George Packer: The Fall of Conservatism. Subtitle: "Have the Republicans run out of ideas?" Don't know if this is part of a longer project, or if it's just meant to touch on such recent books as Rick Perlstein's Nixonland and Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan, but Packer's May 26, 2008 New Yorker article digs up some revealing dirt on the making and breaking of the new right. He starts by interviewing Pat Buchanan:

"From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority," Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. "What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.'s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives -- what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South." Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group -- men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, "burned the paint off the walls." As they left the hotel, Nixon said, "This is the future of this Party, right here in the South."

Note that Nixon's interest wasn't ideological: he was looking for a sizable block of votes he could get out in front of. Nixon's 1968 campaign was one of finnesse, attempting to scrape by a divided and disheartened Democratic Party without disclosing how much he too would become a source of division and disarray. But no sooner than Nixon won, he started working on his majority for 1972:

This strategy was put into action near the end of Nixon's first year in office, when antiwar demonstrators were becoming a disruptive presence in Washington. Buchanan recalls urging Nixon, "We've got to use the siege gun of the Presidency, and go right after these guys." On November 3, 1969, Nixon went on national television to speak about the need to avoid a shameful defeat in Vietnam. Looking benignly into the camera, he concluded, "And so tonight -- to you, the great silent majority of Americans -- I ask for your support." It was the most successful speech of his Presidency. Newscasters criticized him for being divisive and for offering no new vision on Vietnam, but tens of thousands of telegrams and letters expressing approval poured into the White House. It was Nixon's particular political genius to rouse simultaneously the contempt of the bien-pensants and the admiration of those who felt the sting of that contempt in their own lives.

This was when Nixon unleashed Spiro Agnew to practice what Kevin Phillips, the political demographer and author of The Emerging Republican Majority working for Nixon, had called "positive polarization."

Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum -- "A little raw for today," he warned -- that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in "the Old Roosevelt Coalition," it recommended that the White House "exacerbate the ideological division" between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon's policies; highlight "the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party"; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. "Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country," Buchanan wrote. "We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention." Such gambits, he added, could "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

Packer asserts that the "Nixon White House didn't enact all of these recommendations," but Perlstein's book provides a pretty comprehensive listing of how they tried, with a few further dirty tricks added as occasions arose. Note that the emphasis here is on undermining the opposition party than it is to achieve any political ideals.

Packer also argues that the 2006 and 2008 elections mark a turning point:

This will be true whether or not John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, wins in November. He and his likely Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, "both embody a post-polarized, or anti-polarized, style of politics," the Times columnist David Brooks told me. "McCain, crucially, missed the sixties, and in some ways he's a pre-sixties figure. He and Obama don't resonate with the sixties at all." The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing -- despite being despised by significant voices on the right -- shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces. "The fact that there was no conventional, establishment, old-style conservative candidate was not an accident," Brooks said. "Mitt Romney pretended to be one for a while, but he wasn't. Rudy Giuliani sort of pretended, but he wasn't. McCain is certainly not. It's not only a lack of political talent -- there's just no driving force, and it will soften up normal Republicans for change."

It's not clear to me in what sense McCain isn't a conservative, and in particular isn't in thrall to the movers and shakers of the movement. In at least one critical area -- the neoconservative plot to militarily crush any conceivable opposition -- he's out in front of the movement. (It doesn't help here that Packer has his own imperialist blind spot.) Packer quotes Newt Gingrich: "The Republian brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti-Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins) anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail."

Yuval Levin, a former Bush White House official, who is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, agrees with Gingrich's diagnosis. "There's an intellectual fatigue, even if it hasn't yet been made clear by defeat at the polls," he said. "The conservative idea factory is not producing as it did. You hear it from everybody, but nobody agrees what to do about it."

Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

Of course, that whole bit about the Republicans being the "party of ideas" was one of their most blatantly cynical ideas. Their real achievement had less to do with constructing ideas than with selling them, with cajoling or coercing the media into carrying their water, giving them credibility where none was deserved. Great Communicator Ronald Reagan was particularly effective at this:

The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, in his new book, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (Harper), argues that Reagan "learned how to seize and keep control of the terms of public debate." On taxes, race, government spending, national security, crime, welfare, and "traditional values," he made mainstream what had been the positions of the right-wing fringe, and he kept Democrats on the defensive. He also brought a generation of doctrinaire conservatives into the bureaucracy and the courts, making appointments based on ideological tests that only a genuine movement leader would impose. The rightward turn of the judiciary will probably be the most lasting achievement of Reagan and his movement.

Wilentz sees Reagan as the movement's high-point. While Reagan achieved much of what he had intended, he also planted the seeds of the movement's decay:

In retrospect, the Reagan Presidency was the high-water mark of conservatism. "In some respects, the conservative movement was a victim of success," Wilentz concludes. "With the Soviet Union dissolved, inflation reduced to virtually negligible levels, and the top tax rate cut to nearly half of what it was in 1980, all of Ronald Reagan's major stated goals when he took office had been achieved, leaving perplexed and fractious conservatives to fight over where they might now lead the country." Wilentz omits one important failure. According to Buchanan, who was the White House communications director in Reagan's second term, the President once told his barber, Milton Pitts, "You know, Milt, I came here to do five things, and four out of five ain't bad." He had succeeded in lowering taxes, raising morale, increasing defense spending, and facing down the Soviet Union; but he had failed to limit the size of government, which, besides anti-Communism, was the abiding passion of Reagan's political career and of the conservative movement. He didn't come close to achieving it and didn't try very hard, recognizing early that the public would be happy to have its taxes cut as long as its programs weren't touched. And Reagan was a poor steward of the unglamorous but necessary operations of the state. Wilentz notes that he presided over a period of corruption and favoritism, encouraging hostility toward government agencies and "a general disregard for oversight safeguards as among the evils of 'big government.'" In this, and in a notorious attempt to expand executive power outside the Constitution -- the Iran-Contra affair -- Reagan's Presidency presaged that of George W. Bush.

I'm tempted to argue that Reagan offered at most the illusion of success -- that his unique sunny optimism encouraged people to look beyond numerous questionable facts. Just as important, the optimism kept the movement's primordial hate under wraps -- temporarily, with Gingrich's 1994 triumph the signal event:

Instead of governing, the Republican majority in Congress -- along with right-wing authors, journalists, talk-radio personalities, think tanks, and foundations -- surrendered to the negative strain of modern conservatism. As political strategy, this strain went back to the Nixon era, but its philosophical roots were older and deeper. It extended back to William F. Buckley, Jr.'s mission statement, in the inaugural issue of National Review, in 1955, that the new magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop"; and to Goldwater's seminal 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, in which he wrote, "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones." By the end of the century, a movement inspired by sophisticated works such as Russell Kirk's 1953 The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot churned out degenerate descendants with titles like How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). Shortly after engineering President Bill Clinton's impeachment on a narrow party-line basis, Gingrich was gone.

