This Is For The Soldiers

Please go to this site, watch the video and sign the petition for our soldiers and loved ones. They need our help.

http://www.thisisforthesoldiers.org/

Gorbachev: U.S. is sowing 'global disarray'

MOSCOW (AP) — Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Friday laid the blame for the current low in Russia's relations with the West squarely at Washington's door, accusing the United States of making "major strategic mistakes" that had thrown the world into a period of "global disarray."

Russia has fallen out with the United States on a raft of issues, clouding relations and leading some commentators to draw parallels with the Cold War.

Gorbachev expressed strong support for President Vladimir Putin's stance on most questions, and traced the roots of the chill with the West to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which, he said, put Washington in an empire-building mood.

After the Soviet Union's collapse, "the idea of a new empire, of sole leadership, was born," he said at a news conference. "Unilateral actions and wars followed," he added, saying that Washington "ignored the Security Council, international law and the will of their own people."

"These are major strategic mistakes," Gorbachev said.

Gorbachev, whose liberal policies of glasnost and perestroika — openness and restructuring — set in play democratic forces that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, echoed Putin's frequent endorsement of a so-called "multipolar world," or one without the perceived dominance of the United States.

"No one, no single center, can today command the world. No single group of countries, like the G-8, can do it," Gorbachev said. "There is no option other than to build a multipolar world order, no matter how complicated this is."

That, he said, would not be achieved until the Bush administration had departed.

"Under the current U.S. president I don't think we can fundamentally change the situation as it is developing now," he said. "It is dangerous. The world is experiencing a period of growing global disarray."

The Kremlin says the Bush administration's plans for a missile defense system in Eastern Europe could spark a new arms race. It has refused to back Washington's draft Security Council resolution on Kosovo's independence and has suspended its participation in a key treaty on arms reduction in Europe.

Moscow is also in the midst of a bitter diplomatic squabble with Britain over Russia's refusal to extradite a suspect in the polonium killing of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, which has seen a tit-fot-tat expulsion of diplomats.

Addressing the diplomatic dispute with Britain, Gorbachev called for calm. "What's done is done — we need to stop and return to a dialogue and continue developing ties," he said.

Still, he said the case was "politicized" and, therefore, "someone needs it to be so, and to spoil relations." He said Britain "tries to be a good friend only for the United States."

While conceding that there had been some rollbacks in media freedoms under Putin, Gorbachev said his policies were in the "interests of the majority" and stressed that Russia was in a "transitional period."

With presidential elections slated for next year, speculation is rife over who will succeed Putin and what role he will play outside the Kremlin.

Gorbachev pitched in: "I am sure President Putin will find his place in future life. And this place will be a serious one. It will become clear very soon," he said.

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Yea Buddy!!! Gorbachev risked his life to bring communism down in Russia. The man knows what peace is all about. I have to agree with his assessment of king george.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-07-27-us-russia_N.htm

Out How: The Economics of Ending Wars
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070727_out_how_the_economics_of_ending_wars/
Posted on Jul 27, 2007
Michael D. Intriligator

Ten points of Michael D. Intriligator, professor of economics, political science and public policy, UCLA, and vice chair of Economists for Peace and Security:

1. On the economics of ending wars, the decision to prolong a war or to terminate it in various possible ways can be studied using the economic tools of cost-benefit analysis and expected utility theory. One of the belligerents, such as the U.S. currently in Iraq (and also in Afghanistan) will continue the war if it sees the potential future benefits exceeding the costs, where each is weighted by its probability of occurrence and future benefits and costs discounted to the present. On the costs of the Iraq War, the most detailed study was done by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, presented at the 2006 ASSA meetings and published in the Los Angeles Times. They recently updated their study, which they published as “Encore: Iraq Hemorrhage, Update of “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War,” in The Milken Institute Review, Fourth Quarter, 2006, pp. 76-83. They estimated the total price tag for the war as $2.267 trillion, a stunning figure. Future costs will probably continue at more or less the same rate, depending on whether the U.S. changes its strategy by, for example, a surge in troops committed to the war.

As to the benefits, one must consider the real reasons for the Iraq war, in contrast to the reasons given by Bush and others that were excuses, rationales, or simply wrong. The ostensible reasons given by Bush were 1) Iraqi possession of WMD, 2) to fight terrorism, 3) retaliation for 9/11, and 4) building a democracy in the Middle East that would spread throughout the region. The real reasons, however, were: 1) retaliation for Saddam’s attempted assassination of President Bush’s father, 2) desire for U.S. bases and influence in the region, 3) protection of Israel. In my view, retaliation was the main motivation for President Bush while U.S. bases and influence and protection of Israel were the motivations for the “neocons” in the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), Century (PNAC), many of whom became important players in the Bush Administration, occupying many high offices. They were able to use Bush’s powerful personal grievance against Saddam in 1) to convince him to invade and occupy Iraq, as they had been planning for many years when they were out of office, during the preceding Clinton Administration, when they planned the operation as part of PNAC. In fact this plan came up in the very first meeting of President Bush’s Cabinet, to the surprise of some who had not been members of PNAC. None of these neocons had direct personal military experience and thus they were all “armchair generals.” They also had no deep knowledge of Iraq or the region as a whole and did not consult with people in the State Department and CIA who did know the country and region. The neocons had no appreciation for a culture that they did not understand and they had no opposition in the White House or Pentagon. Many people have alleged oil was the real reason for the invasion, but, as I see it, this was only a secondary reason for the neocons as well as for President Bush.

Of course, it is hard to quantify the value of these benefits based on the motivations for the war, and some were achieved, including the overthrow of Saddam and his execution as well as the establishment of U.S. bases in Iraq. No WMD were found, and as to the fight against terrorism, Iraq has become a training base for terrorists, which it never was under Saddam, and these terrorists are now much closer to Israel. It is hard or impossible to justify the continuation of the war based on these past and potential future costs and benefits.

2. Historically, most wars end when one of the belligerents is defeated, as in World Wars I and II or the Vietnam War, but some lead to a stalemate or a truce, as in the Korean War and the Iran-Iraq War. In others, one of the belligerents withdraws, as in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The current Iraq War may, in fact, follow the pattern of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, involving the invasion of a poor and powerless Muslim nation, a neighboring country to Iraq, by a superpower. After many deaths on both sides, the Soviet superpower eventually withdrew without making any gains and left a civil war in its wake. The Soviet Union invaded in December 1979 and withdrew 10 years later, in 1989. If the current Iraq War follows the same course then the U.S. will withdraw in March 2013, ten years after the 2003 invasion without making any gains and leaving a civil war behind. Of course, 10 years for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan does not automatically imply 10 years for the U.S. in Iraq, but this war could drag on much longer than anyone is now considering. Recall that in the Vietnam War large numbers of American combat troops began to arrive in 1965 and the last left the country in 1973, with the war finally concluded on 30 April 1975, with the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces. Thus the U.S. involvement also lasted some 10 years, just as in the case of the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

3. The Harvard philosopher George Santayana stated in a book published in 1905 “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner’s, 1905, p. 284, and this seems to be applying to the Middle East, such the U.S. establishing a puppet government in Iraq much as the British did in the 1920’s modeled upon their own government with a disastrous outcome. We are repeating the British experience in Iraq. They set up a mini British constitutional monarchy with a young King Faisal on the throne. After Britain granted Iraq independence in 1932 the country fell into a period of strife. A military strong man overthrew the monarchy in 1958, and Saddam Hussein eventually deposed him. This may be the most likely future course of Iraq, not a democracy or civil war or partition or a continued U.S. presence, but rather an eventual takeover by a strong man, the leader of one of the militias, perhaps Moktada al-Sadr, who is the strongest militia leader today and has credibility based in part on the legacy of his father and family. There are earlier historical precedents as well.

