U2: Saints or sinners?

Transcendent, spiritual, stadium-sized music with the power to change the world or dreary, overblown, bombastic, vacuous, self-satisfied rubbish? On the eve of the re-issue of their first three albums, long-time U2 watchers Stuart Bailie and Hugh Linehan exchange thoughts on the world's biggest band

Dear Stuart

Let me start by attempting to be reasonable.

As a world-domination project, you'd have to accept that U2 have been extraordinarily successful. You can't gainsay their business acumen, or the force of will which took them to the top of the pile at a time when most of their contemporaries shied away from commercial success. And you'd have to give them considerable credit for the fact that they remained based in Ireland, at a time when everyone else was scrambling to get out of the place. And yes, I acknowledge that lots of people love them. But lots of people love golf. There's no accounting . . .

Personally, I can't stand their horrible, overblown, clodhopping music.

Those bombastic stage shows. Those bloody "anthems" (if I want an anthem, I'll go to a football match). For more than 30 years, the U2 sound has been an irritating and persistent bluebottle in the room of my life.

Okay, there were a couple of songs on Boy that were just about tolerable.

And Achtung Baby had some listenable moments. Apart from that, it's been a long, long, dreary ride, from the mulletted histrionics of the early 1980s to the ersatz Americana of Joshua Tree and the Spinal Tappery of Rattle and Hum, on to the hyper-extended post-modern jokes of the 1990s, and the carefully calculated snooze-rock of the past decade or so.

I've tried to be open-minded. Having avoided them like the plague for decades, I went to one of the Slane concerts a few years ago, and to Croke Park more recently. On both occasions, all my worst prejudices were confirmed: vacuous, self-satisfied stadium rock garnished with trite sloganeering. Never again.

And there's something creepy about how coverage of U2 in Ireland resembles the sort of political journalism you'd find in the softer sort of totalitarian state. Their doings are charted dutifully - a few darts may be allowed at their pomposity - but is there a popular music critic in the country who has come out to declare that he/she can't stand them? Can it be that none of them has noticed how rubbish U2's music is? Over to you.

Best wishes, Hugh

Dear Hugh

Interesting that you believe there's some kind of media conspiracy at home which forbids criticism of U2. I would argue the contrary, that Irish hacks are forever trying to score points and to raise their petty reputations by tilting at Bono. Occasionally, the likes of Eamonn McCann may hit the target, but mostly you get the creaking jibes and a few local observations, when the baby photos are fetched out and the debate gets hopelessly parochial.

A few years ago, I was asked to write something for a Dublin broadsheet about the band. A secondary brief from the editor revealed that he wanted dirt, dishonour and disparagement. His suggestions were lazily conceived and entirely motivated by begrudgery. What is it with your city? Sorry pal, but U2 are an astonishing band.

They did in fact deliver the worst gig I have ever witnessed - the Popmart launch in Las Vegas, 1997, when they combined an unfinished album with an over-cooked production. It sucked so badly that I would pay huge sums just to revisit the awful details. Conversely, I have seen a handful of U2 performances when Bono has willed something exceptional out of the band, his audience and his own modest proportions. On such a night, he can summon up the transcendent - a place out of linear time and rational thought. Van Morrison can take you higher into that place, but U2 are still looking for different ways to get there. When they fail, it's mostly forgivable.

The late Bill Graham once remarked that Bono, like Bob Geldof and Phil Lynott, was a tireless overachiever. He needed those qualities to rise out of Dublin, a city that lacked a music industry, that was primarily grey and dowdy - that couldn't even muster up a decent punk band. Bono and Gavin Friday went off and created an imagined village, a place that celebrated the odd and the uncomfortable. They gave themselves peculiar names and took mime lessons. Their early songs were studies in innocence, ecstasy and corruption, which is why Boy still sounds like an immensely bold effort.

Rock'n'roll bands tend to be random blooms that wither quickly. The survival of U2 is a fascinating aspect. Edge has been able to parlay with Bono's flitting imagination, allowing his own art to prosper. Larry has a signature rattle on the snare and, wisely, Adam plays the straight guy. It works perfectly. And yes, they have a moral dimension that keeps their singer motivated and makes those stadium-sized platforms a necessary place to deliver the pitch. What's not to admire?

Yours, Stuart

Dear Stuart

Your point about Dublin's inferiority to points north and south when it comes to musical creativity is undoubtedly true. But I don't see what it has to do with the subject at hand. Tilting at Bono is indeed a minor national sport, but that's also off the subject, which I thought was supposed to be the music.

I'm intrigued but not particularly surprised that disliking the U2 canon is seen as a sign of begrudgery and moral turpitude. Does that only apply to people from Dublin, or is it universal? As I've already said, I admire their will to success, and I acknowledge the contribution they've made to this country. But I'm sorry - what you see as transcendence, I hear as bathos. What started out as a mildly interesting post-punk band rapidly became a grandiloquent exercise in religiosity as mass entertainment. Then it got worse.

And call me bigoted, but as far as I'm concerned, anyone who sets out to change the world by taking mime lessons has already taken a wrong turn in life.

Yours, Hugh

Dear Hugh

Let's talk about spirituality, the engine that drives the U2 machine. In the early days, it was viewed as a freakish aspect with no place in punk rock and the era that followed. I think it's fascinating that Bono, Larry and Edge were informed by charismatic Christianity and the Shalom group in particular. In the early days, U2's friends in the media were protective of this aspect. They feared that the cynics would scoff, and in time they did.

The second album, October, found Bono at his most preachy and the songs at their least interesting. Soon after, the band broke from their religious community and have been much more ambivalent since then. Achtung Baby is the classic expression of faith in turmoil, and I think you appreciate this.

I also admire the themes of renewal and jubilation of All That You Can't Leave Behind. While rock'n'roll has just about used up all its fuel, Bono has put the accent on one last positive push, allied to collective responsibility. The spiritual notion of unconditional love - agape - has something to do with this.

Bono's lyrics are rich with the Psalms and the Gospels. He uses characters such as Judas and Noah to creative ends. Coming from an island where dogmatic religion has been used to disgraceful ends, I'm wary of any form of Bible-thumping. But Bono, like Nick Cave, can still make the old book sing.

Yours, Stuart

Dear Stuart

You may have helped me put my finger on one of the reasons why the whole thing doesn't work for me: it's not the aspiration towards transcendence, it's the literalness with which that aspiration is couched. I have some sympathy for the friends of the band who tried to conceal the Shalom connection, because in the tribal wars of the late 1970s/early 1980s, it would have been used to give them a ferocious kicking. But there's no escaping the fact that at times there is a strong whiff of the happy-clappy Folk Mass about U2.

