The election ended. The county board of supervisors lost. Wal-Mart won. It can now construct stores in unincorporated sections of the county. The best the supervisors could do now is order the roads leading to the stores closed ...
My own hypothesis (I won't dignify it with the label of theory) is that a lot of county urban dwellers voted against the measure, since they would be glad to have a Wal-Mart relatively easily accessible to them, just not in their own backyard. (The measure would not have prevented Wal-Mart superstores from being constructed inside city limits anywhere in the county.)
I wrote, and I quote:
“Wal-Mart ― and something called the ‘Contra Costa Consumers for Choice’ ― are out in force to defeat this measure, inundating voters with ‘No On L’ mailers paid for primarily by Wal-Mart (yes, it says so right here in small print: ‘With major funding provided by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.’)”
Oops. Maybe the word “primarily” was not well-chosen. I took the liberty, last time I was over at the County Clerk's office, of looking at the financial reports for “Contra Costa Consumers for Choice”. Wal-Mart contributed around one and a quarter million dollars to this organization for its political campaign against Prop L. Want to guess how many others contributed?
Well, maybe thousands upon thousands of people sent in a few dollars each. I know no one who did, but, what the hey. But, according to the rules, every contribution of $100 or more had to be reported ― and not one was. The only reported financier of “Contra Costa Consumers for Choice” was Wal-Mart.
Is anyone out there surprised?
The situation in Iraq is confusing. This should not surprise anyone. When you get involved with trying to tell other people how they should live their lives ― worse, trying to force other people to live their lives as you think they should ― the situation always gets confusing.
Like President Bush, I was opposed to the idea of going into Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein in the pious hope that he would be replaced by a pro-Western democracy. (Oh, sorry ― I didn't mean this President Bush, but the last one, the father, who seems, in retrospect, to have displayed, in this one situation at least, a modicum of good sense.) I didn't believe in Weapons of Mass Destruction ― the last time Saddam had used any of those (World War I-vintage poison gas) was in the 1980s and, for the most part, under the aegis of the government of the United States; and he most particularly had not used them in the Gulf War. I did believe that Saddam Hussein was not the most estimable of characters (“unhanged brigand” was the expression I liked to use to describe the man). Had the Iraqi people stormed his Presidential Palaces, hanged him from a roofbeam, and toppled his statue in Baghdad, I would have been among the first to cheer.
But that was the business of the Iraqi people, not ours. It was their decision (or lack thereof), not ours.
Popular belief to the contrary, there's no evidence that people with no tradition of democracy can't accept it and adapt to it like a fish to water. The problem is that, in Iraq as elsewhere, the United States is not interested in instituting democracy; it's interested in instituting a government that will unhesitatingly do what we want it to do, and force its people to behave in ways we think they should behave.
I have some sympathy for this viewpoint. Although Sistani's view of Iraqi democracy is probably a more correct one than that of Paul Bremmer ― nice, fair general elections in which the majority of Iraqis decide what rules will govern the entire country ― there's no question in my mind that large parts of the Iraqi population (Kurds, Sunnis, women) would suffer more under such democratic rule than they would under a set of relatively benevolent American-imposed regulations ― in some ways, more than they did under Saddam Hussein's rule.
When I see such a situation as we have in Iraq today, I can't help thinking of a scene in L. Sprague DeCamp's science-fiction novel Lest Darkness Fall, written in the days immediately prior to World War II. Protagonist Martin Padway, an archaeologist thrown back through time to sixth-century Rome, is in a bar where he is having a discussion with an “Orthodox” (Catholic) Christian, who is bemoaning religious oppression under the heavy hands of the Goths who now rule in Italy. “But I thought the Goths allowed everyone to worship as they please,” says Padway. “That's the trouble,” sighs the Catholic. “We're forced to stand around and allow all these Arians and Nestorians and what-have-yous to worship as they please instead of following the One True Way. And if that isn't religious oppression, I don't know what is!” In a “democratic”, in the traditional sense of the word, Iraq, the shi'a majority would no longer be forced by foreign oppressors to allow their non-shi'a fellow countrymen to behave wrongly.
The sad fact is, as President Bush père saw in 1991, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq, for all its flaws ― and to call them “flaws” is like calling the sea “damp” ― for all its flaws, it worked. It was arguably, and perhaps only from a religious viewpoint, the most moderate regime (including Israel) in the Middle East. From the international point of view, it suffered primarily from its leader's desire to grab off bits and pieces of other states, a desire that he was never competent to satisfy (even with the aid of the Americans, who were more than desirous of seeing him take part of Iran under his no doubt benevolent protection, and gave him enough aid to keep that vicious and brutal war going for almost a decade). Saddam Hussein's Iraq, thanks to us, no longer exists. And our pious hope that we can put something better in its place, despite the national ambitions of the Kurds in the north, the revanchist aims of the Sunnis in the middle, and the religious goals of the majority Shi'a in the south, remains just that ― a pious hope.
Well, we finally have had a look at the Presidential Daily Briefing for August 6. Is it a smoking gun? Yes, I would say, and no.
There's not a thing in there that would have told President Bush, or anyone else, that on September 11, 2001, agents of Al Qaeda would crash two civilian airliners into the World Trade Center, another one into the Pentagon, and ― potentially ― a fourth into the White House. Put your minds at rest.
On the other hand, there was plenty there that would have caused any thinking person to ask: "They're going to do something. What are they going to do?"
Apparently, President Bush is not a thinking person. He was on vacation in Crawford, Texas. He stayed on vacation in Crawford, Texas. He did nothing. Worse, the people around him did nothing.
Richard Clark talked about "shaking the trees". Shaking some trees in mid-August might well have brought forth the information (already known to the FBI, apparently) that certain unauthorized persons of Middle Eastern origin were swotting the avionics of large civilian aircraft. Somebody might have remembered that the whole 9/11 scenario was anticipated, during the Clinton administration, with respect to the Olympic Games in Atlanta (for that matter, does anybody remember the novel "Black Friday", which dates, I believes, from two or three decades ago?). But the Bush administration's philosophy has apparently been that, if the trees need shaking, the Almighty will send along a high wind to shake them. They apparently forget that other bit of religious philosophy: "God helps those who help themselves."
The contents of the PDB of August 6 seem to show an administration whose reaction was: "Well, that's interesting. Now let's see -- was I planning to stay in bed today or go out and rest on the porch swing today?" And in that sense, it qualifies as a smoking gun.