4. A point I have been making in recent talks builds on one of the recommendations of the recent Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report, which advocated negotiations with Iran and Syria. Many others have been suggesting the use of diplomacy such as these negotiations for some time, including me. What these proposals omit is the agenda for such negotiations. My proposal would be a “Grand Bargain” under which Iran, is very influential in Iraq, could help us exit gracefully from Iraq, while the U.S. in return as a quid pro quo could make a deal with Iran similar to the one that we made with India. Under it we would help them with nuclear technology for energy production and other peaceful purposes but they would have to continue as a non-weapons state member of the NPT and sign on to the Additional Protocol of the IAEA, involving full-scope IAEA safeguards of their nuclear facilities, which would help guarantee that they develop only nuclear energy, as Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad has stated is their avowed goal, and not nuclear weapons. Whether such a “Grand Bargain” will emerge or not it is important for other nations, particularly those in the region to see that we are willing to talk with Iran and Syria. (For a related proposal see Abbas Maleki and Matthew Bunn. “Finding Compromise in Iran.” The Boston Globe, 15 June 2006).

As to negotiations in general, the U.S. has largely avoided them in recent years other than negotiations with friends and allies. Vice President Dick Cheney has refused to negotiate with Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hizbullah, etc. saying, “We do not talk to evil.” During the Cold War as well as earlier and later we regularly negotiated with our ostensible enemies, including the Soviet Union, even when President Reagan had denounced it as an “evil empire.” We even negotiated with China at the time when we did not have diplomatic relations with the PRC, through our ambassadors in Warsaw. In the current Bush Administration we have replaced negotiations with enemies by unilateral demands, ultimatums, economic and political sanctions, and ultimately military invasion and occupation, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. There can be value, however, in negotiations with Iran, Syria, and other states. There would also be value to direct negotiations with North Korea to resolve issues on the Korean peninsula and finally put an end to the Korean War after more than 50 years of a truce. Survival, security and independence are paramount issues to the DPRK and also to Iran, especially after President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech of the Union address and the subsequent invasion of Iraq, leaving only these two nations untouched so far.

5. There was a theory of falling dominos during the Cold War that we used to justify our interventions in Southeast Asia and Central America, but, as it turned out, this theory did not apply. Rather, the falling dominos were seen in the collapse of the Soviet Bloc starting in 1989 and ending in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, so the dominos fell in a different direction than what we feared and in a different place. President Bush was also counting on a theory of falling dominos in the Middle East, with the transformation of Iraq into a democracy leading other nations in the region to become democracies, but as things developed the falling dominos have been going in another direction: from chaos and civil war in Iraq to the same developing in other nations in the region, including Lebanon and possibly others. Of course, things often work out in ways that are very different than what we expect.

In an interview in the New York Times of Dec. 22, 2006 Secretary of State Rice said of the Iraq War, ‘’I don’t think it’s a matter of money. Along the way there have been plenty of markers that show that this is a country that is worth the investment, because once it emerges as a country that is a stabilizing factor you will have a very different kind of Middle East.’’ If the reverse falling dominos theory applies, however, once Iraq emerges as a country that is a destabilizing factor, leading to civil wars in Lebanon, Palestine, and possibly elsewhere we will have a very different kind of Middle East, but one that is much worse than the one that existed prior to March 2003.

6. Bob Woodward’s latest book State of Denial makes the point that President George W. Bush is living in such a state, but one should ask why he is in this state. I believe that President Bush cannot tolerate the thought of possible failure, a situation that goes back to his days in trying to run an oil exploration business that failed when they found no oil and running for Congress but failing to win a seat. When he was asked at a recent press conference what mistake he had made he said that he couldn’t think of any but would get back to the reporter, which he apparently never did. This psychology of President Bush is important in understanding how the current Iraq war will end: he will never admit defeat and thus is likely to try some desperate moves, such as a surge in troops, which is not likely to work, and then wait it out for his successor in January 2009 to take over, presumably to pull out. He can emphasize training the Iraqi military and police but U.S. officers familiar with both the military and police have noted that the problem is not lack of training but rather lack of loyalty. A fundamental problem is that President Bush refuses to lose “face” in the light of his commitments and previous statements. Of course, no U.S. President like to lose a war but some have withdrawn to cut their losses, such as Reagan in Lebanon and Clinton in Somalia.

7. Some have drawn analogies between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War, but there are essential differences between the two. In the case of Vietnam there was a well-established government in North Vietnam ready to take over South Vietnam, which is what ultimately happened. In Iraq, by contrast, there is no “North Iraq” prepared to take over the country, so there is no simple way out of the conflict other than the devastation of the country in an all-out civil war or its takeover by a strong man, each of which is a real possibility today. In addition, the government of South Vietnam was a puppet of the U.S. while in Iraq the government that was initially a puppet of the U.S. has evolved through democratic processes into is a puppet of Iran through the Shia-dominated government, police, and militias. In fact, the Iraq problem is an even bigger one than Vietnam. A lesson from Vietnam was that the domino theory was bogus because the U.S. could withdraw without negative strategic implications, whereas the U.S. faces negative strategic implications if it stays OR withdraws from Iraq.

. The way out of the Iraq war: Neither: 1) President Bush’s earlier mantra of “stay the course;” nor 2) President Bush’s opponent’s “pull the plug,” or “cut and run;” nor 3) adding more troops and resources to the effort, as some have, suggested, such as a “surge” of troops into Baghdad; nor 4) gradually reduce our commitments there until eventually we will be totally out, as others have suggested; nor 5) additional training of Iraqi troops by U.S. troops, None of these options would work, however, as they all have the common denominator of unilateral U.S. decision-making. I suggest that the best option at this point would be to avoid such unilateralism, which got us into this quagmire in the first place, where we have, in effect, painted ourselves in a corner. Rather we should replace it by multilateralism, talking with the neighboring states, including not only our friends in Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia but also Syria and Iran. A model might be the multilateral process in Afghanistan that also involved its neighboring states in the Bonn conference and also the 1995 Dayton accords on Bosnia.