Though conservatives were not much interested in governing, they understood the art of politics. They hadn't made much of a dent in the bureaucracy, and they had done nothing to provide universal health-care coverage or arrest growing economic inequality, but they had created a political culture that was inhospitable to welfare, to an indulgent view of criminals, to high rates of taxation. They had controlled the language and moved the political parameters to the right. Back in November, 1967, Buckley wrote in an essay on Ronald Reagan, "They say that his accomplishments are few, that it is only the rhetoric that is conservative. But the rhetoric is the principal thing. It precedes all action. All thoughtful action."

Then came George W. Bush:

According to [David] Frum, who worked as a White House speechwriter during Bush's first two years, Bush couldn't have won if he'd run as a real conservative, because the country was already moving in a new direction. Bush's goals, like Nixon's, were political. Nixon had set out to expand the Republican vote; Bush wanted to keep it from contracting. At his first meeting with Frum and other speechwriters, Bush declared, "I want to change the Party" -- to soften its hard edge, and make the Party more hospitable to Hispanics. "It was all about positioning," Frum said, "not about confronting a new generation of problems." Frum wasn't happy; although he suspected that Bush might be right, he wanted him to govern along hard-line conservative principles.

The phrase that signalled Bush's approach was "compassionate conservatism," but it never amounted to a policy program. Within hours of the Supreme Court decision that ended the disputed Florida recount, Dick Cheney met with a group of moderate Republican senators, including Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island. According to Chafee's new book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President (Thomas Dunne), the Vice-President-elect gave the new order of battle: "We would seek confrontation on every front. . . . The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us." Cheney's combative instincts and belief in an unfettered and secretive executive proved far more influential at the White House than Bush's campaign promise to be "a uniter, not a divider." Cheney behaved as if, notwithstanding the loss of the popular vote, conservative Republican domination could continue by sheer force of will. On domestic policy, the Administration made tax cuts and privatization its highest priority; and its conduct of the war on terror broke with sixty years of relatively bipartisan and multilateralist foreign policy.

The Administration's political operatives were moving in the same direction. The Republican strategist Matthew Dowd studied the 2000 results and concluded that the proportion of swing voters in America had declined from twenty-two to seven per cent over the previous two decades, which meant that mobilizing the Party's base would be more important in 2004 than attracting independents. The strategist Karl Rove's polarizing political tactics (which brought a new level of demographic sophistication to the old formula) buried any hope of a centrist Presidency before Bush's first term was half finished.

Ed Rollins said, "Rove knew his voters, he stuck to the message with consistency, he drove that base hard -- and there's nothing left of it. Today, if you're not rich or Southern or born again, the chances of your being a Republican are not great." As long as Bush and his party kept winning elections, however slim the margins, Rove's declared ambition to create a "permanent majority" seemed like the vision of a tactical genius. But it was built on two illusions: that the conservative era would stretch on indefinitely, and that politics matters more than governing. The first illusion defied history; the second was blown up in Iraq and drowned in New Orleans.

Packer interviews various people who argue that conservatism is still the principal political belief in the country today, but that conservatives need to find a more functional way of governing with their beliefs.

"If Republican politicians quote Reagan, their political operatives study Nixon," Frum writes. "Republicans have been reprising Nixon's 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well." He adds, "How many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale? Voters want solutions to the problems of today." Polls reveal that Americans favor the Democratic side on nearly every domestic issue, from Social Security and health care to education and the environment. The all-purpose Republican solution of cutting taxes has run its course. Frum writes, "There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of government, we must prove that we care enough about government to manage it well."

David Brooks "was even more scathing than Frum."

Brooks called the conservative think tanks "sclerotic," but much conservative journalism has become just as calcified and ingrown. Last year, writing in The New Republic, Sam Tanenhaus revealed a 1997 memo in which Buckley -- who had originally hired Brooks at National Review on the strength of a brilliant undergraduate parody that he had written of Buckley -- refused to anoint him as his heir because Brooks, a Jew, is not a "believing Christian." At Commentary, the neoconservative counterpart to National Review, the editorship was bequeathed by Norman Podhoretz, its longtime editor, to his son John, whose crude op-eds for the New York Post didn't measure up to Commentary's intellectual past. A conservative journalist familiar with both publications said that what mattered most at the Christian National Review was doctrinal purity, whereas at the Jewish Commentary it was blood relations: "It's a question of who can you trust, and it comes down to religious fundamentals."

Packer ends with some pap on Obama and McCain, including riffs on Obama as McGovern ("Goldwater was to Reagan as McGovern is to Obama") and McCain retracing LBJ's footsteps as the latter launched his Great Society War on Poverty.

While reading Perlstein's Nixonland, I noted a number of analogies between Obama's campaign and McGovern's -- most pointedly, the pivotal role Pennsylvania played in backing the party machine candidates. Other potential similarities have been narrowly avoided this time, like taking credentials disputes to the convention. The Democratic Party was in disarray at the time, split on two axes: over the still-raging Vietnam War, and between the old party bosses and reformers, mostly motivated by their opposition to the Vietnam War. The Iraq War divides today's Democrats, but less so, and the party bosses are long gone. But also looking back, we have 1972 as a lesson: the Party's desertion of McGovern may have seemed like a small thing at the time, but now it looms large, a turning point in the nation's history that we would have been better off not taking. The starkest example was George Meany's refusal to back McGovern: you can date the AFL-CIO's decline from that point -- if the unions weren't smart enough to realize that the escalating cold war was a form of class struggle aimed straight at their throats, you could even say they deserved what they got.

The Democrats are unlikely to be as divided this time, in large part because they've been so irrelevant they have nothing left to get defensive about. McGovern's change was directed as much against his own party as against Nixon, who seemed less a partisan threat than a peculiarly chameleonic form of slime. The Democrats still dominated Congress, most state and local governments, including almost every major city. They still thought of themselves as the establishment, and they still owned a lot of responsibility for the Vietnam War. McGovern couldn't change America until he cleaned up the mess in his own backyard, and that's where he got ambushed. Obama has had similar problems from Democrats who think that the way to win is to follow the Republican lead while feigning slightly more sanity. But those Democrats haven't had much of a winning record, especially now it's clear now how Clinton's two terms wound up playing into Bush's hand. (Not that Obama would ever define change so sharply.)

