skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Telling sign of a failed Iraq strategy
Are the media dumb or just out to lunch? Sorry to be intemperate, but how else can one explain the meager attention paid to the truly historic visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Iraq? Not only is he the first Mideast head of state to visit the country since its alleged liberation, but the very warm official welcome offered by the Iraqi government to the most vociferous critic of the United States speaks volumes to the abject failure of the Bush doctrine.
On Tuesday, Condoleezza Rice reiterated the administration's position that Iran is behind the turmoil that has engulfed the Mideast from Beirut to Baghdad and, most recently, Israel, where what she claims are Iranian-supplied rockets have destroyed the belated Bush peace plan. There is also the matter of Iran's nuclear program, which President Bush condemned once again over the weekend. But what leverage does the United States have over Iran when, as the image of Ahmadinejad holding hands with the top leaders of Iraq demonstrated to the world, we have put the disciples of the Iranian ayatollahs in power in Baghdad? There is no face-saving exit from Iraq without the cooperation of Tehran, and the folks who call America the "Great Satan" now hold the high cards.
How interesting that Ahmadinejad, unlike a U.S. president who has to be airlifted unannounced into ultra-secure bases, was able to convoy in from the airport in broad daylight on a road that U.S. dignitaries fear to travel. His love fest with Iraq President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who fought on Iran's side against Iraq and who speaks Farsi, even took place outside of the safety of the Green Zone, adding emphasis to Ahmadinejad's claim that while he is welcome in Iraq, the Americans are not.
Nor did the Iraqi leaders take exception to Ahmadinejad's insistence that the U.S. has brought only terror to the region and that the continued American presence is the main obstacle to peace. On the contrary, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pronounced his talks with fellow Shiite Ahmadinejad "friendly, positive and full of trust." Video of Talabani, who asked that Ahmadinejad call him "Uncle Jalal" after holding hands and exchanging kisses with the Iranian president, was broadcast throughout the region.
Saddam Hussein went to war with Iran, but George W. Bush has given his Iranian foes a Shiite-run ally. Iran is now a major trading partner of Iraq that has offered a $1 billion loan, the border is increasingly porous as religious pilgrimages have become the norm, and many investment projects supervised by Iranians are in the works. Instead of isolating the "rogue regime" of Iran, the Bush administration has catapulted the theocrats of Tehran into the center of Mideast political power. There can be no peace, whether in Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq, without the cooperation of the ayatollahs of Iran. If that was the intention of the neoconservative cabal that led Bush into this folly, its members should be tried for treason.
That was, however, obviously not what the neocons expected from the invasion of Iraq, which they engineered in the aftermath of 9/11 with a much rosier scenario in mind. The saying that there is no need to attribute to mendacity what can be explained by ordinary stupidity aptly defines the neoconservative folly. Clearly the neocons were conned by the likes of Ahmed Chalabi, the rogue banker accused by the CIA of slipping U.S. secrets to Tehran, into believing that a "liberated" Iraq would advance democracy in the region, not to mention the security of Israel. That the opposite has occurred is no big problem for them as they emerge with their careers intact.
The leading neocon publicist, William Kristol, has even been rewarded for never getting it right with a premier spot on the New York Times opinion pages, so yes, in the punditry business, one does fail upward.
But for Bush, his signature issue, the battle against terrorism, is a shambles. The terrorists are very much on the rise in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which Bush neglected for an Iraq sideshow that has cost over a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of lives. But the long-run price will be far higher, with the blowback from the massive instability that he has engendered in the region.
When Bush has finally retired to that ranch, cutting sagebrush to his heart's content, his all-consuming smugness might ever so subtly be troubled by the memory of a father who knew best, and who warned against the terminal foolishness of seizing Baghdad.
ABC Attacks Obama While Giving McCain a Free RideDuring recent editions of Good Morning America and World News, ABC discussed and aired reports on the "explosive statements" of Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, but ABC has yet to report on controversial comments by two "allies" of Sen. John McCain. For example, evangelist John Hagee has said that "Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans," and pastor Rod Parsley reportedly wrote that "America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion [of Islam] destroyed."
Bush The Torturer, The Tyrant, The DisgraceOn Saturday, Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed the CIA’s use of torture in interrogations (a bill, it should be noted, John McCain, alleged opponent of torture, voted against). He had the temerity, our Dear Leader, to begin his official endorsement of torture in his radio address this morning with these words: “Good morning.” Good for him and his kind of delusional sadists, maybe. Not so good for this country, whose reputation today takes one more plunk toward the abyss of rogue and less than ordinary nations. Not so good for the rest of the world, either, whose nations have been disbelievingly howling, in Babels of translations, that most American of plaints: “Say it ain’t so.” This spring training for terrorist-interrogators (for torture is terrorism at its distilled worst), it very much is so. The United States is officially, proudly, the land of torturers. It’s true that the United States has been at this for years. But the difference here is not only that the president is endorsing torture, but that he’s doing it so openly and willfully. It isn’t arrogance anymore. It isn’t even hubris. Arrogance and hubris suggest that at least some awareness that public perceptions still matter. In Bush’s mind, perceptions are for the birds. This is pure tyranny. His statement embracing torture, a study in mendacity, is worth a line-by-line look.
