I take back any bad thing I’ve ever said about Sen. Al Franken, DFL-Minn.

Why do I do this? Because in his brief tenure in office, Franken has shown himself to be exactly the kind of senator we need more of — bright, driven, and possessed of a sense of justice. He’s not getting things done by grandstanding or being a comedian; he’s getting things done by writing good legislation and getting it passed.

Take the case of Jamie Leigh Jones. Please.

You probably remember the case of Jamie Leigh Jones, the woman who was raped while working for KBR in Iraq. After reporting the rape, KBR responded to this grievous act by imprisoning her in a shipping container, so that she couldn’t tell anyone. When she finally convinced a guard to give her a cell phone, she managed to get a call to her dad in Texas, who worked with Rep. Ted Poe, R-Tex., to get her home. KBR responded to the actions of its employees by banning cell-phones.

Jones was unable to prosecute her assailants, so she attempted instead to sue KBR. But because her contract provided for arbitration for any workplace disputes, she was unable to; her only route for compensation was arbitration, a process that is a) better used for minor contract disputes, as opposed to cases of rape and false imprisonment, and b) decidedly tilted in favor of employers. She’s made some headway — the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that her case should be handled outside of arbitration — but that’s headway for her, and it’s only come after four years of legal fighting. Any woman — or man — who lives outside the 5th circuit who is similarly treated will have to start from scratch.

On Monday, Franken worked to extend those protections, when he successfully attached an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would defund contractors “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”

Franken’s speech on the floor was spot on:

Theres a lot of horrible in there, but the nut graf (which I ganked from ThinkProgress) is as follows:

The constitution gives everybody the right to due process of law … And today, defense contractors are using fine print in their contracts do deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court. … The victims of rape and discrimination deserve their day in court [and] Congress plainly has the constitutional power to make that happen.

It would be nice to think that this sensible amendment was simply passed on a voice vote, all members of the Senate opposing the idea that someone who was raped and imprisoned would be prevented from seeking justice. Alas, that was not the case; the amendment passed 68-30, with all Democrats (save Robert Byrd and Arlen Specter, who did not vote) and 10 Republicans voting in favor, and 30 Republicans — 75 percent of the caucus — opposed.

The list of pro-rape Republican senators is as follows: Alexander (R-TN), Barrasso (R-WY), Bond (R-MO), Brownback (R-KS), Bunning (R-KY), Burr (R-NC), Chambliss (R-GA), Coburn (R-OK), Cochran (R-MS), Corker (R-TN), Cornyn (R-TX), Crapo (R-ID), DeMint (R-SC), Ensign (R-NV), Enzi (R-WY), Graham (R-SC), Gregg (R-NH), Inhofe (R-OK), Isakson (R-GA), Johanns (R-NE), Kyl (R-AZ), McCain (R-AZ), McConnell (R-KY), Risch (R-ID), Roberts (R-KS), Sessions (R-AL), Shelby (R-AL), Thune (R-SD), Vitter (R-LA), Wicker (R-MS).

Obviously, the amendment still has to go through conference committee, but one suspects its future is bright; certainly, the House is unlikely to water this down. And for most people, that’s a good thing; justice demands that those who are egregiously wronged are able to sue for redress. Yes, most Senate Republicans may view the idea of allowing lawsuits to be quaint, especially when compared to corporate profits. But most humans recognize what happened to Jamie Leigh Jones to be an unconscionable crime, and there is nothing quaint about making sure it never happens again.

I’d highly recommend reading “The Real Struggle In Iran,” George Friedman’s analysis the recent events in Iran. I have no way of knowing if Friedman’s analysis is accurate or not; but it seems a good deal more plausible to me than the narrative I’ve seen from much of the major media.

When Ahmadinejad defeated Mir Hossein Mousavi on the night of the election, the clerical elite saw themselves in serious danger. The margin of victory Ahmadinejad claimed might have given him the political clout to challenge their position. Mousavi immediately claimed fraud, and Rafsanjani backed him up. Whatever the motives of those in the streets, the real action was a knife fight between Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani. By the end of the week, Khamenei decided to end the situation. In essence, he tried to hold things together by ordering the demonstrations to halt while throwing a bone to Rafsanjani and Mousavi by extending a probe into the election irregularities and postponing a partial recount by five days.

The key to understanding the situation in Iran is realizing that the past weeks have seen not an uprising against the regime, but a struggle within the regime. Ahmadinejad is not part of the establishment, but rather has been struggling against it, accusing it of having betrayed the principles of the Islamic Revolution. The post-election unrest in Iran therefore was not a matter of a repressive regime suppressing liberals (as in Prague in 1989), but a struggle between two Islamist factions that are each committed to the regime, but opposed to each other.

The demonstrators certainly included Western-style liberalizing elements, but they also included adherents of senior clerics who wanted to block Ahmadinejad’s re-election. And while Ahmadinejad undoubtedly committed electoral fraud to bulk up his numbers, his ability to commit unlimited fraud was blocked, because very powerful people looking for a chance to bring him down were arrayed against him.

