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Last post in August....I guess very little :)
With Obama going green I can't see how this company can miss...
'Your Iraq plan?' is a pointless question
Candidates should acknowledge that Bush's war is a failure and look beyond Iraq.
By Andrew J. Bacevich
ANDREW J. BACEVICH is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the author of "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War."
April 9, 2007
FOR TODAY'S presidential candidates, the question is unavoidable: What is your plan for Iraq?
In interviews and town hall meetings, on talk shows and at fundraisers, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Rudolph W. Giuliani and all the others aspiring to succeed President Bush confront a battery of Iraq questions: Are you for the surge or against it? If the surge fails, what's your Plan B? How will you help the troops win? How will you get the troops out?
However sincere, such questions are also pointless. To pose them is to invite dissembling. The truth is that next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there. Iraqis will decide their own fate. We are spectators, witnesses, bystanders caught in a conflagration that we ourselves, in an act of monumental folly, touched off.
The questions that ought to be asked now — but so far have not been — are of a different order.
Recall that Bush saw Baghdad not as the final destination of his global war on terror but as a point of departure. He imagined that liberating Iraq might trigger a flowering of Arab democracy. He was counting on Saddam Hussein's ouster to jump-start a regional transformation. He expected a forthright demonstration of U.S. military might to enhance America's standing across the Muslim world, with friend and foe alike thereafter deferring to Washington.
None of that has come to pass. Baghdad has become a cul-de-sac. Having plunged into a war he cannot win, Bush will not relent. Iraq consumes his presidency because the president wills that it should. He has become Captain Ahab: His identification with his war is absolute.
As a consequence, the "global" effort aimed at eliminating Islamic terror, launched back in September 2001, has narrowed in scope. Today the global war is global in name only. In reality, it has become a war for Mesopotamia.
For his part, the president increasingly preoccupies himself with tactics at the expense of statecraft. Much as Lyndon Johnson once reviewed lists of targets to be bombed in Hanoi, Bush now ponders how many brigades will be needed to impose order on a handful of neighborhoods around Baghdad.
Ritualistic allusions to freedom as the antidote to terrorism still occasionally crop up in presidential speeches, but rhetoric no longer translates into action. An administration that once touted its expansive and principled approach to preventing another 9/11 has abandoned principle. Now there is only Iraq and the effort to ensure that today's news out of Baghdad isn't any worse than yesterday's.
Our political attention, then, needs to turn to whether the president's would-be successors can do what Bush cannot: acknowledge our failure in Iraq and look beyond it.
Candidates who still find merit in an open-ended global war on terror should explain how we prevail in such an enterprise. Given the lessons of Iraq, what exactly does it mean to wage such a global war? Where can we expect to fight next, and against whom? What will victory look like?
Candidates who, in light of Iraq, have become skeptical of open-ended global war as a response to violent Islamic radicalism should be pressed to describe their alternative. How do they define the threat? How do they propose to deal with it? Will they isolate it? Contain it? Subvert it? Relying on what means and at what costs?
"What's your plan for Iraq?" was the right question back in 2002 and 2003 — although it went largely unasked and almost completely unanswered then. But as we approach the 2008 presidential election, though the tragedy of Iraq continues to unfold, that question is moot.
The one that matters is this: As President Bush departs and leaves the United States bereft of a coherent strategy, what should fill that void?
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-bacevich9apr09,0,3000059,print.story?coll=la-opinion-cente...
Distract and Disenfranchise
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 02 April 2007
I have a theory about the Bush administration abuses of power that are now, finally, coming to light. Ultimately, I believe, they were driven by rising income inequality.
Let me explain.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the White House, conservative ideas appealed to many, even most, Americans. At the time, we were truly a middle-class nation. To white voters, at least, the vast inequalities and social injustices of the past, which were what originally gave liberalism its appeal, seemed like ancient history. It was easy, in that nation, to convince many voters that Big Government was their enemy, that they were being taxed to provide social programs for other people.
Since then, however, we have once again become a deeply unequal society. Median income has risen only 17 percent since 1980, while the income of the richest 0.1 percent of the population has quadrupled. The gap between the rich and the middle class is as wide now as it was in the 1920s, when the political coalition that would eventually become the New Deal was taking shape.
And voters realize that society has changed. They may not pore over income distribution tables, but they do know that today's rich are building themselves mansions bigger than those of the robber barons. They may not read labor statistics, but they know that wages aren't going anywhere: according to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of workers believe that it's harder to earn a decent living today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
You know that perceptions of rising inequality have become a political issue when even President Bush admits, as he did in January, that "some of our citizens worry about the fact that our dynamic economy is leaving working people behind."
But today's Republicans can't respond in any meaningful way to rising inequality, because their activists won't let them. You could see the dilemma just this past Friday and Saturday, when almost all the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls traveled to Palm Beach to make obeisance to the Club for Growth, a supply-side pressure group dedicated to tax cuts and privatization.
The Republican Party's adherence to an outdated ideology leaves it with big problems. It can't offer domestic policies that respond to the public's real needs. So how can it win elections?
The answer, for a while, was a combination of distraction and disenfranchisement.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were themselves a massive, providential distraction; until then the public, realizing that Mr. Bush wasn't the moderate he played in the 2000 election, was growing increasingly unhappy with his administration. And they offered many opportunities for further distractions. Rather than debating Democrats on the issues, the G.O.P. could denounce them as soft on terror. And do you remember the terror alert, based on old and questionable information, that was declared right after the 2004 Democratic National Convention?
But distraction can only go so far. So the other tool was disenfranchisement: finding ways to keep poor people, who tend to vote for the party that might actually do something about inequality, out of the voting booth.
Remember that disenfranchisement in the form of the 2000 Florida "felon purge," which struck many legitimate voters from the rolls, put Mr. Bush in the White House in the first place. And disenfranchisement seems to be what much of the politicization of the Justice Department was about.
Several of the fired U.S. attorneys were under pressure to pursue allegations of voter fraud - a phrase that has become almost synonymous with "voting while black." Former staff members of the Justice Department's civil rights division say that they were repeatedly overruled when they objected to Republican actions, ranging from Georgia's voter ID law to Tom DeLay's Texas redistricting, that they believed would effectively disenfranchise African-American voters.
The good news is that all the G.O.P.'s abuses of power weren't enough to win the 2006 elections. And 2008 may be even harder for the Republicans, because the Democrats - who spent most of the Clinton years trying to reassure rich people and corporations that they weren't really populists - seem to be realizing that times have changed.
A week before the Republican candidates trooped to Palm Beach to declare their allegiance to tax cuts, the Democrats met to declare their commitment to universal health care. And it's hard to see what the G.O.P. can offer in response.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040207L.shtml
Just like we had no 'choice' going into Iraq.
Have you no shame?? If Bush and company told you, 'Buy this stock, it's a slam dunk, a cakewalk', and it tanked...would you be ready to plunk your hard earned cash down on their next 'recommendation'?? I don't think so, but when it comes to war, how quick you and many others are to jump on the band wagon again and again, from the same snake oil salesman.
Can't wait to lose another one, huh???
A searing assault on Iraq's intellectuals
The middle class is fleeing the violence and threats, leaving the question: Who will lead?
In reply to Roosters: Iraqis: life is getting better
Marie Colvin
MOST Iraqis believe life is better for them now than it was under Saddam Hussein, according to a British opinion poll published today.
By Alexandra Zavis
Times Staff Writer
March 25, 2007
BAGHDAD — Artist Jabbar Muhaybis stood amid the ashes of Baghdad's storied literary bazaar. Bloodstained pages were scattered at his feet. A wooden crate, eerily reminiscent of a coffin, covered his head.
Muhaybis spread his arms wide and, in a symbolic gesture, sadly intoned from the darkness of his crate: "The light will not shine here again."
Days after a suicide bomber plowed his explosives-laden truck into the heart of Mutanabi Street, Baghdad's intellectual icons gathered to mourn a place that had been their inspiration and refuge through decades of invasion, war and dictatorship.
Iraq's urban, educated, largely secular middle class had everything to gain from the fall of Saddam Hussein's oppressive and isolating regime. Four years later, it is on the way to being wiped out.
Writers, doctors and university professors are hunted down and killed. Entrepreneurs and engineers are kidnapped for lucrative ransoms. And the symbols of Iraq's intellectual heritage — its bookstores, libraries, museums and archeological sites — have been plundered and burned.
More than 200 Iraqi academics, 110 physicians and 76 journalists have been killed since Hussein's fall, according to figures compiled by government ministries and professional associations. Thousands of others have fled the country.
As the U.S.-led occupation enters its fifth year, holdouts of middle-class society are starting to ask: Who will be left to pick up the pieces when the fighting is done?
Days after the Mutanabi Street blast, Nejah Hayiani, 61, gingerly pulled a blackened trouser leg from the rubble. A cellphone attached to the waistband told him it belonged to his dead brother, Mohammed.
"We didn't find bodies, we just found pieces of flesh," he said bitterly.
A family legacy in ruins
The brothers grew up on Mutanabi Street. Their father opened the Renaissance bookshop in 1957. Here, artists, poets and book lovers from all backgrounds converged to leaf through dusty tomes of Ottoman history, religious texts and Shakespeare's sonnets, always watchful for the eavesdropping government informers who lurked in the alleys. From there they would wander over to the Shahbandar cafe for a glass of tea in a room swirling with lively debate and the sweet smoke of water pipes.
Mohammed Hayiani took over the shop from his father. A nephew, Yehyia, opened a small store nearby, specializing in lawbooks. Now both shops are in ruins, their owners and staff slaughtered in the March 5 blast that killed more than 30 and sent thousands of charred pages fluttering into the sky.
"The future is dark," Nejah Hayiani said. "If the thinkers are targeted and killed, who will lead Iraq? Only the ignorant."
Militants seeking to disrupt Iraqi society deliberately target the wealthiest and most senior professionals. But even those of lesser means are frequently caught in the bloodshed.
At the National Library and Archives, director Saad Eskander is trying to rebuild a collection that was burned and looted in the first weeks of the invasion. In a blog on the British Library's website, he describes the conditions that have turned the work of a librarian into a life-threatening proposition: gunshots through a window, bomb blasts and battles in the streets. In December alone he reported four employees killed, two kidnapped, 58 threatened and 51 displaced.
Iraq once was a modern society, with well-developed infrastructure and health and education systems. All that is in pieces now, and a generation of technical expertise has been ravaged with no prospect of filling the vacuum.
Attendance at Iraq's schools and universities has plummeted as campuses have become battlegrounds in the war between Shiite Muslim and Sunni Arab Muslim militants. University lecturers are afraid of their own students, some of whom report to militant groups.
"They want a people who can't think," said Abu Mohammed, head of Iraq's Assn. of University Lecturers.
Abu Mohammed's predecessor, a geology professor, was killed in a drive-by shooting after he campaigned to keep religion and politics off Iraq's campuses. Fearful for his own life, Abu Mohammed asked to be identified by a traditional alias based on his son's name.
Many students and lecturers, meanwhile, are translating their resumes into English and applying for posts abroad.
"In a few years, I think you will see the middle class will have disappeared," Abu Mohammed said. "The guns, the bad people will control everything in our lives."
Many members of Iraq's middle class are the product of the 1960s and '70s oil boom, when the term "Baghdadi" became shorthand for big spender.
But a United Nations embargo imposed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the U.S.-led purges of members of Hussein's Baath Party from government institutions after the 2003 invasion, devastated them. Though a flood of U.S. investment helped create a new elite, even it could not escape the swell of violence, first from Sunni Arab insurgents, then from sectarian militias and, finally, from common criminals.
Late last year, gunmen snatched businessman Fakhir Zihairi and held him, blindfolded, for 15 days, while they used his cellphone to negotiate a ransom with his family. The kidnappers' asking price was $150,000, but they settled for $7,000.
After he was freed, Zihairi immediately applied for a passport to leave Iraq. He sold his house, furniture, printing business and his wife's gold jewelry in preparation for the move to Cairo. He has no intention of coming back.
"I will leave Iraq to the gangsters, the terrorists, the sectarians and the chaos," he said.
Flight of the middle class
More and more families are trying to do the same. Outside the passport office on a recent Monday, guards pushed back a crush of about 50 people waving documents and clamoring to get inside.
About 2 million Iraqis now live abroad, and as many as 50,000 join them every month, according to U.N. figures. Middle-class families, with the means to buy the tickets and visas, make up a large portion of those who have fled.
Aida Mousawi never thought she would be among them. A Shiite from the southern city of Najaf, she survived years of torment under Hussein's Sunni regime. Her husband, a biology professor, went to work one day and never returned, swallowed up, she believes, in one of the dictator's mass graves.
For 14 years, she nurtured the hope that she would find him alive, or at least get his body back. It was only when she attended the opening of one of those graves that she realized she would get neither wish.
"There were maybe 600 people in there piled on top of each other," she said. "How can you find someone in there?"
For all that time, she had suffered quietly at home, raising four children alone. But the collapse of Hussein's regime changed that.
"I thought this was our time to emerge," she said. "I am the Iraqi woman, and this is the day when the Iraqi woman should come forward and demand her say."
She started a women's center, which offered English and computer classes, ran a clinic and Internet cafe, and helped teach rural women to vote. But like other such groups, especially ones with ties to the U.S. military, it drew the suspicion of the city's conservative Shiite leaders.
One morning in December 2005, a white Opel carrying three gunmen pulled up alongside Mousawi's car as she was driving to work.
"The man sitting in the back seat opened his door, had a good look at me, pulled out a Glock pistol … and emptied it into my car," she said.
Mousawi was hit in the back and arm. Her eldest son, who was also in the car, took two bullets in the chest but survived.
The attack only increased Mousawi's resolve. She was assigned 10 police bodyguards and went back to work. But when the guards showed her a letter from their commander instructing them to leave her within 24 hours, she knew it was time to go. By then, Shiite militant death squads had infiltrated Iraq's security forces.
A week later, she was in Syria. Her frustration is palpable through the crackling phone connection.
"If Iraq should have a strong government, where we can have a free voice, then I'd absolutely like to come back and help build the country, brick by brick," she said. "But not [under] this government of thieves and gangsters."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-middle25mar25,1,6727609,print.story?coll=la-head...
The Coulterization of the American right
The "faggot" episode isn't about Ann Coulter. It's about the deal conservatism made with the devil -- a deal that has cost it its soul.
By Gary Kamiya
Mar. 13, 2007 | So Ann Coulter has done it again. She called John Edwards a "faggot" at a major conservative conference and everyone is outraged. But do we have to go through this ridiculous charade again? Nothing's going to happen. This is old and profitable hat for the shameless buffoon who once compared Hillary Clinton to a prostitute (when Clinton was first lady, no less) and displayed her keen grasp of geopolitical strategy after 9/11 by declaiming, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." (Following her sage advice, George W. Bush acted on the first two recommendations, with splendid results, but the third, despite the best efforts of some of his holy pals, is proving difficult.) We all know that Coulter will emerge from this episode selling even more books, appearing on even more right-wing talk shows and being even more fanatically worshipped by her legions of fans. A few newspapers have dropped her column, and some GOP presidential candidates condemned her statement -- who cares? As should be amply clear by now, there is virtually nothing that Ann Coulter can do that will cause her to be cast out of the bosom of the American right. And even if she was to lose her head and cross a line that even she can't cross -- calling Obama a "nigger" is about the only thing that would do the trick -- a thousand hissing Coulters would spring up to take her place.
For this isn't really about Coulter at all. This is about a pact the American right made with the devil, a pact the devil is now coming to collect on. American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt, free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. The problem, for the GOP, is that this isn't a winning political strategy anymore -- but they're stuck with it. They're trapped. They need the bigoted and reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans from achieving Karl Rove's dream of long-term GOP domination.
It is a truism that American politics is won in the middle. For a magic moment, helped immeasurably by 9/11, the GOP was able to convince just enough centrist Americans that extremists like Coulter and Limbaugh did in fact share their values. But the spell has worn off, and they have been exposed as the vacuous bottom-feeders that they are.
It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and sins, one singularly telling one has gone almost entirely unremarked: Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than Coulter. Imagine the reaction if Al Gore, when he was vice president, had routinely appeared on a radio show hosted by, say, Ward Churchill. (The comparison is feeble: There really is no left-wing equivalent of Limbaugh, just as there is no left-wing equivalent of Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy.) The entire American political system would melt down. Beltway wise men would trip on their penny loafers in their haste to demand Gore's head. Robert Bork would come out of retirement to call for a coup to restore the caliphate, I mean the Judeo-Christian moral law in America. Yet the grotesque Cheney-Limbaugh love-in doesn't raise an eyebrow. We're so inured to the complete convergence of "respectable" conservatism and reactionary talk-radio ravings that we don't even deem it worthy of comment.
The right in America has always flirted with various forms of gutter populism, but its latest incarnation may represent its lowest limbo-dance yet. It's worth pausing for a moment to recall how this happened. Newt Gingrich, the adulterous moralist and demagogic hit man who led the vaunted Republican Revolution of 1994, is largely responsible for the GOP's debased state, along with evangelical holy warriors -- let's call them Christo-jihadists -- like Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed and James Dobson. In a reprise of Nixon's "Southern strategy," which used racist appeals to white Southerners to devastating political effect, Gingrich and the Christo-jihadists fired up the so-called values or social issues conservatives by ranting about guns, God and gays.
Just as important as Newt and the holy men was what former right-wing operative David Brock called "the Republican noise machine," the well-funded media apparatus that ceaselessly broadcasts right-wing propaganda. Figures like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and, of course, Ann Coulter, using the enormous power of the new Fox News network and of talk radio, whipped their audience into a resentful, self-righteous fury, raging against "godless secularists" and "liberal elites" who they blamed for the moral collapse of America. This vicious culture war played on the fear and confusion of traditional Americans confronting massive societal and cultural changes -- a process brilliantly described in Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?"
