Former USAID Director Andrew Natsios Is Shrill!

Welcome, Andrew to the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill. Practice your moans of unearthly terror this evening: you have a solo in tomorrow's concert:

The Washington Monthly: THE REPUBLICAN CRACKUP CONTINUES.....In Newsweek, Michael Hirsh reports that former USAID Director Andrew Natsios is the latest long-suffering Republican loyalist to finally crack. The CPA, under the authority of Paul Bremer, "didn't hire the best people," he now says. "We were just watching it unfold. They [the CPA] were constantly hitting at our people, screaming at them. They were abusive."

But perhaps this paragraph is more interesting: 'There is much more to come, especially on the little-noticed issue of contracting in Iraq, which the watchdog group Transparency International last year warned could become "the biggest corruption scandal in history." The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction is expected to issue a harshly critical report in May concluding that the CPA did not have disciplined contracting procedures in place, according to several people involved in drafting the report. If the Democrats manage to get control of the House later this year, it's all going to come in an avalanche of subpoenas and new investigations.

It's not censure or impeachment that Republicans are really worried about if they lose control of Congress. It's subpoenas. If they lose the ability to block Democrats from conducting genuine investigations backed by the subpoena power of Congress, the jig is up. And they know it.

I disagree. Even if Democrats have a majority of *some* chamber come 2007, the Bush White House will refuse to submit to subpoenas. It will dare the Congress to impeach, and focus on holding the stupid 2/3 of the Republican senators. We do have a constitutional crisis here.

John Tierney Is Shrill

John Tierney is shrill:

Passing the Dinar - New York Times: Two months before the Iraq war began, David Kay reported to the Pentagon for a job in the agency being formed to run postwar Iraq. Kay, a former Defense Department scientist and weapons inspector in Iraq, was supposed to oversee the police. He assumed this meant preparing for the looting and crime to be expected when any regime collapsed. But those problems didn't seem to be on anyone else's mind, he told me, recalling his first day on the job.

"I said our first priority should be to establish order quickly, but that was considered a peripheral issue," he said. "The attitude was that it's not a problem, and if something happens the military will deal with it. I had one of the worst feelings ever in my gut, that this was going over a cliff."

On his second day on the job, he resigned -- an excellent career move in retrospect, although Kay doesn't believe it took any special clairvoyance. There were tough questions before the war, like figuring out whether Saddam had W.M.D. or forecasting the strength of the insurgency. But the looting and disorder were easily predictable, and Kay wasn't the only one making the predictions, as Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor document in their new book on the war, "Cobra II."

Before the war, Dick Mayer, a former policeman working for the Justice Department, came up with a plan to send in thousands of international police officers to maintain order after the invasion. But Pentagon officials bristled at the expense, and the White House rejected the plan.... Some Pentagon officials did warn of civil disorder and crime, but they didn't do anything about it. They passed the buck to Gen. Tommy Franks, even though he didn't have enough troops or money for the job and showed little interest in postwar planning. He simply assured President Bush that there would be a "lord mayor" in each city and large town to deal with civilian problems.

Looting, crime, mayhem -- that was always someone else's department. The buck-passing reached its most absurd level at a briefing in the Situation Room just before the invasion, when Bush heard about the postwar plan to rely on Iraqis for law enforcement. According to Gordon and Trainor, the president was told of an intelligence report concluding that the Iraqi police "appeared to have extensive professional training."

That was like concluding that Inspector Clouseau appeared to be a master detective. During Saddam's era, when his security forces were the prime enforcers of order, the Iraqi police were notorious for corruption and lethargy. Officers waited for citizens to report crimes and expected bribes for investigating them. To the police, preventing crime, or even doing street patrols, was not their job.... That summer, as Iraqis watched looters and criminals taking control, they kept asking why nobody put a stop to the crime. The answer from officials in Washington, it turns out, is the same one that would have been given by the old Iraqi police: not my job.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.

Davey Hume Is Shrill

But I always thought of Davey Hume as a whig. He's surely no throne-and-altar Tory:

The Reality-Based Community: David Hume is shrill by Mark Kleiman:

A too great disproportion among the citizens weakens any state. Every person, if possible, ought to enjoy the fruits of his labour, in a full possession of all the necessaries, and many of the conveniencies of life. No one can doubt, but such an equality is most suitable to human nature, and diminishes much less from the happiness of the rich than it adds to that of the poor. It also augments the power of the state, and makes any extraordinary taxes or impositions be paid with more chearfulness. Where the riches are engrossed by a few, these must contribute very largely to the supplying of the public necessities. But when the riches are dispersed among multitudes, the burthen feels light on every shoulder, and the taxes make not a very sensible difference on any one's way of living.

Add to this, that, where the riches are in few hands, these must enjoy all the power, and will readily conspire to lay the whole burthen on the poor, and oppress them still farther, to the discouragement of all industry.

