Too much choice
 

If your hangover's still this bad on the 28th, you might want to reconsider your plans for New Year's Eve.

S_A_M

8 Americans dead
 

I'd say that the headline, and, I suspect, the article convey some of that horror. Stop yelling.

It is indeed a horrible tragedy. The pictures and video are horrifying, as you watch people (most of whom will die) getting torn away into huge waves. I will not soon forget the picture of the grandmother in her red sari wailing over the bodies of several grandchildren lying in a row.

But your outrage is misplaced. I'm not sure why you would find it strange or inappropriate that Americans would be interested in knowing how many of their countrymen died in the tragedy. (Or, as Bilmore said, might even want to check for specific names.) I don't think that such an interest is unusual or inappropriate - - or in any way diminishes the value of the dead foreigners.

P.S. The news media does indeed exist to cater to the concerns and interests of its predominant readership. If you look at most news sources, you will see loads more space devoted to local, regional, and national news than to international news. They know what pays the bills.

S_A_M

8 Americans dead
 

Are you suggesting that American readership could only possibly be interested in the lives of the Americans? I'll bet there are loads of people in the United States who have friends and relatives who actually live in the area.

8 Americans dead
 

Was Enrique Iglesias anywhere near the Indian Ocean?

8 Americans dead
 

Thanks, Hank. That's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. At least you understand.

Don't forget fellas -- where Enrique goes, Anna and her extraordinary behind follow.

8 Americans dead
 

No, that's not what I said. I'm sure you're right.

To the extent that those folks live in concentrated communities (geographic or otherwise) of recent immigrants, I'd bet they also have community and/or X-language newspapers that are providing plenty of coverage.

[I'd also bet that those papers concentrate mostly on the devastation in their particular country, which sort of reinforces our point about regional and/or parochial interests.]

S_A_M

Too much choice
 

I find her, at times, horribly bitchy, and, at times, bitingly (and insightfully) funny. She's the right's Dowd.

Actually, from reading the various blogging soldiers in Iraq, as well as the military-family group blogs and sites, my impression is that the group you purport to protect here is mostly just pissed that the anti-war, anti-Rummy groups love to jump on this kind of blather in the hopes of turning people against what they themselves hold dear. Go read all the blogs connected in Warbloggers. The auto-pen was a non-issue, but the gleeful way people who really couldn't care less jumped on it for agenda purposes was more important, and more infuriating. As one blogger said, who gives a f*** how that letter gets signed when they overwhelmingly respect and support Rumsfeld?

He should have signed the letters. Big deal. Why is this primarily important to people who are always looking for a slam on Rumsfeld, and (seemingly, from what I've seen) unimportant to the supposed victims?

Incredibly sharp and focused, with aims and goals that match up well with mine, a no-nonsense way of dealing with things, and an unwillingness to allow form to triumph over substance. How many people would have even tried to give an honest answer to the soldier's question about armor? I can think of several in his position in the past who would have stammered a quick "we'll look into it" non-answer.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

If the tooth fairy stops the ongoing civil war and leaves a fully functioning parliamentary democracy under the collective pillow of the Kurds, Shi'ites and Sunnis, that will not be a bad thing.

The differences between Ukraine and Iraq are massive, and do not suggest that our enterprise in Iraq is likely to end well. For example, the forces of democracy in Ukraine appear to have drawn considerable strength from nationalism, and from the desire to have a meddling outside power play less of a role in the country's domestic affairs. We've managed to get those forces working against us in Iraq. Ukraine finds itself in a situation where the use of violence to subvert democracy is so unaccepted that it can only be used minimally (e.g., covert dioxin poisoning). In Iraq, there is much less agreement on the ground rules, if you will.

Not that we're likely to get there anytime soon, but it takes a lot more than a well-run election to find yourself in a durable democracy.

Too much choice
 

You're right. Fuck 'em if they can't take an honest "(a) it's a problem of physics (even though our vendors have offered to increase production), and (b) look, you might get blown up in a tank anyway, so back to the landfill!"

I didn't really find Rumsfeld's response disarmingly honest, but OTOH, it's not what really bugs me about the man.

I think most of his critics focus more on things like the fact that he ignored Shinseki's Army planning office, the State Department, and pretty much everyone else with expertise in post-war nationbuilding, and as a result fucked up things pretty royally. In fact, Maj. Wilson now tells us that DoD never wrote down a Phase IV plan at all.

