Secure ID

Identification card issues have come to my attention lately. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to bludgeon states into committing to implementation of Real ID, a yet to be defined system to be implement sometime in the middle of the next decade, at state expense. State governments in the libertarian mountain West and in the cranky Yankee Northeast have passed legislation rejecting participation in the program. DHS has been scrambling to save face by declaring these rejections to be equivalent of apply for an extension in committing to the program. Wyoming Governor Brian Schweitzer dismisses the DHS Sturm and Drang, in particular the threat to declare driver licenses from non-compliant states invalid for getting on a commercial aircraft, as bureaucratic bluffing. I have a DK diary up about Schweitzer's stand.

At the same time, I received email from someone who wanted to know whether he should participate in a new private sector ID card, called FlyClear. The idea is that you get a secure ID, complete with embedded biometric information that is pre-cleared. At the airport, a proprietary device transmit you ID to the current TSA watchlist, confirming that you are not on it. The question from the person sending me the email reminded me that most people don’t understand, at all, how a well designed biometrically driven ID system would work.

A good ID card would be unique and universal. It would contain biometric information encoded, and encrypted, on the card and nowhere else. It should not be stored on a central, (or distributed) database. A digital fingerprint or iris scan should never be transmitted anywhere. The whole ID of a biometric identification mechanism is that it is always with you, and never anywhere else.

The way it would work is you’d swipe your card through a reader, and then put your thumb in the reader. If the thumbprint matches the digital thumbprint that is on the card, then a green light goes on (“The person holding this card is the person whose thumbprint is on the card.”) If anything further needed to be done, like a lookup of your presence on the TSA watchlist, or your card’s available balance checked, then a unique ID assigned to you is transmitted to the entity doing the lookup. The key is that the authentication should always be entirely local, between the card, the reader and physical biometric input.

Storing or transmitting the digitized biometric ID means a copy of your thumbprint exists. But the whole point of using your thumb is that it doesn’t exist anywhere else. Storing or transmitting the digital image creates the possibility that someone else may obtain the digital print, becoming you in the process. Transmission is clearly the greater risk because transmission is necessarily less secure than storage for capturing the digital rendition. Much more important, though, is that with a transmission system, you can no longer be certain that the source of the digital rendition is in fact the physical, analog object being rendered. If you permit a digital image of your thumb to be transmitted, then that transmission can be simulated without your thumb.

How well do the two ID systems I mentioned above implement these design rules? There’s no way to know for sure how the Real ID system will work, because the system isn’t designed yet. However, as Schweitzer points out in an NPR interview that’s linked in the DK diary above, the reliability of the Real ID will only be as good as the identification documents that are used to obtain it. He notes that half a dozen teenagers in a Kinkos can do a reasonable job of forging the birth certificate that is a primary source for the planned Real ID. A more important indication of the quality to expect from a Real ID program (if it is ever implemented, which I strongly doubt) is the way the program is proceeding. Good security tools, like encryption methods, are created with a great deal of public scrutiny. Bureaucratic authoritarians do not use such systems; they tend to prefer what is called security by obscurity working in secret. Security by obscurity is the design philosophy that led to a SONY CD music encryption technology that was cracked by using a magic marker on a disk.

There is a host of other reasons to believe that 50 individual state implementation of “standards” set in Washington will fail.

The FlyClear system is actually pretty good. The biometric information is indeed stored on the card. The authentication process at the airport does indeed consist of local authentication against a digital biometric signature on the card, and then sending of an identification number to a database updated with TSA information. The digital thumbprint is not transmitted, only the ID is. The only problem is that they do store the biometric information in a “secure” database. There is, of course, no such thing. It’s possible to conceive of a series of security measures that one would have to take to be sure that the information is in fact secure, involving complicated measures for protection from everything from disgruntled employees to off-site backups.

They do it this way because it makes creating the end product easier; they have to do a bunch of pre-processing with the TSA before they issue the card. It’s easier if they have the biographical and biometric data in the database, and then create the card, than to create the card first, and then modify it. This also makes it easier to recreate a lost card. (Note that a lost card is of no value to anyone else, and that making a false replacement card request doesn’t do a bad guy any good, because the card is only useful to somebody with the user’s thumbprint.)