9. After the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. President George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” that was later broadened to a “Global War on Terror (GWOT)” There is no clear enemy in this war as terror is in the mind of the beholder and also that there is no clear end to such a war, as the tactic of terror has existed throughout history. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote the essay “Perpetual Peace” in 1795 in which he considered the possibility of such a peace if states were small and democratic, later analyzed by current political scientists as the theory of “democratic peace.” By contrast, the “Global War on Terror” is one of “Perpetual War” and thus a fundamental threat to global security that must be overcome by global collective action.

10. Following is President George Herbert Walker Bush’s statement on why he did not occupy Baghdad. It’s unfortunate that his son, President George W. Bush did not review this before his own invasion and occupation of Baghdad:

“Trying to eliminate Saddam… would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.” - George Herbert Walker Bush, from his memoir, A World Transformed (1998)

Originally delivered as a speech on Jan. 5, 2007, at the ASSA Conference’s Economists for Peace and Security Roundtable in Chicago.




http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070727_out_how_the_economics_of_ending_wars

07/26/2007
A Stock Market Vote Of Confidence For Bush
By: Lawrence Kudlow , The Bulletin


It has been widely reported that President Bush simply refuses to turn against the surge in Iraq or even compromise on it. At the same time, he admonishes Congress to toss out troop-withdrawal timetables and to give Gen. Petraeus' new counterinsurgency plan time to work. And you know what? While the Democrats stand against nearly all of the president's wartime policies - and in the process court defeat - the stock market is standing with Bush and the chance for victory.About two weeks ago, when the Democratic leadership of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi launched their latest anti-war offensive, stocks dropped about 150 points. Then, in a press conference a few days later, after Bush discussed clear successes in Iraq's Anbar province, the Dow Jones soared nearly 300 points, marching ever closer to the 14,000-point plateau.Of course, shares trade on the profit and interest-rate fundamentals of the economy. But if you ask folks on Wall Street what their biggest worry is, most will say it's another 9/11. They rank another attack far ahead of passing subprime mortgage problems or wiggles in consumer spending.The stock market, in fact, is voting for the president to stay on offense. Here's a case in point. The highest-ranking Iraqi leader of al-Qaida in Iraq was just arrested, after which he told interrogators that Osama bin Laden's inner circle enjoys considerable influence over the Iraqi al-Qaida branch. "Communication between the senior al-Qaida leadership and al-Masri frequently went through al-Mashhadani," said Brigadier Gen. Kevin Bergner. "There is a clear connection between al-Qaida in Iraq and al-Qaida senior leadership outside Iraq."And Wall Street connected the dots, too: That day, the Dow had been down 150 points. But it rallied back 100 points after the Iraqi capture came across the tape.This brings me to a larger point. Despite the criticism President Bush has received over his Iraq War policies, isn't it interesting that stock markets have been booming since early 2003, when Saddam was overthrown and the president signed his supply-side tax cuts into law? (Bush, of course, never gets any credit on either of these points.)In just the past year alone, the Dow has gained a remarkable 30 percent. Meanwhile, Europe and Asia are up about 30 percent, Japan 23 percent, and emerging markets more than 60 percent.Clearly, the world is voting - with real money - for the American system of free-market capitalism. And it's my strong suspicion that the majority of the global investing community supports the Iraq War and a steadfast U.S. commitment to stop terrorism. They seem to know that if the United States doesn't do it, no one else will.I have long believed that stock markets are the best barometer of the health, wealth and security of a nation. And today's stock market message is an unmistakable vote of confidence for the president. Even the best low-tax, limited-government economic policies can be thwarted if the men and women going to work in the morning can't get safely back to their homes and families at night.And the fact that the world economy is experiencing the greatest economic boom in history is a direct rebuke to jihadists everywhere. Al-Qaida despises our country and its capitalist freedoms. And unless stopped cold in its tracks, it will strive to destroy the U.S. financial system and free-market development around the world.The spread of free trade, the free movement of capital, low taxes and the breathtaking rise of the Internet - these are generating more jobs, wealth and prosperity than ever before. And this amounts to a collective thumbing of the nose at the terrorists. It's as though world markets are saying that history is on our side and that the crazed self-proclaimed terrorist clerics will ultimately be defeated.Free-market capitalism, 10. Al-Qaida, 0.And just as Bush won't give up on the surge, he's not about to default to the Democrats on the supply-side investment tax cuts that helped deliver a near six-year economic boom."I'm not going to raise taxes," he told me in a recent White House meeting of conservative columnists, and he pledges to veto non-defense appropriation bills that exceed a $933 billion line in the sand. He also vows to work overtime to get a free-trade deal with the pro-American countries of Colombia and Peru not only to expand economic activity but also to counter the anti-American and socialist policies of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.The media like to paint Bush into a bunker, making him the victim of a torrent of criticism from which they say he can't recover. But here are the plain facts: The president's tax cuts helped reinvigorate investors and businesses. The nation has been safe from attack for nearly six years. And Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq just may be working.In other words, Bush deserves a lot more credit than most are willing to give him.


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And it's my strong suspicion that the majority of the global investing community supports the Iraq War and a steadfast U.S. commitment to stop terrorism."


Looks like money is once again the bottom line!! As long as business is getting rich off the war energies of the US, leading world financiers will back the policy of death to the nth degree. Sounds a lot like what pushed the Vietnam War along for 11 years!!


http://www.thebulletin.us/site/news.cfm?newsid=18630878&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=6

Videos

I am putting a collection Videos on here that I have come accross and think are worth watching on here. So Please watch them and enjoy... If you feel like it let me know what you think of them.

OIF 3

This first video thatt I am putting on is about the 82nd airborne that is in Iraq. I have put it on because my brother is currently in Iraq for his second tour which has gotten extended. He got home from his first tour and was only home for 3 weeks before they sent him over again and then extended his tour.

OIF 3

Add to My Profile More Videos

Remember Me

This next Video is a touching video about remembering our soldiers. I would suggest that every one watches it. I do not support this war or what our government is doing, as you can see from my news articles, but I certainly support our soldiers, especially my brother. Nosh I LOVE YOU, Please cme home soon.

The ‘iRack’ Craze

posted on Jul 16, 2007

Fox comedy show MadTV, in a skit built on the common American mispronunciation of a certain occupied country’s name, effectively skewers the Bush administration’s faulty foreign policy—and especially its intransigence in the face of popular opposition to it—via this phony Steve Jobs presentation of the new “iRack.”

Adam Kontras - Let's Bomb Iran!

A Madrigal for the Bushed-Re: Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran

Kurt Vonnegut is The Resident's People

I will end this list of videos with one of my Hero Kurt Vonnegut. If you have never read his stuff you certainly shoud give it a shot. His works are astounding. I hope that enjoyed my Videos!!

