Monday 05 February 2007
As Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald gets ready to wrap up the government's perjury and obstruction of justice case against former vice presidential staffer I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, he is fighting to introduce two "powerful" pieces of evidence he says will help convince the jury that Libby deliberately lied to federal investigators about how and when he discovered the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and whether he leaked the information to reporters.
(Of course he lied. They all did.)
Fitzgerald wants the jury to see two articles from the Washington Post, dated October 4 and 12, 2003, that his investigators obtained from Libby's personal files. The articles in question, written by Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and Mike Allen, are damaging to Libby's defense, Fitzgerald said, because they contain specific passages that Libby had underlined concerning the harm caused by Plame's identity becoming public and the possibility that whoever was responsible for the leak may have violated a federal law.
Fitzgerald has argued that the articles with the underlined passages prove Libby feared he was responsible for the damage to national security the leak caused and therefore concocted a story about learning Plame's identity and work with the CIA from Tim Russert, host of "Meet the Press," in order to save his job.
( So, when you have damaged national security, ruined the career of a non-prpliferation expert, destroyed the front company associated with her and put the lives and well-being of foreign assets in danger, what do you do? Lie like a freakin' rug, and send your pundits out to say that the whole investigation is a boondoggle, a conspiraccy to get the administration.!)
Plame's name was revealed in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak on July 14, 2003 - eight days after her husband, Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify war with Iraq.
(Novak ought to be in the Dock for treason, as he was told that revealing her name could cause a lot of damage, and he did it anyway.)
It was only during the preparation of his first interview with FBI agent Deborah Bond on October 14, 2003, that Libby found the articles and other documents in his personal files that indicated he was actually told Plame's name and her employment status with the CIA by Cheney - far earlier than the July 2003 time-frame Libby maintains he first learned about her from Russert. Libby's defense is that he was wrapped up with more pressing issues, such as the war in Iraq and national security, and innocently forgot that Cheney had told him about Plame on numerous occasions in June and July 2003.
(Yeah, right. He forgot. If anyone really believes that, there is a bridge in Brooklyn.....)
But Fitzgerald said the articles in question established a motive for Libby to lie to Bond because the substance of the news reports was damning.
Libby's attorneys say the articles will prejudice the jury, and they have filed a motion seeking to block Fitzgerald from introducing them into evidence. The defense argues that the articles contain numerous references to Plame's "clandestine" status, and if introduced into evidence they will lead the jury to believe that Libby is guilty of leaking classified information, a charge Libby is not under indictment for. But Fitzgerald said the articles are relevant to his case in order to establish what Libby's state of mind was when he testified, not to establish the "truth" about whether or not Plame worked in a covert capacity.
"This is a trick, your honor," said defense attorney William Jeffress during a hearing on the issue Thursday, according to a copy of the court transcript. "Let's take the October 4 [2003] article. 'The leak of a CIA operative's name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure ...' blah, blah, blah. Your honor, that would be so prejudicial to the defense, I don't think we would ever be able to recover. You have the same thing with the [October 12, 2003] article. Again, talks about how she was 'clandestine' blah, blah, blah. I mean, this is a trick, your honor. These articles cannot possibly go into evidence to the jury. No instruction to just not consider them for their truth could possibly overcome the prejudice."
Fitzgerald took issue with Jeffress's characterization, telling Judge Walton, "It's not a trick to offer evidence that goes right to the heart of the issue: Mr. Libby's state of mind."
(Which would be guilty, as un-charged)
"[There is] an article [Libby] printed on October 4 [2003], ten days before his FBI interview, that is in his file, indicating that there could be damage" that resulted from the Plame leak, Fitzgerald told Walton. "And I just think it's a trick to stand up there and say there is no motive to lie because all the evidence that shows he had a motive to lie comes from his own file. The jury is entitled to know what was in [Libby's] head and this was in his head and in his file. It's direct proof as what he had in mind when he made up a story that says, you know what, I forgot everything that came from the vice president."
"I think in opening [Libby attorney Theodore] Wells said it is stupid for the government to claim [Libby] would put this on Mr. Russert," Fitzgerald added. "But it's not stupid if what you are looking at is a fear that you may have, whether he did it deliberately or screwed up, but your fear that you may be involved in something that is a big mess in terms of law, in terms of politics, and in terms of getting yourself fired."
(He would not have been fired had he not been indicted. He was carrying out a vendetta under orders from his bosses, Bush and Cheney.)
If the articles were submitted into evidence, they would back up testimony Bond gave Thursday about her interviews with Libby in October and November 2003. Judge Walton is expected to issue a ruling sometime Monday on whether the articles are admissible.
Bond testified that the story Libby told about learning Plame's CIA status first from Russert and then later discovering through his own handwritten notes that it was Cheney who actually told him about Plame wasn't believable from the outset.
(Well, of course not. Especially, since Libby sought information on Plame/Wilson much earlier than his converstaion with Russert, whhich Russert claims did not touch on Plame/Wilson)
Bond testified that Libby told her he received a call from Cheney on either June 10 or 11, 2003, "alerting him that Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus intended to write an article for the paper scheduled to be published on June 12, 2003," about Wilson's claims that the White House manipulated pre-war Iraq intelligence.
(Which, of course, they did.)
"Mr. Libby told us the conversation with the vice president was in regard to an upcoming article being written ... for the newspaper for June 12, [2003]," Bond said during testimony Thursday. "Mr. Libby told us that during the telephone conversation with the vice president, that the vice president told him that the former ambassador's wife worked in the C.P. division of the CIA. Mr. Libby explained that the C.P. stood for counter-proliferation."
(Which should have been a huge red flag, alerting anyone with a grain of sense, that she might be under-cover.)
Libby told Bond that he forgot about the conversation he had with Cheney in June 2003, and that when Russert told him about Plame a few weeks later, it was as if he had heard the information about her for the first time.
(What the hell are they smoking in the White House? Are they drinking themselves into blackouts?)
Bond said Libby explained to her and other agents who were present at the interview how he suddenly triggered his memory.
"It was not until early October 2003 when he was searching through his documents for this investigation that he realized that he had actually learned about the former ambassador's wife working at the CIA [from Cheney] in June 2003."
(In other words, when Ashcroft was forced to recuse himself?)
She added that Libby also told her in a second interview on November 26, 2003, that while aboard Air Force II a week or so before Novak unmasked Plame's identity in his column, Libby and Cheney discussed telling the media that Plame worked for the CIA and was married to Wilson.
"Mr. Libby said that he went to the vice president's cabin and ... there was some discussion of whether or not they should report to the press that Ambassador Wilson's wife worked at the CIA," Bond said.
Jason Leopold is a former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his coverage on the issue as well as a Project Censored award in 2004. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron's downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Monday, February 5, 2007
Are you in a data base, as a person of interest?
I'm not surprised.
DENVER -- You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they're reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.
The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.
"Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong," said one federal air marshal.
These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR. Air marshals told 7NEWS that managers in Las Vegas created and continue to maintain this potentially dangerous quota system.
"Do these reports have real life impacts on the people who are identified as potential terrorists?" 7NEWS Investigator Tony Kovaleski asked.
"Absolutely," a federal air marshal replied.
7NEWS obtained an internal Homeland Security document defining an SDR as a report designed to identify terrorist surveillance activity.
"When you see a decision like this, for these reports, who loses here?" Kovaleski asked.
"The people we're supposed to protect -- the American public," an air marshal said.
What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR?
"That could have serious impact ... They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious," said Don Strange, a former agent in charge of air marshals in Atlanta. He lost his job attempting to change policies inside the agency.
That's why several air marshals object to a July 2004 memo from top management in the Las Vegas office, a memo that reminded air marshals of the SDR requirement.
The body of the memo said, "Each federal air marshal is now expected to generate at least one SDR per month."
"Does that memo read to you that Federal Air Marshal headquarters has set a quota on these reports?" Kovaleski asked.
"Absolutely, no doubt," an air marshal replied.
A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, "There may come an occasion when you just don't see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I'm sure that if you are looking for it, you'll see something."
Another federal air marshal said that not only is there a quota in Las Vegas for SDRs, but that "it directly reflects on (their) performance evaluations" and on how much money they make.
The director of the Air Marshal Service, Dana Brown, declined 7NEWS' request for an interview on the quota system. But the agency points to a memo from August 2004 that said there is not a quota for submitting SDRs and which goes on to say, "I do not expect reports that are inaccurate or frivolous."
But, Las Vegas-based air marshals say the quota system remains in force, now more than two years after managers sent the original memos, and that it's a mandate from management that impacts annual raises, bonuses, awards and special assignments.
"To meet this quota, to get their raises, do you think federal air marshals in Las Vegas are making some of this stuff up?" Kovaleski asked.
"I know they are. It's a joke," an air marshal replied.
"Have marshals in the Las Vegas office, I don't want to say fabricated, but 'created' reports?" Kovaleski asked.
"Creative writing -- stretching a long ways the truth, yes," an air marshal replied.
One example, according to air marshals, occurred on one flight leaving Las Vegas, when an unknowing passenger, most likely a tourist, was identified in an SDR for doing nothing more than taking a photo of the Las Vegas skyline as his plane rolled down the runway.
"You're saying that was not an accurate portrayal of a potential terrorist activity?" Kovaleski asked.
"No, it was not," an air marshal said.
"It was a marshal trying to meet a quota ..." Kovaleski said.
"Yes, he was," the air marshal replied.
Strange said he didn't have a quota in the Atlanta office when he was in charge.
"I would never have done that ... You are going to have people reporting every suspicious looking activity they come across, whether they in their heart feel like it's a threat, just to meet the quota," Strange said.
Strange and other air marshals said the quota allows the government to fill a database with bad information.
A Las Vegas air marshal said he didn't write an SDR every month for exactly that reason.
"Well, it's intelligence information, and like any system, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out," the air marshal said.
"I would like to see an investigation -- a real investigation conducted into the ways things are done here," the air marshal in Las Vegas said.
Although the agency strongly denies any presence of a quota system, Las Vegas-based air marshals have produced documents that show their performance review is directly linked to producing SDRs.
Do you have a question or comment on this story? Call us at 303-832-TIPS or e-mail us.
Previous Stories:
June 20, 2006: Air Marshals Across Country Warn Passengers Aren't Safe
June 7, 2006: Report: Air Marshal Caught Sleeping On Flight
June 7, 2006: Federal Air Marshal Spokesman Responds To 7NEWS Investigation
June 6, 2006: Air Marshals Accuse Managers Of Compromising Safety
Copyright 2006 by TheDenverChannel.com.
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
(Fuck you! You are an idiot if you really believe that laws still apply. We live in a lawless country. Information is the only weapon we have against this uniquely American fascism and we plan to spread it far and wide!)
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
DENVER -- You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they're reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.
The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.
"Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong," said one federal air marshal.
These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR. Air marshals told 7NEWS that managers in Las Vegas created and continue to maintain this potentially dangerous quota system.
"Do these reports have real life impacts on the people who are identified as potential terrorists?" 7NEWS Investigator Tony Kovaleski asked.
"Absolutely," a federal air marshal replied.
7NEWS obtained an internal Homeland Security document defining an SDR as a report designed to identify terrorist surveillance activity.
"When you see a decision like this, for these reports, who loses here?" Kovaleski asked.
"The people we're supposed to protect -- the American public," an air marshal said.
What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR?
"That could have serious impact ... They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious," said Don Strange, a former agent in charge of air marshals in Atlanta. He lost his job attempting to change policies inside the agency.
That's why several air marshals object to a July 2004 memo from top management in the Las Vegas office, a memo that reminded air marshals of the SDR requirement.
The body of the memo said, "Each federal air marshal is now expected to generate at least one SDR per month."
"Does that memo read to you that Federal Air Marshal headquarters has set a quota on these reports?" Kovaleski asked.
"Absolutely, no doubt," an air marshal replied.
A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, "There may come an occasion when you just don't see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I'm sure that if you are looking for it, you'll see something."
Another federal air marshal said that not only is there a quota in Las Vegas for SDRs, but that "it directly reflects on (their) performance evaluations" and on how much money they make.
The director of the Air Marshal Service, Dana Brown, declined 7NEWS' request for an interview on the quota system. But the agency points to a memo from August 2004 that said there is not a quota for submitting SDRs and which goes on to say, "I do not expect reports that are inaccurate or frivolous."
But, Las Vegas-based air marshals say the quota system remains in force, now more than two years after managers sent the original memos, and that it's a mandate from management that impacts annual raises, bonuses, awards and special assignments.
"To meet this quota, to get their raises, do you think federal air marshals in Las Vegas are making some of this stuff up?" Kovaleski asked.
"I know they are. It's a joke," an air marshal replied.
"Have marshals in the Las Vegas office, I don't want to say fabricated, but 'created' reports?" Kovaleski asked.
"Creative writing -- stretching a long ways the truth, yes," an air marshal replied.
One example, according to air marshals, occurred on one flight leaving Las Vegas, when an unknowing passenger, most likely a tourist, was identified in an SDR for doing nothing more than taking a photo of the Las Vegas skyline as his plane rolled down the runway.
"You're saying that was not an accurate portrayal of a potential terrorist activity?" Kovaleski asked.
"No, it was not," an air marshal said.
"It was a marshal trying to meet a quota ..." Kovaleski said.
"Yes, he was," the air marshal replied.
Strange said he didn't have a quota in the Atlanta office when he was in charge.
"I would never have done that ... You are going to have people reporting every suspicious looking activity they come across, whether they in their heart feel like it's a threat, just to meet the quota," Strange said.
Strange and other air marshals said the quota allows the government to fill a database with bad information.
A Las Vegas air marshal said he didn't write an SDR every month for exactly that reason.
"Well, it's intelligence information, and like any system, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out," the air marshal said.
"I would like to see an investigation -- a real investigation conducted into the ways things are done here," the air marshal in Las Vegas said.
Although the agency strongly denies any presence of a quota system, Las Vegas-based air marshals have produced documents that show their performance review is directly linked to producing SDRs.
Do you have a question or comment on this story? Call us at 303-832-TIPS or e-mail us.