From the essay "Of Commerce"

Hume was a close friend of Adam Smith and is usually thought of as a Tory,

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William Pfaff is Shrill!

William Pfaff is driven into shrill unholy madness by the incompetence, mendacity, and bizarre corpspeak of the Bush administration's new national security marketing collateral:

Intellectual poverty is the most striking quality of the Bush administration's new National Security Strategy statement, issued on Thursday. Its overall incoherence, its clichés and stereotyped phraseology give the impression that Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and his fellow authors assembled it from the boilerplate of bureaucratic discourse with contempt for the Congress to whom it is primarily addressed.

General Eaton Is Shrill

Who is General Eaton?

the defeatists!: Hell has just frozen over...: "One week after the president flew to the USS Lincoln in May 2003 to deliver his "Mission Accomplished" speech, the Defense Department ordered Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton to rush from Fort Benning, Ga., to Baghdad. His job: To lead an effort to try to rebuild Iraq's military. "I was very surprised to receive a mission so vital to our exit strategy so late," the now-retired general told The New York Times in an account published Feb. 11...

Here is what he says:

A Top-Down Review for the Pentagon - New York Times: By PAUL D. EATON: DURING World War II, American soldiers en route to Britain before D-Day were given a pamphlet on how to behave while awaiting the invasion. The most important quote in it was this: "It is impolite to criticize your host; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies."

By that rule, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is not competent to lead our armed forces. First, his failure to build coalitions with our allies from what he dismissively called "old Europe" has imposed far greater demands and risks on our soldiers in Iraq than necessary. Second, he alienated his allies in our own military, ignoring the advice of seasoned officers and denying subordinates any chance for input.

In sum, he has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld must step down.

In the five years Mr. Rumsfeld has presided over the Pentagon, I have seen a climate of groupthink become dominant and a growing reluctance by experienced military men and civilians to challenge the notions of the senior leadership.

I thought we had a glimmer of hope last November when Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, faced off with Mr. Rumsfeld on the question of how our soldiers should react if they witnessed illegal treatment of prisoners by Iraqi authorities. (General Pace's view was that our soldiers should intervene, while Mr. Rumsfeld's position was that they should simply report the incident to superiors.)

Unfortunately, the general subsequently backed down and supported the secretary's call to have the rules clarified, giving the impression that our senior man in uniform is just as intimidated by Secretary Rumsfeld as was his predecessor, Gen. Richard Myers.

Mr. Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his cold warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower. As a result, the Army finds itself severely undermanned %u2014 cut to 10 active divisions but asked by the administration to support a foreign policy that requires at least 12 or 14.

Only Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff when President Bush was elected, had the courage to challenge the downsizing plans. So Mr. Rumsfeld retaliated by naming General Shinseki's successor more than a year before his scheduled retirement, effectively undercutting his authority. The rest of the senior brass got the message, and nobody has complained since.

Now the Pentagon's new Quadrennial Defense Review shows that Mr. Rumsfeld also fails to understand the nature of protracted counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and the demands it places on ground forces. The document, amazingly, does not call for enlarging the Army; rather, it increases only our Special Operations forces, by a token 15 percent, maybe 1,500 troops.

Mr. Rumsfeld has also failed in terms of operations in Iraq. He rejected the so-called Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force and sent just enough tech-enhanced troops to complete what we called Phase III of the war %u2014 ground combat against the uniformed Iraqis. He ignored competent advisers like Gen. Anthony Zinni and others who predicted that the Iraqi Army and security forces might melt away after the state apparatus self-destructed, leading to chaos.

It is all too clear that General Shinseki was right: several hundred thousand men would have made a big difference then, as we began Phase IV, or country reconstruction. There was never a question that we would make quick work of the Iraqi Army.

The true professional always looks to the "What's next?" phase. Unfortunately, the supreme commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, either didn't heed that rule or succumbed to Secretary Rumsfeld's bullying. We won't know which until some bright historian writes the true story of Mr. Rumsfeld and the generals he took to war, an Iraq version of the Vietnam War classic "Dereliction of Duty" by H. R. McMaster.

Last, you don't expect a secretary of defense to be criticized for tactical ineptness. Normally, tactics are the domain of the soldier on the ground. But in this case we all felt what L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy in Iraq, has called the "8,000-mile screwdriver" reaching from the Pentagon. Commanders in the field had their discretionary financing for things like rebuilding hospitals and providing police uniforms randomly cut; money to pay Iraqi construction firms to build barracks was withheld; contracts we made for purchasing military equipment for the new Iraqi Army were rewritten back in Washington.