The situation is even more complex because it is not simply a fight between Ahmadinejad and the clerics, but also a fight among the clerical elite regarding perks and privileges — and Ahmadinejad is himself being used within this infighting.

Friedman argues that in terms of foreign policy, there is likely to be no difference to the US, no matter which faction comes out on top.

We do not believe that Iran is close to obtaining a nuclear weapon, a point we have made frequently. Iran understands that the actual acquisition of a nuclear weapon would lead to immediate U.S. or Israeli attacks. Accordingly, Iran’s ideal position is to be seen as developing nuclear weapons, but not close to having them. This gives Tehran a platform for bargaining without triggering Iran’s destruction, a task at which it has proved sure-footed.

In addition, Iran has maintained capabilities in Iraq and Lebanon. Should the United States or Israel attack, Iran would thus be able to counter by doing everything possible to destabilize Iraq — bogging down U.S. forces there — while simultaneously using Hezbollah’s global reach to carry out terror attacks. After all, Hezbollah is today’s al Qaeda on steroids. The radical Shiite group’s ability, coupled with that of Iranian intelligence, is substantial.

We see no likelihood that any Iranian government would abandon this two-pronged strategy without substantial guarantees and concessions from the West. Those would have to include guarantees of noninterference in Iranian affairs. Obama, of course, has been aware of this bedrock condition, which is why he went out of his way before the election to assure Khamenei in a letter that the United States had no intention of interfering.

I’d recommend reading the whole thing, as well as this earlier piece by Friedman.

One of the things I failed to note in the disquieting series of revelations about our national torture program was the timing of it; it seems that quite a bit of the ramping-up was occurring in late 2002 and 2003. That’s odd, of course. One would expect that if we were terrified of additional terror attacks in the wake of 9/11, we would have been looking into torture in late 2001. What was going on in late 2002 that suddenly made us turn to forms of interrogation that shock the senses?

What indeed?

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

So to summarize, we tortured prisoners so we could find the non-existent Iraq-al Qaeda link, which would justify the war against Iraq that the Bush Administration desperately wanted to wage.

I don’t even know how to express how depraved that is.

Of course, we daresn’t do anything about it. Karl Rove says that investigating war crimes would make us into a “Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses,” as if torturing prisoners to justify a war of choice hasn’t already taken us far beyond that moral event horizon.

These people are evil. They are sick. And history will not treat them — or us — kindly.

It is said that after the Battle of Troy, Odysseus, gleeful that his brilliant ruse — the Trojan Horse — had been successful, shouted to the Gods that he, and he alone, was responsible for the Greek triumph in battle. Poseidon, hearing this, forced Odysseus far off course, and kept him from his home in Ithaca for ten long years. The moral of the story, obvious to all who have read The Odyssey, is that one should guard against hubris, and remain humble in your accomplishments — for fate has a way of evening the score in the most humiliating and pointed ways.

Let us remember the events of May 1, 2003. George W. Bush, his flight suit suitably augmented as to draw attention to his cock, flew on a fighter to the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had been turned away from nearby San Diego, so as to give a better backdrop for Bush’s speech. And the bobbleheads, drunk in the belief that our president’s bold leadership had won us the Iraq War and proved all the liberals to be stupid dirty hippies, swooned:

MATTHEWS: What’s the importance of the president’s amazing display of leadership tonight?

[...]

MATTHEWS: What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight? And that’s the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously.What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically [...], the president deserves everything he’s doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That [...] if you’re going to run against him, you’d better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[...]

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here’s a president who’s really nonverbal. He’s like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Ann Coulter, you’re the first to speak tonight on the buzz. The president’s performance tonight, redolent of the best of Reagan — what do you think?

COULTER: It’s stunning. It’s amazing. I think it’s huge. I mean, he’s landing on a boat at 150 miles per hour. It’s tremendous. It’s hard to imagine any Democrat being able to do that. And it doesn’t matter if Democrats try to ridicule it. It’s stunning, and it speaks for itself.

MATTHEWS: Pat Caddell, the president’s performance tonight on television, his arrival on ship?

CADDELL: Well, first of all, Chris, the — I think that — you know, I was — when I first heard about it, I was kind of annoyed. It sounded like the kind of PR stunt that Bill Clinton would pull.But and then I saw it. And you know, there’s a real — there’s a real affection between him and the troops.

[...]

MATTHEWS: The president there — look at this guy! We’re watching him. He looks like he flew the plane. He only flew it as a passenger, but he’s flown –

CADDELL: He looks like a fighter pilot.

MATTHEWS: He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him — I mean, he seems like — he didn’t fight in a war, but he looks like he does.

Perhaps the best line belonged to admitted terrorists and convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy:

MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?

LIDDY: Well, I — in the first place, I think it’s envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know — and I’ve worn those because I parachute — and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those — run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count — they’re all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.