BBC: W's grandpappy planned fascist coup of USA

Kevin says: A BBC Radio 4 investigation sheds new light on a major subject that has received little historical attention, the conspiracy on behalf of a group of influential powerbrokers, led by Prescott Bush, to overthrow FDR and implement a fascist dictatorship in the U.S. based around the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler.

Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen.

The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.

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Very Interesting!!Note:
Heinz foods is now owned by none other than John Kerry's wife which makes him the richest Senator of them all!! Surely king george is aware of his family's leanings toward control of the people by government. Its all money, folks - its all money!!



http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/25/bbc_ws_grandpappy_pl.html

Bush in Free Fall
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070724_bush_in_free_fall/
Posted on Jul 24, 2007
By Robert Scheer

At what point will President Bush finally grasp the enormous disaster that the neoconservatives, from Vice President Dick Cheney on down, have visited upon his presidency? Or, to put it numerically, just how does a president descend from a 92 percent approval rating one month after 9/11—the highest of any president since modern polling began—to the two-thirds disapproval score that has stalked him through the last year, thanks to the Iraq debacle, without getting the message?

Two major polls released this week show that the vast majority of Americans grasp the salient lesson of the Iraq misadventure: “Winning” this war has nothing to do with winning the war on terrorism. Thus, the public overwhelmingly supports the congressional Democratic leadership’s demand that the administration begin concrete steps to extract U.S. troops from Iraq. This week’s New York Times/CBS poll found that two-thirds of those polled said that the war is “going badly” and that “the United States should reduce its forces in Iraq, or remove them altogether.” Meanwhile, a Washington Post/ABC survey reported that, “by a large margin, Americans trust the Democrats rather than the president to find a solution to a conflict that remains enormously unpopular.”

According to the Post poll, more than six in 10 Americans want Congress to make the final decision about when our troops come home. Even a majority of Republicans judge Bush to be too rigid to change course and, significantly, among those who either served in Iraq or had a close friend or relative who did, only 38 percent approve of Bush’s handling of the war. In an important rebuke to those Democrat “centrists” afraid to vigorously challenge Bush on the war, about half of those polled criticized the Democrats for doing “too little” to challenge Bush’s war policy. How much courage will it take for wavering Democrats and Republicans to come out forthrightly in favor of ending a war that the majority of Americans believe is not worth fighting?

At first, the public, driven by false claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaida manufactured by the neocon cabal that dominated the administration, bought into Bush’s claims that the Iraq war was an essential battle in the war on terrorism. At a time when even respectable news organizations were spreading such falsehoods as unquestioned truths and most Democrats in Congress displayed the independence of mind of cheerleaders, it was no wonder that initial support for the Iraq war was nearly unanimous. Fully 90 percent of Americans backed Bush one week after the first bombs fell in a “shock and awe” campaign that neocon ideologues at the Pentagon were convinced would lead a terrorized population to embrace democracy and other purported Western values.

As Winston Churchill once observed, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on. But the truth eventually does catch up, and that is the specter that now haunts our president. There is simply no plausible national security argument for the United States’ ongoing occupation of Iraq. That fact was driven home Tuesday when American and Iranian negotiators met for the second time in Baghdad at the insistence of Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who was quite clear that peace will not come without the Iranian government’s cooperation.

The harsh reality that the United States must now enlist the support of Iran, the “rogue nation” that Bush claims threatens us with nukes, which this very week was once again accused by the U.S. ambassador of supplying arms to Iraq’s anti-American Shiite militias, underscores the folly of this disastrous escapade. The regime change engineered by the neocons vastly extended the power of the regime housed in Tehran and will only intensify with each additional day of the U.S. occupation.

Yet, communication with Iran is a good thing, because Iranians at least have to live with the consequences of increased violence—as opposed to American politicians, who feel required only to muddle through to the next election. The Democrats and the few Republican dissidents are quite happy to make a show of their reservations about the war without actually ending it. The Democratic leadership in Congress is playing a risky game of pretending to be the party of peace without actually pursuing the budget-cutting measures that would force an end to the war.

While this opportunistic strategy may produce a temporary political advantage, it will be of slight comfort to the families of American soldiers killed and maimed in Iraq over the next 18 months, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of future Iraqi victims. Nor will it con a public that has turned solidly against this war and is determined to hold politicians responsible for ending it.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20070724_bush_in_free_fall

Bush Reframes the War in Iraq

“The actual country of Iraq, it seems, is just the unfortunate stage on which this Armageddon occurs.”

NPR.org, July 25, 2007 ·
It hardly seems possible for President Bush to raise his bet on the war in Iraq, the single policy that already defines his presidency and threatens to define his party for a decade.

Yet how else can we describe what the administration has done this week? On the same day that the Washington Post and ABC News released a poll in which nearly 7 of 10 Americans disapproved of his handling of the war, President Bush gave a high-profile speech in Charleston, S.C., declaring "America can accept nothing less than complete victory" in Iraq.

The president then raised the stakes still further by suggesting anything less than that would be a personal triumph for Osama bin Laden. With heavy emphasis, he framed the conflict in Iraq not as a sectarian struggle between long-feuding factions there, but as a duel between two outsiders — the United States and al-Qaida. The forces of America versus the forces of Sept. 11. Us versus them. Good versus evil.

The actual country of Iraq, it seems, is just the unfortunate stage on which this Armageddon occurs. Iraq's own history, religion, politics and culture are of less importance, distractions that were not mentioned in the president's speech.

This White House has long had a penchant for drawing situations in dramatic black-and-white. This rhetoric may be galvanizing in the moment, especially in the midst of wartime. But as a strategy for overcoming war weariness at home – or for actually winning a war abroad – it leaves much to be desired.

First, it is manifest to the nation and the world that Mr. Bush is not winning this struggle that he insists on portraying in apocalyptic terms. That means the coming consequences will be seen as apocalyptic as well, and that's not good news for America.

Second, the president is raising the ante at a moment when the cards he is holding do not beat those already showing on the table. This means that as the realpolitik plays out, he and his government and nation will sacrifice more and more for less and less.

Third, the president is redoubling his war commitment at a time when even his supporters are reconsidering theirs. More and more conservatives are bailing on the policy, in the country and in Congress as well. This month we have heard as many as a dozen Republican senators expressing sentiments ranging from doubt to outright opposition.

What is the administration doing to reassure us? It is returning to its invocation of a connection between Iraq and "the people who attacked us on 9-11." Once, this was an undertone to the central cause for war: Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction. That cause is gone. Now, the president tells us, Iraq is all about Osama bin Laden, a man who — not so long ago — the administration declared did not matter.

Will this born-again bogeyman still be enough to keep the president's party behind him in the Senate, where the minority Republicans have thus far been able to frustrate the majority?

