Fox faux pas (latest in a series)

The folks at fairly imbalanced Fox News have long had a strange and malign preoccupation with matters of race in America. For years now, the rants of mushwit pit-bull right-wing mouthpieces Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity have characterized the Fox news style of reporting on various national affairs vis-à-vis race and ethnicity: smug, intemperate, monochromatic, and often flat-out racist.

“Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade is the latest to swing for the fences at Idiots’ Stadium. On July 8, when mentioning the results of a study on marriage that was conducted in Sweden and Finland, Kilmeade said that “(Americans) keep marrying other species and ethnics ... The problem is the Swedes have pure genes. They marry other Swedes, that’s the rule. Finns marry other Finns; they have a pure society. In America we marry everybody. We will marry Italians and Irish.”

His co-hosts — Gretchen Carlson and Dave Briggs — were dumbfounded. Watch this mess unfold:



It doesn’t make sense (not that much at Fox News ever does); it’s not even consistent; this is the same Brian Kilmeade who walked off the Fox and Friends” set in March, when he clashed with his co-hosts over some spirited Obama bashing Kilmeade took issue with. Will the real Brian Kilmeade please stand up?

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Kilmeade’s comments never mentioned race specifically, but that was the undeniable takeaway in the blogosphere and the media generally. The group UNITY: Journalists of Color is calling for an apology from Fox News for his statements. The multiracial journalists coalition launched an online petition calling for a formal apology and a willingness to “enter into a serious discussion [on “Fox and Friends”] regarding intermarriage and the value of diversity in our society.”

“Mr. Kilmeade's outlandish comments were more than silly and worthy of ridicule,” reads the UNITY petition. “They validate, under the guise of light-hearted humor, the basest of white supremacist ideologies, the notion that white people and non-white people are of different species, with the white race as ‘pure.’”

This follows the recent initiative by News Corporation, Fox News’ parent, to create a diversity council in the wake of protests over the recent New York Post cartoon, a scribble that appeared to characterize President Obama as a monkey shot to death on the street by a police officer.

Guaranteed, some in Fox News/News Corp management will act chastened and apologize, soberly saying Kilmeade’s outburst hampers Fox News’ drive for credibility. But the throughline of intolerance that runs through the on-air commentaries of O’Reilly, Hannity, Glenn Beck and Neil Cavuto shows a news organization that’s willingly off the rails, no friend to anything approaching objectivity, and one of the more reliably reactionary, unbalanced newsgathering entities in the world.

Drive for credibility? Muddy Waters said it years ago: You can’t lose what you never had.
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Image credit: Kilmeade: FoxNews.com bio page. New York Post cartoon: © 2009 New York Post.

The Battle of Sotomayor

The battle lines over the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court were drawn early and often this morning at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. The opening days of such hearings, by acclimation if not custom, are occasions for pleasantries and cordiality; the bloodsport usually starts the second day.

But the contours of the fight to come were obvious before the lunch recess. The Republicans — more in the minority than they were before, now that Al Franken has finally been seated as the 60th Democratic member of the Senate — will fight hard to make this nomination about her, the nominee, rather than about her application of the law.

They’ve already solidly lined up as a bloc prepared to trip her up on her past decisions, various personal statements and matters related to her life narrative, and how it resonates (or fails to) with conservative thinking.

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The Democrats will be just as passionate about defending Sotomayor as a judge and legal scholar, and as an American whose life’s journey is both symbolic of the nation’s ideals, and indicative, in both the giving and the receiving, of the empathy she’s already laid claim to as a central pillar of her judicial philosophy.

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Sens. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and John Cornyn of Texas set the adversarial tone (and perhaps their party’s rhetorical bar) from the start.

Sessions: “I'm afraid our system will only be further corrupted, I have to say, as a result of President Obama's view that in tough cases the critical ingredient for a judge is, quote, ‘the depth and breadth of one's empathy,’ close quote, as well as his words, quote, ‘their broader vision of what America should be.’

“Like the American people, I have watched this process for a number of years, and I fear that this thinking empathy standard is another step down the road to a liberal, activist, results-oriented, relativistic world, where laws lose their fixed meaning …

“I want to be clear. I will not vote for, and no senator should vote for, an individual nominated by any president who is not fully committed to fairness and impartiality toward every person who appears before them.”

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Cornyn was equally blunt: “[T]he Court could demonstrate renewed respect for our original plan of government and return us, slowly but surely, to written Constitution and written laws rather than judge-made laws. The Supreme Court's recent Second Amendment decision in D.C. v. Heller I think is a good example of that.