I haven’t said a word about DNA here. DNA would indeed play a role in a well-defined identification system, but it won’t work as a biometric authentication method on an ID card, because, unlike your thumb, you leave lots of copies of your DNA everywhere you go. I’ll write something up about how you’d work DNA into a national identification system later on. In the meantime, the one sentence takeaway is “If someone offers you a biometric ID card that does not do its authentication locally, back away slowly.”

If you have any further interest in this topic, and you should, because the numbskulls running DHS have no understanding of good security practice, a good source is Bruce Schneier, who wrote a very good book Secrets and Lies and maintains an excellent web site (http://www.schneier.com) where you can signup for a monthly e-newsletter.

On the Democrats' Nomination Process

There's been a lot of tooth-gnashing over the Democratic nominating process. There are complaints that there are too many caucuses, the caucuses are unrepresentative because of low turnout, delegate allocation rules are arcane, the process lasts too long, and on and on. But you have to realize that the nomination process is not about just one objective. If the objective were to pick the most popular candidate among Democrats at a single moment in time, then it would be easy. If the objective were to pick the candidate the party elders thought had the best chance of winning, it would also be easy. The trouble is that those are both objectives, and they are in conflict. The nomination process is replete with conflicting objectives like this. So if you want to talk about what reform should look like next time (and believe me, there will be changes made), you need to keep in mind that the nomination process is not just a method for picking a presidential nominee from a pool of candidates.

You need a process that, among other things:

1) Picks a candidate who reasonably represents the party rank and file

2) Provides an opportunity for low name recognition/low initial money candidates to compete

3) Picks a candidate who has a reasonable chance of winning the general election

4) Provides enough time to assess the relative strengths of candidates, to engage in on-the-job national campaign training and for dirty laundry to be aired.

5) Picks a candidate the party can embrace as a whole, including party leaders and key voting blocs

6) Has reasonably balanced regional appeal

7) Picks a clear winner

8) Grows and strengthen the party

9) Provides an unambiguous nominee

These objectives conflict. 1 and 6 are met by a national primary decided by popular vote, but directly conflicts with 2, 4 and 8, for example. If you think about other systemic change, I think you will see that no method satisfies all these objectives. That’s why the process is constantly being modified, because one or the other objective is not met in most competitive nominating cycles. This year, “picking a clear winner,” which is almost certainly the first and most important objective, is at risk, which is both divisive and upsetting. However, over-reacting to that potential failure is a risk. The last time the party over-reacted, in 1968, it gave Gary Hart’s McGovern campaign an inside track, picking a candidate who was probably not the best choice. In particular, railing about the undemocratic nature of the current process misses the point. It is not just about picking the most popular candidate among the rank and file at a particular moment in time.

For what it's worth, if I were made Democratic Flying Spaghetti Monster for the day I'd drop IA, keep NH, add a primary in a low population state west of the Mississippi shortly after NH. Let those primaries be open. Then I’d divide the rest of the country into quarters by state, randomly, and have closed primaries on the same day, 3-4 weeks apart, winner take all in each state. Delegate allocation identical to the electoral college. Non-state voters, like PR and DC, are assigned delegates proportional to population, and vote in the last superprimary. In the event of no clear winner, a closed national run-off of the top two in delegate count, straight popular vote.

Such a reform would weaken the state parties considerably, which would have to be addressed in other ways. The caucuses create interest, and provide a public and meaningful role for state conventions, especially in low population states. The national convention becomes officially meaningless in the presidential selection process defined here. Any kind of reform will have negative side effects, as thisone does, which reformers need to acknowledge, and deal with, if they are to be taken seriously.

Debbie We Hardly Knew Ye

Back in the day, early 2006, when the liberal netroots were trying to get themselves organized, there were some actions organized by different blogs. One of my favorites was the Republican Rubberstamp action, where an enterprising FireDogLaker set up an account at a rubber stamp manufacturer, commissioning a stamp that said "Rubberstamp Republicans."

This was great symbology. In fact, it's become a permanent part of the lexicon, as witness today, when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Reyes called out Crazy US Rep Michelle Bachman for lying about the House version of the FISA legislation in Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

The congresswoman suggests that Democrats should simply pass the bill the Senate approved. But the people have elected us not simply to rubber-stamp the actions of the Senate, but to exercise our judgment and pass bills that are in the best interests of the American people.