Then there's the Nixon role, which McCain doesn't seem to be up to (even if he wanted, which I wouldn't put past him). He's neither the incumbent of 1972 nor the disengaged statesman of 1968; rather, he's more like Humphrey in 1968, a lame substitute for a lamer duck, remembered somewhat fondly for integrity he has long since abandoned.

Tom Engelhardt: Welcome to the Age of Homeland Insecurity. Starts with something about Tai Chi, then makes a point I've tried to argue for 5-6 years now:

Now, jump to September 11, 2001 and its aftermath -- and you know the Tai Chi version of history from there. Think of it as a grim cosmic joke -- that the 9/11 attacks, as apocalyptic as they looked, were anything but. The true disasters followed and the wounds were largely self-inflicted, as the most militarily powerful nation on the planet used its own force to disable itself.

Terrorism is an act of the desperate as much as the dastardly. The terrorist act itself settles nothing. What really matters is the reaction. Rarely the reaction is to cave in -- like Britain did in surrendering to the Stern Gang, or Reagan backing out of Lebanon after realizing that his provocations had backfired -- but in those cases the underlying power dynamics were already tilted against the targets. Slightly more often terrorism cracks open an existing fissure, but only if it provokes a harsh and unconscionable reaction -- the Boston Tea Party kicked off the American Revolution but only because the British cranked up the repression, outraging hitherto unconcerned colonists. Again, this works only where the latent political power favors the terrorists.

Al Qaeda had no such power base -- not at all in the US, and not really anywhere else, even in Afghanistan where the ruling Taliban was torn between their traditional courtesy of respect for guests and their dislike of Osama Bin Laden's mischief. But Al Qaeda hit the bullseye on 9/11, not only in terms of record numbers of people killed but more importantly in how they pushed George W Bush's button. Since then the US has done all the heavy lifting in its own bankrupt self-destruction. The rest of the piece documents that decline, with the emphasis on bankruptcy.

Al Qaeda is never going to triumph in even their small part of the world, no matter how poorly the US fares. They simply don't have the political appeal to mainstream Muslims, let alone anyone else, and the weaker the US becomes the more their one legitimate calling card fades away. Now the big problem is that Bush and his supporters have painted themselves into a corner by arguing that any US retreat will be seen as a victory for terrorism. The real answer is that both sides have lost, and sheer stubbornness keeps them losing more. Someone needs to come up with a politically palatable explanation for that -- my own is that no one wins at war, so it's always better to reduce conflict.

Thumbing through the mail pile. The May 26, 2008 issue of The Nation has a piece by Benjamin Lytal on Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun. I don't have time/interest to read through it, but I was struck by the big print teaser:

Hamsun liked Mussolini before he liked Hitler; he liked a strong man and a simple solution.

He wasn't alone on that, and he still isn't. It's almost instinctive that in times of stress people line up behind whichever would-be leader seems the strongest, most determined, most self-assured. Mussolini and Hitler exploited that instinct. So did Winston Churchill. So did George W. Bush. You can add more names to that list, mostly disasters. (I could write a book on why Churchill is no exception; even his prosecution of WWII should be viewed skeptically.)

Perhaps this instinct was useful back when humans were organized in small tribes, their threats limited to neighboring tribes and occasional wild animals. The instinct is certainly dysfunctional now, and not just because fearless leaders like Bush are little more than fakes. Threats nowadays have become as complex as our lives, requiring a very different set of skills. Sooner or later we'll adjust our instincts, but later seems more likely, and too late is a distinct possibility -- even with such clear examples as Mussolini, Hitler, Churchill, and Bush to learn from.

Dahr Jamail: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007, Haymarket Books)

Along with Nir Rosen and Patrick Cockburn, Jamail has been one of the few reporters who have covered the invasion and occupation of Iraq from outside the confines of the US "safety net" -- not just the Green Zone but the US propaganda mission that seeks to control how we view what has happened in Iraq. I picked this up from the library, and unfortunately didn't get very far into it -- too many other distractions, too little time. The following are a few quotes. With more time I'm sure I could have found more. Some day I will.

(pp. 37-38):

Some of the men we spoke with in the fuel line were aware of the fact that Halliburton subsidiary KBR had just been caught by the Pentagon for grossly overcharging them by importing gasoline into Iraq from Kuwait at $2.65 per gallon. Iraqi concerns were able to do the job for just under one dollar per gallon. Halliburton, which had Dick Cheney as its chairman and CEO from 1995 to 2000 before he relinquished his position in order to become vice president of the United States, was unabashedly looting the Pentagon. By this time, Cheney's old company, which he still had financial ties with, had obtained billions of dollars of contracts in Iraq. (No one knows exactly how much money has been contracted in total, but as of the time of this writing, Halliburton's overall contracts for LOGCAP and oil infrastructure rebuilding have totaled approximately $20 billion in Iraq. Total expenditures on U.S. corporations operations in Iraq on reconstruction and other services is about $50 billion. LOGCAP is a Logistics Civil Augmentation Program with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is Halliburton's largest government contract. Under this contract, Halliburton is responsible for providing supplies and services to the military on a global basis. Services include construction of military housing for troops, transporting food and supplies to bases, and serving food.

It's worth noting that it was Dick Cheney, as defense secretary in 1992, who spearheaded the movement to privatize most of the military's civil logistics activities. Under Cheney's direction, $9 million was paid by the Pentagon to KBR to conduct a study to determine whether private companies like KBR should handle all the military's civil logistics. KBR's classified study conveniently concluded that greater privatization of logistics was in the government's best interest. Shortly thereafter, on August 3, 1992, Secretary Cheney awarded the first comprehensive LOGCAP contract to KBR. The Washington Post reported, "The Pentagon chose [KBR] to carry out the study and subsequently selected the company to implement its own plan." Three years later Cheney became CEO of Halliburton.

(pp. 44-45):

I had met [translator] Harb [al-Mukhtar] a few days before this second trip to Ramadi. At that time, he had been finishing up his work with a depleted uranium (DU) study team from Japan. He'd taken them all over southern Iraq with their Geiger counters to measure what he said were extremely high levels of radiation in particular locations. DU munitions are used during combat because they are extremely effective. Made of radioactive heavy metals that can effortlessly cut through armor, they leave a radioactive dust upon impact that filters through the air, water, and ground, contaminating everything it touches.

Uranium is a heavy metal and a radioactive poison whose toxicity is not debatable, even according to the director of the U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute, who stated in a report mandated by Congress, "No available technology can significantly change the inherent chemical and radiological toxicity of DU. These are intrinsic properties of uranium." In fact, even the primary U.S. Army training manual stated, "NOTE: (Depleted Uranium) Contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumptions." Nevertheless, hundreds of tons of DU munitions were used in the prior Gulf War, and the Pentagon admitted to using much more during this war. The effects on the Iraqi people had already been shown to be devastating.