“Or the Court could alternatively veer off course, once again, and follow its own star. It could continue to depart from the written Constitution. It could further erode the established rights that we have in the text of the Constitution, and it could invent even more brand-new rights not rooted in the text and not agreed to by the American people. …

“To help the American people understand which of these paths you would take us down, we need to know more about your record. We need to know more about the legal reasoning behind some of your opinions on the Second Circuit. And we need to know more about some of your public statements related to your judicial philosophy.”

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For his part, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, one of Congress’ more eloquent and articulate members, brought a rhetorical baseball bat to the hearings, then promptly and deftly went upside the heads of Sotomayor’s naysayers specifically, and Republican past practices in general.

“Your nomination caps what has already been a remarkable legal career and I join many, many Americans who are so proud to see you here today,” Whitehouse said. “It’s a great country, isn't it? And you represent its greatest attributes. Your record leaves no doubt that you have the intellectual ability to serve as justice.” …

“In the last two and a half months and today, my Republican colleagues have talked a great deal about judicial modesty and restraint. Fair enough, to a point, but that point comes when these words become slogans, not real critiques of your record.

“Indeed, these calls for restraint and modesty and complaints about activist judges are often code words, seeking a particular kind of judge who will deliver a particular set of political outcomes.” …

“For all the talk of modesty and restraint, the right-wing justices of the Court have a striking record of ignoring precedent, overturning congressional statutes, limiting constitutional protections, and discovering new constitutional rights; the infamous Ledbetter decision, for instance; the Louisville and Seattle integration cases, the first limitation on Roe vs. Wade that outright disregards the woman's health and safety; the D.C.-Heller decision discovering a constitutional right to own guns that the Court had not previously noticed in 220 years.”

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And in a first and brilliant move as a senator, one that augurs well for his career, Al Franken of Minnesota, the panel's newest member, smartly undercut the GOP’s pending attack on Sotomayor’s “empathy” for everyday people in his own opening statements.

“I take this oath very seriously as we consider your nomination, Judge Sotomayor. …

“Justice Souter, whom you will replace — if you are confirmed — once said, ‘The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we're in, whatever we're doing, at the end of our task, some human being is going to be affected. Some human life is going to be changed by what we do. And so we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right.’

“I believe Justice Souter had it right.”

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No matter what you think of empathy as a foundation for American jurisprudence, it was there in the judiciary committee room when Sotomayor made some of her initial remarks, in the afternoon.

“I want to make one special note of thanks to my mom. I am here today because of her aspirations and sacrifices for both my brother Juan and me. Mom, I love that we are sharing this together. …

“The progression of my life has been uniquely American. My parents left Puerto Rico during World War II. I grew up in modest circumstances in a Bronx housing project. My father, a factory worker with a third-grade education, passed away when I was 9 years old...”

Eventually, though, the particularities of her personal life returned to her basic approach to the law, one that should hearten conservatives. “In the past month, many senators have asked me about my judicial philosophy. It is simple: fidelity to the law. The task of a judge is not to make the law — it is to apply the law. And it is clear, I believe, that my record in two courts reflects my rigorous commitment to interpreting the Constitution according to its terms …”

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The risks for President Obama, and even for Sotomayor herself, are fairly small, despite the bluster and empty threat of the outnumbered Republicans. There's no way to demonize this nominee, and the conservatives know it. Sotomayor is no fire-breathing ideologue on the bench. It was clear enough when Lindsey Graham of Florida said flat-out: Unless the nominee had a complete "meltdown," she would be confirmed.

Graham confirmed what couldn't be said in public: Sotomayor was, relatively speaking, a slam dunk. But Graham didn't get or overlooked something else folks didn't talk about: Ironically enough, the ones really under scrutiny this week are the Republicans themselves.



As the hearings play out, the American people will discover just how far the conservatives are willing to go to obstruct the confirmation of a clearly deserving nominee, one who’s undergone scrutiny at this level before. It’s just not good political optics to be seen as mean-spirited toward someone whose personal story is as compelling as Sotomayor’s is.

For Sessions, Cornyn, Sen. Tom Coburn and the other Republicans to come across as microvetting her every word and seeking out her every imperfection would deepen the already solid characterization of the GOP as a dirty national acronym. The American people will be watching to make sure the GOP behaves.

So will the Latino American people. And on the basis of their steadily increasing numbers at the voting booths, paralleling their increasing percentage presence of the American population — an estimated 45.5 million Americans self-identify as Latino — Hispanic Americans know that Republicans can hardly afford to antagonize a voting bloc whose clout and heritage made themselves felt in November, and won’t ever be ignored again.