In fact, the right's culture war was -- and is -- mostly bogus. Most of the deep societal changes it decried -- the decline of community, the loss of religious faith, economic insecurity, selfishness, social atomization, anomie -- cannot be blamed on liberalism: They are products of modernity itself and of the modern world's triumphant economic system, capitalism. (Daniel Bell pointed this out more than 30 years ago in his 1976 classic "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.") And those changes have been greatly exacerbated by the monopolistic, heck-of-a-job-Brownie, corporate-crony version of capitalism -- one loudly championed by, naturally, the GOP. Other aspects of the right's culture war are simply reactionary and/or unconstitutional, like its attack on science and its outrageous attempt to tear down the wall between church and state. There are some culture-war issues, like the fight over abortion, that are genuine moral cruxes and difficult to resolve. But even these have been made far more toxic and destructive than necessary by the right's hysterical use of them as a bludgeon to attack its enemies.
But if the right's culture war is almost entirely a fraud, and is one of the major factors behind the unraveling of the American polity, it paid big political dividends. The right's embrace of "values" allowed it to stave off what should have been its inexorable decline. If the price is obeisance to an increasingly vulgar, bigoted, nativist, know-nothing and theocratic ideology -- well, apparently it is better to survive as a slimy Gollum hungering after the Ring of Power than not to survive at all.
By rights, American conservatism should be dead or on life support by now. The ideology has always been incoherent, deeply divided between its libertarian, free-market wing and its traditionalist, "values" wing. As George H. Nash noted in his 1976 book "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945," a shared anti-communism and political convenience temporarily concealed these profound differences. Ronald Reagan's anti-communism, and his sunny personality, allowed free-market conservatives to overlook the fact that government actually grew enormously on his watch. With a majority of Americans continuing to believe in Democratic social policies and programs, and demographic trends running in the Democrats' favor, the right was facing disaster after Reagan's exit and the fall of communism. It desperately needed a boogeyman to unify its unruly factions. Fortunately, conjuring up boogeymen has been a right-wing specialty since the days of the Know-Nothing movement.
First the right launched the culture war, a key part of which was demonizing the Clintons. This and a disgraceful Supreme Court decision sufficed to get a featherweight named George W. Bush named president. But Bush lived down to his résumé, and after his first year his approval ratings were tanking. The old culture-war tricks weren't working anymore; the magic was wearing off. And then a miracle literally fell from the skies: 9/11.
The terror attacks were just what the right needed. It allowed it to fold "national security" into its culture war portfolio -- a potent mixture, especially with Congress and the mainstream media drugged by patriotic fervor. Islamic terrorism was hastily dressed up as the new Red Menace, liberals were painted as Chamberlain-like appeasers, and all was well for a while. In 2004, Bush's strategy of appealing to his base proved successful, despite his disastrous war on Iraq, and inspired GOP hopes that Rove's dream of a decades-long realignment might prove true.
But the "Islamofascist" solution to the right's woes proved to be short-lived. Bush's bungled war on Iraq angered not just the old-style traditionalists, who tended to be isolationist, but the free-marketers and libertarians, who seethed as Bush busted the budget and squandered trillions of dollars on his war of choice. As for the neoconservatives, who dominated Bush's administration, they never established themselves as a dominant political force to begin with, and they lost all credibility after the Iraq debacle.
That left only the base -- the culture warriors for whom the battle over "values" trumps everything else, the zealots who brook no compromise. The problem is, no political movement led by its most extreme elements can win. The right's culture warriors are too manifestly unhinged; their obsessive mean-spiritedness, more than their actual positions, leaves them out of the American mainstream, even out of the mainstream of the Republican Party. A movement figuratively led by the likes of Ann Coulter (or literally by Newt Gingrich, who is lurking on the sidelines, ready to run) cannot win a general election in this country. A red, white and blue banner inscribed with "Faggot!" may rally the hardcore, but most Americans will reject a politics based on hate and fear.
And they will do so in large part because they've been there and done that. The disastrous Bush presidency, which is certain to be recorded as one of the worst in American history, managed to stay politically afloat by making primal appeals to fear, revenge and patriotism. But like the boy who cried "wolf" -- or, in this case, "terrorism!" -- once too often, it has used up its fearmongering capital.
Episodes like the Coulter debacle make it all too clear, especially to the swing and independent voters and pragmatic Republicans who will decide the election, that the GOP's base (which, by the way, is what "al-Qaida" means in Arabic) is a rather scary group. The GOP is reaping what it has sown. It preached hatred, fear and resentment for years, it whipped up the troops with apocalyptic rhetoric, and now it has created a core constituency that only too obviously reflects that negativity. Indeed, the Republican base increasingly defines itself not by positive values, which a true conservatism would affirm and which could hold broad appeal, but only by its partisan hatreds.
The sorry state of contemporary conservatism shows that there is an innate danger to civil society in letting loose the dogs of "values" -- especially right-wing values. Because conservatives tend to believe more than liberals in good and evil, in a clear-cut, transcendental morality, a values-based politics for them quickly acquires not just an authoritarian cast, but an almost religious one. As we learned on 9/11, and observe every day in Iraq, religious zealotry is not conducive to reasoned discussions. When you have God, right and patriarchal authority on your side, anything goes. The result, among other things, is ugly psychosexual mudslinging like Coulter's. As my Salon colleague Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the right's strategy is "to feminize ... all male Democratic or liberal political leaders. For multiple reasons, nobody does that more effectively or audaciously than Coulter, which is why they need her so desperately and will never jettison her."
Yet despite their supposed beliefs, a kind of nihilism, an intellectual sterility, emanates from the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world. This is in part due to the fact that they are, at bottom, entertainers, stand-up comedians of resentment. Their riffs are so facile and endless that they devour whatever actual beliefs supposedly stand behind them. Incapable of compromise or nuance, lashing out robotically, never finding common ground or examining their own ideas, they are shills of negativity, forever battling cartoonish monsters in a lurid, increasingly unrecognizable world. And most Americans, even conservative ones who may share some of their putative positions, are tired of their glib, empty paranoia. If these are the messengers, there must be something wrong with the message.
The GOP brain trust presumably knows this -- but it doesn't have any other cards to play. And as the feebleness of the right's agenda becomes more and more apparent, we can expect the noise from figures like Coulter and Limbaugh to get louder and louder. But the tactic will not work -- in fact, it is likely to backfire. And if the Republicans go down big in 2008, conservatives will finally be forced to confront the Frankenstein monster they created -- and decide whether they dare get rid of it before it consigns their movement to oblivion. Based on their recent history, I don't think they have the common sense to take out the garbage.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/03/13/coulter/print.html
The 'Terrorist' is in the White House...
Of course it's true! They can't have a debate with a serious news organization. They need to be coddled by the Left Leaning bias news organizations.
If they are affraid of Fox News, they certainly can't handle the Terrorist!
Questions for Drew Shindell
Political Heat
Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example? Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone’s interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.
If your department is that politicized, how does that affect research? Well, five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled.
By NASA? Well, it’s a NASA decision following the directives from their political leaders. The money has been redirected into the manned space program, primarily.
Are you referring to President Bush and his plan to send Americans to Mars? The moon and Mars, yes. It’s fine to do it for national spirit or exploring the cosmos, but the problem is that it comes at the cost of observing and protecting our home planet.
Why is NASA involved in climate research in the first place? There is no federal agency whose primary mission is the climate, and that’s a problem, because climate doesn’t command the clout that it should in Washington. Since NASA is the primary agency for launching new scientific satellites, it has ended up collecting some of the most important data on climate change.
I take it you don’t ride along on the satellites. Like the guy in “Dr. Strangelove” who was riding on the bombs? No. I would volunteer to go up on the shuttle, but I don’t think they would take someone like me. My eyesight is really bad.
What do you make of the news of that female astronaut who reportedly planned to kill a romantic rival? Who knew that NASA would turn up in Congress one week and in the tabloids the next?
There are now several bills floating around Congress that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions. Is one better than the others? They are useful first steps. But they are just baby steps. In the long term, we have to reduce emissions much more than any of these bills envision. At the state level, California is a great example of what the rest of the country should be doing. They require that energy be used efficiently, and as a result their per capita energy use has stayed level for decades, despite the growth in their economy.
Why do you think the federal government has been so phobic about adopting energy-efficiency regulations? “Phobic” is the right word, because it’s irrational not to conserve when you think of all the advantages, such as keeping money in consumers’ pockets instead of sending it to Middle Eastern countries that hate us.
What do you consider the most immediate threat of global warming? More heat waves, more drought, rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes.
On the plus side, will New Yorkers one day be able to walk down Broadway in the dead of winter and get a tan? No, it’s not going to get sunnier. Same amount of sun. Just hotter.
The president acknowledged the problem of “global climate change” in his State of the Union address last month. What do you think of the phrase? I’m mostly O.K. with it. It’s a phrase scientists use all the time.
And “global warming”? A bad name. Global warming sounds cozy and comfortable.
So perhaps you should try a new coinage. “Climate meltdown” sounds a little more ominous.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/magazine/18WWLNQ4.t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print
Planning Seen in Iraqi Attacks on U.S. Copters
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and DAVID S. CLOUD
WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 — Documents captured from Iraqi insurgents indicate that some of the recent fatal attacks against American helicopters are a result of a carefully planned strategy to focus on downing coalition aircraft, one that American officials say has been carried out by mounting coordinated assaults with machine guns, rockets and surface-to-air missiles.
The documents, said to have been drafted by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, show that the militants were preparing to “concentrate on the air force.” The contents of the documents are described in an American intelligence report that was reviewed by The New York Times.
Seized near Baghdad, the documents reflect the insurgents’ military preparations from late last year, including plans for attacking aircraft using a variety of weapons.
Officials say they are a fresh indication that the United States is facing an array of “adaptive” adversaries in Iraq, enemies who are likely to step up their attacks as American forces expand their efforts to secure Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.
“Attacks on coalition aircraft probably will increase if helicopter missions expand during the latest phase of the Baghdad Security Plan or if insurgents seek to emulate their recent successes,” notes the intelligence report, which analyzes the recent helicopter crashes.
The American military has said that seven helicopters have been downed since Jan. 20, a figure that exceeds the total number of coalition aircraft shot down in 2006.
After downing the helicopters, the insurgents often laid ambushes for the American ground troops they expected to come to the rescue, sometimes using roadside bombs that they placed in advance. American troops were attacked in five instances in which they rushed to the scene of aircraft that had been shot down, military officials said.
The intelligence report supports the concerns expressed by an American general this month that militants were adapting their tactics in an effort to step up attacks against helicopters. Such strikes have increased since the United States expanded its military operations in Baghdad in August. From December to January, the number of antiaircraft attacks rose by 17 percent, according to an American military report.
Insurgents in Iraq have boasted about the helicopter downings and posted video of some of the wreckage on militant Web sites. While Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has claimed it has “new ways” to shoot down the aircraft, some American analysts believe they are probably not employing new types of weapons but rather are making more effective use of arms already in their inventory.
The insurgents try to plan their attacks by studying flight patterns near American bases and along supply routes, according to the intelligence report.
In several recent helicopter downings, the attackers used a variety of weapons, including shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and unguided rockets that cannot be diverted by the flares helicopters disperse to fool heat-seeking systems.
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which the intelligence report says leads the insurgent group known as the Islamic State of Iraq, has claimed responsibility for shooting down three of the helicopters. Those helicopters were downed near Taji, Karma and in Diyala Province.
While the captured documents point to careful planning, it is not entirely clear whether this is an effort by some of the militant commanders in those areas or a nationwide strategy by the group.
Maj. Gen. James E. Simmons, a deputy commander of the American-led multinational force in Iraq and an Army aviator, told reporters this week that multiple weapons systems had been used against American troops before, in attacks south of Baghdad last year.
“This is not a new tactic,” he said. “But it is the first time that we have seen it employed in several months.”
“We are engaged with a thinking enemy,” he added. “This enemy understands based on the reporting and everything else that we are in the process of executing the prime minister’s new plan for the security of Baghdad. And they understand the strategic implications of shooting down an aircraft.”
He said that American commanders in Iraq have met to consider how to counter the shift in insurgent tactics, but he refused to discuss specifics.
General Simmons said the American military had not concluded whether a single militant cell was behind the attacks. Some of the attacks have been described by American intelligence as “opportunistic,” meaning insurgents are simply firing at helicopters when they seen them.
American helicopters are being used extensively as American troops try to avoid the bombs hidden along streets and roads. Low-flying aircraft are also vulnerable when they pass over urban areas. In 2005, American Army helicopters flew 240,000 hours. In 2007, Army helicopters are expected to fly more than 400,000 hours, military officials said.
General Simmons had a firsthand look at opportunistic tactics on Jan. 25, when he was in one of a group of helicopters that was fired on near Hit in Anbar Province. In that attack, a Black Hawk helicopter in the group was stuck by automatic weapons fire after the helicopters flew near some militants who appeared to be removing or bringing arms to a weapons cache.
The damaged Black Hawk helicopter was forced to land. The helicopter General Simmons was in landed and picked up the crew, and the Marines sent a quick-reaction force to protect the aircraft, which was later brought to the American base at Asad.
“I’ve got firsthand knowledge on that one,” General Simmons said. “We stumbled upon them, and they engaged us with what they had, and they got lucky.”
Military officials say another opportunistic downing was the attack on an Apache helicopter near Najaf on Jan. 28 that killed both of the crew members. It occurred when the aircraft was sent to reinforce American and Iraqi troops. The officials also noted that the attack was the only recent instance in which a Shiite group — in this case, the Soldiers of Heaven — was responsible for shooting down a helicopter.
The Feb. 7 attack on a Marine CH-46 Sea Knight transport helicopter near Karma, an insurgent stronghold near Falluja, was initially attributed by military officials to mechanical problems. But this week they acknowledged it had been downed by hostile fire, most likely a shoulder-fired missile and heavy-caliber machine-gun fire.
In the video posted on the Internet by the Islamic State of Iraq, the Sea Knight is seen flying toward the camera. Then it banks to the right and turns a half-circle. An object darts into the screen from the right, trailed by a curl of black smoke. Moments after the object enters the frame, an explosion rips through the helicopter, which falls to the ground in flames.
Gen. James Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, confirmed Friday that the video seemed genuine. General Conway also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the CH-46’s defensive systems intended to shield the aircraft from missiles “did not properly deploy” when it came under attack from the ground.
The CH-46 did not release flares, which fire automatically and are intended to fool a heat-seeking missile into flying away from the aircraft. Nor did the helicopter take defensive maneuvers, which military officials said suggested that the pilots did not see the missile before they were hit.
Col. Dave Lapan, a Marine spokesman, said investigators were looking into whether the flare system malfunctioned or whether there had been other reasons the system failed, including “environmental factors,” and whether the missile had characteristics that prevented it from being detected.
The recent spate of helicopter attacks began Jan. 20 with the shooting of a Black Hawk in Diyala Province that killed 12 soldiers on board. Three days later, a helicopter operated by the Blackwater security company crashed, leading to the deaths of five civilian contractors, including one thought to have been killed by militants surviving the crash. On Jan. 25, the Black Hawk helicopter in General Simmons’s group was forced to land near Hit, but there were no casualties.
Two American crew members were killed in the Apache helicopter downing near Najaf on Jan. 28. On Jan. 31, a helicopter carrying civilian contractors was hit by small-arms fire near Baghdad and forced to land, but there were no casualties. On Feb. 2, two Americans were killed when their Apache was shot down in a coordinated attack. Seven marines died in the Sea Knight downing near Karma on Feb. 7.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/world/middleeast/18helicopter.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&am...
Maybe???
Game over on global warming?
Action would have to be radical -- but climate change can be slowed.
By Alan Zarembo
Times Staff Writer
Note: Bold by My Dime
February 5, 2007
Everybody in the United States could switch from cars to bicycles.
The Chinese could close all their factories.
Europe could give up electricity and return to the age of the lantern.
But all those steps together would not come close to stopping global warming.
A landmark report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released Friday, warns that there is so much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that even if concentrations held at current levels, the effects of global warming would continue for centuries.
There is still hope. The report notes that a concerted world effort could stave off the direst consequences of global warming, such as widespread flooding, drought and extreme weather.
Ultimately eliminating the global warming threat, however, would require radical action.
To stabilize atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide — the primary contributor to global warming — CO2 emissions would have to drop 70% to 80%, said Richard Somerville, a theoretical meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.
Such a reduction would bring emissions into equilibrium with the planet's ability to absorb carbon dioxide. The last time the planet was in balance was more than 150 years ago, before the widespread use of coal and steam engines.
What would it take to bring that kind of reduction?
"All truck, all trains, all airplanes, cars, motorcycles and boats in the United States — that's 7.3% of global emissions," said Gregg Marland, a fossil fuel pollution expert at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Closing all fossil-fuel-powered electricity plants worldwide and replacing them with windmills, solar panels and nuclear power plants would make a serious dent — a 39% reduction globally, Marland said.
His calculation doesn't include all the fossil fuels that would have to be burned to build the greener facilities, though.
Trees could be planted to absorb more carbon dioxide. But even if every available space in the United States were turned into woodland, Marland said, it would not come close to offsetting U.S. emissions.
"There is not enough land area," he said.
The United States accounts for nearly a quarter of the carbon dioxide released each year, according to government statistics. China, in second at about 15%, is gaining fast.
If the rest of the world returned to the Stone Age, carbon concentrations would still rise.
Carbon does not dissipate rapidly. Some is eventually absorbed by oceans and plants, but about half stays in the atmosphere. And there is no easy way to get it out.
Maintaining current levels would require reducing worldwide carbon dioxide emissions by more than 20 billion tons a year, federal statistics suggest.
For some perspective on that number, consider an icon of the green movement: a 2007 Toyota Prius. Driving it 12,000 miles releases 4,200 pounds of carbon dioxide.
If hybrid cars replaced all 245 million cars in the United States — more than a third of the cars in the world — the carbon savings would be less than 3% of the needed reduction.