One of the netroots' favorite Members also picked up on the symbology. Debbie Wasserman-Schulz gave a great, very funny speech about the stamps, including my favorite bit:

Mr. Meeks has a much bigger rubber stamp.... I feel privileged to hold it, but I don't want to hold it too long, because it will rub off.....The people on the other side of the aisle come into this room, they're checking I don't know their brains, opinions, their convictions at the door."

And now, as a Co-Chair of the Red to Blue Program, Rep Wasserman Schulz seems to have forgotten those rubberstamp days. It seems that, after all, it did rub off.

Two years is about a decade ago in Internet years, but it's just one Congress ago in political years. How can she have forgotten, so quickly, how the members of her delegation refused to stand with her on issue after issue. Instead, they rubberstamped the dictates of the Republican leadership, putting their constituents behind party loyalty on their list of priorities. We have challengers who will represent their constituents. If there are votes, or issues, where they, and Representative Wasserman Schulz feels the need to vote the economic interests of her district, or her region, in opposition to the Democratic leadership, that is something we all can understand.

But to refuse to support Democrats for these seats is to forget those days of the brainless, arm-twisting, deeply corrupt Rubberstamp Congress.

McCain on al qaeda deconstructed

It's taken me a while to figure it out, but last night, during an interview with mcjoan for my Virtually Speaking program, I finally understood what's going on with McCain wrt to Iraq, al qaeda and Iran. What's going on is he is having trouble getting on message. The messaging on Iraq is very tricky, because what the message is supposed to convey is something false, but you're not supposed to actually lie while delivering the message.

So when Bush uttered the 16 words about yellowcake acquired by Iraq, he didn't say that Iraq had acquired yellowcake. He said that British intelligence had reported that Iraq may have acquired yellowcake. This way, the audience took away the yellowcake acquistion, but he could still say that he hadn't lied. Likewise, he didn't say that Iraq had a nuclear weapon, he said that we didn't the first proof to be a mushroom cloud.

When talking about Iraq, al qaeda and Iran, you're supposed to say something like this:

"Waving the white flag of surrender would leave Iraq in a perilous position, with an operational, aggressive enemy of America, al qaeda growing in strength. Likewise, we must remain in place to stop Iran from training extremists in their country, and then sending them across the border to kill American troops. Al qaeda is an existential threat the we must defeat, and we will defeat. This is not the time to give up."

His problem is he keeps forgetting that he's not supposed to put "Iran" and "al qaeda" in the same sentence. It's important to convey, especially to media superstars like Kyra Phillips, that al qaeda and Iran are linked. The Sunni al qaeda is much too fundamentalist to make common cause with the heretic Shi-ites. And Iran, despite its membership in the the "axis of evil" club, doesn't pose any threat to the US. The country does threaten Israel, but given Israel's nuclear capability, even that threat is hyperbolically overstated.

None of the reality of any threat enters into this political manipulation of language. The idea is simple: Say al qaeda, Iran, al qaeda in consecutive sentences. Lieberman understands it; he stepped up during the press conference in Jerusalem and audibly gave him the "extremist" talking point. (Leave aside as well the idea that any Iraqi fighting against an occupying force is an "extremist.")

McCain is either too dumb, or too unused to robotically repeating talking points, to keep straight this very simple strategy of misleading the media, and the voters into believing that Iran, too, in its support of al qaeda, was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Employees Good, Contractors Bad

There has been a concerted effort by the Bush administration to replace civil service worker with contract employees. I've been hearing about it around the extended family dinner table for years. I have a relative who works for a Federal regulatory agency who has said this has been policy from day 1.

There are good reasons for this, from a Bush perspective, especially wrt regulatory agencies:

1) Directing Federal funds to cronies, as the agency providing the contractor takes its cut. This is obviously a real potential boost to fund-raising.

2) Providing a channel to influence how people working at civil service rather than politically appointed jobs. Contractors have two bosses, the one at the agency, and the one at the office.

3) Weakening institutional memory and stability. By using short-term contractors, the administration makes it more difficult to use agency experience with past events to more wisely deal with current issues.

