http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/opinion/08krugman.html?th&emc=th
Quagmire of the Vanities By PAUL KRUGMAN NY Times Op-Ed: January 8, 2007 The only real question about the planned "surge" in Iraq - which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation - is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional. Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks they're cynical. He recently told The Washington Post that administration officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be "the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof." Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they're delusional. Mr. Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administration's unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one's losses - the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even. Of course, such gambling is easier when the lives at stake are those of other people's children. Well, we don't have to settle the question. Either way, what's clear is the enormous price our nation is paying for President Bush's character flaws. I began writing about the Bush administration's infallibility complex, the president's Captain Queeg-like inability to own up to mistakes, almost a year before the invasion of Iraq. When you put a man like that in a position of power - the kind of position where he can punish people who tell him what he doesn't want to hear, and base policy decisions on the advice of people who play to his vanity - it's a recipe for disaster. Consider, on one side, the case of the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief during 2004, who provided accurate assessments of the deteriorating situation in Iraq. "What is he, some kind of defeatist?" asked the president - and according to The Washington Post, at the end of his tour, the station chief "was punished with a poor assignment." On the other side, consider the men Mr. Bush has turned to since the midterm election. They constitute a remarkable coalition of the unwilling - men who have been wrong about Iraq every step of the way, but aren't willing to admit it. The principal proponents of the "surge" are William Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. Now, even if the Joint Chiefs of Staff hadn't given the surge a thumbs down, Mr. Kristol's track record should have been reason enough to ignore his advice. For example, early in the war, Mr. Kristol dismissed as "pop sociology" warnings that there would be conflict between Sunnis and Shiites and that the Shiites might try to create an Islamic fundamentalist state. He assured National Public Radio listeners that "Iraq's always been very secular." But Mr. Kristol and Mr. Kagan appealed to Mr. Bush's ego, suggesting that he might yet be able to rescue his signature war. And am I the only person to notice that after all the Oedipal innuendo surrounding the Iraq Study Group - Daddy's men coming in to fix Junior's mess, etc. - Mr. Bush turned for advice to two other sons of famous and more successful fathers? Not that Mr. Bush rejects all advice from elder statesmen. We now know that he has been talking to Henry Kissinger. But Mr. Kissinger is a kindred spirit. In remarks published after his death, Gerald Ford said of his secretary of state, "Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he implemented, in retrospect he would defend." Oh, and Senator John McCain, the first major political figure to advocate a surge, is another man who can't admit mistakes. Mr. McCain now says that he always knew that the conflict was "probably going to be long and hard and tough" - but back in 2002, before the Senate voted on the resolution authorizing the use of force, he declared that a war with Iraq would be "fairly easy." Mr. Bush is expected to announce his plan for escalation in the next few days. According to the BBC, the theme of his speech will be "sacrifice." But sacrifice for what? Not for the national interest, which would be best served by withdrawing before the strain of the war breaks our ground forces. No, Iraq has become a quagmire of the vanities - a place where America is spending blood and treasure to protect the egos of men who won't admit that they were wrong. *** Globe and Mail 06/01/07 Amid the intifada, a courageous friendship Jewish secretary interrogated, jailed after banned visits with Palestinian militia leader ByMark Mackinnon Jaffa, Israel -- Even strapped to a chair with her hands and feet bound, as agents from Israel's Shin Bet domestic intelligence interrogated her for 18 straight hours about her contacts with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Tali Fahima never doubted she had done the right thing. Once an unknown legal secretary who supported Israel's right-wing Likud party, Ms. Fahima earned the adoration of her country's left, and the suspicion of the Shin Bet, by repeatedly travelling to the West Bank refugee camp at Jenin during the worst violence of the intifada to try to better understand Palestinians and their cause. Over the course of her repeated trips to Jenin, Ms. Fahima struck up a friendship with Zakaria Zubeidi, the local head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an organization that dispatched dozens of suicide bombers into Israel during the Palestinian uprising. It was a relationship that eventually landed her in prison. "It took a little while for me to absorb that I was standing in the middle of Jenin, an unarmed Jew during the height of the intifada. [Mr. Zubeidi] said to me 'you're crazy.' I think he was, too," the 30-year-old said in an interview, recalling her first trip to Jenin. Yesterday was her third day of freedom after being paroled following 28 months in jail. Ms. Fahima describes her friendship with Mr. Zubeidi as "courageous" on both their parts. Many Israelis describe it as treason. In May of 2004, she defied a military order banning Israelis from visiting the West Bank in order to visit Mr. Zubeidi, one of Israel's most wanted men. After he survived an assassination attempt, Ms. Fahima declared her willingness to act as a human shield for him. She was arrested in Jenin shortly thereafter. She says that during her first year in prison, before she was convicted of any crime, she was kept in isolation, and frequently was interrogated from dawn until midnight. She eventually made a deal with the prosecution, under which she pleaded guilty to passing information to the enemy and of maintaining contacts with a foreign agent with the intent of harming state security. Sitting in a café near her home in the port city of Jaffa, Ms. Fahima said she has no regrets about what she did, even though it made her one of the most polarizing figures in Israel. She believes she was silenced not because she was a threat to Israel's security, but because she was challenging the idea that people like Mr. Zubeidi were murderous terrorists who couldn't be dealt with except by force. "I went to meet with the enemy. I broke the walls that the state built. And I'm not a lefty; I come from the Israeli mainstream. It's something that really scared them," she said, black-rimmed glasses perched on her thin nose. She added that she was only arrested after she refused an offer to work for Shin Bet. In Yafa, the café at which she chooses to meet, she's clearly seen as a hero. Her drinking of a Turkish coffee is repeatedly interrupted by admirers and well-wishers. She says that her journey to Jenin began several years before, at a conference she attended in Tel Aviv shortly after the outbreak of the intifada in the fall of 2000. An Israeli Arab who was there complained that Jewish repairmen refused to visit his home because they were scared to travel to Arab towns. Ms. Fahima says she told the man that she wouldn't go there either because she was afraid she'd be killed, and was caught off guard when the man responded by challenging her to visit his city, Umm al-Fahm. She decided to face her fears and take him up on his invitation. "I said, 'Okay, I'm going to do this,' and I went by myself, by bus," she recalled. "I was scared. But I went and when I got there I called him and said, 'I'm here,' and he hosted me beautifully." The experience changed her entire outlook, and Ms. Fahima began reading Palestinian websites and attending anti-occupation political conferences. Later, she read an interview Mr. Zubeidi gave to an Israeli newspaper in which he recounted his childhood involvement in an Israeli-Palestinian theatre project and his desire to live a normal life. The two were the same age, she realized, and she decided she wanted to contact him. At Mr. Zubeidi's invitation, she travelled to Jenin in 2002, shortly after dozens of Palestinians were killed in an Israeli military incursion. She felt partly responsible for what she saw: "This army was my army, acting in my name." When she returned to Tel Aviv, she started giving interviews to Israeli newspapers that were harshly critical of Israel's 35-year occupation of the West Bank. Now that she's served her sentence, she says she'll continue her work, though she intends to respect the conditions of her release, which prohibit her from visiting the West Bank, or from having any contact with Mr. Zubeidi. She plans to work from Jaffa to help the children's theatre in Jenin, and says she will fight to improve the conditions of those categorized as security prisoners, as she was. Once her court-imposed, one-year travel ban is over, she says she wants to take advantage of her celebrity and go on speaking tours to raise international awareness of the Palestinian cause. "I touched a very sensitive point in Israeli society, causing a lot of excitement and a lot of anger," she said. "As an Israeli citizen, I'm just fighting for my future and my children's future. We have to stop the occupation." --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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