Rapid industrial development in some of the most populous nations has compounded the problem. Their burgeoning emissions could swamp environmental gains in other countries.
In India, carbon dioxide emissions increased 39% between 1993 and 2004 — nearly double the global rate. The figure was 36% in Indonesia. China, which saw a 45% rise, now opens a coal-fired power plant every week to 10 days.
Given the scale of the problem, experts see no realistic way to lower the concentration of atmospheric carbon.
In fact, Robert Socolow, a carbon mitigation expert at Princeton University, said that even if the entire world stopped burning fossil fuels, carbon wouldn't approach pre-Industrial Revolution levels for several hundred years.
The only possibility now is to slow the buildup of carbon. If emissions can be reduced enough, the gradual process of warming can be stretched into centuries.
From this perspective, there is some hope. Though the savings from any one measure may look small, in combination, they could add up to something significant, experts said.
There is no shortage of ideas.
The Environmental Protection Agency's administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said high-efficiency appliances and other products in the Energy Star program last year eliminated greenhouse gas emissions equal to the pollution from 23 million cars.
"As a citizen, each of us has an opportunity to make a difference," he said Friday after the release of the U.N. report.
He urged people to use compact fluorescent light bulbs, which provide the same light as a standard bulb on two-thirds of the energy.
Replacing one standard light bulb in every U.S. home would prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.
Tips from TerraPass Inc. of Menlo Park, Calif., include going back to clotheslines.
The company, which promotes alternative energy, says eliminating a family's dryer could save electricity equivalent to 1,016 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.
Socolow said the ultimate solution might rely on technology.
He said his research suggested that by improving energy efficiency now and phasing out fossil fuels over the next 100 years, carbon concentrations could remain within safe levels.
The biggest polluter, he said, should lead the way: "The U.S. is going to have to decarbonize."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-sci-emissions5feb05,0,4297089,print.story
I suppose you believe and hang on every word Bush has to say...I gather you must have tagged Rooster as one of your 'favorites'; good choice!
Hey Macc: I had to do a quick edit here after reading Krugman's piece posted by F6. Since you are proudly 'from the right', and likely disagree with what Krugman wrote, could you do us all a favor and give us the truth. I promise I won't put you on ignore...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Landmark Legal Foundation Nominates Rush Limbaugh for 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
Good post, F6. Molly was one of a kind and she will be sorely missed. It's a shame Molly is gone and we are still stuck with Bush, someone she pegged years ago.
May she rest in peace...
Surging and Purging
by Paul Krugman
There’s something happening here, and what it is seems completely clear: the Bush administration is trying to protect itself by purging independent-minded prosecutors.
Last month, Bud Cummins, the U.S. attorney (federal prosecutor) for the Eastern District of Arkansas, received a call on his cellphone while hiking in the woods with his son. He was informed that he had just been replaced by J. Timothy Griffin, a Republican political operative who has spent the last few years working as an opposition researcher for Karl Rove.
Mr. Cummins’s case isn’t unique. Since the middle of last month, the Bush administration has pushed out at least four U.S. attorneys, and possibly as many as seven, without explanation. The list includes Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for San Diego, who successfully prosecuted Duke Cunningham, a Republican congressman, on major corruption charges. The top F.B.I. official in San Diego told The San Diego Union-Tribune that Ms. Lam’s dismissal would undermine multiple continuing investigations.
In Senate testimony yesterday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales refused to say how many other attorneys have been asked to resign, calling it a “personnel matter.”
In case you’re wondering, such a wholesale firing of prosecutors midway through an administration isn’t normal. U.S. attorneys, The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, “typically are appointed at the beginning of a new president’s term, and serve throughout that term.” Why, then, are prosecutors that the Bush administration itself appointed suddenly being pushed out?
The likely answer is that for the first time the administration is really worried about where corruption investigations might lead.
Since the day it took power this administration has shown nothing but contempt for the normal principles of good government. For six years ethical problems and conflicts of interest have been the rule, not the exception.
For a long time the administration nonetheless seemed untouchable, protected both by Republican control of Congress and by its ability to justify anything and everything as necessary for the war on terror. Now, however, the investigations are closing in on the Oval Office. The latest news is that J. Steven Griles, the former deputy secretary of the Interior Department and the poster child for the administration’s systematic policy of putting foxes in charge of henhouses, is finally facing possible indictment.
And the purge of U.S. attorneys looks like a pre-emptive strike against the gathering forces of justice.
Won’t the administration have trouble getting its new appointees confirmed by the Senate? Well, it turns out that it won’t have to.
Arlen Specter, the Republican senator who headed the Judiciary Committee until Congress changed hands, made sure of that last year. Previously, new U.S. attorneys needed Senate confirmation within 120 days or federal district courts would name replacements. But as part of a conference committee reconciling House and Senate versions of the revised Patriot Act, Mr. Specter slipped in a clause eliminating that rule.
As Paul Kiel of TPMmuckraker.com — which has done yeoman investigative reporting on this story — put it, this clause in effect allows the administration “to handpick replacements and keep them there in perpetuity without the ordeal of Senate confirmation.” How convenient.
Mr. Gonzales says that there’s nothing political about the firings. And according to The Associated Press, he said that district court judges shouldn’t appoint U.S. attorneys because they “tend to appoint friends and others not properly qualified to be prosecutors.” Words fail me.
Mr. Gonzales also says that the administration intends to get Senate confirmation for every replacement. Sorry, but that’s not at all credible, even if we ignore the administration’s track record. Mr. Griffin, the political-operative-turned-prosecutor, would be savaged in a confirmation hearing. By appointing him, the administration showed that it has no intention of following the usual rules.
The broader context is this: defeat in the midterm elections hasn’t led the Bush administration to scale back its imperial view of presidential power.
On the contrary, now that President Bush can no longer count on Congress to do his bidding, he’s more determined than ever to claim essentially unlimited authority — whether it’s the authority to send more troops into Iraq or the authority to stonewall investigations into his own administration’s conduct.
The next two years, in other words, are going to be a rolling constitutional crisis.
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0119-30.htm
Reading Melanie Morgan's bio, I'll bet Mr. Virtue himself, Bill Bennett, got the hots for her...
In 1990, Morgan resigned at KGO and moved to Seattle where her husband, Jack Swanson, had taken a job as General Manager for King AM & FM. While in Seattle, according to a report that aired in May 2000 on CBS News, she became addicted to gambling. "I felt totally comfortable behind a poker table," she told interviewer Troy Roberts. "I could just get high off the cards. ... On the credit cards, I probably ran up $ 25,000. ... And that doesn't count the cash that I was going through either." The gambling continued after she became pregnant, "I ended up going into labor early," she said. "Of course, I was in a terrible environment, smoke-filled room, hardly taking care of myself. Yeah, I was gambling right up until an hour before I gave birth." After her son was born, her gambling obsession led her to neglect the child, requiring an informal intervention by Child Protective Services.
Rooster, you need to read the crap you write and post...the CEO's are saying it ain't God warming up the earth
CEOs lobby Bush to curb warming
and as for other countries trying to force us to change our way of life, we sure have no problem trying to force our way of life on others.
I'm all for companies cutting emissions. Just as long that it is their decision and the Federal Government, and certainly not other countries trying to force us to change our way of life.
Rooster, I know you just say things to get under people's skin because you couldn't be that....well, then again...
CEOs lobby Bush to curb warming
10 companies join activist groups in calling for caps on carbon emissions
MSNBC staff and news service reports
Updated: 1:16 p.m. PT Jan 19, 2007
WASHINGTON - Major corporations and environmental groups on Friday announced what they called an "unprecedented alliance" to push for quicker action against global warming — urging lawmakers to pass mandatory curbs on carbon emissions, in contrast to President Bush's voluntary approach.
In a statement, the 10 U.S.-based companies and four environmental groups called for mandatory reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, including those from power plants, transportation and buildings.
Called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the group includes aluminum giant Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar, DuPont, General Electric, Lehman Brothers and four utilities with a big stake in climate policy: Duke Energy, FPL Group, PG&E and PNM Resources. (MSNBC.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and GE's NBC Universal unit.)
The environmental partners are Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change and the World Resources Institute.
The partnership said the cornerstone of its approach to fighting global warming would be "a cap-and-trade program," echoing what Democrats and many environmentalists have proposed: a system that allows companies to buy and sell carbon credits. In such a system, emissions would be capped. Companies that reduce emissions and don't hit their limits could sell what is left over to companies that exceed their limits.
"There must be a reasoned and serious debate about the solutions," the group stated. "But debate cannot substitute for action. We hope that the consensus we have reached through our unique partnership provides further impetus toward the creation of sensible and effective policies to address global climate change."
Members of the group, which had been in talks over the last year, said company CEOs would offer more details at a National Press Club event on Monday, a day before Bush's State of the Union speech in which the president is expected to address climate change.
Members said they had agreed on a "shared goal of slowing, stopping and reversing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions over the shortest period of time reasonably achievable."
The New York Times reported Friday that the carbon caps called for by the group would aim to reduce emissions by 10 percent to 30 percent over the next 15 years.
In a reference to conventional coal-fired power plants, the group also said it favors "policies to speed the transition to low- and zero-emission stationary sources and strongly discourage further construction of stationary sources that cannot easily capture CO2 emissions."
The coalition’s diversity could send a signal that businesses want to get ahead of the increasing political momentum for federal emissions controls, in part to protect their long-term interests, the Times said.
In his speech next week, Bush is likely to support a massive increase in U.S. ethanol usage and tweak climate change policy, sources familiar with the White House plans said this week.
Political movement
The White House has confirmed that the speech will outline a policy on global warming, but said Bush has not dropped his opposition to mandatory limits on the heat-trapping greenhouse-gas emissions.
The Kyoto Protocol is the only global pact obliging signatories to cut carbon dioxide emissions, but the United States is not a member, nor are China and India. The protocol expires in 2012.
News of the coalition comes as governments and groups devote more attention to climate change policy.
Democrats in Congress are pushing legislation to curb carbon emissions, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proposed creating a special committee to deal with the issue.
In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order Thursday to reduce carbon emissions from transportation fuels, a move intended to widen the development and use of alternative vehicle fuels in the nation’s biggest state.
Abroad, the European Union's top diplomat said on Thursday that global warming has moved to the heart of European foreign policy.
And last Monday, a summit of Asian leaders promised to encourage more efficient energy use to help stave off global warming.
An EU-U.S. summit in April is expected to focus on energy security and a Group of Eight summit in early June will highlight energy and climate.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16708004/
What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy
By DAVID LEONHARDT
(Rooster: MyDime bold)
The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same.
The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.
For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.
Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.
The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.
All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:
The war in Iraq.
In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.
These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has pointed out.
But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom. The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington.
That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.
The two best-known analyses of the war’s costs agree on this figure, but they diverge from there. Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion on the war. They include a number of indirect costs, like the economic stimulus that the war funds would have provided if they had been spent in this country.
Mr. Wallsten, who worked with Katrina Kosec, another economist, argues for a figure closer to $1 trillion in today’s dollars. My own estimate falls on the conservative side, largely because it focuses on the actual money that Americans would have been able to spend in the absence of a war. I didn’t even attempt to put a monetary value on the more than 3,000 American deaths in the war.
Besides the direct military spending, I’m including the gas tax that the war has effectively imposed on American families (to the benefit of oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia). At the start of 2003, a barrel of oil was selling for $30. Since then, the average price has been about $50. Attributing even $5 of this difference to the conflict adds another $150 billion to the war’s price tag, Ms. Bilmes and Mr. Stiglitz say.
The war has also guaranteed some big future expenses. Replacing the hardware used in Iraq and otherwise getting the United States military back into its prewar fighting shape could cost $100 billion. And if this war’s veterans receive disability payments and medical care at the same rate as veterans of the first gulf war, their health costs will add up to $250 billion. If the disability rate matches Vietnam’s, the number climbs higher. Either way, Ms. Bilmes says, “It’s like a miniature Medicare.”
In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.
Whatever number you use for the war’s total cost, it will tower over costs that normally seem prohibitive. Right now, including everything, the war is costing about $200 billion a year.
Treating heart disease and diabetes, by contrast, would probably cost about $50 billion a year. The remaining 9/11 Commission recommendations — held up in Congress partly because of their cost — might cost somewhat less. Universal preschool would be $35 billion. In Afghanistan, $10 billion could make a real difference. At the National Cancer Institute, annual budget is about $6 billion.
“This war has skewed our thinking about resources,” said Mr. Wallsten, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative-leaning research group. “In the context of the war, $20 billion is nothing.”
As it happens, $20 billion is not a bad ballpark estimate for the added cost of Mr. Bush’s planned surge in troops. By itself, of course, that price tag doesn’t mean the surge is a bad idea. If it offers the best chance to stabilize Iraq, then it may well be the right option.
But the standard shouldn’t simply be whether a surge is better than the most popular alternative — a far-less-expensive political strategy that includes getting tough with the Iraqi government. The standard should be whether the surge would be better than the political strategy plus whatever else might be accomplished with the $20 billion.
This time, it would be nice to have that discussion before the troops reach Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/business/17leonhardt.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&ref=business&am...
Saudis consider sending troops to Iraq
Government ‘deeply skeptical’ al-Maliki can make Bush surge plan work
(Note: MyDime comments bold)
EXCLUSIVE
By Alex Johnson and Andrea Mitchell
MSNBC and NBC News
Updated: 2:01 p.m. PT Jan 16, 2007
Saudi Arabia believes the Iraqi government is not up to the challenge and has told the United States that it is prepared to move its own forces into Iraq should the violence there degenerate into chaos, a senior U.S. official told NBC News on Tuesday.
Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal made no effort to mask his skepticism Tuesday about President Bush’s proposal to send 21,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq to stem sectarian fighting.
“We agree with the full objectives set by the new plan,” Saud said at a joint news conference in Riyadh with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is traveling in the region selling Bush’s plan. “We are hoping these objectives can be accomplished, but the means are not in our hands. They are in the hands of the Iraqis themselves.”
In fact, Saudi leaders are privately “deeply skeptical” that the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki could implement the U.S. plan, the senior U.S. official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, who is traveling with Rice.
The Saudi government has signaled in the past that it would oppose an early withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, fearing it would leave minority Sunni Muslims at the mercy of Shiite Muslim militias.
The Saudis’ primary concern is the Sunni population of Anbar province, the senior U.S. official. The official said the Saudis had informed Washington that they were considering a plan to send troops into the province if Bush’s plan failed.
A White House spokesman declined to comment on the report, which Rice downplayed during a briefing for reporters. She said such a scenario was why it was important for the U.S. plan to produce a unified Iraq.
Rice seeks support for plan
Rice is in the region to lobby Egypt, Jordan and the six moderate Arab states in the Persian Gulf for a statement of support for Bush’s plan.
“I’ve briefed the president’s plan on Iraq at all the different stops,” Rice told reporters. “There is, I think, very good support for the American commitment there, very good support for the objectives the president wants to achieve.”
Bush’s proposal has met with wide skepticism as sectarian violence has deepened in Iraq. The United Nations reported Tuesday that more than 34,000 Iraqi civilians died last year; at least 109 people were killed or found dead Tuesday, the bloodiest day in weeks.
Bush acknowledged frustration at the turn of events in an interview Tuesday with PBS’s Jim Lehrer.
“I’m frustrated at times about Iraq because I understand the consequences of failure. I want the Iraqis to succeed for our own sake,” the president said, according to a transcript of the interview.
“This is a war, part of a broader war, and if we fail in Iraq, there is a better likelihood that the enemy comes and hurts us here.”
Saudis pledge no interference with Iran
While the focus of Rice’s tour is to drum up support for the U.S. initiative in Iraq, she was also seeking to put out a diplomatic brush fire over Iran after a top Iranian diplomat visited Riyadh to meet with King Abdullah to complain about the U.S. military build-up.
Saudi officials reassured Rice on Tuesday that they had no intention of getting in the middle of the dispute between Iran and the United States. Rice emphasized that the U.S. campaign to disrupt Iranian networks threatening U.S. forces in Iraq would be confined within the boundaries of Iraq, officials said.
During the meetings, Saud, the foreign minister, also welcomed Rice’s initiative to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, U.S. officials said.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16656642/
They screw up everything they touch...you may want to reconsider!!
Closer to War Against Iran?
Even after George W. Bush on Wednesday night rattled his saber at Iran while defending his escalation in Iraq, I've been wondering whether the Bush gang is really willing to (and capable of) taking on Tehran in a military fashion. Aren't their hands full (and bloody enough) in Iraq? Perhaps. But my friend, retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, believes the White House is moving closer to an attack against Iran. Gardiner, an expert on military strategy who has taught at the National War College, has been reading tea leaves longer and closer than I have. For months, he has warned that the clues point to war against Iran. Here's his latest analysis:
Pieces in Place for Escalation Against Iran
by Sam Gardiner
The pieces are moving. They'll be in place by the end of February. The United States will be able to escalate military operations against Iran.
The second carrier strike group leaves the US west coast on Tuesday. It will be joined by naval mine clearing assets from both the United States and the UK. Patriot missile defense systems have also been ordered to deploy to the Gulf. A squadron of F-16's arrived in Turkey on Friday, the first deployment there in three years.
Maybe as a guard against North Korea seeing operations focused on Iran as a chance to be aggressive, a squadron of F-117 stealth fighters has just been deployed to Korea.
This has to be called escalation. We have to remind ourselves, just as Iran is supporting groups inside Iraq, the United States is supporting groups inside Iran. Just as Iran has special operations troops operating inside Iraq, we've read the United States has special operations troops operating inside Iran.
Just as Iran is supporting Hamas, two weeks ago we found out the United States is supporting arms for Abbas. Just as Iran and Syria are supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon we're now learning the White House has approved a finding to allow the CIA to support opposition groups inside Lebanon. Just as Iran is supporting Syria, we've learned recently that the United States is going to fund Syrian opposition groups.
We learned this week the President authorized an attack on the Iranian liaison office in Irbil.