4) Making it easier to shrink the agency. It's hard to fire civil servants. It's easy no to renew a contract.

5) Making it easier to influence civil servants to break work rules. One of the reasons rules controlling access to, say, passport records, have teeth is that if you do break the rules, and are fired, you stop contributing to your pension, stop accumulating service time toward retirement and are booted out of a great health care plan. If your contract is terminated, all that happens is your employer sends you to some other assignment.

The Obama passport snooping incident is made more suspicious because the perps were contractors. The sanctions that applied to them are weaker than those applied to civil service staff, they could well have more loyalty to the interests of the agency that put them into the job.

Of course, the use of contractors creates the possibility of dirty tricksters penetrating the agency intentionally. It's a lot harder to turn a civil service employee than it is to introduce a mole.

Clinton Bets Her Stake

As we watch Clinton try to keep her hopes alive in the minds of the press and the superdelegates, you have both admire her persistence, and shake your head about the train wreck to come.

She had to win on March 4th, take both Texas and Ohio in the primary, and win one of them reasonably big. March 4 was do or die day. She could not afford to think strategically, at all. She had to find a way to take Obama down no matter what it took, and so she adopted the kitchen sink approach. This meant hauling out tactics that would win the OH and TX contests, without regard to what that would mean on March 21. The worst of her positions, the ones that would not stand scrutiny over time, were pulled out on the weekend before the primary.

So, just before the primaries, she pulled out the NAFTA card, with a boost from the Conservative Canadian cabinet. She doubled down on the 35 years experience business, making specific claims about foreign policy initiatives she claimed to have been involved with. Also, if you were in comments sections that weekend you saw what looked like proponents with talking points that included a claim that she was Bill's real Vice President, referring to a metaphor Gail Sheehy used in a Vanity Fair article.

Taken individually, these are all weak arguments. To attack NAFTA was to attack the Clinton administration that she claims as her virtual incumbency. The foreign policy claim was ridiculous; she was not even cleared to read secure cables coming in from embassies around. The nearly VP claim was absurd,especially given the unprecedented role Gore played in the Clinton administration.

One by one, they arguments all kinda suck But taken together, these things were even worse, because she had to claim to be inconsequential on NAFTA, while terribly consequential on Kosovo and that Gore spent his time in office on the equivalent of playing golf with Dan Quayle.

The campaign recognized these were bad arguments, and they dropped them immediately, switching to "ZOMG he's BLACK" and therefore can't win, pitching to the press and to the superdelegates that his race made Obama fundamentally flawed. This was done using surrogates, and does not in the least bit imply that Clinton, or her most prominent surrogate, Geraldine Ferraro, is racist. Clinton was prefiguring the coming race, getting a boost from the cable television constant looping of the Wright content. (Chris Bowers confirms that Clinton is pushing the Wright story.)

Obama's Unity speech ended that attack, at least for now, and answered questions superdelegates had about Obama's capability under fire. However, polling indicates that she has raised doubts among key demographic groups in PA. Obama may not be able to repeat his past performances of closing an initial polling gap to either win, or lose narrowly.

We are in danger what several commentators have called the worst case scenario, a candidate selected in a less than transparent way, or a candidate with lagging, even negative momentum. A lot depends on how Obama's big speeches this week play out in the media over the next week.

Don't...Read....Edward....Rothstein

There are things you know you shouldn't do. You've done them before, and nothing good came of it. You tell yourself never to do it again. I'm not talking about mind-altering substances, or ill-thought out liaisons that don't look so good just before sunup. I'm talking about reading stuff that makes your brain hurt.

Edward Rothstein, who writes about culture is someone I really try not to read. And when I do forget, and read him, I mentally kick myself and swear never to do it again.

But today I saw the headline, and I had to read it. Mistake, but this time my brain didn't hurt as much as I got angry.

On the death of Arthur C. Clark

He starts out very nicely, actually:

“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral” were the instructions left by Arthur C. Clarke, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90.

This is, of course, not easy to do. It's very difficult to keep religion out of death. Death's avoidance is at the heart of religious belief, whether it is through personal immortality or immortality through your offspring. So it's a challenge to fend it off.