Previous Stories:
June 20, 2006: Air Marshals Across Country Warn Passengers Aren't Safe
June 7, 2006: Report: Air Marshal Caught Sleeping On Flight
June 7, 2006: Federal Air Marshal Spokesman Responds To 7NEWS Investigation
June 6, 2006: Air Marshals Accuse Managers Of Compromising Safety
Copyright 2006 by TheDenverChannel.com.
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
(Fuck you! You are an idiot if you really believe that laws still apply. We live in a lawless country. Information is the only weapon we have against this uniquely American fascism and we plan to spread it far and wide!)
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Healthcare may be what destroys Hillary
It's conventional wisdom that if Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign falters with Democratic activists in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, it will be over the issue of the Iraq war. And her vacillations on the war.
Yet the dividing-line issue in the upcoming primaries may turn out to be not Iraq, but health care. And just like on Iraq, the Democratic base is in no mood for timidity and half-way measures and vague rhetoric. Most rank-and-file Democrats support government-provided national health insurance: enhanced Medicare for All.
And that's no secret to the candidates. This is how the Washington Post described Hillary Clinton's recent, maiden voyage into Iowa as a candidate:
In keeping with her expressed desire to hold a "conversation with Iowans," Clinton asked at one point for a show of hands from the audience, asking them to declare whether they preferred an employer-based system of insurance, a system that mandates all individuals to purchase insurance, with help from the government if necessary, or one modeled on the Medicare system.
Overwhelmingly the audience favored moving toward a Medicare-like system for all Americans.
A show of hands in almost any roomful of Democratic activists will produce the same result: they want a single-payer "Medicare-like system for all Americans." According to the Post, Clinton told the Iowa group: "I'm not ready to be specific until I hear from people."
Pressure from the base on Clinton and other Democratic contenders to get specific will intensify in the early states -- mobilized by groups such as Progressive Democrats of America, Healthcare Now, National Nurses Organizing Committee and Physicians for a National Healthcare Program. So far, none of the sitting senators seeking the nomination are supporting Medicare for All, though former Sen. John Edwards may be coming close. Rep. Dennis Kucinich for years has been a leading supporter in the House.
That single-payer is the rational, cost-effective way to reform healthcare is an easy case to make -- and was eloquently argued last month by respected Democratic party activist and lawyer Guy T. Saperstein. Despite spending twice as much money on healthcare as other industrialized nations, our system fails to cover 47 million people and generally performs poorly. Experts point to the main cause of the failure -- a private insurance bureaucracy that soaks up nearly one-third of all healthcare dollars in waste, profits, paperwork, commissions and advertising.
Insurance companies don't treat or heal patients; they just suck the healthcare system dry of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Adding pressure on Democratic presidential candidates was last month's reintroduction of "The U.S. National Health Insurance Act," HR 676, authored by Rep. John Conyers and soon expected to have 80 congressional cosponsors. This Expanded & Improved Medicare for All Bill would fully cover every American, thanks to cost-savings. In its first year, single-payer would save over $150 billion on paperwork alone, and $50 billion though rational bulk order purchasing of medications. Care will be privately delivered by healers and hospitals, but publicly financed -- with no bills, co-pays, deductibles, denials or medically induced bankruptcies.
Every Democratic aspirant will be asked where they stand on HR 676, which is endorsed by 225 labor organizations. Over the years, a common-sense single-payer approach has been endorsed by Consumers Union, some corporate CEOs and 20,000 physicians. Only one force in society stands in the way: the insurance industry. And that sector donates heavily to many "top tier" Democrats.
As healthcare emerges as a dividing-line issue among Democratic candidates, expect mainstream media to tell us the story of Hillary Clinton's healthcare initiative as "First Lady" in 1993. And expect every fact in the retelling to be wrong. Why? Because they got almost every fact wrong at the time. Clinton did not support single-payer; she resolutely stood against popular legislation led by Sen. Paul Wellstone, Conyers and Rep. Jim McDermott, then one of two "doctors in the House."
Indeed, Clinton's proposal was aimed at "reforming" healthcare while keeping a handful of huge insurance companies in the center of the system. No surprise since those firms helped draw up her complicated and bureaucratic "managed competition" scheme, through the industry-dominated Jackson Hole Study Group. A Mother Jones writer in 1993 described the assignment given Hillary by the White House: Build us a better, leaner, cheaper mousetrap (healthcare system) -- but make sure you include a player piano (private insurance giants) in the middle of your contraption.
In late 1993, Hillary's plan came under attack by devious TV ads sponsored by an outfit called the Health Insurance Association of America, acting on behalf of smaller and medium-sized insurance companies. These smaller firms were furious that the Clinton plan would wipe them out and concentrate the industry in a handful of insurers like Aetna and Cigna. (Not unlike what happened to broadcasting under Clintonite media "reform.")
The November election has already changed the terms of the national debate on Iraq. If progressives mobilize, we can also use this moment (and the upcoming presidential primaries) to transform the healthcare debate.
And one day soon we may get what other advanced countries already have: a healthcare system that works, with nonprofit insurance for all.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Yet the dividing-line issue in the upcoming primaries may turn out to be not Iraq, but health care. And just like on Iraq, the Democratic base is in no mood for timidity and half-way measures and vague rhetoric. Most rank-and-file Democrats support government-provided national health insurance: enhanced Medicare for All.
And that's no secret to the candidates. This is how the Washington Post described Hillary Clinton's recent, maiden voyage into Iowa as a candidate:
In keeping with her expressed desire to hold a "conversation with Iowans," Clinton asked at one point for a show of hands from the audience, asking them to declare whether they preferred an employer-based system of insurance, a system that mandates all individuals to purchase insurance, with help from the government if necessary, or one modeled on the Medicare system.
Overwhelmingly the audience favored moving toward a Medicare-like system for all Americans.
A show of hands in almost any roomful of Democratic activists will produce the same result: they want a single-payer "Medicare-like system for all Americans." According to the Post, Clinton told the Iowa group: "I'm not ready to be specific until I hear from people."
Pressure from the base on Clinton and other Democratic contenders to get specific will intensify in the early states -- mobilized by groups such as Progressive Democrats of America, Healthcare Now, National Nurses Organizing Committee and Physicians for a National Healthcare Program. So far, none of the sitting senators seeking the nomination are supporting Medicare for All, though former Sen. John Edwards may be coming close. Rep. Dennis Kucinich for years has been a leading supporter in the House.
That single-payer is the rational, cost-effective way to reform healthcare is an easy case to make -- and was eloquently argued last month by respected Democratic party activist and lawyer Guy T. Saperstein. Despite spending twice as much money on healthcare as other industrialized nations, our system fails to cover 47 million people and generally performs poorly. Experts point to the main cause of the failure -- a private insurance bureaucracy that soaks up nearly one-third of all healthcare dollars in waste, profits, paperwork, commissions and advertising.
Insurance companies don't treat or heal patients; they just suck the healthcare system dry of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Adding pressure on Democratic presidential candidates was last month's reintroduction of "The U.S. National Health Insurance Act," HR 676, authored by Rep. John Conyers and soon expected to have 80 congressional cosponsors. This Expanded & Improved Medicare for All Bill would fully cover every American, thanks to cost-savings. In its first year, single-payer would save over $150 billion on paperwork alone, and $50 billion though rational bulk order purchasing of medications. Care will be privately delivered by healers and hospitals, but publicly financed -- with no bills, co-pays, deductibles, denials or medically induced bankruptcies.
Every Democratic aspirant will be asked where they stand on HR 676, which is endorsed by 225 labor organizations. Over the years, a common-sense single-payer approach has been endorsed by Consumers Union, some corporate CEOs and 20,000 physicians. Only one force in society stands in the way: the insurance industry. And that sector donates heavily to many "top tier" Democrats.
As healthcare emerges as a dividing-line issue among Democratic candidates, expect mainstream media to tell us the story of Hillary Clinton's healthcare initiative as "First Lady" in 1993. And expect every fact in the retelling to be wrong. Why? Because they got almost every fact wrong at the time. Clinton did not support single-payer; she resolutely stood against popular legislation led by Sen. Paul Wellstone, Conyers and Rep. Jim McDermott, then one of two "doctors in the House."
Indeed, Clinton's proposal was aimed at "reforming" healthcare while keeping a handful of huge insurance companies in the center of the system. No surprise since those firms helped draw up her complicated and bureaucratic "managed competition" scheme, through the industry-dominated Jackson Hole Study Group. A Mother Jones writer in 1993 described the assignment given Hillary by the White House: Build us a better, leaner, cheaper mousetrap (healthcare system) -- but make sure you include a player piano (private insurance giants) in the middle of your contraption.
In late 1993, Hillary's plan came under attack by devious TV ads sponsored by an outfit called the Health Insurance Association of America, acting on behalf of smaller and medium-sized insurance companies. These smaller firms were furious that the Clinton plan would wipe them out and concentrate the industry in a handful of insurers like Aetna and Cigna. (Not unlike what happened to broadcasting under Clintonite media "reform.")
The November election has already changed the terms of the national debate on Iraq. If progressives mobilize, we can also use this moment (and the upcoming presidential primaries) to transform the healthcare debate.
And one day soon we may get what other advanced countries already have: a healthcare system that works, with nonprofit insurance for all.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
How Can Bush be stopped, before he launches WWIII
Admittedly, word for word, it is like a bad flashback. There are always the hollow sounding words that "war is a last resort," while at the same time, Bush and others in his administration ramp up the rhetoric.
I doesn't help that the ususal suspects in pundit-land are, again, not questioning this administration, but rather making references to the U.S. Hostages, taken in 1979, and telling Americans how they should feel about it; that we should all still be angry as hell about it. I haven't heard one hostage, from those terrible days, asked about their feelings and thoughts on the matter of attacking Iran today.
There are, however, a few differences between today and winter 2002-03. Former, as wll as active, Military officials are warning against an attack on Iran, saying that such an action would be catastrophic for the region and for the West, including the U.S.
Certain elected officials in Congress, particularly in the Senate, are warning that Bush doesn't have the authority to expand the war in Iraq to other nations. But the question arises, what will they do if he ignores them and attacks without their permission?
We are one false flag operation away from a possible nuclear conflagaration. We know that convetional bunker-buster bombs will not penetrate to destroy whatever underground installations Iran may have. That will require the use of "low yield" nukes.
Will the U.S. use nuclear weapons again. Have we learned nothing?
Bush is following the same course he chose in the run-up to war in Iraq: he insists that war is "a last resort" yet puts in motion the engines of war; he times the release of alarming intelligence reports for maximum political effect; he brushes aside doubts and warnings; he then presents war as unavoidable or a fait accompli.
Despite the painful lessons from the Iraq War disaster -- including more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers dead and Iraq torn apart by sectarian civil war -- the key institutions of Washington, particularly the Congress and the press, are playing similar roles, too.
The capital again is possessed of an air of unreality as the clock ticks down to a likely military showdown with Iran. Though the documentary record is now clear that Bush set his sights on war in Iraq a year or so before the actual invasion, the President is still believed when he insists now that he wants a diplomatic solution with Iran.
Democratic congressional leaders politely accepted Bush's new war council -- from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the new regional commander Adm. William Fallon -- while the only harsh questioning came from pro-war Republican Sen. John McCain to the departing general for Iraq, George Casey, for not making Bush's Iraq scheme work.
Meanwhile, the Senate has tied itself up for more than three weeks quibbling about the wording of a non-binding resolution of disapproval about Bush's troop escalation in Iraq. The Senate is finally expected to begin debate next week on compromise language that limits criticism to the narrow issue of the Iraq troop "surge."
Washington's drift on the Iraq resolution rolls on with almost no one pointing at the gathering speed of Bush's confrontation with Iran.
Congress and the major U.S. news media appear to be taking Bush at his word that he is not planning to bomb Iran, although he has dispatched two aircraft carrier strike groups to the region, deployed Patriot anti-missile missile batteries, has British mine sweepers in place, and accuses Iranian agents of helping to kill American troops in Iraq.
This wishful disbelief around Washington that a wider war is looming remains steadfast even as Israeli officials call Iran's nuclear program an "existential threat" and reportedly train their pilots for bombing runs against Iran's heavily fortified nuclear facilities.
Yet, instead of front-page stories about the dangers of an expanded war in the Middle East or an examination of alternative strategies that might be tried, the major U.S. newspapers act as if nothing is happening.
Predictive War
The underlying problem appears to be a continued unwillingness to challenge Bush's five-year-old strategy of "preemptive" -- or one might say "predictive" -- war that he first enunciated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Bush has never budged from his claim that U.S. military intervention is justified anywhere in the world when a hostile state is developing the potential for weapons of mass destruction that conceivably could fall into the hands of a terrorist group that might use them against American targets.
That was the fundamental rationalization for invading Iraq, even though Bush and his aides found that to sell the idea to the American people they had to exaggerate Iraq's WMD capabilities and invent connections between the secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in al-Qaeda. [See Consortiumnews.com's "How Neocon Favorites Duped U.S."]
Bush has put together a similar sales package for Iran. By applying broad definitions of "terrorism" to Iranian-supported Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Bush has defined Iran as a state sponsor of "terrorism." Iran's development of nuclear technology has met the other requirement for a WMD scare.
So, the question about an attack on Iran shouldn't be as much if as when, at least if one follows the neoconservative logic of the Bush administration. Though Iran appears to be years away from having the capability to build a nuclear bomb and although neither Hezbollah nor Hamas has sponsored acts of terrorism inside the United States, Bush and his top aides want to counter this potential threat now.
And, despite Bush's slump in the polls and the Republican defeat in the November elections, the White House is encountering surprisingly few obstacles. Indeed, some leading Democrats and prominent TV pundits still try to talk as tough -- or even tougher than Bush -- about Iran.
For instance, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, supposedly one of the more liberal Democratic presidential candidates, spoke via satellite to a security conference in Herzliya, Israel, in January telling senior Israeli government officials that he shared their view that Iran was the world's preeminent threat. "At the top of these threats is Iran," Edwards said. "Iran threatens the security of Israel and the entire world. Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons. ... "We have muddled along for far too long. To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep ALL options on the table, Let me reiterate -- ALL options must remain on the table."
