BeggarsCanBeChoosers.com

By MARC McDONALD

I'm not sure what the specific grievance was that motivated an Iraqi journalist to throw two shoes at George W. Bush during a news conference in Baghdad. Throwing shoes at someone is a considered a supreme insult in the Middle East.

But I do know this: if I could speak to that Iraqi journalist, I'd tell him that I share his contempt for Bush.

Indeed, I wish those shoes had hit Bush squarely in the middle of his smirking face.

After all, Bush now has only a few weeks left in office. Bush will leave the White House without ever having faced any consequences whatsoever for his reckless, illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq.

Throughout history, other world leaders have faced serious consequences for comparable crimes. They've faced international court tribunals. They've been tried in The Hague. They've gone to jail. In some cases, they've even faced the firing squad.

But thanks to the spineless, wimpy Democrats, Bush will apparently never face any consequences for the Iraq War, a $3 trillion fiasco that has resulted in the deaths of over 1 million men, women and children.

No, Bush will any face any consequences for the Iraq horror that he unleashed. He'll never be arrested. He'll never be tried. He'll never face justice.

Indeed (like all ex-presidents) Bush can look forward to a nice, cushy, lucrative career after the White House. Presidents generally land multi-million-dollar book deals (and thanks to ghost writers, they don't even have to bother to write their books).

And ex-presidents can generally command enormous multi-million-dollar fees on the lecture circuit. (Note that although most of America despises Bush, there are still plenty of Kool-Aid-drinking Bush cultists who will glad shell out money to hear him speak).

So like Jack the Ripper, Bush is a monster with blood on his hands who is going to get off scot-free and never face any repercussions for his crimes.

Like I said, the shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist speaks for a lot of us in his contempt for Bush.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq War

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This video does a good job of summing up the blatant, outrageous lies that George W. Bush and the NeoCons told in leading America into the $3 trillion Iraq War fiasco, which has led to the deaths of over 1 million Iraqi men, women and children.

Labels: Bush Crime Family, Iraq War, NeoCons

By MANIFESTO JOE

Full disclosure: I have no military background. I do have 30 years of experience as a professional journalist, and have known enough U.S. history, for long enough, that at 17, I earned 6 hours of college credit in that subject just by taking a test. Take those for whatever they're worth.

My perhaps-risky thesis: The "surge" in Iraq, now being touted as some kind of unequivocal success, is yet another deception in a military campaign that will be remembered as the war that keeps on costing.

Granted, al Qaeda in Iraq has apparently been dealt some crushing blows (for now), and U.S. military casualties are sharply down. These things are being widely reported as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is on his overseas trip, which included a stop in Iraq.

But, the latter point, about the decline in U.S. casualties, reflects the ethnocentrism with which Americans tend to look at foreign conflicts. Juan Cole, writing on Informed Comment, points out:

Despite all the talk about Iraq being "calm," I'd like to point out that the month just before the last visit Barack Obama made to Iraq (he went in January, 2006), there were 537 civilian and ISF Iraqi casualties. In June of this year, 2008, there were 554 according to AP. These are official statistics gathered passively that probably only capture about 10 percent of the true toll.

That is, the Iraqi death toll is actually still worse now than the last time Obama was in Iraq! (See the bombings and shootings listed below for Sunday). The hype around last year's troop escalation obscures a simple fact: that Obama formed his views about the need for the US to leave Iraq at a time when its security situation was very similar to what it is now! Why a return to the bad situation in late 05 and early 06 should be greeted by the GOP as the veritable coming of the Messiah is beyond me. You have people like Joe Lieberman saying silly things like if it weren't for the troop escalation, Obama wouldn't be able to visit Iraq. Uh, he visited it before the troop escalation, just fine.

To read the entire Cole article, click here.

What we seem to be hearing is that when fewer Americans are being killed and maimed as a result of the "surge," that makes it an unequivocal success. When the furrenurs is gettin' whacked a little faster than they wuz two and a half years ago, well, that's their tough luck. It's an A-Murkan world.

And, we've heard all this before, at other times and in other places. And it hasn't been so long since we've heard it. I seem to recall that "we" (in the editorial sense) were supposed to have pretty much routed the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies in Afghanistan. Been reading or hearing any news from there lately? It ain't over till it's over. And that one, the war "we" actually have reasonable justification for, is far from over.

I also seem to recall a day in 2003 when, just weeks after the invasion of Iraq, Il Doofus staged a landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier and declared major military operations in Iraq to be over.

The MSM mouthpieces remain very much on the Pentagon bandwagon (not to mention the Straitjacket Express), with a mantra of "Obama was dead wrong" on the outcome of the "surge."

True, Obama didn't call it right in predicting that the "surge" would bring an increase in violence.

But, given the continued toll on Iraqi civilians, reports of success seem greatly exaggerated. I think the "surge" could be pronounced a success on the day that there are no unusual civilian deaths in Iraq, that the millions of refugees can return home safely, and that a stable Iraqi government can be elected without being propped up by a U.S. military presence. Perhaps in 100 years?

I'll venture a possibly risky prediction, but one firmly based on recent U.S. history.

In January 1973, the Nixon administration finally reached that elusive "peace with honor" deal with North Vietnam. The "peace" lasted a while. Then, a couple of years later, communist troops were overrunning South Vietnam. The American people were so sick of that bottomless pit of lives and money that they said a loud and resounding "NO" when the Ford administration had the nerve to propose that "we" go back in there.

The bottom line is that the U.S. is an occupier in a land generally hostile to the occupation. And, it should come as no surprise that the resistance will hide and play possum with every "surge" that our taxpayers can be conned into bankrolling. That's the name of the game in guerrilla warfare.

I'll gamble, and predict an outcome similar to the previously cited ones. For Americans, this will be the war that keeps on costing.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Labels: Iraq War, Obama, propaganda, surge

By MARC McDONALD

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is starting to become a real pain in the ass for the Bush White House. Instead of being a good little client state puppet, he keeps shooting his mouth off, asking for a timetable for the U.S. military to leave his shattered nation.

If Al-Maliki is smart, he really needs to start watching his back. His days are clearly numbered.

In order to realize this, you don't have to put on a tin foil hat. All you have to do is look at America's own sordid history in dealing with foreign heads of state who don't stick to the script. Time and time again, they wind up deposed or dead.

Take Saddam Hussein, for example. For decades, he was a U.S. ally in the Middle East. We armed him and funded him and even helped him ruthlessly purge his opponents in Iraq. It was only when he stopped following the script from Washington that he became an enemy of the U.S.

But Saddam is hardly alone among heads of state who ran afoul of U.S. policy over the years (and wound up dead or deposed as a result).

In fact, the CIA has been running around the world deposing foreign heads of state for decades, (including such democratically elected leaders as Iran's Mohammed Mosaddeq and Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz Guzman).

Now, Al-Maliki is latest leader to run afoul of U.S. policy. In the latest controversy, he has expressed approval of Barack Obama's plan to get U.S. troops out of Iraq within 16 months of next January. He made the remarks in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel.

This latest stunning development has the NeoCons reeling. In a desperate attempt to spin the story to their advantage, the NeoCons have been claiming that Al-Maliki's words were mistranslated or misinterpreted.

Much to the NeoCons' dismay, however, Der Spiegel has stood by its story. As Juan Cole points out, Der Spiegel still has the audio recording of the interview and what's more, it turns out that the translator involved works for al-Maliki, not for Der Spiegel.

Thus, the last fig leaf that the NeoCons could hide behind has been removed. The whole incident has become an enormous embarrassment for Bush and his allies.

There can no longer be any doubt: Al-Maliki now clearly wants a firm timetable for getting U.S. troops out of his nation and he even explicitly supports Obama's plan.

It's clear that Al-Maliki has turned into a big, big problem for Bush and the NeoCons.

Unfortunately for Al-Maliki, he lives in the most dangerous nation on earth: a country where bloody shootouts and bombings occur on a daily basis. What's worse is that he has increasingly turned into a thorn in the side of the NeoCons who fiercely reject any timetables for withdrawal.

Like I said, Al-Maliki had better start watching his back. His days are clearly numbered.

Labels: Al-Maliki, Bush Crime Family, Iraq War

By MARC McDONALD

One of the most heavily-hyped and highly rated films in years, The Dark Knight is more than just a mere movie: it's an industry unto itself. This juggernaut, which cost an eye-popping $180 million to produce, opened to rapturous response, and massive crowds on Friday. As of Saturday afternoon, it had already raked in a one-day box office record $66 million and is (at least at the moment) the all-time No. 1 highest rated film on IMDB.com, just ahead of The Godfather.

The back-story of The Dark Knight is causing a media frenzy, led by the tragic death earlier this year of Heath Ledger, who plays The Joker.

The film itself is being hailed for its dark, menacing atmosphere, as well as the sheer amount of graphic bloodiness (unusual for a comic book movie). But overall, everyone seems to be happy: from comic book fanboys to Time Warner shareholders.

However, I can't help but think that there's something horribly wrong about the whole Dark Knight phenomenon that is symbolic of what's wrong with our nation as a whole these days. And it goes well beyond the dumbing-down of our culture, which is so easily entertained by a movie based on a comic book (a mediocre comic book at that----I can think of dozens of manga and underground comics that are vastly superior to "Batman").

For a start, there is the matter of misplaced priorities. Between The Dark Knight and Heath Ledger's death, our national media has once again devoted acres of column space to a movie, during a time in which the ongoing Iraq War has all but disappeared from our nation's media radar.

The long-suffering people of Iraq have no need to go a movie to see bloody shootouts and spectacular explosions: they see them all the time in real life, every day.

In fact, while the people of America are idly distracting themselves with comic book movies, the people of Iraq are still suffering a horrible ongoing nightmare.

Despite the proclamations by the GOP and the corporate media that Iraq is "getting better," the Iraqi people still have to contend with daily shootings and bombings on a mind-numbing scale.

Take Tuesday, for example. Just on that one day, guerrillas killed around 40 people and wounded dozens in several attacks in northern Iraq.

Did you hear about this story? Of course not. The U.S. media had more important priorities, such as gearing up the Great Hype Machine for The Dark Knight.

Tuesday's attacks were the sort of horrific violence that would dominate the news for years if it happened here. But since it happened in Iraq, it barely even gets reported in the U.S. these days. Our politicians are too busy proclaiming the "success" of our operations in Iraq.

I'm sure some readers will complain that I'm being a spoilsport. "Americans are weary of the war," they'll say. "We need an occasional break from reality with escapist fare like The Dark Knight."