So what does Rothstein do? He writes about he religious elements of Clarke's work, declaring, at the end:

For all his acclaimed forecasting ability, though, it is unclear whether Mr. Clarke knew precisely what he saw in that future. There is something cold in his vision, particularly when he imagines the evolutionary transformation of humanity. He leaves behind all the things that we recognize and know, and he doesn’t provide much guidance for how to live within the world we recognize and know. In that sense his work has little to do with religion.

But overall religion is unavoidable. Mr. Clarke famously — and accurately — said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Perhaps any sufficiently sophisticated science fiction, at least in his case, is nearly indistinguishable from religion.

The body of the article is about some of the stories Clarke wrote that had religion in them, like the famous short story "The Nine Billion Names of God" where two computer technicians help an Eastern sect print out all God's names, thereby ending the universe.

Along the way he peddles this tripe:

Mr. Clarke’s writings were the most biblical, the most prepared to amplify reason with mystical conviction, the most religious in the largest sense of religion: speculating about beginnings and endings, and how we get from one to the other.

The fact that Clarke noticed that other people believed in this stuff, and that there was fodder for irony and pathos doesn't make him mystical or religious. Another story he might have mentioned, "The Star," is about a Jesuit astronomer who discovers that the nova that Magi followed destroyed a thriving civilization. (I happen to think this story inspired George RR Martin's "The Way of Cross and Dragon," which is about another Jesuit who has challenges to his faith).

But the fact that Clarke was a keen observer of what motivates people, had the strong sense of irony that makes for a great short story writer--the best of the Golden Age authors at that length--doesn't in anyway make him religious, any more than Larry Niven creating a compelling alien makes him a Pearson's Puppeteer.

It's an insult to Clarke's memory to put his work in this frame, and Edward Rothstein should be ashamed.

Of course, if he knew shame, he wouldn't keep writing.

Revival

I enjoy give and take in comments. I'm not real big on pronouncements from above. So my blog attempts have always been abortive. But, lately, I find I have more to say, at greater length, than fits into blog posts. So I'm gonna take another crack here.

Kurtz in Circles

So Howie ends his criticism of Ken Silverstein's undercover story on lobbyists by saying:

The reason is that, no matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects.

And he proceeds to his next subject:

Why do journalists keep making political contributions?

which has this fascinating coda:

The news outlets that don't ban donations seem to regard them as a matter of personal preference, like joining the PTA. But they seriously underestimate the public distrust of journalists, which is only fueled by such practices. Those who work for opinion magazines or are employed as commentators have a stronger case that their views are no secret. But there is still an important distinction between rhetorically supporting a candidate and helping bankroll one.

The scorecard -- 125 of 144 donations to Democrats -- provides fresh ammunition to those who say the press has a liberal tilt. It's hard to argue you don't favor one party when you've just coughed up cash for that party.

So, working undercover to get an accurate news story raises questions. And it's imperative that reporters keep their political positions a secret--that they lie to their readers, by omission, about their political views.

In both cases, not in order to get the readership more information, but to get them less information, all in order to preserve people like Howie in their positions of august authority and cocktail weenie consumption.

Occupational Reality

For at least three years, I have been calling attention in comments, and in emails to people who do not have comment sections, that the US is, and has been from the outset, engaged in a policy of permanent occupation in Iraq. This has been clear since the decision was made to build "enduring bases" in Iraq.

As time has past, all the other pretexts have been stripped away by events, and we are left, at this point with nothing more nor less than permanent occupation in support of a puppet government. I have despaired of anybody, in the MSM or in the blogosphere writing clearly about this--or about the severe difficulty involved in ending the US involvement in the occupation because of Iraq's status as a failed state with no national defense capability, surrounded by four states that have reason to have designs on its territory, and who are, in some ways natural enemies.

This is complicated further by the fact that one of those states, Turkey, is a member of NATO, and has legitimate concerns over border security. The positions taken by democratic candidates--the wiggle room in their detailed statements about their plans for Iraq--make it clear that they understand these difficulties, but fear saying so out loud, because of the enormous unpopularity of this catastrophic occupation.

The blathering from the beltway pundits, spouting the FU justification of the week also impedes serious discussion of what is to be done, and is frequently characterized by arm waving that presumes that the US is both sovereign and if not omnipotent, effectively able to impose conditions, like a tripartite division, or the dissolution of the current government or alliance with "good" ex-Baathists. But there is very little written that discusses the reality of the strategic situation.