Edwards even chided Bush for not being aggressive enough in confronting Iran.
"To a large extent, the U.S. abdicated its responsibility to the Europeans. This was a mistake," Edwards said in a speech that contained not a single critical word about Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, its settlements on occupied territory or its own large and sophisticated nuclear arsenal.
Typical of Democrats
In many ways, Edwards's speech was typical of how leading Democrats pander to Israel for political gain. But the failure of Democrats -- and other elements of the American Establishment -- to maintain the traditional U.S. posture as "honest broker" actually portends greater dangers for Israel and other nations in the Middle East.
If the region continues to go up in flames and even larger numbers of Muslims die, Israel will find it harder to protect itself against an eventual attack by someone with an unconventional weapon that could inflict mass casualties.
The endless pursuit of security through "preemptive" war is almost surely a fool's errand. Indeed, it could speed, not retard, terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear bomb.
For instance, the precarious Pakistani government of dictator Pervez Musharraf already possesses a nuclear bomb and elements of the Pakistani intelligence service are believed to be sympathetic to al-Qaeda and other radical movements. A wider U.S. war against another Muslim state could tip control of Pakistan to the extremists.
Already, an epidemic of anti-Americanism is infecting populations across the Middle East and around the globe. If counterinsurgency -- which is what the "war on terror" ultimately is -- requires winning hearts and minds, then Bush is doing the opposite.
A bombing campaign against Iran is certain to stir up even more fury and further isolate the United States. Plus, virtually no military analyst believes a bombing campaign -- short of using nuclear weapons -- can inflict long-term damage on Iran's dug-in facilities.
Yet, Edwards and other Democrats, with their hard-line rhetoric, have lowered the bar for Bush to start a war with Iran, much as Edwards and other top Democrats eased his route into Iraq by voting for a resolution on the use of force. (Edwards has since apologized for that Iraq War vote.)
Winds of War
More and more signs point to Bush's determination to strike at Iran sooner rather than later -- and to do so with massive force.
As author Craig Unger noted in a new article in Vanity Fair, the ominous rumble of war has been reverberating across the political landscape for almost a year now.
Last April, in the New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh described the Bush administration's preliminary planning for bombing Iran. In September, Time magazine said a U.S. bombing campaign could strike as many as 1,500 targets in Iran.
More recently, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi said, "I've heard from sources at the Pentagon that their impression is that the White House has made a decision that war is going to happen."
Unger reported that Bush also has turned to the U.S. Strategic Command (StratCom) to draw up plans for the bombing campaign against Iran. StratCom oversees nuclear weapons, missile defense, and protection against weapons of mass destruction.
"Shifting to StratCom indicates that they are talking about a really punishing air-force and naval air attack [on Iran]," said retired Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. [Vanity Fair, March 2007] My own military and intelligence sources have painted a similar picture of an expected American air campaign against Iran, which may involve the Israelis as the initiators of the attack to make the U.S. attack appear more defensive and to nail down more Democratic and media support. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Iran Clock Is Ticking."]
Though the Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is expected to join in or at least support the attack on Iran, the war ultimately might damage Israeli interests by cutting off opportunities to defuse regional tensions.
Some Middle East analysts believe Israel would be better served in the long term by tamping down the fiery rhetoric and working in more collaborative ways with the Muslim world, including returning land captured during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
The United States also could reestablish its credentials as a peacemaker if it openly cooperated in such an endeavor.
If, for instance, the United States redeployed its forces from Iraq, some could be sent to Israel, both to remain in the region if needed for a quick return to Iraq and to reassure Israelis about the American commitment to their security. U.S. troops also could assist in the peaceful withdrawal of settlers from the Golan Heights and West Bank.
The image of U.S. troops assisting Israel remove settlers would be graphic evidence to the Muslim world that both Washington and Tel Aviv were serious about a commitment to a new era. The removal of the settlers could coincide with peace negotiations with Syria, the Palestinians and Lebanon.
Israel also could move to engage Iran with a positive commercial relationship, possibly including technological help in building Iranian oil refineries. Business ties would give Israel some positive leverage to discourage Iran from building a nuclear device or at least the chances would be better than just bombing.
Israel also might initiate a conference on nuclear disarmament that would seek to make the Near East a nuclear-free zone with India, Pakistan and Israel phasing out their nuclear arsenals while securing international guarantees about Iran's nuclear program.
Eventually, other smaller nuclear powers, such as the United Kingdom and France, might relinquish their nuclear bombs, and the major nuclear powers -- the United States, Russia and China -- might agree to reduce their stockpiles.
As unlikely as a Middle East peace initiative might be at this time, it should be an alternative that is part of a pre-war debate.
Peace Guidelines
Some other guidelines that would help a peace initiative:
--The U.S. press and politicians should cool the rhetoric about "terrorism" and start using the word more precisely and less ideologically. The definition should apply to intentional violence against civilians to achieve a political goal.
Plus, the word should be applied evenhandedly, not as a propaganda weapon.
When the word is hurled against any militant group that's unpopular with Washington or that has attacked U.S. soldiers, it becomes not only a way to incite irrational hatred, but an impediment to rational policy. Also, overusing the word serves the interests of actual terrorists such as al-Qaeda by lumping them together with, say, Iraqi insurgents.
--Recognize another harsh truth, that virtually no ethnic group, race, religion or nation has clean hands when it comes to "terrorism." Historians can point to a long record of Americans employing terror tactics going back to the origins of the country and continuing through recent atrocities and indiscriminate killings committed against Iraqi civilians.
It's also true that some Jewish extremists used terrorism against British administrators and Palestinians to advance the founding of Israel. Some of these extremists, such as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, later rose to positions of prominence, including the post of prime minister. So, avoid selective outrage.
--The United States must recognize that the best way to help Israel is not always to do what the Israeli government and its influential backers demand. One of the greatest contributions to Israeli security was the Sinai peace deal with Egypt that President Jimmy Carter hammered out in the late 1970s, often over the angry objections of Prime Minister Begin and Israeli hardliners.
On the other hand, the yoking of U.S. and Israeli positions during George W. Bush's administration has caused damage to Israeli security interests, including a stunning military-diplomatic misadventure in Lebanon in summer 2006 and a disturbing rise in Islamic extremism across the region.
Overall, the goal of a more peaceful way forward would be to wind down the tensions and the hatreds, rather than ratcheting them up.
Granted, the prospects for such a peace initiative do not seem bright. It is especially hard to envision President Bush canning his tough talk in favor of peace talks, or the Democrats and the national news media shaking off their opportunism and timidity.
In a healthy democracy, however, all chances for peace would be openly debated and tried out before a decision was made to wage war.
Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
I doesn't help that the ususal suspects in pundit-land are, again, not questioning this administration, but rather making references to the U.S. Hostages, taken in 1979, and telling Americans how they should feel about it; that we should all still be angry as hell about it. I haven't heard one hostage, from those terrible days, asked about their feelings and thoughts on the matter of attacking Iran today.
There are, however, a few differences between today and winter 2002-03. Former, as wll as active, Military officials are warning against an attack on Iran, saying that such an action would be catastrophic for the region and for the West, including the U.S.
Certain elected officials in Congress, particularly in the Senate, are warning that Bush doesn't have the authority to expand the war in Iraq to other nations. But the question arises, what will they do if he ignores them and attacks without their permission?
We are one false flag operation away from a possible nuclear conflagaration. We know that convetional bunker-buster bombs will not penetrate to destroy whatever underground installations Iran may have. That will require the use of "low yield" nukes.
Will the U.S. use nuclear weapons again. Have we learned nothing?
Bush is following the same course he chose in the run-up to war in Iraq: he insists that war is "a last resort" yet puts in motion the engines of war; he times the release of alarming intelligence reports for maximum political effect; he brushes aside doubts and warnings; he then presents war as unavoidable or a fait accompli.
Despite the painful lessons from the Iraq War disaster -- including more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers dead and Iraq torn apart by sectarian civil war -- the key institutions of Washington, particularly the Congress and the press, are playing similar roles, too.
The capital again is possessed of an air of unreality as the clock ticks down to a likely military showdown with Iran. Though the documentary record is now clear that Bush set his sights on war in Iraq a year or so before the actual invasion, the President is still believed when he insists now that he wants a diplomatic solution with Iran.
Democratic congressional leaders politely accepted Bush's new war council -- from Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the new regional commander Adm. William Fallon -- while the only harsh questioning came from pro-war Republican Sen. John McCain to the departing general for Iraq, George Casey, for not making Bush's Iraq scheme work.
Meanwhile, the Senate has tied itself up for more than three weeks quibbling about the wording of a non-binding resolution of disapproval about Bush's troop escalation in Iraq. The Senate is finally expected to begin debate next week on compromise language that limits criticism to the narrow issue of the Iraq troop "surge."
Washington's drift on the Iraq resolution rolls on with almost no one pointing at the gathering speed of Bush's confrontation with Iran.
Congress and the major U.S. news media appear to be taking Bush at his word that he is not planning to bomb Iran, although he has dispatched two aircraft carrier strike groups to the region, deployed Patriot anti-missile missile batteries, has British mine sweepers in place, and accuses Iranian agents of helping to kill American troops in Iraq.
This wishful disbelief around Washington that a wider war is looming remains steadfast even as Israeli officials call Iran's nuclear program an "existential threat" and reportedly train their pilots for bombing runs against Iran's heavily fortified nuclear facilities.
Yet, instead of front-page stories about the dangers of an expanded war in the Middle East or an examination of alternative strategies that might be tried, the major U.S. newspapers act as if nothing is happening.
Predictive War
The underlying problem appears to be a continued unwillingness to challenge Bush's five-year-old strategy of "preemptive" -- or one might say "predictive" -- war that he first enunciated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Bush has never budged from his claim that U.S. military intervention is justified anywhere in the world when a hostile state is developing the potential for weapons of mass destruction that conceivably could fall into the hands of a terrorist group that might use them against American targets.
That was the fundamental rationalization for invading Iraq, even though Bush and his aides found that to sell the idea to the American people they had to exaggerate Iraq's WMD capabilities and invent connections between the secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in al-Qaeda. [See Consortiumnews.com's "How Neocon Favorites Duped U.S."]
Bush has put together a similar sales package for Iran. By applying broad definitions of "terrorism" to Iranian-supported Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Bush has defined Iran as a state sponsor of "terrorism." Iran's development of nuclear technology has met the other requirement for a WMD scare.
So, the question about an attack on Iran shouldn't be as much if as when, at least if one follows the neoconservative logic of the Bush administration. Though Iran appears to be years away from having the capability to build a nuclear bomb and although neither Hezbollah nor Hamas has sponsored acts of terrorism inside the United States, Bush and his top aides want to counter this potential threat now.
And, despite Bush's slump in the polls and the Republican defeat in the November elections, the White House is encountering surprisingly few obstacles. Indeed, some leading Democrats and prominent TV pundits still try to talk as tough -- or even tougher than Bush -- about Iran.
For instance, former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, supposedly one of the more liberal Democratic presidential candidates, spoke via satellite to a security conference in Herzliya, Israel, in January telling senior Israeli government officials that he shared their view that Iran was the world's preeminent threat. "At the top of these threats is Iran," Edwards said. "Iran threatens the security of Israel and the entire world. Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons. ... "We have muddled along for far too long. To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep ALL options on the table, Let me reiterate -- ALL options must remain on the table."
Edwards even chided Bush for not being aggressive enough in confronting Iran.
"To a large extent, the U.S. abdicated its responsibility to the Europeans. This was a mistake," Edwards said in a speech that contained not a single critical word about Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, its settlements on occupied territory or its own large and sophisticated nuclear arsenal.
Typical of Democrats
In many ways, Edwards's speech was typical of how leading Democrats pander to Israel for political gain. But the failure of Democrats -- and other elements of the American Establishment -- to maintain the traditional U.S. posture as "honest broker" actually portends greater dangers for Israel and other nations in the Middle East.
If the region continues to go up in flames and even larger numbers of Muslims die, Israel will find it harder to protect itself against an eventual attack by someone with an unconventional weapon that could inflict mass casualties.
The endless pursuit of security through "preemptive" war is almost surely a fool's errand. Indeed, it could speed, not retard, terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear bomb.
For instance, the precarious Pakistani government of dictator Pervez Musharraf already possesses a nuclear bomb and elements of the Pakistani intelligence service are believed to be sympathetic to al-Qaeda and other radical movements. A wider U.S. war against another Muslim state could tip control of Pakistan to the extremists.
Already, an epidemic of anti-Americanism is infecting populations across the Middle East and around the globe. If counterinsurgency -- which is what the "war on terror" ultimately is -- requires winning hearts and minds, then Bush is doing the opposite.
A bombing campaign against Iran is certain to stir up even more fury and further isolate the United States. Plus, virtually no military analyst believes a bombing campaign -- short of using nuclear weapons -- can inflict long-term damage on Iran's dug-in facilities.
Yet, Edwards and other Democrats, with their hard-line rhetoric, have lowered the bar for Bush to start a war with Iran, much as Edwards and other top Democrats eased his route into Iraq by voting for a resolution on the use of force. (Edwards has since apologized for that Iraq War vote.)
Winds of War
More and more signs point to Bush's determination to strike at Iran sooner rather than later -- and to do so with massive force.
As author Craig Unger noted in a new article in Vanity Fair, the ominous rumble of war has been reverberating across the political landscape for almost a year now.
Last April, in the New Yorker, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh described the Bush administration's preliminary planning for bombing Iran. In September, Time magazine said a U.S. bombing campaign could strike as many as 1,500 targets in Iran.
More recently, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi said, "I've heard from sources at the Pentagon that their impression is that the White House has made a decision that war is going to happen."
Unger reported that Bush also has turned to the U.S. Strategic Command (StratCom) to draw up plans for the bombing campaign against Iran. StratCom oversees nuclear weapons, missile defense, and protection against weapons of mass destruction.