Donald Rumsfeld demands more than loyalty. He wants fealty. And he has hired men who give it. Consider the new secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, who when faced with the compelling need to increase the service's size has refused to do so. He is instead relying on the shell game of hiring civilians to do jobs that had previously been done by soldiers, and thus keeping the force strength static on paper. This tactic may help for a bit, but it will likely fall apart in the next budget cycle, with those positions swiftly eliminated.

So, what to do?

First, President Bush should accept the offer to resign that Mr. Rumsfeld says he has tendered more than once, and hire a man who will listen to and support the magnificent soldiers on the ground. Perhaps a proven Democrat like Senator Joseph Lieberman could repair fissures that have arisen both between parties and between uniformed men and the Pentagon big shots.

More vital in the longer term, Congress must assert itself. Too much power has shifted to the executive branch, not just in terms of waging war but also in planning the military of the future. Congress should remember it still has the power of the purse; it should call our generals, colonels, captains and sergeants to testify frequently, so that their opinions and needs are known to the men they lead. Then when they are asked if they have enough troops -- and no soldier has ever had enough of anything, more is always better -- the reply is public.

Our most important, and sometimes most severe, judges are our subordinates. That is a fact I discovered early in my military career. It is, unfortunately, a lesson Donald Rumsfeld seems incapable of learning.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Impeach Donald Rumsfeld. Do it now.

Peggy Noonan Realizes She Has Conned Herself--and Says That She Wouldn't Have Voted for Bush If She'd Known Who He Was

She looks at Bush fiscal policy and joins the Ancient, Occult, and Hermetic Order of the shrill, saying that if she'd known who George W. Bush really was she wouldn't have voted for him:

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan: Hey, Big Spender Should we have known that President Bush would bust the budget?: Thursday, March 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST: This week's column is a question, a brief one addressed with honest curiosity to Republicans. It is: When George W. Bush first came on the scene in 2000, did you understand him to be a liberal in terms of spending?

The question has been on my mind since the summer of 2005 when, at a gathering of conservatives, the question of Mr. Bush and big spending was raised.... Everyone murmured about... how the president "spends like a drunken sailor except the sailor spends his own money." And then someone, a smart young journalist, said, (I paraphrase), But we always knew what Bush was. He told us when he ran as a compassionate conservative. This left me rubbing my brow in confusion. Is that what Mr. Bush meant by compassionate conservatism?

That's not what I understood him to mean. If I'd thought he was a big-spending Rockefeller Republican.... I wouldn't have voted for him.... I didn't understand Mr. Bush's grand passion to be cutting spending.... But he did present himself as a conservative... conservatism is hostile, for reasons ranging from the abstract and philosophical to the concrete and practical, to high spending and high taxing....

How did this happen? In the years after 9/11 I looked at Mr. Bush's big budgets, and his expansion of entitlements, and assumed he was sacrificing fiscal prudence--interesting that that's the word people used to spoof his father--in order to build and maintain, however tenuously, a feeling of national unity. I assumed he wanted to lessen bipartisan tensions when America was wading into the new world of modern terrorism. I thought: This may be right and it may be wrong, but I understand it.... Mr. Bush will never have to run again, and he is in a position to come forward and make the case, even if only rhetorically, to slow and cut spending. He has not. And there's no sign he will....

Mr. President:

Did you ever hold conservative notions and assumptions on the issue of spending? If so, did you abandon them after the trauma of 9/11? For what reasons, exactly? Did you intend to revert to conservative thinking on spending at some point? Do you still? Were you always a liberal on spending? Were you, or are you, frankly baffled that conservatives assumed you were a conservative on spending? Did you feel they misunderstood you? Did you allow or encourage them to misunderstand you?

What are the implications for our country if spending levels continue to grow at their current pace?

What are the implications for the Republican party if it continues to cede one of the pillars on which it stood?

Did compassionate conservatism always mean big spending?

Now Peggy Noonan and the rest of the plastic Republican chattering teeth did not think back in 2000 that Bush's "compassionate conservatism" meant that he was a spender, they thought it meant that he was a liar--and that they were in on the con. The Bush budget strategy, they thought at the time, had four components:

1. Highball estimates of future budget surpluses in order to make it look like there's more room for tax cuts than there was.
2. Lowball the costs of the tax cuts by telling people that the AMT will be repealed when you calculate the magnitude of their tax cut and yet keeping the AMT in effect when calculating the revenue cost of the tax cut.
3. Call yourself a "compassionate conservative" to convince voters you don't want to make elderly emphysema patients front the money for their oxygen cylinders.
4. Then, when deficits reemerge, say: "Oh. What a surprise. We have to cut way back on federal services and programs after all."

That's the David Stockman quadrille. They thought Bush was lying to everybody else--that, as Andrew Sullivan liked to put it:

Some... get steamed because Bush has obscured this figure or claimed his tax cut will cost less than it actually will, or because he is using Medicare surplus money today that will be needed tomorrow and beyond.... [T]hey miss the deeper point... Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of 'compassionate conservatism'.... B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state.... I just hope the smoke doesn't clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again.