(p. 60):

Things were already going poorly for the occupiers. According to the Department of Defense, by December 2003, U.S. soldiers reported to be sick, injured, or dead from the invasion/occupation numbered over ten thousand, a figure that kept rising, alarmingly, by the day. Resistance attacks on Americans were averaging over thirty per day, which amounted to an average over over 1.3 soldiers killed per day.

But, it was far worse for Iraqis. One of the doctors I interviewed at the Baghdad medical center informed me that the number of Iraqi children dying from malnutrition and disease had doubled sine the invasion, and natal mortality among women had tripled. Fear of kidnappings led to most children being kept at home. Women faced a constant threat of rape and abduction from criminal gangs on the rampage. Gunfire at all hours of the night and day had become familiar and commonplace in most areas of Baghdad.

It was gut-wrenching to witness the heavy toll that a dictatorial regime, multiple wars, sanctions, and now the occupation had taken on this ancient land. Environmentally, Iraq was a disaster area. Most people I knew, including myself, had the "Baghdad cough" from the impossibly high levels of pollution in the capital city. Many areas in southern Iraq were uninhabitable due to the presence of contaminated soil and water from the use of depleted uranium munitions by the U.S. military during the 1991 Gulf War. The scars of war were visible everywhere: on the buildings, the landscape, and the people.

Steve Benen: McCain releases tax returns -- at least, some of them. Another way McCain is the new Kerry: his wife holds almost all of the money. Maybe not as much as Teresa Heinz Kerry, but something on the order of $100 million. Kerry initially tried to get by with only releasing his own tax returns, and got slammed by the Republicans for the slight. Not sure of all the ins and outs, but McCain's wife is his second, after he dumped his first for a younger, richer model.

Steve Benen: Debating the debate, complaining about complaining. More fallout from the last Pennsylvania debate. Key quote:

Yesterday afternoon, Bill Clinton suggested Obama was "whining," adding, "If you don't want to play, keep your uniform off."

The first level of inanity here is to treat running for president as a game. The higher level is to treat the media's framework of gotcha trivia as the proper set of rules for the game. Maybe the Clintons are so satisfied with the mere idea of being president that they're willing to forego any serious issues and cater to the media's whims, but let's say you had a hypothetical candidate who felt like running because he or she thought that real issues matter. What should such a candidate do? The campaign path is already like a potato sack race, where all the candidates are made to make fools of themselves in order to get taken seriously. Is it any wonder that campaigns like this result in winners like we have had?

Fred Kaplan: Stonewall Petraeus. Last week's big no-new-news event was the testifying of Petraeus and Crocker before Congress. Yes, we've made progress, but no, not really. No, we can't withdraw any troops, because even if we've made progress it won't hold without the troops. Oh, and Iran is causing us a lot of trouble, although no way near as much as they might if they tried.

Fred Kaplan: Bush's Double Talk on Iraq. As usual, Bush heard what he wanted to hear from Petraeus, then made up some more for good measure.

Tony Karon: Iraq: Ain't a Damn Thing Changed. Karon was so impressed by the Petraeus-Crocker testimony that he decided to re-run a column he wrote on April 26, 2007, unchanged.

Helena Cobban: Iraq: A Sinkhole, Not a Quagmire. The semantic differences betwen sinkhole and quagmire are overstated -- even if quagmire suggests that there's a end point to slog to, it doesn't offer much confidence in one's ability to get there. Otherwise, a good summary of the present situation.

Frank Rich: The Petraeus-Crocker Show Gets the Hook. Once and future drama critic: "The best General Petraeus could muster was a bit of bloodless Beltway-speak . . . He couldn't even argue that we're on a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people. That would require him to acknowledge that roughly five million of those people, 60 percent of them children, are now refugees receiving scant help from either our government of Nuri al-Maliki's." Last paragraph is worth quoting, referring back to the new Errol Morris documentary, Standard Operating Procedure:

This war has lasted so long that Americans, even the bad apples of Abu Ghraib interviewed by Mr. Morris, have had the time to pass through all five of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief over its implosion. Though dead-enders like Mr. McCain may have only gone from denial to anger to bargaining, most others have moved on to depression and acceptance. Unable to even look at the fiasco anymore, the nation is now just waiting for someone to administer the last rites.

There's a significant asymmetry in US electoral politics. Political parties compete to assemble a majority coalition of votes, but they also compete for money, which not only influences votes but to some extent is necessary even to establish a candidacy. While votes are, in principle at least, equally distributed, money is not. This means that both parties have to curry favor with the rich, regardless of the interests of their prospective voter coalition. This presents fundamentally different problems for the Republican and Democratic parties.

The Republicans blatantly favor the interests of the rich, which has long given them a substantial advantage in raising money. Their problem is that the rich are a tiny minority in America, one that they have to opportunistically broaden to win elections. The money certainly helps. The Republicans have put together a very efficient propaganda machine, especially adept at exploiting non-economic issues that do not significantly detract from the party's sponsors. Their success is a remarkable story, especially in how they've used thin vote margins to promote their extreme ideological agenda.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are torn between the two pillars of American politics. Their voting base is working class, but they have to balance their voter appeal off against their funder appeals. For numerous reasons, the latter predominate. The result is that it is impossible for them to promote a consistent populist platform. One casualty of this inconsistency has been voter turnout: because the Democrats deliver so little to the poor many poor voters don't see much point in politics. Needing to bridge between their funders and voters, Democrats emphasize moderation, reconciliation, a mixed society. One effect is wishy-washy messages. Another is overeagerness to compromise, even when the other side is clearly wrong.

In theory, you could eliminate fundraising from politics, thereby getting rid of the distorting effects of money (not to mention the flat out corruption), and restoring democracy -- the ideal that each vote is equal to any other vote. One reason this is hard to do is that the current system selects for politicians who are adept at raising money. Another reason is that the current system favors the rich by giving them about two parties vs. maybe one-half for the poor. The net effect is that nothing political can happen that runs against their interests.