"Shifting to StratCom indicates that they are talking about a really punishing air-force and naval air attack [on Iran]," said retired Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. [Vanity Fair, March 2007] My own military and intelligence sources have painted a similar picture of an expected American air campaign against Iran, which may involve the Israelis as the initiators of the attack to make the U.S. attack appear more defensive and to nail down more Democratic and media support. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Iran Clock Is Ticking."]
Though the Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is expected to join in or at least support the attack on Iran, the war ultimately might damage Israeli interests by cutting off opportunities to defuse regional tensions.
Some Middle East analysts believe Israel would be better served in the long term by tamping down the fiery rhetoric and working in more collaborative ways with the Muslim world, including returning land captured during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
The United States also could reestablish its credentials as a peacemaker if it openly cooperated in such an endeavor.
If, for instance, the United States redeployed its forces from Iraq, some could be sent to Israel, both to remain in the region if needed for a quick return to Iraq and to reassure Israelis about the American commitment to their security. U.S. troops also could assist in the peaceful withdrawal of settlers from the Golan Heights and West Bank.
The image of U.S. troops assisting Israel remove settlers would be graphic evidence to the Muslim world that both Washington and Tel Aviv were serious about a commitment to a new era. The removal of the settlers could coincide with peace negotiations with Syria, the Palestinians and Lebanon.
Israel also could move to engage Iran with a positive commercial relationship, possibly including technological help in building Iranian oil refineries. Business ties would give Israel some positive leverage to discourage Iran from building a nuclear device or at least the chances would be better than just bombing.
Israel also might initiate a conference on nuclear disarmament that would seek to make the Near East a nuclear-free zone with India, Pakistan and Israel phasing out their nuclear arsenals while securing international guarantees about Iran's nuclear program.
Eventually, other smaller nuclear powers, such as the United Kingdom and France, might relinquish their nuclear bombs, and the major nuclear powers -- the United States, Russia and China -- might agree to reduce their stockpiles.
As unlikely as a Middle East peace initiative might be at this time, it should be an alternative that is part of a pre-war debate.
Peace Guidelines
Some other guidelines that would help a peace initiative:
--The U.S. press and politicians should cool the rhetoric about "terrorism" and start using the word more precisely and less ideologically. The definition should apply to intentional violence against civilians to achieve a political goal.
Plus, the word should be applied evenhandedly, not as a propaganda weapon.
When the word is hurled against any militant group that's unpopular with Washington or that has attacked U.S. soldiers, it becomes not only a way to incite irrational hatred, but an impediment to rational policy. Also, overusing the word serves the interests of actual terrorists such as al-Qaeda by lumping them together with, say, Iraqi insurgents.
--Recognize another harsh truth, that virtually no ethnic group, race, religion or nation has clean hands when it comes to "terrorism." Historians can point to a long record of Americans employing terror tactics going back to the origins of the country and continuing through recent atrocities and indiscriminate killings committed against Iraqi civilians.
It's also true that some Jewish extremists used terrorism against British administrators and Palestinians to advance the founding of Israel. Some of these extremists, such as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, later rose to positions of prominence, including the post of prime minister. So, avoid selective outrage.
--The United States must recognize that the best way to help Israel is not always to do what the Israeli government and its influential backers demand. One of the greatest contributions to Israeli security was the Sinai peace deal with Egypt that President Jimmy Carter hammered out in the late 1970s, often over the angry objections of Prime Minister Begin and Israeli hardliners.
On the other hand, the yoking of U.S. and Israeli positions during George W. Bush's administration has caused damage to Israeli security interests, including a stunning military-diplomatic misadventure in Lebanon in summer 2006 and a disturbing rise in Islamic extremism across the region.
Overall, the goal of a more peaceful way forward would be to wind down the tensions and the hatreds, rather than ratcheting them up.
Granted, the prospects for such a peace initiative do not seem bright. It is especially hard to envision President Bush canning his tough talk in favor of peace talks, or the Democrats and the national news media shaking off their opportunism and timidity.
In a healthy democracy, however, all chances for peace would be openly debated and tried out before a decision was made to wage war.
Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
The Drowning of a people: Not just for New Orleans, anymore!
WASHINGTON - Keeping troops in Iraq for another year and a half will cost nearly a quarter-trillion dollars - about $800 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. - under the budget President Bush will submit to Congress Monday.
Bush will ask for $100 billion more for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year and seek $145 billion for 2008, a senior Pentagon official said Friday. Those requests come on top of about $344 billion spent for Iraq since the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
At the same time, Bush's budget request will propose cost curbs on Medicare providers, a cap on subsidy payments to wealthier farmers and an increase to $4,600 in the maximum Pell Grant for low-income college students.
Bush's proposal, totaling almost $3 trillion for the budget year starting Oct. 1, will kick off a major debate with the new Democratic-controlled Congress. Democrats are sure to press for more money for domestic programs, and they've signaled they won't consider renewing Bush's tax cuts until closer to 2010, when they are to expire.
Click for related content
Bush administration seeks $245B for wars
How much is the war in Iraq costing us?
Let's not hide health costs
The White House plan will produce a surplus in 2012, budget director Rob Portman said Friday - assuming strong growth in tax revenues, continued curbs on domestic agencies' spending and relatively modest cuts to farm programs, Medicare and the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled.
Bush's plan assumes Congress extends the two rounds of tax cuts that were passed in 2001 and 2003.
Health care
Portman said Bush's budget submission contains about a 1 percentage point cut in the rapid growth in Medicare - which averages almost 8 percent a year without changes - to squeeze about $66 billion in savings over five years from the federal health care program for the elderly.
Bush would curb payments to health care providers such as hospitals, and would require more of the higher-income recipients to pay greater premiums.
"We need to get these unsustainable growth rates under control," Portman said, noting that Congress passed more ambitious cuts in 1997, when President Clinton and a GOP-controlled Congress enacted more than $160 billion in Medicare savings. "This is a good first step."
Everything you need to know about Social Security
However, Congress has since given back much of the 1997 savings, particularly cuts in doctors' fees. Smaller cuts proposed last year got nowhere in a Congress controlled by Republicans.
The requests, to be released Monday, would bring war spending for fiscal 2007 to about $170 billion, with the $145 billion for 2008 representing a decline.
The additional request for the current year includes $93.4 billion for the Pentagon and $6 billion for foreign aid and State Department costs - on top of $70 billion approved by Congress in September.
Missing costs?
The White House assumes war spending will be down to $50 billion in 2009 with none planned beyond then in hopes the war in Iraq will have wound down.
Bush's recent budgets have been met with skepticism by Democrats, partly because they have left out war costs and expensive changes to the alternative minimum tax, which is hitting an increasing number of middle class taxpayers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates updating the AMT for inflation would cost $93 billion in 2012 alone.
The increase in war spending - up from $120 billion approved by Congress for 2006 - have been prompted by large costs to replace equipment destroyed in combat or worn out in harsh conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Iraq requests are certain to face scrutiny by the Democrats, who already are debating whether to try to block Bush's request to increase troop levels in Baghdad.
Critics say the Pentagon is also using war-money requests to modernize the armed services with weaponry - such as the next-generation Joint Strike Fighters or the controversial V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft - unlikely to see action in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Pentagon counters that the planes are replacing aircraft that are no longer manufactured.
• Click here to share your thoughts on political events, including presidential candidates, 2008 budget, taxes, budget cuts, the deficit, surging more troops into Iraq, and a potential conflict with Iran.
The additional budget request for Iraq is far below lists assembled by the military branches, which were given a green light last fall by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. He instructed the four services that they could add projects connected to the broader fight against terrorism, though critics said that could be interpreted to cover almost anything.
Those lists were met with resistance in the White House and on Capitol Hill, and the Pentagon pared them back in the request it forwarded to the White House's Office of Management and Budget, which trimmed them further.
In addition to its share of the $245 billion for the wars, the Defense Department will seek $481.4 billion to run the department for 2008 - an 11.3 percent increase over the $432 billion amount approved by Congress for this year, according to a defense official and budget documents.
That total includes about $12 billion to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps, to meet the growing strains of fighting wars on two fronts, said the Pentagon official, who requested anonymity because the budget has not yet been released.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Bush will ask for $100 billion more for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year and seek $145 billion for 2008, a senior Pentagon official said Friday. Those requests come on top of about $344 billion spent for Iraq since the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
At the same time, Bush's budget request will propose cost curbs on Medicare providers, a cap on subsidy payments to wealthier farmers and an increase to $4,600 in the maximum Pell Grant for low-income college students.
Bush's proposal, totaling almost $3 trillion for the budget year starting Oct. 1, will kick off a major debate with the new Democratic-controlled Congress. Democrats are sure to press for more money for domestic programs, and they've signaled they won't consider renewing Bush's tax cuts until closer to 2010, when they are to expire.
Click for related content
Bush administration seeks $245B for wars
How much is the war in Iraq costing us?
Let's not hide health costs
The White House plan will produce a surplus in 2012, budget director Rob Portman said Friday - assuming strong growth in tax revenues, continued curbs on domestic agencies' spending and relatively modest cuts to farm programs, Medicare and the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled.
Bush's plan assumes Congress extends the two rounds of tax cuts that were passed in 2001 and 2003.
Health care
Portman said Bush's budget submission contains about a 1 percentage point cut in the rapid growth in Medicare - which averages almost 8 percent a year without changes - to squeeze about $66 billion in savings over five years from the federal health care program for the elderly.
Bush would curb payments to health care providers such as hospitals, and would require more of the higher-income recipients to pay greater premiums.
"We need to get these unsustainable growth rates under control," Portman said, noting that Congress passed more ambitious cuts in 1997, when President Clinton and a GOP-controlled Congress enacted more than $160 billion in Medicare savings. "This is a good first step."
Everything you need to know about Social Security
However, Congress has since given back much of the 1997 savings, particularly cuts in doctors' fees. Smaller cuts proposed last year got nowhere in a Congress controlled by Republicans.
The requests, to be released Monday, would bring war spending for fiscal 2007 to about $170 billion, with the $145 billion for 2008 representing a decline.
The additional request for the current year includes $93.4 billion for the Pentagon and $6 billion for foreign aid and State Department costs - on top of $70 billion approved by Congress in September.
Missing costs?
The White House assumes war spending will be down to $50 billion in 2009 with none planned beyond then in hopes the war in Iraq will have wound down.
Bush's recent budgets have been met with skepticism by Democrats, partly because they have left out war costs and expensive changes to the alternative minimum tax, which is hitting an increasing number of middle class taxpayers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates updating the AMT for inflation would cost $93 billion in 2012 alone.
The increase in war spending - up from $120 billion approved by Congress for 2006 - have been prompted by large costs to replace equipment destroyed in combat or worn out in harsh conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Iraq requests are certain to face scrutiny by the Democrats, who already are debating whether to try to block Bush's request to increase troop levels in Baghdad.
Critics say the Pentagon is also using war-money requests to modernize the armed services with weaponry - such as the next-generation Joint Strike Fighters or the controversial V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft - unlikely to see action in Iraq or Afghanistan. The Pentagon counters that the planes are replacing aircraft that are no longer manufactured.
• Click here to share your thoughts on political events, including presidential candidates, 2008 budget, taxes, budget cuts, the deficit, surging more troops into Iraq, and a potential conflict with Iran.
The additional budget request for Iraq is far below lists assembled by the military branches, which were given a green light last fall by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. He instructed the four services that they could add projects connected to the broader fight against terrorism, though critics said that could be interpreted to cover almost anything.
Those lists were met with resistance in the White House and on Capitol Hill, and the Pentagon pared them back in the request it forwarded to the White House's Office of Management and Budget, which trimmed them further.
In addition to its share of the $245 billion for the wars, the Defense Department will seek $481.4 billion to run the department for 2008 - an 11.3 percent increase over the $432 billion amount approved by Congress for this year, according to a defense official and budget documents.
That total includes about $12 billion to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps, to meet the growing strains of fighting wars on two fronts, said the Pentagon official, who requested anonymity because the budget has not yet been released.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
An Honorable Man Faces Court Martial
The first trial of a commissioned officer who refused to deploy to Iraq starts Monday.
By Dean Paton Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
BELLEVUE, WASH. - Carolyn Ho was at her apartment that overlooks Kaneohe Bay on the windward side of Oahu, on another enviable evening of silk-shirt temperatures, when the phone rang. It was New Year's Day 2006. Her son, Ehren, was calling from Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Wash., where he was stationed as an artillery officer in the US Army.
She assumed he was calling to wish her a happy New Year. He had something else on his mind. He told her he was opposed to the war in Iraq and was going to refuse to deploy there. "I was surprised and pretty much went ballistic over it," recalls Ms. Ho. "I tried to talk him out of it."
hero or villain?
A week later, Ho – with the help of a Kahlil Gibran poem reminding her that we don't really own our children – changed her mind and has supported her son ever since. Proudly. Fiercely.
On Monday she will be doing it again as 1st Lt. Ehren Watada goes on trial in a military court as the nation's first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq.
It's a trial with significance beyond Lieutenant Watada. The case will provide a test of how far officers can go in resisting an order and how much they can criticize their superiors – notably the commander in chief. Over time, Watada came to believe that the Bush administration lied about the reasons for invading Iraq and concluded its actions were "illegal and immoral."
The Pentagon, however, argues that no soldier can pick and choose assignments, something that would undermine a core tenet of the military – the command structure. It also says that when people join the Army, they lose some of the free-speech rights of a civilian.
Thus Watada faces two charges of conduct unbecoming an officer, for his suggestion that President Bush "deceived" Americans, and one count of "missing movement." Two other charges were dropped. He could get a maximum sentence of four years in prison.
The trial comes at a time when the antiwar movement is gaining strength, which has added to its symbolic importance. Almost overnight, Watada has become a poster child for critics of the war – a sort of Cindy Sheehan in fatigues. He speaks at public rallies. His father addressed the antiwar protest in Washington D.C. last weekend.
Yet beneath it all lies the story of how a one-time Eagle Scout and model patriot came to be a war resister – one willing to suffer time in prison to prove the "generals, the Congress, and the president" are a "threat to the Constitution."