Perhaps the gushing would have been less noteworthy, had not George W. Bush, as Odysseus before him, declared victory before he had reached a safe harbor:

We all know what happened. Be it fate or the Gods or karma or simply the ultimate result of putting a intellectually lazy buffoon in charge of the country, but the Battle of Iraq was far from over. Within a few years, the “Mission Accomplished” banner that hung over Bush’s shoulder would be a cruel reminder of the hubris this bunch conducted themselves with — one that the administration would try to blame on sailors, in an effort to deflect criticism. Bush’s moment in his flight suit would grow to look, not like the vision of a tough President-Soldier, but of a little boy playing dress-up, pretending that he had killed all the bad guys with his magic heat ray. Like the rest of the Bush Administration, what started as a display of force became, in the end, a bitter joke.

This is easily the apotheosis of the Bush Administration. It has it all – style over substance, a touchdown dance on one’s own eight yard line, talking heads swooning over Dubya’s “manly characteristic” – so obvious is this choice that I hesitated to put it as number one.

But number one it is, because it was at this moment that George W. Bush truly disconnected from reality. When historians looks back on the Bush Administration, they will highlight this moment as the point at which our national delusions reached their zenith, and broke. A month later, we would begin to notice that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. A year later, we would realize that the mission had never been accomplished at all. In the end, for all the pomp and circumstance surrounding this moment, it was really just a callow man shaking his fist and declaring himself the winner of a battle that was barely begun. And nothing sums up the Bush Administration better than that.

In the spring of 2003, as it was starting to become clear that Iraq would not, in fact, be a cake walk, George W. Bush said the following to the growing insurgency there:

More than 4,000 American troops have died since Bush issued this challenge. Men and women who paid the ultimate price for Bush’s schoolyard challenge.

Abu Ghraib is far from our only national stain; Guantánamo is arguably worse. But Abu Ghraib was the wake-up call for many of us, the first proof of what we had feared, that we were, in fact, engaged in torture and degradation in our military prisons, that far from upholding the principles of our nation, we had abandoned them.

There was no ignoring the facts on the ground; the dead were dead, the degraded degraded. We had photographic evidence of it. We could see it. And we were horrified.

Well, except for the Bush Administration. Oh, they mumbled about “bad apples,” and Donald Rumsfeld claims he offered his resignation. But Rummy wasn’t allowed to resign, and the Bush Administration didn’t take any real steps to ensure that the events wouldn’t be repeated. How could they? After all, Abu Ghraib happened because of the Bush Administration’s policies, their subtle and cute distinctions between torture and “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” actions — the latter of which were okayed at the highest level of government. When you create a culture in which waterboarding is considered a perfectly acceptable means of questioning, you create the events of Abu Ghraib.

Sadly, Abu Ghraib was not the end of it; even knowing what was being done in our names, Americans re-elected George W. Bush. We continued a policy of degradation and extraordinary rendition and, yes, torture through to this very day. And those actions have stained our nation’s soul, and helped to make us the international pariah that we are today.

Hopefully, the Obama Administration can work to undo that damage. Hopefully, they remain true to their promises to close Guantánamo and end torture. But it is too late for those who died in our custody, and too late for those who were tortured in the name of freedom. We can only offer our apologies, and never, never allow ourselves to go down that path again.

Gulf War II: The Vengeance will appear often on this list of the twenty worst Bush moments. And it appropriately makes its debut here, with the Congressional resolution that spawned it. Not just because the vote on the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 was a travesty — though it was most certainly that. No, because the vote was everything wrong with the way the Bush Administration operated.

An administration looking to depoliticize international affairs would schedule a vote on going to war for sometime distant from an election. President George H.W. Bush did just this in 1991, waiting until January to put forward the AUMF for the first Gulf War. We were gearing up for war against Iraq, of course, before the vote. But Bush pere waited through an election and for a new Congress to be seated before going to get authorization. He did so for a variety of reasons, but he did so in part so that members of Congress would not be pressured to vote one way or another based on their fears of getting re-elected. Had he been more concerned with politics, he could have put forward the resolution in, say, October of an election year. Which was exactly what his son would do in 2002.

It is hard to remember now, but 2002 was a different political world than 2009 is. George W. Bush was popular and trusted — it’s crazy, I know, but we were but a year removed from September 11 and people wanted to believe we had a decent leader. Bush leveraged that to get his Iraq resolution before the mid-terms, cynically calculating that he could pressure Democrats into supporting the measure, for fear of being branded weak on terror. And of course, many Democrats caved exactly as Bush expected, including a junior senator from New York who would come to rue the decision six years later. Of the Senators seeking re-election in 2002, only one — Paul Wellstone, bless his soul — voted against it.

Wellstone gave that speech knowing it could cost him the election; it wouldn’t have, but it could have. No other Democrat was as brave. 20 other Democrats, one Republican, and one independent did join with Wellstone, but none was up for re-election that year.