Therein lies the problem. America is responsible for the horrific mess in Iraq. The disaster there may no longer interest Americans, with our short, MTV attention spans. But Iraq is OUR disaster and it ought to be relentlessly rubbed in our faces every single day until we demand and scream that this disastrous, illegal, immoral war be brought to an end now.

Labels: America in Decline, Iraq War, The Dark Knight

By MARC McDONALD

Taking a look at the latest troop casualties from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq, it quickly becomes apparent that IEDs remain a lethal threat to the U.S. military. In April, May and June, IEDs killed at least 54 U.S. troops, causing over half the 104 combat deaths suffered by the military in those three months.

It's clear that the U.S. military's $10 billion program to defeat the IED threat isn't working. The program (officially called the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization) was launched by the Pentagon in 2005 to foil IED attacks.

The program has increasingly come under fire as ineffective and poorly run. As WorldTribune.com reported in September, the program is a "boondoggle" that a Joint Forces Staff College review concluded is "mired in red tape and has relied excessively on technology."

Astonishingly, the U.S. has now spent more on this anti-IED program, in equivalent dollars, than it spent on the Manhattan Project installation that produced plutonium for World War II's atomic bombs.

Insurgents have enjoyed great success with IEDs, despite the fact the devices are remarkably low-tech and are often detonated with ordinary remote controls or cell phones.

What is particularly stunning about the whole IED saga is the fact that ordnance used in these devices was looted by insurgents in the first few weeks of the Iraq War. The Pentagon admits that over 250,000 tons of ordnance was looted--enough to build 1 million 500-pound bombs.

One might wonder why arms depots across Iraq were left unguarded in the early stages of the war. Well, it appears the U.S. military had higher priorities.

One of the few buildings left untouched by looters in April 2003 was the massive Oil Ministry building in Baghdad, which was heavily guarded by U.S. troops. When U.S. forces entered Baghdad, they immediately surrounded the building with 50 tanks, while sharpshooters positioned themselves on the roof and in the windows.

Oil fields in Iraq were also heavily guarded in the early days of the war. Amnesty International criticized the attention placed on controlling oilfields, which it noted must have taken "much planning and resources."

But while the U.S. military lavished great care on securing the Baghdad Oil Ministry and Iraq's oil fields, hundreds of arms depots remained unguarded in April 2003.

Five years later, the ordnance looted from those arms depots continues to be used to build IEDs. And despite spending $10 billion to defeat IEDs, the Pentagon has yet to come up with an answer to this lethal threat to our troops.
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Labels: IED, Iraq War, Pentagon

By MARC MCDONALD

In its lead editorial Friday, The Wall Street Journal took a swipe at Barack Obama for calling for a withdrawal of American troops from the fiasco in Iraq. That much was predictable from this right-wing rag. But what's bizarre was the Journal's reason for opposing the withdrawal of our troops: the "success" of the surge.

Huh?

Since it was bought by Rupert Murdoch, the Journal has increasingly begun to sound like an unhinged right-wing blog---fanatical in its support of George W. Bush and its foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of Democrats. And like the lunatic fringe blogs MichelleMalkin.com and Little Green Footballs, the Journal is increasingly disconnected from reality.

On Friday, the Journal predictably took aim at Scott McClellan, along with the rest of the Great GOP Noise Machine. In the middle of an editorial bashing McClellan, the Journal paused to take a shot at Obama:

"Mr. Obama has staked out a position for immediate troop withdrawal that looks increasingly untenable amid the success of the "surge" and improving security in Baghdad and Basra."

Let me see if I understand this correctly: the surge is a "success" and, as a result, this means our troops can't be brought home? Then, exactly, when can Americans look forward to our troops coming home and the end of this bloody fiasco of a war?

The Journal follows the same sort of infantile "heads I win, tails you lose" logic that the NeoCons use so often these days. If horrible violence continues in Iraq, the Right-Wing demands that our troops stay there. But if violence declines, this also means our troops must stay in Iraq.

In any case, it's highly debatable whether the surge has worked at all. And as Middle East experts like Nir Rosen have repeatedly reminded us, the recent decline in violence has nothing to do with the increase in troops announced by Bush in January.

Labels: George W. Bush, GOP noise machine, Iraq War

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Scott McClellan has raised eyebrows with his new book, which says George W. Bush misled the nation into an unnecessary war in Iraq. Note that this isn't a left-wing blogger making this claim---it's none other than the former White House press secretary.

Among the revelations in McClellan's book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, due out Monday, is a conversation that he reports on the topic of cocaine use, in 1999 when it briefly became a campaign issue, much to Bush's annoyance.

McClellan writes:

"'The media won't let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,' I heard Bush say. 'You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don't remember.'"

AJC.com reports McClellan writes that he was mystified by Bush's comments.

"I remember thinking to myself, How can that be?" McClellan wrote. "How can someone simply not remember whether or not they used an illegal substance like cocaine? It didn't make a lot of sense."

Read more here.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq War, Scott McClellan

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As Chris Floyd writes, George W. Bush and David Petraeus are now gearing up to make a new Fallujah in Sadr City, home to 2 million Shiites in Baghdad.

Like Fallujah, it should be quite a bloodbath. Not that the American people will ever know. No, we'll continue to live our carefree lives, mindlessly listening to American Idol and eagerly following the latest exploits of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

God forbid that our corporate mainstream media should ever bring us the reality of the Iraq War. Just as in the case of Fallujah, the upcoming horrific Sadr City bloodbath will be carefully censored and sanitized.

As Floyd notes, the horrors of Fallujah were rarely reported by the MSM.

Americans "were spared shots of engineers cutting off water and electricity to the city – a flagrant war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as CounterPunch notes, but standard practice throughout the occupation. Nor did pictures of attack helicopters gunning down civilians trying to escape across the Euphrates River – including a family of five – make the TV news, despite the eyewitness account of an AP journalist. Nor were tender American sensibilities subjected to the sight of phosphorous shells bathing enemy fighters – and nearby civilians – with unquenchable chemical fire, literally melting their skin, as the Washington Post reports. Nor did they see the fetus being blown out of the body of Artica Salim when her home was bombed during the "softening-up attacks" that raged relentlessly – and unnoticed – in the closing days of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the Scotland Sunday Herald reports."

In case you never saw it, the video Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre, (which documents the war crimes in the 2004 assault) can be viewed online here.

Labels: Bush Crime Family, Bush war crimes, Iraq War

By MARC MCDONALD

AP reports that Blackwater Worldwide, the profiteering, mercenary outfit, is not expected to face criminal charges in the September shooting deaths of 17 civilians in Iraq.

So it looks like it'll soon be back to business as usual for Blackwater in Iraq. And make no mistake, business has been very good for Blackwater in recent years.

As the The Virginian-Pilot has noted, since 2000, Blackwater has raked in $505 million in publicly identifiable federal contracts. About two-thirds of that amount was in no-bid contracts.

Indeed, times are good for Blackwater these days. As HuffingtonPost.com reported on April 4, Blackwater's multimillion-dollar contract to protect diplomats in Baghdad was renewed, according to the State Department.

From the Associated Press:

Blackwater unlikely to face charges in Iraq shooting

Blackwater Worldwide, the security contractor blamed by an angry Iraqi government for the shooting deaths of 17 civilians, is not expected to face criminal charges-—all but ensuring the company will keep its multimillion-dollar contract to protect U.S. diplomats.

Instead, the seven-month-old Justice Department investigation is focused on as few as three or four Blackwater guards who could be indicted in the Sept. 16 shootings, according to interviews with a half-dozen people close to the investigation.

The final decision on any charges will not be made until late summer at the earliest, a law enforcement official said. All spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation.

The State Department publicly raised the question of Blackwater's corporate liability last month when it extended the company's contract by one year. The contract could still be canceled if criminal charges are brought, but the department said it was unlikely to penalize the corporation if only its employees were charged.

More here.

Labels: Blackwater, Iraq War

By MARC MCDONALD

A report released Thursday describes the Iraq War as "a major debacle" in which the outcome "is in doubt."

Who published these harshly critical words? An anti-war group? Some obscure left-wing blog? The Huffington Post? Code Pink?

Uh, no: actually this sharp criticism came from none other than the National Defense University, a leading Pentagon military educational institute.

One wonders how the Bush White House (as well as its allies at Fox News and HateWing radio) will spin this story. No doubt, they will either ignore the story, or attack or smear its authors.

To which I say: Good luck with that.

Bush will have a tough time trying to debunk this stunning report. After all, as McClatchy Newspapers noted, "the report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations."

The report's opening sentence says it all: "Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle."

Watch out for major NeoCon spin control in the weeks ahead. And look out for the Republicans to throw a major hissy fit. I suspect they'll also be angry at McClatchy for simply publishing this story in the first place.

Here's the McClatchy Newspapers story on the Pentagon institute's report:

By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott, McClatchy Newspapers

The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.

The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.

It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center.

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.

At the time the report was written last fall, more than 4,000 U.S. and foreign troops, more than 7,500 Iraqi security forces and as many as 82,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and tens of thousands of others wounded, while the cost of the war since March 2003 was estimated at $450 billion .

"No one as yet has calculated the costs of long-term veterans' benefits or the total impact on service personnel and materiel," wrote Collins, who was involved in planning post-invasion humanitarian operations.

The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.

"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East," the report continued.

Read the rest of the McClatchy story here. Go here to read the Pentagon institute report.

Labels: Iraq War, Pentagon

By THE MASKED LIBERAL

If you like the way things are going in Iraq, then you'll be thrilled by what our continued presence there will bring. More of the same. Six days, six months, six years--more of the same.

Violence will continue. Some months, killings will be up. Some months, down. Attacks on U.S. troops and installations will continue. Some days, we'll be spared a single casualty. Some days, two or three Americans will die.

Our half-billion-dollar embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone will continue to take hits, and an incendiary device could burn the place to the ground because Iraqi workers botched the fire-control system during construction. On purpose? Who's to say?

Can we look forward to a reduction in the strife between the Shiites and Sunnis? Truces will be declared and broken. Some months, killings will be up. Some months, they'll be down. Same old, same old. Religious strife has been part of the fabric of Iraqi civilization since it was called Mesopotamia. The Ottoman Empire couldn't pacify the region in the hundreds of years of trying. The British Empire had little better luck in the 1900s, despite an effort that killed 100,000 of its troops. Nation building has a hard go of it in Iraq.

Iraq's oil fields? Production is improving. It's a bit greater than it was prior to our invasion. Can it be sustained? Maybe--if we can keep it a secret that oil is flammable.

A workable Iraqi government? Sure, when the Shiites and Sunnis learn to love each other.

