A 3rd grader could figure this one out

Ramzy Baroud, writing for Asia Times Online discusses findings from the US State Department's Annual Terrorism Report for 2007. Some cogent observations follow:

... Iraq accounted for 60% of worldwide terrorism fatalities.


Considering that the horrifying violence currently witnessed in Iraq was unheard of prior to the US invasion of 2003, will the Bush administration take a moment to connect the dots? Even a third-grader could figure this one out: the US occupation was a major, if not sole factor in Iraq's relentless bloodbath. To right the wrong in Iraq, the US military should clearly just withdraw, and Bush - or whoever next claims the White House - should stop fabricating pretexts to justify the prolonged mission.

...

[T]he report's findings, if viewed responsibly, substantiate the claim that the Bush administration's policies have only made the world more unsafe. Wouldn't a war against Iran hike up the number of violent or terrorist activities?


It also remains unclear how powerful al-Qaeda really is, and how much of its capabilities were hyped in order to enable the Bush administration to continue its mission.

Quite an important issue - just how large and powerful is al-Qaeda?

How big is their navy? (they have none)

How big is their air-force? (they have none)

How big are their ground forces?

Where are those ground forces located? (not in Iraq)

'Twas ever thus

Digby had a link to an excerpt from Rick Perlstein's Nixonland. These thought insights from that work caught my eye:

The New Politics reformers had fantasized a pure politics, a politics of unyielding principle—an antipolitics. But in the real world, politics without equivocation or compromise is impossible.

...

[W]e live in a fallen world. The saintly don’t survive in politics

The mililtary operation succeeded

Overthrow evil dictator - check
Eliminate (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction - check
(Accomplishable) Mission accomplished - check
So, why are our soldiers still there - ?

Common Dreams features a James Carroll column from the Boston Globe:

However misconceived, the project of ridding the world of Saddam and his Ba’athist regime was indeed a military operation, and it succeeded. But bringing order to a post-Saddam Iraq, especially once sectarian rivalries were set loose, was not a project for which the US war machine was remotely suited.


...

“Coalition” notwithstanding, the almost exclusively US occupation became the inflammable medium in which sectarian disputes flared, with Iraq’s warring parties united only in seeing that occupation as an enemy. Let’s call this repeated insanity the mistake of “supermilitarism,” choosing war over diplomacy, and expecting order to follow, instead of chaos.


The mistake was made at the beginning, in the middle, and is being repeated now, in what should be the end. The mistake is so deeply rooted in American structures of imagination, economy, and government that it isn’t even perceived as a mistake by those in power.

Those in power understand that the perception of stability in Iraq is far more important than the realities on the ground. Thus, the "metrics" of all the schools the U.S. was building (painting), stories which "never get published in the media", and how the "surge" was working because of the decrease in deaths. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have told us so.


The plan all along was to stay in Iraq "forever". What else explains the construction of the one billion dollar edifice of the U.S. embassy, or the permanent military bases, or the decision to disband the Iraqi military so very early on.

This stay in Iraq "forever" plan was NOT what was sold to the American public.


The notion that our military can "bring democracy to the Iraqi people" or any people has always been delusional. A nation cannot export democracy at the end of a bayonet. Although the U.S. routinely goes abroad looking for demons to destroy.

Maybe protest begins at home

Writing in Counterpunch, Dave Zirin recalls the historic Olympic protests of 1968 and contrasts the statements made by Tommie Smith and John Carlos to the protests of present day Olympic athletes:

... while I support the right of any athlete to speak out and not be silenced by Olympic bureaucrats to make things pleasant for China's rulers, we should also look critically at what it is that people are protesting.

It speaks to a far different set of concerns than those represented by Tommie Smith, John Carlos and the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

Smith and Carlos came to Mexico City to raise awareness about injustices happening in their own country. They wore no shoes on the stand to protest poverty in the United States. They wore beads to protest lynching in the United States. They wore gloves and raised them during the playing of the anthem to signify dissent against the way the African American Olympic athletes were treated. As they said in their founding statement, "Why should we run in Mexico City only to crawl home?"

Yet none of this 2008 crop of athletes is daring to say that maybe protest begins at home. They are raising concerns about China's policies in Tibet or Darfur, but not the U.S. wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. There are concerns about China's labor standards, but not the way their own sponsors, like Nike, exploit those standards.

Rationing Health Care is "Unpleasant"

The Des Moines Register reports on one aspect of national planning for the event of a disaster that overwhelms the nation's medical resources

Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won't get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.

Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn't be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia.

The suggested list was compiled by a task force whose members come from prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government agencies. They include the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Representation from DHS, CDC, DHHS suggest that SOME people working for the Bush Administration take health threats seriously.

The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals "so that everybody will be thinking in the same way" when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits

...

... proposals resemble a battlefield approach in which limited health care resources are reserved for those most likely to survive.

...it's not the first time this type of approach has been recommended for a catastrophic pandemic ...

While the notion of rationing health care is unpleasant, the report could help the public understand that it will be necessary ...

I think the unpleasantness of rationing health care described here means rationing health care for people with health insurance.