29 Democrats joined 48 Republicans in voting for it.

The AUMF was a failure of Bush, of course — he used political fears to boost his support artificially, part of his broader strategy of using the War on Terror as a political cudgel. It was also a failure of the opposition, one of many. Given the opportunity to ask hard questions, to push for real information, to serve as an opposition — given that chance, the Democrats caved. It was a bad moment for Bush. It was a far worse one for the country.

It’s really hard to find out about anything of this security pact with the woeful situation our media is in. All I’ve been seeing on TV is Americans talking to American anchors and American colleges about the American-Iraqi Security pact.

This is a news show from Al Jazeera English which interviews pro and anti-treaty Iraqis. One is an Iraqi government official, the other a member of parliament who is aligned with Muqtada al-Sadr, and the other is a leader for a national dialogue organization.

Cross-posted from The Mustard Seed.

You almost certainly remember the case of Jamie Leigh Jones, a KBR/Halliburton employee who was raped and imprisoned in Iraq, and only escaped because a sympathetic guard loaned her a cell phone that allowed her to call for help.

Well, KBR has looked at the situation, and they’ve decided to take action. No, not by protecting women from sexual assault — the very idea! No, they’ve decided to ban cell phone use among their contractors in Iraq.

Each time I think we’ve hit the floor, someone starts digging deeper.

I trust the anti-colonialist and anti-racist reasons to oppose most US uses of military force against other countries are clear to most “Alas” readers. I haven’t been discussing that connection because it’s too clear to be missed, not because it’s not important.

In contrast, I am worried, perhaps needlessly, that some readers will read this series of posts as me saying that I’m voting based on foreign policy concerns, not concerns about sexism, misogyny and LGBTQ issues.

I don’t believe the distinction exists. I’ll use this post to discuss why the distinction between a hawkish versus a moderate foreign policy should matter to feminists of all sorts.

And make no mistake — Clinton is a hawk, not just posturing as one for the election. Quoting Stephen Zunes:

…When her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination Senator Barack Obama expressed his willingness to meet with Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or other foreign leaders with whom the United States has differences, she denounced him for being “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

Senator Clinton appears to have a history of advocating the blunt instrument of military force to deal with complex international problems. For example, she was one of the chief advocates in her husband’s inner circle for the 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 to attempt to resolve the Kosovo crisis.

Though she had not indicated any support for the Kosovar Albanians’ nonviolent campaign against Serbian oppression which had been ongoing since she had first moved into the White House six years earlier, she was quite eager for the United States to go to war on behalf of the militant Kosovo Liberation Army which had just recently come to prominence. Gail Sheehy’s book Hillary’s Choice reveals how, when President Bill Clinton and others correctly expressed concerns that bombing Serbia would likely lead to a dramatic worsening of the human rights situation by provoking the Serbs into engaging in full-scale ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Hillary Clinton successfully pushed her husband to bomb that country anyway.

The most famous difference between Clinton and Obama is Clinton’s support of invading Iraq — an approach to foreign policy fully consistent with her history, and likely to continue in a future Clinton adminstration, judging from who she’s chosen to lead her foreign policy team so far. From a feminist perspective, it cannot be overemphasized that our decision to invade and occupy Iraq has been a nightmare. Here are just a few examples:

First, from an op-ed by Bonnie Erbe:

A new poll of leaders of Iraqi women’s-rights groups finds that women were treated better and their civil rights were more secure under deposed President Saddam Hussein than under the faltering and increasingly sectarian U.S.-installed government.

Roz Kaveny writes:

Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people - people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is - he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.

This is a direct consequence of the war - the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.

Riverbend:

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it’s not really the latest- it’s just the one that’s being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last.

Houzan Mahmoud, of The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, writes: (link via Bitch PhD):

More widely, professional women have been deliberately targeted and killed - notably in the city of Mosul - and, recently, anti-women fundamentalists in Baghdad have taken to throwing acid in women’s faces and on to their uncovered legs.

So-called “honour killings” are rife, as is the kidnapping and rape of women. Beheadings have occurred and women have been sold into sexual servitude. […] This is a recipe for future gender enslavement, second-class citizenship and ignorance. Thousands of female university students have now given up their studies to protect themselves against Islamist threats.

Islamist hostility is contagious and echoed daily in high-level political debate. Currently there is a drive over the “right” of men to have four wives, to make divorce a male preserve and for custody of children to be given to men only. Even women on Iraq’s National Assembly - the country’s parliament - have been calling for resolutions to allow for the beating of women by their guardians (males relatives, such as husbands or fathers).

This is all the outcome of the occupation of Iraq.

Melissa at Shakesville writes:

This is madness. In one fell swoop, they have turned back literally decades of women’s rights in Iraq.

When all other rationales for this war were proved devoid of substance, the Right yammered about a humanitarian intervention…and so did the hawkish Left. The last time I checked, women were humans, too, and they ought not to be left with less freedom than they had before we got there.