When a new president is elected this November, what will change in the war that's costing the United States $200,000 a minute? Very little, be our new leader Republican or Democrat. We're so deeply entwined in the pitiful nation of Iraq and in the region as a whole that massive policy change isn't possible. Troops will be shuffled in and shuffled out. Plans will be made and discarded. Generals will come and go. And we'll remain in Iraq.

And remain ... and remain ... and remain.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq War

John Lennon's 1973 song, "Bring on the Lucie (Freda People)," wasn't about the Iraq War, of course---but it might as well have been. From Lennon's underrated Mind Games album, the song expressed anger at all the warmongering bastards in power. Lennon's line, "666 is your name," might have been directed at George W. Bush (had he lived to see The Psychopath-In-Chief).

We don't care what flag you're waving
We don't even want to know your name
We don't care where you're from or where you're going
All we know is that you came
You're making all our decisions
We have just one request of you
That while you're thinking things over
Here's something you just better do

Free the people now
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now
Free the people now
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now

Well we were caught with our hands in the air
Don't despair paranoia is everywhere
We can shake it with love when we're scared
So let's shout it aloud like a prayer

Free the people now
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now
Free the people now
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now

We understand your paranoia
But we don't want to play your game
You think you're cool and know what you are doing
666 is your name
So while you're jerking off each other
You better bear this thought in mind
Your time is up you better know it
But maybe you don't read the signs

Free the people now
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now
Free the people now
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now

Well you were caught with your hands in the kill
And you still got to swallow your pill
As you slip and you slide down the hill
On the blood of the people you killed

Stop the killing (Free the people now)
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now
Stop the killing (Free the people now)
Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it now

Lennon lyric from LyricsDepot.com

Labels: Iraq War, John Lennon

By MARC MCDONALD

Five years after the start of the disastrous Iraq War, there remains one fig leaf that the remaining war supporters and other hopeful Americans can still hide behind these days. After all, these fig-leaf wearers constantly remind us, we did get rid of Saddam Hussein, right?

So despite the fact that the war is a $3 trillion fiasco that has slaughtered a million people, the fig-leaf wearers think they can still find a silver lining in this disaster by reminding all of us that, after all, Saddam is gone.

I am not defending Saddam. But on the other hand, I think those who proclaimed Saddam to be a monstrous tyrant who was the "new Hitler" need to ask themselves a few questions:

1. First of all, I find it incredible that any Americans can still smugly proclaim that they know exactly what was going on in Iraq before the U.S. invaded. Saddam may well have been an evil tyrant---but the fact is, America was totally in the dark about Iraq. Everything we were told about Iraq turned out to be a crock of sh*t (from the non-existent WMDs to Saddam's non-existent ties to 9/11 to the "fact" that Iraqis would greet us as liberators).

All lies. All bullsh*t. And yet, incredibly, there are those fig-leaf wearers who still, to this day, arrogantly proclaim that they know exactly what Saddam was up to---and that it consisted of horrific crimes that murdered millions of people. Keep in mind that these are the same people who smugly proclaimed that Saddam had WMDs---and indeed, used that issue as a club to beat the heads of anyone who dared question George W. Bush's case for war in 2003.

I'm astonished at how smug and arrogant many of these people are. They've been proven wrong time and time again on everything to do with Iraq. And yet, when they make sweeping statements about Iraq and Saddam's crimes, you'll never find anyone who is more sure of themselves.

One wonders: where, exactly, are they getting this info about Saddam's murder of "millions"? The reality is, it's likely largely coming from the same disgruntled anti-Baathist Iraqi exiles who were peddling the same fairy tales about Saddam having WMDs. Between Bush's hysterical, over-the-top denunciations of Saddam, and these misinformed exiles (many of whom hadn't actually lived in Iraq for many years), it's no wonder that Americans came to believe that Saddam was the next Hitler.

2. Speaking of Saddam's murder of "millions": maybe it's true. I don't claim to know one way or another. But those who condemn Saddam weaken their credibility by constantly citing wildly different figures. I've seen some authors claim the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands. Other cite figures in excess of millions dead.

I find all this interesting. After all, the U.S. has little idea of the carnage that has taken place right under our noses during our occupation of Iraq. As the Pentagon has repeatedly put it, the U.S. military "doesn't do body counts." And yet, even though we have no idea of how many have died in our occupation of Iraq, there are fig-leaf wearers who make sweeping proclamations about the "millions" that Saddam murdered many years ago.

Actually, America could have bolstered its credibility and its case for invading Iraq if it had worked to ensure that Saddam got a fair trial. Such a trial could have presented to the world a detailed case for Saddam's crimes. It would have also given survivors of Saddam's regime their day in court.

Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Saddam's trial was a travesty. Basically, we handed him over to his political enemies for a kangaroo trial that mocked the very idea of justice. Saddam's lawyers couldn't even do their job without worrying about getting a bullet in the head (and indeed, several were gunned down during the trial).

There was no detailed examination of the "millions" that Saddam murdered during the trial. One wonders: why not? If we had solid evidence of Saddam murdering millions, then why not try him for that? In the end, Saddam was convicted for the killing of 148 people in 1982 who were reportedly connected to an assassination attempt.

Watching the trial proceedings, I couldn't help but think that the whole event was a mockery of justice. It seems to me that the U.S. just wanted to quickly get the trial over with and hang Saddam as soon as possible. Which begs the question: why? What was the rush? If Saddam was indeed the new Hitler, why didn't the trial take a deeper look at his past crimes?

Call me cynical, but I can't help but wonder if the U.S. just didn't want Saddam dead as quickly as possible before he started talking about his past lengthy, cozy ties to the U.S. Which brings me to another point:

3. Did the U.S. really ever have a leg to stand on in condemning Saddam? Of course, the vast majority of Americans will say yes. But I wonder. If Saddam did indeed murder millions, there is still the uncomfortable fact that the U.S. worked closely with Saddam for decades. If Saddam was indeed the New Hitler, what does that make America?

Most Americans are completely in the dark when it comes to knowledge about how America worked closely with Saddam.

In fact, the U.S. had a cozy relationship with Saddam that lasted for decades. How many Americans are aware that, in 1959, the CIA hired the then-22-year-old Saddam to carry out a plot to assassinate the Iraqi prime minister, General Abd al-Karim Qasim? (Saddam's assassination attempt failed when he fired too soon and he only wound up killing Qasim's driver).

Bush has long condemned Saddam for crimes such as gassing the Kurds in the town of Halabjah in 1988. But how many Americans know that the U.S. in fact sold materials to Saddam for creating biological and chemical weapons in the 1980s?

As Craig Unger reported in his 2004 book, House of Bush, House of Saud:

"Beginning in 1984, the Centers for Disease Control began providing Saddam's Iraq with biological materials--including viruses, retroviruses, bacteria, fungi, and even tissue that was infected with bubonic plague."

Unger noted that the latter exchange may have been initiated in the spirit of an "innocent" transfer of scientific information. But as he points out: "It is not difficult to argue against giving bubonic-plague-infected tissues to Saddam Hussein."

Unger quotes former Senate investigator James Tuite: "We were freely exchanging pathogenic materials with a country that we knew had an active biological warfare program."

But don't try to tell any of this to the fig-leaf wearers. The fact is, America has become an infantile culture. We're deeply ignorant about the rest of the world. And we tend to see the world in simplistic black-and-white/good-versus-evil terms (with, of course, the U.S. always being the "good guys").

All the fig-leaf wearers will permit themselves to hear is that Saddam was the next Hitler. End of story. The vast majority of Americans don't want to hear that maybe, just maybe, the story is a little more complex than that. Which leads me to my final point:

4. It's clear that America never really understood Iraq. We never bothered to learn a thing about the Iraqi people, their language and their culture. We were completely clueless and in the dark. Hell, most Americans had no clue that our own government had been working, hand-in-glove, with Saddam for decades.

Instead, on the eve of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Americans were blissfully ignorant and eagerly lapping up the Fox News/corporate media line: "Saddam is the new Hitler and America needs to get rid of him. If we do this, Iraqis will greet us with flowers and everyone will live happily ever after."

Five years later, it's clear that everything we were told about Saddam (and Iraq in general) back in those heady days in 2003 was a f*cking lie. And by deluding ourselves by building up this cartoonish image of Saddam-as-the-new-Hitler, we were completely in the dark about the oncoming freight train of disaster we were about to encounter.

The fact is, Saddam was no Hitler. He was a dime-a-dozen petty tyrant of a poor, Third World nation. He posed absolutely no threat to the U.S. (Indeed, if he did somehow pose a threat to America, then the real question wasn't whether to invade Iraq---it should have been this: what, exactly, had U.S. taxpayers been getting in return for the trillions of dollars that we've pumped into the Pentagon over the years? We've lavished more on military spending than the rest of the world combined---and yet we were not safe from Iraq, a poor Third World nation with no industry that was crippled by crushing sanctions?)

One thing I'd like the fig-leaf wearers to explain to me is this: how, exactly, was Saddam any more evil than the dozens of other petty dictators around the world (many of whom America has also supported over the years).

For that matter, how was Saddam more evil than, say, the leaders of Saudi Arabia? The latter, after all, run one of the world's most repressive dictatorships. They routinely torture and murder their opponents. (Oh, and Saudi Arabia is also the beating heart of Islamic radicalism worldwide). And yet, instead of invading that nation, Bush happily hobnobs with their leaders and even invites them out to the ranch for barbecue.

One final thing I'd like the fig-leaf wearers to explain to me is this: if Saddam was so evil, then why is it that there was never a single recorded instance of a suicide bomber in Iraq before 2003? And why did Saddam's convoys never face roadside bombs?

For that matter, why, exactly has the U.S. faced a ferocious insurgency now for the past five years? If Saddam was the next Hitler and he was so evil, then why weren't we greeted as liberators in the first place?

Yes, these are troubling questions. And they are questions that the fig-leaf wearers (and most Americans) will never bother to answer. Probably because if we answer these questions, it'll lead us to even more troubling questions that we as a nation would simply rather not think about. So in the time-honored American tradition of sanitizing our own history, we'll simply sweep these troubling questions under the rug and not give them any further thought.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq War, Saddam

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The following article, from today's Army Times newspaper, neatly sums up the Bush administration's "screw you" attitude toward working with Congress. One can only hope that this contempt toward Congress will finally give the Democrats the backbone to put the issue of impeachment back on the table:

Bush Officials: Congress Irrelevant On Iraq

By William H. McMichael

The Bush administration says the 2002 congressional authorization to go to war in Iraq gives it the authority to conduct combat operations in Iraq and negotiate far-reaching agreements with the current Iraqi government without consulting Congress.