***
As a child growing up in Honolulu, Watada remembers "playing war. Who didn't? Who didn't watch 'G.I. Joe'?" His mother recalls "a reflective child. When I would take him to soccer practice he always listened intently to his coach; he wasn't horsing around like the other kids."
Young Watada was a two-sport athlete: soccer and football. He also rose to the top in the local Boy Scouts. "Some of that desire to be in the military came from that," he says – "the dedication to service, loyalty, morality."
In his early 20s, Watada delivered packages during the day while finishing school at night. Then terrorists struck in New York and Washington. "I always wanted to join the military – and, especially after 9/11, a lot of us wanted to do more," he says. "We had this call to duty."
Watada already had a strong military heritage in his family, which is of mixed origin: his mother is Chinese-American, his father Japanese-American. Both grandparents on his mother's side served in the US Army and were stationed in China. Two of his father's brothers enlisted as translators and interrogators in World War II. Another died in Korea, and a fourth later joined the US Marines. "We served when we were asked," Watada says. His father, Robert, took a different path. Ehren Watada says his father saw Vietnam as a "very racist war." So he joined the Peace Corps and went to South America.
When it came time for Watada to enlist, he was diagnosed with asthma and declared physically unfit. He paid $800 to have an outside test done and was accepted into the Army's college-option program. He completed basic training in June 2003, and went to Officer Candidate School in South Carolina. He emerged 14 weeks later as a 2nd lieutenant. "Nothing dissuaded me from wanting to be in the military, not even the war in Iraq," he says. "I believed in the war. I believed in the president. I believed there were weapons of mass destruction."
During a yearlong tour in Korea, he served under a commander who told his junior officers that if they didn't learn everything about their mission, they would be mediocre leaders – and fail those serving under them. The earnest Watada took this to heart in his own way. When he returned to Fort Lewis, he began researching Iraq. The exposé at Abu Ghraib prison fueled his doubts about the war. He read the report of the Iraq Survey Group, a team formed after the 2003 invasion to see if weapons of mass destruction existed. It found they didn't. He studied the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Later, after concluding that Saddam Hussein had no ties to Al Qaeda, as the president had claimed, he became more disillusioned: "And I said, 'Wow – it's not bad intelligence; it's manipulative intelligence.' When you put it all together, I became convinced that what we're doing is illegal and immoral. I went into a short period of deep depression. I was so shocked. I felt betrayed."
In early 2006, after telling his family of his decision not to deploy, Watada went to see his commanding officer. "I was very nervous," he says. He offered to train his replacement. He offered to fight in Afghanistan instead of in Iraq. Both requests were denied. On June 5, 2006, he called a press conference to announce that he would not fight in a war he considered "illegal and immoral." Soon afterward, the Army took a step of its own – launching an investigation that resulted in the convening of a court-martial.
***
Watada looks trim and athletic, though not large. He has neatly cropped black hair and today is dressed in a gray sweater, blue jeans, and running shoes. He has just addressed a crowd of 60 people at a church here in Bellevue.
As his case has gained notoriety, and his trial neared, he has been speaking out about the war at public rallies and to the media. In a 90-minute interview at the church, he talks matter-of-factly about his possible court-martial and position at the vortex of a national debate.
Not surprisingly, he is both vilified and vaunted. Letters to the editor here have called Watada a coward and a traitor. Many members of his Fort Lewis unit were shocked and angered at his decision. "Soldiers can't just pick and choose which war they would like to fight or where they would like to deploy," says Joseph Piek, a civilian public information officer at the base.
His family has been engulfed in the controversy, too. His mother asked the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) to back her son. One influential group – the storied 442 Infantry, an all-Japanese unit that served in World War II – was adamant: Watada is being unpatriotic. In the end, the JACL voted 7 to 5 to stand by him.
While his mother doesn't want to "dwell" on what might happen at the trial, Watada is prepared for the worst. His older brother, Lorin, has come here to help pack up his apartment.
"To me, it's a worthwhile sacrifice," Watada says over a buffet lunch. "I didn't enter into this cause because I thought I had a great case, especially in the military justice system."
He adds: "And I didn't want the people of the world to look back on America and say, 'Why didn't Americans stand up against this?' "
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
By Dean Paton Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
BELLEVUE, WASH. - Carolyn Ho was at her apartment that overlooks Kaneohe Bay on the windward side of Oahu, on another enviable evening of silk-shirt temperatures, when the phone rang. It was New Year's Day 2006. Her son, Ehren, was calling from Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Wash., where he was stationed as an artillery officer in the US Army.
She assumed he was calling to wish her a happy New Year. He had something else on his mind. He told her he was opposed to the war in Iraq and was going to refuse to deploy there. "I was surprised and pretty much went ballistic over it," recalls Ms. Ho. "I tried to talk him out of it."
hero or villain?
A week later, Ho – with the help of a Kahlil Gibran poem reminding her that we don't really own our children – changed her mind and has supported her son ever since. Proudly. Fiercely.
On Monday she will be doing it again as 1st Lt. Ehren Watada goes on trial in a military court as the nation's first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq.
It's a trial with significance beyond Lieutenant Watada. The case will provide a test of how far officers can go in resisting an order and how much they can criticize their superiors – notably the commander in chief. Over time, Watada came to believe that the Bush administration lied about the reasons for invading Iraq and concluded its actions were "illegal and immoral."
The Pentagon, however, argues that no soldier can pick and choose assignments, something that would undermine a core tenet of the military – the command structure. It also says that when people join the Army, they lose some of the free-speech rights of a civilian.
Thus Watada faces two charges of conduct unbecoming an officer, for his suggestion that President Bush "deceived" Americans, and one count of "missing movement." Two other charges were dropped. He could get a maximum sentence of four years in prison.
The trial comes at a time when the antiwar movement is gaining strength, which has added to its symbolic importance. Almost overnight, Watada has become a poster child for critics of the war – a sort of Cindy Sheehan in fatigues. He speaks at public rallies. His father addressed the antiwar protest in Washington D.C. last weekend.
Yet beneath it all lies the story of how a one-time Eagle Scout and model patriot came to be a war resister – one willing to suffer time in prison to prove the "generals, the Congress, and the president" are a "threat to the Constitution."
***
As a child growing up in Honolulu, Watada remembers "playing war. Who didn't? Who didn't watch 'G.I. Joe'?" His mother recalls "a reflective child. When I would take him to soccer practice he always listened intently to his coach; he wasn't horsing around like the other kids."
Young Watada was a two-sport athlete: soccer and football. He also rose to the top in the local Boy Scouts. "Some of that desire to be in the military came from that," he says – "the dedication to service, loyalty, morality."
In his early 20s, Watada delivered packages during the day while finishing school at night. Then terrorists struck in New York and Washington. "I always wanted to join the military – and, especially after 9/11, a lot of us wanted to do more," he says. "We had this call to duty."
Watada already had a strong military heritage in his family, which is of mixed origin: his mother is Chinese-American, his father Japanese-American. Both grandparents on his mother's side served in the US Army and were stationed in China. Two of his father's brothers enlisted as translators and interrogators in World War II. Another died in Korea, and a fourth later joined the US Marines. "We served when we were asked," Watada says. His father, Robert, took a different path. Ehren Watada says his father saw Vietnam as a "very racist war." So he joined the Peace Corps and went to South America.
When it came time for Watada to enlist, he was diagnosed with asthma and declared physically unfit. He paid $800 to have an outside test done and was accepted into the Army's college-option program. He completed basic training in June 2003, and went to Officer Candidate School in South Carolina. He emerged 14 weeks later as a 2nd lieutenant. "Nothing dissuaded me from wanting to be in the military, not even the war in Iraq," he says. "I believed in the war. I believed in the president. I believed there were weapons of mass destruction."
During a yearlong tour in Korea, he served under a commander who told his junior officers that if they didn't learn everything about their mission, they would be mediocre leaders – and fail those serving under them. The earnest Watada took this to heart in his own way. When he returned to Fort Lewis, he began researching Iraq. The exposé at Abu Ghraib prison fueled his doubts about the war. He read the report of the Iraq Survey Group, a team formed after the 2003 invasion to see if weapons of mass destruction existed. It found they didn't. He studied the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Later, after concluding that Saddam Hussein had no ties to Al Qaeda, as the president had claimed, he became more disillusioned: "And I said, 'Wow – it's not bad intelligence; it's manipulative intelligence.' When you put it all together, I became convinced that what we're doing is illegal and immoral. I went into a short period of deep depression. I was so shocked. I felt betrayed."
In early 2006, after telling his family of his decision not to deploy, Watada went to see his commanding officer. "I was very nervous," he says. He offered to train his replacement. He offered to fight in Afghanistan instead of in Iraq. Both requests were denied. On June 5, 2006, he called a press conference to announce that he would not fight in a war he considered "illegal and immoral." Soon afterward, the Army took a step of its own – launching an investigation that resulted in the convening of a court-martial.
***
Watada looks trim and athletic, though not large. He has neatly cropped black hair and today is dressed in a gray sweater, blue jeans, and running shoes. He has just addressed a crowd of 60 people at a church here in Bellevue.
As his case has gained notoriety, and his trial neared, he has been speaking out about the war at public rallies and to the media. In a 90-minute interview at the church, he talks matter-of-factly about his possible court-martial and position at the vortex of a national debate.
Not surprisingly, he is both vilified and vaunted. Letters to the editor here have called Watada a coward and a traitor. Many members of his Fort Lewis unit were shocked and angered at his decision. "Soldiers can't just pick and choose which war they would like to fight or where they would like to deploy," says Joseph Piek, a civilian public information officer at the base.
His family has been engulfed in the controversy, too. His mother asked the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) to back her son. One influential group – the storied 442 Infantry, an all-Japanese unit that served in World War II – was adamant: Watada is being unpatriotic. In the end, the JACL voted 7 to 5 to stand by him.
While his mother doesn't want to "dwell" on what might happen at the trial, Watada is prepared for the worst. His older brother, Lorin, has come here to help pack up his apartment.
"To me, it's a worthwhile sacrifice," Watada says over a buffet lunch. "I didn't enter into this cause because I thought I had a great case, especially in the military justice system."
He adds: "And I didn't want the people of the world to look back on America and say, 'Why didn't Americans stand up against this?' "
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
This, from the troops..........
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Army 1st Lt. Antonio Hardy took a slow look around the east Baghdad neighborhood that he and his men were patrolling. He grimaced at the sound of gunshots in the distance. A machine gunner on top of a Humvee scanned the rooftops for snipers. Some of Hardy's men wondered aloud if they'd get hit by a roadside bomb on the way back to their base.
"To be honest, it's going to be like this for a long time to come, no matter what we do," said Hardy, 25, of Atlanta. "I think some people in America don't want to know about all this violence, about all the killings. The people back home are shielded from it; they get it sugar-coated."
While senior military officials and the Bush administration say the president's decision to send more American troops to pacify Baghdad will succeed, many of the soldiers who're already there say it's a lost cause.
"What is victory supposed to look like? Every time we turn around and go in a new area there's somebody new waiting to kill us," said Sgt. 1st Class Herbert Gill, 29, of Pulaski, Tenn., as his Humvee rumbled down a dark Baghdad highway one evening last week. "Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting for thousands of years, and we're not going to change that overnight."
"Once more raids start happening, they'll (insurgents) melt away," said Gill, who serves with the 1st Infantry Division in east Baghdad. "And then two or three months later, when we leave and say it was a success, they'll come back."
Soldiers interviewed across east Baghdad, home to more than half the city's 8 million people, said the violence is so out of control that while a surge of 21,500 more American troops may momentarily suppress it, the notion that U.S. forces can bring lasting security to Iraq is misguided.
Lt. Hardy and his men of the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 2nd Infantry Division, from Fort Carson, Colo., patrol an area southeast of Sadr City, the stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
A map in Hardy's company headquarters charts at least 50 roadside bombs since late October, and the lieutenant recently watched in horror as the blast from one killed his Humvee's driver and wounded two other soldiers in a spray of blood and shrapnel.
Soldiers such as Hardy must contend not only with an escalating civil war between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite Muslims, but also with insurgents on both sides who target U.S. forces.
"We can go get into a firefight and empty out ammo, but it doesn't accomplish much," said Pvt. 1st Class Zach Clouser, 19, of York, Pa. "This isn't our war - we're just in the middle."
Almost every foot soldier interviewed during a week of patrols on the streets and alleys of east Baghdad said that Bush's plan would halt the bloodshed only temporarily. The soldiers cited a variety of reasons, including incompetence or corruption among Iraqi troops, the complexities of Iraq's sectarian violence and the lack of Iraqi public support, a cornerstone of counterinsurgency warfare.
"They can keep sending more and more troops over here, but until the people here start working with us, it's not going to change," said Sgt. Chance Oswalt, 22, of Tulsa, Okla.
Bush's initiative calls for American soldiers in Baghdad to take positions in outposts throughout the capital, paired up with Iraqi police and soldiers. Few of the U.S. soldiers interviewed, however, said they think Iraqi forces can operate effectively without American help.
Their officers were more optimistic.
If there's enough progress during the next four to six months, "we can look at doing provincial Iraqi control, and we can move U.S. forces to the edge of the city," said Lt. Col. Dean Dunham, the deputy commander of the 2nd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade, which oversees most of east Baghdad.
Maj. Christopher Wendland, a senior staff officer for Dunham's brigade, said he thinks there's a good chance that by late 2007 American troops will have handed over most of Baghdad to Iraqi troops.
"I'm actually really positive," said Wendland, 35, of Chicago. "We have an Iraqi army that's actually capable of maintaining once we leave."
If the Iraqi army can control the violence, his thinking goes, economic and political progress will follow in the safest areas, accompanied by infrastructure improvement, then spread outward.
In counterinsurgency circles, that notion is commonly called the "inkblot" approach. It's been relatively successful in some isolated parts of Iraq, such as Tal Afar on the Syrian border, but in most areas it's failed to halt the bloodshed for any length of time.
Wendland and Dunham said, however, that if the Iraqi forces in Baghdad falter, much of the city could fall to Sunni and Shiite insurgents.