Now they are surprised--and shrill--to learn that George W. Bush was lying to them too.

I'm not surprised that she too has been driven to shrill unholy madness by this act of Bushian mendacity. Her copy of the Krugmanomicon is on its way. We ask her to report in her giant evil cephalopod form to Fort Lauderdale, to swim with the dolphins.

Larry Kudlow Joins the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill

Yes. He calls for the Democrats to retake control of Congress this year:

The RCP Blog: A Pathetic State of Affairs - By Larry Kudlow: The Senate budget resolution now in play has dropped Bush's entitlement savings according to Budget Chairman Judd Gregg. Plus, Republican senators are trying to front-load new pork into the resolution even though Gregg wants to hold the line (at least on that).

After all the GOP Congressional talk about newfound budget-cutting religion, including earmark transparency and reform, so far they have produced nothing.

People like Arlen Specter, and many others, are still trying to get their pet projects funded. So, what else is new?

Gregg has thrown in the towel on mandatory spending cuts because he says he doesn't have the votes. Well then, I don't think that the American people should "have the votes" to keep the Republicans in charge of the Senate--or the House for that matter.

Larry: I'm sorry, but we've run out of space. You'll have to hot-bunk in with Shub-Ascalatl for a while, as you get used to your new state of shrill unholy madness.

Sandra Day O'Connor Joins the Order of the Shrill!

Nina Totenberg reports:

The Raw Story | Retired Supreme Court Justice hits attacks on courts and warns of dictatorship: Supreme Court justices keep many opinions private but Sandra Day O'Connor no longer faces that obligation. Yesterday, the retired justice criticized Republicans who criticized the courts. She said they challenge the independence of judges and the freedoms of all Americans. O'Connor's speech at Georgetown University was not available for broadcast but NPR's legal correspondent Nina Totenberg was there.

Nina Totenberg: In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O'onnor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms. O'Connor began by conceding that courts do have the power to make presidents or the Congress or governors as she put it "really, really angry." But, she continued, if we don't make them mad some of the time we probably aren't doing our jobs as judges, and our effectiveness, she said, is premised on the notion that we won't be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts. The nation's founders wrote repeatedly, she said, that without an independent judiciary to protect individual rights from the other branches of government those rights and privileges would amount to nothing. But said O'Connor as the founding fathers knew statutes and constitutions don't protect judicial independence, people do.

And then she took aim at former GOP house leader Tom DeLay... she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year when DeLay took out after the courts for rulings on abortions, prayer and the Terri Schiavo case. This, said O'Connor was after the federal courts had applied Congress' onetime only status of Schiavo as it was written. Not, said O'Connor, as the congressman might have wished it were written. This response to this flagrant display of judicial restraint, said O'Connor, her voice dripping with sarcasm, was that the congressman blasted the courts.

It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing. It doesn't help, she said, when a high-profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and decisions that a senator disagrees with. She didn't name him, but it was Texas senator John Cornyn who made that statement, after a Georgia judge was murdered in the courtroom and the family of a federal judge in Illinois murdered in the judge's home. O'Connor observed that there have been a lot of suggestions lately for so-called judicial reforms, recommendations for the massive impeachment of judges, stripping the courts of jurisdiction and cutting judicial budgets for punishing offending judges. Any of these might be debatable, she said, as long as they are not retaliation for decisions that political leaders disagree with.

I, said O'Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. Pointing to the experience of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O'Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a long of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

Welcome, Justice O'Connor! We have reserved the Chaos Suite for you. You can pick up your robe... oh, I see you have your robe...

Unqualified Offerings Is Shrill

We welcome Jim Henley, Grand Heresiarch and High Tentacled One of the Ancient, Occult, and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

Ia Henley!! Ia Fhtagn!!: Outraged Moderate got hold of Steven Cambone’s handwritten notes of his meeting with Donald Rumsfeld from the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The notes confirm CBS News’ report of September 4, 2002 that, at that meeting, Rumsfeld was already thinking of using the atrocities as an excuse to go to war with Iraq. It’s important to stress: Rumsfeld is not wondering if Iraq did it; he’s wondering if it can look enough like Iraq did it to pin the blame there.

It can’t be stressed enough: the Pentagon was aflame; there was smoke pouring from a hole in the Pennsylvania fields and the World Trade Center complex was belching its ghastly cloud, and already our rulers were thinking not, who is to blame? but what can we get away with? What will the still-bubbling fat of the murdered serve to cook?

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Impeach Donald Rumsfeld. Do it now.

Francis Fukuyama is Shrill and Unbalanced?