“This week,” he began, “I addressed the Department of Homeland Security on its fifth anniversary and thanked the men and women who work tirelessly to keep us safe.” Really? As of last May 1, Homeland Security, the Washington Post reported, “had 138 vacancies among its top 575 positions, with the greatest voids reported in its policy, legal and intelligence sections, as well as in immigration agencies, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard.” It got so bad that a panicky report was sent to the House committee overseeing the department-the department led, as we unfortunately know, by the intrepidly dismal Michael Chertoff, who captained the agency through its finest hour: its spectatorship of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.
“Because the danger remains,” Bush continued, “we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists.” All the tools. Not the necessary tools, but all the tools. The most effective way not to worry about crossing the line into the dark side is not to have a line at all. For the Dear leader there is no question of nuance, of the difference between right and wrong. It is all right as long as he declares it so. By all means necessary (although I hate to soil Malcolm’s fine line, given its context, with the Dear Leader’s criminal intent). But by that reasoning, nuking Kandahar would be justified. Aren’t nuclear weapons also tools in the fight against “terrorism”? One day, the question may well be answered. Especially if the country insists on electing John McCain (and liberals who personally despise the black one or the bitch, as their prejudices couch them, insist on helping along the reactionaries).
Where Bush Lies Like a Nixonian Sweat Bead
“The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror — the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives.” The bill, of course, does no such thing. It does not take away the CIA’s right to detain anyone. It does not take away the CIA’s right to question anyone. It only forbids the CIA to employ waterboarding and other forms of torture or degrading and dehumanizing treatment of inmates-inmates, we should always, always remember, who aren’t terrorists, but alleged terrorists. Until they are proven so, it is only their incarcerators who are the demonstrably proven terrorists.
Bush then lists a series of supposed terrorist attacks the interrogations foiled. We have to trust him on that one, as several of them have never been mentioned before. Trusting Bush at this point, of course, is an exercise best left to the pathologically cretinous. One example from the plots Bush does mention-the supposed attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles. It’s an old story, peddled by his administration since 2002. But when even the Voice of America, which is barely two radio waves removed from Radio White House, gives credence to doubts about the Dear Leader’s story, it’s time to give his fictions a chance to get sold as the latest memoir. “Micheal Scheuer, who was the leading al-Qaida expert in the CIA’s counter-terrorism center in 2002,” VOA reported in 2006, “says he is not aware of any such serious threat against the West Coast in 2002. As the man in the CIA who knew more about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida than perhaps any other agency officer, he says it is unlikely that he would not have been kept informed on such a plot. “It could be that it was very closely held, but I think that’s unlikely,” he said. “It could be just a function of my failing memory. But this doesn’t sound like anything that I would recall as a major threat, or as a major success in stopping it.’”
Brutality’s Euphemisms
Bush in his radio address then moves on to euphemizing torture as “specialized interrogation procedures to question a small number of the most dangerous terrorists under careful supervision.” It’s a little disingenuous for the man who turned extraordinary renditions into a secret competitor of Disney’s Vacation Club, the man who replaced the Soviet Union’s gulags with a secret gulag of his own (using, cleverly, the Soviet Union’s old prisons in some cases, as in Poland and Romania), the man under whose careful supervision the likes of Khaled el Masri and Maher Arar were wrongly imprisoned, tortured in Afghanistan and Syria, and released without apologies long after the CIA knew they had the wrong men-it’s a little disingenuous for that man now to claim “careful supervision” in torture chambers.
And to characterize torture as “these safe and lawful techniques.” Safe? When, by 2006, more than 100 individuals in American detention had been murdered by their captors? Lawful, when this very veto the Dear Leader is bandying about is an attempt to evade the law? But here’s his reasoning: limiting the CIA to interrogation techniques allowed only by the Army field manual would be wrong because the field manual deals with soldiers. The CIA deals with terrorists. Just as Bush on March 8 officially placed the United States as a champion of torture, Bush on this day also placed the United States as a champion of separating the race between legitimate human beings and sub-human creatures-”hardened terrorists.” The circular argument gives the appearance of perfect logic-if you’re willing to accept the notion that some human beings are not quite human beings. And isn’t that the notion once peddled in the United States about blacks-excuse me, about niggers? Isn’t that the notion peddled about Indians, at least while there were enough of them around that a distinction mattered? Isn’t that the kind of distinction some conservatives attempted to write into the Constitution with their prohibition of “oriental” immigrants at the turn of the last century?