Iraqi women’s rights activist Yanar Mohammed:

Even apart from this the streets are not women-friendly. Many professional women who drive to and from work get insulted by men travelling around in pick-up trucks holding machine guns and wearing black from head to foot. Going out in the streets is scary. Many females have stopped going to school.[…]

If you travel from the north down through Iraq to the south, it is like being in a time machine. You travel from the 21st century in Sulamaniya, through Kirkuk to Baghdad, where you see a city which is in ruins. There is dust everywhere, and people are wearing very old clothes. Then in the south you are in the Dark Ages. In the areas dominated by the Sunni Islamists, in Fallujah or in Mosul, women’s situation is even worse than in Basra. You have something there which is new to us in Iraq. It comes from Wahhabism, from al Qaeda, from Saudi Arabia.

Riverbend again:

For me, June marked the first month I don’t dare leave the house without a hijab, or headscarf. I don’t wear a hijab usually, but it’s no longer possible to drive around Baghdad without one. It’s just not a good idea. (Take note that when I say ‘drive’ I actually mean ‘sit in the back seat of the car’- I haven’t driven for the longest time.) Going around bare-headed in a car or in the street also puts the family members with you in danger. You risk hearing something you don’t want to hear and then the father or the brother or cousin or uncle can’t just sit by and let it happen. I haven’t driven for the longest time. If you’re a female, you risk being attacked.

I look at my older clothes- the jeans and t-shirts and colorful skirts- and it’s like I’m studying a wardrobe from another country, another lifetime. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when you could more or less wear what you wanted if you weren’t going to a public place. If you were going to a friends or relatives house, you could wear trousers and a shirt, or jeans, something you wouldn’t ordinarily wear. We don’t do that anymore because there’s always that risk of getting stopped in the car and checked by one militia or another.

There are no laws that say we have to wear a hijab (yet), but there are the men in head-to-toe black and the turbans, the extremists and fanatics who were liberated by the occupation, and at some point, you tire of the defiance.

I could go on with quotes like this for another fifty screens, easily. The scope of the disaster is almost impossible to comprehend.

What’s important for this election isn’t how bad Iraq is, however. Iraq has happened, and neither Clinton nor Obama can change that. What’s important is how a Clinton or Obama presidency will change what happens in the future.

If Obama’s approach to foreign policy, and his team of policy advisers, comes into power, that will not mean that progressives occupy the White House, and it will not mean that horrible abuses of American power will cease to happen. Obama is not perfect. Obama is not even progressive. He’s just significantly better than the alternatives.

An Obama White House mean that a group of people who are significantly less warlike, and more critical of the U.S.’s use of military power, will become much more important in Washington and in our national conversation than they have been (and will remain so for years after Obama leaves office). It means that questionable invasions and bombings, which Clinton has supported throughout her career, will probably happen less frequently.

If Clinton becomes President, that will be a big improvement over Bush, in that we’ll switch from having a Republican hawk to having a Democratic hawk. It will be a much saner and more intelligent hawkish administration; but it will still be a hawkish administration, and from a feminist perspective — especially a feminism perspective that recognizes that anti-racism, anti-colonialism and LGBTQ issues aren’t separate from feminism — that’s bad.

Clinton didn’t intend the enormous harms I discussed above, of course. (On the contrary, Clinton has a dedication to women’s rights internationally that goes back many years, and which I admire.) But the unintended consequences of hawkishness aren’t less dire because they’re unintentional. The unintended consequences of Clinton’s future hawkish policies could easily turn into thousands of deaths, thousands of rapes, thousands of women under virtual house arrest, thousands of LGBTQ people in prison or worse. For people on the margins, unintended consequences are deadly.

I am not saying that if you’re a feminist, you must vote against Clinton because she’s a hawk. Feminists can vote a variety of ways for a variety of legitimate reasons, and countless feminists I admire will be voting for Clinton, or already have.

But foreign policy isn’t separate from feminist issues. It makes no sense at all to say that you’re voting based on feminist concerns, not foreign policy concerns. Foreign policy is a feminist issue, and anyone voting as a feminist should take that into account as they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each candidate.

Previously, I argued that the differences between Obama and Clinton even on desperately important domestic issues, such as LGBTQ rights or health care, are unlikely to make a real difference in policy outcomes. This is because the differences between the candidates — both centrist Democrats — on these policies are small, and the enormous effects of political constraints and legislative give-and-take will matter so much that the small differences between Clinton’s and Obama’s policies will be a wash.

But Presidents have much more control over foreign policy, especially matters of war and peace. This is an area where even small differences can potentially matter a lot. Specifically, a President’s beliefs about the use of military power, versus diplomatic approaches, is essential. There are areas of foreign policy in which the President will be forced to compromise with Congress, for better or worse: trade policy, for example, and immigration law. But there is no area where the President has more freedom to choose than military and diplomatic policy.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to determine what the differences between Clinton and Obama on foreign policy are. Listening to what they say is of limited use, because currently they’re both primarily concerned with persuading swing voters and superdelegates to support them, and everything they say is tailored to that end.¹

What matters more is who each candidate has chosen to be their foreign policy advisers. The press and public don’t pay much attention to these advisers, except when one gaffes² ; furthermore, the candidates are probably planning to be stuck with most of these advisers for years to come. So the foreign policy teams Clinton and Obama pick probably reflect their real policy preferences — or at least, reflect their real preferences more than calculated candidate statements to the public do.