The White House keeps saying there are no plans to attack Iran. Obviously, the facts suggest otherwise. Equally as clear, the Iranians will read what the Administration is doing not what it is saying.
It is possible the White House strategy is just implementing a strategy to put pressure on Iran on a number of fronts, and this will never amount to anything. On the other hand, if the White House is on a path to strike Iran, we'll see a few more steps unfold.
First, we know there is a National Security Council staff-led group whose mission is to create outrage in the world against Iran. Just like before Gulf II, this media group will begin to release stories to sell a strike against Iran. Watch for the outrage stuff.
The Patriot missiles going to the GCC states are only part of the missile defense assets. I would expect to see the deployment of some of the European-based missile defense assets to Israel, just as they were before Gulf II.
I would expect deployment of additional USAF fighters into the bases in Iraq, maybe some into Afghanistan.
I think we will read about the deployment of some of the newly arriving Army brigades going into Iraq being deployed to the border with Iran. Their mission will be to guard against any Iranian movements into Iraq.
As one of the last steps before a strike, we'll see USAF tankers moved to unusual places, like Bulgaria. These will be used to refuel the US-based B-2 bombers on their strike missions into Iran. When that happens, we'll only be days away from a strike.
The White House could be telling the truth. Maybe there are no plans to take Iran to the next level. The fuel for a fire is in place, however. All we need is a spark. The danger is that we have created conditions that could lead to a Greater Middle East War.
If it is truly just a matter of a spark, then the conflagration will probably be started eventually. This administration does not practice fire safety.
http://www.davidcorn.com/
Rooster, thanks for the laughs. The GOP's all bent out of shape over the Dems appalling behavior...too funny, or better yet...
Breathtaking.
Simply breathtaking.
We scarcely know where to begin.
Ya'll drag us into the greatest foreign policy blunder in the history of our country, pummel the middle class, tear asunder our constitution...and you got your shorts in a knott over what...???
Yup, breathtaking, simply breathtaking...
Bubba, we -- yes, we --have to stop the war now
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
The president of the United States does not have the sense that God gave a duck -- so it's up to us. You and me, Bubba.
I don't know why George W. Bush is just standing there like a frozen rabbit, but it's time we found out. The fact is that WE have to do something about it. This country is being torn apart by an evil and unnecessary war, and it has to be stopped. NOW.
This war is being prosecuted in our names, with our money, with our blood, against our will. Polls consistently show that less than 30 percent of the people want to maintain current troop levels. It is obscene and wrong for the president to go against the people in this fashion. And it's doubly wrong for him to increase U.S. troop levels in this hellhole by up to 20,000, as he reportedly will soon announce.
What happened to the nation that never tortured? The nation that wasn't supposed to start wars of choice? The nation that respected human rights and life? A nation that from the beginning was against tyranny?
Where have we gone? How did we let these people take us there? How did we let them fool us?
It's monstrous to put people in prison and keep them there. Since 1215, civil authorities have been obligated to tell people the charges against them if they're arrested. This administration has done away with rights enshrined in the Magna Carta, and we've let them do it.
This will be a regular feature of mine, like an old-fashioned newspaper campaign. Every column, I'll write about this war until we find some way to end it. Every column, we will review some factor we should have gotten right.
So let's take a step back and note that before the war, one of its architects, Paul Wolfowitz, testified to Congress that Iraq had no history of ethnic strife.
Sectarian and ethnic strife is a part of the region. And the region is full of examples of Western colonial powers trying to occupy countries, take their resources and take over the administration of their people -- and failing. The sectarian bloodbath we see daily completely refutes Wolfowitz.
And let's keep in mind that when the Army arrived in Baghdad, we, the television viewers, watched footage of a bunch of enraged and joyous Iraqis pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein, their repulsive dictator, in Firdos Square. Only one thing was wrong: The event was staged, instigated by a Marine colonel and a psychological operations unit that made it appear spontaneous.
When we later saw the whole square where the statue was located, only 30 to 40 people were there (U.S. soldiers, press and some Iraqis -- and one of several U.S. tanks present pulled the statue down with a cable). We, the television viewers, saw the square being presented as though the people of Iraq had gone into a frenzy, mobbed the square and spontaneously pulled down the statue.
We need to cut through all this smoke and mirrors and come up with an exit strategy, forthwith.
The Democrats have yet to offer a cohesive plan to get us out of this mess. Of course, it's not their fault -- but the fact is that we need leaders who are grown-ups and who are willing to try to fix it. Bush has ignored the actual grown-ups from the Iraq Study Group and the generals and all other experts who are nearly unanimous in the opinion that more troops will not help.
It's up to you and me, Bubba.
We need to make sure that the new Congress curbs executive power, which has been so misused, and asserts its own power to make this situation change.
Now.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/columnists/molly_ivins/16398938.htm?template=contentModules...
The Imperial Presidency 2.0
Observing President Bush in action lately, we have to wonder if he actually watched the election returns in November, or if he was just rerunning the 2002 vote on his TiVo.
That year, the White House used the fear of terrorism to scare American voters into cementing the Republican domination of Congress. Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney then embarked on an expansion of presidential power chilling both in its sweep and in the damage it did to the constitutional system of checks and balances.
In 2006, the voters sent Mr. Bush a powerful message that it was time to rein in his imperial ambitions. But we have yet to see any sign that Mr. Bush understands that — or even realizes that the Democrats are now in control of the Congress. Indeed, he seems to have interpreted his party’s drubbing as a mandate to keep pursuing his fantasy of victory in Iraq and to press ahead undaunted with his assault on civil liberties and the judicial system. Just before the Christmas break, the Justice Department served notice to Senator Patrick Leahy — the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee — that it intended to keep stonewalling Congressional inquiries into Mr. Bush’s inhumane and unconstitutional treatment of prisoners taken in anti-terrorist campaigns. It refused to hand over two documents, including one in which Mr. Bush authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to establish secret prisons beyond the reach of American law or international treaties. The other set forth the interrogation methods authorized in these prisons — which we now know ranged from abuse to outright torture.
Also last month, Mr. Bush issued another of his infamous “presidential signing statements,” which he has used scores of times to make clear he does not intend to respect the requirements of a particular law — in this case a little-noticed Postal Service bill. The statement suggested that Mr. Bush does not believe the government must obtain a court order before opening Americans’ first-class mail. It said the administration had the right to “conduct searches in exigent circumstances,” which include not only protecting lives, but also unspecified “foreign intelligence collection.”
The law is clear on this. A warrant is required to open Americans’ mail under a statute that was passed to stop just this sort of abuse using just this sort of pretext. But then again, the law is also clear on the need to obtain a warrant before intercepting Americans’ telephone calls and e-mail. Mr. Bush began openly defying that law after Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail between the United States and other countries.
•
News accounts have also reminded us of the shameful state of American military prisons, where supposed terrorist suspects are kept without respect for civil or human rights, and on the basis of evidence so deeply tainted by abuse, hearsay or secrecy that it is essentially worthless.
Deborah Sontag wrote in The Times last week about the sorry excuse for a criminal case that the administration whipped up against Jose Padilla, who was once — but no longer is — accused of plotting to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States. Mr. Padilla was held for two years without charges or access to a lawyer. Then, to avoid having the Supreme Court review Mr. Bush’s power grab, the administration dropped those accusations and charged Mr. Padilla in a criminal court on hazy counts of lending financial support to terrorists.
But just as the government abandoned the “dirty bomb” case against Mr. Padilla, it quietly charged an Ethiopian-born man, Binyam Mohamed, with conspiring with Mr. Padilla to commit that very crime. Unlike Mr. Padilla, Mr. Mohamed is not a United States citizen, so the administration threw him into Guantánamo. Now 28, he is still being held there as an “illegal enemy combatant” under the anti-constitutional military tribunals act that was rushed through the Republican-controlled Congress just before last November’s elections.
Mr. Mohamed was a target of another favorite Bush administration practice: “extraordinary rendition,” in which foreign citizens are snatched off the streets of their hometowns and secretly shipped to countries where they can be abused and tortured on behalf of the American government. Mr. Mohamed — whose name appears nowhere in either of the cases against Mr. Padilla — has said he was tortured in Morocco until he signed a confession that he conspired with Mr. Padilla. The Bush administration clearly has no intention of answering that claim, and plans to keep Mr. Mohamed in extralegal detention indefinitely.
•
The Democratic majority in Congress has a moral responsibility to address all these issues: fixing the profound flaws in the military tribunals act, restoring the rule of law over Mr. Bush’s rogue intelligence operations and restoring the balance of powers between Congress and the executive branch. So far, key Democrats, including Mr. Leahy and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, chairman of a new subcommittee on human rights, have said these issues are high priorities for them.
We would lend such efforts our enthusiastic backing and hope Mr. Leahy, Mr. Durbin and other Democratic leaders are not swayed by the absurd notion circulating in Washington that the Democrats should now “look ahead” rather than use their new majority to right the dangerous wrongs of the last six years of Mr. Bush’s one-party rule.
This is a false choice. Dealing with these issues is not about the past. The administration’s assault on some of the nation’s founding principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/opinion/07sun1.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pa...
Kristol Clear at Time
From my "Capital Games" column at www.thenation.com....
The market doesn't work -- not when it comes to conservative commentators.
Before the Iraq war, rightwing (and middle-of-the-road) pundits claimed Saddam Hussein was a dire WMD threat, that he was in cahoots with al Qaeda, that the war was necessary. The neoconservative cheerleaders for war also argued that an invasion of Iraq would bring democracy to that nation and throughout the region. They were wrong. But they have paid no price for their errors. They did not have to serve in Iraq. None, as far as I can tell, have had sons or daughters harmed or killed in the fighting there. They did not have to bear higher taxes, because George W. Bush has charged the costs of this military enterprise to the national credit card. Though they miscalled the number-one issue of the post-9/11 period, they did not lose their influential perches in the commentariat. Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Gary Schmitt, Danielle Pletka and others (including non-neocon Thomas Friedman) who blew it on Iraq still regularly appear on op-ed pages and television news shows, pitching their latest notions about Iraq, Iran or other matters.
Foremost among this band is William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and former chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle. Kristol, a Fox News regular, has not seen his standing as a go-to conservative pundit suffered. Moreover, he has been rewarded with a plum posting. Time magazine's new managing editor, Richard Stengel, has invited Kristol to become what Stengel calls a "star" columnist for the magazine.
Both Kristol and Stengel are likable fellows. I usually enjoy debating Kristol on television or radio. He's no hater, and he's no autopilot partisan. Stengel is a thoughtful and cerebral person who once was a senior adviser to cerebral Senator Bill Bradley, a Democrat. So there's nothing personal when I ask, why in the hell does Stengel believe that what America needs now is more Bill Kristol? (Slate media cop Jack Shafer criticized Stengel's pick of Kristol by noting that "Kristol isn't much of a deviation from Charles Krauthammer, an occasional Time 'Essay' writer." Friendship declared: Shafer is a pal of mine.)
It's too late to affect Stengel's decision, but let's take this occasion to review Kristol's record on Iraq, courtesy of a rather cursory Nexis search. It holds no surprises.
On September 11, 2002, as the Bush administration began its sales campaign for the coming war, Kristol suggested that Saddam Hussein could do more harm to the United States than al Qaeda had: "we cannot afford to let Saddam Hussein inflict a worse 9/11 on us in the future."
On September 15, 2002, he claimed that inspection and containment could not work with Saddam: "No one believes the inspections can work." Actually, UN inspectors believed they could work. So, too, did about half of congressional Democrats. They were right.
On September 18, 2002, Kristol opined that a war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East."
On September 19, 2002, he once again pooh-poohed inspections: "We should not fool ourselves by believing that inspections could make any difference at all." During a debate with me on Fox News Channel, after I noted that the goal of inspections was to prevent Saddam from reaching "the finish line" in developing nuclear weapons, Kristol exclaimed, "He's past that finish line. He's past the finish line."
On November 21, 2002, he maintained, "we can remove Saddam because that could start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy."
On February 2, 2003, he claimed that Secretary of State Colin Powell at an upcoming UN speech would "show that there are loaded guns throughout Iraq" regarding weapons of mass destruction. As it turned out, everything in Powell's speech was wrong. Kristol was uncritically echoing misleading information handed him by friends and allies within the Bush administration.
On February 20, 2003, he summed up the argument for war against Saddam: "He's got weapons of mass destruction. At some point he will use them or give them to a terrorist group to use...Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world....France and Germany don't have the courage to face up to the situation. That's too bad. Most of Europe is with us. And I think we will be respected around the world for helping the people of Iraq to be liberated."
On March 1, 2003, Kristol dismissed concerns that sectarian conflict might arise following a US invasion of Iraq: "We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they've never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together." He also said, "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president." And he maintained that the war would be a bargain at $100 to $200 billion. The running tab is now nearing half a trillion dollars.
On March 5, 2003, Kristol said, "I think we'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq."
Such vindication never came. Kristol was mistaken about the justification for the war, the costs of the war, the planning for the war, and the consequences of the war. That's a lot for a pundit to miss. In his columns and statements about Iraq, Kristol displayed little judgment or expertise. He was not informing the public; he was whipping it. He turned his wishes into pronouncements and helped move the country to a mismanaged and misguided war that has claimed the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. That's not journalism.
In an effectively functioning market of opinion-trading, Kristol's views would be relegated to the bargain basement. And he ought to be doing penance, not penning columns for Time. But -- fortunate for him -- the world of punditry is a rather imperfect marketplace.
http://www.davidcorn.com/
Weaning the military from the GOP
A less partisan military is good for democracy and allows a more frank debate on national security.
Rosa Brooks
January 5, 2007
BURIED IN THE NEWS last week was one of the most potentially significant stories of recent years. The Military Times released its annual poll of active-duty service members, and the results showed something virtually unprecedented: a one-year decline of 10 percentage points in the number of military personnel identifying themselves as Republicans. In the 2004 poll, the percentage of military respondents who characterized themselves as Republicans stood at 60%. By the end of 2005, that had dropped to 56%. And by the end of 2006, the percentage of military Republicans plummeted to 46%.
The drop in Republican Party identification among active-duty personnel is a sharp reversal of a 30-year trend toward the "Republicanization" of the U.S. military, and it could mark a sea change in the nature of the military — and the nature of public debates about national security issues.
For most of U.S. history, issues of national security rarely divided Americans along sharp party lines: The old adage that "politics ends at the water's edge" generally held true. The military, while institutionally conservative with a small "c," was not closely identified with a particular political party. But somewhere between the end of the Vietnam War and the middle of the Clinton era, the U.S. military began to look like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.
The rightward shift was dramatic: In 1976, 25% of civilians characterized themselves as Republicans, while 33% of military officers were Republicans — a military-civilian "gap" of only 8%. By 1996, the military-civilian gap on party affiliation had grown to 33%; while 34% of civilians self-identified as Republicans, so did a whopping 70% of military officers.
In Britain, the Anglican Church used to be snidely described as "the Tory Party at Prayer." In the United States over the last 30 years, the military became, to a significant extent, the Republican Party at War.
The Republicanization of the professional military came about for many reasons, some obvious, some less so. To some extent, it resulted from changing perceptions of how "pro-military" the two main parties were: In the wake of the Vietnam War, the Democratic Party became associated, in the popular mind, with antiwar, antimilitary policies. With the end of Vietnam-era conscription, which guaranteed a relatively representative military, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats may have opted to join the military (at least as officers), while many career military personnel transferred their allegiance to the political party they saw as "on their side."
But the Republicanization of the military was not just because of "natural" self-selection. It also resulted from changed recruitment and base-closing policies, combined with the steady Republicanization of the American South. The period since the late 1960s saw the closure of many northeastern ROTC programs and the expansion of those programs in the South. By the late 1990s, more than 40% of all ROTC programs were in the South — mainly at state universities — though the South is home to fewer than 30% of the nation's college students. Similar patterns in base closures have meant that disproportionate numbers of military personnel are now stationed at bases in the South and Southwest.
For a time, the Republicanization of the military became self-reinforcing. The GOP has controlled the White House for all but 12 of the last 34 years and has made a determined effort to identify itself with the military and to court military voters. By the turn of the millennium, the perception that Republicans were "pro-military" while Democrats were "soft" on defense had become an entrenched facet of American politics.
The latest Military Times poll offers the most telling evidence yet that this is beginning to change. Although the reasons for the recent military flight from the Republican Party can only be guessed at, it's a safe bet that disgust at Bush administration bungling in Iraq is the single biggest factor.
The poll shows that only 35% of military personnel approve of the president's handling of the war, and three-fourths of those polled say that the military is "stretched too thin to be effective." Anecdotal evidence suggests that many career officers also are skeptical of the administration's approach to combating terrorism and unhappy with its undermining of the norms of the Geneva Convention.
The partial de-Republicanization of the military is a hopeful sign — and not just for Democrats. A politicized military presents a threat to democratic ideals of civilian control. Over the last 30 years, the Republicanization of the military also has had a deeply distorting effect on public debates about national security, making it almost impossible to question Republican national security policies without being labeled "anti-military."
As we struggle to move beyond the horrors of Iraq, we desperately need to develop fresh approaches to changing security threats. That requires a military that isn't partisan — and political leaders who won't make posturing in front of the troops a substitute for responsible policies.
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkpg=http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opini...
3,000 Deaths in Iraq, Countless Tears at Home
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ and ANDREW LEHREN
Jordan W. Hess was the unlikeliest of soldiers.
He could bench-press 300 pounds and then go home and write poetry. He learned the art of glass blowing because it seemed interesting and built a computer with only a magazine as his guide. Most recently, he fell in love with a woman from Brazil and took up digital photography, letting both sweep his heart away.
Specialist Hess, the seventh of eight children, was never keen on premonitions, but on Christmas of 2005, as his tight-knit family gathered on a beach for the weekend, he told each sibling and parent privately that he did not expect to come home from Iraq.
