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Tue 22 May, 2007 10:24 am
May 22, 2007
Books of The Times
Al Gore Speaks of a Nation in Danger
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
New York Times
In "The Assault on Reason" Al Gore excoriates George W. Bush, asserting that the president is "out of touch with reality," that his administration is so incompetent that it "can't manage its own way out of a horse show," that it ignored "clear warnings" about the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that it has made Americans less safe by "stirring up a hornets' nest in Iraq," while using "the language and politics of fear" to try to "drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest."
The administration's pursuit of unilateralism abroad, Mr. Gore says, has isolated the United States in an ever more dangerous world, even as its efforts to expand executive power at home and "relegate the Congress and the courts to the sidelines" have undermined the constitutional system of checks and balances.
The former vice president contends that the fiasco in Iraq stems from President Bush's use of "a counterfeit combination of misdirected vengeance and misguided dogma to dominate the national discussion, bypass reason, silence dissent and intimidate those who questioned his logic both inside and outside the administration."
He argues that the gruesome acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq "were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity ?- encouraged, authorized and instituted" by President Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. And he writes that the violations of civil liberties committed by the Bush-Cheney administration ?- including its secret authorization of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail messages between the United States and other countries, and its suspension of the rights of due process for "enemy combatants" ?- demonstrate "a disrespect for America's Constitution that has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of democracy."
Similar charges have been made by a growing number of historians, political analysts and even former administration insiders, and President Bush's plummeting approval ratings have further emboldened his critics. But Mr. Gore writes not just as a former vice president and the man who won the popular vote in the 2000 election, but also as a possible future candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 race for the White House, and the vehemence of his language and his arguments make statements about the Bush administration by already announced candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton seem polite and mild-mannered in contrast.
And yet for all its sharply voiced opinions, "The Assault on Reason" turns out to be less a partisan, election-cycle harangue than a fiercely argued brief about the current Bush White House that is grounded in copiously footnoted citations from newspaper articles, Congressional testimony and commission reports ?- a brief that is as powerful in making its points about the implications of this administration's policies as the author's 2006 book, "An Inconvenient Truth," was in making its points about the fallout of global warming.
This volume moves beyond its criticisms of the Bush administration to diagnose the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy ?- low voter turnout, rampant voter cynicism, an often ill-informed electorate, political campaigns dominated by 30-second television ads, and an increasingly conglomerate-controlled media landscape ?- and it does so not with the calculated, sound-bite-conscious tone of many political-platform-type books, but with the sort of wonky ardor that made both the book and movie versions of "An Inconvenient Truth" so bluntly effective.
Mr. Gore's central argument is that "reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions" and that the country's public discourse has become "less focused and clear, less reasoned." This "assault on reason," he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operates. Echoing many reporters and former administration insiders, Mr. Gore says that the administration tends to ignore expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it can promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies.
Doubts about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction were sidestepped in the walk-up to the war: Mr. Gore says that uranium experts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee told him "there was zero possibility" that aluminum tubes acquired by Saddam Hussein were for the purpose of nuclear enrichment, but felt intimidated from "making any public statement that disagreed with the assertions being made to the people by President Bush."
And the Army chief of staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki's pre-invasion recommendation that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for a successful occupation of Iraq was similarly dismissed. "Rather than engaging in a reasoned debate on the question," Mr. Gore writes, administration members "undercut Shinseki for disagreeing with their preconceived notion ?- even though he was an expert, and they were not."
Moreover, Mr. Gore contends, the administration's penchant for secrecy (keeping everything from the details of its coercive interrogation policy to its National Security Agency surveillance program under wraps) has dismantled the principle of accountability, even as what he calls its "unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception" on matters like Iraq has made "true deliberation and meaningful debate by the people virtually impossible."
Mr. Gore points out that the White House repeatedly implied that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, between the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Iraq, when in fact no such linkage existed. He observes that the administration "withheld facts" from Congress concerning the cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which turned out to be "far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the president."
And he contends that "it has become common for President Bush to rely on special interests" ?- like those represented by the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi before the war, and ExxonMobil on the climate crisis ?- for "basic information about the policies important to these interests."