Last night, over at FDL, swopa outlined these issues in the context of parsing democratic presidential candidates' statements. He describes why these issues pose difficulties for those who want to end the occupation, and what realistically we have to worry about. The US will not be able to withdraw substantial forces without facing these issues, and making clear decisions about what the least horrific outcome is, and how it can be pursued.

This is a debate that is long overdue. I urge people to read that post.

It's not just the blogosphere

So everybody reacted to Richard Cohen's ill-reasoned column with derision yesterday. Literally a thousand comments taking him to task for demanding a get out of jail free card for Scooter Libby because, well, because he's part of Sally Quinn's salon. Sure, atrios gave him the WotD award, and Glenn applied his writing scalpel, but it was the hoi polloi in the comments section that tells you just how completely out of touch those Beltway pundits have become.

In a less widely publicized instance, Chris Matthews endured catcalls at the AFSCME event yesterday, when he decided that one of the most pressing issues of the day was Senator Clinton's view on the question of pardoning Libby.

Those dirty effin' hippies are everywhere. And they keep making noise.

The latest enabler: Roger Cohen

Unfortunately, this piece by Roger Cohen of the IHT is behind the NYTimes subscription wall.

But I can give you the skinny. It's the first line:

The Iraqi conflict is going to be with us for years if not decades.

This is the latest in a series of breaking-it-to-you-slowly pieces about the plans for permanent occupation in Iraq. The first mention came a couple of Sundays ago, when the NYT quoted anonymous sources that there was the possibility of Iraq being like Korea--with a long term occupation force of about 50,000 troops. I'm gonna pull a few bits out of the piece to demonstrate just how completely out of touch or complicit the media continues to be.

The last military build-up will not be repeated. Americans have no stomach for a further "surge" and the U.S. armed forces have no capacity for one.

When the escalation was first proposed in mid January 2007as Bush's response to the ISG report calling for diplomacy and drawdown, the media spent some time reversing direction from the certainty, expressed by Time and Newsweek, that this would provide political cover for a drawdown. By the time they had finished adjusting their conventional wisdom cocktail weenie goggles, it was March, so the law of the Friedman unit decreed that September was when All Would Be Settled. The Last Chance For Bush, because Republicans Would Turn On Him. There was a brief introduction of a Boehner Interval of 90 days, but that was much too imminent to preserve the fiction that something would be different at the end of the requisite period.

What Cohen says here does not, of course, reflect reality. The decision to escalate came after the 2006 elections, which confirmed what the polls had been saying for some time--that Americans had no stomach for an escalation. And the time it took, and the corners cut in terms of training, equipment readiness and extensions of tours of duty indicated that the armed forces did not have the capacity for the escalation.

In fact, Americans had no stomach for the last escalation, and the US Armed Forces clearly had insufficient capacity for it—training was curtailed, equipment was provided upon arrival in theatre, injured soldiers were sent back into battle, rotation length was increased and any number of other indicators demonstrated this. Whether you read polls, or just talk to people, it is very clear that Americans have turned decisively against this war.. And it is also very clear that this simply does not matter to our policymakers, our elected officials or the Beltway punditocracy. The escalation happened anyway.

I see four core American interests in Iraq that cannot be abandoned. There must be no Afghan-like Al Qaeda takeover of wide areas. There must be no genocide (say a Shiite sweep against Sunnis). There must be no regional conflagration (for example, a Turkish invasion). And there must be no return to the old order (murderous Stalinist dictatorship).

And now let's just tack on one more "must." Everybody gets a pony.

We use the the Friedman Unit not just because it's snarky and derisive. We also use it because it encapsulates, in only two words, a sense of pseudo analysis, wishful thinking and a Mr Micawber-like belief that something will turn up that has characterized MSM coverage of the war from the beginning. It also connotes the unwillingness of advocates of this disaster,especially the “liberal hawks,” to admit that it is a disaster, and to accept the inevitable catastrophic results.