On Nov. 11, Specialist Hess, 26, freshly arrived in Iraq, was conducting a mission as the driver of an Abrams tank when an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., blew up with brain-rattling force. The blast was so potent it penetrated the 67-ton tank, flinging him against the top and critically injuring his spine. His four crewmates survived. For three weeks, he hung on at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, long enough to utter a few words to his loved ones and absorb their kindness.
On Dec. 4, Specialist Hess slipped onto the ever-expanding list of American military fatalities in Iraq, one that has increased by an average of more than three a day since Oct. 1, the highest three-month toll in two years. On Sunday, with the announcement of the death in Baghdad of Specialist Dustin R. Donica, 22, of Spring, Tex., the list reached the somber milestone of at least 3,000 deaths since the March 2003 invasion.
The landmark reflects how much more dangerous and muddled a soldier’s job in Iraq has become in the face of a growing and increasingly sophisticated insurgency. Violence in the country is at an all-time high, according to a Pentagon report released last month. December was the third deadliest month for American troops since the start of the war, with insurgents claiming 111 soldiers’ lives. October and November also witnessed a high number of casualties, 106 and 68 respectively, as American forces stepped up combat operations to try to stabilize Baghdad.
“It escalated while I was there,” said Capt. Scott Stanford, a National Guard officer who was a commander of a headquarters company in Ramadi for a year, arriving in June 2005. “When we left this June, it was completely unhinged. There was a huge increase in the suicide car bombs we had. The I.E.D.’s were bigger and more complex.”
“And it was very tense before we left in terms of snipers,” said Captain Stanford, a member of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “I don’t know if there were more of them, or if they were getting better.”
This spike in violence, which has been felt most profoundly by Iraqi civilians, who are dying by the thousands, has stoked feverish debate about the nation’s presence in Iraq. Many Democrats in Congress are urging a phased withdrawal from the country, and the Bush administration is leaning toward deploying additional troops in 2007. If the conflict continues into March, the Iraq war will be the third longest in American history, ranked behind the Vietnam War and the American Revolution.
President Bush did not specifically acknowledge reaching the milestone of 3,000 American deaths, but a White House spokesman, Scott Stanzel, said the president “grieves for each one that is lost” and would ensure that their sacrifices were not made in vain. The campaign against terrorism, Mr. Stanzel said, will be a long struggle.
Specialist Hess had volunteered for his mission to spare another soldier the danger of going outside the wire that day. Like so many of his fallen comrades, he had become the victim of an inescapably dangerous roadside landscape.
“It was the type of injury you rarely recover from; in past wars you wouldn’t have gotten out of theater,” said his father, Bill Hess, a Boeing engineer and retired Air Force man. “So that was a blessing, that he could talk to us. He mouthed words and we were able to say we loved him. There is a lot to be said for that.”
A Steady Toll of Deaths
In many ways, the third 1,000 men and women to die in Iraq faced the same unflinching challenge as the second 1,000 soldiers to die there — a dedicated and ruthless Iraqi insurgency that has exploited the power of roadside bombs to chilling effect. These bombs now cause about half of all American combat deaths and injuries in Iraq.
Over all, the casualty rate has remained relatively steady since 2005, dipping only slightly. It took 14 months for the death toll to jump to 2,000 soldiers from 1,000. It took about two weeks longer for it to rise to 3,000 from 2,000, during the period covering Oct. 25, 2005, to this week.
“It is hugely frustrating, tragic and disappointing that we can’t reduce the fatality rate,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst for the Brookings Institution.
The service members who died during this latest period fit an unchanging profile. They were mostly white men from rural areas, soldiers so young they still held fresh memories of high school football heroics and teenage escapades. Many men and women were in Iraq for the second or third time. Some were going on their fourth, fifth or sixth deployment.
But in other ways, the situation has changed in the past year. Improvised explosive devices — the kind that killed Specialist Hess — have grown deadlier, despite concerted Pentagon efforts and billions of dollars spent trying to counteract them. Insurgents are now more adept at concealing bombs, booby-trapping them and powering them to penetrate well-armored vehicles. They are also scattering more of them along countless roads using myriad triggers and hiding spots — under garbage and tires, behind guardrails, inside craters.
At the same time, Iraqi citizens have grown less inclined to tip off soldiers to the presence of these bombs. About 1,200 roadside bombs were detonated in August.
The toll of war has fallen most heavily this year on regular Army soldiers, at least 544 of whom died in this group of 1,000, compared with 405 in the last group. This increase was the result of fewer National Guard soldiers and reservists being deployed to Iraq in 2006.
Considering the intensity of the violence in Iraq this year, it is remarkable that the casualty rate did not climb higher, analysts and officers say. Long-awaited improvements in body and vehicle armor have helped protect soldiers, and advances in battlefield medicine have saved many lives. New procedures, like leaving wounds open to prevent infection, and relaying soldiers to hospitals faster than ever, have kept more service members alive. Troops now carry their own tourniquets.
During World War II, 30 percent of all wounded soldiers died of their injuries, a number that dipped to 24 percent during the Vietnam War and then to 9 percent for the Iraq conflict. Though this is a positive development, it also means that more soldiers are coming home with life-changing injuries, including amputations and brain trauma. More than 22,000 soldiers have been wounded in Iraq.
“There is no question that the number of dead should have been far higher,” said Dr. William Winkenwerder, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, referring to the Iraqi conflict. “Some of these blast injuries are very powerful.”
Bombs and bullets are not the only things that can kill soldiers; nearly 20 percent of those who die in Iraq do so outside of combat operations. Sometimes it is the hazard of driving too quickly on badly rutted roads to avoid danger. Humvees, weighted down with armor, can easily flip if maneuvered too quickly. Many of Iraq’s roads are not built to hold heavy vehicles, and the ground can give way, tossing multi-ton machines into narrow canals where soldiers have drowned. Helicopters are sometimes strafed by sandstorms or crippled by mechanical malfunctions. Accidents make up two-thirds of the nonhostile deaths.
With so many soldiers carrying so many weapons, unintentional casualties occur, sometimes while handling firearms. Fire from one’s own side is another inevitability of war, as is suicide. Since March 2003, 93 soldiers have died from self-inflicted wounds in Iraq.
In a way, these deaths, coming not at the hands of the enemy, but as a consequence of inferior roads and turbulent weather, can be even more difficult for parents to accept. Sometimes they wait months for official reports, since all noncombat deaths must be investigated.
“I don’t think I ever thought something like this could happen,” said Shelley Burnett, whose son, Lance Cpl. Jason K. Burnett, 20, died in May after his tank toppled into a canal. “We talked a lot about the I.E.D.’s and the dangers out there, but Jason kept saying, ‘There is not a whole lot they can do to a tank.’ ”
Death at Roadside
Over the last two years, the Pentagon has worked frantically to harden body armor and the armor on its Humvees and other vehicles. And the insurgents in Iraq have responded just as forcefully with deadly innovations in roadside bombs, and a fury of sniper bullets.
The most lethal development is the use of the “explosively formed penetrators,” which pierce armor and stay intact when they explode. Roadside bombs are often detonated from a distance — with garage door openers, for example — or automatically, from pressure-sensitive devices, like a simple rubber air hose. Motion detectors and infrared devices are also used.
The vast majority of these bombs do not kill soldiers, or even injure them seriously. Four out of five I.E.D.’s that detonate do not cause casualties, an improvement over previous years, the Pentagon says. But those devices that do cause casualties are killing more soldiers. An analysis by The New York Times of military records found that in 2003, the devices accounted for 16 percent of troop fatalities. This year, they accounted for 43 percent. And an increasing number are killing more than one soldier.
“Unfortunately, when there is a fatal I.E.D. attack, there often are multiple wounded and casualties,” said Christine DeVries, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s Joint I.E.D. Defeat Organization. “The enemy has had some success in adapting to what we are doing.”
Lance Cpl. Jon Eric Bowman, 21, affectionate and angel-faced, was typical of many of the soldiers and marines who found their calling in the military. He was raised in rural Dubach, La., far from the razzmatazz of New Orleans, and could not wait to join after the Sept. 11 attacks.
He was first sent to Iraq early in 2005. When he came home later that year, he had changed. Three days before he was set to redeploy this September, he sat with his wife in their truck and talked for six hours.
“He was crying, he was so scared,” said his wife, Dawn Bowman, 26. “He was having dreams that he wasn’t coming back.”
In fact, Corporal Bowman had been having blackouts, migraines and a tic, new ailments from his time in Iraq, his wife said. The diagnosis was Tourette’s syndrome, and he was then told by doctors in in Louisiana that fluid had built up in his brain.
He wound up back in Iraq, anyway. “They felt he was just trying to get out of Iraq,” said Johnny Bowman, the corporal’s father, of his son’s superiors. “That there was really nothing wrong with him. That’s what he told me on the phone.”
Corporal Bowman did not push the issue, feeling guilty about abandoning his fellow marines. On Oct. 9, his Humvee ran across a roadside bomb, killing him instantly. He had been manning the machine gun.
“Jon Eric was not just my only son,” his father said. “He was my best friend.”
Lance Cpl. Jeromy D. West, 20, a mortar man who loved to fish as much as he hated to study, was killed on Nov. 25 by a sniper bullet as he stood guard on a roof in Haditha. It was his second deployment.
In December, shortly after word of his death, his family honored his wishes and held a memorial for him on the football field at Hamilton High School, near San Diego, where he had been a star player. A thousand people showed up.
“Everybody liked him,” his stepfather, Ron Klopf, said. “People would say, ‘God, your son is polite.’ And I would say, ‘My kid?’ I called him Eddie Haskell — so polite at everybody else’s house.”
Corporal West was goofy in the best way. Not long before he joined the Marines, he and his friend would compete to see who could get a bigger freeze headache from eating too much ice cream. They would writhe in pain. Then they would do it again. He was 17 when he decided to get serious and join the corps, something his parents tried to talk him out of.
“ ‘You can get killed doing this,’ ” Mr. Klopf remembers saying. “And he said, ‘Should we send some other parent’s kid out there?’ And that’s how he was.”
For Corporal Burnett, death came not from bullets or bombs but from riding in a tank in a country crisscrossed with irrigation canals and crumbly roads. Just two years after graduating from high school in St. Cloud, Fla., where he spent his summers building houses for the poor and four-wheeling on back-country roads, Corporal Burnett’s tank fell off a bridge and plunged into a canal, in which he drowned.
His mother cannot forget the day Jason and his younger brother tossed her back and forth in the yard to make her scream with laughter. “He was a fun-loving kid,” Mrs. Burnett said. “If you heard laughter, you knew Jason was around.”
Optimism was Specialist Robert F. Weber’s indelible quality. A gunner from Cincinnati, he had warned his mother, Cathy, that the roads in Iraq were wretched. She worried a lot during his first deployment, particularly after he sent home a roll of film to develop. The first print she saw was of a missile hitting a barracks.
But he made it back to America and bought a blue Kia, the color of his eyes, before redeploying three weeks later. The Army had been a good fit. “He was proud of himself,” she said of Bobby, her only child. “I was very proud. It was like he found his niche.”
On his second deployment, though, the situation in Iraq had become grimmer. “Mom, things are getting worse over here, more dangerous,” he said, from his base near Mosul the Saturday before he died. “The roads are bad. You don’t run over anything even if it looks like a piece of paper.”
But the lumbering armored Humvee he was on never hit a bomb on Sept. 30. It swerved somehow and flipped, killing him.
Mrs. Weber said she cannot imagine seeing the troops walk away from Iraq now, when democracy seems as unattainable as ever. “For what did all these guys get killed over there?” she asked, incredulously. “What for?”
Seven Days from Home
Back in America, countless families and friends have waited and worried and tried their best these past years to keep themselves busy until their husbands, sons, wives, daughters, fathers, mothers or buddies returned home safely. For 3,000 of them, the reunion never came.
In too many cases, the homecoming was tantalizingly near, a few more X’s on the calendar and the vigil would be over. A number of soldiers were killed just days and weeks from the end of their deployment, a date close enough to allow those back home to lower their guard a trifle, making the deaths all the more devastating.
“It’s almost like Christmas is here, and you wake up Christmas morning and there is no Christmas,” said Col. Bill Rochelle, a retired National Guard commander of the 42nd Division support command.
Gunnery Sgt. John D. Fry, a 28-year-old marine from Lorena, Tex., was seven days from scooping up his wife, Malia, and his three kids into a group hug back in America. “My plans,” Sergeant Fry told his commander, “are to go home and wrestle with my kids.”
He and Mrs. Fry were only 15 when they went on their first date, to see “A League of Their Own,” and then to eat ice cream at the mall. Mom and Dad drove them home. A year later, he plopped her on his lap and proposed. They kept their engagement a secret. Not long after, he was named salutatorian at Heritage Christian Academy. Another student bested him for the top title; it was the future Mrs. Fry, the valedictorian.
“We were soul mates,” Mrs. Fry said. On Nov. 15, 1995, five days after he graduated from boot camp, they were married.
Mr. Fry, who liked a challenge, specialized in defusing explosive devices, a nerve-racking skill he brought with him to Iraq. “Babe,” Mrs. Fry recalled his saying when he chose the specialty, “it’s dangerous, but I want to do it. And I said, ‘Let’s go.’ ”
A team leader, Sergeant Fry, who shipped out to Iraq in September 2005, disarmed 73 bombs, including one of the biggest car bombs found in Falluja. Once he helped defuse a suicide vest that insurgents had belted to a mentally handicapped Iraqi teenage boy. The boy had been beaten and chained to a wall. Another time, he spotted a bomb from the roof of a house. A little boy popped into the yard, hovering dangerously close to it. Sergeant Fry won his confidence by playing peekaboo, then got him to move away.
He was in “very high spirits” in March, calling his wife to say that his duties were done, his paperwork filed and his anticipation impossible to stifle. “He had made it,” she said. Then a mission came down, and commanders were preparing to send a team of mostly inexperienced men to defuse bombs along a road in Al Anbar province. He volunteered for the job, instead. “That is how he led,” Mrs. Fry said.
Sergeant Fry found three bombs that night and defused them. But the insurgents had hidden a fourth bomb under the third one, a booby-trap. It blew up and killed him. An Army team stayed with his body for six hours, fending off enemy fire in the dark until soldiers with mortuary affairs arrived to take his body away.
The war never scared him, Mrs. Fry said.
“It was hard, but he felt he was making a difference,” she said. “He believed truly, that if he wasn’t over there, they would be trying to harm us here.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/us/01deaths.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
No, my fine feathered friend, it is just ending...Happy New Year to a new dawn...
The Republican revolution is over:
A Failed Revolution, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times:
After first attempting to deny the scale of last month’s defeat, the apologists have settled on a story line that sounds just like Marxist explanations for the failure of the Soviet Union. What happened, you see, was that the noble ideals of the Republican revolution of 1994 were undermined by Washington’s corrupting ways. And the recent defeat was a good thing, because it will force a return to the true conservative path.
But the truth is that the movement ... was always based on a lie.
The lie is right there in “The Freedom Revolution,” the book that Dick Armey, ... the House majority leader, published in 1995. He declares that most government programs don’t do anything “to help American families with the needs of everyday life,” and that “very few American families would notice their disappearance.” He goes on to assert that “there is no reason we cannot, by the time our children come of age, reduce the federal government by half as a percentage of gross domestic product.”
Right. Somehow, I think more than a few families would notice the disappearance of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and those three programs alone account for a majority of nondefense, noninterest spending. ...
As long as people like Mr. Armey, Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay were out of power, they could run on promises to eliminate vast government waste that existed only in the public’s imagination — all those welfare queens driving Cadillacs. But once in power, they couldn’t deliver ... the government hasn’t shrunk...
Unable to make good on its promises, the G.O.P., like other failed revolutionary movements, tried to maintain its grip by exploiting its position of power. Friends were rewarded with patronage: Jack Abramoff began building his web of corruption almost as soon as Republicans took control. Adversaries were harassed with smear campaigns and witch hunts: Congress spent six years ... investigating a failed land deal, and Bill Clinton was impeached over a consensual affair.
But it wasn’t enough. Without 9/11, the Republican revolution would probably have petered out quietly... Instead, the atrocity created ... four extra years gained by drowning out unfavorable news with terror alerts, starting a gratuitous war, and accusing Democrats of being weak on national security.
Yet the Bush administration failed to convert this electoral success into progress on a right-wing domestic agenda. The collapse of the push to privatize Social Security recapitulated the failure of the Republican revolution as a whole. Once the administration was forced to get specific about the details, it became obvious that private accounts couldn’t produce something for nothing, and the public’s support vanished.
In the end, Republicans didn’t shrink the government. But they did degrade it. ...
Is that the end for the radical right? Probably not. ... Many of the ideas that failed in the Bush years had previously failed in the Reagan years. So there’s no reason to assume they’re gone for good.
Indeed, it appears that loss of power and the ensuing lack of accountability is liberating right-wingers to lie yet again: since last month’s election, I’ve noticed a number of Social Security privatizers propounding the same free-lunch falsehoods that the Bush administration had to abandon in the face of demands that it present an actual plan.
Still, the Republican revolution of 1994 is over. And not a moment too soon.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/12/paul_krugman_a_.html
What Should Congressional Democrats Do, When the Bush Administration Stonewalls Their Efforts To Undertake Oversight?:
Part Two in a Three-Part Series
By JOHN W. DEAN
----
Friday, Dec. 29, 2006
"We see a war coming on Capitol Hill," a well-connected Republican attorney based in Washington recently told me, as I reported in my last column on the subject. The clash is not surprising, because Vice President Dick Cheney -- who is at the center of many of the subjects the Democratic Congress will be investigating -- is strongly opposed to Congress's inquiring into these areas. He believes the power of the presidency is at stake. Accordingly, as I noted earlier, he has made it quite clear that he is not going to cooperate with these investigations.
Before the conflict develops, it might seem helpful to go over the rules of the game -- to appreciate who is on solid ground, who is on shaky ground, and why this is the case. But as it happens, there are no rules!