When Mr. Gore turns to the larger cultural and social reasons behind the decline of reason in America's marketplace of ideas, his arguments become fuzzier and less convincing. His argument that radio was essential to the rise and reign of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini ("without the introduction of radio, it is doubtful that these totalitarian regimes would have commanded the obedience of the people in the manner they did") is highly reductive, just as his argument that television has enabled politicians to manipulate mass opinion while preventing individuals from taking part in the national dialogue seems overly simplistic.
As for his conviction that the Internet can help re-establish "an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish," it plays down the more troubling aspects of the Web, like its promotion of rumor and misinformation alongside real information, and its tendency to fuel polarizing, partisan warfare.
Part civics lesson, part political jeremiad, part philosophical tract, "The Assault on Reason" reveals an angry, impassioned Al Gore ?- a far cry from the carefully scripted, earth-tone-wearing Al Gore of the 2000 presidential campaign and the programmed "creature of Washington" described in the reporter Bill Turque's 2000 biography of him, "Inventing Al Gore."
Much the way that the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" showed a more accessible Al Gore ?- at ease with himself and passionate about the dangers of global warming ?- this book shows a fiery, throw-caution-to-the winds Al Gore, who, whether or not he runs for the White House again, has decided to lay it all on the line with a blistering assessment of the Bush administration and the state of public discourse in America at this "fateful juncture" in history.
I wish Al Gore would become presidential candidate
A Drive for Global Domination Has Put Us in Greater Danger
By Al Gore
The Guardian UK
Thursday 24 May 2007
Moral authority, which is our greatest source of strength, has been recklessly put at risk by this wilful president.
The pursuit of "dominance" in foreign policy led the Bush administration to ignore the UN, to do serious damage to our most important alliances, to violate international law, and to cultivate the hatred and contempt of many in the rest of the world. The seductive appeal of exercising unconstrained unilateral power led this president to interpret his powers under the constitution in a way that brought to life the worst nightmare of the founders. Any policy based on domination of the rest of the world not only creates enemies for the US and recruits for al-Qaida, but also undermines the international cooperation that is essential to defeating terrorists who wish to harm and intimidate America. Instead of "dominance", we should be seeking pre-eminence in a world where nations respect us and seek to follow our leadership and adopt our values.
With the blatant failure by the government to respect the rule of law, we face a great challenge in restoring America's moral authority in the world. Our moral authority is our greatest source of strength. It is our moral authority that has been recklessly put at risk by the cheap calculations of this wilful president.
The Bush administration's objective of attempting to establish US domination over any potential adversary was what led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war - a painful misadventure marked by one disaster after another, based on one mistaken assumption after another. But the people who paid the price have been the American men and women in uniform trapped over there, and the Iraqis themselves. At the level of our relations with the rest of the world, the administration has willingly traded respect for the US in favour of fear. That was the real meaning of "shock and awe". This administration has coupled its theory of US dominance with a doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, regardless of whether the threat to be pre-empted is imminent or not.
The doctrine is presented in open-ended terms, which means that Iraq is not necessarily the last application. In fact, the very logic of the concept suggests a string of military engagements against a succession of sovereign states - Syria, Libya, North Korea, Iran - but the implication is that wherever the combination exists of an interest in weapons of mass destruction together with an ongoing role as host to, or participant in, terrorist operations, the doctrine will apply. It also means that the Iraq resolution created the precedent for pre-emptive action anywhere, whenever this or any future president decides that it is time. The risks of this doctrine stretch far beyond the disaster in Iraq. The policy affects the basic relationship between the US and the rest of the world. Article 51 of the UN charter recognises the right of any nation to defend itself, including the right to take pre-emptive action in order to deal with imminent threats.
By now, the administration may have begun to realise that national and international cohesion are indeed strategic assets. But it is a lesson long delayed and clearly not uniformly and consistently accepted by senior members of the cabinet. From the outset, the administration has operated in a manner calculated to please the portion of its base that occupies the far right, at the expense of solidarity among all Americans and between our country and our allies. The gross violations of human rights authorised by Bush at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and dozens of other locations around the world, have seriously damaged US moral authority and delegitimised US efforts to continue promoting human rights.