"We have to have momentum . . . or else it could all fall like a house of cards," Wendland said.
Leaning against a pile of sandbags last week, 1st Lt. Tim Evers took a drag from his Marlboro cigarette. He said that while sending more troops sounded good, Sunni and Shiite fighters would only move out of Baghdad, fight elsewhere and wait until they can re-enter the capital.
Evers' men were part of the last U.S. effort to subdue Baghdad, Operation Forward Together, which included Iraqi and American soldiers. It lasted most of last summer and ended in failure.
"When we first got here it was, `Let's put up schools, let's work on a power plant' - but you can't do that without security, and security here is crap," said Evers, 26, of Stockton, Calif. "They keep trying different crap and it doesn't work. . . . They're talking about the inkblot method, and doing that you secure a small area, but the rest is still bad."
America's three-and-a-half-year effort to quell Iraqi unrest has been largely unsuccessful, according to statistics compiled by The Brookings Institution, which gets most of its data from the U.S. government.
In June 2003, a month after Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, 18 U.S. troops were killed by hostile fire. Last month, hostile fire killed at least 80 American troops, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a Web site that tracks U.S. casualty numbers from military releases. On Jan. 20 alone, 25 U.S. soldiers were killed, almost one-third more than died in all of June 2003.
There are troubling indications in the Brookings statistics that adding more troops only to draw down later to lower levels - as is the current plan - may not bring peace.
The coming increase will bring the number of American soldiers and Marines in Iraq to some 153,000. During the country's national elections in December 2005, there were 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Fifty-seven of them were killed by hostile fire, and there were on average 90 daily insurgent and militia attacks. In December 2006, when the number of U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq dropped to about 140,000, 95 Americans were killed and there were on average 185 attacks a day.
The problem, many soldiers say, is that as long as the majority of Iraqis oppose the presence of American troops, a trend that's only accelerated since the 2003 invasion, no amount of bullets or bodies will solve the problem.
That's a bitter truth for Sgt. Chance Oswalt and many others on the streets of Baghdad.
Oswalt somberly named two men in his company who fought in Fallujah in November 2004, in the most intense urban combat since Vietnam, only to be killed in Baghdad late last year. One bled to death after he was shot by a sniper; the other was killed by a roadside bomb.
"All of our friends who have been killed by (roadside bombs) and snipers, it's like there's no justice for it - it's just another body bag filled," he said. "The guys who died just trying to stay alive and get home, they'll be forgotten. No one will remember their stories."
Riding on a patrol last week, Spc. Elmer Beere looked out of his Humvee window for any hint of wires leading to a roadside bomb.
"It's kind of relentless and pointless," said Beere, 22, of State College, Pa. "It'll be the same thing going on here, no matter what we do."
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
"To be honest, it's going to be like this for a long time to come, no matter what we do," said Hardy, 25, of Atlanta. "I think some people in America don't want to know about all this violence, about all the killings. The people back home are shielded from it; they get it sugar-coated."
While senior military officials and the Bush administration say the president's decision to send more American troops to pacify Baghdad will succeed, many of the soldiers who're already there say it's a lost cause.
"What is victory supposed to look like? Every time we turn around and go in a new area there's somebody new waiting to kill us," said Sgt. 1st Class Herbert Gill, 29, of Pulaski, Tenn., as his Humvee rumbled down a dark Baghdad highway one evening last week. "Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting for thousands of years, and we're not going to change that overnight."
"Once more raids start happening, they'll (insurgents) melt away," said Gill, who serves with the 1st Infantry Division in east Baghdad. "And then two or three months later, when we leave and say it was a success, they'll come back."
Soldiers interviewed across east Baghdad, home to more than half the city's 8 million people, said the violence is so out of control that while a surge of 21,500 more American troops may momentarily suppress it, the notion that U.S. forces can bring lasting security to Iraq is misguided.
Lt. Hardy and his men of the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 2nd Infantry Division, from Fort Carson, Colo., patrol an area southeast of Sadr City, the stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
A map in Hardy's company headquarters charts at least 50 roadside bombs since late October, and the lieutenant recently watched in horror as the blast from one killed his Humvee's driver and wounded two other soldiers in a spray of blood and shrapnel.
Soldiers such as Hardy must contend not only with an escalating civil war between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite Muslims, but also with insurgents on both sides who target U.S. forces.
"We can go get into a firefight and empty out ammo, but it doesn't accomplish much," said Pvt. 1st Class Zach Clouser, 19, of York, Pa. "This isn't our war - we're just in the middle."
Almost every foot soldier interviewed during a week of patrols on the streets and alleys of east Baghdad said that Bush's plan would halt the bloodshed only temporarily. The soldiers cited a variety of reasons, including incompetence or corruption among Iraqi troops, the complexities of Iraq's sectarian violence and the lack of Iraqi public support, a cornerstone of counterinsurgency warfare.
"They can keep sending more and more troops over here, but until the people here start working with us, it's not going to change," said Sgt. Chance Oswalt, 22, of Tulsa, Okla.
Bush's initiative calls for American soldiers in Baghdad to take positions in outposts throughout the capital, paired up with Iraqi police and soldiers. Few of the U.S. soldiers interviewed, however, said they think Iraqi forces can operate effectively without American help.
Their officers were more optimistic.
If there's enough progress during the next four to six months, "we can look at doing provincial Iraqi control, and we can move U.S. forces to the edge of the city," said Lt. Col. Dean Dunham, the deputy commander of the 2nd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade, which oversees most of east Baghdad.
Maj. Christopher Wendland, a senior staff officer for Dunham's brigade, said he thinks there's a good chance that by late 2007 American troops will have handed over most of Baghdad to Iraqi troops.
"I'm actually really positive," said Wendland, 35, of Chicago. "We have an Iraqi army that's actually capable of maintaining once we leave."
If the Iraqi army can control the violence, his thinking goes, economic and political progress will follow in the safest areas, accompanied by infrastructure improvement, then spread outward.
In counterinsurgency circles, that notion is commonly called the "inkblot" approach. It's been relatively successful in some isolated parts of Iraq, such as Tal Afar on the Syrian border, but in most areas it's failed to halt the bloodshed for any length of time.
Wendland and Dunham said, however, that if the Iraqi forces in Baghdad falter, much of the city could fall to Sunni and Shiite insurgents.
"We have to have momentum . . . or else it could all fall like a house of cards," Wendland said.
Leaning against a pile of sandbags last week, 1st Lt. Tim Evers took a drag from his Marlboro cigarette. He said that while sending more troops sounded good, Sunni and Shiite fighters would only move out of Baghdad, fight elsewhere and wait until they can re-enter the capital.
Evers' men were part of the last U.S. effort to subdue Baghdad, Operation Forward Together, which included Iraqi and American soldiers. It lasted most of last summer and ended in failure.
"When we first got here it was, `Let's put up schools, let's work on a power plant' - but you can't do that without security, and security here is crap," said Evers, 26, of Stockton, Calif. "They keep trying different crap and it doesn't work. . . . They're talking about the inkblot method, and doing that you secure a small area, but the rest is still bad."
America's three-and-a-half-year effort to quell Iraqi unrest has been largely unsuccessful, according to statistics compiled by The Brookings Institution, which gets most of its data from the U.S. government.
In June 2003, a month after Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, 18 U.S. troops were killed by hostile fire. Last month, hostile fire killed at least 80 American troops, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a Web site that tracks U.S. casualty numbers from military releases. On Jan. 20 alone, 25 U.S. soldiers were killed, almost one-third more than died in all of June 2003.
There are troubling indications in the Brookings statistics that adding more troops only to draw down later to lower levels - as is the current plan - may not bring peace.
The coming increase will bring the number of American soldiers and Marines in Iraq to some 153,000. During the country's national elections in December 2005, there were 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Fifty-seven of them were killed by hostile fire, and there were on average 90 daily insurgent and militia attacks. In December 2006, when the number of U.S. soldiers and Marines in Iraq dropped to about 140,000, 95 Americans were killed and there were on average 185 attacks a day.
The problem, many soldiers say, is that as long as the majority of Iraqis oppose the presence of American troops, a trend that's only accelerated since the 2003 invasion, no amount of bullets or bodies will solve the problem.
That's a bitter truth for Sgt. Chance Oswalt and many others on the streets of Baghdad.
Oswalt somberly named two men in his company who fought in Fallujah in November 2004, in the most intense urban combat since Vietnam, only to be killed in Baghdad late last year. One bled to death after he was shot by a sniper; the other was killed by a roadside bomb.
"All of our friends who have been killed by (roadside bombs) and snipers, it's like there's no justice for it - it's just another body bag filled," he said. "The guys who died just trying to stay alive and get home, they'll be forgotten. No one will remember their stories."
Riding on a patrol last week, Spc. Elmer Beere looked out of his Humvee window for any hint of wires leading to a roadside bomb.
"It's kind of relentless and pointless," said Beere, 22, of State College, Pa. "It'll be the same thing going on here, no matter what we do."
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Bush Decalres War on U.S.
By Caren Bohan
President George W. Bush said on Saturday his upcoming budget proposal would emphasize restraint on domestic spending while making defense and war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan the top priority.
"Cutting the deficit during a time of war requires us to restrain spending in other areas," Bush said in his weekly radio address.
Previewing the fiscal year 2008 budget he will unveil on Monday, Bush also said it would show that his goal of erasing the deficit by 2012 could be accomplished while making his tax cuts permanent.
"Congress needs to make this tax relief permanent, so we can keep America's economy growing. Pro-growth economic policies also play a vital role in our plan to balance the federal budget," he said.
"Our growing economy has produced record levels of tax revenue. This increase in tax revenue has helped us cut the deficit in half three years ahead of schedule," he added. "On Monday, we will take the next step when I submit to Congress a budget that will eliminate the deficit by 2012."
Bush will propose a 1 percent increase in spending outside defense for fiscal 2008, according to The Washington Post. That would amount to a decrease in programs after accounting for inflation, which is running at about 2.5 percent.
The Post also said the president would seek a 10 percent increase in the regular Pentagon budget to $481 billion.
FINANCING IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN WARS
An administration official has said the president will request a total of $245 billion to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through late 2008. That will include a $100 billion request for the wars for the rest of the current fiscal year that ends on September 30 and $145 billion for next year.
Including $70 billion that Congress has already approved, the total of $170 billion for this fiscal year would mark the highest spending level so far for the two wars.
"Our troops deserve our full support, and this budget gives them the resources they need," Bush said, adding he would set as his top priority "keeping America safe and winning the war against extremists."
He did not discuss any of the numbers in the budget, nor did he specify the non-defense areas where he would curb spending. However, he said some "wasteful spending" could be cut by getting rid of "earmarks" -- or special interest projects.
This is the first year Bush will submit his budget to a Democratic-controlled Congress. Many Democrats have called Bush fiscally reckless and contend that his huge tax cuts were heavily skewed toward the wealthy and were unaffordable.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a report last month that balancing the budget was possible by 2012. But its assumptions did not factor in an extension of the Bush tax cuts or changes Congress is likely to make to shield middle-class Americans from the alternative minimum tax.
Bush, who addressed House of Representatives Democrats at their retreat in Williamsburg, Virginia, on Saturday, also called for a bipartisan effort to rein in entitlement programs, such as the Medicare health program for older Americans.
"Controlling spending also requires us to address the unsustainable growth of entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid," Bush said. "Spending for these programs is growing faster than inflation, faster than our economy, and faster than our ability to pay for it.
Bush's budget will propose squeezing about $70 billion in savings from the Medicare and Medicaid health programs over the next five years, an administration official said.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
President George W. Bush said on Saturday his upcoming budget proposal would emphasize restraint on domestic spending while making defense and war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan the top priority.
"Cutting the deficit during a time of war requires us to restrain spending in other areas," Bush said in his weekly radio address.
Previewing the fiscal year 2008 budget he will unveil on Monday, Bush also said it would show that his goal of erasing the deficit by 2012 could be accomplished while making his tax cuts permanent.
"Congress needs to make this tax relief permanent, so we can keep America's economy growing. Pro-growth economic policies also play a vital role in our plan to balance the federal budget," he said.
"Our growing economy has produced record levels of tax revenue. This increase in tax revenue has helped us cut the deficit in half three years ahead of schedule," he added. "On Monday, we will take the next step when I submit to Congress a budget that will eliminate the deficit by 2012."
Bush will propose a 1 percent increase in spending outside defense for fiscal 2008, according to The Washington Post. That would amount to a decrease in programs after accounting for inflation, which is running at about 2.5 percent.
The Post also said the president would seek a 10 percent increase in the regular Pentagon budget to $481 billion.
FINANCING IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN WARS
An administration official has said the president will request a total of $245 billion to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through late 2008. That will include a $100 billion request for the wars for the rest of the current fiscal year that ends on September 30 and $145 billion for next year.
Including $70 billion that Congress has already approved, the total of $170 billion for this fiscal year would mark the highest spending level so far for the two wars.
"Our troops deserve our full support, and this budget gives them the resources they need," Bush said, adding he would set as his top priority "keeping America safe and winning the war against extremists."
He did not discuss any of the numbers in the budget, nor did he specify the non-defense areas where he would curb spending. However, he said some "wasteful spending" could be cut by getting rid of "earmarks" -- or special interest projects.
This is the first year Bush will submit his budget to a Democratic-controlled Congress. Many Democrats have called Bush fiscally reckless and contend that his huge tax cuts were heavily skewed toward the wealthy and were unaffordable.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a report last month that balancing the budget was possible by 2012. But its assumptions did not factor in an extension of the Bush tax cuts or changes Congress is likely to make to shield middle-class Americans from the alternative minimum tax.
Bush, who addressed House of Representatives Democrats at their retreat in Williamsburg, Virginia, on Saturday, also called for a bipartisan effort to rein in entitlement programs, such as the Medicare health program for older Americans.
"Controlling spending also requires us to address the unsustainable growth of entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid," Bush said. "Spending for these programs is growing faster than inflation, faster than our economy, and faster than our ability to pay for it.