• The U.S. military invaded Iraq without a formal plan for occupying and stabilizing the country and this high-level failure continues to undercut what has been a "mediocre" Army effort there, an Army historian and strategist has concluded.
  
  "There was no Phase IV plan" for occupying Iraq after the combat phase, writes Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. While a variety of government offices had considered the possible situations that would follow a U.S. victory, Wilson writes, no one produced an actual document laying out a strategy to consolidate the victory after major combat operations ended.
  
  "While there may have been 'plans' at the national level, and even within various agencies within the war zone, none of these 'plans' operationalized the problem beyond regime collapse" -- that is, laid out how U.S. forces would be moved and structured, Wilson writes in an essay that has been delivered at several academic conferences but not published. "There was no adequate operational plan for stability operations and support operations."

Armored Humvees and Autopens are nice theatre, but really they're only theatre in comparison to the man's larger problems.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

How long has this "love of democracy" existed in the Ukraine? Give Iraq a chance Ty. People are still signing up to be cops despite the murders. They might really want to be in charge of their lives.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

I think our difference lies in our view of the popularity of the anti-democratic forces native to Iraq.

I see an overwhelming Iraqi support for democracy. Because the tools of modern war are so powerful, I see a very small contingent wielding great disruptive power right now, but I think they start to wander away in the face of the failure to them that is expressed by a succesful election, and in the face of popular Iraqi support for a new government. Iraq is always going to be problematic, for the same reasons Israel is problematic - they're surrounded by hostile groups to whom democratic rule is anathema - and they are going to have to keep a powerful army, but it will be (if this works) an outward-looking one, not one (like the rest of the entire region) that guards against its own.

In the absence of SH's threats, and in the absence of his mass murdering, and in the presence of an Iraqi citizenry that seems to want this, I'm willing to call the glass half full.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Apologize if someone else made that point, but it took you very few posts indeed to move from a discussion of whether we're likely to see the birth of a functional democracy in Iraq to a discussion of our (lack of) sympathy for the Sunnis who are about to be on the outside of the "democracy" looking in. I agree -- screw the Sunnis -- but once we're having that conversation the important game is already over.

Of course, the Bush Administration, in its munificent wisdom, made this problem much worse by selecting a method of voting that awards representation in proportion to the number of voters who actually show up, unlike the way we do it in this country, in which the number of representives in the House, Senate or Electoral College has nothing to do with the level of voter turnout in a particular jurisdiction or election. If the Sunnis were guaranteed representation in proportion to their share of the population, they could boycott the election and still be represented. So now you have the Administration talking about monkeying with this formula, with a month (less?) to go before the vote. Not surprisingly, other Iraqis object to have the rules tampered with at this late stage. Not surprisingly, few Americans seem to be asking why we are messing in this way with the election procedures of a putatively sovereign country.

Too much choice
 

I agree with you to a certain extent - the projections that allowed for the skipping of the occupancy phase were way too rosy, and represented a huge mistake of prediction (in that no one seemed to think that the SH Iraqi army might just take a powder and then pop up as guerillas) but I don't remember any war that ever stuck to plan, evenin the broad strokes. I wish they had gotten that part right. So, obviously, do the generals who are now quite eager to say "I told him to listen to MEEEE".

And, I think you willingly mischaracterize his armor answer.

Too much choice
 

If, by the way, your goals included military transformation in the general sense, then perhaps you're actually a fan of General Shinseki. He believed in that concept writ large, but some nagging differences remained.

• When Donald H. Rumsfeld swooped down on the Pentagon in 2001 as President Bush's secretary of Defense, Gen. Eric Shinseki must have looked like a natural ally to him. Like Rumsfeld, Shinseki wanted to "transform" the armed services and had announced his plan for changing the Army when he became chief of staff in 1999.
  
  But Shinseki's notion of transformation differed substantially from Rumsfeld's. To the new Defense secretary, transformation meant greater reliance on technology, not troops, to achieve goals; to Shinseki, it meant more intensified training, featuring highly mobile medium-light brigades of mechanized infantry capable of a variety of missions.

In case you're interested in Shinseki's thoughts on what needed/needs to be done differently:

• Since his retirement in June 2003, Shinseki has restricted his public appearances to foreign policy and university audiences. Early this month at Pomona College, he outlined his policy for a post-Cold War Army equipped to deal with a multitude of duties.
  
  Here are some excerpts:
  
  • The Army's job: "During the 1990s, we used the Army for many nontraditional tasks — humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, wildfire control and peacekeeping, among others — but the Army's nonnegotiable contract with the American people is to fight and win wars. We grow our own leadership — thorough troop training is our most vital mission — but we need about 180,000 new people each year, so recruiting is a vital task. For a professional Army, it must not slip."
  