The assertion, jointly made Tuesday by U.S. Ambassador David Satterfield and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Mary Beth Long, drew an incredulous reaction from Democrats on a Joint House committee during a hearing on future U.S. commitments to Iraq.

"It's the view of the administration that as long as there’s trouble in Iraq that you have authorization of this Congress to continue there in perpetuity and define trouble as you desire?" asked Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y.

"We have authorization to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq," Satterfield replied. "The situation in Iraq continues to present a threat to the United States."

The Bush administration also feels it does not need to seek the authorization of Congress to ratify two pending agreements with Iraq: a "Strategic Framework" that would govern "normalized" relations with the U.S., and a Status of Forces Agreement that would govern the "authorities and protections" of U.S. troops in Iraq past Dec. 31, the expiration of a U.N. resolution that the administration says authorizes their presence.

More here.

Labels: Congress, George W. Bush, Iraq War

By MARC MCDONALD

Like a relentless salesman who won't take no for an answer, George W. Bush has been peddling the Iraq War for six years now. And the American people are still steadfastly refusing to buy Bush's case for war.

Bush and his Kool-Aid drinking followers seem genuinely baffled and hurt that the American people want the war ended now.

After all, they argue, in increasingly shrill tones, if we leave Iraq, then Al Qaeda will "win," and America will surely be hit with another 9/11 terrorist attack.

Pretty strong words. And yet they fail to sway the American people.

In fact, the American people simply don't believe Bush's bullsh*t about Iraq. They want the war ended now. They want the troops brought home. They're deeply unhappy with Bush's handling of the war. And Bush's approval ratings remain in the toilet.

Bush and his followers point the finger at countless suspects in trying to explain why the Iraq War remains so deeply unpopular with the American people.

It's the media's fault, they say. It's the liberal bloggers' fault. It's the Democrats' fault. It's the fault of the American people (who clearly don't see the threat the nation faces).

Bush has had enormous help in selling his war over the years. The mainstream media, which helped Bush sell the case for invading Iraq in the first place, has now gone to bat for Bush to sell the idea that the surge is a success (despite strong evidence that it's a failure). And even the military (which is supposed to be non-partisan) has stepped up to the plate to help Bush sell the surge.

What Bush and his followers have never grasped is that necessary wars don't have to be sold at all.

If a war is really essential, the American people have shown time and again that they will not only support it, but they will make whatever sacrifices are needed to achieve victory. They'll accept rationing. They'll accept higher taxes. They'll even line up to buy war bonds.

FDR never had to sell the war against the Axis Powers. The American people understood the necessity of World War II.

Back in 2003, Americans briefly were swayed by Bush's argument that we needed to invade Iraq. With the help of the corporate media, Bush hammered away the idea that Iraq had terrifying Weapons of Mass Destruction that posed a mortal threat to America.

At the time, a few rational voices were disputing Bush's case for war. We rejected the silly idea that a small, isolated Third World desert nation with no industry could somehow pose a threat to America. We even rejected the term "Weapons of Mass Destruction," which is a term that belongs in comic books, not in the real world.

Indeed, in the build-up to war, some of us were arguing that the real question wasn't whether the nation should invade Iraq. Instead, we were wondering what, exactly, American taxpayers had been getting in return for the trillions of dollars we'd sunk into the Pentagon money pit over the decades.

The Pentagon, apparently, couldn't protect America even though our nation spent more on defense than the rest of the world combined. What was wrong with this picture?

Fast-forward five years later and America is totally sick and tired of Bush's Iraq disaster. Not only is the Bush legacy in the toilet, but the Republican Party itself has been seriously wounded by the fiasco of the Bush years.

At this point, the only people who want the Iraq War to continue are Bush and his followers, and Al Qaeda. Although the MSM has done a poor job of reporting it, the fact is that U.S. intelligence has long believed that Al Qaeda wants the U.S. military to remain in Iraq.

It's no mystery why Al Qaeda wants the war to continue. After all, the Iraq War has been a fantastic boon to Al Qaeda. The photos from Abu Ghraib alone have done wonders for Al Qaeda recruitment. Countless young Muslim men have been radicalized by their anger over the bloodshed in Iraq.

Before the Iraq War, Bin Laden was regarded as an embarrassment to many moderate Muslims around the world. But since 2003, Bin Laden's stature and prestige has risen sharply in much of the Muslim world.

Bush's original reason for invading Iraq (the non-existent WMDs) turned out to be a fraud. Since then, Bush has tried to retroactively justify his war by coming up with numerous other reasons why the war was necessary.

The most contemptible and blatant lie Bush has peddled has been his insistence that the Iraq War is somehow connected to the 9/11 attacks and that U.S. withdrawal will lead to more such attacks.

Given such fear-mongering, it's quite remarkable that the American people continue to hold Bush in such low esteem. In effect, we the people are calling Bush a liar.

If the Iraq War was really necessary, Bush wouldn't need to lift a finger to sell it. Instead, selling the war has consumed his presidency.

If there's a silver lining to all this, it's that Iraq so consumed Bush that he was unable to spend as much time foisting his extreme radical right corporatist agenda on the American people.

Labels: George W. Bush, GOP lies, Iraq War

By MARC MCDONALD

Anyone who has ever spent any time in the creepy parallel universe known as the right-wing blogosphere has likely noticed that these sites tend to share one thing in common. Here, you'll find a complete and total absence of any mention of our troops who've fallen on the battlefield in Iraq.

As far as the right-wing blogosphere is concerned, troop deaths in Iraq simply don't exist.

There's a great deal of bluster and jingoism on these sites about "supporting the troops." But when it comes to the slightest mention of any wounded or dead soldiers, you simply won't find it in the right-wing blogosphere.

This is a stark contrast to the progressive blogosphere. Here, you'll routinely find mentions of troop casualties (along with regular calls to get the troops out of harm's way). You'll also find calls to fix the mess at Walter Reed and to improve the paltry benefits that our troops receive.

Five U.S. soldiers were killed in two roadside bombings on Friday. And yet, if you visited much of the right-wing blogosphere, there was zero mention of these fallen heroes. Nor, of course, was there any mention of the ongoing horrific violence over the weekend in Iraq (which included a car bomb that killed at least 33 people).

Why, exactly, do right-wing blogs and sites completely ignore troop deaths? Do they simply figure that it's not important news?

If that's the case, then let's take a look at some examples of the sort of news that the right-wing blogosphere did consider important on Sunday:

• Flopping Aces: A tiresome, predictable attack on Nancy Pelosi for daring to question whether the surge is really working. (Actually, she's right: the surge is a fiasco). Hilariously, the wingnuts at this site call Pelosi "simple-minded"---this, from a blog that is still spinning ridiculous yarns, trying to link Saddam and Al Qaeda.
  
  
• The Drudge Report: A glance at this site on Sunday showed that tabloid crap about Britney Spears and Heather Mills is apparently more important than news of our fallen troops.
  
  
• RushLimbaugh.com: No mention of troop deaths here, from the Fat One. However, he does find room on his site to peddle his exploitative "Adopt-A-Soldier" scheme to sell paid memberships to his site. (One might think that a fantastically wealthy mega-millionaire like Limbaugh could afford to give away free memberships to the troops that he claims to support).
  
  
• Instapundit.com: Like a lot of right-wing propaganda blogs, if you spend much time here, you might be convinced that the War in Iraq is actually a big success after all and the only problem is that the treasonous Liberal Media won't report it. Sadly, though, you won't see even a tiny mention of the on-going horrific violence and troop deaths.
  

It's clear that the right-wing blogosphere has embraced the Dick Cheney view of the war in Iraq. Victory is just around the corner. The insurgents are in their last throes. And as for the ongoing U.S. troop deaths, well, let's distance ourselves from that uncomfortable topic (as much as Dick "Five Deferments" Cheney distanced himself from serving his country during the Vietnam War).

These days, about the only time one ever does encounter a mention of the troops in the right-wing blogosphere, it's usually in the form of a vicious attack on our nation's war heroes (from John Kerry to John Murtha to Wesley Clark to Max Cleland).

Labels: chickenhawks, Iraq War, right-wing lies

God, it was satisfying to see talk show host Montel Williams offer a few moments of sanity and honesty to the sick, sad 24/7 parade of fluff/junk food news/jingoism/GOP propaganda over at the Fox News Channel.

The lobotomized talking heads at Fox just wanted to chat about Heath Ledger, but Montel, a former Marine, stunned everyone by bringing up the subject that no one at Fox wants to discuss: the ongoing, senseless slaughter of our troops in Bush's immoral, illegal war in Iraq. (Needless to say, Williams lost his job after this segment).

Williams would certainly be a vast improvement over the GOP crooks and the gutless Dem wimps that are "serving" the people in Washington. I wonder how the right-wing Kool-Aid fringe blogs will spin this story.

Labels: Fox News, Iraq War, Montel Williams

By MARC MCDONALD

Browsing news stories of the latest carnage from Iraq today, my eye caught this extraordinary sentence buried in an Associated Press report about U.S. forces claiming to have killed 49 militants in a dawn raid in Baghdad's Sadr City Shiite enclave:

"Iraqi police and hospital officials, who often overstate casualties, reported only 15 deaths including three children."

Say what?

This sounds like the sort of wild-eyed, paranoia-fueled conspiracy claim that one normally would find only in the extreme fringe far-right blogosphere.

But that sentence didn't come from Little Green Footballs or Flopping Aces, or any of the other right-wing nutcase blogs that populate the outer fringes of the Web.

It came from the Associated Press.

And, frankly, it's an extraordinary claim--and one that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Note that this AP report isn't claiming that Sunni insurgents, or Shiite militias lie about their casualties. That wouldn't be anything new. In fact, we've heard claims like those before, (as the insurgency and the U.S. military continue their ongoing propaganda wars).

No, this is "Iraqi police and hospital officials," whose casualty claims, AP would have us believe, are no longer to be trusted.

Maybe I've missed it in previous AP coverage, but I don't recall ever seeing this extraordinary claim made in previous AP coverage. It seems like this bold claim would warrant a major, investigative story in and of itself.

There's a couple of major problems with AP's assertion that Iraq police forces and hospitals are liars.

First of all, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. If we're talking about claims made by insurgents, then surely a dose of skepticism is in order (although, from what I've seen, insurgent casualty claims have been no more inaccurate than claims by U.S. military officials over the years in Iraq).

But this latest AP report is disputing the Iraq police and hospitals: a solidly mainstream source if there ever was one. If we can't believe fundamental, basic information released by the major institutions of the Iraq state, then, who, exactly, can we believe? Is AP now making the kooky right-wing blog-like claim that Iraq's own police and hospitals are conspiring against the U.S. military? That's surely what this sounds like.

