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This has been a lucky stretch for me in getting letters to the editor printed in major daily newspapers. Today the Washington Post ran a badly edited version of this letter I sent in response to Josh White’s report of a former Guantanamo prisoner involved in a suicide bombing in Iraq.

To the Editor:

Your story, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack (8 May 2008) states that “the Defense Intelligence Agency has estimated that as many as three dozen former Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of having returned to terrorist activities.”

This characterization begs the question which is absolutely central — and completely unaddressed in your report — as to whether this activity is, indeed, a “return” to terrorist activities or an initiation into terrorist action prompted, at least in part, by resentment based on the Guantanamo imprisonments. In a system which puts habeas corpus, not to mention release, beyond the reach of most detainees, is it plausible to believe that the DoD had evidence of prior terrorist participation on those it had released?

Mark B. Jacobs
San Francisco, California

The Quiet American and the Cost of Civic Disengagement since 9/11

George W. Bush likes to say the world changed on September 11, 2001. He’s absolutely right, of course. But then, he should know. He and his administration were the chief architects of that change.

Six years later, it is fascinating and horrible to trace the course of those transformations, and to assess our culpability as citizens of a democracy. We have looked-on like a herd of docile sheep as the Bush administration emasculated Congress, radically altered our conceptions of life in a free society, and embarked on a war contrary to nearly every national value or policy objective one might have otherwise articulated.

Good War Gone Bad

In May of 2006, I posed the question: how could the United States allow the pointless and probably illegal war in Iraq derail the imperative and morally justified conflict in Afghanistan? Mine was not an up-to-the-minute, breaking news sort of analysis. It had long been clear that Mr. Bush’s war in Iraq was draining precious resources from the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda, and, more importantly at that point, the reconstruction projects which would create the economic and social stability to allow the feeble Kharzai government to consolidate political authority throughout the county. The game had already turned by the time I wrote:

America failed to eradicate the Taliban, failed to deliver development aid in the amounts promised, and diverted troops which might have helped to secure the problematic southern provinces — all to focus on Iraq. Any reasonable semblance of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan would have been cheap and easy, especially when compared against the invasion of Iraq. Now, Afghanistan is under siege by a resurgent Taliban and religious fundamentalism again dominates social behavior in Afghanistan’s cities. The appallingly corrupt Kharzai government has never been able to exert its authority much beyond Kabul. Opium production is at record levels. The people of the country are poor, hungry, and frustrated. Each day the situation gets worse.

$1.2 Trillion: Build a Great Future or Destroy One

As anyone who takes even a cursory look at this blog knows, I generally like to post original ideas — or at least my own take on ideas already in circulation. Some memes are so helpful to our understanding of the world, however, that they deserve a nod and a link — on my blog and elsewhere.

That’s how I feel about David Leonhardt’s column in a recent edition of the New York Times, entitled “What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy.”

Why Iraq?

Let’s try to take the neoconservatives at their word. The invasion of Iraq was never about oil. And it was never about “finishing the job” Bush pere left undone following the first Gulf war. It was not even about establishing a base of military operations in this critical region which would allow America to begin to distance itself from its problematic alliance with the Saudis.

It was solely about replacing a murderous, autocratic regime with a democracy, which would then embolden democratic reformers throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Iraq was to be the first domino in the democratization of the region.

Let’s leave aside the fact that metaphor was always a little careless. Dominoes topple a bit more easily than governments, systems of government, and the social values that have enabled or created those systems. Fallen dominoes dispossess no one, threaten no stakeholders, and force no radical realignment of interdomino relations. And they leave far less collateral damage.

Also try to ignore, as the neocons themselves did, that democracy in much of the Islamic world is likely to yield popularly elected theocracy. I personally have no problem with this notion; but I can’t help imagining it would have troubled the neocons, had it occurred to them.

One must still wonder: why Iraq?

Making Haste and Waste in Iraq

Baby we can do it
Take the time – do it right,
We can do it, Baby -
Do it tonight.
– S.O.S. Band, Take Your Time

I said, I hope you get your constitution written on time, and he agreed… He understands the need for of a timely write of the constitution.
– George W. Bush, On his conversation with Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, 28 April 2005

It is depressing to watch the US government pressure the Iraqi Transitional National Assembly to complete the drafting of its country’s constitution. As always, the Bush administration places higher priority on partisan politics at home than the successful democratization and governance of Iraq. If constitution drafting can be checked off the to-do list, then Republicans standing for re-election in 2006 can point to a tangible accomplishment of the new Iraqi government, and try to strike a hopeful note about the abysmal situation they and their president have created.

But will a constitution created in haste really signal a positive achievement? In all likelihood, it will simply codify, in the nation’s supreme legal document, the sectarian divisions that already threaten to rip the country apart. The Sunis remain largely estranged from the process. The kind of negotiation and compromise necessary to build sufficient cohesion to avoid civil war will take time.

But now the first arbitrary deadline has been passed and the Bush administration wants the constitution done yesterday!

The drafting of a constitution is the single most important political act in the governance of a country. If America is, as our politicians like to tell us, the greatest nation on earth – and, indeed, if that phrase has any discernable meaning beyond its hollow, prideful jingoism – it is entirely down to the fact that it has an absolutely beautiful constitutional system. Sure, the US Constitution contains the quirks borne of compromise and historical context. Sure, Madison and others agreed, even at the time, that it was an imperfect document. Sure, the Constitution is more principled and noble in conception than it is in practice, given the careless disregard our politicians sometimes have for it. But no other country in the world has so ably defined the mechanisms of self-governance, finding the delicate balance between effective administration of the public welfare and curtailing the awesome power of the state over the rights of the individual.

The American experience itself shows that these things take time. The Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787 commenced on 25 May. It was not until 29 September – more than four months later – that the Constitution was approved by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. This is more than a month longer than the Bush administration mandated for the drafting of Iraq’s Constitution. And let’s not forget that the work of the Constitutional Convention was preceded by the Annapolis Conference in 1786 and by weeks of crucial advance work by James Madison and the delegates of Virginia; or that the Bill of Rights, the crowning achievement of American constitutionalism, wasn’t ratified until 1791. The Iraqis were starting from scratch on 16 May, and were asked to be done by 15 August.

You may also have noticed that the Iraqi’s are working under somewhat more difficult circumstances than the American delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. America was enjoying peace and prosperity unheard of in a newly-minted, formerly colonial country. The delegates to the convention were all established legislators and included some of the most brilliant political minds of their day – or of any day, for that matter. The issues dividing the delegates were well-drawn, with the country having had the benefit of nearly a decade of experience with democratic self-governance under the Articles of Confederation. Iraq, on the other hand, is a shambles. It’s all the constitutional delegates can do to get themselves to the meetings alive!

It is patently unrealistic to expect an inexperienced, cobbled-together, sectarian, shell-shocked group of would-be politicians to do in three months what James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Roger Sherman, and their colleagues could not do in four.

If only President Bush weren’t on another protracted vacation, he might be able to lend them a hand.