Strange times: Francis Fukuyama, intellectual Godfather to the Neoconservative movement, appears to be writing obituary notices for the Bush doctrine. Next he'll be howling at the moon, having been driven to shrill unholy madness by the sheer disconnection from reality of the George W. Bush administration.

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before.

...

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise.

...

It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism.

Michael Hirsh is Shrill!

It appear's that Newsweek's Michael Hirsh has been driven to shrill unholy madness by the incompetence of the George W. Bush administration. Don't believe us? See for yourself.

How then did we arrive at this day, with anti-American Islamist governments rising in the Mideast, bin Laden sneering at us, Qaeda lieutenants escaping from prison, Iran brazenly enriching uranium, and America as hated and mistrusted as it ever has been? The answer, in a word, is incompetence.

William M. Arkin Is Shrill!

He curses the inhabitants of the Pentagon:

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com : Pentagon Fails on Roadside Bombs:The roadside bomb threat in Iraq made national news last weekend when an IED seriously injured ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt while they were embedded with the U.S. military. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to the Defense Department, 51 percent of 1,735 combat deaths and two-thirds of 16,500 injuries are due to roadside bombs.

Some in the military are grousing about wall to wall coverage of Woodruff and Vogt, and the suggestion that "press folks are more important than mere military folks." What soldiers need to understand is that not only were Woodruff and Vogt in Iraq to report on those very folks, but if they have anger and frustration about the threats in Iraq, they should focus their ire on the Pentagon and the bureaucracy and not on the media.

The Pentagon's inability to competently deliver help to soldiers in the field is partly due to its insane propensity to create ad hoc organizations to address a problem and then constantly reorganize at the drop of a hat.... In December, Rumsfeld appointed retired Army Gen. Montgomery Meigs to head the Pentagon's efforts to deal with the problem, essentially firing the one star running the program and admitting that a number of diffuse and uncoordinated efforts had failed to produce either the technology or the tactics to protect American servicemembers. Meigs oversees a growing IED organization and over $1 billion committed for counter-IED initiatives. If there is one thing the Pentagon knows how to do, it is throw money at a problem, particularly one that suggests a technology solution.

But it also knows how to play with blocs, organizational blocs that is. Consider this: In October 2003, the Army created the Improvised Explosive Device Task Force (IED-TF) in recognition of the threat. In February 2004, the Army further directed the IED-TF be made a standing capability with assigned field teams. In April 2004, the Army proposed activation of an Asymmetric Warfare Regiment (later designated the Asymmetric Warfare Group) to oversee IED response and counter-terrorism priorities. In July 2004, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz redesignates the Army Task Force the Joint IED Defeat Task Force (JIEDD-TF), again assigning it the mission of providing streamlined and timely support to soldiers in the field. In July 2004, DOD establishes a Joint Integrated Process Team for Defeating Improvised Explosive Devices (Joint IED Defeat IPT) to sharpen DoD focus on IEDs. In June 2005, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld signed a directive (DOD Directive 2000.19, Joint Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Defeat) designating DOD resources and direction to the problem. In January 2006, Meigs' JIEDD-TF is again redesignated as the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) and is made a permanent task force.

What has all this produced to stop IEDs? I guess a lot of old letterhead and not much action.

So it should be no surprise that in October 2004, when the Army published interim Field Manual 3-07.22, "Counterinsurgency Operations," the new doctrine only mentioned IEDs as a peripheral threat and made no mention whatsoever of potential IED campaigns employed by an adversary such as in Iraq. The new doctrine establish no doctrine for countering such campaigns.

No wonder that this week Republican and military stalwart Rep. Hunter now says "we need to focus more effort" on the IED problem and threat.

The President may declare that we are "winning" in Iraq, but on the ground, happy talk about progress masks an unchanging if not even growing threat.

Of course none of this would be the epidemic that it is if the Defense Secretary and his department had recognized from the beginning that Iraq not only was chock-a-block filled with munitions but also that more troops were needed to ensure security after vanquishing the Iraqi Army.

My point is not to go over old territory, but to lament the clear contradiction evident in wild reorganization and the writing of check for over $1 billion to solve the problem: We are winning? Not only aren't we, but I have little confidence that this Pentagon leadership can even do what is needed to minimally protect American and Iraqi lives.

Shrillblog Joke Contest!

Sometimes we sit around the halls of The Order trying to find a silver lining to the incompetence, malevolence, mendacity, and sheer disconnection of reality of the George W. Bush administration. At the very least, we'd like a good joke. Here's the latest batch, fresh from the lab:

Q: What's funnier than President Bush proclaiming we need to reduce dependence on oil?
A: President Bush's own advisors admitting he was making it up.

Q: What's funnier tha President Bush's own advisors admitting he was making it up?
A: Nothing!

Thank you, thank you -- we're here all foureight years. Semper catum.

Presenting the Grand Heresiarch of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill

It's Andrew Sullivan! Shriller than five Krugmans!! More Mad than Michael Moore!!!