The second major problem I have with AP's claim is that I really wonder how on earth AP would know if the Iraq hospitals and police were "overstating" casualty figures.

Like I said, this AP report looks like it could've been lifted from the pages of the Web's extremist right-wing nutcase fringe. The latter, after all, are always disputing anything and everything that comes out of Iraq (unless it's spoken by the likes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Rush Limbaugh---a group which, ironically has the worst track record of accurate information on anything Iraq-related).

Ever since 2003, when the Iraq War began turning disastrous (around the time Bush declared "Mission Accomplished"), the right-wing blogosphere has been casting about, looking for a scapegoat to blame for the fiasco. AP has been one of the main targets of the right-wing lunatic fringe, with "controversies" like the Jamil Hussein case. In the latter case, the right-wing nutcases claimed that Hussein, an AP source, didn't exist. When it was later determined that he did, in fact, exist, the right-wingers quietly tiptoed away from the story and dropped the matter.

Despite the fact that the Jamil Hussein "controversy" blew up in their faces and revealed them to be the uninformed Kool-Aid-drinking idiots that they are, the right-wing blogosphere has continued to slam AP repeatedly over "biased" war coverage over the years.

And now, it appears that AP is caving in to the right-wing blogosphere and is giving credence to the sort of wild-eyed paranoid claims that one previously had to scour the nutcase fringe blogs to find.

Labels: Iraq War, propaganda, right-wing lies

By MARC McDONALD

So, what's the most effective strategy we can use to end the disastrous Iraq War? Carry a sign at an anti-war rally? Contact our members of Congress to voice our opposition? Impeach George W. Bush?

All of these strategies are worthy. But if we really want to bring an end to the ongoing bloody fiasco, the most effective method is to boycott China.

Remember, China is America's bank these days. Without hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese capital, the U.S. dollar would crumble in value. Indeed, the functioning of the U.S. government (including the Pentagon) is dependent on China's purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds.

Last year, America's trade deficit with China soared 15.4 percent to $232.5 billion, the biggest imbalance ever recorded with a single trading partner.

When you consider that America is drowning in titanic trade and fiscal deficits, it's clear that China, not the U.S. Treasury Department, is the one that is really financing this war.

In recent weeks, China has already threatened to use its $1.33 trillion of foreign reserves as a political weapon to counter pressure from the U.S. Congress. And if American consumers began boycotting China, this would clearly force Beijing's hand and prompt China to liquidate its vast holding of U.S. Treasuries.

And there's a bonus to boycotting Chinese products these days. The fact is, Chinese products can be deadly for you (as has been evidenced lately by tainted and toxic goods imported from China).

If you'd instead prefer to carry a sign at an anti-war rally, knock yourself out. But keep in mind that George W. Bush has never paid the slightest attention to anti-war rallies. (Recall how the 2003 Iraq invasion was preceded by millions of demonstrators marching in cities across the world in the biggest global protests ever organized).

And if you want to wait around for the Democrats to step up and take action to end this war, I'm afraid you'll be waiting for a long time. The Democrats are simply too timid these days to either end the war or impeach Bush.

If Americans start boycotting China, then Beijing will have fewer assets to prop up the U.S. dollar (and to buy Treasury bonds). Currently, the U.S. economy is dependent on an eye-popping $2.5 billion in foreign capital flowing into our nation daily (much of it from China).

An American boycott of China might give headaches to the likes of Wal-Mart (the single biggest importer of Chinese goods into the U.S.) But as far as I'm concerned, that's yet another bonus. Anyone who shops at Wal-Mart these days needs to be aware of the true price they're paying for Wal-Mart's supposedly "everyday low prices."

The fact is: Bush will never, ever listen to the voices of reason on the Iraq War. At this point, the war is really about nothing more than salvaging his "legacy." If we really want this insane war to end, we've got to force Bush's hand. And there's no better way to do this than to boycott China.

Labels: China, Iraq War, U.S. economic crisis

By MARC McDONALD

Who should we blame for the Iraq War fiasco?

George W. Bush? Dick Cheney? The NeoCons in general?

Personally, I think we ought to blame the arrogance of the American nation for this fiasco.

After all, many Americans, both rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats, are some of the most arrogant people on the face of the earth.

It's an arrogance that is the result of many factors. For one thing, it stems from the fact that U.S. is widely perceived to be the world's leading economic power. And the fact that Americans regard our nation to be nothing less than God's gift to the world: a nation with the world's best political system, the best justice system, the best economic system---in fact, the best overall system of any nation.

With this sort of arrogance rampant amongst Americans, it shouldn't really be any surprise that we as a nation believe that the rest of the world hungers to live the way we do. We believe that the rest of the world these days not only seeks to model their nations after America---but that they are actively working to do so.

Such hubris led most Americans to believe that Iraqis would greet us as liberators. Such arrogance led most of us to believe that the Iraqis would shower our troops with flowers---and then busy themselves with the task of re-making their society along the lines of an American-style Jeffersonian democracy.

We were astonished when this did not in fact happen. Psychologically, we as a people simply couldn't fathom why the Iraqi people wouldn't eagerly remake their nation in our image. We were stunned when the Iraqis began a ferocious insurgency against our occupation and began killing our troops with IEDs and suicide bombers. We were even more stunned when opinion polls consistently showed that an astonishing number of ordinary Iraqis supported these attacks on U.S. troops.

It's interesting to note that Iraq has a culture that was already ancient when Christ was born. And yet for all the turmoil, war, and strife that that nation has endured over the years, there was never a recorded instance of a suicide bomber until 2003, when America invaded Iraq. For all its faults, Saddam's regime never faced a single suicide bomb. Nor did Saddam's convoys ever face a roadside bomb.

America's arrogance has resulted in disasters for our nation (and for the world at large) before. After all, it was arrogance that led the U.S. into its previous disastrous war in Vietnam. We were convinced then that the Vietnamese were eager to embrace U.S.-style capitalism (when in fact, the Communists enjoyed widespread support among the peasants in the countryside).

It is our arrogance as a nation that will almost certainly lead us into future wars.

Many Americans have a tough time comprehending that the rest of the world simply doesn't wish to live the way we do. To be sure, there may be specific aspects of our society, here and there, that other nations admire. But the rest of the world simply doesn't want to emulate our nation as a whole.

A big part of the reason we can't comprehend why the world doesn't wish to live like us is rooted in Americans' complete and total ignorance about the rest of the world. It's a state of affairs that has arisen in large part because of America's abysmal education system and our lousy corporate media.

Few Americans speak a second language. And even fewer seem to fathom that the rest of the world simply doesn't think the way that we do. Instead of accepting this basic fact of life, Americans instead tend to criticize other nations for not doing things the way we do (because, after all, we reason, the American Way is, of course the best way to get things done).

Americans never stop to consider that maybe, just maybe, other nations don't worship the American Way and have no intention of copying us.

A good example of this is the American corporate media's constant slamming of Europe's economic system these days. As a result of the U.S. media's misinformation campaign about Europe, most Americans these days are under the impression that Europe is an economic basket case, struggling with "sky-high" taxes, an "over-regulated" economic system, "out-of-control" labor unions, and "excessive" workers' rights that threaten to destroy Europe's economic competitiveness.

What's worse is that the American media would have us believe that Europeans are busy these days "deregulating" their economies and working to re-make their nations along American lines, with less regulation, weaker unions, longer working hours, etc.

It might come as a surprise to most Americans that Europe, in fact, has no intention of copying America's concept of capitalism. In fact, Europe long ago took a good, hard look at America's brutal, dog-eat-dog economic system and rejected it.

In fact, many Europeans resent the U.S. lecturing them about economics. They wonder how Americans can proclaim their nation to be the "world's most competitive" economy, when in fact the U.S. economy doesn't make much these days that the rest of the world wants to buy. (Hence, America's titanic trade deficits, the largest in world history).

Do the Europeans really need any lessons in economics from America? Through European eyes, the U.S. economy seems to be a giant Ponzi scheme: an economic system that needs trillions of dollars in foreign capital just to stay afloat.

All of this raises the question: does any nation really want to emulate the American system these days? After all, the U.S. has the worst education system in the industrialized world. We have the world's largest prison population. We have a currency that is in danger of meltdown, because of our out-of-control deficits. We have a population that is the most economically polarized in the First World. We have a crumbling infrastructure. We have 47 million people who have no health-care coverage.

Last, but not least, we have a political system that has been thoroughly corrupted by money. People in other nations look at our political system these days not with admiration, but with bafflement. They wonder how Americans can tolerate a system that produces travesties like the 2000 election, when the "losing" candidate got 549,000 more votes than George W. Bush. They also wonder how Americans can tolerate a political system that is so obviously rigged to benefit the rich, at the expense of the poor and middle class.

In George W. Bush's simplistic, black-and-white view of the Middle East, the people were hungering for American-style democracy. I'd suspect most Americans believed the same, particularly in the heady days leading up to the U.S. 2003 invasion, when Americans went through one of their periodic outbursts of jingoistic flag-waving.

Four bloody years later, we've come to learn that maybe, we never really understood Iraq, after all. In the end, we invited the current disaster, with our nation's complete ignorance of other cultures and our arrogant delusion that the people of the Middle East were eager to remake their societies along American lines.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq War

By MARC McDONALD

George W. Bush has long presided over the most secrecy-obsessed White House in American history. He has spent a good chunk of his time in office classifying every document in sight (and even frustrating historians by re-classifying documents that were in the public domain for decades).

So it came as a surprise when Bush decided to release formerly classified documents that purport to show that Osama bin Laden ordered a top lieutenant in early 2005 to form a terrorist unit to hit targets outside Iraq.

Clearly, Bush is making another desperate bid to try to rally a weary nation that is sick and tired of his disastrous Iraq adventure.

The only problem is that these newly declassified documents weaken, not strengthen Bush's case for war.

The declassified documents show that Iraq has been transformed into a terrorist staging ground since the 2003 invasion by the U.S. That's the same argument that critics of Bush's war have been making since Day One.

Bush may be trying to rally the nation, but in this case, he's only going to rally the dwindling wingnuts who comprise the 28 percent of the nation that still supports him. After all, these are the folks who have been convinced all along that, before the 2003 invasion, Iraq was a terrorist state with ties to 9/11.

These Kool-Aid-drinking folks are the same ones who believe Saddam did have WMDs after all, and whisked them to Syria, just before the invasion. They live off in their own little hermitically sealed world, fed a steady diet of Rush, Drudge and Fox.

But if Bush is trying to convince the rest of us that his disastrous decision to invade Iraq is somehow bolstered by this newly released intelligence, he's even more deluded that we thought previously.