Furthermore, it’s important to realize that the advisers a president “brings with” will stick around for years. Some of them will have the President’s ear while the President is in office, which is important. Many of them will be elevated into positions of greater importance within foreign policy circles, which is an effect that can last long after the President who elevated them leaves office. (Many of President Nixon’s foreign policy people remain important foreign policy people today.)

This is one of the most important effects a President can have. In the months before we invaded Iraq, the greatest advantage that the Bush/Cheney pro-war group had is that the bounds of “serious” foreign policy views were being set almost entirely by people who were in favor of invading Iraq; those who were not in favor of preemptive war were not considered serious, and so had a limited impact on the national debate.

The invasion of Iraq has been a disaster, and that disaster will probably continue for many years to come. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who would otherwise be alive are now dead, because of our invasion. Even more Iraqis have not been killed, but have been hurt in other ways; they’ve been horribly injured, their lives have been constrained, their infrastructure (even more) destroyed, their children’s and grandchildren’s prospects for the future dimmed.³ In addition, thousands of Americans have been killed and tens of thousands grievously wounded or traumatized. After that come the less important, but still substantial costs: Costs in money, costs in missed opportunities, and costs to the US’s international standing and effectiveness.

Over the next thirty years, there will be many times when the tenor of the “expert class” of foreign policy thinkers will again set the bounds of what is “serious” and what is not. As we’ve seen in Iraq, when the “serious” opinion excludes all people who oppose wars of choice, the costs to the world are hideous. The foreign policy experts riding on Clinton’s and Obama’s coattails are therefore important to consider.

And it’s here that we find a real difference between the candidates. Stephen Zunes, writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, reports:

Obama advisors like Joseph Cirincione have emphasized a policy toward Iraq based on containment and engagement and have downplayed the supposed threat from Iran. Clinton advisor Holbrooke, meanwhile, insists that “the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler.

…it may be significant that Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors, many of whom are veterans of her husband’s administration, were virtually all strong supporters of President George W. Bush’s call for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. By contrast, almost every one of Senator Obama’s foreign policy team was opposed to a U.S. invasion. [...]

Hillary Clinton has a few advisors who did oppose the war, like Wesley Clark, but taken together, the kinds of key people she’s surrounded herself with supports the likelihood that her administration, like Bush’s, would be more likely to embrace exaggerated and alarmist reports regarding potential national security threats, to ignore international law and the advice of allies, and to launch offensive wars.

By contrast, as The Nation magazine noted, a Barack Obama administration would be more likely to examine the actual evidence of potential threats before reacting, to work more closely with America’s allies to maintain peace and security, to respect the country’s international legal obligations, and to use military force only as a last resort.

In terms of Iran, for instance, [Obama advisor] Cirincione has downplayed the supposed threat, while Clinton advisor Holbrooke insists that “the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler. This is consistent with Clinton’s vote for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that opened the door to a potential Bush attack on Iran, and with Obama’s opposition to it.

Which experts do you want influencing the boundaries of acceptable foreign policy thought for the next three decades: The ones who supported invading Iraq, or the ones who opposed it?

Matt Yglesias writes:

Obama people are more likely to value international law, strategic restraint, and a narrow focus on al-Qaeda whereas Clinton people are more likely to take a pragmatic/instrumental view of international institutions, worry that nothing will happen without American leadership, and to have more sympathy for the Bushian idea that you need broad confrontation with rogue regimes.

Which expert do you want whispering in the President’s ear for the next four to eight years, when the next important foreign policy decisions come — Susan Rice, who has been arguing for the last six years that humanitarian intervention in Darfur should be among the US’s most pressing foreign policy goals, or Richard Holbrooke, who has been a cheerleader for invading Iraq from the start? (Holbrooke is a leading contender for Secretary of State if Clinton is elected.)

And at the most basic level, which President do you want: The one whose foreign policy team consists almost elusively of people who got the single most important foreign policy question of the last decade wrong, or the one who hires people who didn’t get it wrong?

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Note: The original draft of this post included a section arguing that foreign policy is a feminist issue. The section got to be so long that I decided to make it a separate post, which I will post later today.

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PLEASE DON’T POST COMMENTS ARGUING THAT INVADING IRAQ WAS A GOOD IDEA, or arguing that supporting hawks is a good idea. If you want to do that, use this post instead.

This thread is intended to be an argument for progressives who agree with core progressive ideas, and in particular progressive ideas about war.