That the Democrats are raising more money this year than the Republicans are reflects the fact that no matter how much they claim to support the rich, their extremist ideology and their corrupt implementation has actually done immeasurable harm. However, that only makes possible a very limited set of reforms -- much more limited than what is actually needed to move back toward the ideal of America as a land of democracy, equality, and opportunity.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been getting increasingly nervous that the continuing degeneration of the Democratic presidential campaign will tear the party far enough apart to let the otherwise unthinkable happen: four more years of GOP terror. One thing that stimulated this fear was reading Donald Critchlow's The Conservative Ascendancy, which has capsule recaps of all the presidential elections, at least from 1964 on. In three cases incumbent presidents were defeated, each following primary challenges that Critchlow puts a lot of weight on: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and the former George Bush. One could also add Johnson/Humphrey in 1968 to that list. Admittedly, the Democratic nominee isn't the incumbent this year, but a unified Democratic party would have been presumed to be a strong favorite. That expectation is palpably weakening as the nicks and scratches of a campaign has gone through a stretch that has been barren of real election results.

The degeneration is mostly coming out of the Clinton camp as they try to find some traction with the nomination slowly slipping from their grasp. At present, Clinton is trailing slightly in delegates and in votes, slightly ahead in early superdelegate endorsements but losing her edge lately, and way behind in money. I figure the last of these will prove fatal: the Republican Party can usually finance promising candidates, but the Democrats especially like someone who can raise his or her own money. Meanwhile, Clinton's favorite tactic is to hypothesize tests that supposedly put Obama at a disadvantage, but which she's hardly rock solid on either. Most obvious is the "Commander in Chief Test" -- her experience at rubber stamping DOD expenses and her propensity for hot-headed posturing don't make for much of a case. Most insidious is the whole debate over electability, which all too readily slips into race baiting, even though polls show prejudice against voting for a woman is if anything stronger than prejudice against voting for a black man (unless, that is, the polls are tainted by the woman in question). Then there's the whining over Michigan and Florida. The problem with all of these things is not just that they induce division among Democrats but that many of them are readymade for McCain to exploit in the fall.

But the biggest problem with Clinton's campaign is and always has been the sense of inevitability. She was the front runner because she started with an incumbent-level brand name campaign organization, backed by the sense that Bill Clinton was the only Democrat in recent times to have solved the problem of how to beat the Republicans. The effect was that were Obama tries to sell change, Clinton promises restoration. I don't see that as an idea that's been at all well tested. The Bush restoration, which a Clinton return unfortunately recalls, at least moved a generation forward with mostly different people and priorities. Clinton promises something unprecedentedly close to a third term -- of the regime if not strictly the figurehead -- and no one really knows how that will play with the voters.

That's hardly the only baggage Clinton carries. For whatever combination of reasons, she's fallen behind Obama. She's managed to avoid being eliminated by winning some big Democratic-leaning states, benefitting from labor, city and state machines, white ethnics (who seem, along with Republican-leaning southerners, to be the last redoubts of racial backlash). She'll probably do that again in Pennsylvania, then lose North Carolina and Indiana to wind up about where she is, not quite numerically eliminated but still behind, having accomplished nothing but to drag the decision out.

But there would be a simple way for Clinton to undo much of the damage her campaign is causing. That would be to withdraw and go a couple of steps further: endorse Obama and offer her services as a vice-presidential candidate, which would remind her supporters every day of their stake in the Obama campaign, and dispell any notion that Democrats are divided in such a critical election. Right now I'm unfavorable enough on Clinton I'm not sure this would be a good thing. But it's probably an option if she wants it. For one thing, it would go some ways toward mitigating some big problems I see with her in the top slot: it seriously cuts down on her patronage, which means her ability to reconstruct the previous Clinton administration; it keeps Bill Clinton out of the White House, with its inevitable who's-in-charge confusion; it keeps her away from the commander in chief conceit, limiting her greatest liability, which is a tendency to get belligerent in foreign affairs. Conversely, it sets Obama up to set the public tone, to work his vision mojo. There's at least one precedent for this: JFK/LBJ. That didn't work out perfectly in every respect, but at least it held the party together to win a close election reversing an 8-year Republican hold on the White House.

Postscript: It occurs to me that Clinton could even take the Cheney vow, promising she won't run for president to succeed Obama. Of course, she wouldn't be as effective, not to mention destructive, as Cheney, whose unique power is partly a reflection on Bush. She also wouldn't be as good assassination insurance, especially given that most bullets come from the right.

Missed posting yesterday, after posting at least something every day in March.

Anne Flaherty: Military Feels Fuel-Cost Gouge in Iraq. AP article, noticed it in Wichita Eagle this morning. Reports that the US military is paying an average of $3.23/gallon for fuel in Iraq (about what we're paying here in Kansas), which given the Pentagon's penchant for gas guzzlers works out to $88 per soldier per day.

Some lawmakers say oil-rich allies in the Middle East should be doing more to subsidize fuel costs because of the stake they have in a secure Iraq.

Maybe they realize that the US isn't doing squat to stabilize and reconstruct a secure Iraq. Maybe they just appreciate the up side of free markets, which allows scarce commodities to rise in price until pain pinches demand. Bush in Iraq actually works both sides of this equation: adding to the demand while taking much of Iraq's oil off the market. Exxon Mobil doesn't flinch from taking advantage of the market. Why should Saudi Aramco? This is about the only positive payback the Saudis have received from billions of dollars they've paid out to subsidize US war aims, especially in Afghanistan from 1980 to when we pulled the rug out from under their buddies in the Taliban.

Tony Karon: A Teachable Moment in Basra. Summary quote, followed by a long list of examples (Somalia, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq):

The pattern is all too common: The U.S. or an ally or proxy launches a military offensive against a politically popular "enemy" group; Bush and his minions welcome the violence as "clarifying" matters, demonstrating "resolve," or, in the most grotesque rhetorical flourish of all, the "birth pangs" of a brave new world. Each time, the "enemy" proves far more resilient than expected, largely because Bush and his allies have failed to recognize that each adversary's power should be measured in political support rather than firepower; and the net effect of the offensive invariably leaves the enemy strengthened and the U.S. and its allies even weaker than before they launched the offensive.

That the US (especially Bush) can screw up so consistently and not incur the wrath of American voters just goes to show that the consequences of success or failure in the Middle East are relatively trivial for most Americans -- contrary to all those admonitions on how we can't afford to lose.

While the analysts -- at least the ones I bother reading -- are pretty much unanimous that the Basra offensive hurt Maliki (and the US) and helped Sadr (and Iran, diplomatically more so than because they have much of a stake in Sadr), it has led to a major purge of the Iraqi Army, with those who refused to fight the Sadrists out and much or all of ISCI's Badr Militia (the ones actually trained in Iran) joining in. This augurs for similar offensives in the future, which Bush will no doubt support as enthusiastically as he did this one.

Juan Cole: Why Al-Maliki Attacked Basra. The analysis is starting to come out now, not to mention the spin. Why did Maliki launch this "predictable fiasco, another in a long line of strategic failures for the sickly and divided Iraqi government, which survives largely because it is propped up by the United States"?