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish : Fiscal blather: The man has added over $20 trillion in fiscal liabilities to the next generation. And he brags about alleged future savings of ... $40 billion. He makes the line-item veto the criterion for fiscal responsibility, knowing it will never pass. He says his proposal last year was designed to "save social security." But it had no long-term impact on the costs. To deal with the entitlement crunch, after five years in office, he proposes ... a commission! And urges Washington to avoid "partisan politics." I'm sorry but this is duplicitous when it isn't pathetic.

Unrepentant on illegal wire-tapping. But the "statute" to which he refers specifically sets up a court for the kind of warrants he says he doesn't need to ask for. Classic Bush: ignore the actual criticism; set up a straw man; and then whack it with a big baseball bat. And you know what? It worked extremely well. "We will not sit back and wait to be hit again." Great line. Best defense. Avoids the basic issue. Keep going ...

Ex-Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin Joins the Order

Yes, we can now reveal that ex-Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin has joined the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill, in a measured, polite, and sober way:

WSJ.com - 'We Must Change Policy Direction' : Some would argue that our reasonably healthy GDP growth in the last few years -- driven largely by the Federal Reserve Board's accommodative monetary policy and the disposition of consumers to spend based on high housing prices and lower interest rates -- indicates that we can stick with the economic policy status quo. I believe this would be a serious mistake. Median real wages and median family incomes have been roughly stagnant for the past five years.... Private sector job growth has been the lowest of any recovery since the '30s. Most importantly, the longer-term underpinnings of our economy are unsound.... Re-establishing seriousness of purpose regarding economic policy... will require our political system to do what it is not doing today: making choices that are very difficult politically... putting aside ideology in favor of facts and analysis....

[O]ur future economic well-being is threatened by large current and projected fiscal deficits, huge increases in entitlement costs... personal savings rates of approximately zero, public school system inadequacies, and high health care costs. But our political system is... failing to make the difficult decisions required. Political leaders... have taken on critically important economic issues, as President Clinton did on deficit reduction, trade liberalization and global economic crises... as Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill did on Social Security in 1983....

(1) We should re-establish sound fiscal conditions for the intermediate term (the 10-year federal budget window) and put in place a real plan to get entitlements on a sound footing for the long term. (2) We need a strong public investment program -- paid for... -- to promote productivity growth, to help those dislocated by technology and trade, and to equip all citizens to share in our economic well-being and growth. (3) We must pursue an international economic policy that continues global integration, especially multilaterally, and proactively addresses our other international economic interests, including combating global poverty. (4) We should work toward a regulatory regime that meets our needs and sensibly weigh risks and rewards. Our strategy should reaffirm market-based economics as the most effective organizing principle for economic activity, while recognizing the critical role of government in providing the many requisites for economic success that markets, by their very nature, will not provide.

Broad participation in economic well-being and growth is critical, both as a fundamental value and to realize our economic potential.... [I]n 1979 it took 44 people with average earnings in the bottom half of the population to equal each person in the top 0.1 of 1%, while in 2001, the last year in that study, that number was 160.... The proponents of supply-side theory who assert that tax cuts will wholly -- or even significantly -- pay for themselves (through increased growth and federal tax revenues), appear to be no more accurate now than they were in the '90s.... Virtually all mainstream economists take the view that sustained long-term deficits will crowd out private investment, increase interest rates, reduce productivity and reduce growth. And the far greater danger is that these various imbalances could at some point lead to fear of fiscal disarray and concern about our currency, causing sharply higher interest rates in our bond markets and the risk of a sharp exchange-rate decline. Also, very importantly, the evidence of the early '90s strongly suggests that sustained deficits can undermine business and consumer confidence. The adverse impact on interest and currency rates has not yet occurred, partly because business has had relatively low levels of demand for capital -- but most importantly because of vast capital inflows from abroad (until recently, predominantly from central banks supporting the dollar to subsidize their exports). This is not indefinitely sustainable....

I believe that the most realistic way forward is for the president to bring together the leaders of both parties and both houses to make these decisions with joint political responsibility. Everything should be on the table, including cost discipline, progress toward entitlement reform, and judgment as to the revenues needed to close current deficits and provide the functions the American people expect of government. These include public investment in education, basic research, infrastructure and other requisites for a successful economy as well as national security and the entitlement costs of an aging population. Finding the balance that best promotes economic growth in this context could well call for revenue increases as well as spending discipline, as evidenced by the '90s, when a mixture of spending cuts and targeted tax increases was followed by years of strong growth, powerful job creation and rising incomes. Moreover, any revenue-increasing measures should reduce, not exacerbate, our growing income gap....

None of this is easy, but our economy could well be at a critical juncture for the longer term. To realize our bright future and to minimize the risk of serious difficulty, we urgently need our own sense of mission to meet the challenges facing our economy.