Am I applying a double standard? Possibly. I may be an atheist, but I've never really had a problem with the overt religiousness of, say, the Wailers or Al Green. That said, for me there's a world of difference between Nick Cave's Old Testament Gothick (which teeters precariously but productively on the brink of self-parody) and Bono's preachiness.

And yes, one of the reasons Achtung Baby works better is because he goes over to the Dark Side a bit more, albeit by plundering other people's back catalogues (but hey, where would any of us be without plagiarism?).

For me, rock'n'roll's fuel tank ran dry a long time ago, and the world is all the better for it. I've never bought into the notion of rock music as some sort of redemptive act of mass consciousness - the concept is creepy. The best stuff has always been awkward, angular and beautiful in a way that goes against the grain of whatever the received wisdom of the age happens to be. You might argue that U2 do all of those things. But the very virtues which you see in the later work - the positivity, the unconditional love, etc - remind me of something on the Hallmark Channel.

Yours, Hugh

Dear Hugh

We recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement in Belfast, and of a lesser-known event that copper-fastened the politics. I'm talking about that May 1998 Waterfront Hall gig which featured U2 and Ash, with David Trimble and John Hume. The two politicians had never shaken hands in public, but it took a rock gig and Bono to make it happen. In a week that support for the agreement was dropping off to a terminal degree, this symbolic moment swung the polls by three per cent and won the day.

That's one instance when Bono has been able to make a pragmatic difference. It almost wipes out the memory of Sunday Bloody Sunday. Bono is interested in what happens up the road. Few other acts from the Republic have shown any such concern. Therefore we've had songs such as Please, Peace On Earth and Staring at the Sun to document the changing times. In Belfast, the song One always resonates, a rogue song that mutates according to the emotions of the occasion.

I'm not an expert on African issues, but my guess is that Bono has given it socks, and that the politicians have often abused his concern and his proposed solutions. There are gaping contradictions in his liberality, but we probably all have a few stray lepers in the head.

Yours, Stuart

Dear Stuart

I have serious reservations about the dichotomy between U2's shiny Dutch tax shelter and Bono's lectures to the rest of us about why our governments should raise their aid budgets as a proportion of their expenditure (funded for the most part as it is by the poor, tax-unsheltered masses). But I don't have any great problem with the decent positions the band has taken over the years.

But yes, the fact that Bono has been prepared to engage politically with some of the big issues is no bad thing, and that he hasn't minded making a spectacle of himself in the process stands to his credit.

Yours, Hugh

Dear Hugh

There's a lot of U2 stuff we may never agree on. Where I get a thrill from the Big Music, you hear a charmless ballyhoo. My radar is veering towards the mystic, but you suspect a vacuum. My heart tells me that Bono is working to the dictates of his conscience, but you may suspect the disease of conceit.

Two thoughts to sign off with. Firstly, we probably wouldn't have the interest to sustain this argument about another such band. That's an indication of U2's cultural presence. Secondly, if we ever got to sit together with the band's collected works, we'd probably agree on a dozen songs that are incontestably great. We're one, but not the same.

Yours, Stuart

• Stuart Bailie is a music journalist, BBC broadcaster and a former Assistant Editor of NME. He is currently chief executive of Oh Yeah, a dedicated music centre in Belfast. www.ohyeahbelfast.com

• Hugh Linehan is Features Editor of The Irish Times and former editor of The Ticket

U2's producer Brian Eno reveals studio secrets

Debut album Boy reached number 52 in the UK charts

The band said Lillywhite was "like a children's TV presenter"

The Edge says U2 "had very few new songs of merit" going into the studio

Bono wanted an album " that would separate us from our contemporaries"

Lillywhite shares U2's Grammy for How To Dismantle An Atom Bomb

Hamilton's power display defies explanation

Scott Rovak/US Presswire

Josh Hamilton's Home Run Derby

Deadspin_July15
by bsap11

U2 Deluxe Remaster's Streaming Here

Boy
October
War

U2's Dirty Day

Dirty Day: Part 1
Dirty Day: Part 2
Dirty Day: Part 3

Iraq in Review: Is there anything left of the antiwar Left’s criticisms of the Iraq war?

Many commentators on Iraq had no strong ideas about the wisdom of removing Saddam Hussein, but often predicated their evolving views on the basis of whether we were perceived as winning or losing — and later made the necessary and often fluid adjustments. So in light of the changing pulse of the battlefield, it is time once again to examine carefully a few of the now commonplace critiques of the Iraq war.

1. We took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan by going into Iraq, thereby allowing the Taliban to regain the advantage.

Any two-theater war can result in less resources allotted to one of the two fronts. But such multiple-front wars, whether in World War II or the Cold War, have never stymied the United States military. More importantly, if we are truly in a global war against Islamic extremists — as al Qaeda itself reminded us when it announced that Iraq was the key front in their jihad against infidel crusaders — then the problem is not necessarily fighting the insurgents in Iraq, but whether it is a theater conducive to our aims and resources — and can be won.

In other words, Iraq simply upped the ante of a larger war, promising disaster if we lost, and enormous advantages if we won. Progress in Iraq is already having positive effects in Afghanistan, where an experienced American counterinsurgency force is fighting extremists who know that their kindred are on the verge of losing militarily and politically in Iraq, and are afraid that the same bitter calculus now applies to them.

In the first years, the odds were with the terrorists — given indigenous Muslim local populations, the hostile neighborhood of a Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and anti-war fervor at home and abroad. But once the U.S. military defeated al Qaeda in Anbar, the population turned on Islamic terrorists, and the elected Iraqi government gained stature, then Islamists in and out of Iraq suffered a terrible defeat.

We learned to fight a war of counterinsurgency and win hearts and minds far from home; they lost an insurgency — and with it the support of the local and once naturally sympathetic Muslim population. Note that suddenly journalists, intelligence analysts, and politicians are struck by al Qaeda’s implosion, as the Muslim street turns on radical Islamists, who themselves are torn apart by internal ideological schisms.

While many critics remain too heavily invested in antiwar positions staked out between 2003–7 to cite the war as a contributory cause, the obvious catalyst for al Qaeda’s fiasco is its terrible performance in Iraq. Remember, if Americans adjusted their own support for the war on their perceptions of the success or failure of the U.S. military, why wouldn’t millions in the Middle East do the same with radical Islamists like al Qaeda, whose fortunes on the battlefield have only gone from bad to worse?

2. Bush lied about the war and entered it under the false circumstances of fears of WMD and Iraqi ties to al Qaeda.

Bush erred in focusing on WMDs when the Senate and House approved over 20 writs for war, all of them as valid now as they were in October 2002. That said, it is hard to find a single prominent congressional critic of the war who has made the case that the administration itself altered intelligence information, doctored reports, or had substantially different assessments than those provided to Congress or offered up by foreign governments. The reason recent critics of the war such as Sen. Rockefeller are utterly unconvincing in their allegations of administration malfeasance is that the record shows that they themselves had access to the same information, and often outdid the President in their prewar rhetoric and saber-rattling about Saddam.