That may depend on how Republican senators react to another story that appeared this week, on the same day the president gave his Charleston speech. USA Today and the New York Times and others reported that General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker have a plan that relies on strong U.S. troop presence to placate Iraq for two years or more.

That timing may well reflect a realistic or even optimistic assessment of the security situation in Iraq. But it can hardly be reassuring to Republicans who have been vigorously pointing toward mid-September as a moment of reckoning for the Bush policy in Iraq.

Earlier this month, the Senate debated a measure that would have begun U.S. troop withdrawals in 120 days. Republicans begged for General Petraeus to be given until September. The citing of this month became a mantra.

That will continue, in spite of the president's Charleston speech. Within hours of that speech, House Republican leader John Boehner appeared on CNN and referred to a September reassessment of the war strategy three times in the course of one answer.

Even as Congress clings to that timing, the Bush administration seems to be letting it slip. General Petraeus' No. 2 general has suggested he needs until November for an assessment. Others have suggested the real sea change will come next March, when the Pentagon's troop rotation will no longer be able to sustain the current surge.

Or perhaps the moment of truth will be deferred to mid-2009, as the latest plan from Defense and State seems to indicate.

If the only acceptable outcome is Mr. Bush's ideal of "complete victory," then even those deadlines may need to slip. Setting the bar for American success so high may put it out of reach indefinitely.

Given that reality, does it make sense to portray this fight as a duel to the death between the United States and al-Qaida? Is that how we want the world to judge what it sees happening in Iraq?



http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12219479

Ft. Lewis general to decide today on limiting number of funerals
ARMY GENERAL SEEKS A MONTHLY SERVICE; FAMILIES OBJECT


By William YardleyNew York TimesSan Jose Mercury News
Article Launched:07/25/2007 01:30:42 AM PDT

FORT LEWIS, Wash. - Twenty soldiers deployed to Iraq from Fort Lewis were killed in May, a monthly high. That same month, the Army base announced a change in how it would honor its dead: instead of units holding services as casualties occurred, they would be held collectively once a month.

The anger and hurt were immediate. Soldiers' families and veterans protested the change as cold and logistics-driven. Critics online said the military was trying to repress bad news about deaths. By mid-June, the base had put the plan on hold, and its commander, Lt. Gen. Charles Jacoby, is expected to decide today whether to go through with it.

"If I lost my husband at the beginning of the month, what do you do, wait until the end of the month?" asked Toni Shanyfelt, who said her husband was serving one of multiple tours in Iraq. "I don't know if it's more convenient for them, or what, but that's insane."

Military historians and scholars say the proposal and its fallout highlight the questions facing the armed forces as casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan mount, and some soldiers and their families come to expect more from military bases than in past wars.

In Vietnam and Korea, historians say, many bases were places for training soldiers and shipping them out, rarely to see them return, with memorial services uncommon. Now, in the age of the all-volunteer force, the base has become the center of community. The Army and other branches have fostered the idea that military service is as much about education, job training and belonging to a community as it is about national defense.

"It wasn't considered the Army's business in any of the other wars to conduct these services," said Alan Archambault, director of the Fort Lewis Military Museum, which is supported by the Army. "It was the hometowns of the soldiers that died that had these. Now, I think the Army bases are trying to be the hometowns."

Army officials said the idea to hold monthly services reflected a need to find balance between honoring the dead and the practical reality that the services take time to plan, including things such as coordinating rifle salutes and arranging receptions for family members who attend.

The Army emphasizes that the ceremonies held on bases are in addition to those held by the soldier's unit overseas as well as private family services, which usually include a military honor guard.



http://www.mercurynews.com/nationworld/ci_6457685?nclick_check=1

July 23, 2007, 10:50PM
U.S. foresees 2 more years in IraqClassified plans do not explicitly address troop level

By MICHAEL R. GORDONNew York Times
BAGHDAD, IRAQ — While Washington is mired in political debate over Iraq, the American command here has prepared a detailed plan that foresees a significant American role for the next two years.

The classified plan, which represents the coordinated strategy of the top American commander and the American ambassador, calls for restoring security in local areas, including Baghdad, by the summer of 2008. "Sustainable security" is to be established on a nationwide basis by the summer of 2009, according to officials familiar with the document.

The detailed document, known as the Joint Campaign Plan, is an elaboration of the new strategy President Bush signaled in January when he decided to send five additional American combat brigades and other units to Iraq. That marked a shift from the previous strategy, which emphasized transferring to Iraqis the responsibility for safeguarding security.

That new approach put a premium on protecting the Iraqi population in Baghdad, on the theory that improved security would provide Iraqi political leaders with breathing space to attempt political reconciliation.

The latest plan does not explicitly address troop levels or withdrawal schedules. It anticipates a decline in American forces as the "surge" in troops runs its course later this year or in early 2008. But it nonetheless assumes continued American involvement to train soldiers, act as partners with Iraqi forces, and fight terrorist groups in Iraq.

Given the immensity of the challenge of dealing with die-hard Sunni insurgents, renegade Shiite militias, Iraqi leaders who have made only fitful progress toward political reconciliation, as well as Iranian and Syrian neighbors who have not hesitated to interfere in Iraq's affairs, the goals in the document appear ambitious.

The plan, developed by Gen. David Petraeus, the senior American commander, and Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador, has been briefed to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. William J. Fallon, head of the Central Command. It is expected to be formally issued to officials here this week.


http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/world/4992578.html

Robert Fisk: TE Lawrence had it right about Iraq


'Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active and 98 per cent passively sympathetic'

Published: 14 July 2007
Back in 1929, Lawrence of Arabia wrote the entry for "Guerrilla" in the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is a chilling read - and here I thank one of my favourite readers, Peter Metcalfe of Stevenage, for sending me TE's remarkable article - because it contains so ghastly a message to the American armies in Iraq.

Writing of the Arab resistance to Turkish occupation in the 1914-18 war, he asks of the insurgents (in Iraq and elsewhere): "... suppose they were an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. The Arabs might be a vapour..."

How typical of Lawrence to use the horror of gas warfare as a metaphor for insurgency. To control the land they occupied, he continued, the Turks "would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not be less than 20 men. The Turks would need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill wills of all the local Arab people. They had 100,000 men available."

Now who does that remind you of? The "fortified post every four square miles" is the ghostly future echo of George W Bush's absurd "surge". The Americans need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill will of the Iraqi people, and they have only 150,000 available. Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of "war lite" is responsible for that. Yet still these rascals get away with it.

Hands up those readers who know that Canada's Defence Minister, Gordon O'Connor, actually sent a letter to Rumsfeld two days before his departure in disgrace from the Pentagon, praising this disreputable man's "leadership". Yes, O'Connor wanted "to take this opportunity to congratulate you on your many achievements (sic) as Secretary of Defence, and to recognise the significant contribution you have made in the fight against terrorism". The world, gushed the ridiculous O'Connor, had benefited from Rumsfeld's "leadership in addressing the complex issues in play".