Before the invasion, Bush said that his goal was to transform Iraq into a shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Instead, all Bush's war has done is create another Afghanistan-like terrorist staging base from which extremists will plot further 9/11 attacks.

I don't know if the latest intelligence documents released by Bush are valid or not. Ever since its colossal blunder over Iraq's non-existent WMDs, Americans have increasingly doubted the efficiency of our nation's intelligence capabilities.

But if these intelligence documents are true, all they do is demonstrate that the Iraq War has been an even bigger disaster than we previously thought.

Labels: Bush, GOP, Iraq War

By MANIFESTO JOE

I'm convinced that history will remember Tony Blair as Bush's enabler: the ally who lent tragic "legitimacy" to rogue actions that at least temporarily destroyed both U.S. and British credibility on the world stage. After 10 years, this is his only legacy, and it has a very bitter look.

Blair has announced that he will step down as prime minister soon, leaving the Labour Party to see what can be salvaged of its damaged reputation at home. I doubt that Britons really want to go through many more rounds of Thatcherism or John Major, so someone will probably be able to resurrect Labour for a new generation.

But the harm Blair has done has been staggering on many levels. He has announced his imminent departure just as two British officials have been convicted of leaking a classified memo about a meeting between "Poodle" Blair and Il Doofus himself, in violation of something called the Official Secrets Act. (I suppose I shouldn't sound condescending here. The U.S. appears to be moving far beyond the likes of this.)

This news from The Canadian Press:

David Keogh, a cipher expert who was convicted on two counts, had admitted passing on the secret memo about April 2004 talks between the two leaders in which Bush purportedly referred to bombing Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera.

Keogh was accused of passing the memo to co-defendant, Leo O'Connor, 44, who in turn handed it to his boss, Tony Clarke, then a legislator who voted against Britain's decision to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Keogh, 50, told London's Central Criminal Court he felt strongly about the memo, which he had to relay to diplomats overseas using secure methods, and hoped it would come to wider attention.

"The main person in my mind was John Kerry, who at the time was American candidate for the U.S. presidential election in 2004," Keogh had testified.

He admitted holding "unfavourable" views on Bush, but said he did not think publishing the document would hurt Britain's security or international relations.

The Daily Mirror newspaper reported that the memo showed Blair arguing against Bush's suggestion of bombing Al-Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, Qatar. The Daily Mirror said its sources disagreed on whether Bush's suggestion was serious.

Yeah, so Il Doofus was just joking. I had honestly hoped that he was kidding when he started talking about invading a foreign country with no solid evidence for such an action. The problem with his jokes is that they are "practical" ones, with enormous consequences.

And, there are more problems plaguing The Poodle Dude. This from The Associated Press:

Blair's last months in office also have been overshadowed by a police investigation into claims that his party and the opposition traded political honors for cash. Senior Blair aide Ruth Turner, Blair's chief fundraiser Lord Levy and two others have been arrested during the police inquiry into claims that seats in the House of Lords and other honors were awarded in exchange for party donations. Prosecutors are considering whether anyone should be charged.

Blair was questioned twice by police as a witness, but is not considered a suspect.

Blair had a unique opportunity to have stood against a manifestly unbalanced leader of the Western world and resisted an action that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people; one that has seriously set back U.S.-British relations with the rest of the world for at least a generation. He chose to be led on a leash.

There are those who defend Blair based on domestic policies. He is said to have done much to help Britain's poor. Sadly, whatever he did in this regard will always be overshadowed by his decision to blindly follow the most foolish and reckless leader the U.S. has ever had. It will be his albatross for life.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Labels: Bush, Iraq War, Tony Blair

By MARC McDONALD

The stunning development in which 11 GOP lawmakers went to the White House to confront George W. Bush over the Iraq War ought to be welcome news---except for one detail. The fact is, the GOP lawmakers are worried about the Iraq fiasco for the wrong reason.

It's refreshing that some moderate Republicans are starting to act like they put the interests of the nation above partisan politics. It's also nice to see that, for once at least, some GOP lawmakers are willing to question Bush's fiasco of a war.

But you have to wonder: why are these GOP lawmakers getting cold feet now? Is it because the war is a disaster on every level? Is it because the war was based on lies? Or that over 600,000 Iraqis have senselessly died in this fiasco?

Uh, no.

Actually, the GOP lawmakers are questioning the war's direction purely for reasons of self-interest.

Namely, they're simply worried about the political impact that the war is having on their congressional districts.

In other words, they're simply trying to save their own hides from a drubbing by the voters in the 2008 elections. So much for the idea that the GOP lawmakers have finally developed a backbone---or a brain, for that matter.

In any case, despite all the posturing, there is no way that we're going to see any sort of real change in direction on the Iraq War on Bush's watch, short of impeachment.

The fact is, the Iraq War at this point is really only about one thing (well, besides the oil): George W. Bush's legacy.

In Bush's deluded brain, he keeps hoping that somehow Iraq will turn around and that he'll be vindicated in the end, and prove all the naysayers wrong.

Bush's Kool-Aid-drinking followers are hoping for the same thing---they've invested a great deal of their reputations in this fiasco of a war and they're hoping that somehow, it'll all turn out OK, and they'll be vindicated.

So while Bush is solely concerned about trying to salvage his legacy (and GOP lawmakers fret over their re-election prospects) our troops--and the people of Iraq--continue to die for no reason.

Labels: Bush, GOP, Iraq War

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The latest polls show that the American people strongly support the Democrats over George W. Bush on Iraq. Which begs the question: will the Democrats stand firm and make Dick Cheney eat his words?

From the Washington Post:

Congress and the White House will move this week toward a final showdown over a contested war funding bill with most Americans trusting Democrats over President Bush to set Iraq policy but with sentiment deeply divided over Congress's push to set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. forces.

Democratic leaders will formally convene House and Senate negotiators tomorrow to hammer out a final version of the war funding bill, hoping to have the compromise on Bush's desk by the end of next week. The president and Democratic leaders again exchanged verbal fire today.

Bush used a backdrop of military families to declare "we should not legislate defeat in this vital war." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), flanked by retired Army generals, fired back, "The president and the vice president continue to desperately cling to their failed escalation strategy and attack those who disagree with them."

Democrats appear to be standing on firm political ground, as they work toward a final bill this week. A Washington Post-ABC News poll of 1,141 adults, conducted April 12-15, found that 58 percent trusted the Democrats in Congress to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq, compared to 33 percent who trusted Bush.

The president has taken advantage of the congressional spring recess to pound Democrats over their legislation, which would impose benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet, set strict rules for resting, equipping and training combat troops, and set a 2008 date for the final withdrawal of U.S. troops. Despite those efforts, Bush has actually lost a little ground to Democrats, who were trusted by 54 percent to set Iraq policy in February.

And pessimism about the war continues to grow. For the first time, a narrow majority of Americans, 51 percent, say the United States will lose the war in Iraq, compared to 35 percent who said the United States will win. Bush continued today to say victory in Iraq is pivotal to the larger war on terrorism, but Americans are increasingly siding with the Democratic view that the issues are separate. Some 57 percent now say the United States can succeed in the war on terrorism without winning the war in Iraq, a 10-percentage point increase since January, when Americans were almost evenly divided on the question.

The percentage of Americans who favor withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, even if that means civil order is not restored, held steady from February at 56 percent.

More here.

Labels: Bush, Democrats, Iraq War

By MANIFESTO JOE

There's nothing like a good old-fashioned war to divert public attention away from scandal(s).

According to some sources, the Bush administration has one planned, and it may be just a question of when: days, weeks or months.

The Times of India published this report last month:

US preparations for invading Iran are complete: Report

By Rashmee Roshan Lal

LONDON: American preparations for invading Iran are complete and a major conventional war with Teheran could begin any day, according to a chilling new report that coincides with leading US Democrat Congressmen's warning to President Bush that he does not have the authority to go to war with Iran.

The report, by authoritative defence expert Dan Plesch, says American military operations for Iran "extend far beyond targeting suspect WMD facilities and will enable President Bush to destroy Iran's military, political and economic infrastructure overnight using conventional weapons."

Plesch, who is known to be well-connected and well-networked at the very highest reaches of the trans-Atlantic political and defence establishment, quoted unnamed British military sources to say that "the US military switched its whole focus to Iran" as soon as Saddam Hussein was kicked out of Baghdad.

He said his sources added that the US has continued this target-Iran strategy ever since, even though the American infantry continues to be bogged down fighting the insurgency in Iraq.

In an assertion that has astonished European capitals, the defence guru claimed that despite the gross failure to re-build post-Saddam Iraq, American hubris extends to plans for a "peaceful" post-invasion "settlement" for Iran. This plan will seek to create a federal nation, an "Iran of the regions", he said.


With the administration embattled with yet another scandal, involving the firing of U.S. attorneys, it's such a convenient time for Big Brother to get us a new, improved enemy, one that even many liberals can hate. After all, that country's leader is a hard-liner who has even denied that the Holocaust took place. He seems more than a bit of a kook -- even more of one than we have in the White House. (You know, the fella who has lots of meaningful dialogues with God, now that he's sober.)

I won't discuss whether such a war, to be fought over Iran's apparent nuclear ambitions, would be justified. I won't go back in time, to 1953, about how the U.S. set itself up for this dilemma by engineering a coup that overthrew a legitimate nationalist government and installed the Shah in power for 25 brutal years, largely because Big Oil coveted Iran's reserves. I won't even go into the usual tedious humanitarian objections to all the civilian carnage that would surely follow such an invasion. Let us assume here as the Right does, just for the sake of argument, that U.S. moral authority is beyond question and that we would have a perfect right to lay waste to large portions of Iran and its people, unless its government backs down on the nukes.

A new military adventure of this kind by the Bush neo-con cabal would have the potential to become a far worse disaster than the Iraq war has been. The problem is, and has been for four years now, that our all-volunteer military is severely overextended. We've already got two wars going, and even the one in Afghanistan now looks far from over. This administration, with its remarkable hubris, did not pick our battles wisely.

Afghanistan, historically, is a very bad place to make war. But toppling the Taliban seemed very much the thing to do at the time, since they were harboring bin Laden and al-Qaida. But then the neo-cons soon got us into an elective war in Iraq, one that at least initially had nothing at all to do with the particular terrorists we were supposed to be hunting. Message to the Right Wing: There was no verifiable link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida; even the administration conceded that, albeit long after the invasion.

To be sure, Saddam was an evil dude. But he was being effectively contained; and toppling him got U.S. troops caught up in a bloody civil war, and actually opened Iraq's borders so that al-Qaida terrorists could enter the country after that.