  • The limits of force: "In my time in uniform, the use of force was often not the preferred solution; neither was it necessarily the first option considered…. Once the use of force is sanctioned, there's almost no turning back…. Lethal force involves blunt trauma and surgical strikes, [which] better describe a military planner's range of options than they do the effects produced on the ground…. We can pinpoint targets with total accuracy … as long as they don't move."
  
  • Military occupation: "If your forces are in Baghdad, you own it. And that means you own the water, the electricity, the public buildings — and public order. If the task is to create a secure environment, troops on the ground are needed."
  
  • Multilateralism: "Unilateralism as a stated policy is bad. The U.N. and this country have had our differences, but we need its cooperation and support."
  
  • Crisis management: "I was personally involved … in dealing with explosive crises in East Timor and Bosnia. The U.S. needed to help get Indonesia right and to link whatever happened in Indonesia to a comprehensive long-term strategy for the region. In Bosnia, the effort at peacekeeping took a long time, but after nine years the forces needed there greatly diminished — from 20,000 to 8,500. How long would it take to stabilize Iraq?"
  
  • Threats and complicators: "In the Bush administration's first appraisal of defense needs, reference was made to 'asymmetric threats transcending geography.' Little was said about the kinds of 'complicators' that those of us who lived abroad in the 1990s were watching. These complicators — the best term we could find at the time — included transnational criminal organizations, international narco-trafficking, the surge in terrorist incidents involving Muslim extremists and the suspicion of ongoing proliferation of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology. The nagging question for which the Army had no answers was, 'What happens if the four complicators merge into a larger transnational threat? Whose responsibility will it be to deal with that kind of danger?' "
  
  • Force levels. "We need to have enough forces on the ground to deter and hold crises where they are. You can't fall into the trap of organizing for specific missions and then being unable to perform other missions when the conditions change very quickly — and in places like Kosovo, they can change in 20 minutes. You may find yourself having to go very quickly, intellectually and physically, from what was a peacekeeping mission to fighting a war — and preparing the troops for this [shift]. And with the missions multiplying, you cannot go on fighting a 12-division war with only 10 divisions available."

Were the opinions of the Army planners simply discounted as being unnecessary? No, they simply weren't consulted.

• What puzzled many of us who had listened to Shinseki was the contrast between his emphasis on careful military planning and how shortsighted the administration was in preparing for the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Before the war, Shinseki's Army planners were not once consulted by Rumsfeld's office. The State Department's planning proposal for postwar Iraq was similarly ignored by the administration.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

I'm sure many of them do. If only that were enough.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Depending on how many zeros are in the many (10,000,000?) compared to 10,000 people who don't want a government established, it might be enough.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Disagree completely. As I said, if the Sunnis, or anyone, voluntarily withholds their votes, well, life goes on. Bad choice. If the Sunnis, or anyone else, don't vote out of fear, different story - then there's no true election. No, I hold no sympathy for them - but you make it sound like that lack of love should warrant extra consideration for them. I'm simply holding them equally accountable, no more, no less. So, yeah, fuck em, but they get to vote, too.

It amazes me that anyone could see this statement as a desireable thing. You don't want a democracy in Iraq, do you? While your "fairness" has a certain surface-level attraction, I can see no more sure way to guarantee that Iraq remains a hodgepodge of tribal areas and not a state.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

I don't think the difference between us lies in our views of the popularity of the anti-democracy forces. Perhaps the glass is half-full, whatever that means. When the Titanic was half-full, it sank. Somehow, the Kurds and Sunnis are going to have to be persuaded to submit themselves to a government dominated by Shi'ites. Somehow, the Shi'ites are going to have be persuaded not to exercise control over the Kurds and Sunnis commensurate with the Shi'ite share of the population. If you want to figure out how likely this is, you have to do more than poll Iraqis about their support for the ideal of democracy.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Are you saying that, even if the vast majority of Iraqis want democracy, we should back down if a small minority is well-armed?

Too much choice
 

It's fairly clear to me that people -- i.e., Republicans, since what Democrats think about Rumsfeld doesn't make headlines since early November -- are concerned about the ongoing morass that is Iraq, and that this concern finds its outlet in criticisms of Rumsfeld's "tin ear." Most Republicans are not yet willing to criticize the President's Iraq policy, but they know they score points in a way that will not be perceived as disloyal to the President if they criticize Rumsfeld for gaffes which putatively undermine that policy. Democratic officials were almost universally in favor of retiring Rumsfeld in early November, so the news more recently is that Republicans like Trent Lott were calling for Rumsfeld to step down. Far easier for the Ann Coulters of the world, however, to pretend that "liberals" were behind the stories -- "liberals" like Trent Lott, I guess.