O'Connor tried to shrug off this grovelling note, acquired through the Canadian Access to Information Act, by claiming he merely wanted to thank Rumsfeld for the use of US medical facilities in Germany to ferry wounded Canadian soldiers home from Afghanistan. But he made no mention of this in his preposterous letter. O'Connor, it seems, is just another of the world's illusionists who believe they can ignore the facts - and laud fools - by stating the opposite of the truth. Bush, of course, is among the worst of these meretricious creatures. So is the late Tony Blair.

Oh, how we miss Lawrence. "The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern (guerrilla) commander," he wrote 78 years ago, accurately predicting al-Qa'ida's modern-day use of the internet. For insurgents, "battles were a mistake ... Napoleon had spoken in angry reaction against the excessive finesse of the 18th century, when men almost forgot that war gave licence to murder".

True, the First World War Arab Revolt was not identical to today's Iraqi insurgency. In 1917, the Turks had manpower but insufficient weapons. Today the Americans have the weapons but insufficient men. But listen to Lawrence again.

"Rebellion must have an unassailable base ...

In the minds of men converted to its creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts.

"It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active in a striking force, and 98 per cent passively sympathetic ... Granted mobility, security ... time, and doctrine ... victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

Has the US General David Petraeus read this? Has Bush? Have any of the tired American columnists whose anti-Arab bias is wobbling close to racism, bothered to study this wisdom? I remember how Daniel Pipes - one of the great illusionists of modern American journalism - announced in the summer of 2003 that what the Iraqis needed was (no smirking here, please), a "democratically minded strongman".

They had already had one, of course, our old chum Saddam Hussein, whom we did indeed call a "strongman" when he was our friend and when he was busy using our gas against Iran. And I do wonder whether Bush - defeated, as he is, in Iraq - may not soon sanction an Iraqi military coup d'état to overthrow the ridiculous Maliki "Green Zone" government in Baghdad. Well, as one of my favourite expressions goes, we'll see.

But wait, Pipes is at it again. The director of the "Middle East Forum" has been writing in Canada's National Post about "Palestine". His piece is filled with the usual bile. Palestinian anarchy had "spewed forth" warlords. Arafat was an "evil" figure. Israeli withdrawal from Gaza had deprived Palestinians of the one "stabilising element" in the region. Phew! "Palestinianism" (whatever that is) is "superficial". Palestinian "victimisation" is a "supreme myth of modern politics". Gaza is now an "[Islamist] beachhead at the heart of the Middle East from which to infiltrate Egypt, Israel and the West Bank".

One of these days, Pipes concludes, "maybe the idiot savant 'peace processors' will note the trail of disasters their handiwork has achieved". He notes with approval that "Ehud Barak, Israel's brand new Defence Minister, reportedly plans to attack Hamas within weeks" and condemns the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, for buoying Mahmoud Abbas' "corrupt and irredentist Fatah".

So we are going to have yet another war in the Middle East, this time against Hamas - democratically elected, of course, but only as a result of what Pipes calls "the Bush administration's heedless rush to Palestinian elections"? It's good to see that the late Tony Blair is already being dubbed a "savant". But shouldn't Pipes, too, read Lawrence? For insurgency is a more powerful "vapour" than that which comes from the mouths of illusionists.


http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2768261.ece

Democratic lawmaker wants Senate to censure Bush over Iraq war

WASHINGTON, July 22 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. Democratic senator said on Sunday that he was planning to introduce legislation to censure President George W. Bush over his handling of the Iraq war.

"I think we need to do something serious in terms of accountability. And that's why I will be shortly introducing a censure resolution of the president and the administration," Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, said on NBC's "Meet The Press."

"This is an opportunity for people to say, let's at least reflect on the record that something terrible has happened here," he said.

One of the two resolutions Feingold planned to introduce would censure Bush for getting the country into the Iraq war, the administration's failure to adequately prepare the military, and issuing misleading statements about the war.

The other resolution would criticize the president for the administration's "outrageous attack on the rule of law," such as authorizing the warrantless domestic spying program and the "torture" of detainees in Iraq and at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said Feingold's proposed measures reflected the nation's sentiment, but that he might not act on them.

"We have a lot of work to do," Reid said during an interview with CBS. "The president already has the mark of the American people -- he's the worst president we ever had. I don't think we need a censure resolution in the Senate to prove that," he said.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-07/23/content_6414624.htm

Bush Alters Rules for CIA Interrogations

Friday July 20, 2007 11:31 PM
By KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush breathed new life into the CIA's terror interrogation program Friday in an executive order that would allow harsh questioning of suspects, limited in public only by a vaguely worded ban on cruel and inhuman treatment.

The order bars some practices such as sexual abuse, part of an effort to quell international criticism of some of the CIA's most sensitive and debated work. It does not say what practices would be allowed.

The executive order is the White House's first public effort to reach into the CIA's five-year-old terror detention program, which has been in limbo since a Supreme Court decision last year called its legal foundation into question.

Officials would not provide any details on specific interrogation techniques that the CIA may use under the new order. In the past, its methods are believed to have included sleep deprivation and disorientation, exposing prisoners to uncomfortable cold or heat for long periods, stress positions and - most controversially - the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The Bush administration has portrayed the interrogation operation as one of one of its most successful tools in the war on terror, while opponents have said the agency's techniques have left a black mark on the United States' reputation around the world.

Bush's order requires that CIA detainees ``receive the basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.''

A senior intelligence official would not comment directly when asked if waterboarding would be allowed under the new order and under related - but classified - legal documents drafted by the Justice Department.

However, the official said, ``It would be wrong to assume the program of the past transfers to the future.''

A second senior administration official acknowledged sleep is not among the basic necessities outlined in the order.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the order more freely.

Skeptical human rights groups did not embrace Bush's effort.

Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, said the broad outlines in the public order don't matter. The key is in the still-classified guidance distributed to CIA officers.

As a result, the executive order requires the public to trust the president to provide adequate protection to detainees. ``Given the experience of the last few years, they have to be naive if they think that is going to reassure too many people,'' he said.

The order specifically refers to captured al-Qaida suspects who may have information on attack plans or the whereabouts of the group's senior leaders. White House press secretary Tony Snow said the CIA's program has saved lives and must continue on a sound legal footing.

``The president has insisted on clear legal standards so that CIA officers involved in this essential work are not placed in jeopardy for doing their job - and keeping America safe from attacks,'' he said.

The five-page order reiterated many protections already granted under U.S. and international law. It said that any conditions of confinement and interrogation cannot include:

- Torture or other acts of violence serious enough to be considered comparable to murder, torture, mutilation or cruel or inhuman treatment.

- Willful or outrageous acts of personal abuse done to humiliate or degrade someone in a way so serious that any reasonable person would ``deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency.'' That includes sexually indecent acts.

- Acts intended to denigrate the religion of an individual.