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For Latino voters, the GOP’s got some ‘splainin to do already.

Roberto Lovato, blogging at firedoglake, fully grasps what’s at stake not for Sonia Sotomayor, but for her inquisitors. One in particular:

“[M]illions of Latinos will watch what for them is a historical event of the utmost political and intimate importance. Many of these Latinos will be watching to see any signs of the racism and xenophobia many Latinos blame the GOP for and voted overwhelmingly against in the last election. Latino voters will, for example, be vigilant about what GOP Senate Judiciary members like Jeff Sessions say before and during the hearings.

“Earlier this month, reports linking Sessions, the ranking Republican on the committee, to anti-immigrant hate groups, filled Spanish-language media. According to the Washington-based America’s Voice, the Alabama senator has appeared at several events organized by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), NumbersUSA, the Federation for American Immigration Reform and other groups designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations as ‘hate groups.’

“Anything in this must-see Latino political event resembling the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been Sessions’ trademark will cost his party for years to come.”
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Image credits: Sotomayor, Frankel, Sessions: From pool feed.

Never can say goodbye

There’s talk of a concert in his honor in L.A., a show with his new music and moves and everything but him. There’s also been some discussion of a memorial concert for him sometime in August, back at the Apollo in Harlem, N.Y., back where it all started. If they happen, they’ll be just two more attempts to hold on to him, to let that flame burn a little longer.

And there was no celebration for doing that quite like what happened today at the Staples Center in L.A. Los Angeles, the nation and the world said formal goodbyes to Michael Jackson in a memorial service that was maybe slightly less emotionally exhausting to witness on television as it must have been inside the arena in the City of Angels.



It may well have been the single most draining marathon television experience since the all-day anguish of September 11, 2001. And the fact that the rawness of emotion, the passion, the sorrow, the joy, the humanness of the moment was thoroughly communicated over the medium most of the country used to witness that moment speaks volumes about our peripatetic nation's ability to chill for a minute and gather around the galvanizing event — as we did on 9/11, as we did after Diana, as we did after Bobby, and after Martin and John.

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It started, oddly enough, the way many urban dramas do in America: with a long helicopter tracking shot of cars in motion on a freeway in southern California. This wasn’t O.J., of course, or even one of the knuckleheads we see from time to time, jacked up on bravado and some illicit substance, leading the Highway Patrol in a hopeless 70-mile-an-hour attempt at escape.

This was the motorcade that moved from the Jackson family compound in Encino to celebrated Forest Lawn Cemetery and from there to the Staples Center. Much of this morning, cable viewers were treated to what amounted to free advertising for the Rolls-Royce Phantom and the California interstate highway system.

There were plenty of opportunities to act out, or so L.A. officials feared in the days before the ceremony. Their early crowd guesstimates soared to well above 500,000 people anticipated as a turnout at or near Staples Center, a scenario that seemed to almost invite trouble.

But Los Angeles knew how to represent itself. This wasn’t the Lakers winning the championship. This was different, it was heavier and L.A. knew it. In a city known for the unpredictable, for things that aren’t in the script, the potential was there for something out of control. But L.A. rose to the occasion, with dignity and class. Rodney King’s long-ago question was answered; at least in the short-term, at least in the Staples Center and in the vicinity, we could all get along.

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Over the last twenty years it’s been so easy to demonize Michael Jackson. We all did it. We cruelly lampooned the champion of splendid isolation; the manchild with the frequently surgically altered face; the musical prodigy channeling Charles Foster Kane, Howard Hughes and the Phantom of the Opera.

Today’s service negated much of that — negated, in fact, a lot of the cult of celebrity that attended Jackson’s life from almost the very beginning. We had forty years of Michael the Phenomenon. What we got today, what we needed badly, was Michael the Human Being.

There was Rev. Al Sharpton remembering a young Michael from back in the early days. Magic Johnson sharing a memory of downing a bucket of Kentucky Fried with MJ. Brooke Shields recalling how she and Michael sneaked into Elizabeth Taylor’s room on a lark.



And there was the testimony of Paris Katherine Jackson, the 11-year-old daughter of the King of Pop, whose unplanned, utterly unscripted testimonial at the end of the service topped everything that came before.

"I just wanted to say ... ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him — so much," she said before all but breaking down. Just like the rest of us.