But again, the battlefield, rightly or wrongly, colors these controversies. In a world in which there is no longer a Saddam Hussein (who would now have had his hands on trillions of dollars in oil revenue), a Libyan WMD program, and Dr. Khan’s nuclear export business, the proliferation issue is becoming less contentious. (If one were to believe the National Intelligence Estimate, Iran ceased its weapons-grade nuclear track opportunely right after Saddam’s capture). Since 2003, thousands of Islamic extremists and al Qaeda’s notables have been killed, and the organization routed and discredited; it is hard to see how Iraq has not had positive effects in curbing proliferation and damaging the organization that was responsible for 9/11. Moreover, disputes about Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s post-Afghanistan odyssey, assorted terrorists in Saddam’s Baghdad in 2003, or al Qaeda in Kurdistan during Saddam’s rule become less contentious with the knowledge that al Qaeda, between 2003–7, tried to win, and then lost, Iraq.

3. Mistakes in Iraq were legion and irreversible.

It is better to see such controversies in terms of long- and short-term consequences. Examine the two most discussed — the Iraqi army and troop levels. Disbanding the Iraqi army without providing temporary financial support for young males with military skills was disastrous. Yet in the long-term, building a new army without tens of thousands of hard-core Baathists — as was true of the de-Nazification program with German army in 1946–7 — offered a greater chance for eventual success.

Did we send too few troops? Apparently we had enough manpower to take out Saddam, which we did brilliantly in three weeks — a force determined partly in reaction to the first Gulf War, when current critics then alleged that we had needlessly sent over far too many troops, both our own and those of the unwieldy coalition.

Evaluating the surge is more complex, since in a vast theater the size of Iraq, an increase of a little more than 20 percent in troop strength probably does not per se win wars. We forget now that many supporters of the surge were calling for 80,000-100,000 more troops in 2004–7. The 30,000 troops was a compromise figure, given our commitments elsewhere.

As important as the 30,000 reinforcements were, just as critical were three other factors associated with it: a signal to both Iraqi friends and enemies that we were staying on and fighting to win; a radical change in tactics from counterterrorism based in compounds to counterinsurgency intended to protect the local populations from terrorist reprisals; and the appointment of Gen. Petraeus as senior commander in Iraq who won the confidence of the Iraqis; silenced critics at home; and energized his officers on the ground with a new commitment to victory.

Again, there were tragic mistakes — focusing on WMDs as a sole casus belli, the pullback from the first siege of Fallujah, and bellicose Presidential rhetoric coupled with operational tentativeness — all of them regrettable, none of them fatal or comparable to the disastrous foul-ups of World War II, Korea, or Vietnam.

4. Democratization was naïve and bound to fail, given the realities of the tribal Middle East.

In fact, the promotion of constitutional government, however clumsy our efforts in 2003–4, was the only chance the U.S. had after the fall of Saddam Hussein to stabilize the country and hurt our terrorist enemies. No development infuriated al Qaeda more than U.S. support for elections and a constitutional Iraq that undercut the slander of a 21st-century crusade to annex the ancient caliphate, and invested the Iraqi people themselves in the fight against terrorism for their own future. Iraq is not comparable to the Hamas plebiscite, in that its elections were in concert with a ratified constitution and a result of an American-led effort to depose Saddam Hussein.

One of the most surreal developments of the war has been the Left’s caricature of American idealism and our support for a democratic Iraqi government — a brave group of reformers who have been more tarred and demonized by American politicians than have been their al Qaeda enemies.

Should we see a President Obama, and he realizes that Iraq is working, expect the Left to cease its criticisms of neocon democracy fantasies, and instead adopt Iraq’s democracy as yet more proof of Obama’s hope-and-change idealism in foreign policy.

5. The real winner of the war was Iran.

In the short-term, yes — Iran benefited from the removal of its traditional enemy, Baathist Iraq, and from the initial pan-Islamist rallying against the U.S. presence in Iraq. But in the long-term, should Iraq succeed, nothing will be more destabilizing to Iran than to have a free society next door, where Shiites say, write, and read what they wish, and do so in pluralistic fashion. Again, the ante has been raised. Should Iranian-backed militias lose in Iraq, the theocracy will have suffered a terrible defeat, at a time it diverts precious oil dollars to failed military adventures while its silenced population rations gas. Iran’s theocratic government must either incite a U.S. preemptive strike, or destroy Iraqi democracy — or it is doomed.

6. President Bush’s presidency was ruined in Iraq.

If we were to lose the war, then yes. But should we win, should a constitutional government stabilize, should al Qaeda keep unraveling, and should the hiatus of terrorist attacks against Americans at home and abroad continue, then historians will rank Bush in Trumanesque terms: a similarly orphaned presidency that ended disliked — even as it crafted a strategy to defeat global Islamic terror by taking the fight to the heart of the Middle East, while establishing proof of America’s good intentions by fostering constitutional government that offered Iraqis an alternative other than the usual Middle East non-choice of theocracy or autocracy.

Bush was terribly damaged by a series of poor spokesmen, his own bellicose soundbites of 2002–3, a series of tell-all defections of former intimates and officials, and an inability to cut U.S. consumption of imported petroleum. But that said, years from now, historians will look at the record and the results, not the present rhetoric, and his legacy could well be — “He kept us safe.”

7. Our military is nearly ruined and the war was never worth the cost.

We have paid a high price for our efforts with thousands of dead and wounded, and billions spent. But if the deterioration of al Qaeda continues, America is kept safe, and the Middle East at last has some alternative to the dismal autocratic norm — one that curbs future oil-fed extremism — then Iraq will be the most important American achievement since the end of the Cold War. If we lose or quit, and Iraq devolves along the lines of the badlands of Pakistan, then, yes, the losses were not worth it.

For all the wear and tear on our military, recruitments are up, we have developed the most sophisticated and experienced anti-insurgent force in the world, and we are just beginning to shake-up the entire military by promoting a new generation of brilliant officers who came of age in the cauldron of Iraq.

In the end, the U.S. military has achieved the near impossible by removing the worst government in the Middle East and fostering what has a real chance to become by far the best. In some sense, whether Iraq was worth the high cost depends on whether one thinks the present-day liberal and humane democracies in Europe, Japan, and Korea were likewise worth the past, and far more terrible, price that America paid in blood and treasure to secure their enduring freedom.

'Wall-E,' Pixar's surprisingly political postmodern masterpiece

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, July 13, 2008

Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.