... members believe it's just a matter of time before such a health care disaster hits

I've read that an influenza pandemic occurs about once every 70 years, which suggests the world is about 20 years overdue.

Endless War

Tom Englehardt writes of the madness that is the U.S. occupation of Iraq with an overview and insights that put the mainstream media to shame. I'm going to quote extensively from his analysis of 04 May, 2008:

Concisely describing how some things have come full cycle to the point we're at today:

... no longer is the U.S. attacking Sunnis. In the wake of the President's 2007 surge, the U.S. military is now officially allied with 90,000 Sunnis of the so-called Awakening Movement, mainly former insurgents, many of them undoubtedly once linked to the Baathist government U.S. forces overthrew in 2003.

Meanwhile, American troops are fighting the Shiite militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, a cleric who seems now to be living in Iran, but whose spokesman in Najaf recently bitterly denounced that country for "seeking to share with the U.S. in influence over Iraq."

And they are fighting the Sadrist Mahdi Army militia in the name of an Iraqi government dominated by another Shiite militia, the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, whose ties to Iran are even closer.

Similar madness inspired Country Joe and the Fish's immortal lyrics:

well it's one, two, three
what are we all fightin' for?
don't ask me now I don't give a damn;


And a perverse reversal hearkening back to U.S. metrics of the war upon the Vietnamese:

The fighting in the heavily populated urban slums of Sadr City has been fierce, murderous, and destructive. It has quieted most of the talk about the "lowering of casualties" and of "violence" that was the singular hallmark of the surge year in Iraq. Though never commented upon, that remarkable year-long emphasis on the ever lessening number of corpses actually represented the return, in perversely reverse form, of the Vietnam era "body count."

...

With the coming of the surge strategy in 2007, frustration over the President's unaccomplished mission and his constant talk of victory meant that some other "metric," some other "benchmark," for success had to be established, and it proved to be the reverse body count. Over the last year, in fact, just about the only measure of success regularly trumpeted in the mainstream media has been that lowering of the death count. In reverse form, however, it still held some of the same dangers for the administration as its Vietnamese cousin.

...

In April, of the 51 American deaths in Iraq, more than twenty evidently took place in the ongoing battle for Sadr City or greater Baghdad. ... And many of them have died under the circumstances most feared by American commanders (and thought for a time to have been avoided) before the invasion of Iraq -- in block to block, house to house fighting in the warren of streets in one of this planet's many slum cities.

Unlike virtually all of the reporting from Iraq, Englehardt considers the situation from the viewpoint of the Iraqis.

For the Iraqis of Sadr City, of course, this is a living hell. ... As in all colonial wars, all wars on the peripheries, the "natives" always die in staggeringly higher numbers than the far better armed occupation or expeditionary forces.

...

That rising body count has, after all, taken away the last metric by which to measure "success" in Iraq. Even the small explanations ... seem increasingly bizarre. Take, for instance, the convoluted explanation of who exactly is responsible for the devastation in Sadr City. ...

"'The sole burden of responsibility lies on the shoulders of the militants who care nothing for the Iraqi people…' He said the militiamen purposely attack from buildings and alleyways in densely populated areas, hoping to protect themselves by hiding among civilians. 'What does that say about the enemy?... He is heartless and evil.'"

...

So, to sum up ... The Bush administration liberated Iraq in order to send U.S. troops against a ragtag militia that has nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein's former government (and many of whose members were, in fact, oppressed by it, as were its leaders) in the name of another group of Iraqis, who have long been backed by Iran, and… uh…

...

As in Vietnam, so four decades later, we are observing a full-scale descent into madness and, undoubtedly, into atrocity.

At least in 2003, American troops were heading for Baghdad. They thought they had a goal, a city to take. Now, they are heading for nowhere, for the heart of a slum city which they cannot hold in a guerrilla war where the taking of territory and the occupying of neighborhoods is essentially beside the point.

They are heading for oblivion, while trying to win hearts and minds by shooting missiles into homes and enclosing people in giant walls which break families and communities apart, while destroying livelihoods.

...

Remember the days when the warmongers were so elated with their "victory":

Remember when the globe's imperial policeman, its New Rome, was going to wield its unsurpassed military power by moving from country to country, using lightning strikes and shock-and-awe tactics? We're talking about the now-unimaginably distant past of perhaps 2002-2003.


Afghanistan had been "liberated" in a matter of weeks;


"regime change" in Iraq was going to be a "cakewalk,"


and it would be followed by the reordering of what the neoconservatives liked to refer to as "the Greater Middle East."


No one who mattered was talking about protracted guerrilla warfare; nor was there anything being said about counterinsurgency (nor, as in the Powell Doctrine, about exits either).


The U.S. military was going to go into Iraq fast and hard, be victorious in short order, and then, of course, we would stay. We would, in fact, be welcomed with open arms by natives so eternally grateful that they would practically beg us to garrison their countries.

Here's another point, so obvious which Christopher Hedges has also made: Armies win wars and armies lose wars, but politicians begin wars and politicians end wars.


The current U.S. puppet government of Iraq has little legitimacy amongst the Iraqi people, all of whom want our foreign army to leave.