Nekesa Mumbi Moody of The Associated Press nailed it: “It was a deeply emotional moment, the most profound part of a memorial that accomplished what Jackson could not in life: humanizing a man who for so long had seemed like a caricature.”

And more than just humanizing Jackson: this painful cry of love and affirmation by his daughter is a powerful counter to the allegations of child molestation that dogged the latter half of the singer’s career.

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It’s been hard for all of us, this letting-go thing. Strangers weep in the streets; grown men burst into tears in their living rooms at the sound of “Billie Jean.” And Usher, deep deep brother Usher, sang “Gone Too Soon” at the services and wept out loud. He knew. We all knew, whether we talked about MJ like a dog or not while he was alive. Something’s wrong. The world’s more off axis now than it was before.

So we needed what happened today. The memorial was bigger than what went down at the Staples Center itself, though that was important, and necessary.

But we needed to start up the electronic fireplace that is television, and gather to grieve and laugh, and to remember a man whose demons and prisons could not contain a foundationally humanist spirit that would not be extinguished; a man whose emotional, musical and physical gifts held our thrall like a train wreck, or the aurora borealis, or a meteor shower or the greatest show on earth — like an irresistible force of nature, and culture, and humanity.

Nobody wanted to let go of Michael today. And nobody will tomorrow. Whenever tomorrow is.
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Image credit: Casket: AEG pool feed. Jackson motorcade: Unknown original source, via The Huffington Post.

Independence Day III: Sarah Palin reinvents herself

Not to be outdone by other global and national events in the runup to the national holiday, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made an announcement on Friday that immediately generated its own baffling brand of fireworks.

In a rambling address from her home in Wasilla, Palin announced her intention to resign as governor effective at the end of the month, speaking in a statement part 1960-Nixonian valedictory, part chamber-of-commerce report card, part life strategy, part love letter to family … but mostly an oration as revealing about what it said about Palin’s future as what it didn’t say.

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“Life is too short to compromise time and resources,” Palin said Friday outside her home, on the splendid shores of Lake Lucille. “And though it may be tempting and more comfortable to just kind of keep your head down and plod along and appease those who are demanding, hey, just sit down and shut up, but that's a worthless, easy path. That's a quitter’s way out. And I think a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just kind of hunker down and go with the flow.

“We're fishermen. We know that only dead fish go with the flow.

“No, productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time to build up. And there is such a need to build up and fight for our state and our country. And I choose to fight for it.

“So I choose for my state and for my family more freedom to process all the way around so that Alaska may progress. I will not seek reelection as governor. …”

“Let me go back quickly to a comfortable analogy for me, and that's sports -- basketball. …

“A good point guard, here's what she does. She drives through a full-court press, protecting the ball, keeping her head up because she needs to keep her eye on the basket. And she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win. And that is what I'm doing — keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities. Remember, they include energy independence and smaller government and national security and freedom. And I know when it's time to pass the ball for victory.”

Lieutenant Gov. Sean Parnell is to be sworn in in Fairbanks on July 26.

That scream you hear is the Republican Party.

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Political analysts and other readers of the tea leaves in Washington are trying to sort it all out, attempting to sort out the mystery of Sarah Palin. To this observer of politics, it’s not so difficult to understand.


Palin’s use of a quotation that may have originated with Gen. Douglas MacArthur — its gist has also been attributed to Marine Maj. Gen. Oliver P. Smith — tells a lot of the story. The idea that she’s not retreating but just advancing in another direction indicates a willingness to retrench and redouble her efforts at achieving the same goals she’s had as governor.

Palin is a political animal; we’ve known that since last August, when she became John McCain’s running mate. Palin is also an iconoclast, a political original, as even a cursory look at her life story will show. The drubbing in the media and the blogosphere that she’s taken since then — over her qualifications to run for the vice presidency, her personal style, aspects of her governing style in Alaska, her family’s dramas — hasn’t prevented the development of a hardcore bloc of Palin supporters from within the more conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Among those in the GOP leadership, there’s a division of opinion about the wisdom of Palin’s decision to vacate the governor’s chair, a logical place from which to seek the presidency, and one with a built-in power base.

John Weaver, a GOP strategist and former adviser to the McCain campaign, was all over the place on Friday. “Good point guards don’t quit and walk off the floor if the going gets tough,” he told The New York Times. “Today’s move falls further into the weirdness category; people don’t like a quitter.”

Weaver really piled on on Friday; that’s when he also told The Washington Post’s Dan Balz that “if this is about running for president, it’s about as odd a way as we’ve ever seen.”