It's hard to understand how even the most indoctrinated super-patriot fails to see that this was, at the very least, a devastating blunder. And, there's not going to be any good way out of it.

And now we're looking at the possibility of war with Iran. Certainly they don't have the military technology to win, at least not outright. Their infrastructure would likely be demolished quickly.

But consider: This is a country of 70 million, over three times the size of Iraq, with the median age of the male population being 25.4 years, according to the CIA Factbook. And, as the Israelis discovered long ago, women can shoot, too. They can be very lethal rifle soldiers.

That's an awful lot of cannon fodder. Would there be an insurgency? Imagine Iraq, times 3 or 4. And Iran is overwhelmingly Shiite. The Iranians wouldn't likely be fighting each other very much, as the Iraqis are.

It's a bigger country than Iraq in land mass, too, and there's lots of mountains. It would require a huge occupation force. (Hey, young fellas -- ready to get that draft notice from Chickenhawk George?)

And, what will the neighbors think? Iraq has Shiite militias that aren't openly fighting us now. If we invade a Shiite neighbor, do you figure they might? And what about Syria, to name only one Arab country that might be chapped?

Let's think on an even broader scale. Is there a possibility that Israel would get involved on our side, and then attacked? (Not necessarily in that order.) They have nukes, by the way. And hey, I just remembered that Russia and China have nukes, too. Lots of them. And big armies. And they've already warned the U.S. against such military action. We can only hope that they would be loath to get involved in such a bloody mess and would limit themselves to strong condemnations of U.S. actions.

We've got the potential for World War III here, with the entire Mideast as Ground Zero. Surely, one would think, our leaders would be circumspect enough not to get us involved in such a needless Armageddon.

But think again. Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, has written about a group of men who served during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, and also Bush the First in early '90s, as high-level, but not top-level, officials. They were often referred to (reportedly, for one, by then-General Colin Powell) as "the crazies." Name any reckless military action you can imagine from that time, and they were for it.

Guess what? These are the men who have been in charge of Bush policy in the Mideast, for over six years.

And one thing we've seen over and over is that a nasty war, with lots of burning Humvees, bodybags and gutwagons, will be Page One, at least for a good while. In that news budget meeting, the fired U.S. attorneys wouldn't stand a chance. And flag lapel pins will become mandatory. ("Hey, hippie, America's at war. Git a f***ing haircut and join the f***ing Marines!")

I'm not much of a gambler. But if I were, I would bet a modest sum that the U.S., Israel and other allies would eventually win such a protracted, epic war -- but the costs would be almost unimaginable. Envision the United Kingdom in 1946 -- victorious, but in ruins. I would wager further that the U.S. would emerge in a similar condition, and our world "hegemony" would be ceded to up-and-comers like China, Japan and India. I don't think that's what the neo-cons, or any other "cons" for that matter, had in mind. Believe it or not, Righties, that ain't even what them godless liberals wants.

And by the way, this plan for postwar Iran -- sounds mighty familiar, doesn't it? Our officials seem to be stuck in a mode of: "We're going to make all the same mistakes again. But we're going to make them better this time."

Now back to that Times of India report:

Defence experts said the revelation that America's military planning is advanced and well-calibrated to wipe out chunks of Iran's installations and infrastructure and could lay bare swathes of the country was bound to scare policy makers and diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic. ...

Plesch's report claimed the US Army, Navy, Air Force and marines have all prepared battle plans and spent four years building bases and training for "Operation Iranian Freedom". He added that Admiral Fallon, the new head of US Central Command, has inherited computerised plans under the name TIRANNT (Theatre Iran Near Term).

He chillingly claimed, "US defence establishment's programme called "Global Strike" means that, without any obvious signal, what was done to Serbia and Lebanon can be done overnight to the whole of Iran." He added saying, "We, and probably the Iranians, would not know about it until after the bombs fell. Forces that hide will suffer the fate of Saddam's armies, once their positions are known."

Semper fi, y'all.

Manifesto Joe is an underground writer living in Texas. Check out his new blog at Manifesto Joe's Texas Blues.

Labels: Bush, Iran War, Iraq War, NeoCons

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This Los Angeles Times op-ed by Kitty Kelley really says it all. The only thing I'd like to add to this piece is that during World War II, FDR set taxes at a responsible level that enabled America to (A) fight the war without racking up crushing deficits and (B) make sure that everyone contributed---even those who stayed home while our soldiers fought overseas.
By contrast, today's fratboy-in-chief doesn't call for any war-time sacrifice on the home front, least of all from his family. And while FDR's war-time inauguration balls were low-key and subdued, Bush staged one of the most expensive, lavish inaugurations in American history in 2005. And now Bush seems to just spend all his time trying to figure out how to cut Paris Hilton's taxes. I guess letting Hilton buy yet another yacht is more important than giving our troops adequate armor for combat.

Why aren't the Bush daughters in Iraq?
By Kitty Kelley
When I was a little girl in a convent school, the nuns impressed on me the power of setting a good example. These beloved teachers are no longer around to instruct the president and his family, so I recommend that the Bushes learn from Mark Twain, who said: "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."

My suggestion comes after the White House announcement earlier this month that Jenna Bush, one of the president's twin daughters, is writing a book on her all-expenses-paid trip to Panama, where she worked for a few weeks as an intern for UNICEF. Jenna Bush is quoted as saying she will donate her earnings from her book to UNICEF, a commendable gesture, considering her father's net worth of $20 million. But while the 25-year-old makes the rounds of TV talk shows this fall in a White House limousine, dozens of her contemporaries will be arriving home from Iraq in wooden boxes. In Britain, Prince Harry is insisting on going off to Iraq — even as his country is reducing its troop commitment.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed how the power of good example could also be powerfully good politics. When he led the country to sacrifice in World War II, his children enlisted and his wife traveled to military bases to counsel and comfort the families of soldiers. Newsreels showed the president's four sons fighting with the Marines in the Pacific, flying with the Army Air Forces in North Africa and landing with the Navy at Normandy. Soon other public figures followed suit — movie stars (James Stewart and Clark Gable) enlisted and sports heroes (Joe DiMaggio and Hank Greenberg) went off to war.

The contrast between FDR's good example during wartime and that of George W. Bush is stark and sad. The Bush family rallies to the political campaigns of its scions and spends months on the road raising money and shaking hands to put their men into public office. In fact, the public image of their cohesive family — the pearl-choked matriarch surrounded by progeny and springer spaniels — helped cinch more than one presidency for the Bushes. Yet now, when its legacy is most in peril, the family seems to be squandering its good will on a mess of celebridreck.

The president tells us Iraq is a "noble" war, but his wife, his children and his nieces and nephews are not listening. None has enlisted in the armed services, and none seems to be paying attention to the sacrifices of military families. Until Jenna's trip to Panama, the presidential daughters performed community service only when mandated by a court after they were cited for underage drinking. Since then they have surfaced in public during lavish presidential trips with their parents, bar-hopping outings in Georgetown and champagne-popping art openings in New York.

The first lady, so often lauded for her love of literacy, has not been seen in the reading rooms of veterans' hospitals. The president's sister, Doro, publicly picketed Al Gore's last days in the vice president's mansion as he awaited the Supreme Court's decision on the Florida recount of 2000. Yet she has been strangely absent from publicly supporting her brother's war.

The presidential nieces and nephews also have missed the memo on setting a good public example. Ashley Bush — the youngest daughter of the president's brother, Neil, and Neil's ex-wife, Sharon — was presented to Manhattan society at the 52nd Annual International Debutantes Ball at the Waldorf Astoria. Her older sister, Lauren, a runway model, told London's Evening Standard that she is a student ambassador for the United Nations World Food Program, but she would not lobby her uncle for U.S. funds. Her cousin, Billy Bush, chronicles the lives of celebrities on "Access Hollywood."

"Uncle Bucky," as William H.T. Bush is known within the family, is one presidential relative who has profited from the Iraq war. He recently sold all of his shares in Engineered Support Systems Inc. (ESSI), a St. Louis-based company that has flourished under the president's no-bid policy for military contractors. Uncle Bucky told the Los Angeles Times that he would have preferred that ESSI, on whose board he sits, was not involved in Iraq, "but, unfortunately, we live in a troubled world."

The only member of the Bush family to show the strains of our "troubled world" is former President George H.W. Bush, who shed tears recently while addressing the Florida Legislature. The elder Bush was talking about son Jeb's gubernatorial loss in 1994. Jeb, who was later elected, tried to console him. But the sobs of Bush 41 seemed to be more about his older son's "noble" war.

Perhaps the father's sadness sprang from his own experience fighting in what his parents called "Mr. Roosevelt's war" — the good war — the war that saved the world from tyranny. He enlisted at 18 to fly torpedo bombers. He flew 58 missions in two years and returned home a war hero. Since then, no one in his large family has seen fit to follow his sterling example of service and patriotism.

Labels: Bush, Iraq War, Republicans

By MARC McDONALD

Australian Prime Minister John Howard raised eyebrows when he took aim at Sen. Barack Obama with a vicious attack that used the sort of language that one usually encounters only in the right-wing nutcase blogosphere.

In criticizing Obama's call for the removal of U.S. combat forces by March 31, 2008, Howard had this to say:

"I think that will just encourage those who want to destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory. If I were running Al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."

It's interesting how Howard seems to be so concerned about bringing democracy to Iraq, when he has utter contempt for democracy in his own nation.

The fact is, Howard ignored the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Australian people in 2003 when he committed Australian troops to Bush's "Coalition of the Willing."

An astonishing 76 percent of Australians opposed their nation participating in the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. The Australian Senate even voted to censure Howard for committing 2,000 soldiers to Iraq.

Some cynics have noted that perhaps there was some ulterior motive for Howard's participation in the Iraq invasion.

In fact, in Jan. 2005, the U.S. and Australia signed The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) perhaps the most important bilateral economic agreement ever undertaken by Australia, (which was viewed by many observers as a reward for Australian loyalty in the U.S. war on terrorism).

In any case, Howard's utter contempt for doing what the Australian people want appears to have finally caught up with him.

A recent poll shows that Australia's opposition Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd has overtaken Prime Minister John Howard in popularity ahead of elections later this year. The ACNielsen survey of 1,412 voters found that 65 percent of Australians approve of Rudd, the highest satisfaction rating for an opposition leader in the poll's 35 year history. The Associated Press noted that recent polls have suggested that voters are growing increasing unhappy about Howard's involvement in the Iraq war.

Labels: Democrats, Iraq War, World

By MARC McDONALD

Who should we blame for the Iraq War fiasco?

George W. Bush? Dick Cheney? The NeoCons in general?