The order does not permit detainees to contact family members or have access to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In a decision last year aimed at the military's tribunal system, the Supreme Court required the U.S. government to apply Geneva Convention protections to the conflict with al-Qaida, shaking the legal footing of the CIA's program.

Last fall, Congress instructed the White House to draft an executive order as part of the Military Commissions Act, which outlined the rules for trying terrorism suspects. The bill barred torture, rape and other war crimes that clearly would have violated the Geneva Conventions, but allowed Bush to determine - through executive order - whether less harsh interrogation methods can be used.

The administration and the CIA have maintained that the agency's program has been lawful all along.

In a message to CIA employees on Friday, Director Michael Hayden tried to stress the importance and narrow scope of the program. He noted that fewer than half of the less than 100 detainees have experienced the agency's ``enhanced interrogation measures.''

``Simply put, the information developed by our program has been irreplaceable,'' he said. ``If the CIA, with all its expertise in counterterrorism, had not stepped forward to hold and interrogate people like (senior al-Qaida operatives) Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the American people would be right to ask why.''

For decades, the United States had two paths for questioning suspects: the U.S. justice system and the military's Army Field Manual.

However, after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration decided more needed to be done. With Zubaydah's capture in 2002, the CIA program was quietly created.

Since then, 97 terror suspects are believed to have been held by the agency at locations around the world, often referred to as ``black sites.''

The program sparked international controversy as details slowly emerged, with human rights groups saying the agency's work was a violation of international law, including the Third Geneva Convention's Common Article 3 protections, which set a baseline standard for the treatment of prisoners of war.

In September, Bush announced the U.S. had transferred the last 14 high-value CIA detainees to the military's detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they would stand trial. The CIA has held one detainee since then - an Iraqi who the U.S. considered one of al-Qaida's most senior operatives. He was also eventually transferred to Guantanamo.


---

Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann and Lara Jakes Jordan contributed to this report.






http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6794815,00.html

King George W.: James Madison’s Nightmare
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070717_the_president_we_were_warned_about/

George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the “foreign entanglements” that George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used the sledgehammer of war to obliterate the separation of powers that James Madison enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

With the “war on terror,” Bush has asserted the right of the president to wage war anywhere and for any length of time, at his whim, because the “terrorists” will always provide a convenient shadowy target. Just the “continual warfare” that Madison warned of in justifying the primary role of Congress in initiating and continuing to finance a war—the very issue now at stake in Bush’s battle with Congress.

In his “Political Observations,” written years before he served as fourth president of the United States, Madison went on to underscore the dangers of an imperial presidency bloated by war fever. “In war,” Madison wrote in 1795, at a time when the young republic still faced its share of dangerous enemies, “the discretionary power of the Executive is extended ... and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.”

How remarkably prescient of Madison to anticipate the specter of our current King George imperiously undermining Congress’ attempts to end the Iraq war. When the prime author of the U.S. Constitution explained why that document grants Congress—not the president—the exclusive power to declare and fund wars, Madison wrote, “A delegation of such powers [to the president] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments.”

Because “[n]o nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare,” Madison urged that the constitutional separation of powers he had codified be respected. “The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war ... the power of raising armies,” he wrote. “The separation of the power of raising armies from the power of commanding them is intended to prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them.”

That last sentence perfectly describes the threat of what President Dwight Eisenhower, 165 years later, would describe as the “military-industrial complex,” a permanent war economy feeding off a permanent state of insecurity. The collapse of the Soviet Union deprived the military profiteers and their handsomely rewarded cheerleaders in the government of a raison d’être for the massive war economy supposedly created in response to it. Fortunately for them, Bush found in the 9/11 attack an excuse to make war even more profitable and longer lasting. The Iraq war, which the president’s 9/11 Commission concluded never had anything to do with the terrorist assault, nonetheless has transferred many hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars into the military economy. And when Congress seeks to exercise its power to control the budget, this president asserts that this will not govern his conduct of the war.

There never was a congressional declaration of war to cover the invasion of Iraq. Instead, President Bush acted under his claimed power as commander in chief, which the Supreme Court has held does allow him to respond to a “state of war” against the United States. That proviso was clearly a reference to surprise attacks or sudden emergencies.

The problem is that the “state of war” in question here was an al-Qaida attack on the U.S. that had nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Perhaps to spare Congress the embarrassment of formally declaring war against a nation that had not attacked America, Bush settled for a loosely worded resolution supporting his use of military power if Iraq failed to comply with U.N. mandates. This was justified by the White House as a means of strengthening the United Nations in holding Iraq accountable for its WMD arsenal, but as most of the world looked on in dismay, Bush invaded Iraq after U.N. inspectors on the ground discovered that Iraq had no WMD.

Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people—just as Madison feared when he wrote: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it compromises and develops the germ of every other.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070717_the_president_we_were_warned_about