Too much choice
 

Nor do I. Fortunately, we're not discussing that point, but instead that the official historian of the campaign concluded that the Administration was so convinced that the barrels would contain only flowers that no one sat down and put pen to paper to cover the possibility that they did not.

As do we all.

Yes. The tough part, of course, is to read carefully the content of such criticisms and determine whether they arise merely from the same temptation that draws a moth to the light, or perhaps they possess the minimum credibility to conclude that something was profoundly wrong in the Administration's war planning.

Well, let's go to the tape. (emphasis added)

• SEC. RUMSFELD: I talked to the General coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored. They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they’re not needed, to a place here where they are needed. I’m told that they are being – the Army is – I think it’s something like 400 a month are being done. And it’s essentially a matter of physics. It isn’t a matter of money. It isn’t a matter on the part of the Army of desire. It’s a matter of production and capability of doing it.*
  
  As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe – it’s a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment.
  
  I can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army and certainly General Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that they’re working at it at a good clip. It’s interesting, I’ve talked a great deal about this with a team of people who’ve been working on it hard at the Pentagon. And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored humvee and it can be blown up. And you can go down and, the vehicle, the goal we have is to have as many of those vehicles as is humanly possible with the appropriate level of armor available for the troops. And that is what the Army has been working on.

I'll grant you, he did not say "back to the landfill, sonny!" That part was indeed an embellishment. The rest, the man actually said. Even if literally true, were such words to be said in a Kerry or Clinton or any other Democratic Administration, the howls from the right would be such that the SecDef would not have lasted the evening, and that's my point.

Gattigap



* You've also seen, I am sure, the subsequent stories about the vendors being able to increase production, and having offered to. To be clear, I do not accuse DoD of malfeasance here, but for heaven's sake, if it is so readily possible to increase production, don't say in front of your troops, God and everyone that doing so is an impossibility.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

What did I say about "backing down"? If only this all were a question of our resolve.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Bush won by about - what? - three percent? And yet, he controls what we're doing fairly completely. Is this different than what you warn against? Or are you simply of the mind that Iraqis are too primitive or misguided or religious to put aside those lines of religious demarcation and make one unified country?

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

I don't understand what question you think you're answering here. If the question, how do we get to a functioning democracy in Iraq, then I submit that no part of the answer involves saying "fuck 'em" to the Sunnis, as much fun as that may be. If we want to make Iraq work, the question is, what works?

I submit that devising an electoral regime that excludes Sunnis who don't vote -- for whatever reason -- is unlikely to work well. Instead, I submit that it's likely to lead to a civil war between a Shi'ite government and the Sunni minority. The Bushies evidently share this concern, since they're now looking at ways to guarantee some level of Sunni representation even if there's a boycott.

I don't know why you think I'm talking about fairness. I -- and the Bush Administration -- am looking at ways to make sure that Sunnis find the government legitimate, even if a boycott and/or violence (etc.) leads to few Sunnis voting. All I'm suggesting is that Iraq's government could be structured like ours, in that California (e.g.) wouldn't have lost relative power in Congress in the last election if Californians had voted in few numbers than the residents of other states.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

I know this idea will seem foreign to you, but we have checks and balances, and different branches of the federal government constrain each other. Bush only "controls what we're doing" to the extent that he and Congress march in step, and there are already signs that the unanimity of purpose that we've seen since 9/11 on that score will be a thing of the past. Be that as it may, my understanding is that the government we've given Iraq is more of a parliamentary model than our own, and that the better analogue for my point is not our presidential election, but how power in Congress is divided between the States. If, for whatever reasons -- violence or a boycott, say -- New Englanders declined to vote in the next election, New England would still have its same number of seats in the Senate and House thereafter, because we allocate seats in proportion to population. In Iraq, someone made the decision that seats should be allocated in proportion to share of the vote. The difference is pretty important now.

eta: You used the word primitive, not me. Whatever the reason, it appears that Iraq does not cohere as a nation in the way that many other nations do. It appears that many (most?) Iraqis tend to identify themselves more as Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'ites than as Iraqis, which -- at the very least -- tends to complicate the process of building a political community.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Strange bedfellows indeed. Next thing you know, we'll have Ty agreeing with Trent Lott.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

The "fuck em" comment was put in to show how uncentral and meaningless that feeling is is if we allow for everyone to get to the polls and participate without getting blown up. I don't like them - but that shouldn't matter, and, if they get to vote, it doesn't matter.