Three main motivations present themselves: control of petroleum smuggling, staying in power (including keeping U.S. troops around to ensure it), and the achievement of a Shiite super-province in the south. A southern super-province would spell a soft partition of the country, benefiting Shiites in the long term while cutting Sunnis out of substantial oil revenues, both licit and illicit. But all of the motivations have to do with something President Bush established as a benchmark in January 2007: upcoming provincial elections.

Still, this only adds up if you think Maliki thought he could decisively defeat the Sadrists. What I find striking is not only that he couldn't, but that he threw in the towel so quickly. He doesn't really want the provincial elections --they've always been part of the US reconciliation plan, but would only serve to weaken Maliki's central government (such as it is). So it's at least possible that he went along with the hair brained scheme to show Bush that elections will just hurt the US. Whether the message has gotten through isn't clear, but it's pretty clearly been sent.

Charles Crain: How Moqtada al-Sadr Won in Basra. Argues that one thing that Maliki's act of force clarified is that Moqtada al-Sadr is in effective charge of the Mehdi Army. More specifically, he's in a position where he can restrain the militia for political reasons, but doesn't necessarily direct it when it springs into action. He is a man to be dealth with, cautiously.

Helena Cobban: US Position in Iraq Eroding Fast. Whether the US started the attack on Basra, ushered it along, or just went along for a joy ride, it's clear now that the only force in the region that wanted stability and was able to do something about it was Iran. I'm sure that matters little to a Bush Administration that still fancies Iran as the Great Satan, the sole unrepentant member of the once notorious Axis of Evil. On the other hand, if some future administration finds it wants to get something accomplished to start disengaging from the abyss, it looks like Iran is the answer. Bush has done little but play into Iran's hands the last six years anyway, taking out Iran's enemies and installing Iran's friends in their place.

I suppose we should have known we were in for big trouble last week (March 24, to be exact) when Frederick Kagan announced, "The civil war in Iraq is over." The Surgemeister has never been right yet, but even by his standards this is pretty spectacular. With Dick Cheney and John McCain touching base in Iraq recently, with General Petraeus due for a DC dog and pony show on how the Surge has brought peace and prosperity to Baghdad, with the withdrawal promised back at the start of the Surge on indefinite Pause, it looks like all the planets were aligned to tug Kagan's brain even further than usual out of orbit.

I've read a few theories about why Maliki decided to lapse from his well established habits of do-nothingism to pick a war with the Sadr faction of Iraqi Shiism that brought him to power, but I haven't read anything convincing. Most likely the orders came from Washington, given how readily everyone from Bush on down fell into line, with US air power and tanks already taking over much of the fighting. But why Washington would push for a plan like this is hard to fathom. You'd think they'd be happy just to leave well enough alone and try to play out the clock, leaving the mess for the next administration. But that line of thinking assumes they're conscious enough to realize they're fucked and there's nothing much they can do about it. Since they have done something about it, we need to focus on dumber lines of reasoning, since clearly they're not smart enoguh to stay clear of this mess.

One question is whether they think they can effectively defeat Sadr. One problem is that the military damage they do manage to inflict will be self-limiting: the more dominant they are, the more they will drive the Mahdi Army underground into a protracted guerrilla war. Their chances at a military rout of a well armed, popularly supported, and increasingly decentralized movement are vanishingly small. The far bigger problem is political: it's inconceivable that US-backed Maliki unleashing war in Shiite neighborhoods will do anything but boost the Sadr movement's legitimacy as the only credible force willing and able to stand up against the US and their Iraqi cronies.

Any way you slice it, this sure looks like a losing move. So why? Here you have two basic choices. On the one hand, you can guess that the US thinks it can win this war, because the idiots-in-chief always think they can win everything no matter how often they're proven wrong. With Bush and Cheney, it's hard to dismiss this possibility no matter how stupid it looks. On the other hand, it's doubtful that Maliki is that stupid, which raises the other option. It's possible that Sadr, working behind the scenes of his cease fire, was on his way to putting together some sort of alliance that could send the US packing and Maliki into hiding. That might make one desperate enough to wage a preemptive strike, even if the prospects of it working for long were slim -- and with the US time is especially important.

As you'll recall, the US occupation was on the ropes back in spring 2004, with the US fighting Sadr as well as the Sunnis, and losing spectacularly on both fronts, but more dangerously with Sadr backing the Sunnis. The US backed off, making deals with both sides, most of all to keep them separate. Sadr, for his part, hurt himself immensely when he sat by idly while the US punitively destroyed Fallujah after the 2004 election. His sectarian Islamism and fanatical anti-Baath stance undercut his appeal as an Iraqi nationalist, and that's kept him on the sidelines ever since. But nobody else's in a position to do what needs to be done. Right-wingers like Fred Barnes have been saying all along that sooner or later the US has to take out Sadr. For them, later is coming sooner now -- hitting Sadr later in the election may be too much, and waiting until the election's over may be too late. They may figure this is the best chance they're going to get, so caution be damned.

One side effect of the siege that we're already seeing is the shutdown of Iraq's remaining oil exports, pushing pump prices up to soon-to-be record levels. Presumably that's not the reason, but Cheney may find the synergies gratifying.

Glenn Greenwald: Fred Kagan on Monday. The Kagan quote and more, including several updates.

Other than Bill Kristol and Fred's brother, war cheerleader Robert Kagan, nobody has been more wrong about more things with regard to Iraq than supreme war theorist Fred Kagan. He's also deemed by the establishment media and the Bush administration to be the most respectable and knowledgeable expert on Iraq. Within that depressing contradiction lies most of the answers as to why we have destroyed that country and will continue to do so indefinitely.

Fred Kaplan: Warlord vs. Warlord. An early attempt to sort out what's happening in Basra. I like the parenthetical line: "The lively blogger who calls himself Abu Muqawama speculates that Bush officials have embraced ISCI because, unlike Sadr, its leaders speak English." ISCI is the former SCIRI -- founded, trained, and armed originally by Iran, but close to the US occupation, unlike Sadr's group, which is wholly based in Iraq with no foreign entanglements. This points to the sort of shallow reasoning the US specializes in, even though it leads to all sorts of insane confusion about which bad guys Iran must be backing even though Iran's real allies in Iraq are actually our so-called good guys.

Patrick Cockburn: Iraq Implodes as Shia Fights Shia. Another report:

Mr Sadr's followers believe the government is trying to eliminate them before elections in southern Iraq later this year, which they are expected to win. [ . . . ]

The supporters of Mr Sadr, who form the largest political movement in Iraq, blame the Americans for giving the go-ahead for Mr Maliki's offensive against them and supporting it with helicopters and bomber aircraft.