Conservatives love to complain about Hollywood liberalism, but most of the political films that shuffle through the cineplexes are standard-issue leftie hackwork that neither persuade nor succeed. You can see them coming a mile away. And then you get something like Wall-E, Pixar's postmodern masterpiece, which is one of the most subversive films I've ever seen.

But get this: If anything, its politics are traditionalist conservative (as distinct from whatever it is the Republican Party is peddling these days). To be fair, that label is too reductive. Wall-E goes much deeper than contemporary politics. It's a brilliant Aristotelian, even agrarian, critique of modernity, and the fate of man under consumerist technopoly. It's also a lot of fun. (Warning: Spoilers follow).Set in the distant dystopian future, Wall-E tells the story of a grubby little robot, the title character, left behind to help clean up Earth. Humanity, having trashed the planet with junk from its over-consumption, has lit out for deep space aboard a luxury space liner called the Axiom. When the film opens, Wall-E is plugging away on a five-year plan to clean the lifeless planet and make it fit for human habitation again; it has taken seven centuries.

Lovesick Wall-E finds his way to the Axiom chasing Eve, a sentry robot who, like Noah's dove, delivers a newfound Earth seedling to the Axiom's captain, who in turn is supposed to lead a recolonization of the planet. But why should humanity return? In their long exile, they've grown extremely fat and happy aboard the Axiom, which was provided for them by the quasi-governmental BuyNLarge corporation.

There is no material need or desire that BNL doesn't meet. BNL's sophisticated technology ferries the obese humans around the ship on floating chairs (they've lost the ability to walk), feeds them junk and keeps them entertained. The people, strangers to one another, have outsourced the raising of their children to the company-run system, which teaches them propaganda that advances BNL's interests.

These infantilized people have lost all cultural memory, having become perfect – and perfectly controllable – consumers. They are wards of a therapeutic state, of a self-chosen soft tyranny that Tocqueville called "democratic despotism."

Their idea of politics is to order their collective life around satisfying individual desires. Having no memory of the past, they've lost touch with what it means to be human. Their lack of consciousness of their own predicament is their tragedy. It's this spotless pseudo-Eden that the plant Eve carries within her, as well as her dirty little friend Wall-E, threatens to destroy.

Technology, the film's ambiguous villain, allowed for the development of Earth's consumer economy, which gave humanity the opportunity to indulge boundlessly. It also created the fantastic spaceship that allowed humanity to escape the planet it ruined by denying its own limits.

But technology also shaped humans' consciousness. It led them to break with nature and see technology as something that delivered them from work and struggle. As humanity became more technologically sophisticated, the film argues, they became ever more divorced from nature, and their own nature. They developed a culture and society that was mechanistic and artificial, as opposed to organic and natural.

Wall-E contends that what makes us fully human is cultivating our own deepest nature by working, and working together. In a stunningly iconic image at the film's end, the Tree of Life on the new earth grows out of an old work boot. Humanity renews the face of the Earth through its own labor, by people taking responsibility for themselves instead of being passive consumers coddled by the corporate welfare state.

In a twist in the usual sci-fi formula, the machines in Wall-E don't turn on man, but liberate man from enslavement to ... machines. Paradoxically, then, Pixar's techno-whiz-bang fable is a whimsical but full-frontal attack on modernity. Philosophical modernity begins, in part, with Francis Bacon, the 17th-century philosopher of science who declared that the proper end of politics is "the conquest of nature for the relief of man's estate."

But as the older Aristotelian tradition contends, nature is to be husbanded, not conquered. Man is embedded within nature and cannot know himself outside its laws and logic. Human nature withers without struggle, without cultivation, without companionship, without community.

Wall-E opens up the discerning viewer's imagination, inviting him to consider what authentic personal and communal human goods we have lost as we've gained prosperity and mastery over nature – and how we might get them back.

Wall-E is the kind of movie that presents planting a garden as a revolutionary act. One way or another, we're all living on the Axiom. Wall-E is a call to wake up, stand up and abandon ship.

Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.

John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account

These are the never-before-seen last known photos of Sen. John McCain's Hoa Lo prison cell, images that prove that even after being cleaned up for an American historical filmmaker, the terror of the Hanoi Hilton is real. Debra Watkins, who took the pictures and video in 1993 and 1994 before this and other areas of the century-old prison were destroyed, provided them to Whispers as part of a story that appears in the Washington Whispers column. Watkins did volumes of research before traveling to Hanoi, sparked by reports the government planned to rip down most of the facility. She was able to find McCain's cell which she says is pictured in the above photos. The first shows an official opening the cell. You can clearly see old locks used presumably to hold leg irons and other torture implements on the inside. The second shot shows the inside of McCain's cell and the leg iron contraption Watkins believes he was tortured with. In 1973, McCain wrote a first-person account of his five-year captivity for U.S. News, read it here.

Barack's Brilliant Ground Game

For a campaign that says it wants to end the politics of the Bush-Cheney years, the Obama for President effort has cribbed an awful lot from the Bush-Cheney playbooks of 2000 and 2004.

For starters, Barack Obama's manager admitted to the New York Times that he wanted an "army of persuasion" modeled explicitly on the massive Bush neighbor-to-neighbor "Victory Committee" of '00 and '04. Those efforts deployed millions of volunteers to register, persuade and get-out-the-vote.

AP

Barack Obama

Sen. Obama's organizational emphasis wisely avoids the Democratic mistake of 2000, when Donna Brazille's plea for a stronger grassroots focus was ignored by the Gore high command. It also avoids the mistake of 2004, when Democrats outsourced their ground game to George Soros's 527 organizations. The latter effort paid at least $76 million to more than 45,000 canvassers – many hired from temp agencies – to register and turn out voters. It was the wrong model: Undecideds are more likely to be influenced by those in their social network than an anonymous, low-wage campaign worker.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has harnessed the Internet for persuasion, communication and self-directed organization. A Bush campaign secret weapon in 2004 was nearly 7.5 million email addresses of supporters, 1.5 million of them volunteers. Some volunteers ran "virtual precincts," using the Web to register, persuade and organize family and friends around the country. Technology has opened even more possibilities for Mr. Obama today.

The Obama campaign is trying to catch up with the GOP's "microtargeting" program, which uses powerful analytical tools and extensive household consumer information to focus on prospects for conversion and extra turnout help. Another Obama adaptation of a 2004 Bush campaign technique is a stepped-up, rapid response effort. Charges do not go unanswered, the campaign stays relentlessly on the offense, using every channel of communication.

The Obama campaign has also copied the Bush strategy of broadening the general election map. In 2000, the Bush effort targeted not just the traditional battlegrounds, but also West Virginia (last won by the GOP in an open race for the presidency in 1928), Tennessee (Al Gore's home), Arkansas (Bill Clinton's home), Washington and Oregon.

Hoping for a breakthrough somewhere, Mr. Obama also wants to force John McCain to play defense. So in addition to traditional battleground states, he's running TV ads and organizing in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana, Alaska and North Dakota. And where Mr. Bush targeted Latinos, African-Americans, Jews, Catholics and education voters to narrow Democratic margins, Mr. Obama is going after evangelicals, veterans and values voters with ads and outreach to trim the GOP's margin.

There are problems, however. Mr. Obama's people admit they want to sucker Mr. McCain into spending money. To be successful, a bluff must be credible. In places like Nebraska and North Dakota, Mr. Obama can't rely on local issues – like Mr. Bush did with coal in West Virginia in 2000 – to unexpectedly win a critical state. Organization alone won't suffice. And putting Obama dollars into Texas, for example, to help win five state House seats may simply cause Texan Republicans – not Mr. McCain – to raise money and work harder to counter.

Democrats don't have the same large volunteer pool the GOP does with its Federated GOP Women, College and Young Republicans, and local party committees. In the primaries, Mr. Obama instead moved hordes of volunteers from state to state. It was a brilliant tactic, but Nov. 4 is different. The volunteers adequate for primaries held over five months will simply not be enough to compete in 51 separate elections (all 50 states plus the District of Columbia) all on one day.

Mr. Obama's biggest problem is that when it comes to substance, he's following the playbook of a Republican other than George W. Bush. In 2000, Mr. Bush won the general election on the same themes and positions as in the primaries, including compassionate conservatism, the faith-based initiative, tax cuts and Social Security reform. There was no repudiation of past positions, no chameleon-like shifts in positions.

Instead of consistency, Mr. Obama has followed Richard Nixon's advice, to cater to his party's extreme in the primaries and then move aggressively to the middle for the fall.

In the primary, Mr. Obama supported pulling out of Iraq within 16 months, called the D.C. gun ban constitutional, backed the subjection of telecom companies to expensive lawsuits for cooperating in the terror surveillance program, opposed welfare reform, pledged to renegotiate Nafta, disavowed free trade and was strongly against the death penalty in all cases. But in the past few weeks, Mr. Obama has reversed course on all of these, discarding fringe liberal views for relentlessly centrist positions. He also flip-flopped on accepting public financing and condemning negative ads from third party groups, like unions.

By taking Nixon's advice, Mr. Obama is assuming such dramatic reversals will somehow avoid voter scrutiny. But people are watching closely, and by setting a world indoor record for jettisoning past positions, Mr. Obama may be risking his reputation for truthfulness. A candidate's credibility, once lost, is very hard to restore, regardless of how fine an organization he has built.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

The Decline of the National League

See a timeline of the developments that have led to the NL's current chronic inferiority.

Baseball's Greatest Hits - Vol. 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails

"Writing a song about Harvey Haddix or Curt Flood didn't seem like much of a stretch for us," explains ex-Dream Syndicate frontman Steve Wynn, who joined with REM guitarist Scott McCaughey last year to form The Baseball Project. Their first album, Vol. 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails, released on Yep Roc this week, veers away from the familiar territory of baseball ditties like "Centerfield" and "Talkin' Baseball" to explore edgier subjects like Big Ed Delahanty's plunge over Niagara Falls and Jack McDowell flipping the bird to Yankee fans. Here's their short list of their favorite baseball songs -- with attitude.

Corbis

Steve Goodman

A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request: "This one sets the bar so high I don't know if anyone can match it," says Mr. McCaughey. Mr. Goodman, a Chicago native, released this in 1983 after he was diagnosed with leukemia, but it's hardly a tearjerker: "It's a beautiful day for a funeral/Hey Ernie, let's play two!"

WireImage/Getty Images

Bob Dylan

Catfish: This obscure 1975 ballad about Hall of Fame pitcher Catfish Hunter includes a dig at former Oakland A's owner Charles O. Finley. "He used to work on Mr. Finley's Farm/But the old man wouldn't pay." "It really feels like a Dylan song," explains Mr. Wynn. "It's simple and direct, but it's also mythological."

J. Neo Marvin

Barbara Manning and the SF Seals

Dock Ellis: A psychedelic homage to the Pittsburgh pitcher by that name who once claimed to have thrown a 1970 no-hitter while on LSD. "It sounds like the inside of somebody's brain while they're pitching on acid," says Mr. Wynn.

Terror Tactics

What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it.

The author catches his breath after undergoing his first waterboarding session. Photographs by Gasper Tringale.

by Christopher Hitchens August 2008

Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, “waterboarding” was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.

Exploring this narrow but deep distinction, on a gorgeous day last May I found myself deep in the hill country of western North Carolina, preparing to be surprised by a team of extremely hardened veterans who had confronted their country’s enemies in highly arduous terrain all over the world. They knew about everything from unarmed combat to enhanced interrogation and, in exchange for anonymity, were going to show me as nearly as possible what real waterboarding might be like.

View a video of Hitchens’s waterboarding experience.

It goes without saying that I knew I could stop the process at any time, and that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather than returned to a darkened cell. But it’s been well said that cowards die many times before their deaths, and it was difficult for me to completely forget the clause in the contract of indemnification that I had signed. This document (written by one who knew) stated revealingly:

“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.

As the agreement went on to say, there would be safeguards provided “during the ‘water boarding’ process, however, these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing serious injury or death.”

On the night before the encounter I got to sleep with what I thought was creditable ease, but woke early and knew at once that I wasn’t going back to any sort of doze or snooze. The first specialist I had approached with the scheme had asked my age on the telephone and when told what it was (I am 59) had laughed out loud and told me to forget it. Waterboarding is for Green Berets in training, or wiry young jihadists whose teeth can bite through the gristle of an old goat. It’s not for wheezing, paunchy scribblers. For my current “handlers” I had had to produce a doctor’s certificate assuring them that I did not have asthma, but I wondered whether I should tell them about the 15,000 cigarettes I had inhaled every year for the last several decades. I was feeling apprehensive, in other words, and beginning to wish I hadn’t given myself so long to think about it.

I have to be opaque about exactly where I was later that day, but there came a moment when, sitting on a porch outside a remote house at the end of a winding country road, I was very gently yet firmly grabbed from behind, pulled to my feet, pinioned by my wrists (which were then cuffed to a belt), and cut off from the sunlight by having a black hood pulled over my face. I was then turned around a few times, I presume to assist in disorienting me, and led over some crunchy gravel into a darkened room. Well, mainly darkened: there were some oddly spaced bright lights that came as pinpoints through my hood. And some weird music assaulted my ears. (I’m no judge of these things, but I wouldn’t have expected former Special Forces types to be so fond of New Age techno-disco.) The outside world seemed very suddenly very distant indeed.

Arms already lost to me, I wasn’t able to flail as I was pushed onto a sloping board and positioned with my head lower than my heart. (That’s the main point: the angle can be slight or steep.) Then my legs were lashed together so that the board and I were one single and trussed unit. Not to bore you with my phobias, but if I don’t have at least two pillows I wake up with acid reflux and mild sleep apnea, so even a merely supine position makes me uneasy. And, to tell you something I had been keeping from myself as well as from my new experimental friends, I do have a fear of drowning that comes from a bad childhood moment on the Isle of Wight, when I got out of my depth. As a boy reading the climactic torture scene of 1984, where what is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world, I realize that somewhere in my version of that hideous chamber comes the moment when the wave washes over me. Not that that makes me special: I don’t know anyone who likes the idea of drowning. As mammals we may have originated in the ocean, but water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element. In brief, when it comes to breathing, give me good old air every time.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

This is because I had read that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, invariably referred to as the “mastermind” of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, had impressed his interrogators by holding out for upwards of two minutes before cracking. (By the way, this story is not confirmed. My North Carolina friends jeered at it. “Hell,” said one, “from what I heard they only washed his damn face before he babbled.”) But, hell, I thought in my turn, no Hitchens is going to do worse than that. Well, O.K., I admit I didn’t outdo him. And so then I said, with slightly more bravado than was justified, that I’d like to try it one more time. There was a paramedic present who checked my racing pulse and warned me about adrenaline rush. An interval was ordered, and then I felt the mask come down again. Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Hitchens is helped up after signaling for the waterboarding to stop.

I am somewhat proud of my ability to “keep my head,” as the saying goes, and to maintain presence of mind under trying circumstances. I was completely convinced that, when the water pressure had become intolerable, I had firmly uttered the pre-determined code word that would cause it to cease. But my interrogator told me that, rather to his surprise, I had not spoken a word. I had activated the “dead man’s handle” that signaled the onset of unconsciousness. So now I have to wonder about the role of false memory and delusion. What I do recall clearly, though, is a hard finger feeling for my solar plexus as the water was being poured. What was that for? “That’s to find out if you are trying to cheat, and timing your breathing to the doses. If you try that, we can outsmart you. We have all kinds of enhancements.” I was briefly embarrassed that I hadn’t earned or warranted these refinements, but it hit me yet again that this is certainly the language of torture.

Maybe I am being premature in phrasing it thus. Among the veterans there are at least two views on all this, which means in practice that there are two opinions on whether or not “waterboarding” constitutes torture. I have had some extremely serious conversations on the topic, with two groups of highly decent and serious men, and I think that both cases have to be stated at their strongest.

The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Against it, however, I call as my main witness Mr. Malcolm Nance. Mr. Nance is not what you call a bleeding heart. In fact, speaking of the coronary area, he has said that, in battlefield conditions, he “would personally cut bin Laden’s heart out with a plastic M.R.E. spoon.” He was to the fore on September 11, 2001, dealing with the burning nightmare in the debris of the Pentagon. He has been involved with the sere program since 1997. He speaks Arabic and has been on al-Qaeda’s tail since the early 1990s. His most recent book, The Terrorists of Iraq, is a highly potent analysis both of the jihadist threat in Mesopotamia and of the ways in which we have made its life easier. I passed one of the most dramatic evenings of my life listening to his cold but enraged denunciation of the adoption of waterboarding by the United States. The argument goes like this:

1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

Masked by these arguments, there lurks another very penetrating point. Nance doubts very much that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted that long under the water treatment (and I am pathetically pleased to hear it). It’s also quite thinkable, if he did, that he was trying to attain martyrdom at our hands. But even if he endured so long, and since the United States has in any case bragged that in fact he did, one of our worst enemies has now become one of the founders of something that will someday disturb your sleep as well as mine. To quote Nance:

Torture advocates hide behind the argument that an open discussion about specific American interrogation techniques will aid the enemy. Yet, convicted Al Qaeda members and innocent captives who were released to their host nations have already debriefed the world through hundreds of interviews, movies and documentaries on exactly what methods they were subjected to and how they endured. Our own missteps have created a cadre of highly experienced lecturers for Al Qaeda’s own virtual sere school for terrorists.

Which returns us to my starting point, about the distinction between training for something and training to resist it. One used to be told—and surely with truth—that the lethal fanatics of al-Qaeda were schooled to lie, and instructed to claim that they had been tortured and maltreated whether they had been tortured and maltreated or not. Did we notice what a frontier we had crossed when we admitted and even proclaimed that their stories might in fact be true? I had only a very slight encounter on that frontier, but I still wish that my experience were the only way in which the words “waterboard” and “American” could be mentioned in the same (gasping and sobbing) breath.

War & Decision

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War and Decision by Douglas Feith - Review by Victor Davis Hanson

Order of Battle
War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism
by Douglas Feith
Harper. 688 pp. $27.95

"The stupidest f—ing guy on the planet” is how General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, summed up Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Pentagon from July 2001 until his resignation in August 2005. Franks was cruder than most, but Feith was under almost continuously hostile scrutiny and controversy throughout his tenure. As the third-highest ranking civilian official in Donald Rumsfeld’s wartime Pentagon, he oversaw the Defense Department’s relations with foreign governments at a time of unprecedented anti-Americanism abroad. More important, he headed both the Office of Special Plans, charged with analyzing prewar intelligence reports on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and, subsequently, the Pentagon groups that would eventually coalesce into the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which oversaw much of the early rebuilding of postwar Iraq.

Of course, many other policy-makers in the Bush administration came in for their share of contumely after the lightning-fast victory of April 2003 turned into the long slog of the occupation and the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. But no one was quite so vilified as the Harvard- and Georgetown-educated Feith. He was variously charged with advocating torture, undermining the Geneva Convention, fronting for Israel’s Likud party, and sexing up the intelligence to exaggerate Saddam Hussein’s links with al Qaeda—not to mention sheer incompetence in failing to foresee the problems of the occupation.

Since 2005, journalists including Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Michael Gordon, George Packer, Thomas Ricks, Bernard Trainor, and Bob Woodward have published scathing accounts of administration policy. According to much of their common narrative, neoconservatives like Feith distorted prewar intelligence, brainwashing or tricking others into undertaking a unilateral, preemptive, and unnecessary war. They then subverted the postwar occupation by disbanding the Iraqi army, sending too few American troops, and ignoring the principled warnings of patriots like Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, Generals Eric Shinseki and Anthony Zinni, and a host of former advisers to George Bush, Sr. The result was the loss of thousands of lives and a trillion dollars in a struggle that has left us less safe and the Iraqis worse off, and whose only solution is summary withdrawal.

Agreeing with a great deal of this critique, army officers like Franks, and civilian officials such as CIA director George Tenet and Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, have claimed that others, not they, were the real culprits for the botched operations and occupation. And once again at the center of the indictments has been Feith, the bespectacled neocon who is said to have imperiously nitpicked, second-guessed, and hobbled the more experienced men of action.

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In War and Decision, Feith offers a dispassionate counterresponse—the first, one can only hope, of others to follow from Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush. Feith is not interested in getting even, but rather in systematically exploring the accuracy of the entire pessimistic narrative that has grown up about Iraq. Although he does not question every detail, he subjects enough of the narrative to cross-examination to show that it is largely a myth. His tools are understated irony and extensive documentation—some 600 footnotes and dozens of reprinted documents. These bring forcefully to view what the Bush administration was actually thinking in the days, weeks, and months after 9/11.

As the record adduced by Feith clearly demonstrates, neither he nor Rumsfeld advocated a preemptive war for democracy. Feith was more interested in simply removing dictators like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from power before they or their surrogates could trump the horrors of 9/11, while Rumsfeld was almost obsessive in his anxiety over mounting costs, unforeseen battlefield complications, and occupations with no predetermined end. Far from wanting an imperial American presence in Iraq, Pentagon officials wished to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis as quickly as possible—unlike their counterparts in the State Department, and unlike Paul Bremer, whose quest for the perfect constitutional government got in the way of implementing an interim governing body that would have been good enough.

Powell and Armitage—as the record also demonstrates—were neither critics nor supporters of the war, but had carefully situated themselves to be for it if it worked, and against it if it did not. Their studied triangulation meant that when things went well they were never enthusiastic advocates of the policies they were charged with overseeing, while when things turned bad they were ready to provide off-the-record quotes and background information to the growing chorus of antiwar critics.

As for the intelligence about Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, that came from the CIA, and it happened to coincide with the assessment of every pertinent foreign intelligence agency as well, including that of France. (This, quite apart from the fact that the CIA was a hotbed of political and ideological partisans with little sympathy for the Bush administration and less for its decision to go to war.) Arguments over proper troop levels were left largely to top generals. Franks adjudicated the size of the invading forces. He never requested additional troops, and summarily quit his command six weeks after the victory, just as the insurgency began.

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What then were the administration’s mistakes? Feith lists several. In his view, it was wrong to make Saddam’s arsenals into the main casus belli, especially since Congress had listed several other justifications for war that could have easily been given pride of place. Although there was prewar planning aplenty, in the euphoria that followed the three-week walkover of Saddam it was either poorly implemented—too many diverse agencies—or hijacked by the State Department and the often maverick Bremer. Among particular lapses, Feith lists Bremer’s failure to turn control over to Iraqi officials early enough and waiting too long to create an Iraqi security force.

It was Defense Department personnel who, Feith writes, had been largely responsible for the inspired American efforts against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Had they been listened to, they might have mitigated at least some of the unfolding difficulties in Iraq. Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was hardly the weak facilitator he was sometimes portrayed as being. Donald Rumsfeld pressed his underlings too hard, but not as hard as he worked himself. His tragedy lay not in any failure to anticipate the mess of 2004-06—in fact, he uncannily forecast almost every mishap of the “long hard slog”—but his inability to convince the President or the State Department of the mounting dangers and his crippling worry that committing more troops would stretch U.S. forces too thinly elsewhere.

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There is much to be said about each of these points, and others one might name (like the debate over incorporating anti-Baathist “externals”—i.e., Iraqis who had fled Saddam’s regime—into the postwar government). Perhaps the first thing to be noted in assessing Feith’s version, however, is that even today we still do not have the final verdict on Iraq. The costly occupation/reconstruction seems one endless and bitter disappointment when set against the brilliant three-week removal of Saddam; but, on a longer-term view, if we defeat and humiliate al Qaeda in Iraq and ensure the stability of a constitutional government, even this will appear in retrospect to have been not so disastrous after all.

Similarly, it is worth bearing in mind that the choices facing Feith and others were usually of the bad-vs.-worse variety; there were no good ones. Should we cleanse the Iraqi government of Baathists who had blood on their hands, or retain valuable civil servants no matter their previous record or potential security risk? Such choices were predicated ultimately on the military situation: had we crushed the insurgency in its first few weeks, going with the worse of two bad alternatives would probably not have proved so catastrophic.

In any case, what is refreshingly and almost startlingly different about Feith’s account, in contrast to others, is that it provides a basis for disagreement. Feith does not rely on quotations from anonymous sources. Instead of the usual ploy of advancing pseudo-citations from “a senior Pentagon official” or “a high-ranking officer,” his footnotes refer to what actual people have said and have put their names to. Critics can fault his interpretation of the evidence, but at least they have a body of evidence over which to argue. In addition, Feith has provided a website (www.waranddecision.com) where readers can check his sources and ascertain for themselves the degree to which he has quoted fairly and argued honestly. All this is a huge vote in his favor.

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In light of this book’s virtues, it is somewhat regrettable that Feith does not address in detail the failure of the administration to apprise the American people adequately as to the difficulty of the task ahead or to counter the often untrue but sensational accusations of critics. That multi-agency failure constantly to set the record straight did terrible damage to the once-strong public support for the war. Administration officials might have explained over and over again what exactly were our choices after 9/11, what our aims were in Iraq, how the unexpected dilemmas of this war were materially no different from those of past wars, and how, even so, our blunders in Iraq nowhere approximated the scale of earlier disasters in Korea, in World War II, in World War I, or in the Civil War.

Early on, as Feith points out, administration officials stopped emphasizing the benefits—to the Iraqis, to us, to the world—of having Saddam gone from the scene, concentrating instead on the future advantages that would accrue from Iraqi democracy. This mixed message came at precisely the moment when the insurgency was growing, and when security, not idealism, was the chief concern of the American people. The result was that our successful effort to remove a genocidal dictator in the heart of the ancient caliphate—followed by the establishment of a constitutional government where none had previously existed in the Arab world, by the routing of al Qaeda, and by the recruiting and training of thousands of Iraqi fighters, all at the cost of fewer lives than most single battles of World War II—could be written off as the worst blunder in our nation’s history. It would be useful to have had not just Feith’s general views of this matter but an anatomy of who in the administration was responsible for the lapse and why and how it was never rectified.

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I have mentioned the campaign of near-character assassination waged against Douglas Feith. The supposedly unpardonable sins of which he has been accused—they amount to his being an unapologetic policy intellectual who could be haughty to his subordinates and colleagues and obsequious to his superiors—do nothing to obscure the fact that he served his country honorably in wartime and has written a candid and invaluable account of that service.

To no avail, it would seem. Recently, Georgetown University released Feith from teaching a class at its school of foreign service. A student paper at the university ran an editorial about his impending departure: “Feith can take his salary,” it thundered, “and the further thousands he will no doubt earn from his memoir, and try to justify his failures somewhere else.”

Here, however, is the final paragraph of the appendix to War and Decision:

With appreciation of the valor and sacrifice of the men and women of the U.S. armed forces, I have donated all of my revenues from this book to a charitable foundation that will use the funds exclusively for the benefit of veterans and their families.

This, too, needs to be entered into the record, and gratefully acknowledged.

How Bush Sold the War, by Douglas Feith

In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq.

President Bush no longer stressed Saddam's record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president's credibility that had already been caused by the CIA's errors on Iraqi WMD. The president was seen as distancing himself from the actual case he had made for removing the Iraqi regime from power.

AP

This change can be quantified: In the year beginning with his first major speech about Iraq – the Sept. 12, 2002 address to the U.N. General Assembly – Mr. Bush delivered nine major talks about Iraq. There were, on average, approximately 14 paragraphs per speech on Saddam's record as an enemy, aggressor, tyrant and danger, with only three paragraphs on promoting democracy. In the next year – from September 2003 to September 2004 – Mr. Bush delivered 15 major talks about Iraq. The average number of paragraphs devoted to the record of threats from Saddam was one, and the number devoted to democracy promotion was approximately 11.

The stunning change in rhetoric appeared to confirm his critics' argument that the security rationale for the war was at best an error, and at worst a lie. That's a shame, for Mr. Bush had solid grounds for worrying about the dangers of leaving Saddam in power.

In the spring of 2004, with the transfer of sovereign authority to the Iraqis imminent, the president was scheduled to give a major speech about Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld received an advance draft and he gave it to me for review. In keeping with the new trend, the drafted speech focused on the prospects for Iraqi democracy.

White House officials understandably preferred to declare affirmative messages about Iraq's future, rather than rehash the government's intelligence embarrassments. Even so, I thought it was a strategic error for the president to make no effort to defend the arguments that had motivated him before the war. Mr. Bush's political opponents were intent on magnifying the administration's mistakes regarding WMD. On television and radio, in print and on the Internet, day after day they repeated the claim that the undiscovered stockpiles were the sum and substance of why the U.S. went to war against Saddam.

Electoral politics aside, I thought it was important for national security reasons that the president refute his critics' misstatements. The CIA assessments of WMD were wrong, but they originated in the years before he became president and they had been accepted by Democratic and Republican members of Congress, as well as by the U.N. and other officials around the world. And, in any event, the erroneous WMD intelligence was not the entire security rationale for overthrowing Saddam.

On May 22, 2004, I gave Mr. Rumsfeld a memo to pass along to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and the president's speechwriters. I proposed that the speech "should deal with some basics – in particular, why we went to war in the first place." It would be useful to "make clear the tie-in between Iraq and the broader war on terrorism" in the following terms: The Saddam Hussein regime "had used WMD, supported various terrorist groups, was hostile to the U.S. and had a record of aggression and of defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions."

In light of 9/11, the "danger that Saddam's regime could provide biological weapons or other WMD to terrorist groups for use against us was too great" to let stand. And other ways of countering the danger – containment, sanctions, inspections, no-fly zones – had proven "unsustainable or inadequate." I suggested that the president distinguish between the essential U.S. interests in Iraq and the extra benefits if we could succeed in building democratic institutions there: "A unified Iraq that does not support terrorism or pursue WMD will in and of itself be an important victory in the war on terrorism."

Some of the speech's rhetoric about democracy struck me as a problem: "The draft speech now implies that we went to war in Iraq simply to free the Iraqi people from tyranny and create democracy there," I noted. But that implication "is not accurate and it sets us up for accusations of failure if Iraq does not quickly achieve 'democracy.'"

As was typical, the speech went through multiple drafts. Ms. Rice's office sent us a new version, and the next day I wrote Mr. Rumsfeld another set of comments – without great hope of persuading the speechwriting team. The speech's centerpiece, once again, was the set of steps "to help Iraq achieve democracy." One line in particular asserted that we went to Iraq "to make them free." I dissented:

- "This mixes up our current important goal (i.e., getting Iraq on the path to democratic government) with the strategic rationale for the war, which was to end the danger that Saddam might provide biological or [other] weapons of mass destruction to terrorists for use against us."

- "There is a widespread misconception that the war's rationale was the existence of Iraqi WMD stockpiles. This allows critics to say that our failure to find such stockpiles undermines that rationale."

- "If the President ignores this altogether and then implies that the war's rationale was not the terrorism/state sponsorship/WMD nexus but rather democracy for Iraqis, the critics may say that he is changing the subject or rewriting history."

Again, I proposed that the president distinguish between achieving our primary goal in Iraq – eliminating a security threat – and aiming for the over-and-above goal of democracy promotion, which may not be readily achievable.

Mr. Bush gave his speech at the Army War College on May 24, as Iraq was entering into the last month of its 14-month occupation by the U.S. The president declared: "I sent American troops to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power. I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way."

I had hoped the president would explain why sending American troops to Iraq had helped defend our security, but he did not. The questionable line about sending those troops to make Iraq's people free had remained in the speech. And it was rather late to be promising the Iraqis that we would not stay as an occupying power but instead let them find their own way.

The president had chosen to talk almost exclusively about Iraq's future. His political opponents noticed that if they talked about the past – about prewar intelligence and prewar planning for the war and the aftermath – no one in the White House communications effort would contradict them. Opponents could say anything about the prewar period – misstating Saddam's record, the administration's record or their own – and their statements would go uncorrected. This was a big incentive for them to recriminate about the administration's prewar work, and congressional Democrats have pressed for one retrospective investigation after another.

But the most damaging effect of this communications strategy was that it changed the definition of success. Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.

This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.

To fight a long war, the president has to ensure he can preserve public and congressional support for the effort. It is not an overstatement to say that the president's shift in rhetoric nearly cost the U.S. the war. Victory or defeat can hinge on the president's words as much as on the military plans of his generals or the actions of their troops on the ground.

Mr. Feith was under secretary of defense for policy from July 2001 until August 2005. This article is adapted from his new memoir, "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" (HarperCollins).

Wikipropaganda - global-warming censorship on Wikipedia

Dupes for Obama

Has there ever in recent political memory been so much calculation and bad faith by a politician who has made so much of eschewing both?

Mac Is Moving to the Supply-Side

Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop

The Importance of Hell

The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith. by Tim Keller

Tim Keller's next book, The Prodigal God, is scheduled for an October 2008 release. Pastor Keller was kind enough to answer a few questions about the book.

Tim Keller responds to questions about whether it's appropriate to call God "the prodigal God" (the title of his next book).

Those Who Stay Will Be _____

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Rodriguez shares Schembechler's fiery side, although Bo never made people as mad as Rich has.