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This is no doubt the thinking of the GOP hierarchy, thinking that points to an abundant lack of imagination. The Republicans have always been about power: the accrual of power; the use of power for its own sake; the use of power as a means of leveraging more power.

To them, it’s inconceivable that a sitting governor would surrender a position of power in order to pursue the presidency. That kind of strategy just doesn’t feature in the Republican mentality.

Which is why Palin’s gambit could be an incredibly shrewd move. Retreating and advancing are terms highly subject to interpretation. What looks like a retreat to the conventional thinking may be anything but on a wider scale of things.

Palin is playing cagey about her real future plans; she spoke on Friday of her future in a context wide-open enough to be interpreted in a number of ways. Part of what she said sounded like a goodbye to electoral politics; there was passion and deep anger in some of her statement, especially as it related to the media spotlight on her family.

But there was little or nothing she said Friday to suggest she couldn’t be serious about a presidential run. Palin discovered in the 2008 campaign a standing rule of presidential politics for generations: A ticket derives its energy from the name at the top, not the name on the bottom. The McCain campaign reckoned too late with that immutable election-year calculus. It’s a safe bet that Palin won’t make that mistake. If she wants to go that way.

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Palin’s supporters have already given her one of the things she’d need if she were to make a run at the big chair in 2012: a passionate following, something the Republican usual suspects have had a hard time developing — something the wave of recent scandals in their ranks will make ever harder to find.

And the political kingmakers are making the assumption that any presidential aspirations Palin may harbor are limited to the horizon of the next four years. Why is 2012 the sell-by date, anyway? In 2016, Palin will be 52 years old, five years older then than President Obama is right now.

For all the oddities in Palin’s personal narrative, there’s so far been nothing that’s an absolute deal-breaker for a candidate seeking a relationship with the American people. She’s strange and quirky; her use of the American idiom of English is original, to say the least; her personal story is definitely out of left field; and Palin definitely needs not just coaching on international affairs, but a solid, reasoned throughline on what the modern world tick and what her contribution to that modern world would be.

But in some important ways, what Sarah Palin needs is what Sarah Palin’s already got: People who believe passionately in someone who believes passionately in herself.

Maybe it’s possible to actually see the White House from land in Alaska, too.
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Image credits: Basketball: Reisio (public domain). MacArthur at Leyte: U.S. Army Signal Corps (public domain).

Independence Day II: Minnesota, Congress and limbo’s end

Minnesota, your long congressional nightmare is over. On Tuesday, finally throwing in a towel that’s been gathering dust on the turnbuckle for months, Norm Coleman, once the Republican senator from the Gopher State, officially ended an increasingly quixotic pursuit of re-election, conceding defeat in last November’s election, at the hands of Democratic challenger Al Franken — a win by no more or less than 312 votes out of about 3.9 million votes cast.

Coleman’s last-nanosecond appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court was rejected; the candidate, knowing that the state Supreme Court made its announcement the same day the U.S. Supreme Court was ending its current term, finally saw the handwriting that's been writ large on the wall since January.

The Franken victory, of course, not only liberates the good people of Minnesota from effectively having no voice in the United States Senate. In raw numbers, at least, Franken (who could take the oath of office next week) becomes the 60th Democrat of the 111th Congress, assuming a straight party-line vote. Within that august body, the Democrats have now attained the magical, if not magic, number required to advance legislation and overcoming any proposed Republican filibusters.



Some in the conservative wing of the punditburo had sour grapes in extremis. The op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal Online was not feeling especially magnanimous on Thursday. At all: “Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election. If the GOP hopes to avoid repeats, it should learn from Minnesota that modern elections don't end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.”

Over at News Corporation tentacle Fox News, Glenn Beck was similarly uncharitable. “[I]t shows how crazy our country has gone" … “[I]t shows that we've lost our minds.” No, Glenn, only you can do that.

Beck kept jabbering. “It is — we have entered a place, I mean, with Al Franken coming into office, we've entered a place to where there isn't statesmanship anymore.”

Wrong again, Glenn m’lad. We entered that place about eight years earlier, and we stayed in that place until last November. When the country decided it had had enough. When the people of Minnesota decided they’d had enough — by a margin no bigger than the number of people attending a healthy town hall.

And Fox News’ Sean Hannity, asserting that Franken is “not all there,” later dug his heels in the sandy soil of denial. “I, in my heart of hearts, do not believe that Al Franken won that election.”