Personally, I think we ought to blame the arrogance of the American nation for this fiasco.

After all, many Americans, both rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats, are some of the most arrogant people on the face of the earth.

It's an arrogance that is the result of many factors. For one thing, it stems from the fact that U.S. is widely perceived to be the world's leading economic power. And the fact that Americans regard our nation to be nothing less than God's gift to the world: a nation with the world's best political system, the best justice system, the best economic system---in fact, the best overall system of any nation.

With this sort of arrogance rampant amongst Americans, it shouldn't really be any surprise that we as a nation believe that the rest of the world hungers to live the way we do. We believe that the rest of the world these days not only seeks to model their nations after America---but that they are actively working to do so.

Such hubris led most Americans to believe that Iraqis would greet us as liberators. Such arrogance led most of us to believe that the Iraqis would shower our troops with flowers---and then busy themselves with the task of re-making their society along the lines of an American-style Jeffersonian democracy.

We were astonished when this did not in fact happen. Psychologically, we as a people simply couldn't fathom why the Iraqi people wouldn't eagerly remake their nation in our image. We were stunned when the Iraqis began a ferocious insurgency against our occupation and began killing our troops with IEDs and suicide bombers. We were even more stunned when opinion polls consistently showed that an astonishing number of ordinary Iraqis supported these attacks on U.S. troops.

It's interesting to note that Iraq has a culture that was already ancient when Christ was born. And yet for all the turmoil, war, and strife that that nation has endured over the years, there was never a recorded instance of a suicide bomber until 2003, when America invaded Iraq. For all its faults, Saddam's regime never faced a single suicide bomb. Nor did Saddam's convoys ever face a roadside bomb.

America's arrogance has resulted in disasters for our nation (and for the world at large) before. After all, it was arrogance that led the U.S. into its previous disastrous war in Vietnam. We were convinced then that the Vietnamese were eager to embrace U.S.-style capitalism (when in fact, the Communists enjoyed widespread support among the peasants in the countryside).

It is our arrogance as a nation that will almost certainly lead us into future wars.

Many Americans have a tough time comprehending that the rest of the world simply doesn't wish to live the way we do. To be sure, there may be specific aspects of our society, here and there, that other nations admire. But the rest of the world simply doesn't want to emulate our nation as a whole.

A big part of the reason we can't comprehend why the world doesn't wish to live like us is rooted in Americans' complete and total ignorance about the rest of the world. It's a state of affairs that has arisen in large part because of America's abysmal education system and our lousy corporate media.

Few Americans speak a second language. And even fewer seem to fathom that the rest of the world simply doesn't think the way that we do. Instead of accepting this basic fact of life, Americans instead tend to criticize other nations for not doing things the way we do (because, after all, we reason, the American Way is, of course the best way to get things done).

Americans never stop to consider that maybe, just maybe, other nations don't worship the American Way and have no intention of copying us.

A good example of this is the American corporate media's constant slamming of Europe's economic system these days. As a result of the U.S. media's misinformation campaign about Europe, most Americans these days are under the impression that Europe is an economic basket case, struggling with "sky-high" taxes, an "over-regulated" economic system, "out-of-control" labor unions, and "excessive" workers' rights that threaten to destroy Europe's economic competitiveness.

What's worse is that the American media would have us believe that Europeans are busy these days "deregulating" their economies and working to re-make their nations along American lines, with less regulation, weaker unions, longer working hours, etc.

It might come as a surprise to most Americans that Europe, in fact, has no intention of copying America's concept of capitalism. In fact, Europe long ago took a good, hard look at America's brutal, dog-eat-dog economic system and rejected it.

In fact, many Europeans resent the U.S. lecturing them about economics. They wonder how Americans can proclaim their nation to be the "world's most competitive" economy, when in fact the U.S. economy doesn't make much these days that the rest of the world wants to buy. (Hence, America's titanic trade deficits, the largest in world history).

Do the Europeans really need any lessons in economics from America? Through European eyes, the U.S. economy seems to be a giant Ponzi scheme: an economic system that needs trillions of dollars in foreign capital just to stay afloat.

All of this raises the question: does any nation really want to emulate the American system these days? After all, the U.S. has the worst education system in the industrialized world. We have the world's largest prison population. We have a currency that is in danger of meltdown, because of our out-of-control deficits. We have a population that is the most economically polarized in the First World. We have a crumbling infrastructure. We have 45 million people who have no health-care coverage.

Last, but not least, we have a political system that has been thoroughly corrupted by money. People in other nations look at our political system these days not with admiration, but with bafflement. They wonder how Americans can tolerate a system that produces travesties like the 2000 election, when the "losing" candidate got 549,000 more votes than George W. Bush. They also wonder how Americans can tolerate a political system that is so obviously rigged to benefit the rich, at the expense of the poor and middle class.

In George W. Bush's simplistic, black-and-white view of the Middle East, the people were hungering for American-style democracy. I'd suspect most Americans believed the same, particularly in the heady days leading up to the U.S. 2003 invasion, when Americans went through one of their periodic outbursts of jingoistic flag-waving.

Four bloody years later, we've come to learn that maybe, we never really understood Iraq, after all. In the end, we invited the current disaster, with our nation's complete ignorance of other cultures and our arrogant delusion that the people of the Middle East were eager to remake their societies along American lines.

Labels: Bush, Iraq War, NeoCons

By MARC McDONALD

Out of the mind-numbing blizzard of horrific stories emerging from the Iraq fiasco, one particular story has haunted me over the past few months. It is a stomach-churning Associated Press story from November:

"One of four U.S. soldiers accused of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl last spring and killing her and her family pleaded guilty (Nov. 15) and agreed to testify against the others. Spc. James P. Barker agreed to the plea deal to avoid the death penalty, said his civilian attorney, David Sheldon."

The military judge presiding over the case asked Barker why he participated in the attack in Mahmoudiya, a village about 20 miles south of Baghdad.

"I hated Iraqis, your honor," Barker is quoted as saying in the courtroom.

And what, exactly, might have motivated this hatred for the Iraqi people?

To get the answer to this question, you need look no further than the lies that George W. Bush has been steadily feeding our troops over the years.

As Mark Crispin Miller noted in his 2004 book, Cruel and Unusual:

"Bush sent a very different message to our troops....by harping on Iraq's alleged complicity in 9/11, and by hyping the fictitious `terrorist threat' posed by that nation. Because of such inflammatory propaganda, our troops were motivated mainly by a craving for revenge, as after the destruction of Pearl Harbor. Throughout the march to war, and through the first year of the war itself, payback was on everybody's mind. `The only thing that motivates all the soldiers fighting in Iraq is payback for Sept. 11, 2001,' reported Reuters."

Miller continues:
"That lust for righteous vengeance has helped push our troops toward barbarism---which is often frightening even to themselves."

In the aftermath of the horrific atrocities committed by our troops against the Iraqi people, the U.S. media can be counted upon to do a great deal of soul-searching, hand-wringing "how could this happen?" type stories. We've seen this happen over and over again in Iraq.

But for anyone wondering how our troops could be so savage and barbaric at times, I think the finger of blame should be pointed at the Bush White House for the steady diet of lies and misinformation it has fed to our troops.

The fact is, the Bush White House has deliberately lied to our soldiers in Iraq. By feeding them a constant stream of bullsh*t about Iraq's "ties" to 9/11, the Bush team has created a situation in which our troops are filled with rage and hell-bent on vengeance: a situation that has been directly responsible for the barbaric acts that we've seen committed by U.S. troops in Iraq.

Labels: Bush, Iraq War, Military

By MARC McDONALD

There was once a time when it was perhaps understandable that the Democrats cowered in fear of George W. Bush.

That would have been during the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when Bush's approval rating soared into the stratosphere. Any Democrat who dared speak out against Bush then would have been flayed alive---not just by the right-wing propaganda attack machine, but by the mainstream media, as well.

Over five years later, how times have changed. But you wouldn't know that by taking a look at how many Democrats today still cower in fear of Bush.

Here's a memo to all the Dems who do so: you are no longer Bush's bitch.

You are no longer facing the swaggering flight-suit-wearing "warrior" who strutted across the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with such confidence and aplomb in May 2003.

Today, you are facing the lamest of lame duck presidents. A politician whose approval ratings are in the toilet.

I wish the Democrats would show one-thousandth the enthusiasm for impeaching Bush for his many serious crimes and acts of treason that the GOP showed for impeaching Clinton for lying about a blow job.

Perhaps the Dems believe that if they show some courtesy and restraint now, the GOP will reciprocate on down the road and stop bullying them (the way the Repukes did the entire eight years of Clinton's presidency).

If that's the case, then I think the Dems are fooling themselves. If Hillary gets elected in 2008, then we will see a repeat of the Bill Clinton years, with Rush, Fox, etc. viciously attacking Hillary every minute of every day.

Dems: you have the power these days. You control the House and Senate. What's more, America's voters sent you to Washington with a clear mandate. To end this fiasco of a war. Now.

What, exactly, are you afraid of these days, Democrats?

Bush has been exposed for what he is. A liar and a crook. A chickensh*t coward who refused to go to combat when his nation was at war in Vietnam. A spoiled, trust-fund-collecting frat boy who used his rich family's connections to get ahead.

To be sure, Bush still has appeal to the Kool-Aid drinking diehards who adore their hero and consider him a "warrior" president, bravely guiding America in the War on Terror. But the fact is, Bush really has more in common with Paris Hilton than he does with any real soldiers like John Murtha or Max Cleland.

In fact, it's not really any wonder that Bush has cut veterans' benefits, even as he's fought hard to give wealthy people like Hilton yet more tax cuts.

I really can't understand why the Dems still cower in fear of Bush these days. Maybe they're afraid of the Great Republican Slime Machine and how right-wing talk radio and Fox News will savage them if they attempt to stand up to Bush.

If that's the case, here's another memo for the Dems: the GOP propaganda machine is already attacking you, and will continue to do so, regardless of what you do. However, this isn't quite the threat that it once was. The GOP propaganda machine's diehard, fanatical base is starting to wither away these days, as ratings at Fox News continue to plummet.

Not only should you Dems stand up to Bush and end this war now, you have a duty to do so. The American people, who voted Democrats into power in November, could not have been clearer in their message.

Democrats: you have a mandate. By ending this war, not only are you doing the will of the people, you're doing the right thing for America.

Please, Dems: stop being afraid of a spoiled frat boy. Stop fearing a coward who was waving pompons as a cheerleader at Andover prep school while true heroes like John Murtha and Wesley Clark were getting shot at in the jungle by the Viet Cong.

End this evil war now.

Labels: Bush, Congress, Democrats, Iraq War