Cockburn notes that Sunnis seem to be supporting Maliki, seeing the Mehdi Army as little more than a death squad. This suggests Sadr hasn't made much progress in forming a united anti-US front. His short-sighted failure to do so is what allows the occupation to carry on, despite its destruction and unpopularity.

If these events prove anything, it's that the argument that the US has any sort of moral obligation to stay in Iraq to fix or at least steady things that it wrecked is completely at odds with the actual US presence in Iraq. Balancing conflicting forces and nudging them toward some sort of political compromise might be desirable, but that's not part of the skill set Bush et al. have brought to the country. They persist in picking sides, backing favorites, working out longstanding grudges. They think force works, and they see politics as just another means to extend their force. If it was ever going to work, you'd think you'd see some sign by now. As this proves, there is no such sign.

I just posted an updated recipe page on something called Eretz Israel Cake. Joan Nathan published the recipe in her cookbook, The Foods of Israel Today. I've made it three times now, and the latest was possibly the best cake I've ever made. The ingredients include marzipan, dates, and lots of oranges -- touted as the taste of the land of Israel. Of course, under a different twist of history it could just as well be Land of Palestine Cake.

I made it for a potluck dinner we had to discuss Sandy Tolan's remarkable book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East. Seemed like an appropriate thing to bring.

I've long had a section on the website here with a collection of recipes, mostly cribbed from cookbooks with minor annotations. One reason is just that it gives me easy recourse to look up old favorite recipes, especially when I'm travelling and don't have access to the usual cookbooks. But I've only updated the cache occasionally, and right now it's in limbo between two designs and indexing schemes. A lot of things should be there but aren't, but if you rummage around you'll find some very good recipes -- mostly international (Spanish, Turkish, Indian, and Chinese are staples here) plus a few down home favorites (like my mother's chicken and dumplings).

I also have a website section for books -- another longterm, slow-evolving project, although I've been giving it a lot more attention lately. The link above to The Lemon Tree puts you there. I originally started collecting comments I had written on books I've read, but that soon evolved into collecting quotes (with or without annotation). Most of these have been posted at one point or another in the blog, but they're more accessible in the books section. The page on The Lemon Tree should give you a pretty broad sense of the book.

The books section currently lists 35 books on Israel. I've read two-thirds of them (plus a few others, some showing up in other categories). A couple more are on my shelf, and a few more are books that I've written something about based on a review (e.g., Dennis Ross, who is very, very low on my reading priority list). Tolan's book is especially good for how it personalizes the conflict, but also for the extreme rigor of its writing. Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arabs is probably the best general history up to 1998 or so, but it misses the Barak-Sharon destruction of the Oslo Peace Process. Richard Ben Cramer's How Israel Lost: The Four Questions has a lot of insight into the politics of perpetual war in Israel, although subsequent events have overtaken him as well. I don't think anyone has taken full account of how morally corrosive the Bush administration, with W's dead certain faith in the clarifying power of force, could have been to Israel. (The news today from Iraq, along with Bush's musings on the need to confront outlaws, are one more instance of this mindset.)

At some point I should add cookbooks to the books section, and cross-reference the recipes. Nathan's cookbook is rife with Israeli propaganda, as well as Israeli glosses on mostly middle eastern recipes, plus a few specialties of Arik Sharon's wife. Still, the Eretz Israel cake is a wonder. Like Bashir and Dahlia's lemon tree, it's something we all can savor.

Gene Sperling wrote a book a couple of years back, called The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity (2005, Simon & Schuster). He was touted as one of the top gurus of Clintonomics. The book looked to be short on insight and long on bullshit, but I had some minor interest in how he might try to play it, especially given the traps that Bushonomics dropped along the way. So I thought I might wait for the book to come out in paperback, but that still hasn't happened. Now he seems to be Hillary Clinton's economics spokeswonk. The Wichita Eagle has been running a series of columns -- McCain and Clinton down, Obama to go -- on how each of the presidential candidates proposes to address the economy. Sperling wrote Clinton's piece. It is as lamebrained as McCain's (written by Douglas Holtz-Eakin) was incoherent. (Both are here, on the Washington Post's website. Sperling leads off:

To solve the current crisis, Hillary Clinton believes we need sorely missed proactive policies that ask what is best for families on Main Street.

He then repeatedly refers back to this "Main Street Test" (always capitalized, sometimes in quotes), as in "Sometimes the best way to meet the Main Street Test is to directly assist those who live there." He even gets witty at one point, asking "can't we afford $30 billion to prevent Main Streets from turning into mean streets?" -- the $30 billion referring back to her proposed Emergency Housing Fund and/or the Bear Stearns bailout.

As someone who literally grew up on Main Street, I can relate to this notion as well as anyone, even though I'm skeptical that the 1,000 sq. ft., $30,000 houses on my block -- my parents bought one for less than $8,000 in 1949, and lived in it until they died in 2000 -- are Clinton's idea of Main Street. The mortgages going belly up these days are more likely to be on suburban cul de sacs, because that's where the overreach is: the gap between how well we think we're living and how poorly we're actually doing. Clinton seems to think Main Street is just another word for her chosen demographic, the sanctified Middle Class -- of "American Dream" fame, now every bit as illusory as Main Street.

But where the Middle Class is a time-tested cliché, and Main Street is a hoped-for cliché, the really lame thing is the Test. She's done this before with her Commander-in-Chief Test. Indeed, this seems to be her specialty: making up bogus standards, then declaring oneself to have passed while the competition fails. Maybe she likes the pass-fail aspect, or maybe she just likes playing games. But even if you take this at better than face value and assume that by Main Street she means people with more/less median incomes, wealth, and security, and that she would really like to do something to help those people, it still makes no sense to say that the Main Street Test holds the answer to every economic problem. Preventing the entire financial house of cards from collapsing is a much bigger matter than just how it affects Main Street.

Similarly, there are many other economic problems that are not all that well viewed from the middle. In particular, the poor have a much clearer view of economic risk and lack of opportunity than median earners have -- part of this is that the poor show what can happen to the currently better off if/when misfortune strikes, but the reasons for addressing these problems shouldn't be limited to the Middle Class fear of falling. There are other cases where the rich offer a clearer view -- often times as bad examples, but not always.

One quasi-interesting thing about the Fed's actions to date is that thus far they've enjoyed pretty much across-the-board support. That's basically because no one wants to see the whole system fall to its knees, and that's about all these stopgaps can try to prevent. But there are much bigger political problems, which hardly anyone is up to raising -- least of all presidential candidates. But the problems aren't likely to be avoidable for long.