Some things don’t change. Once a bigoted nation, always a bigoted nation. But this goes beyond bigotry. Bush is projecting an interpretation of human beings that links up with the sort of distinctions Nazi and apartheid regimes were known for, when they, too, facilitated the torture and murder of “enemies” by dehumanizing them in the eyes of the public. This is no different. He may be speaking the language of Anglo-Saxon civilization. He may be doing so from the august rooms of the White House. What he’s saying makes him no different in these regards than the tyrants of the 20 th century. His rhetoric is another chain-link to his actions: he dehumanizes in words in order to dehumanize in deeds.
Last month Michelle Obama was criticized for saying that finally, she can be proud of the United States, the implication being that she hadn’t been proud of it before Barack Obama’s hopeful run. She may want to rethink her newfound pride. There’s nothing to be proud of when the president reduces this country to rank criminality while calling it, of all things, a “higher responsibility” that is “keeping America safe.” No one should envy the next Americans to be taken prisoner by rogue nations and terrorists, now that we’re no better than either. (article by way of Common Dreams)
Halting Illegal Spying on Americans
Almost seven years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, mainstream media and Congressional Democrats are finally beginning to defy President Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional program of spying on Americans.
During an astounding press conference on February 28, 2008, President Bush was jarred by the veteran and habitually-reserved CBS correspondent, Bill Plante, who asked point blank: “I know it’s unintended to spy on Americans, but in the collection process information about everybody gets swept up and then it gets sorted. So if Americans don’t have any recourse, are you just telling them when it comes to their privacy to suck it up?”
Stunned by the question, Bush delivered a condescending non-sequiter: “I wouldn’t put it that way, if I were you - in public. You’ve been around long enough.” (The President never disputed Plante’s premise that everyone’s information is vacuumed up by the government.)
Visibly angry, the President blamed everything on his favorite target - trial lawyers: “You cannot expect phone companies to participate if they feel like they’re going to be sued… class-action plaintiffs attorneys, you know - I don’t want to try to get inside their head; I suspect they see, you know, a financial gravy train - are trying to sue these companies. It’s unfair. It is patently unfair.”
Always willing to go to the mat to defend helpless phone giants, President Bush neglected to mention that the original lawsuits were brought by public interest lawyers like us and the ACLU, not class-action lawyers. This is only one of a series of untruths told by the Bush Administration about the largest domestic spying program in American history. Not least, as reported in this paper in January, the Bush administration took steps to monitor the calls of American citizens before 9/11, not after, as the administration has repeatedly asserted.
The President’s suggestion that it would be “patently unfair” to hold the phone companies liable represents a new low in this administration’s disregard of the law. Congress has long made it a crime for phone carriers to share a subscriber’s phone records with the government without a warrant or subpoena. Both the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Stored Communications Act provide for a minimum of $1,000 in damages for each violation of a phone subscriber’s privacy rights.
The Bush Administration never mentions that at least two phone companies refused to participate in the Administrations’ illegal attempts to access citizen phone records without court order. Qwest, under former CEO Joe Nacchio, refused to cooperate with the NSA’s spying program because the government would not certify that the program was legal. Michael Kieschnick, President of the Working Assets phone company, went further: “Working Assets believes that the warrantless monitoring of phone conversations ordered by the Bush administration is illegal and unacceptable… Working Assets would never, under any circumstances, give (let alone sell) records to the Bush administration without a warrant or court order.”
John McCain Wants America To Be In Debt Forever
"In the shorter term," said McCain, "if you somehow told American businesses and families, 'Look, you're not going to experience a tax increase in 2010,' I think that's a pretty good short-term measure."
So making permanent tax cuts that McCain originally voted against because he thought, correctly, that they were an unconscionable, budget-busting giveaway to the richest Americans, will now provide a short-term stimulus to the poor and working class as the economy goes into the tank.
McCain Embraces Hate Mongering MinisterThe McCain/Hagee story is growing, though still not as much as it ought to. My new friends from the Catholic League emailed earlier to advise that Bill Donohue was being interviewed for tonight's program of The Situation Room on CNN. Blogs at The Washington Post and ABC News today covered the growing scandal from the anti-Catholic bigotry perspective, with the latter actually featuring the unbelievably inflammatory You Clip -- found by Ann Althouse, which I posted yesterday and which is now being distributed by the Catholic League -- of a shirt-sleeved Pastor Hagee spewing the creepiest, most hateful bile imaginable about Catholicism ("This is the Great Whore of Revelation 17").
As The Post noted, Catholics United, a less reactionary group than the Catholic League, has now also denounced McCain's warm embrace of Hagee and demanded that he repudiate his endorsement. Thus far, it is Hagee's anti-Catholicism which is being featured -- largely because when Bill Donohue issues press releases, the media jumps to cover it. While that angle has substantial political ramifications -- Karl Rove identified the Catholic vote in 2004 as the most vital to the GOP's electoral successes -- the reality is that Hagee's hateful and twisted extremism extends far beyond that realm. In sum, John McCain has aligned himself with one of America's purest -- and most powerful -- haters, and that ought to be the story here.