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1. Although I hasten to add that what they say is not entirely meaningless. First of all, the political pressures limiting what Clinton and Obama say now, will still operate (although less powerfully) once either of them takes office. And secondly, on the rare occasion that Obama and Clinton’s public statements on foreign policy do diverge, that may indicate a real difference in their approaches to foreign policy. (back)
2. ”Monster.” — S. Powers, 2008. (back)
3. Obligatory Saddam-Was-A-Monster statement: None of this is to say that Saddam Hussain wasn’t a monster. But our invasion has made things much worse. (back)

This thread is the home of arguments about whether or not invading Iraq was a good idea, whether or not the US should attack Iran, whether or not hawkish foreign policies are wrong, etc.

The first seven or so comments were originally in response to this post, but I’ve moved them.

Glenn Greenwald, writing a week or two ago:

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” - 102

“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73

“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16

“Obama and bowling” — 1,043

“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607

“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above.

The Nation has a detailed article. A woman working for KBR, a private contractor the US hires to operate in Iraq, claims to have been drugged and gang raped by her co-workers, possibly including her boss. The rape was then covered up.

This part enraged me (well, lots of it did, but this part too):

[Rape victims face] two major roadblocks in the fight for justice. The first is the battle to have the perpetrators prosecuted in criminal court — which, because of Order 17, may be nearly impossible. According to the order, imposed by Paul Bremer, U.S. defense contractors in Iraq cannot be prosecuted in the Iraqi criminal justice system. While they can technically be tried in U.S. federal court, the Justice Department has shown no interest in prosecuting her case. In fact, for more than two years now, the DOJ has brought no criminal charges in the matter. Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican who has taken up Jones’ cause, reports that federal agencies refuse to discuss the status of the investigation; meanwhile, in December, the DOJ refused to send a representative to the related congressional hearing on the matter.

Even more appalling, the Justice Department, which can and should prosecute most of these cases, has declined to do so. “There is no rational explanation for this,” says Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School who specializes in the law of armed conflict. Prosecutorial jurisdiction for crimes like Jones’ alleged rape is easily established under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act and the Patriot Act’s special maritime and territorial jurisdiction provisions. But somebody has to want to prosecute the cases.

Horton wonders what the 200 Justice Department employees and contractors stationed in Iraq do all day, noting that there has not been a single completed criminal conviction against a U.S. contractor implicated in a violent crime anywhere in Iraq since the invasion.

[...] “You have 180,000 people over there, you’re going to have a few crimes. [...] And if you eliminate law enforcement, the crimes are going to get worse because people will quickly learn they can get away with it.”

This is an important point. Rapists exist no matter what the US government does, and that’s not the Republican Party’s fault. But it’s reasonable to expect the government to work to reduce rape and to punish rapists; instead, Republican leaders have chosen to be accessory to rape, by refusing to investigate or prosecute the crime.

Do I really think that Bush and his managers want Americans raped and the rapists to get off scott-free? No. But they consider that better than the alternative. In Bush’s eyes, for American contractors to be arrested and tried for rape would be unbearable; letting them get away with rape is, in the administration’s view, the lesser evil.

I can’t wait until these cancers in suits are out of office.

That said, even if we had a competent administration staffed by people instead of soulless monsters, there would still be too many rapes committed by Americans in Iraq. ¹ There would be fewer such crimes, but they’d still happen, because the vastly uneven power relations and dehumanization brought about by war and occupation make rape of soldiers and of civilians inevitable.

This is one reason the Bush doctrine, which makes wars of choice inevitable, is evil. The cost of war is always hideous, and the rapes are just a small part of that. War should always be a last resort. It wasn’t in Iraq. The shame of it is that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, and thousands of Americans, have paid the price for the fecklessness and warlust of US leaders. It would have been far better — both objectively and morally — if Bush, and Cheney, and McCain, and the rest of the pro-war leadership class had died instead.

1. I’m ignoring for a moment the obvious point that if the current administration was staffed by competent, decent people, there never would have been an invasion of Iraq at all. (back)

The sun was shining as I sat down at the Cenotaph. Like most war memorials it looks like a giant penis. No-one else was there, but I was I knitted a few rows, and the mother of kids I used to babysat for walked by. We talked a bit, mostly about knitting and she left. I knitted a few more rows; no-one else showed up. I packed my knitting away, and walked off. For ten minutes, I’d vigiled alone in solidarity with the people of Iraq.

That was the political action in Wellington on the fifth anniversary of the War on Iraq. Maybe the people who had called the vigil turned up after I left, I don’t know. It’s been a hard six months for many of us here - there are extenuating circumstances

But it’s not just here, the movement against the war in Iraq was at it’s peak in the first six months of 2003. I own this book:

I’ve always loved it, I flick through and look at the sea of placards in London, the shivering scientists in Antarctica, the incomprehensible naked demos and the mass of people in Santiago. I think back to what we were doing on the fifteenth of February 2003, and what a crazy chaotic time it was, and how much we managed to do.