Meyerson Fhtagn!! Meyerson Fhtagn!!

Howard Meyerson of the Washington Post is shrill!

Bush the Incompetent : Incompetence is... hardly the worst attribute that can be ascribed to George W. Bush. But it is this president's defining attribute. Historians... the hash... of his war in Iraq... Hurricane Katrina... Medicare drug plan, will have to grapple with how one president could so cosmically botch so many big things... the president's own initiatives.... [L]itanies of screw-ups. Yesterday's New York Times... the first official assessment... reconstruction... in Iraq... "gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting [and] secrecy."... [T]he president's prescription drug plan... is his most mind-boggling failure.... Pharmacists are not resisting the program; seniors are not planting car bombs to impede it.... [P]eople are trying to get their medications covered under the program.... [T]his is a contingency for which the administration was not prepared....

Initially, Part D's biggest glitch seemed to be the difficulty that seniors encountered in selecting a plan. But since Part D took effect... the most acute problem has been the plan's failure to cover the 6.2 million low-income seniors whose medications had been covered by Medicaid. On New Year's Day, the new law shifted these people's coverage to private insurers. And all hell broke loose. Pharmacists found that the insurers didn't have the seniors' names in their systems, or charged them far in excess of what the new law stipulated -- and what the seniors could afford. In California fully 20 percent of the state's 1.1 million elderly Medicaid recipients had their coverage denied. The state had to step in to pick up the tab for their medications. California has appropriated $150 million for the medications, and estimates that it will be out of pocket more than $900 million by 2008-09. Before Jan. 1 the Bush administration had told California that it would save roughly $120 million a year once Part D was in effect.

California's experience is hardly unique. To date at least 25 states and the District have had to defray the costs to seniors that Part D was supposed to cover. What's truly stunning about this tale is that... they always knew that these 6.2 million seniors would be shifted into the plan on the first day of the year. There were absolutely no surprises, and yet administration officials weren't even remotely prepared. No such problems attended the creation of Medicare itself in the mid-1960s....

[F]inancially beholden to both the drug and insurance industries, the Bush administration and the Repsublican Congress mandated that millions of Americans have their coverage shifted to these most byzantine of bureaucracies. This is, remember, the president's signature domestic initiative, just as the Iraq war is his signature foreign initiative. How could a president get these things so wrong? Incompetence may describe this presidency, but it doesn't explain it. For that, historians may need to turn to the seven deadly sins: to greed... sloth... Incurious George.... [T]he key question for this administration is that of the great American sage, Casey Stengel: Can't anybody here play this game?

Five Octaves Above Middle C...

So shrill that only dogs can hear him, is Eric Alterman:

Eric Alterman : So we’ve gutted the budget for reconstruction in Iraq, something that may make sense, given that we’re not really conducting any, and are incapable of providing the necessary security to do so, but at the same time, we’ve destroyed what was a functioning country. True it was a totalitarian dictatorship run by mass murderer, but it functioned for most people. It no longer does. As unbelievable as it appears, we seem to have made Iraq a worse place than it was before. Look here and here if you think I exaggerate. (And keep in mind, as my young friend Paul McLeary demonstrates here, that it is damn hard and dangerous to do any solid reporting in that chaotic environment.)

Remember, I opposed the war even though I calculated at the time that it would include what I called the “liberation” of the people of Iraq. (Leftists attacked me for using that term unironically.) As a realist, I didn’t think what I then believed was that their liberation would justify its cost. Well, amazingly, the Bush administration was too incompetent to accomplish even that—and this is outside of the fact that they had to lie to the country to get us in there.

Really, there is nothing, nothing that justifies this war any more and nothing that justifies the faith anyone has that the Bush administration can make it any better. (Take a look here at what Eliot Weinberger heard about Iraq in 2005 if you doubt that.) Perhaps it will happen. But that would sure be a break from the past. I seem to recall from freshman philosophy that somebody big, David Hume, argued that just because the sun has risen in the East and set in the West every day since time immemorial is no argument for the fact that it will necessarily do so tomorrow. Still, I think it’s a good bet. And I think it’s a good bet that the Bush administration will continue to screw up Iraq even worse than before.

William M. Arkin of washingtonpost.com Joins Our Ranks!

Welcome, William M. Arkin! It's good to see yet another employee of washingtonpost.com succumb to shrill unholy madness, and howl his shrill screeds of Bush hatred though the night!

Early Warning by William M. Arkin - washingtonpost.com : Col. Thomas M. Pappas, once commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and the senior intelligence officer responsible for military interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison, has now been given immunity.... [T]here will never be a connection made between the goings on at Abu Ghraib and the top ranks of either the Pentagon or the Bush administration.... Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the one time commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison and the supposed inspiration for Abu Ghraib's operations has invoked his right not to incriminate himself.... Pappas' nonjudicial proceedings resulted in a written reprimand and forfeiture of $4,000 pay per month for two months. Seven enlisted military policemen have so far been prosecuted for treatment of detainees. Private Charles A. Graner received a 10-year prison sentence.