Bush's budget will propose squeezing about $70 billion in savings from the Medicare and Medicaid health programs over the next five years, an administration official said.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Clinton refuses to take military option off the table
At a speech Friday to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) said "no option can be taken off the table" when dealing with Iran, RAW STORY has learned.
Clinton tempered her remarks by saying she's advocated engagement with "our enemies and Israeli's enemies," adding, "I believe we can gain valuable knowledge and leverage from being part of a process again that enables us to get a better idea of how to take on and defeat our adversaries."
Her quotes were reported by the Associated Press.
The dinner was held by the nation's largest pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC is widely believed to the most powerful lobbying group in Washington and routinely sees major politicians from both sides of the aisle -- also in attendance Friday was former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
AIPAC tends to take a more hawkish stance on foreign policy, and has routinely labeled Iran a serious threat. In a Dec. 6 memo, the group labeled Iran "The Core of Instability in the Middle East."
'No option can be taken off the table'
Clinton told some 1,700 AIPAC supporters that the US must take any step to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
"U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons," she said. "In dealing with this threat ... no option can be taken off the table."
"To deny the Holocaust places Iran's leadership in company with the most despicable bigots and historical revisionists," she added. Clinton excoriated the Iranian administration's "pro-terrorist, anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric."
"We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force," she added.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been a vehement critic of Israel, and according to various media reports Israel has prepared strike plans to target Iran's nuclear enrichment sites.
In October 2005, Ahmadinejad said he concurred with Ayatollah Khomeini's remarks on Israel that the "occupying regime" had to be removed, calling it a "disgraceful stain [on] the Islamic world" that must be "wiped off the map," according to a translation published in the New York Times.
Ahmadinejad did not use Israel by name in his speech.
Some Middle East experts disagree with the translation, which was widely used by the Associated Press and other news agencies. saying, "all official translations" of the comments, including the foreign ministry and president's office, "refer to wiping Israel away." He did, however, agree that "map" was not the most suitable translation.
Iran continues nuclear development
Iran continues to develop its nuclear program despite protestations from its European neighbors and the United States. Diplomats said this week that the Persian nation would begin installing more than 3,000 cetrifuges at their underground nuclear enrichment site at Natanz.
Analysts disagree over the timeframe in which Iran might develop a nuclear bomb. Most place an estimate somewhere between 3-5 years. Iran has said they intend to use the program for "peaceful" civilian power needs.
According to New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, a classified draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House.
Still, Iran's plans to install as many as 50,000 centrifuges comes in direct defiance of the UN Security Council, which called on Iran last summer to suspend uranium enrichment.
Iran opened the doors of its enrichment plant to 'non-aligned' nations Saturday in an effort to give ambassadors "the opportunity to see for themselves what is going on in the peaceful nuclear activities of Iran," said Iran's envoy to the UN Atomic Watchdog, Ali Asghar Soltanieh.
With Wire Services.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad referred to Israel as the "Zionist state." A more accurate translation of his remarks were, "occupying regime." The updated version of this article also includes a more detailed discussion of the translation.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Clinton tempered her remarks by saying she's advocated engagement with "our enemies and Israeli's enemies," adding, "I believe we can gain valuable knowledge and leverage from being part of a process again that enables us to get a better idea of how to take on and defeat our adversaries."
Her quotes were reported by the Associated Press.
The dinner was held by the nation's largest pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC is widely believed to the most powerful lobbying group in Washington and routinely sees major politicians from both sides of the aisle -- also in attendance Friday was former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
AIPAC tends to take a more hawkish stance on foreign policy, and has routinely labeled Iran a serious threat. In a Dec. 6 memo, the group labeled Iran "The Core of Instability in the Middle East."
'No option can be taken off the table'
Clinton told some 1,700 AIPAC supporters that the US must take any step to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
"U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons," she said. "In dealing with this threat ... no option can be taken off the table."
"To deny the Holocaust places Iran's leadership in company with the most despicable bigots and historical revisionists," she added. Clinton excoriated the Iranian administration's "pro-terrorist, anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric."
"We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force," she added.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been a vehement critic of Israel, and according to various media reports Israel has prepared strike plans to target Iran's nuclear enrichment sites.
In October 2005, Ahmadinejad said he concurred with Ayatollah Khomeini's remarks on Israel that the "occupying regime" had to be removed, calling it a "disgraceful stain [on] the Islamic world" that must be "wiped off the map," according to a translation published in the New York Times.
Ahmadinejad did not use Israel by name in his speech.
Some Middle East experts disagree with the translation, which was widely used by the Associated Press and other news agencies. saying, "all official translations" of the comments, including the foreign ministry and president's office, "refer to wiping Israel away." He did, however, agree that "map" was not the most suitable translation.
Iran continues nuclear development
Iran continues to develop its nuclear program despite protestations from its European neighbors and the United States. Diplomats said this week that the Persian nation would begin installing more than 3,000 cetrifuges at their underground nuclear enrichment site at Natanz.
Analysts disagree over the timeframe in which Iran might develop a nuclear bomb. Most place an estimate somewhere between 3-5 years. Iran has said they intend to use the program for "peaceful" civilian power needs.
According to New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, a classified draft CIA assessment has found no firm evidence of a secret drive by Iran to develop nuclear weapons, as alleged by the White House.
Still, Iran's plans to install as many as 50,000 centrifuges comes in direct defiance of the UN Security Council, which called on Iran last summer to suspend uranium enrichment.
Iran opened the doors of its enrichment plant to 'non-aligned' nations Saturday in an effort to give ambassadors "the opportunity to see for themselves what is going on in the peaceful nuclear activities of Iran," said Iran's envoy to the UN Atomic Watchdog, Ali Asghar Soltanieh.
With Wire Services.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad referred to Israel as the "Zionist state." A more accurate translation of his remarks were, "occupying regime." The updated version of this article also includes a more detailed discussion of the translation.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Former Military Officials Warn Against Attack on Iran
Three former high-ranking American military officers have warned against any military attack on Iran.
They said such action would have "disastrous consequences" for security in the Middle East and also for coalition forces in Iraq.
They said the crisis over Tehran's nuclear programme must be resolved through diplomacy, urging Washington to start direct talks with Iran.
The letter was published in Britain's Sunday Times newspaper.
It was signed by:
Lt Gen Robert Gard, a former military assistant to the US defence secretary
Gen Joseph Hoar, a former commander-in-chief, US Central Command
Vice Adm Jack Shanahan, a former director of the Center for Defense Information
"As former US military leaders, we strongly caution against the use of military force against Iran," the authors said.
Iran's account of its nuclear programme has not satisfied the US
They said such action would further exacerbate regional and global tensions.
"A strategy of diplomatic engagement with Iran would serve the interests of the US and the UK and potentially could enhance regional and international security," the letter said.
It also said that "the British government has a vital role play in securing a renewed diplomatic push and making it clear that it will oppose any recourse to military force".
The US and its Western allies suspect Iran of using its nuclear programme as a cover to produce nuclear weapons, a claim denied by Tehran.
Washington has so far refused to rule out military action if Iran does not halt its nuclear activities.
The US has also recently beefed up its military presence in the Gulf.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
They said such action would have "disastrous consequences" for security in the Middle East and also for coalition forces in Iraq.
They said the crisis over Tehran's nuclear programme must be resolved through diplomacy, urging Washington to start direct talks with Iran.
The letter was published in Britain's Sunday Times newspaper.
It was signed by:
Lt Gen Robert Gard, a former military assistant to the US defence secretary
Gen Joseph Hoar, a former commander-in-chief, US Central Command
Vice Adm Jack Shanahan, a former director of the Center for Defense Information
"As former US military leaders, we strongly caution against the use of military force against Iran," the authors said.
Iran's account of its nuclear programme has not satisfied the US
They said such action would further exacerbate regional and global tensions.
"A strategy of diplomatic engagement with Iran would serve the interests of the US and the UK and potentially could enhance regional and international security," the letter said.
It also said that "the British government has a vital role play in securing a renewed diplomatic push and making it clear that it will oppose any recourse to military force".
The US and its Western allies suspect Iran of using its nuclear programme as a cover to produce nuclear weapons, a claim denied by Tehran.
Washington has so far refused to rule out military action if Iran does not halt its nuclear activities.
The US has also recently beefed up its military presence in the Gulf.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Vice Crack-up (Writing with Frank Rich)
In the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation’s armchair shrinks have had a blast.
(Real Shrinks, as well, Frank)
The vice president who boasted of “enormous successes” in Iraq and barked “hogwash” at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago.
(Indeed we have, but no one seems to listen. The easiest solution would be to wait for a cabinet meeting, then throw a net over the White House and make it an annex to St Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane)
The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.
The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney’s former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president’s on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq.
(Nothing new there! We have known that Intel. was cooked, stove-piped, exaggerated, etc. for years now. The Libby trail is only a reminder. The only real difference is that people are finally being put under oath in a public trial.)
He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House’s current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.
(Wait a minute! Is he not already on the witness list? What's this "might" business??
Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as “a tempest in a teapot,” as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago.
When “all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great,” Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, “weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger” are “little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.
(Thus losing what credibility they had left. Of course, Novak and Woodward were in the middle of the whole disgusting mess. Does anyone, among the D.C. elite have any credibility left, at all?
In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson’s identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove) to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) has always been a red herring.
(Not to Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, the CIA front company, which was destroyed, or to CIA assets in foreign countries, who may have been imprisoned, tortured or killed because of the leak. Let's not forget what Mrs Wilson did at the CIA. She was an expert in, of all things, non-proliferation of WMD, especially of the nuclear variety, in places like Iraq and Iran. Could be that she was as much of a target as her husband if not more so.)
It’s entirely possible that the White House has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to unmask a secret agent. (No one has been charged with that crime.)
(Does the term "non-proliferation" mean nothing to these people? No one can convince me that when that term was known by simply everyone, as applying to Mrs. Wilson, it never occurred to seasoned D.C. operatives that she might be undercover, either official or non-official)
The White House is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr. Cheney did not send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check out a supposed Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since Mr. Wilson didn’t make that accusation in the first place.)
(It is true that Vice did not call Joe Wilson into his office and, personally, request that he go to Africa. Nevertheless, the CIA was being pressured non-stop to come up with evidence that would support crudely forged documents which did claim that Saddam had sough to buy, or did buy yellow-cake from Niger. They were being pressured by Vice and his little vice, Libby.)
But if the administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and had little to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to the episode was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else.
According to testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when Mr. Wilson published his Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003 about what he didn’t find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly about both Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby conferred about them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an exceptionally discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his alleged lying landed him with five felony counts.
The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious.
(We submit that the whole explanation is still not obvious to a vast majority of Americans. Who forged the Niger Documents and Why?)
The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr. Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the president’s men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson’s modest finding in Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still far more damning evidence of the administration’s W.M.D. lies lurking in the bowels of the bureaucracy.
Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen instances before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence agencies and others signaled that evidence of Iraq’s purchase of uranium in Africa might be dubious or fabricated. (These are detailed in the timelines at http://frankrich.com/timeline.htm.)
The culmination of these warnings arrived in January 2003, the same month as the president’s State of the Union address, when the White House received a memo from the National Intelligence Council, the coordinating body for all American spy agencies, stating unequivocally that the claim was baseless.
Nonetheless President Bush brandished that fearful “uranium from Africa” in his speech to Congress as he hustled the country into war in Iraq.
If the war had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the administration’s deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson’s Op-Ed article appeared — some five months after the State of the Union and two months after “Mission Accomplished” — there was something terribly wrong with the White House’s triumphal picture.
More than 60 American troops had been killed since Mr. Bush celebrated the end of “major combat operations” by prancing about an aircraft carrier. No W.M.D. had been found, and we weren’t even able to turn on the lights in Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of Americans told a Washington Post-ABC News poll that the level of casualties was “unacceptable.” It was urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson’s revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial boondoggle arranged by his wife.
The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the uranium fictions, had to be strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16 errant words in the State of the Union speech. What we are learning from Mr. Libby’s trial is just what a herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr. Wilson’s article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7 campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man.
(...and why not? Didn't Cheney head up the Iraq Study Group, the first one, which was more of a P.R. group than a real "study group," with the express purpose of selling the war on Iraq to the American people?)
Though Mr. Libby’s lawyers are now arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was — and still is — a stooge for the vice president.
Whether he will go to jail for his misplaced loyalty is the human drama of his trial.
But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they are not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history.
The administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being retrofitted to expand and extend it.
In a replay of the run-up to the original invasion, a new National Intelligence Estimate, requested by Congress in August to summarize all intelligence assessments on Iraq, was mysteriously delayed until last week, well after the president had set his surge.Even the declassified passages released on Friday — the grim takes on the weak Iraqi security forces and the spiraling sectarian violence — foretell that the latest plan for victory is doomed. (As a White House communications aide testified at the Libby trial, this administration habitually releases bad news on Fridays because “fewer people pay attention when it’s reported on Saturday.”)
A Pentagon inspector general’s report, uncovered by Business Week last week, was also kept on the q.t.: it shows that even as more American troops are being thrown into the grinder in Iraq, existing troops lack the guns and ammunition to “effectively complete their missions.” Army and Marine Corps commanders told The Washington Post that both armor and trucks were in such short supply that their best hope is that “five brigades of up-armored Humvees fall out of the sky.”
( We wouldn't blame any military personnel who took off to places, unknown, to avoid the Iraq debacle, as well as to avoid obeying anymore illegal orders, a war crime.)
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell’s notorious W.M.D. pantomime before the United Nations Security Council, a fair amount of it a Cheney-Libby production. To mark this milestone, the White House is reviving the same script to rev up the war’s escalation, this time hyping Iran-Iraq connections instead of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections.
(What they are planning for Iraq may be an escalation, but the mention of Iran portends and even worse catastrophe; EXPANSION.)
In his Jan. 10 prime-time speech on Iraq, Mr. Bush said that Iran was supplying “advanced weaponry and training to our enemies,” even though the evidence suggests that Iran is actually in bed with our “friends” in Iraq, the Maliki government.