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But it’s a good bet that the citizens of Minnesota, in the hearts of their hearts, don’t much care what Sean Hannity believes. Not anymore. This has gone on for seven months, a length of time in which a state of 5.2 million people tried to conduct its social and legislative and economic business hampered by a phantom congressional identity.

Sometimes political victory happens by the skin of the skin of the teeth. But a landslide doesn’t have to bury your car to be a landslide. Dirt six inches above the tailpipe is quite enough to achieve the same thing as dirt at the roofline. John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election by 0.1%, a popular-vote margin said to be the closest of any election in the 20th century, anywhere. 312 votes will do just fine, if they're the right 312 votes.

What awaits the former “Saturday Night Live” writer and actor in Washington will be a landslide of bills and wrangling and debates. Franken will be very much in the crosshairs of the opposition, representing as he does the Democratic breakthrough in the Senate. He can expect to be courted, and targeted, on all sides, at least in the short term.

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And it’s fair to say that — as he's been all along — Franken will be a man of principle in the Senate. With Franken, we can count on a senator who’ll no doubt be more fearless than most of his colleagues about voting his convictions, having held fast to those convictions during one of the most bitterly contested senate races in generations, and maybe ever.

Like the recently-reinvented Arlen Specter, who crossed party lines from GOP to Democrat in April, Franken shouldn’t be seen as a forgone-conclusion vote for the Democrats.

As Senator-elect Franken prepares to take office, casting votes on his state’s behalf, he’ll probably thank more than his lucky stars for where he is. He should quietly thank himself for performing that one extra campaign event, going to that one extra rally ... shaking those 312 extra hands. Just enough to win with.
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Image credits: Franken at victory speech: Still from C-SPAN broadcast. Great Seal of Minnesota: State of Minnesota.

Independence Day I: I.E.D. on the Tigris

Within days of the celebration of the birthday of the nation that occupies it militarily, the Republic of Iraq has quietly, then boisterously, celebrated its own re-independence day:

On Tuesday, the United States began the process of withdrawing its armed forces from 15 major cities and municipalities of Iraq, leaving the Iraqi army to protect the nation from the insurgents who have recently revived the bloodshed that’s been a hallmark of Iraqi urban life for far too long.

"This day, which we consider a national celebration, is an achievement made by all Iraqis," Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said in Baghdad. "Those who think that Iraqis are unable to defend their country are committing a fatal mistake."

As of Tuesday, U.S. military commanders were required to either ask permission from the Iraqis to participate in combat missions, or be invited to participate by the Iraqi military. It's a sea change from the wars past when American might called the shots form beginning to end.



Tuesday, which the Iraqi government has called National Sovereignty Day, was the same day that at least 40 people were killed in a bomb blast in a crowded market in Kirkuk, the northern Iraqi city that’s long been one of the points of resistance to American entreaties for calm. It was the same day that the U.S. military command announced the deaths of four more U.S. armed forces, south of Baghdad.

What started with circumspect statements from the prime minister soon turned jubilant in Iraqi cities and towns. The Iraqi people had to fight for their right to party; when the deal went down, they did just that. People hit the streets; police and military vehicles bore streamers and banners.

At a Tuesday outdoor concert at Baghdad, Ahmed Ebrahim, 35, explained his feelings to The Guardian UK: "No words can describe how I feel. The occupation stayed in Iraqi hearts for six years and this is a big occasion that deserves to be a permanent national day in future.”

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How this Inchoate Explosive Democracy taking shape on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers fully manifests itself isn’t really a matter of being “anyone’s guess.” It’s anyone’s certainty. No matter whether you predict more anarchy and bloodshed, or more steady progress toward political and social stability — either way, you’re right.

For better or worse, and maybe better and worse in the short term, the Iraqi nation has cast its lot with at least making a serious attempt at participatory democracy. Chastened by six years of war, and no doubt looking at the widening gyre of unrest within neighbor Iran, the Iraqi people have decided that their future problems, and there will be many, are best resolved “within the family.”

They’ve also decided that, despite all the dire warnings from various think tanks and analysts within the region and outside it, sooner or later the best time to determine the strength of a democracy is after that democracy’s military guarantors have vacated the scene.

Then we’ll know for sure. Until then, and despite the challenges facing the young Iraqi government in its first urban summer without the U.S. military, the Iraqis are marking National Sovereignty Day with red letters.

Americans could do the same: As U.S. military action in Iraq winds down, as American men and women pull back to smaller, less physically concentrated areas, as the price tag of lives is less frequently in need of an update, National Sovereignty Day may be an independence day for Americans in all but the name.
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Image credits: al-Maliki entourage: Still from AFP.