That is, there is simply no well-established law of the land regarding what Congress can require a president, or a vice president, to provide them. Similarly, there is no well-settled law regarding what the president can, and cannot, withhold from Congress by citing "executive privilege" or other rationales. Thus, while this ground has been traveled many times, it still remains essentially uncharted.
Of course, there are precedents, and even U.S. Supreme Court rulings, in this area. But they have virtually no applicability when the contest involves Congress and the White House. Also, while forests have doubtless been consumed to publish copious learned treatises, essays, articles, and reports on this subject, at bottom, this is a matter not of law, but purely of politics. There is, however, evidence regarding this matter that can be drawn from history.
Allow me to elaborate - in this column, and the next - on the legal and political situation.
The Elusive Rules Regarding Congress's Access to Executive Branch Information
The Constitution is silent regarding Congress's power to investigate the president, and his constitutional partner, the vice president. It is equally silent about the power of a president and vice president to withhold information from Congress, when it is requested.
Thus, the implied powers of Congress and the President, respectively, are exclusively at issue; express constitutional language offers no guide.
Moreover, federal courts often cede jurisdiction in disputes between these constitutionally co-equal entities, for they involve "political questions." In the end, such disputes are most frequently resolved by political accommodation by either the Congress, or the President.
"Congressional oversight is one of the most important responsibilities of the United States Congress," the Committee on Rules of the U.S. House of Representatives states, adding that this responsibility extends to "the review, monitoring, and supervision of federal agencies, programs and policy implementation, and it provides the legislative branch with an opportunity to inspect, examine, review and check the executive branch and its agencies." For all practical purposes, then, there is nothing that transpires within the Executive Branch that is beyond Congressional oversight.
Historical Practice: Congress Seeks and Gets Wide-Ranging Information on the Executive
Indeed, since the beginnings of our government, Congress has sought, and been given, information relating to every facet of executive actions.
The fact that a president's actions are undertaken pursuant to his Constitutional authority, such as that granted by the Commander-in-Chief clause or the "Take Care" clause, does not preclude Congress from examining that activity. There is almost no area of presidential activity into which Congress has not previously made inquiry. Thus, Bush and Cheney are going to be hard-pressed to justify any refusal to cooperate with the Democratic Congress.
When Congress seeks information from the Executive Branch, it typically starts with an informal request at the staff level, made of an official in one of the departments or agencies. If the request is refused, the relevant congressional staffer goes to a member of his or her committee, and requests that the member seek the information. If the member is also turned down, the request is taken to the full committee, or its chair, and a decision is made whether to issue a subpoena.
Often, before the Chairman or the full committee issues a subpoena, further informal negotiations occur. There is a long-existing tradition, recognized by all three branches, that Congress and the President are expected to work through a series of negotiations and accommodations to avoid a constitutional clash. Sometimes this process works, and the Congress narrows its requests, agrees to keep the information confidential, or obtains the information informally. When it does not work, the president must claim privilege.
The Bush Administration has been reluctant to claim "executive privilege" - given the bad name Nixon gave the use of the privilege. Accordingly, the Administration has on several occasions claimed a "deliberative privilege" - even though no such privilege exists, and it is merely another name for executive privilege.
Often, Congress folds when the president invokes executive privilege, for there is no real judicial remedy (as noted above, courts tend to punt, citing the "political question" doctrine). However, a determined Congress - or committee thereof - can prevail over a recalcitrant president (or vice president) if its members are determined and persistent.
Thus, if the 110th Congress, controlled by the Democrats, fails to get the information it needs -- and the public wants -- about the workings of the Bush/Cheney presidency, it will not be because it does not have the tools with which to obtain that information. Rather, it will be because it lacks the will to use those tools.
Forcing Executive Compliance with Congressional Information Requests
When Congress plays hardball, it gets the information it wants from the president. The Congressional Reference Service (CRS) has prepared a complete manual on oversight, which they updated recently. In the manual, CRS has laid out all Congress needs to know to crack any stonewall Bush and Cheney may erect to block their oversight efforts.
Lou Fisher, one of the authors of the CRS manual, catalogued a number of the methods available to Congress in his essay: "Congressional Access To Information: Using Legislative Will And Leverage." Drawing on historical examples, Fisher shows that Congress has a host of tools, of various size and shape and depending on the situation, to "extract information from the President."
Together, the manual, the update, and Fisher's excellent article provide an adept guide to everything Congress needs to exercise meaningful oversight as to the Bush Administration - everything, that is except the intestinal fortitude required for winning this staring contest, without blinking.
In my next column, I will take a specific look at some of the weapons in this awesome arsenal.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/scripts/printer_friendly.pl?page=/dean/20061229.html
So, Rooster, can we go home now??
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED..
BAGHDAD, Dec 30 (Reuters) - U.S.-backed Iraqi television station Al Hurra said Saddam Hussein had been executed by hanging shortly before 6 a.m. (0300 GMT) on Saturday....
Rooster, it's OK to love your Republicans beyond any measure of reality and if you look good stylin' in blinders and knee pads, more power to you. But if you think the death of Saddam will change things any more than than that silly 'mission accomplished' banner or large number of Iraqi's holding up their purple fingers or the capture of Saddam or the killing of Zarqwahi, then kool aid is obviously your drink of choice!!
And tell me, Rooster, why was Saddam tried on a relatively minor charge while ignoring the mass murder of tens of thousands of Kurds??? What say you, ol' wise one??
(Bold by My Dime)
Impact of Hussein's death likely to be limited
The execution only underscores lingering divisions in Iraq.
By Paul Richter
Times Staff Writer
December 30, 2006
WASHINGTON — Many Iraqis and Americans have looked forward to the day when justice would catch up with Saddam Hussein. Yet, when it arrived today, it seemed to be much less than the historic turning point many once had anticipated.
With Iraq beset by violence and turmoil, the former dictator's demise no longer appeared to signal the beginning of new order. After a trial marked by disruption and controversy, the execution seemed only another reminder that the country's divisions remain deep and seemingly insoluble nearly four years after the U.S.-led invasion.
"If everything had followed the coalition plan, if everything were calm now, this could have been the biggest event of the year, maybe the biggest event in the post-invasion," said Henri J. Barkey, a former State Department official and Mideast specialist.
"This is not just a sideshow. But everyday existence is so grave and grim, it's not what it might have been."
Ever since Hussein was toppled from power, Bush administration officials have pinned their hopes on a procession of developments — the elections, the capture of the former leader and the killing of terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, to name a few — to reshape opinions in the United States and Iraq about the American mission.
But though some of the events have affected public opinion, none has so far succeeded in convincing most Americans that things have fundamentally changed for the better.
"I just don't see this as a big turning point," said Daniel P. Serwer, a former U.S. diplomat and State Department official now at the U.S. Institute for Peace.
Even among some in the Bush administration, the potential for a positive reaction to Hussein 's death was considered limited.
One U.S. official said he believed that the execution would serve as a reminder that Hussein had been a danger to Iraqis as well as the region. But the official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, acknowledged that the development's effect was likely to be "limited," in part because of the continuing difficulties in Iraq, and in part because it had been foreseen for some time.
Any positive reaction among Americans also is likely to muted by disenchantment over the number of U.S. troops who have died in Iraq.
In Iraq, the execution of Hussein has commanded attention, but it may not outlast the daily struggle faced by most Iraqis.
"People in Iraq today are concerned with very basic things these days. Will this put more food on the table, make the streets safer, put more electricity in the wires?" Serwer asked. "The answer is likely not. So many people will not see this as that big."
Two years ago, it appeared that Iraqis were beginning a dialogue about their common history and Hussein's place in it.
If the country had made greater steps toward a unified view of their history, Hussein's execution might have more weight, said Nathan Brown, a specialist in Arab politics at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But with the country increasingly fractured along sectarian lines, "this is a bit more of a sideshow than it would have been," Brown said.
Hussein's execution also would have carried more significance had his trial been carried out differently, some experts said.
Barkey, who is now at Lehigh University, believes the Iraqis made a major mistake in deciding to put Hussein on trial for the killings of 148 Shiite men and boys from the town of Dujayl after a 1982 assassination attempt there, rather than for the chemical weapons attacks in the country's north that are thought to have killed as many as 100,000 Kurds.
By executing Hussein for "a relatively minor crime … you're leaving this important chapter open," said Barkey. The attacks on Kurds were clear violations of international law, he said.
"It's one of the reasons the United States went to war, and yet they're leaving that unresolved," Barkey said. "It's very problematic."
He said that decision has left many Kurds feeling that "they are being cheated — they have not received justice."
Juan R. Cole, a Mideast specialist at the University of Michigan, said the nature of the trial also tended to further divide Iraqis, rather than heal wounds.
Because the charges concerned Hussein's reprisals against members of a revolutionary Shiite party, Dawa — which happens to be the party of the current and previous Iraqi prime ministers — the execution could appear to many Sunnis as simple score-settling.
"This can be read as the Dawa party and a Kurdish judge taking revenge on Saddam," Cole said. "To the Sunnis it will look like just one more slap in the face…. This is the opposite of national healing and will just deepen the divisions."
Cole said he expected adverse Sunni reaction to the execution, noting that about 20 demonstrators were killed in Sunni-dominated Baqubah after Hussein 's verdict was announced.
Even so, he agreed that the execution's political significance would be limited.
"It won't change anything on the ground," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-fg-ussaddam30dec30,1,2607970,print.story
Bush's New Look on Iraq: Weary
By David Ignatius
Wednesday, December 27, 2006; A19
Watching President Bush in recent weeks has become a grim kind of reality TV show. In almost every news conference, speech and photo opportunity, the topic is the same: what to do about the grinding war in Iraq. Bush has let the facade crack open -- admitting that his strategy for victory isn't working -- but then he struggles to rebuild it with new words of confidence.
The stress of the job -- so well hidden for much of the past six years -- has begun to show on Bush's face. He often looks burdened, distracted, haunted by a question that has no good answer. When a photographer captures him at ease, as in a sweet Texas-romance picture of Bush and his wife, Laura, that appeared in People magazine last week, it's as if he has escaped the Iraq sweatbox.
I grew up in a Washington that was struggling with the nightmare of a failing war in Vietnam. The government officials of that time were people who behaved as if they'd never known failure in their lives. They had the rosy confidence of the chosen -- "the best and the brightest," as David Halberstam put it. But then the war began to grind them down. I see that same meat grinder at work now. Bush and his officials are strong characters; they work hard not to let you see them sweat. But the anguish and exhaustion are there.
Bush is not a man for introspection. That's part of his flinty personality -- the tight, clipped answers and the forced jocularity of the nicknames he gives to reporters and White House aides. That's why this version of reality TV is so poignant: This very private man has begun to talk out loud about the emotional turmoil inside. He is letting it bleed.
Bush opened the emotional curtain at a news conference last week. A reporter noted that Lyndon Johnson hadn't been able to sleep well during the Vietnam War and asked Bush if this was a "painful time" for him. He gave an unexpectedly personal answer: "Most painful aspect of my presidency has been knowing that good men and women have died in combat. I read about it every night. And my heart breaks for a mother or father or husband or wife or son and daughter. It just does. And so when you ask about pain, that's pain."
Bush's "state of denial," as Bob Woodward rightly called it, has officially ended. He actually spoke the words "We're not winning" last week in an interview with The Post, coupling it with the reverse: "We're not losing." But in truth, he cannot abide the possibility that Iraq will not end in victory. So a day after his "not winning" comment, he half took it back, saying: "I believe that we're going to win," and then adding oddly, as if to reassure himself: "I believe that -- and by the way, if I didn't think that, I wouldn't have our troops there. That's what you've got to know. We're going to succeed."
Policy debates in this White House are often described as battles between competing advisers -- Dick Cheney wants this; the Joint Chiefs favor that; Condi Rice favors a third outcome. This kind of analysis implies that Bush isn't really master of his own house, but I think it's a big mistake. The truth is that with this president, the only opinion that finally matters is his own. And he's a stubborn man. Military leaders can tell him it's a mistake to surge troops into Baghdad, but that doesn't mean he will listen.
Bush says he doesn't care what happens now to his poll numbers, and I believe him. He broke through the political barriers a while ago. I sense that, as he anguishes about Iraq, he has in mind the judgment of future historians. He said it plainly in an interview in October with conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly: "Look, history is interesting. I read three books on George Washington last year. And my opinion is that if they're still analyzing the first president, the 43rd president ought to be doing what he thinks is right. And eventually, historians will come and realize whether . . . the decisions I made made sense."
What makes reality TV gripping is that it's all happening live -- the contestants make their choices under pressure, win or lose. So too with Bush. He is making a vast wager -- of American lives, treasure and the nation's security -- that his judgments about Iraq were right. The Baker-Hamilton report gave him a chance to take some chips off the table, but Bush doesn't seem interested. He is still playing to win. The audience is shouting out advice, but the man under the spotlight knows he will have to make this decision alone.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/26/AR2006122600776_pf.html
The War Against Strawmen
a.k.a. "The War on Terrorism"
by Harry Browne
December 13, 2005
The Bush Administration continues to maintain that its war in Iraq, and its adventures anywhere else, are aimed at ending worldwide terrorism.
But such a feat is not only impossible, it is absurd.
Terrorism is a crime, not a war. Terrorism is committed by gangs of criminals — not soldiers representing a sovereign government. And no one in his right mind can believe that our government can eliminate every criminal gang in the world.
If our government could do that, why wouldn’t it start with the drug gangs that terrorize areas of Washington, D.C.? What a perfect opportunity for the politicians to demonstrate their crime-fighting abilities.
On October 4, 2001, I wrote:
Because the September attacks were a crime, the government's job is to locate and bring to trial any perpetrators who didn't die in the attacks. If some of them are located in foreign countries, our government should request extradition — not threaten to bomb the foreign country if we don't get our way.
I was criticized by some people, who asked, "But what if all the ‘criminals’ aren’t caught"
And yet, here we are four years later, tens of thousands of people have died, and still not all the criminals have been caught regardless. Osama Bin Laden not only hasn’t been apprehended, he isn’t even talked about anymore. As I said in 2001:
If not all the criminals are found and brought to trial, it doesn't mean that bombing innocent people would have brought the criminals to justice.
So why do the politicians talk about a War on Terrorism that makes no sense?
Because it opens the door to all sorts of aggressions against foreigners and Americans.
And it allows the politicians — most notably the leading members of the Bush administration — to pose as noble warriors against enemies that are really only Strawmen.
Charley Reese, in a recent LewRockwell.com article, quoted Dick Cheney as claiming a U.S. pullout from Iraq would leave it in the hands of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama Bin Laden, and/or Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Charley points out that "Zarqawi is a Jordanian, not an Iraqi; he has been denounced by his tribe and his family; and he has killed more Iraqis than Americans. It is just a matter of time before some Iraqi drops a dime on him and he’s packed off to Islamic hell."
But he’s a worthy Strawman, a bogey man, whose name is worth a hundred million dollars or more in Congressional appropriations.
Charley goes on, "As for bin Laden and his Egyptian adviser, they are — assuming they’re still alive — hiding out in some cave or rat-infested village in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They could not control a small town, much less a country of 25 million people of which neither of them is a native."
As we all know, the U.S. government has since World War II been financing and arming various foreign dictators — such as Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, the Shah of Iran, and others — only to denounce and attack them once they become wealthy and aggressive enough to be worthy Strawmen.
It’s also true that the U.S. government has financed and armed various opposition groups that supposedly represent the opportunity to topple the mean old dictators. Often these groups oppose each other, and engage in violence against one another. But no matter, the object of our government is to be doing something to fight a Strawman.
Robert Dreyfuss, in another excellent LewRockwell.com article, catalogs a number of the groups that opposed Saddam Hussein and are now battling for control of Iraq. There is far more than the Iraqi National Congress. The strongest groups are SCIRI (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution), Al Dawa (The Islamic Call), SCIRI’s paramilitary arm, the Badr Brigade, the Muslim Brotherhood , represented by IIP (the Iraqi Islamic Party) — not to mention Al-Qaeda. The first three originated and are based in — guess where — Iran. In fact, SCIRI was founded in 1982 by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Today these groups are fighting each other as much as they’re fighting Iraqi insurgents, Americans, or Iraqi civilians. They regularly practice torture, assassinations, and other dastardly deeds upon one another. They are fighting to become the rulers of the new Iraq — the "democracy" that George Bush claims to be creating.
Is this what 2,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died for? Is this what $200 billion dollars has financed? Is this why we have given up so much of our freedom?
And whoever wins the battle to rule Iraq will eventually become Strawmen against whom the Bush administration can get on its horses and ride off to protect us.
There is no War on Terrorism. There is only a War on Strawmen, a War on Shadows, a War on Fantasies — allowing George Bush to do whatever he, or his advisors, choose to do.
It is time to quit pretending that the War in Iraq serves any purpose relating to world peace, democracy in the Middle East, the first line against terrorism, or any other salutary goal.
It is simply part of the War on Strawmen.
http://www.harrybrowne.org/articles/WarOnStawmen.htm
Putting Iraq on the Credit Card
Posted on Dec 15, 2006
By E.J. Dionne
WASHINGTON—Believe it or not, winning the war in Iraq was never the Bush administration’s highest priority. Saving its tax cuts was more important. That was once spoken of as a moral problem. Now, it’s a practical barrier to a successful outcome.
Until recently, President Bush’s refusal to scale back any of his tax cuts was debated around the question of shared sacrifice: How could we ask so much from a courageous group of Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan but not ask even the wealthiest of their fellow citizens to part with a few extra dollars to support an endeavor supposedly central to our nation’s security? On the contrary, even after we committed to war in Iraq, the administration pushed for yet more tax cuts in dividends and capital gains.
Now we know that the decision to put the war on a credit card is not simply a moral question. The administration’s failure to acknowledge the real costs of the war—and to pay them—has put it in a corner.