President Bush offered a brief and halfhearted apology to the Arab world, but he should make amends to the American people for abandoning the Geneva conventions, and to the US forces for sending troops into harm's way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly, he owes an explanation to all those men and women throughout our world who have held high the ideal of the US as a shining goal to inspire their own efforts to bring about justice and the rule of law.
Most Americans have tended to give the Bush-Cheney administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to its failure to take action in advance of 9/11 to guard against an attack. Hindsight casts a harsh light on mistakes that should have been visible at the time they were made. But now, years later, with the benefit of investigations that have been made public, it is no longer clear that the administration deserves this act of political grace from the American people. It is useful and important to examine the warnings the administration ignored - not to point the finger of blame, but to better determine how our country can avoid such mistakes in the future. When leaders are not held accountable for serious mistakes, they and their successors are more likely to repeat those mistakes.
Part of the explanation for the increased difficulty in gaining cooperation in fighting terrorism is Bush's attitude of contempt for any person, institution or nation that disagrees with him. He has exposed Americans abroad and in the US to a greater danger of attack because of his arrogance and wilfulness, in particular his insistence upon stirring up a hornet's nest in Iraq. Compounding the problem, he has regularly insulted the religion, the culture and the tradition of people in countries throughout the Muslim world.
The unpleasant truth is that Bush's failed policies in both Iraq and Afghanistan have made the world a far more dangerous place. Our friends in the Middle East, including most prominently Israel, have been placed in greater danger because of the policy blunders and sheer incompetence with which the civilian Pentagon officials have conducted this war.
We as Americans should have "known then what we know now"- not only about the invasion of Iraq but also about the climate crisis; what would happen if the levees failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina; and about many other fateful choices that have been made on the basis of flawed, and even outright false, information. We could and should have known, because the information was readily available. We should have known years ago about the potential for a global HIV/Aids pandemic. But the larger explanation for this crisis in American decision-making is that reason itself is playing a diminished, less respected, role in our national conversation.
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Al Gore is a former US vice-president; this is an edited extract from his new book, The Assault on Reason, published this week by Bloomsbury.
Anyone who says that the US's greatest strength is in its -moral authority- is just plain delusional.
We have, to put it bluntly, a huge economy at the cutting edge of productivity. Perfect? Hell no. We're not absolutely the best in every respect. But on average, we're certainly right up there with everyone, and the countries that can keep up with us are (again, bluntly) a lot smaller than we are. US output is pretty much the same as all of Europe; despite everybody wowing over Chinese growth gains, in absolute terms it's still not that huge.
In military terms, even leaving aside nuclear weapons, the US military is not merely in a different league from any other military on earth, it's not even really playing the same game anymore. Only a handful of the most highly industrialized Western nations have -any- troops trained to the standard of the average US unit. In naval strength, the US is essentially in control of every sea and ocean; the combined naval strength of every other nation on the planet wouldn't even slow the modern US Navy down much. And the gap is widening - US forces are getting deadlier at a much faster pace than other nations. They'd call this "dominion" if we weren't nice about it, but yeah, "hegemony" is probably the right word for it.
Fact is, our most important allies are not, in the end, that important. They don't give us much in the way of added capabilities, they certainly don't give us anything in the way of added protection, and they tie our hands dangerously from activities that we should undertake for our own benefit. Does anyone here really believe that we were right in 1991 to stop the first Gulf War, and leave Saddam in power, in order to propitiate world opinion?
That's all powerful, but our culture is more powerful.
Our culture gets people to want to do things we like. All our military might can do is force them to do what we like. Doesn't matter how many multiplicatives over we can kill someone.
Cycloptichorn
Sure, and I'd argue we're pretty powerful on the culture export side too. Weapons of media destruction, and all that. ;p But it's one thing to say "our culture is liked and admired by other countries", and another to say "our culture is our country's greatest strength." The former is true to one extent or another, the latter just ain't.
I don't mean to say that "soft power" is useless or that the US shouldn't do what it can to keep up a good world image. But soft power is no substitute for hard power, and we have a truly awesome amount of the latter.
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