Moreover, those uacceptable conditions that must be avoided are largely happening now. There is genocide going on. There is a regional conflagration taking place, with Saudi, Syrian and Iranian proxy forces doing battle, as well as a very nervous line drawn through the center of would-be Kurdistan. It can be argued that the US has established a murderous dictatorship. The death rate is a lot higher now than it was under Saddam Hussein. People are rousted out of their homes at night, and arrested and held with no due process. People have been tortured. And there is no way to ensure that the end game will not be another strong man.

I'm sure Gorbachev saw four core interests that couldn’t be abandoned when he announced glasnost, too. Sometimes the world is not what you wish it to be.

To ensure this, the United States must keep a military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future. The size of this deterrent force is up for debate, but 50,000 soldiers, or 105,000 less than today, is one talked-about figure. The timing of the drawdown will have to be discussed with Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, but it should begin soon after September.

Oh there is so much here to write about here. Let’s start with the first sentence. The US must keep a military presence in Iraq indefinitely. Let’s think about what that must entail. First, it must entail that the Iraq government not be representative of the popular view of Iraqis. There is no way that an openly nominated, freely elected government of Iraq would support a permanent 50,000 soldier occupation that would be in place, in part, in support of Israel and in opposition to the Palestinians, Iran, and the arab states in the region. Further, this sentence is a declaration of hegemony and denies the existence of a sovereign Iraq. There are no holds barred here in this statement, no pretext that there are Thieu supporters throughout the South. The USmust occupy Iraq for the foreseeable future. The US, and only the US, will decide the nature of the occupation of Iraq.

Now as to the size of the, ahem, proposed “deterrent” force. Shortly after Saddam fell, the administration was talking about a residual force of 30,000 to 50,000 troops (see a contemporary TNR article as an example). Permanent occupation has always been the plan.

The notion that we are slowly coming to the realization that a permanent presence in Iraq will, unfortunately, become necessary is either profoundly dishonest or disturbingly naive and uninformed. The plan for tens of thousands of occupying soldiers has been in place from the outset. The infrastructure to support this occupation has been systematically put into place over the last four years, with the building of hardened “enduring bases” complete with Baskin Robbins and Pizza Huts. The embassy has clearly been built as the quarters for a viceroy and bureaucracy for ruling the country. The idea that there is now “one talked about figure” carries the implication that we have just come to this realization. Not so.

This has been the plan from the outset. And, for some reason, the reporting on this has been very limited. The Chicago Tribune had a piece in 2004 about the plans for enduring bases. George Packer visited ones of the bases for the New Yorker. Fred Kaplan finally did write a column about them in Slate. By and large, though, these very clear plans have not been reported upon, and now columns like yours today are facilitating the myth that these are new plans, a new recognition of reality. In fact, had there been any plan for a real withdrawal, the US would have been working to rebuild the Iraq national defense force, including air power, armor and logistical capability. Instead the US has left the Iraqi defense capability gutted, leaving little option to continued occupation in a country surrounded by armed, potentially hostile both to Iraqi subpopulations and each other . The reference to Korea and Japan is not idle. We’ll leave aside whether this kind of occupation in the face of hostile opposition is actually possible.

And now, in the third sentence of the graf, it turns out that, of course, we have to let the Iraqi Prime Minisiter, former exile and recipient of CIA funds, know what our plans are. The US will, of course, “discuss” how the US plans to dispose of of its troops in his country. Can there be no clearer statement of the nature of this operation that will continue into the foreseeable future? I’m sure Stalin discussed his plans with Bolesław Bierut, as well.

The piece ends with this bizarre coda:

That chance will be increased if, as the United States steps down, the United Nations steps up.

Where does the UN charter specify support for an occupying power? And where will the US have the moral authority to move UN delegates in support of this occupation? Especially given his starting point—that the US will occupy the country for the foreseeable future--the idea that the UN will have anything to do with a US satrapy in Iraq is not even worthy of discussion.

But this where the traditional media is. The Beltway is still committed to supporting whatever the latest talking points are, and to grease the skids as much as necessary for a continuation of this occupation, ad infinitum, regardless of what the electorate thinks.

Hat Number 2 

Hat number 1 

Cloudy day, from kayak 

Blue ice seen on foot 

Blue ice from kayak 

Sunflower star 

Humpback whale, exhaling 

Glacier, with calves