The president’s options in Iraq are severely constrained because our military is too small for the foreign policy he is pursuing. Sending more troops to Iraq would place even more excruciating burdens on members of our armed forces and their families. And the brass fears that an extended new commitment could, quite simply, break the Army.
Yet instead of building up our military for a long engagement and levying the taxes to pay for such an enterprise, the administration kept issuing merry reports of progress in Iraq. Right through Election Day this year, the president continued to condemn anyone who dared suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should raise taxes to pay for this war.
I think it would be a mistake to send more troops to Iraq. But for the sake of argument, let’s take seriously the idea that doing so might help, as Sen. John McCain and other staunch advocates of the war insist. By not matching the military’s size to what we are asking it to do, we have hugely raised the costs, including the human costs, of such a policy.
Two advocates of “surging 50,000 more troops” to Iraq, Frederick W. Kagan and William Kristol, acknowledged in The Weekly Standard last month that their proposal “will strain a strained military further.”
“But it is also true,” they added, “that we can do it—if we think success in Iraq is a national priority—by extending tours, moving troops from other theaters into Iraq, and calling up expanded numbers from the Guard and Reserves.”
How easy it is to talk about extending other people’s tours, calling (or recalling) reservists and National Guard members who have already paid such a high price in this war, and endangering American interests elsewhere in the world in one last effort to make the Iraq gamble work. It’s absurd that the most powerful country in the world finds itself forced to treat its armed forces so shabbily.
Kagan and Kristol, at least, have long spoken out in favor of building a bigger Army. But I don’t recall that they or their comrades in this cause proposed any taxes to pay for it. Presumably that would have been too much to ask of the Republican coalition and those who bankroll it.
So here we are: Policymakers and politicians will demand more and more from the volunteers of the armed forces but can’t find the gumption to ask shareholders to pay a bit more tax on their dividends or high earners to pay slightly larger levies on their incomes. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, since 2001 we’ve offered $2 in tax cuts for every $1 we have spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And conservatives wonder why we have deficits? At least the libertarians, who are against both high taxes and an interventionist foreign policy, have their philosophical story (and their numbers) straight.
It has always been true that the administration and its allies couldn’t have it both ways. Their illogic has finally caught up with them. They claimed to be against big government so they could justify big tax cuts. But they were also for a big, interventionist foreign policy, especially after 9/11, which required a big military and—sorry to break it to you, guys—a big military is a big part of big government. They were not willing to pay for a large enough military, and so now we, and especially our armed forces, are paying for their deficit in logic and courage.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061215_ej_dionne_jr_putting_iraq_on_the_credit_card/
The Bloodbath We Created
Gareth Porter
December 14, 2006
Gareth Porter is a historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam was published in June 2005. During the Vietnam War, Porter was a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Vietnamese history and politics who debunked the Nixon administration's "bloodbath" argument in a series of articles and monographs.
Of all the faults of the Iraq Study Group the most serious was its warning, highlighted by Co-Chairman Lee Hamilton, that a “precipitate withdrawal” would cause a “bloodbath” in Iraq as well as a region-wide war. The cry of “bloodbath”—now given bipartisan status—will certainly be used to crush any attempt in Congress to advance a plan for a timetable for withdrawal.
In offering this bloodbath argument, the ISG has unconsciously mimicked the argument used by President Richard Nixon to justify continuing the U.S. war in Vietnam for another four years. Nixon, too, warned of a postwar “bloodbath” if there was a “precipitate withdrawal” of U.S. troops. If the Vietnam era bloodbath argument sought to distract the public’s attention from the very real bloodbath that the U.S. war was causing, the new bloodbath argument distracts attention from the relationship between the U.S. occupation and the sectarian bloodbath that is continuing to worsen with every passing month.
You would think that the political elite might be wary of an argument suggesting that the U.S. military presence in Iraq somehow helps restrain the Shiites and Sunnis from civil war—in light of the escalating sectarian killings in Baghdad since thousands of U.S. troops poured into Baghdad ostensibly to curb the sectarian war. Yet that is exactly what we are asked to believe by the ISG.
The bloodbath argument evades the central fact that the U.S. occupation has never been aimed at avoiding or reducing sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. On the contrary, the U.S. has used sectarian conflict for its own purposes. The main purpose of the U.S. occupation has been to claim victory over those who resisted it, which has meant primarily suppressing the Sunni armed resistance throughout the Sunni zone. The Bush administration had to have Iraqi allies against the Sunni resistance, and after Sunni security units showed in 2004 that they would not fight other Sunnis on behalf of the occupation, the administration began relying primarily on Shiites to assist its war against the Sunnis.
Thus the militant Shiite political parties and their military wing became the administration’s primary Iraqi allies. Unfortunately those were the very sectarian organizations that were motivated by revenge against Sunnis. As soon they had gained control of the state organs of violence through the January 2005 election, those organizations began to unleash retribution against the Sunni community in Baghdad—seizing Sunni mosques and killing Sunni political and religious leaders. The torture and killing of Sunni detainees by such Shiite paramilitary groups as the Badr brigade and the Wolf brigade were well documented by mid-2005.
The Bush administration was hardly unaware of the dangerous rise of the pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Baghdad who intended to carry out ethnic cleansing against Sunnis. Their closest Iraqi collaborator, the secular Shiite interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, was warning them in no uncertain terms. In July 2005 , Allawi warned publicly that Iraq was “practically in stage one of a civil war as we speak.”
For a period of months in late 2005 and early 2006, the administration fretted over the new threat of sectarian civil war. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad publicly resisted Shiite control over the interior and defense ministries and threatened to reconsider U.S. assistance if they were not put in non-sectarian hands. As reported by the Sunday Times of London December 10, Khalilzad even carried on secret negotiations with Sunni resistance leaders for two months on their offer to be integrated into the national army and to “clean up” the pro-Iranian militias in Baghdad with arms provided by the United States.
In the end, however, Bush pulled back from making a deal with the Sunnis. When a permanent government was finally negotiated under firm sectarian Shiite control in April 2006, the administration resumed its support for its Shiite allies in the official war against both the Sunni resistance and al-Qaida-related terrorists. The interests of the military command and the White House in claiming a success in “standing up” an Iraqi army and police force trumped any concern about sectarian civil war.
The ISG failed to consider the full implications of that policy. Contrary to the official administration line that involvement in sectarian violence is limited to a minority of “extremists” in the military and police, in fact virtually the entire structure of Shiite military and police units is either actively participating or complicit in terrorism against Sunnis. When the SCIRI and its allies took over the interior department in 2005, its Badr militia was given wide latitude to infiltrate thousands of its loyal militiamen into the national police.
Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militiamen dominate the police both in parts of Baghdad and the Shiite south. Both Badr and Mahdi army recruits have been implicated in sectarian killings. The Defense Department admitted in its August 2006 report to Congress that it has no system for screening police for membership in Shiite militias. Wayne White, who was Deputy Director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Near Eastern Division and coordinated Iraqi Intelligence until his retirement in 2005, and an adviser to the ISG, says the Iraqi police force have such close ties with the Shiite militias that it is “probably beyond help.”
The U.S.-sponsored Iraqi army is scarcely less sectarian in nature. The ISG itself admits that there are “significant questions about the ethnic composition and loyalties of some Iraqi units—specifically whether they will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda.” Reporter Tom Lasseter, who was imbedded in the all-Shiite first brigade in October 2005, was told by one sergeant that they would do to the Sunnis what Saddam did to Shiites: “Start with five people from each neighborhood and kill them in the streets and go from there.”
Nevertheless, the United States has already transferred 287,000 AK-47 rifles, 17,000 machine guns, 7,600 grenade launchers, and 1,800 high mobility wheeled vehicles to these forces, according to official Central Command figures. The transfer of weapons to the police accelerated this past year, despite the well-known involvement of police units in death squad activities. And the Defense Department plans to send yet another 50,000 rifles to the police and another 86,000 to the army—along with 3,000 more vehicles.
We have every reason to fear that these weapons will become the basis for a higher level of warfare by Shiites against Sunnis in the future. Despite the administration’s complaints that Iran is supporting the Shiite militias who are causing sectarian violence, the United States itself is the quartermaster of the forces of sectarian civil war. And the recommendations of the ISG would continue this role for the indefinite future.
Why, then, should the occupation be considered as representing a restraint on the sectarian civil war already underway? It has no realistic plan or strategy for protecting the victims of “sectarian cleansing” except for “pressure” on the Shiite prime minister, which Shiite leaders rightly regard as serving domestic U.S. political purposes. And the idea that thousands of U.S. trainers swarming into Iraq will somehow transform the existing sectarian anti-Sunni army into one that will effectively oppose sectarian violence is, of course, laughable.
The notion that years more of U.S. military occupation will help stanch the bloodletting between Shiites and Sunnis is a self-deception of monumental proportions. If the objective were really to end the bloodletting, the United States would actively seek a peace agreement with the Sunni resistance based on a rapid, phased withdrawal and stop supporting the Shiite war against them. That would give international diplomatic efforts a more serious chance to succeed.
The bloodbath argument foisted on the public by the ISG is really about the refusal of a large segment of the political elite to accept the fact that the United States has broken Iraq in a way that can no longer be fixed by U.S. power—and has lost a war it entered into with such arrogance. It is a statement of ideological belief by an elite still deep in denial.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/12/14/the_bloodbath_we_created.php
A Soldier's Story
by MAJOR BILL EDMONDS
[posted online on November 29, 2006]
For just a minute or two, step into my life. I am an American soldier in the Army Special Forces. I have just returned from a one-year tour of duty in Iraq, where I lived, shared meals, slept and fought beside my Iraqi counterpart as we battled insurgents in the center of a thousand-year-old city. I am a conflicted man, and I want you to read the story of that experience as I lived it. In the interest of security, I have omitted some identifying details, but every word is true.
Routine and Ritual
I wake in the cold and dark of each morning to the sound of a hundred different muezzins calling Muslim men and women to prayer. These calls reverberate five times per day throughout a city the size of San Francisco. Above this sound I also hear two American helicopters making their steady patrol over the rooftops of the city and the blaring horns of armored vehicles as they swerve through dense city traffic. As a combat adviser and interrogator, I find these contrasts very appropriate for the life that I now lead.
This morning, on the Iraqi base in which I live, I walk 100 feet from my bedroom to work and back again. These are the same 100 feet I will travel month after month for one year. During every trip I smile, put a hand to my heart, sometimes a hand to my head, and say to every passing Iraqi the religious and cultural words that are expected from a fellow human being. In Iraq, one cannot separate Islamic culture from the individual. They are intrinsically woven into the fabric of daily life, but for most Westerners, they seem abnormal. I sit in smoke-filled rooms and drink sugar-laden tea in small crystal glasses. I spray tobacco-scented air freshener, kiss cheeks three times or more, allow the Iraqi on the right to pass through the doorway first. I know never to inquire on the health of a wife or elder daughter. I even hold hands with other men.
I proclaim my submission to God and my relationship to reality by saying "God willing" when referring to any future event. I say "God bless you" every time someone takes a seat. I eat with my hands, standing up, taking food from communal bowls. I attend work meetings where socializing is always the first priority. I hear the expressions "upon my mustache" or "by my eyes" or "over my head"--signifying the most binding and heartfelt of oaths. One day, I ask an Iraqi friend how many relatives he has and he answers, "In the city, maybe a thousand." I have slowly come to realize that in Islam, and in Iraq, every action is worship. Every single thing that a person does--not just prayer or the time spent in a mosque but every action--is in fact an act of veneration. So yes, many things are different here. Yet we all have become friends--good friends--in part because I am here; I honor them and their religion by going out of my way to show them respect. Not all Americans act this way.
Many Americans assume that if a person does not speak English, it implies a lack of intelligence or some mental simplicity. We usually speak up only when spoken to. We attend meetings to pass information in the most efficient ways possible; our goal is always to decrease time while not losing content. For most Americans, God is intensely personal and religious utterances are not considered appropriate in a group of strangers. Our society is established on the principle of separating religion from state. In America, tobacco is quickly becoming a social taboo, and most men do not hold hands. If we are the first to arrive at a door, we enter first. We go on dates to meet future spouses--this is a cultural activity that I try again and again to explain. Also, Americans are a pragmatic people. We calculate the merit of an action first by its utility. In Islam, such a philosophy is immoral, and this truth is clearly manifest in the current clash between the Muslim and the postmodern worlds. So yes, we are very different. Yet if I look closely, with eyes wide open, I see that we are in some ways very much alike.
I jogged this morning around the small Iraqi base where I live. It was 6:00 a.m. and mildly warm. I wore very revealing blue Nike running shorts with ankle socks while listening to Limp Bizkit on my iPod. I slowly passed a small group of Iraqis and they all just stared, unsmiling. As I came closer, with a huge smile spread across my face, I put my hand to my heart and said, "Peace be upon you all," (in Arabic of course) while gasping for air. They all, in unison, completely changed and beamed smiles, waved, talked, gave me a thumbs-up and replied, "Peace be upon you."
Insurgents
On this small plot of land where I live, next to the Tigris River, in the very center of an Islamic metropolis, I help find and then interrogate terrorists alongside the Iraqi officer whom I advise and with whom I also live. We interrogate hundreds of suspected terrorists over many, many months. One of my responsibilities is to insure that prisoners are not abused. This I have done.
But for a year I have also been an observer of an immensely complicated situation. I am a soldier who fights alongside Iraqis, and I interact daily with and hear the words of Iraqi soldiers, civilians and insurgents alike. Through their eyes I see the strengths, foibles and faults of my military and culture. Sometimes I wish for the return of my ignorance. If no one else can understand my distress, I hope other Americans who fought shoulder to shoulder with other cultures--the French, Filipino, the Nungs and Yards and tribesmen of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia--will understand.
From my seat in a dark basement room I understand that many of those who terrorize have always hated the Americans. But being Muslim is definitely not a predisposition for violence; quite the opposite for most Iraqis. Why is it that many have slowly transformed over three years from happily liberated American supporters, to passive supporters of the insurgency, to active fighters of the American "occupation"? "I love Americans but hate your military," says a college professor turned insurgent. "Americans have come here because you want our oil and because of your support of Israel. You bring democracy, but the Iraqi pays the price." These were the first words I heard from a man I will call Ibrahim. The Iraqi Army had captured him. He was angry, and for the first time he was sitting face to face with the American soldier whom he hates beyond reason. That was two weeks ago.
Yesterday, I put two red plastic chairs outside in the sun and spoke with him again. This time, I believe I am not the American soldier he has come to hate. This time I am "Mr. Bill," and it is now hard for him to hate me. I can see and sense his inner turmoil. For Ibrahim and for me, it is hard to hold on to the hate when the once-indistinct face becomes a real person. Later, he admits to having been deceived about the evil that is the American soldier. For two weeks I have spoken Arabic with him, started and ended every interaction with the required cultural and religious sayings, and demonstrated knowledge of his religion. For two weeks I have shown Ibrahim that I respect him as both an Iraqi and as a Muslim.
"It is how you act," he says, "and how we are treated that makes me fight. For many Iraqis this anger at you is just an excuse to kill for money or greed. But for most others, they truly feel they are doing what is right. But you give them this excuse; the American military gives them the excuse." So now terrorist leaders pretending to be pious Iraqis target this very common base anger, Iraqis fight and civilians raise their fists to salute the Holy Fighter.
"Two years ago I saw Abu Ghraib and what Americans did to women. I became an insurgent," whispers a man I call Kareem, another civilian turned insurgent. "You come into our homes without separating the women and children, or asking the men politely if you may enter. Almost every hour of my life I hear some noise or see some sight of the American military. Soldiers talk with Iraqis only from behind a gun, from a position of power and not respect. Last week American soldiers got on a school bus and talked with all of the teenage girls. You had them take off their hijab so you could see their faces. You do not respect our women. This is the biggest of all problems of yours. You do not respect our women. How can we believe that Americans want to help when you do not even respect us or our faith?"
I later tell Kareem that these soldiers thought a person hiding a bomb was on the bus. This was obviously too little and too late. Perceptions are what count and word of American soldiers demanding to see the faces of Muslim women streamed from cellphone to cellphone across an entire city. Perhaps different from other past insurgencies fighting in different societies, within Iraq and over years, negative perceptions are what transform a citizen into an insurgency supporter and then into an insurgent. Now I drive throughout the crowded city alternating between shooting a machine gun and throwing Beanie-Babies to waving children. I think that at least the children are out in the streets and most are still waving. But even this hopeful sight is disappearing.
Last night the Iraqi Army captured Ibrahim's cell leader and brought the two together in the same small room. For Ibrahim, this was a very traumatic moment, for he saw that the pious Muslim man, whom he followed but had not met, was in fact a 27-year-old tattooed common criminal. Ibrahim began to weep when he realized he had been deceived. A greedy and immoral man who killed for money while pretending to be religious had skillfully manipulated Ibrahim's anger at Americans. Before Ibrahim was turned over to the Iraqi authorities, I saw him teaching soldiers to use their new office computer. He was helping them to type up his own written confession. But Ibrahim's transformation is an anomaly. Such a confluence of peaceful events does not often turn an insurgent away from the insurgency. Most insurgents continue to fight the hated American soldier whom they have never met. Their hope is that the American soldier will just go away.
Bursting Bubbles
I have slowly come to understand that if we are to succeed in Iraq, we must either change the way we perceive and treat those we want to help or we must disengage the great percentage of our military from the population. The Iraqi base where I now live was once a small American base. The anxiety and distress of American soldiers in years past are scratched in the ceiling over my bed. "The mind is a terrible thing...," "keep a sharp look-out during your descent," "happiness is a temporary state of mind," "control is just an illusion" and "nothing is as it seems." Across the room, on another wall, next to another bed, are other words from another soldier. They read, "My score in this War: Arabs=10, cars=10, houses=3."