I submit that a philosophy that holds that we have to count votes that intentionally are not cast, just so we don't offend those who already see that they are a minority in a new democracy, is the first huge step away from a democratic Iraq. You talk about us guiding results that we want - this is the worst sort of such guiding. If this is to succeed, it won;t be as some bastardized affirmative action plan for minority voters. This is an attempt to make Iraq into one country - not three or four always-diverging interest groups who will "balance each other out".

First, I'm tired of you always siding with Bush. Second, the Sunnis don't find a democratic government to be illegitimate - they find a government that they don't control to be undesirable. Big difference. If you want to build democracy by imposing anti-democratic principles, you're taking the kind of short-sided stance that seemed to have characterized so much of our history in South America. I think we either need to work towards democracy, or get out, and not try to fashion some Rube Goldberg let's-make-everyone-happy kludge.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Any Americans?

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

I know. Let's give them our Constitution and legal system. That'll work.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Don't drag Charlton Heston into this. He's feeling poorly.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

I think whether our project there succeeds or fails will depend on a lot more than whether everyone gets a chance to vote. They voted under Hussein, too.

You really seem to be missing the point, so let me try again. Suppose a world in which, in the 2006 election in Maine, only five people show up to vote for Maine's two congressional representatives. Maine still gets its two seats, because under our system, the seats are apportioned on the basis of population.

In the Iraqi election to be held next month, if only five people show up to vote in one of the Sunni provinces, they will be unrepresented, in essence and in fact, because the number of seats they get in the parliament (or whatever it's going to be called) will be proportionate to their share of the total votes case, not to their province's share of the population.

So this is not about "counting votes that are not cast."

Heh.

I'm sure that many Sunnis would be happy to have a democratic government, even though they will be outnumbered by the Shi'ites. They apparently have fewer guns, or something.

And what anti-democratic principles do you think I'm advocating? Aren't we both talking about how to "work towards democracy"? My point is that holding elections that predictably will exclude and marginalize the Sunnis is a good way to prevent Iraq from seeing a meaningful democracy anytime soon. You seem to think that if we hold a vote in which everyone has a chance to vote, our role is done.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

It's like black magic. If you talk about "cold, dead hands" too often, it's gonna happen.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Or maybe they want to infiltrate?

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Look, I think we all understand your argument that the Sunnis bear some degree of personal responsibility to get out and vote, and shouldn't have the luxury of sitting on their asses and saying that the vote was therefore illegitimate.

But as Ty pointed out, the impact of not voting (for whatever reason) is more profound than Sunni Terrorist Fuckhead doesn't get a seat at Parliament, because if I understand it correctly, because seats are apportioned according to who votes, not voting means that there'll be no Sunni in Parliament ever.

Acknowledging that this outcome creates a number of unique problems, including the significant likelihood of civil war involving factions that feel completely unrepresented in the nifty new Iraq government does not, IMO, necessarily equate with giving the Sunnis a free ride.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

And I'm going to miss the try-again, too. Wife's car is dead in a parking lot. Full of kids. Off to the rescue.

Why Aren't We Talking About This?
 

Good luck with that. Not to worry -- the post will still be there later.

tsunami question
 

Has anyone heard about how American troops on Diego Garcia made it through the tsunami? Diego Garcia is a major military base on an atoll in the Indian Ocean with an average elevation of four feet above sea level and a maximum elevation of only twenty-two feet. It sounds like a big wave could put the whole place under water. I read a story that said that a scientific station in Hawaii was able to warn Diego Garcia before the wave hit, but on an island like that, what can you do?

tsunami question
 

Good point. It would seem hard to be defensive there. The 8 dead
headline helps here.

tsunami question
 

Good question. I imagine the only answer is to try and get everyone on a boat, if possible.

[spree: WaPo article, suggesting that tsunamis aren't so much immense waves as drastic and abrupt increases (and decreases) in water levels, which inundate everything. The anecdotal story suggests that being afloat on something seaworthy, while no guarantee for survival, probably helps your odds.]

tsunami question
 

I actually was asking a question, not making a point. Anyone know how the folks on Diego Garcia made out? They're talking about thousands of dead on the Andamans and Maldives, other low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean.