Managing the Conversation for Change

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.—Niccolo Machiavelli

If national elections in the United States are about one thing, that thing is change. We change from liberal to conservative, from peace to war, from a strong domestic commitment stressing economic equity to a commitment to economic disenfranchisement. We give entitlements to the poor or we give tax breaks to the wealthy. We secure the futures of our working class or gild the parachutes of CEOs and CFOs, and grant them pardons when they do to their employees what our government cannot. We vote. We change.

The thing is, you can go three or four presidents and - unless there's a war or an economic collapse - not notice a thing. Sure, you may get a little more or a little less money back from your taxes, and there is the occasional media sensation or scandal, but as long as your working, life goes on; the paychecks come in; you fill your car with gas and take your vacations and love your family and take this wonderful American routine for granted.

It should come as little surprise then, that Americans tend to wallow in the rut of secure sameness, holding on to the day-to-day like a toddler to a binky. The times that allow this static lifestyle are numbing, so much so that politicians and purveyors cannot resist taking advantage of a lulled populace, picking our futures from our pockets like back alley thieves.

Indeed, it could be said that some Americans get to choose change, while others have change thrust upon them.

Just because Bush and Cheney have run our country over the cliff in a barrel of mismanaged change does not mean we are doomed to to splat like Wile E. Coyote on the stark floor of the Painted Desert, while they peer over the edge and dusts off their hands in satisfactory glee.

Admittedly, the news of the day is not good: Wall Street is teetering; McCain has been bumped up by throngs of white men in love with the legs and lies of Sarah "Peggy Hill" Palin (or her husband); gas is over four dollars a gallon again. But all that is what happens when "change" is unfurled like a "Mission Accomplished" banner. It's not change we can believe in; it's change they want us to believe. It's the kind of change where things are really just the same, which is what they really want. Our kind of change, Barack's change, really scares them, and their chants of "burn baby burn" (oops!) I mean "drill baby drill", in turn, scare us.

I may just be paranoid, but I fear that Palin especially - with her neocon church beliefs - is using words like "some of these CEOs and top management people" as code when she says they are "addicted to other people's money." I fear that Palin will foment an atmosphere of anti-Semitism disguised as classism. That is why we have to pull together behind Barack Obama.

Obama and Biden are challenging us to believe in change and be their agents in affecting it. If this change is going to happen, we must make it happen. Unlike the current administration that just wants us to go shopping and fill our cars with four dollar a gallon gasoline, the Democratic ticket wants us to have a hand in determining the course of our own democracy. What a radical idea!

"...creating change starts with creating a vision for change and then empowering individuals to act as change agents to attain that vision. The empowered change management agents need plans that provide a total systems approach, are realistic, and are future oriented. Change management encompasses the effective strategies and programs to enable those change agents to achieve the new vision." from Managing Change: An Overview, by Nancy M. Lorenzi, PhD and Robert T. Riley, PhD, published by JAMIA, Mar-Apr 2000

Unlike the populist politics of Obama, I think that when Bush 41 had his vision of "A New World Order" he was counting on the participation of multinational corporations, NATO, the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank to help create it. They are who he wanted to "empower." Not the people. God no.

Forty-one's legacy staff in Bush 43's White House wanted to continue in that direction. Even after 9/11 happened, they still went to Haliburton and Blackwater to help fight this stupid war in Iraq. They didn't ask anything out of us except to "go shopping."According to a 2007 article published in Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations (who conspiracy folks think are in on this whole mess), "George W. Bush has revived George H. W. Bush's call for a 'new world order' -- by creating, in effect, a new new world order." But even this cabal isn't sure the world is ready. "Because the U.S. government is viewed as having undercut many global governance structures in recent years, any effort by this administration to rewrite the rules of the global game is naturally seen as yet another attempt by Washington to escape the constraints of international law."

Included in the JAMIA "Managing Change" article there is a table entitled "Reasons for Contemporary System Failures" which lists ways in which change implementation fails in a corporate environment. One does not have to look far to find the failures of the Bush-Cheney administration in their efforts to change the USA's approach to global politics. Of course, these (in italics) are just my associations and interpretations. Feel free to use your own:

Category	Examples
Communication	Ineffective outgoing communication
	Ineffective listening President’s August 2001 Daily Briefing: “Bin Laden Determined to Attack” Phoenix FBI Pet Goat
	Failure to effectively prepare the staff for the new system Condi and the NSA Differences with Colin Powell, Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neill
Culture	Hostile culture within the information systems organization Facts don’t matter; politics do. We'll make the facts fit. The Cheney push to reclassify documents, including a “new” kind of classification Outing Valerie Plame
	Hostile culture toward the information systems area They don’t have to know what we do, just what we say. We’ll make the press afraid to speak against us.
	No strategies to nurture or grow a new culture Could have used the opportunity after 9/11 to reach out to the rest of the world and unite to find a way to resolve the terrorist situation in a statesman like manner. Instead, things like “Dead or Alive,” “Bring it on!” Also, dissolving the Iraqi Army, not guarding the borders. Basically not having a strategy for peace.
Underestimation of complexity	Missed deadlines and cost overruns It’s hard to be president. Surplus to deficit How many billions has this war cost us?
	Lost credibility Mission Accomplished. Katrina: You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie. Medals for the idiots who planned and mishandled Iraq. Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson
Scope creep	Failure to define and maintain original success criteria Find WMDs Welcomed as liberators It will pay for itself
	Failure to renegotiate deadlines and resources if criteria do change Refusal to deal with Iran Refusal to re-evaluate relationship with Russia Refusal to acknowledge the bad intelligence, even before March ‘03 Refusal to allow the UN inspectors to do their jobs
Organizational	No clear vision for the change Holding on to the Cold War mentality of an evil enemy that must be vanquished. Holding that everyone longs for democracy and freedom – also a Cold War legacy
	Unintended consequences 5,000 dead soldiers Longest war the US has ever fought Loss of credibility in the rest of the world Shifting allegiances to try to find a suitable ally among the sects of Baghdad. Huge deficit.
	Ineffective reporting structure Abu Ghraib Reporting to Cheney and not the Pres.
	Staff turnover
	Staff competency
	Provision of a technical “fix” to a management problem Gonzales and Rove firing Federal Prosecutors Visiting Ashcroft in the hospital to get his approval for illegal wiretaps rather than agree with the acting AG
	Lack of full support of “boss(es)” Powell was against it; Lack of support of the American people, and we are the bosses
	Roles and responsibilities not clearly defined or understood by everyone Scott McClellan Richard Clarke The US Military W did not ask us to play our part; he felt as though he didn't need it. "Go shopping," he said.
	Several people vying to be “in charge” Cheney, Ashcroft, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld (remember Rummy’s wanting to co-opt all intelligence for the DoD?)
	Adequate resources not available from the beginning Rumsfeld’s refusal to acknowledge the need for more initial forces - "You got to war with the army you have, not the army you want." Not enough intelligence, both the spy kind and the brain kind
	Failure to benchmark existing practices Well, there have been benchmarks. They just haven’t been met.
	Inability to measure success “When they stand up we’ll stand down.” They do keep moving the line lower. Can you say “everybody limbo!”?
Technology	System too technology oriented Too complicated for simple minds
	Poor procurement
	Lure of the leading (bleeding) edge Democracy anywhere will bring democracy everywhere. We fight them there so we won’t have to fight them here. A small force ought to be enough to do it.
	Inadequate testing Did anyone think this through, I mean with their brains?
Training	Inadequate or poor-quality training
	Poor timing of training—too early or too late
Leadership issues	Leader too emotionally committed “Bring ‘em on!”
	Leader's time over committed It’s hard to read stories to kids and saw logs in Crawford.
	Too much delegation without control Haliburton, Blackwater and Dick Cheney
	Failure to get ownership in the effort No call to join in the effort. Just go shopping.
	Leader's political skills weak duh
	“Lying” to get initial approval WMDs Spurious ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda Nigerian yellowcake Downing Street’s “Dodgy Dossier”

Again, the italics are mine. The rest is from: J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2000 Mar–Apr; 7(2): 116–124. Copyright © 2000, American Medical Informatics Association

Like I said, these are just my ideas. I'm curious to know if you have your own. Let me know. Even the briefest internet search brings a handful of past news stories illustrating the issue of Bush trying to shift us to this change of his:

"Members of the Bush administration keep talking about what a promising moment for peace this is. The suggestion is that the departure of Saddam Hussein, and the arrival of a new Palestinian Prime Minister, Abu Mazen, has changed everything. It is hard to see precisely how Saddam Hussein was preventing the Israelis and Palestinians from making peace. What has really changed is President Bush himself.

"Suddenly he is taking a strong personal interest in the peace process, and putting his own personal political capital on the line. But what motivates him is still a bit of a mystery."

-Bush's change of direction

by Jon Leyne BBC State Department correspondent

.........................
"Commentators have fixated on the invocation of 'preemptive' military action to counter enemies seeking 'the world's most destructive technologies.' Yet this is not the crazy idea it is often portrayed to be. To enforce a robust nonproliferation regime, preemption might actually make sense in certain cases. The real problem in the new strategy is not preemption but narrowness -- the focus on three wretched governments and terrorists, and the emphasis on force, coercion, and selective treaty enforcement as the main instruments of national policy.
Conservative defense intellectuals and officials deserve credit for highlighting the fact that effective nonproliferation requires changes in the policies or governments of states unwilling to abide by international laws and norms. Yet they then proceed to make the reverse mistake, looking only at the outlaws and ignoring the challenges posed by nuclear weapons in general. So long as some states are allowed to possess nuclear weapons legitimately and derive the benefits that flow from them, then other states in the system will want them too -- including, perhaps, the successors to the governments the Bush administration currently opposes. The proliferation threat thus stems from the existence and possession of nuclear weapons and theft-prone materials, not merely from the intentions of today's 'axis of evil.'

"The nonproliferation radicals recognize that the good guys of today can become the bad guys of tomorrow. So they say the United States must retain and 'upgrade' an enormous strategic arsenal forever to deter or defeat any adversary. At the same time, they argue that the new bad guys (rogue states and terrorists), unlike the old bad guys (the Soviet Union), cannot be deterred and contained and so must be eliminated quickly. The Bush administration thus essentially favors a strategy of repeated regime change plus a large, steadily modernizing nuclear arsenal.

"This bleak vision makes sense only if the determination to retain deployed nuclear arsenals forever does not exacerbate proliferation risks, and if the weapons being retained provide a necessary, usable, and effective deterrent against threats that are greater than proliferation. Since neither of these assumptions is valid, the strategy is flawed."

Bush's Nuclear Revolution: A Regime Change in Nonproliferation

George Perkovich

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2003

--------------------

BUSH: "We've got a plan in place. The plan says there will be elections in January, and there will be. The plan says we'll train Iraqi soldiers so they can do the hard work, and we are. And it's not only just America, but NATO is now helping, Jordan's helping train police, UAE is helping train police. We've allocated $7 billion over the next months for reconstruction efforts. And we're making progress there. And our alliance is strong. We're making progress.

"It is hard work. It is hard work to go from a tyranny to a democracy. It's hard work to go from a place where people get their hands cut off, or executed, to a place where people are free. But it's necessary work. And a free Iraq is going to make this world a more peaceful place."

from the first Presidential debate, Kerry/Bush-Sept 30, 2004

-------------------------------

"Our work in Iraq has been hard.

"Helping construct a stable democracy after decades of dictatorship is a massive undertaking. Yet we have a great advantage. Whenever people are given a choice in the matter, they prefer lives of freedom to lives of fear. Our enemies in Iraq are good at filling hospitals, but they do not build any. They can incite men to murder and suicide, but they cannot inspire men to live, and hope, and add to the progress of their country. The terrorists' only influence is violence, and their only agenda is death.

"Our agenda, in contrast, is freedom and independence, security and prosperity for the Iraqi people. And by removing a source of terrorist violence and instability in the Middle East, we also make our own country more secure.

"Our coalition has a clear goal, understood by all -- to see the Iraqi people in charge of Iraq for the first time in generations. America's task in Iraq is not only to defeat an enemy, it is to give strength to a friend - a free, representative government that serves its people and fights on their behalf. And the sooner this goal is achieved, the sooner our job will be done."

-- President Outlines Steps to Help Iraq Achieve Democracy and Freedom
Remarks by the President on Iraq and the War on Terror
United States Army War College
Carlisle, Pennsylvania--May 24, 2004

So I guess now that we have started re-regulating the financial industry, we're in for a newer new new world order. Can I order a new leader who listens to the people and not the New World Order?

-PBG

Shadowy Perspectives in the Time of Politics

The Relative Importance of Past Elections

There is a sense now that this could be the most important presidential election ever for our country. You hear it from this side of the aisle all the time. It is an important time for change, so vote because this election will be the one that changes our path. This election will determine if we can turn a downward socio-economic spiral into a surge upward. This election will get us away from policies based on war and toward policies based on diplomacy. This election is about the future.

But truth hides in shadowy perspectives on the past. I mean, if we go ahead, say, eight years, would we look back on this election with the same kind of intense gravitas which we ascribe to it now? More? Less? Certainly I can point to three presidential elections in my lifetime that seem very important now, though they did not necessarily occur that way at the time.

1968

1968, in fact, was one that was just as important then as it is now. The country was deeply divided over age, over race, over rights and over another unwinnable war. There is no doubt that the intensity of that election and its subsequent result changed the way an entire generation approached politics and public service.

1980

I think that one election to which we were not tuned in all the way was, in hindsight, 1980, Reagan/Carter. Reagan was elected only because he represented a clear difference from our pal Jimmy, who had a very tough administration. Even with a Democratic majority, he kept hitting roadblocks. That and the events in Tehran were Carter's undoing. Reagan promised to bring us out of what Carter called our "national malaise."

I don't think anyone foresaw how wildly popular Reagan would become, that he could take the Marines on a little tap dance through Grenada and call it a war, or that he could get away with fighting the Communist backed Sandinista government in Nicaragua by sending weapons to the Contras in exchange for cocaine sold to Americans by the CIA, or that he would be able to send arms to Iran via Israel to get hostages back, or that he could sell arms directly to the Iranians and use some of the money to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.

So 1980 saw the election of someone who we all knew would be difficult for progressive values, but we had no idea he would stay so busy sticking our collective noses where they didn't belong.

2000

The last, most important election was 2000. As my wife says, we knew we didn't like him but we didn't expect that W was actually dangerous. Who really knows what would have happened had the will of the people prevailed? Would a Gore administration have paid closer attention to the warnings before 9/11? We almost certainly would not have invaded and occupied Iraq:

"It is impossible to succeed against terrorism unless we have secured the continuing, sustained cooperation of many nations. And here's one of my central points; our ability to secure that kind of multilateral cooperation in the war against terrorism can be severely damaged in the way we go about undertaking unilateral action against Iraq."-Al Gore, Commonwealth Club, Sept.23, 2002

We probably would not have raided Social Security. There would most likely be no federal deficit. Really, in this case, hindsight reared its head quickly, followed four years later by intense regret.

Now we find ourselves in another "most important election." Is it? Only time will tell.

-PBG

An Undigested Bit of Beef: Fear, Reality and Scrooge

" '...You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!'


"Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones."

-Scrooge's reaction to the presence of Marley's Ghost
from "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, Plain Label Books, pp. 35-36.

Like Scrooge's unwelcome visitor, it comes as no surprise that George Bush's and Dick Cheney's chains are weighted with a 21st century version of old fashioned corporate greed, but they have added to Marley's burden of "cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds and heavy purses wrought in steel."

They also drag on the floor the shears that shredded our rights and our values, and their shoulders hunch from the weight of the coffins of the more than 6,000 American dead of September 11 and the Iraq War. Shattered lives dangle from the tattered cuffs of their muddy blue suits, which reek from the mildewed walls of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward.

Like Scrooge, we sit incredulously in fear, pouring out our wit through pen and punditry to try to cope with the chill rattling through our collective bones. Were that we could dismiss it as "an undigested bit of beef." But cuisine plays no cameo in America's misfortune these last seven years. Fear is now an institution in our country. The scary status quo from semi-transparent politicians is a warning not to make our institutional fear Constitutional.

Like Bob Cratchit, the faithful buy their turkeys and hams and plea with us to reform our waggish ways. They hold up their children, their future, and ask us to embrace it. "God bless us, everyone." It is important to them that we hold that ideal closely.

Last year's election was our "Bah, Humbug" to the Bob Cratchits of this country, but after a year it seems that the halls of Congress are haunted by ghosts who take our representatives into a nightmare scenario, leaving them terrified of lying beneath the lonely headstone of un-Americanism or worse: un-electability.

It seems so unreal, this nightmare of congressional capitulation. Thank God, there's still some sanity in Washington. You won't see Russ Feingold or Dennis Kucinich running out into the snow Christmas morning looking to appease the fearful. If not for the few who act fearlessly to extinguish the flames of unreasonable paranoia, we would be the goose Scrooge brings to Christmas dinner.

-PBG

Dimples and Craters: Acheiving MAXIMUM IMPACT

"I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where..."

From "The Arrow and the Song"
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I find the term "meteoric rise" to be somewhat oxymoronic. After all, meteors don't rise. Well in space they might, if there is an "up" up there.

The term references a brilliant, streaking light in the night sky that comes out of nowhere and bounces with a fiery glow across the edge of our atmosphere before fading into nothingness. In that sense, "meteoric rise" is a metaphor for an individual whose soaring achievement similarly comes out of nowhere, but burns so brightly that it attracts everyone's attention and is hard to miss. And, unfortunately, like their namesakes, this moment of personal glory burns to a fizzle and is quickly gone.

But streaking meteors aren't actually rising. They are hurtling at tremendous speeds towards the earth. Where the metaphor falls apart is, well, where the meteor falls apart - on re-entry - and that's just the climax of its journey. It's still around until -

KABLOOEY!! It slams into the ground! What impact is left in it's wake? It depends on the size of the meteor. Arizona's Meteor Crater is a huge impact site, 4,000 feet across, 550 feet deep! They dug a 1,400 lb. meteorite out of that crater. OMG, as the kids say.

What if the meteor's impact were just a dimple, a pockmark on the planet, neither bigger nor more impressive than the hole left behind when when you pull a skipping stone from the clay? If it were your brilliance hurtling towards the earth, what would be its maximum impact?

"I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where..."
Ibid, 2nd verse

So I guess not all impacts are from arrows. Some are indeed from beautiful songs. Either way, I think Longfellow would agree that whatever we issue to the world, be it through fisticuffs or Facebook, bombs or Brahms, Bush or Buddha, they land with an impact that has more permanence than we realize. As for me, I hope that my impact is, as the people gathered on the mountaintop for the soda commercial sang (or would have sung, had they not been selling soda pop): "a song of peace that echoes on and never goes away."

"Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend."
Ibid, 3rd verse

I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing-The Shaw Brothers
-PBG

Behind the Curtain

Pay No Attention to the Politician Behind the Curtain

There is a shadow play going on behind the shroud, and like the characters in an old cartoon, the shaded shapes creep in apparent self awareness, while we cheer and jeer the performances of those who cast them. The hidden machinations of the players bear little resemblance to what they choose to show us.

It works something like this. In any political goings-on, there are three kinds of curtains that drape the stage where our politicians play: opaque, translucent and transparent. Then there's the performance upstage, in front - the one they play out to dazzle, distract or otherwise numb us into obeisance. Occasionally, the sharp observer can discern a movement not quite right in the narrow, transparent panels, that belies the otherwise unrevealing obfuscators.

For example, let's say Bush is standing in front of a crowd of foreign war veterans, comparing the chaos under which Saigon fell with the potentially worsening dissolution of order when we leave Baghdad, and saying that it would have been different had we stayed in Vietnam and "finished the job."

He wants us to see brave men and women fighting to victory, but instead in the transparent panel directly behind him we easily see a drunken, AWOL flier from the Texas Air National Guard, circa 1970. He wants us to see the genocide of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, but behind the wider translucent panel we can discern the shadowy images of bullets and bombs felling American soldier after American soldier, the piling bodies and flag draped coffins and weeping Gold Star mothers. He wants us to see an America responsible for squashing terrorism like a foot crushes a cockroach, yet we know that somewhere behind the very wide, opaque curtain America is enabling the torture and rendition of perceived enemies while it supports the governments of those who harbor our real enemies.

Meanwhile every shout is greeted with applause, every wag of the finger greeted with cheers.

Status Quo or Quid Pro Quo

Some of those cheers are our own, fellow lefties. Karl Rove leaving? Sure, shout for joy. Hooray! But now that he is no longer in government (officially anyway), will there be as hard an effort to expose his malfeasance? He is not leaving because any threat of exposure that we know of, so it looks like this is his own decision, status quo for the waning months of a lame duck administration. But what don't we know? Is it possible that this is part of a deal? The weak Congress seems unwilling to pursue any sort of retribution against an administration that continues to abuse its power. This could be more quid pro quo than status quo.

I really don't know. I'm just saying that things are not always what they seem, especially in First World politics, so we have to be willing to look past what is presented as truth and find the real truth. We can't rely on just the Washington Post or the New York Times. We have to make our congress-people be accountable to holding the Executive accountable. That, sadly, is the one thing they seem unwilling to do.

So for those of you who give money specifically to the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee), I'm asking you to stop. They are not working for us. They want to continue to do business as usual. I'm asking that you give money directly to the campaign coffers of the legislators who actually seem to stand against the status quo.

Send money to Russ Feingold's re-election campaign, or any of the 28 other senators or 183 members of the House who stuck to their convictions and voted against the Wiretapping bill that was passed just before the August recess. Why did the Democratic led Congress end up passing this bill? Well, CNET has an interesting and uncomplicated answer: it was political.

See, the Democrats want to appear strong in the "War on Terror." But just behind them you can see them through the transparent curtain shaking in political fear. Behind the translucent curtain, their shadows are stomping on the Bill of Rights while they hold out their hands to the "military industrial complex," who hide just out of sight, behind the opaque curtain.

-PBG

Taking a Train to Dachau

Timeless Messages of the Past

It has recently been reported that, according to scientists, time travel into the past is probably not possible. So we are stuck with the tried and true ways of touching history: a book, a movie, a play, and travel.

Sometimes, some coins in a slot is all you need. They buy you a story, an eyeful of strobing shadows through the binocular lenses of a nickelodeon. There is also the story that unrolls itself on railroad tracks, paid for with some Euro coins in a ticket machine, and revealed through the strobing light and color of the German countryside zipping by the windows of an S-bahn train from Munich.

I took a train into a story of the past. I took a train to Dachau.

Before I left to meet my wife for a week in Germany, my brother asked me, in that goofy, cynical way he has, "Oh. Germany. Are you going to a concentration camp?" I cannot wait to tell him that I did, that I actually took a train there. It's a quirky dark irony to which, I think, perhaps only children of Holocaust Survivors can relate.

But in the interest of full disclosure, we did not actually step off a steaming train by the old gate house, waiting to be marched past the "Arbeit Macht Frei" ["Work Will Set You Free" - a cruel Nazi joke] sign in the gate door. We had to take a public bus, along with loads of other tourists, from the town of Dachau's main train station.

But this is not a travelogue. This is about a journey, a pilgrimage to a horrible place from a horrible time. It is about where the unimaginable started, and it presents an opportunity to talk about the political and social relevance to our time. After all, what began in Dachau is the scale by which all unsavory, modern political and military actions have been measured. Some say such comparisons tend to dilute, or even disrespect, the magnitude of the death of compassion those terrible times signify for so many. They may be right.

On the other hand, all those horrors that my parents and millions of others went through were allowed to happen because each call for counteraction was ignored and unheeded. In this extreme case, ignorance was not just bliss; it was murder. State sanctioned discrimination, then arrests and deportations, then pogroms and finally genocide - each happened with barely a murmur of shock from the world community.

If one defines a "holocaust" as any one of those actions being allowed to happen by an apathetic world, then it is easy to see the tragedy in the former Yugoslavia in the same terms as Darfur and in the same terms as George Bush making political arrests without due process and allowing torture. After all, the Nazis did these things too. Therefore, regardless of where one stands on the issue of comparisons, we still have a responsibility to speak against all these things, whenever and wherever they happen.

That the Nazis were permitted to commit all of these, and so many more, unimaginable horrors, shows how important it is to pay attention to each act an unrestrained government takes on its own people (or others) on their own behalf.

But using a page from the Nazi playbook does not make Cheney into Goebbels or GW into Hitler (Putin's recent allusions notwithstanding). Still, if we continue to allow any branch of our government to support and fund these bad policies, we will be just as guilty as the Germans who were mostly silent while their government ran a cold scythe across Europe. In this there is no breakdown of comparisons. Apathy is apathy.

When I stepped through the gate into Dachau, and I saw the reminders of the murder, torture, political arrests and medical experiments, I was in that time seventy years ago, feeling the dust blowing across the enormous assembly ground. Then, when I read about shipping people to a prison camp at a former armory, holding them without due process, arresting them for their political and religious beliefs, of course I thought of Guantanamo Bay and no habeus corpus and renditions that our happening while we watch.

When I got on that train to Dachau, I was traveling to a place in time that I was able to feel, to see, to learn about. When I returned to my own time, I came back with the sad, certain knowledge that the apathy that allowed Dachau to happen is still in the world.

The Universe, it seems, called on me to take notice of the timelessness of the experience. You see, the exact minute I dropped my coins into the ticket machine in Munich for that train trip back in time, my watch literally stopped.

-PBG

Get Off the Surge; Go Off On the Contractors

Posturing is not governing. It's like a farmer wearing an expensive Italian suit to plant potatoes - you can only stand there looking good for so long before your customers wonder why you aren't bending down and getting dirty so you can fill their orders.

Look, I'm all for Congress resolutely standing against the President's surge (ewww), but let's move on. America's tragic policy in Iraq deserves all the attention and light Congress can shed on it, but there's no need to bulldog what everyone already knows: the country is opposed to the Surge.

The President has just asked for a lot more money to pay for his failed policy, and promises that he'll ask for even more next year. The problem is, all this vocal opposition to the Surge has put those of us against the war in a difficult position. We cannot hold off funding the troops and come out smelling good in the long run, regardless of the probable failure of the "new way forward". If we want to attack the White House's funding proposal we have to start questioning where the money is going, and get off of, sadly, who it's killing.

More waste from contractors like Parsons, Haliburton and KBR has come to light in the last week. The report from the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction cites numerous abuses of our money; that is what we should question. It is the one thing we actually can do something about.

We can talk about resolutions against Bush, but in the end, his word is the dragon's breath that sends brave young men and women into danger. The various Congressional resolutions are not only non-binding, they are non-gagging too. We can't keep him or Cheney from talking (ahh to dream) and that makes this principled stand little more than a thin ribbon of raffia on a pole in a hurricane.

Let's focus our attention on the contractors. Let's start that immediately, and make it part of the congressional budget hearings. Let's not appropriate funds for inappropriate work. The real way to get to the administration is to bite the hand that feeds it: big special interest contractors. A well reasoned confrontation on this front will put the administration back on the defensive in a way that will keep them from being able to claim that we are "emboldening the enemy".

Besides, it's the right way to deliver the potatoes.

-PBG

Mis-state of the Union: President Projector

"For the terrorists, life since 9/11 has never been the same."

With those words, President Bush began the portion of his speech Tuesday night that was yet another justification for taking on Iraq, for turning it into a terrorist haven and a killing field. I am not comforted by his assurances, and not because I fear the long arm of al-Qaeda; it's how he will use his misrepresentation of success to muscle through more changes in our lives that I fear most.

A PROSE AND THORN TRUTH:
I am more afraid

of my government
than I am of
my country's enemy.

This is how our lives have changed since 9/11: an abrogation of our rights and our most basic liberties, no habeus corpus for anyone in U.S. custody, warrantless wiretaps and phone company data mining, the inability to board a plane because your name is on a list, sanctioned torture, needless passport laws and a baggie full of travel-size lotions.

Hector-the-Projector struck again later in the speech, with his characterization of the enemy we are killing and dying to fight:

"They preach with threats, instruct with bullets and bombs, and promise paradise for the murder of the innocent."

If you substitute the word "democracy" for "paradise" (no, they are not always inter-changeable) Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans (and soon Iranians) can be saying the same thing about us.

The real problem here is Bush believes in this fight as if it were a classic biblical battle against a godless enemy, and those whom we fight feel the same:

"This war is more than a clash of arms -- it is a decisive ideological struggle..."

The problem here is that wars for ideological principles weren't even that successful in their heyday, a thousand years ago.

ANOTHER PROSE AND THORN TRUTH:
Just because our guns are bigger
doesn't mean we're right.

Fighting for a principal in a "civilized society" is something you do with words in Debate Club, not with weapons in an armed conflict eight thousand miles away, and not in someone else's civil war (regardless of the fact that we started it). But Bush says he didn't mean to be in a war like this:

"This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we're in."

And that is what has really changed for the terrorists since 9/11. The fight we wanted, the one that made the most sense, was the one that we could stop with a vigilant government that doesn't ignore warnings. But now, the "fight we're in" is the fight the terrorists want, and despite his Texas machismo, Bush cannot stop his own ignorant disaster from delivering the dead to our doorstep.

So be afraid, America.

"If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists aided by al Qaeda and supporters of the old regime. A contagion of violence could spill out across the country -- and in time, the entire region could be drawn into the conflict.

"For America, this is a nightmare scenario. For the enemy, this is the objective. Chaos is the greatest ally -- their greatest ally in this struggle. And out of chaos in Iraq would emerge an emboldened enemy with new safe havens, new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to harm America."

Epic battles? Come on, Mr. President, this is already a nightmare. I have to believe, though, that America can be restored in spite of all you have done to bring our society to the brink. I'm counting on it.

-PBG

Nothing Fails Like Success

So the Baker-Hamilton Commission decided, among other things, that we must engage in direct talks with Iran and Syria. As loyal readers of this column may remember, we called for the Iraq Study Group to make just such a recommendation (Shaking Hands with Extremists: An Exit Strategy , 22 October, 2006). Since the report's release on Wednesday, this has become one of the commissions most controversial points.

In his press conference with Tony Blair yesterday, President Bush was adamant (shock!) that the United States will not talk to Iran until it steps back from its nuclear enrichment program. Nor will there be any discussions with the Syrians until they stop trying to "de-stabilize" Lebanon.

Not to include regional powers in talks aimed at stabilizing Iraq is stubborn and shortsighted (and not limited to the administration, but more about that later). It also indicates that this administration will only accept a "working" Iraq on its own terms, which, according to the ISG, are no longer attainable.

Still, Bush speaks of his consensus-less success as if it were still just around the corner. He does not admit that success became failure in Iraq years ago. "If we were to fail," he said yesterday, phrasing it as a hypothetical even though it has already happenned, "If we were to fail, that failed policy will come to hurt generations of Americans in the future."

Doesn't that sound like something that should have been said before March, 2003? It appears Bush is setting it up to look like failure will be the future's fault - a future Congress, a future president - and not his own, criminal stubbornness.

And while we await the immediate future Congress and what they will or won't do about Iraq, the Senate Armed Service's Committee questioned the members of the Iraq Study Group yesterday. They also had something to say about engaging Iran and Syria in the process. Not surprisingly, Senator Joseph Lieberman wondered aloud if Iran was willing to "help the United States succeed" in Iraq.

Joe misunderstands the same thing that many who cling to this entanglement do: we are not there for the benefit of the United States. We haven't benefitted at all since Saddam fell. Our goal now is to help the Iraqis succeed, not the U.S.

That is the point of the Baker-Hamilton / Iraq Study Group report: the United States has failed in the goal of stabilizing Iraq. There is no more succeeding. It's a done deal. The report begins with that brutal, honest assessment. That is why we must create a new regional consensus - so Iraq can succeed, in spite of us and the mess our president's policy has made.

If U.S. policy is to have the Iraqis stand up, we need regional cooperation to help hold them up while we crawl out from under their massacred bodies.

-PBG