Every one of those assumptions about the new American way of war was absurd, even then. At the very least, the problem should have been obvious once American generals reached Baghdad and sat down at a marble table in one of Saddam Hussein's overwrought palaces, grinning for a victory snapshot -- without any evidence of a defeated enemy on the other side of the table to sign a set of surrender documents.


If this were a normal campaign and an obvious imperial triumph, then where was the other side? Where were those we had defeated?

...

[Secretary of Defense] Gates describes our war-fighting future in this way: "What has been called the 'Long War' [i.e. Bush's War on Terror, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq] is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies."


... This is Gates' ultimate insight as secretary of defense, and his response is to urge the military to plan for more and better of the same. For this we give the Pentagon almost a trillion dollars a year.

...

Every time you hear the phrase "the next war" -- and journalists already love it -- you should wince. It means endless war, eternal war, and it's the path to madness.


Vietnam… Iraq… Afghanistan… Don't we already have enough examples of American counterinsurgency operations under our belt? The American people evidently think so. For some time now, significant majorities have wanted out of Baghdad, out of Iraq. All the way out.

...


And yet, the path to Sadr City is one that even an imperialist should want to turn back from. It's the road to Hell and it's paved with the worst of intentions.

War without end, amen.

Fabius Maximus, in a post entitled How long will all American Presidents be war Presidents, directs readers to an Obama speech about national security, noting that Obama plans to remove troops from Iraq and position them in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama's plan means that

The Long War continues

without debate among our senior statesmen.

Without considering alternatives other than force.

Without a stated destination or goals, other than pacification of Islam — purging it of elements we find objectionable.

Without balancing of its costs vs. its benefits.

Without regard for the damage a sustained high tempo does to our Army and Marines.

Without analysis of the structural reasons we have had such little success in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

War without end, without thought. This is the inheritance the boomers bequeath to our children.

Turkana's opening salvo, posted at The Left Coaster, repeats a charge against Democratic leadership that is typically made by Republicans:

The Democratic House "leadership" is soft on terror.

In justifying this "Soft" charge, Turkana notes:

The Bush Administration openly and unapologetically flouts international strictures against torture, and the Democratic Congress does nothing.

The Bush Administration lied the country into a war that didn't need to be fought, and that has devastated both an innocent people and the U.S. military, and the Democratic Congress does nothing.

The Bush Administration has systematically undermined American national security, and the Democratic Congress does nothing.

In 2005, they were so focused on winning the 2006 elections that they took impeachment off the table.

In 2007 and 2008, they've been so focused on winning the 2008 elections that they're taking ending the war off the table.

The Democratic House "leadership" is so focused on winning the government that they're refusing to govern.

...

They're not resigned that they "can't" stop the war while Bush is still in power, they're unwilling to make any effort to stop it. Even after Bush is out of power. And by the middle of next year, they'll be worrying about the 2010 elections. They're so worried about looking soft that they're proving how soft they really are.

Maybe things have always been awry

The Legal Schnauzer cites a Thom Hartmann interview with Dan Seigleman:

Here's Siegelman about why the mainstream press, and many citizens, have ignored the story:

"Well, I really believe that people just don't want to believe bad things do happen in America. You know, we want to believe that decisions to go to war are made on what . . . is our best national interest, or we want to believe that our justice system works fairly and evenhandedly, that innocent people don't get indicted. We want to believe that our elections, as opposed to the elections of other countries, are conducted fairly and honestly. But, you know, when we take a close look at what is going on, we find that maybe things are awry."

Siegelman's statements about the broad nature of the Bush DOJ scandal are spoken in the finest Democratic tradition. And for that, he deserves our nation's gratitude.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright has offered similar insights with documented examples:

BILL MOYERS: What is your notion of why so many Americans ... don't want to seem to acknowledge that a nation capable of greatness is also capable of cruelty?

REVEREND WRIGHT: ... we are miseducated as a people ... because we're miseducated, you end up with the majority of the people not wanting to hear the truth. Because they would rather cling to what they are taught.

James Washington, now a deceased church historian, says that after every revolution, the winners of that revolution write down what the revolution was about so that their children can learn it, whether it's true or not.

They don't learn anything at all about the Arawak, they don't learn anything at all about the Seminole, the Cheek-Trail of Tears, the Cherokee. ... No, they don't learn that.

What they learn is 1776, Crispus Attucks was the one black guy in there. Fight against the British, the- terrible.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal while we're holding slaves." No, keep that part out.

They learn that. And they cling to that. And when you start trying to show them you only got a piece of the story, and lemme show you the rest of the story, you run into vitriolic hatred because you're desecrating our myth. You're desecrating what we hold sacred. And [what] you're holding sacred is a miseducational system that has not taught you the truth.

"We find that maybe things are awry"

For some people (native Americans, Afro-Americans, and the poor), clearly, things in this country, have been worse than awry for a long long time. There is no maybe about it.

Legacy Appointees

Dan Froomkin cites a frightening prospect:

one way for Bush to tie the hands of his successor is to install

political loyalists in career positions.

And of course, the supremes.