But tonight, I thought different things at I looked at the photos of the young woman in Sydney who had written ‘Make Love Not War’ written on her arm and was making out with an equally young man; the school kids on strike in London, on the first day of the war; the soccer fan who ran on the pitch with “Stop Bush” written on his backs; the hundreds of windows in Milan with peace flags flying; the two women in Washington DC who had written Peace Womb on their pregnant bellies - their children would be five by now. I want to know where they all were on Thursday, the fifth anniversary.

Almost everyone in those pictures must still oppose the war, five years later. It’s not as if it’s gone better than planned. But in those five years they must have lost something, all those people who came out and took action in so many ways. They must have lost hope.

I think we, by which I mean the anti-war movements in the broadest sense, must have done something wrong, not to be able to build on that hope that existed in those months. I can tell you some of the specific things that I would do differently in Wellington. But those details are too specific to explain the world-wide shrinking in the anti-war movement (unless every anti-war group had massive disagreements around meat).

The fifteenth of February 2003 was amazing, but a war cannot be stopped in one day, even one day with millions of people. Anything we do must be sustained longer than the period where urgency overwhelms us. I think the question for those of us who took part is how we can build, next time.

In order to keep the discussion focused, comments on this post are only open to those who supported the goals of stopping, and then ending, the war on Iraq.

The Iranian government is run by Shiites, and hates Sunnis. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni group, spends most of its time trying to kill as many Shiites as possible. Obviously, these groups are interchangeable, right?

AMMAN, Jordan — Sen. John McCain [...] said several times that Iran, a predominately Shiite country, was supplying the mostly Sunni militant group, al-Qaeda. [...] Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives “taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”

In recent days, McCain has repeatedly said his intimate knowledge of foreign policy make him the best equipped to answer a phone ringing in the White House late at night.

Thank goodness McCain had a former Democrat standing by him to correct his embarrassing gaffe.

Okay, that’s unfair, because some Democrats — including Texas rep Silvestre Reyes — who is only the fucking chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, so it’s not like his job requires him to know anything about Iran, Iraq, or al Qaeda — are likewise ignorant of the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. (Although neither Clinton nor Obama would have made McCain’s asinine error). Republicans like Terry Everett and [the late] Jo Ann Davis don’t know the difference, either, even though they lead intelligence committees. Neither do the FBI’s leading counterterrorism officers.

Our foreign policy is run by soundbite-vomiting nincompoops who adeptly advance careers — often, like McCain, selling themselves as foreign policy experts — but don’t give a shit about doing their jobs well. And our media lets them get away with it, by and large, because without the mother bird politicians vomiting soundbites, what would baby bird reporters ravenously eat?

Politicians aren’t ordinary citizens. These aren’t shoe salesmen with blogs. These are people are entrusted to take the time to make informed decisions, because ordinary citizens are too busy working for a living. It’s appalling — worse, disgusting, and in a better world impeachable — that after so many years of war and so many hundreds of thousands of lives lost, leading politicians haven’t taken their responsibilities seriously enough to learn the fucking A B Cs.

P.S. “Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.” — Senator Trent Lott.

UPDATE: McCain’s people are now claiming that this was just a slip of the tongue, which McCain corrected immediately. But he only corrected it because he had Lieberman there whispering in his ear — and he made the same slip of the tongue the previous night on a right-wing radio show.

Although I don’t often link to it — its focus is mainstream politics and foreign policy, subjects I don’t often blog about — one of my most frequently read blogs is Obsidian Wings. One of the co-bloggers at Obsidian Wings, Andrew Olmsted, who posts — posted — as G’Kar, is a soldier (as well as a considerable Babylon 5 fan). He was killed in Iraq this week.

A man of foresight, G’Kar had written a post to be published in the event of his death. That’s panache.

In his post, G’Kar requests his death not be used as ammunition in either pro-war or anti-war arguments; please respect that if you leave any comments, either here or at Obsidian Wings. And please think some good wishes at his family, his friends, and his co-bloggers.

So why am I posting this link? Well: the man was a blogger, after all. He’d want his last post to get a hell of a lot of linkage.

From Rozk:

All of the religious factions and militias and Kurdish nationalists and government police in Iraq have one thing that they can agree on, which is killing queers.

Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people - people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is - he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.

This is a direct consequence of the war - the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that George Bush can’t open his mouth without saying something stupid:

This has received attention from “Bush is stupid” commenters around the world. But in commenting on George Bush’s inability to communicate even the most basic of concepts - they missed the fallacy in what Bush was trying to say.

Whatever Nelson Mandela has become, the ANC, and larger black resistance against apartheid, was not the movement that Bush wants to persuade us it was. Mandela was arrested as a terrorist. The ANC was not non-violent; they blew stuff up and killed people.

You can say the ANC should have stuck to non-violent resistance (although I think to do so from the comfort of your own home would make you look like a right dick), but to imply that the ANC was non-violent (even if no-one understands what you’re trying to do) is just lying.