American soldiers are angry and frustrated with Iraqis. Iraqis are angry and frustrated with Americans. Many Iraqis just want American soldiers to go away, and I struggle within myself not to agree. Day after day I observe the interactions of Americans with Iraqis and am often ashamed. I see that required classes given to all American soldiers on cultural sensitivity do not work; 100,000 or more American soldiers daily interacting, engaging and fighting Iraqis within their own society for more than three years will inevitably create a wellspring of citizen hostility. In this war, none of us can change who we fundamentally are.
American military culture interacts with Iraqi Islamic culture like a head-on collision. And massive deployments of American soldiers fighting a counterinsurgency now hurts more than it helps. When we focus on the military solution to resolve a social problem, we inevitably create more insurgents than we can capture or kill. As a consequence, real "Islamic terrorists" subverting their own tolerant religion will use this popular anger and sense of resentment to their advantage. As much as they hate and fear us, they also say that we cannot just leave the mess that we have made.
"I know the American military cannot now leave Iraq," says another captured insurgent whom I will call Muhammad. "If you did, we would all start fighting each other until one person killed enough enemies to come out on top. When I stop seeing your military shooting at civilians on our streets and I stop seeing Iraqi soldiers and policemen as your puppets, then I will stop fighting."
Muhammad may be naïve and living in a bubble of projected motivations and false perceptions. But his bubble burst when he was captured and plucked from an insular society. My own bubble burst when I was taken out of my society and put into Muhammad's. Military leaders tell us to "focus on training the Iraqi soldiers and policemen to fight, and do not fight the insurgency yourself." Yet if the citizen is angry with us, won't this anger just transfer to the very people we train and fight with? What if we are unintentionally assuring that the Iraqi soldiers and policemen will have someone to fight against if we leave?
The Iraqi civilian I speak with says that is so. In the eyes of many, there is now no difference between the American on patrol and the Iraqi policeman or soldier who is with the American on patrol. If the citizen believes that the American military is an "occupying power," won't he now perceive the Iraqi policeman or soldier as this occupier's puppet?
American soldiers do live within self-imposed bubbles of isolation. These are called American bases and are where the greatest percentage of soldiers live and never leave. These bubbles are far different from the universe of Muhammad and his colleagues. We know that Muhammad's beliefs about who we are and what motivates us are mostly false. His first perceptions are defined by culture and religion, careful words of terrorist leaders, and a thousand channels of satellite television beamed into the homes of almost every Iraqi. It is then our behavior that contributes to these negative perceptions. Our self-imposed isolation and the citizens' perceptions may be all that the insurgency needs to continue and be successful.
I have come to realize that we isolate our soldiers from the societies in which we operate. We airlift and sealift vacuum-sealed replicas of America to remote corners of the world; once there, we isolate ourselves from the very people we are trying to protect or win over. An Iraqi once told me, "How you treat us must be like how African-Americans felt." If you're an American soldier in Iraq working as an adviser, ask yourself this: Is the Iraqi I live and fight with not allowed to enter any American facility? If you are a military adviser or training to be an adviser, look around where you eat: Are the Americans on one side of the room and the Iraqis on the other? Do you even eat with Iraqis? Do you go out of your way to avoid eye contact and thus not greet the Iraqis you walk by? Do you try to learn their language or follow their customs? Do you habitually expect Iraqis to share intelligence and then not respond in kind? Do you distrust them?
Last week I read an article in an American newspaper that described a very common scene. Getting ready to go on a mission with an Iraqi policeman, a young American soldier snaps at an Iraqi officer and says, "Get off the cellphone." Then this same soldier turns to another American soldier and says, "He is probably warning a terrorist that we are coming." It may not be racism, only ignorance combined with frustration and paranoia, but to the Iraqi, it sure does feel like racism.
To play the role of a combat adviser--something American military personnel are increasingly asked to do--is to live within a foreign culture and to train and fight with a foreign military. Many American soldiers are not capable of such an important role or mission. The job is long, very difficult, and set within a very austere, hostile and unfamiliar environment. The adviser becomes culturally isolated and so requires a unique personality combined with extensive training; but most lack this expertise and inclination. It's a sink-or-swim job, and most candidates sink after only a few months. They then retreat inside the shells of themselves and soon become combat advisers who do not interact or even advise. They thus form adviser teams that are dysfunctional and counterproductive. They exist until the day arrives when they can return home to a place that is familiar, where they are not hated.
The Tightrope
American soldiers now patrol the streets with extreme caution and quick reflexes. They have come to think that every Iraqi who runs a red light or does not yield is a terrorist. They shoot at or accidentally kill civilians, which then creates one more insurgent and three more insurgency supporters. I know this cause-and-effect explanation is simplistic for an immensely complicated situation, but you get the picture. I will never fault American soldiers for their actions and reactions; it really is dangerous out there, and no other nation could ever ask for such service and sacrifice from its citizens. Yet I also try not to fault Iraqi civilians, for their truth is just as valid to them as is mine to me.
I have seen firsthand why I cannot create stability by force within an Islamic society and why many say democracy cannot be brought by force but must evolve.
To be a moral person in a protracted counterinsurgency is my daily struggle, one in which I am asked to instill social morality on a culture that is not my own.
So what is the balance between taking charge in Iraq and/or abandoning the country? Our best response is to pull the American soldiers back and push the Iraqi soldiers/policemen forward as quickly as possible. I feel the urgency of this mandate as I type these very words on this small Iraqi base among Iraqi soldiers. As I told Ibrahim, the captured insurgent, "I want to leave your country. The only reason I stay here is because Iraqis are dying and you insist on fighting. All we want to do is to help."
I naturally assumed he understood this. Well, he had not, and most do not. This message is one that is lacking and one that Iraqis surely need. So I find myself balanced on a tightrope bridging a deathly height. As Iraqi intelligence officers once explained to me over hot tea, "It is a race to see which of many possibilities comes first; the competency of an Iraqi Security Force with a stable and competent government, or the formation of a monolithic and deadly insurgency or civil war, both of which would prevent the latter."
In Iraq, I wish to survive and to succeed. Yet as the days pass, my hopes increasingly become mutually exclusive: The insurgency gets more effective; the citizen anger at us and the Iraqi Security Force becomes greater; the fractions in the society grow deeper and more violent; the American public becomes more impatient as the war is perceived as less legitimate and the conditions to form a stable Iraqi government become more elusive. So I run along this rope as if in a race to get away. I run knowing full well that my speed comes only at the sacrifice of my balance. I long for the tranquility of normalcy, the comfortable, the understandable, and so I want to run from Iraq. So what then can I do besides serve admirably and hope for the best while fearing the worst?
The Iraqi officer I advise once said after months of frantically working to capture terrorists, "You need to just relax. You are here, so there will always be another terrorist to capture. Sit and drink some tea with me."
I doubt he was intentionally being prophetic. As a soldier who lives with an Iraqi, I do hope to one day just sit and drink some tea with him. To sit and talk of family without a worry in the world. But to do so, I must do more than just train, advise and fight with my Iraqi friend. I must go out of my way every single day to disprove the "Ugly American" label that is attached to me. I must approach every personal interaction as a singular opportunity to battle the insurgency and then realize that my interactions with each and every Iraqi do have very lasting and very strategic consequences.
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20061211&s=soldiers_story
Are Congressional Wars Coming? Since Cheney Has Already Said He'll Ignore the Democratic Congress, It Seems Likely
By JOHN W. DEAN
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Friday, Dec. 01, 2006
Note: Bold is MyDime
This is the first of a two-part series by the author on Congressional oversight of the Bush Administration by the newly-elected Democratic Congress. - Ed.
During the 2006 campaign, which actually started in 2005, President Bush and Vice President Cheney said remarkably ugly things about Congressional Democrats, describing the possibility that they would take control of Congress as an unmitigated disaster, or worse. For example, as the campaign came to a close, President Bush all but accused Democrats of committing treason: "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses," Bush said.
It was Cheney who led the GOP's attack on Democrats to prevent them from winning control of Congress. In fact, the Vice President was more active in fighting to keep Republican control of Congress, than he was in seeking his own reelection in 2004. The Washington Post reported that Cheney was the star attraction at some 111 GOP fundraisers for the 2006 midterm campaign, in addition to actively campaigning for a slew of Republican candidates. As he traveled the country, Cheney accused Democrats of being soft on terrorism; he named names, and he called people names, as he warned of the end of civilization if Democrats won control of Congress.
Voters' Message to Democrats in the 2006 Election
With this election, however, the Bush/Cheney fearmongering failed. Voters did not buy it. Bush and Cheney had cried wolf too often. Accordingly, voters took control of Congress away from the Republicans on November 7, 2006. This cannot be read as representing voters' enthusiasm for the Democrats, so much as it represented voters' opposition to - and in some cases, disgust with - the Republicans.
I believe Democrats have read that message correctly. Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi told reporters that Americans wanted a "new direction," which includes a return to "bipartisan civility." For that reason, Democrats say that, when they take charge of the new 110th Congress in January, they plan to end the excessive partisanship, with its accompanying paralysis, that has characterized Republican rule.
But ending partisanship, clearly, was not the only message voters sought to send on November 7. Many Democrats ran, and won, on the claim that the Bush Administration was operating unchecked by Congress; that Congressional Republicans refused to exercise oversight of the administration. Early in the campaign, in March 2006, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), along with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), released a joint report to provide Democratic candidates with information showing that the Republican Congress had failed to fulfill its oversight responsibilities. With solid justification, the report labeled Republicans a mere "rubber stamp" for the Bush/Cheney White House, and this theme resonated through many House and Senate races. It was a significant factor in many Democrats' winning their races.
There is, however, an inherent conflict between the two dominant messages voters sent the new Democratic Congress. Civility and oversight are not the best of friends. Indeed, I seriously doubt it is possible for Democrats to bring civility to Congress, while at the same time fulfilling their pledge to meet Congress' responsibility, as an institution, to check and balance the Administration. It is not that Democrats want to imitate Republican investigative techniques, which are well-known for their aggressiveness; it is, rather, that when Republicans respond to the Democrats' efforts by employing aggression and incivility, the Democrats' efforts will inevitably be tainted by the Republicans' incivility.
President Bush is publicly claiming that he is ready to act in a bipartisan manner with respect to the new Democratic Congress, as if he has heard the message voters sent. But his olive branch to the Democratic Congressional Leadership strikes me as more like a fly-swatter, which he is waving about, hoping to keep them at bay as long as possible. I say that because, as of now, Cheney is busy passing the word to the troops that it will be full speed ahead, as if nothing happened in November. In the distance, I can already hear the Republican attack dogs howling, getting ready for the coming Congressional war.
Cheney's Defiant Posture Is Understandable: He Is the Likely Target Of Congressional Oversight
No wonder Dick Cheney worked so hard to prevent the Democrats from winning control of Congress, and is working so hard to push ahead now as if they never had. The DSCC-DCCC report shows that the Democratic Congress has good reason to be interested in Cheney, for he is at the center of the highly controversial activities that the Republican Congress conspicuously ignored.
For example, the report notes the following damning facts: The Republicans refused to investigate the mishandling of the intelligence leading to the war in Iraq. The GOP Congress ignored the fact that Cheney's office was involved in securing a $7 billion no-bid contract for Halliburton, which Cheney headed before becoming VP. The Republicans ignored Cheney's refusal to provide information about his energy task force, which developed policy for the Administration in secret while working with energy company executives. The Republicans refused to investigate the White House's outing of a covert CIA agent (Valerie Plame Wilson) in order to attack her husband, a critic of the Administration. And last, but very much not least, the Republican Congress has ignored the abuses (and torture) of detainees.
In short, Cheney is a key witness with respect to all these questionable - if not illegal -- activities.
Since the election, Cheney has made it clear that he has no interest in cooperating with the Democrats. He told ABC News host George Stephanopoulos he would not testify if subpoenaed. In addition, he told members of the Federalist Society, gathered in Washington for their national convention, that notwithstanding the election results, nothing had changed: The President was going to stay the course in Iraq, and continue sending conservative judicial nominees to the Senate for confirmation.
Not only is Cheney necessarily a key player, if Congress to is understand what has transpired in the Bush Administration during its first six years, but this fact puts Cheney's philosophy, not to mention his mission as Vice President, directly at odds with Congress' undertaking its Constitutional responsibility.
Cheney is a champion of a strong presidency. He believes - or at least his actions suggest he believes - that a strong president is a secretive president, and a secretive president tells Congress what he wishes to tell them, just as he tells them which laws he will or will not obey, particularly as Commander-in-Chief. With the help of a compliant GOP Congress, which evidenced no institutional pride, Cheney has had no problem killing all oversight efforts during the first six years of the Bush presidency. But now, with Democrats prepared to hold the Bush Administration accountable, Cheney does have problems - and they may be quite serious ones.
Still, Cheney's problems are nothing like the woes that Republicans inflicted on Democratic President Bill Clinton, during the Independent Counsel investigations and, ultimately, the impeachment proceeding. I do not believe that the Democrats will resort to such abuses for partisan purposes.
Democrats Are Not Likely To Adopt GOP Tactics
In many ways, Dick Cheney is to Congressional Democrats what Bill Clinton was to Congressional Republicans: An epitome of evil. Republicans saw Clinton as a threat to their "values"; Democrats see Cheney as a threat to their "liberty," if not to democratic government itself. Based on four decades of observing both parties, one of the conspicuous differences I've noted is that Republicans have no reservations about abusing the processes of governing. On the other hand, Democrats do.
Accordingly, when Democrats take control of Congress, they are not likely to repeat the flagrant partisan misuses of investigative powers that Republicans employed against Bill Clinton. The GOP's misuse of the Independent Counsel Act against the Clinton Administration killed that valuable but flawed post-Watergate statute, because Republicans feared they would be subjected to similar treatment. Moreover, the GOP's misuse of Congress' investigative powers during the Clinton years represented a low point in American history - exceeding even Congress' misguided attack on President Andrew Johnson for purely partisan (as well as racially discriminatory) reasons following the Civil War, which brought shame on the institution.
Recall that, when Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, two years into the Clinton Presidency, they launched an unprecedented number of investigations into every facet of the Clinton Administration. Indeed, they were still investigating Clinton when he was out of office, and George W. Bush was in the White House. Republicans literally bludgeoned Clinton with investigation.
Republicans' Investigations During the Clinton Years: Their Folly, and the Their High Cost
For example, Republicans held congressional hearings into alleged drug use by the White House staff; investments by the President and First Lady when he was Governor of Arkansas and they invested in a land development project known as Whitewater; the operations of the White House travel office; the death of White House deputy counsel Vince Foster; the referral of FBI files to the White House security office; the billing records of former associate attorney general Webster Hubbell; the foreign travel of Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary; and President Clinton's holding coffee klatsches with campaign contributors and inviting others to stay overnight at the White House, in the infamous Lincoln Bedroom.
And these were not passing investigations; to the contrary. For example, the Republican-controlled House devoted 140 hours to taking sworn testimony when investigating whether President Clinton had engaged in misconduct with respect to a Christmas-card fundraiser. Republicans worked mightily to criminalize Democratic political behavior, by using (and abusing) the Independent Counsel Act.
Republicans demanded independent counsel investigations of Henry Cisneros, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for allegedly giving the FBI false information during his background check (Cisneros lied about his finances, but only to cover up an extramarital affair); Bruce Babbitt, for allegedly giving Congress misleading information about an Indian casino proposal; Alexis Herman, Secretary of Labor, for alleged improper campaign finance arrangements; Ron Brown, Secretary of Commerce, for alleged improprieties with respect to his personal finances; and Eli Segal, Director of AmeriCorps, for alleged conflicts of interest. And, of course, an Independent Counsel would investigate the President and First Lady regarding Whitewater, Vince Foster's death, the travel office, and the Paula Jones lawsuit, which revealed the president's sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Independent Counsel Ken Starr would become Congress's surrogate impeachment counsel, as the House voted to overturn the 1996 election, and the Senate wasted months doing what they could to tarnish President Clinton, but refusing to convict him of any impeachable offense. It was a donnybrook of the highest order.
Typical of the Congressional abuses of power during the Clinton presidency was the operation of the House Committee on Government Reform, which issued a staggering 1,052 subpoenas to investigate the Clinton Administration between 1997 and 2002.
By way of comparison, the committee has issued a paltry three subpoenas to the Bush Administration relating to the appalling handling of Hurricane Katrina - a far more serious matter and one where there are highly credible allegations of the Administration's incompetence before and after Katrina hit, which resulted in mass suffering and death. In sum, the Republican Congress has been invisible when it comes to oversight of the Bush Presidency.
Conservatively, I would estimate that the costs of Republican investigations of the Clinton Administration, which continued even after Clinton has left the White House, exceeded $200 million. It was clearly abusive, not to mention cruel. The Bush Administration is fortunate that the Independent Counsel Act has expired, and that Democrats do not play the game the way Republicans do.
What Should the Democrats Do If The Bush Administration Stonewalls Them?
Rumblings on Capitol Hill suggest that Republicans may literally be "out of control" as the minority party. Many Republicans in Congress are upset that they will lose their perks, and they want to punish the Democrats for winning. In addition, the White House believes its conservative base wants it to make life difficult for the Democrat Congress, so they will assist in doing just that.
The word on K Street is also that making life difficult for Congressional Democrats will help Republicans win the White House and Congress in 2008. As one well-connected Republican attorney in Washington told me: "We see a war coming on Capitol Hill." In fact, many Congressional Republicans believe they are better at being opponents than proponents, so they look forward to raising hell.
Since Democrats are going to encountering some major stonewalling, when they try to pursue oversight of the Bush Administration, this raises two key questions: What should the Democrats do in response to the stonewalling, and how should they do it?
Answering these questions will be the subject of my next column.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20061201.html
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Who's looking for a way out? Why would we leave when we are beating the Terrorist even further back into the Dark Ages?
Yes....he is.
He would rather see the Dems 'fail' at somehow extracting this administration out of the greatest foreign policy blunder in the history of our country so he can run around cackling like his bloviating gas-bag hero...... RRRUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSHHHHHHHH. Republicans are great at starting things........gee, bet they got a lot of unsatisfied 'partners'...