The military calls it different spanks for different ranks....

Here's how it works: An Army Colonel in Iraq talks to his direct commander and liaises with adjacent commanders. He occasionally talks to the one-star staff officers, special assistants and executive aides to the two and three stars. The staff jockeys are themselves strap hangers and note takers in video teleconferences.... But... when sensitive matters -- including issues of personality and high level assignments -- are being discussed, the general officers "meet" privately on the VTC without back seaters in the room. Or they talk on the phone.... I wrote almost two years ago, when the Abu Ghraib scandal was first breaking... that I didn't believe that an "order" would ever be uncovered, that a direct connection would ever be made between the soldiers in those cell blocks and officers at a higher level.

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, one of the few heroes... testified before Congress that a "failure in leadership, lack of discipline; no training whatsoever; and no supervision" led to the mistreatment. I wrote then that "In the context of what was going on in Iraq [in 2003], a muddled, leaderless, unsupervised, high-pressure environment at Abu Ghraib led military policemen and their intelligence brethren to turn into a mob."

Heads should certainly roll, I said, but more important, I thought we should learn the lesson: "that we, represented by the American fighting men and women stuck in the muddled and hopeless endeavor of Iraq, are in way over our heads."

We still haven't learned that lesson.

The real crime of the wars since 9/11 is that when it comes to any kind of "sensitive" -- read controversial -- actions and policies, there are no explicit written orders. Without rules, without oversight, without accountability, with such a high octane and high pressured overblown -- almost manic -- enterprise, it is no wonder that many of the participants think that they are saving the world and thereby take liberties in their day-to-day efforts.

We welcome Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz to the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

Howard Kurtz : The larger issue is that much of the press has abandoned reporting on health and safety regulation until disaster strikes. How many reporters have dug into the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration, which under the Bush administration was run by a former Utah mine manager until last year? About as many as did pieces, before Hurricane Katrina, on why a former Arabian horse official was running the dysfunctional bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Heck of a job. "I have tried to get the general press interested," says Ellen Smith, owner of the trade publication Mine Safety and Health News. "I just kind of gave up." The mine agency has received scant coverage, even as it has changed -- critics say softened -- the Clinton administration%u2019s enforcement approach. Since 2001... The Post has published three staff-written stories on mine safety not related to a specific accident; the New York Times, two; Wall Street Journal, one; Chicago Tribune, one; and Los Angeles Times and USA Today, none. 60 Minutes did one segment on a mine safety whistle-blower.

Perhaps the most persistent reporter has been Ken Ward of West Virginia's Charleston Gazette, who says that under the Bush administration, the mine safety agency "started clamping down on folks like me" and "people we dealt with all the time were all of a sudden instructed not to talk." Ward says the agency didn't tell the Gazette of a media conference call last week: "It's pretty amazing that a federal agency would hold a briefing on the biggest mining disaster in West Virginia in 40 years and exclude the biggest paper in the state."Labor Department spokesman David James says the call was put together on the fly and there was no attempt to exclude the Gazette.

Former Iraq Viceroy Paul Bremer has joined the shrill unbalanced Critics of George W. Bush. Welcome, Paul! Pick up your black hooded robe covered with eldritch symbols at the laundry, and report to the North Pond for lessons in transforming yourself into your tentacled cephalopod form. The Scaife Foundation has paid your room, board, and fees through June.

Kevin Drum writes:

The Washington Monthly: BREMER ON IRAQ....On Dateline last night, Paul Bremer confirmed something that he briefly alluded to last year: we never had enough troops on the ground to keep order in Iraq, and both George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld knew it.

Bremer said he sent a memo to Rumsfeld suggesting that half a million soldiers would be needed, three times the number deployed by the Bush administration.

"I never had any reaction from him," the former diplomat told NBC's Brian Williams on "Dateline."

Although he never heard back from his direct boss, Bremer said he discussed his concerns with Bush, who told him he would seek troops from other countries, but did not mention increasing U.S. forces.

...[T]hat half million number is pretty stunning. It's one thing to tell your boss you need more troops, but it's quite another to tell him you need three times as many as you have. That's the kind of warning that really ought to make someone sit up and listen, and if Bremer is on the level here it means that Rumsfeld and Bush screwed the pooch even worse than we thought -- something I'm not sure I would have thought possible until now.

Silly Kevin. He is a valued member of the Order of the Shrill, but apparently not too bright. How long will he take to learn that the Bush administration is worse than he imagined, even after taking account of the fact that the Bush administration is worse than he imagined?