John McCain's latest view of the future: "Today in Iraq, America and our allies stand on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism." Precipice? My dictionary gives two definitions: 1) An extremely steep or overhanging mass of rock; 2) The brink of a dangerous situation. Even the less metaphorical first defintion begs a question: how many allies can you fit on a precipice? (About as many as the US has?)

In the Wichita Eagle's article on the 4000th US soldier killed in Iraq, they go on to report a few more events of the day:

In Sunday's worst attack, a suicide bomber blew up a tanker laden with explosives at the entrance to an Iraqi army base in Mosul, a northern city described by the US military as the last urban stronghold of Sunni militants loyal to the group al-Qaida in Iraq.

At least 12 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 30 others injured along with 12 civilians, said army Brig. Gen. Mohammed Ahmed.

Another suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint in Mosul, killing one officer and injuring 10 other people, police said.

Militants pounded the capital with at least 16 rockets and seven mortar rounds Sunday, including three barrages aimed at the Green Zone, the Interior Ministry said. US officials did not immediately say who was responsible for the attack, but typically they blame rogue elements of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia for such attacks.

Sadr has ordered the militia to stand down until August, a move US officials credit with helping to reduce violence in Iraq. But a series of clashes with US and Iraqi security forces in Baghdad and south of the capital in recent days has frayed the truce.

Shiite neighborhoods also were hit in Sunday's rocket and mortar fire, which police said killed at least 13 people and injured 29, suggesting Sunni militants may have been firing rounds.

Gunmen in three cars sprayed bullets at commuters waiting to board minibus taxis, killing seven people and injuring 16 others in the mostly Shiite southeastern neighborhood of Zafaraniya, police said.

In the northwestern Shiite neighborhood of Shula, police said a suicide car bomber attacked a line of people waiting for gasoline, killing seven of them and inuring 12. The US military described the method of attack as a parked car bomb and put the toll at five dead and seven wounded.

Police in Baghdad also recovered the bodies of six people killed execution-style.

Northeast of the capital, two police officers were killed in drive-by shootings in Baqubah and Balad Ruz in Diyala provine, police said. Two other policemen were injured in the Baqubah attack.

South of Kirkuk, a roadside bomb exploded near an Iraqi military convoy, killing four soldiers, police said.

In other developments, the US military said it had verified the identities of six people killed in a helicopter strike near Samarra the previous day and determined that none of them were members of a US-backed neighborhood guard force known as the Sons of Iraq. A military statement said they were killed after five people were spotted conducting "suspicious activity" in an area known for raodside bombs. An Iraqi army commander and a local guard leader had said the men were manning a Sons of Iraq checkpoint.

The decision of tens of thousands of mostly Sunni Arab fighters to defend their neighborhoods against the insurgents they once backed or tolerated was another decisive factor in the ebb in violence. But tensions are building after a series of mistaken US strikes against the guards.

Meanwhile, George W Bush concluded: "The surge is working. And as a return on our success in Iraq, we've begun bringing some of our troops home. The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around -- it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror."

It's hard to imagine what Bush could possibly mean by victory. But McCain has a point about the precipice: it's the point from which every direction heads down, most (for lack of a better word) precipitously.

Michael Schwartz: How to Disintegrate a City. The history of the Battle of Baghdad. The Bush and McCain quotes above come from Tom Engelhardt's introduction. Schwartz has a book coming out in June, based on his remarkable series of TomDispatch posts: War Without End: The Iraq War in Context.

Evidently the number one obstacle in Israel to any sort of peace deal with Abbas isn't the opposition Likud or the rump-Sharonist party of Ehud Olmert but the new leader of the Labor Party, also Defense Minister, Ehud Barak. Helena Cobban recently had this to say about Barak, and I think it's worth quoting at length:

In the west, Ehud Barak is generally widely thought of as a relative "peacenik" among Israeli political leaders. In 1999, when he was head of the Labor Party, he was indeed elected PM on a strongly pro-peace platform. ("I will complete the negotiations with the Palestinians within 6-9 months," etc.) He failed miserably. In fact, he was hustled at the speed of light out of being the IDF's chief of staff into being head of Labor, and never had time to learn anything at all about politics or diplomacy along the way. Hence, the coalition that he headed in Israel fell apart in almost record time, because of his total lack of political skills. The "peace process" fell apart disastrously, too, bringing us in short order Sharon's disastrous September 2000 visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the outbreak of the Second Intifada, and Sharon's amazing triumphant re-entry into national leadership just 17 years after the Kahan Commission had said he should be banned from high office for life.

Along the way, Barak did make what could be described as two "drive-by, quickie" attempts at peacemaking. One with Hafez al-Asad, which failed miserably because of Barak's arrogance and duplicity (and Bill Clinton's complicity with both those aspects of Barak's behavior.) That failure almost certainly helped kill Hafez al-Asad. After that one failed, Barak turned those same attributes in Yasser Arafat's direction, forcing him to the completely ill-prepared Camp David 2 summit from which both Barak and Clinton emerged vociferously and in a quite one-sided way blaming Arafat.

My best friends in the Israeli peace movement heap a lot of blame on Barak for killing the Israeli peace movement at that point. By successfully spreading the (significantly inaccurate) story that he had made Arafat a "generous offer" and that Arafat had turned it down out of hand, Barak spread the idea very broadly in Israel and the US that the Israelis had "no partner for peace" on the Palestinian side.

Israel's Labour Party has always been a flawed vehicle for any hopes of concluding a just and sustainable peace. One problem with the party since its inception has been the extremely incestuous relationship between its leadership and that of the Israeli military. Some of the IDF's retired generals have become voices of good sense regarding the need for peacemaking; but many more of them have not. People like Ephraim Sneh, Binyamin ("Fouad") Ben-Eliezer, and Ehud Barak have taken into the party's upper echelons the mindset of bulldozers and bullies. They are also very much aware of the huge interests many of their friends and former colleagues have in the success of Israel's massive military-industrial complex.

A lot more could be said about Barak. I think his low point was after all but throwing the 2001 election to Sharon, he asked Sharon to return the favor and make him Defense Minister. Now he's finally made it, under Sharon's successor. He probably thinks of that as some form of vindication. More likely Olmert's just trying to figure out how to blow off the shotgun deal that Rice is trying to rope Olmert and Abbas into. He may figure that if anyone can sabotage a deal it is Barak. After all, Barak not only opposed Oslo from the start; he took a fall as the most incompetent Israeli Prime Minister ever just to kill Oslo in the end.