The administration promised a dossier to back up its claims, but that too has been delayed twice amid reports of what The Times calls “a continuing debate about how well the information proved the Bush administration’s case.”
Call it a coincidence — though there are no coincidences — but it’s only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later.
(Now that you mention it, we never did get a good answer as to why Nixon's men broke into the DNC in the first place. That may be ancient history, or it may be very revealing and pertinent, even at this late date.)
Still, we can’t push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This time around our country can’t wait two more years for the White House to be stopped from playing its games with American blood.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
(Real Shrinks, as well, Frank)
The vice president who boasted of “enormous successes” in Iraq and barked “hogwash” at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago.
(Indeed we have, but no one seems to listen. The easiest solution would be to wait for a cabinet meeting, then throw a net over the White House and make it an annex to St Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane)
The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.
The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney’s former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president’s on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq.
(Nothing new there! We have known that Intel. was cooked, stove-piped, exaggerated, etc. for years now. The Libby trail is only a reminder. The only real difference is that people are finally being put under oath in a public trial.)
He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House’s current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.
(Wait a minute! Is he not already on the witness list? What's this "might" business??
Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as “a tempest in a teapot,” as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago.
When “all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great,” Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, “weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger” are “little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.
(Thus losing what credibility they had left. Of course, Novak and Woodward were in the middle of the whole disgusting mess. Does anyone, among the D.C. elite have any credibility left, at all?
In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson’s identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove) to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) has always been a red herring.
(Not to Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, the CIA front company, which was destroyed, or to CIA assets in foreign countries, who may have been imprisoned, tortured or killed because of the leak. Let's not forget what Mrs Wilson did at the CIA. She was an expert in, of all things, non-proliferation of WMD, especially of the nuclear variety, in places like Iraq and Iran. Could be that she was as much of a target as her husband if not more so.)
It’s entirely possible that the White House has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to unmask a secret agent. (No one has been charged with that crime.)
(Does the term "non-proliferation" mean nothing to these people? No one can convince me that when that term was known by simply everyone, as applying to Mrs. Wilson, it never occurred to seasoned D.C. operatives that she might be undercover, either official or non-official)
The White House is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr. Cheney did not send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check out a supposed Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since Mr. Wilson didn’t make that accusation in the first place.)
(It is true that Vice did not call Joe Wilson into his office and, personally, request that he go to Africa. Nevertheless, the CIA was being pressured non-stop to come up with evidence that would support crudely forged documents which did claim that Saddam had sough to buy, or did buy yellow-cake from Niger. They were being pressured by Vice and his little vice, Libby.)
But if the administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and had little to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to the episode was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else.
According to testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when Mr. Wilson published his Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003 about what he didn’t find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly about both Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby conferred about them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an exceptionally discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his alleged lying landed him with five felony counts.
The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious.
(We submit that the whole explanation is still not obvious to a vast majority of Americans. Who forged the Niger Documents and Why?)
The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr. Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the president’s men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson’s modest finding in Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still far more damning evidence of the administration’s W.M.D. lies lurking in the bowels of the bureaucracy.
Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen instances before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence agencies and others signaled that evidence of Iraq’s purchase of uranium in Africa might be dubious or fabricated. (These are detailed in the timelines at http://frankrich.com/timeline.htm.)
The culmination of these warnings arrived in January 2003, the same month as the president’s State of the Union address, when the White House received a memo from the National Intelligence Council, the coordinating body for all American spy agencies, stating unequivocally that the claim was baseless.
Nonetheless President Bush brandished that fearful “uranium from Africa” in his speech to Congress as he hustled the country into war in Iraq.
If the war had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the administration’s deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson’s Op-Ed article appeared — some five months after the State of the Union and two months after “Mission Accomplished” — there was something terribly wrong with the White House’s triumphal picture.
More than 60 American troops had been killed since Mr. Bush celebrated the end of “major combat operations” by prancing about an aircraft carrier. No W.M.D. had been found, and we weren’t even able to turn on the lights in Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of Americans told a Washington Post-ABC News poll that the level of casualties was “unacceptable.” It was urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson’s revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial boondoggle arranged by his wife.
The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the uranium fictions, had to be strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16 errant words in the State of the Union speech. What we are learning from Mr. Libby’s trial is just what a herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr. Wilson’s article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7 campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man.
(...and why not? Didn't Cheney head up the Iraq Study Group, the first one, which was more of a P.R. group than a real "study group," with the express purpose of selling the war on Iraq to the American people?)
Though Mr. Libby’s lawyers are now arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was — and still is — a stooge for the vice president.
Whether he will go to jail for his misplaced loyalty is the human drama of his trial.
But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they are not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history.
The administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being retrofitted to expand and extend it.
In a replay of the run-up to the original invasion, a new National Intelligence Estimate, requested by Congress in August to summarize all intelligence assessments on Iraq, was mysteriously delayed until last week, well after the president had set his surge.Even the declassified passages released on Friday — the grim takes on the weak Iraqi security forces and the spiraling sectarian violence — foretell that the latest plan for victory is doomed. (As a White House communications aide testified at the Libby trial, this administration habitually releases bad news on Fridays because “fewer people pay attention when it’s reported on Saturday.”)
A Pentagon inspector general’s report, uncovered by Business Week last week, was also kept on the q.t.: it shows that even as more American troops are being thrown into the grinder in Iraq, existing troops lack the guns and ammunition to “effectively complete their missions.” Army and Marine Corps commanders told The Washington Post that both armor and trucks were in such short supply that their best hope is that “five brigades of up-armored Humvees fall out of the sky.”
( We wouldn't blame any military personnel who took off to places, unknown, to avoid the Iraq debacle, as well as to avoid obeying anymore illegal orders, a war crime.)
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell’s notorious W.M.D. pantomime before the United Nations Security Council, a fair amount of it a Cheney-Libby production. To mark this milestone, the White House is reviving the same script to rev up the war’s escalation, this time hyping Iran-Iraq connections instead of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections.
(What they are planning for Iraq may be an escalation, but the mention of Iran portends and even worse catastrophe; EXPANSION.)
In his Jan. 10 prime-time speech on Iraq, Mr. Bush said that Iran was supplying “advanced weaponry and training to our enemies,” even though the evidence suggests that Iran is actually in bed with our “friends” in Iraq, the Maliki government.
The administration promised a dossier to back up its claims, but that too has been delayed twice amid reports of what The Times calls “a continuing debate about how well the information proved the Bush administration’s case.”
Call it a coincidence — though there are no coincidences — but it’s only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later.
(Now that you mention it, we never did get a good answer as to why Nixon's men broke into the DNC in the first place. That may be ancient history, or it may be very revealing and pertinent, even at this late date.)
Still, we can’t push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This time around our country can’t wait two more years for the White House to be stopped from playing its games with American blood.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Saturday, February 3, 2007
MoDo doesn't Even Try to Be Funny.
Way to go Maureen!
While laughter is needed to get us through the day, this is a serious matter, and should be treated as such, ocassionally even by those who usually get their point across through humor.
“Everything you’ve heard and read is true. And I am deeply sorry about that.”
Who said it?
(a) George Bush, about the chilling new intelligence report on Iraq.(b) Joe Biden, about his self-imploding prolixity.(c) Condi Rice, on her ability to understand Peyton Manning’s vulnerabilities better than Nuri Kamal al-Malaki’s.(d) Silvio Berlusconi, on his wife’s Junoesque lightning bolt after his public flirting.(e) Jacques Chirac, after giving a Gallic shrug at the prospect of Iran getting un or deux nuclear weapons.(f) Hillary Clinton, on enabling the president to invade Iraq.(g) Barack Obama, for the ultimate sin of not being black enough or white enough.(h) Mary Cheney, on her decision to work on her terrifying dad’s homophobic campaign because the thought of John Kerry was “terrifying.”(i) Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, about his affair with his campaign manager’s wife.The answer is Gavin Newsom.It’s rare to get a simple apology when a complex obfuscation will do.
Even after releasing parts of an intelligence report so pessimistic that it may as well have been titled “Iraq: We’re Cooked,” Bush officials clung to their alternate reality, using nonsensical logic and cherry-picking whatever phrases they could find in the report that they could use to sell the Surge.In the 2004 National Intelligence Estimate, civil war was a worst-case scenario. In the 2007 one, Iraq has zoomed past civil war to hell:
“The Intelligence Community judges that the term ‘civil war’ does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence.”
As John McLaughlin, the former acting director of central intelligence, told The Times’s Mark Mazzetti: “Civil war is checkers. This is chess.”
Far from Dick Cheney’s claim of “enormous successes” and Gen. William Casey’s claim of “slow progress,” the report shows that any path the U.S. takes in Iraq could lead to a river of blood. It says that in the absence of any strong Sunni and Shiite leaders who can control their groups, prospects are dim for a cohesive government, much less a democracy.
If the violence gets worse, the report concludes, three sulfurous possibilities loom: chaos leading to partition, the emergence of a Shiite strongman or anarchy “mixing extreme ethnosectarian violence with debilitating intragroup clashes.”
So after four years of war, we get to choose between chaos, another Saddam or anarchy. Good work, W. And at such bargain prices; the administration is breaking the record for the military budget, asking for $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan this year and $145 billion more for 2008.The White House thinks it can somehow spin the Iraq apocalypse so it sounds as if multiple wars are better than one civil war.
At a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Bob Gates rebuffed the idea of a civil war, saying: “I think that the words ‘civil war’ oversimplify a very complex situation in Iraq. I believe that there are essentially four wars going on in Iraq. One is Shia on Shia, principally in the south. The second is sectarian conflict, principally in Baghdad but not solely. Third is the insurgency, and fourth is Al Qaeda.”
That’s a relief, all right — we’re in four wars in Iraq and threatening another with Iran.
Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, agreed that the term civil war is unacceptable: “We need to get across the complexities of the situation we face in Iraq ... and simple labels don’t do that.”
When General Casey testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, he sounded as if he was talking about a completely different Iraq than the one limned in the intelligence report. “Today,” he said, “Iraqis are poised to assume responsibility for their own security by the end of 2007, still with some level of support from us.”Compare that with the bleak tone of the report, which states that “the Iraqi Security Forces — particularly the Iraqi police — will be hard-pressed in the next 12 to 18 months to execute significantly increased security responsibilities, and particularly to operate independently against Shia militias with success.”
It’s official. We’re in a cycle of violence so complex and awful that withdrawing American troops will make it worse and keeping American troops there may also make it worse.We can try or we can leave, but either way, it seems, we’re cooked.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
While laughter is needed to get us through the day, this is a serious matter, and should be treated as such, ocassionally even by those who usually get their point across through humor.
“Everything you’ve heard and read is true. And I am deeply sorry about that.”
Who said it?
(a) George Bush, about the chilling new intelligence report on Iraq.(b) Joe Biden, about his self-imploding prolixity.(c) Condi Rice, on her ability to understand Peyton Manning’s vulnerabilities better than Nuri Kamal al-Malaki’s.(d) Silvio Berlusconi, on his wife’s Junoesque lightning bolt after his public flirting.(e) Jacques Chirac, after giving a Gallic shrug at the prospect of Iran getting un or deux nuclear weapons.(f) Hillary Clinton, on enabling the president to invade Iraq.(g) Barack Obama, for the ultimate sin of not being black enough or white enough.(h) Mary Cheney, on her decision to work on her terrifying dad’s homophobic campaign because the thought of John Kerry was “terrifying.”(i) Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco, about his affair with his campaign manager’s wife.The answer is Gavin Newsom.It’s rare to get a simple apology when a complex obfuscation will do.
Even after releasing parts of an intelligence report so pessimistic that it may as well have been titled “Iraq: We’re Cooked,” Bush officials clung to their alternate reality, using nonsensical logic and cherry-picking whatever phrases they could find in the report that they could use to sell the Surge.In the 2004 National Intelligence Estimate, civil war was a worst-case scenario. In the 2007 one, Iraq has zoomed past civil war to hell:
“The Intelligence Community judges that the term ‘civil war’ does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence.”
As John McLaughlin, the former acting director of central intelligence, told The Times’s Mark Mazzetti: “Civil war is checkers. This is chess.”
Far from Dick Cheney’s claim of “enormous successes” and Gen. William Casey’s claim of “slow progress,” the report shows that any path the U.S. takes in Iraq could lead to a river of blood. It says that in the absence of any strong Sunni and Shiite leaders who can control their groups, prospects are dim for a cohesive government, much less a democracy.
If the violence gets worse, the report concludes, three sulfurous possibilities loom: chaos leading to partition, the emergence of a Shiite strongman or anarchy “mixing extreme ethnosectarian violence with debilitating intragroup clashes.”
So after four years of war, we get to choose between chaos, another Saddam or anarchy. Good work, W. And at such bargain prices; the administration is breaking the record for the military budget, asking for $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan this year and $145 billion more for 2008.The White House thinks it can somehow spin the Iraq apocalypse so it sounds as if multiple wars are better than one civil war.
At a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Bob Gates rebuffed the idea of a civil war, saying: “I think that the words ‘civil war’ oversimplify a very complex situation in Iraq. I believe that there are essentially four wars going on in Iraq. One is Shia on Shia, principally in the south. The second is sectarian conflict, principally in Baghdad but not solely. Third is the insurgency, and fourth is Al Qaeda.”
That’s a relief, all right — we’re in four wars in Iraq and threatening another with Iran.
Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, agreed that the term civil war is unacceptable: “We need to get across the complexities of the situation we face in Iraq ... and simple labels don’t do that.”
When General Casey testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, he sounded as if he was talking about a completely different Iraq than the one limned in the intelligence report. “Today,” he said, “Iraqis are poised to assume responsibility for their own security by the end of 2007, still with some level of support from us.”Compare that with the bleak tone of the report, which states that “the Iraqi Security Forces — particularly the Iraqi police — will be hard-pressed in the next 12 to 18 months to execute significantly increased security responsibilities, and particularly to operate independently against Shia militias with success.”
It’s official. We’re in a cycle of violence so complex and awful that withdrawing American troops will make it worse and keeping American troops there may also make it worse.We can try or we can leave, but either way, it seems, we’re cooked.
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
