin Laden and al Qaeda was held up as the reason for Afghanistan and Iraq, where so many American soldiers have died. It is perhaps too much to ask that we acknowledge that the capture of Mladic has brought more justice — if justice is counted in number of deaths avenged — than the killing of Bin Laden. Americans, after all, are not asked for much. But though we regard our own wounds as deeper and more painful than those of the Serbian and Bosnian families that Mladic destroyed, we cannot escape the fact that there are tyrants in the world more evil and more powerful than the man behind 9/11.

An Also-Ran Goes to Pakistan

“The Pakistan Whisperer” (Newsweek)

“Kerry Seeks to Soothe Pakistani Anger Over Bin Laden Raid” (NYTimes)

This article from Newsweek provides good background for Senator John Kerry’s trip to Pakistan, explaining his history with the country and his rapport with its leaders.

The Times is reporting that the visit has produced results; Kerry “said Monday that Pakistan had agreed to take ‘several immediate steps’ to show its seriousness about the importance of relations with America. They included returning the tail of the helicopter that crashed on the night of the Bin Laden raid, he said.” In light of rumors that Pakistan had considered offering the modified (presumably with top-secret technology) tailpiece to China, this is good news.

According to the Times article, Pakistan’s primary concern is to ensure that the U.S. has “no designs against Pakistan’s nuclear and strategic assets.” A joint American-Pakistani statement maintained that Kerry”was prepared to personally affirm such a guarantee.”

Newsweek’s Michelle Cottle cites the senator’s lead role in the 2009 Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid package, which gives Pakistan $1.5 billion each year.

As former State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley puts it: “Kerry is probably unique in being able to go to Pakistan as a demonstrated friend and say, ‘Look, lots of people are calling for us to cut off assistance. I will not be able to defend you unless you respond in a meaningful way to this event.’”

According to Cottle, Kerry worked closely with the late Richard Holbrooke, who once used his cell phone to dial up Kerry in the middle of a meeting with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. An official tells Cottle that, after the that incident, “whenever Holbrooke and Zardari were scheduled to meet, the president’s staff would install cell-phone jammers to prevent the ambassador from repeating the stunt.”

Kerry is simultaneously aligned with the Obama administration without being of it. He is widely thought to have designs on Hillary Clinton’s job as Secretary of State when she steps down as expected in 2012. While this has reportedly caused some friction with Obama insiders, Kerry’s independence also gives him an edge in negotiations with Pakistani leaders, who were burned by the secrecy with which the bin Laden raid was carried out. To Cottle he says, “I’m not a member of the administration. I don’t work for the administration . . . . But I’m perfectly happy to work with them when the interests of our country are on the line—when there’s a policy we’re mutually in agreement on.”