Intelligence Puts Rationale For War on Shakier Ground
By Michael AbramowitzWashington Post Staff WriterWednesday, July 18, 2007; A05
The White House faced fresh political peril yesterday in the form of a new intelligence assessment that raised sharp questions about the success of its counterterrorism strategy and judgment in making Iraq the focus of that effort.
Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush has been able to deflect criticism of his counterterrorism policy by repeatedly noting the absence of any new domestic attacks and by citing the continuing threat that terrorists in Iraq pose to U.S. interests.
But this line of defense seemed to unravel a bit yesterday with the release of a new National Intelligence Estimate that concludes that al-Qaeda "has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability" by reestablishing a haven in Pakistan and reconstituting its top leadership. The report also notes that al-Qaeda has been able "to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks," by associating itself with an Iraqi subsidiary.
These disclosures triggered a new round of criticism from Democrats and others who say that the administration took its eye off the ball by invading Iraq without first destroying Osama bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan.
Confronted with a political brush fire, the president and his aides retreated to familiar ground, highlighting the parts of the report that they saw as supportive of their policies, particularly the need to confront Islamic radicals on the ground in Iraq.
In talking with reporters in the Oval Office yesterday, Bush concentrated on a single paragraph in the assessment that placed the enemy in Iraq in a larger context of international terrorism. The estimate said bin Laden's organization will "probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland."
Although only a portion of the instability in Iraq is attributed to al-Qaeda and the group had no substantial power base there before the U.S. invasion, Bush again cast the war as a battle against its members, whom his aides have described as key provocateurs there.
"These people have sworn allegiance to the very same man who ordered the attack on September the 11th, 2001: Osama bin Laden," the president said. "And they want us to leave parts of the world, like Iraq, so they can establish a safe haven from which to spread their poisonous ideology. And we are steadfast in our determination to not only protect the American people, but to protect these young democracies."
Bush's top advisers also pushed back at the proposition from many Democrats that the White House allowed the pursuit of al-Qaeda to be diverted by going after Saddam Hussein. Briefing reporters yesterday, Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush's homeland security adviser, took issue with the suggestion that the president had ignored warnings from the intelligence community that attacking Iraq would stimulate al-Qaeda's drive for recruits and influence.
"You're assuming it's a zero-sum game, which is what I don't understand," Townsend said. "The fact is, we were harassing them in Afghanistan, we're harassing them in Iraq, we're harassing them in other ways, non-militarily, around the world. And the answer is, every time you poke the hornet's nest, they are bound to come back and push back on you. That doesn't suggest to me that we shouldn't be doing it."
But many Democrats questioned the administration's explanations, seizing on the key judgments of the new intelligence estimate as yet another reason to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq and changing the administration's mission of the past four years.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said the current situation in Iraq "has helped to energize" al-Qaeda. "Changing our strategy in Iraq and narrowing our military mission to countering al-Qaeda terrorism -- as a bipartisan majority in the Senate now favors -- would be the single greatest thing we could do to undermine al-Qaeda's ability to use Iraq as a recruiting and propaganda tool fueling the growth of regional terrorist groups," he said in a statement.
Al-Qaeda's participation in the Iraqi violence has figured particularly heavily in recent administration arguments for a continued U.S. troop presence there, because White House strategists regard it as a politically salable reason for staying and continuing to fight.
Some terrorism analysts say Bush has used inflated rhetoric to depict al-Qaeda in Iraq as part of the same group of extremists that attacked the United States on Sept. 11 -- noting that the group did not exist until after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. These analysts say Bush also has overlooked the contribution that U.S. actions have made to the growth of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has been described as kind of a franchise of the main al-Qaeda network headed by bin Laden.
Paul R. Pillar, a former CIA analyst who has been involved in previous intelligence estimates, said that the administration has correctly identified the danger posed by al-Qaeda in Iraq and that there are indeed links between the Iraq group and the larger international terrorist network. But he said the White House is drawing the wrong conclusion, noting that it is the U.S. presence in Iraq that is fueling the terrorists' cause.
"Iraq matters because it has become a cause celebre and because groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda central exploit the image of the United States being out to occupy Muslim lands," Pillar said.
Referring to al-Qaeda in Iraq, Clinton administration official Daniel S. Benjamin, who has written books and articles on international terrorism, said: "These are bad guys. These are jihadists." He added: "That doesn't mean we [should] stay in Iraq the way we have been, because we are not making the situation any better. We're creating terrorists in Iraq, we are creating terrorists outside of Iraq who are inspired by what's going on in Iraq. . . . The longer we stay, the more terrorists we create."
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/17/AR2007071702007.html

Nuke Waste Drums Tipped in Japan Quake
Tuesday July 17, 2007 2:16 PM
By ERIC TALMADGE
Associated Press Writer
KASHIWAZAKI, Japan (AP) - A nuclear power plant near the epicenter of a powerful earthquake suffered a slew of problems, including spilled waste drums, leaked radioactive water, fires and burst pipes, the reactor's operator said Tuesday - more than 24 hours after the tremors struck northern Japan.
The problems at the Kashiwazaki power plant and the delays in acknowledging them are likely to feed concerns about the safety of Japan's 55 nuclear reactors, which supply 30 percent of the quake-prone country's electricity and have suffered a long string of accidents and cover-ups.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said a total of 50 cases of malfunctioning and trouble had been found at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant since Monday's magnitude 6.6 quake, which killed at least nine people and left 13,000 homeless.
The company said they were still inspecting the plant, which shut down automatically after the quake, and further problems could emerge.
Still, TEPCO spokesman Kensuke Takeuchi called the instances discovered so far ``minor troubles'' and said they posed no threat to people or the environment.
In five of the reactors, major exhaust pipes were knocked out of place and TEPCO was investigating whether they had leaked radioactive materials, the statement said.
TEPCO also said about 100 drums containing low-level nuclear waste fell at the plant during the quake and were found a day later, some of the lids open.
The company also said a small amount of radioactive materials cobalt-60 and chromium-51 had been emitted into the atmosphere from an exhaust stack. Monday's quake also initially caused a small fire at an electrical transformer in the sprawling plant.
Japan's nuclear power plants, which have suffered a string of accidents and cover-ups amid deep concerns they are vulnerable in earthquakes.
The Kariwa nuclear power plant, the world's largest in terms of power output capacity, stands near the epicenter of Monday's magnitude 6.6 quake.
Monday's quake initially triggered a small fire at an electrical transformer in the sprawling plant. But it was announced 12 hours later that the temblor also caused a leak of water containing radioactive material.
Later Tuesday, TEPCO said a small amount of radioactive materials cobalt-60 and chromium-51 had been emitted into the atmosphere from an exhaust stack, but posed no danger to the environment. It was unclear if that leak was caused by the quake.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe criticized the delay in notifying the public.
``They raised the alert too late. I have sent stern instructions that such alerts must be raised seriously and swiftly,'' Abe told reporters in Tokyo. ``Those involved should repent their actions.''
Nearly 13,000 people packed into evacuation centers such as schools and other secure buildings in the quake zone 160 miles northwest of Tokyo, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.
People packed school gymnasiums and community centers in the city, camping out on traditional Japanese futon mattresses and fanning themselves from the muggy summer heat.
Thunderstorms and flooding were expected Tuesday throughout the quake zone, increasing the likelihood that the quake-softened, water-logged ground would give way on hillsides and cause even more damage, officials said.
Light rain began to fall by early afternoon in Kashiwazaki and up to 2.4 inches were expected by Wednesday morning, according to the local observatory.
``The damage is more than we had imagined,'' Kashiwazaki Mayor Hiroshi Aida said while inspecting damaged areas of his town. ``We want to restore the water supply as soon as possible so more people can return home.''
Nine people in their 70s or 80s - six women and three men - were killed in the quake, and 47 were seriously injured.
The Defense Ministry dispatched 450 soldiers to the devastated area to clear rumble, search for any survivors under collapsed buildings and provide food, water and toilet facilities. People formed long lines to fill bottles with fresh water.
About 50,000 homes were without water and 35,000 were without gas as of Tuesday morning, local official Mitsugu Abe said. About 27,000 households were without power.
The Japanese Meteorological Agency put the initial quake's magnitude at 6.8, while the U.S. Geological Survey said it was 6.6. The quake, which hit the region at 10:13 a.m., was centered off the coast of Niigata, 160 miles northwest of Tokyo.
The area was plagued by a series of aftershocks, though there were no immediate reports of additional damage or injuries from the aftershocks.
Near midnight, Japan's Meteorological Agency said a 6.6-magnitude quake hit off the west coast, shaking wide areas of Japan, but it was unrelated to the Niigata quake to the north and there were no immediate reports of damage.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6785147,00.html

From the Faraway Nearby
Reasons Not to Glow
On not jumping out of the frying pan into the eternal fires
by Rebecca Solnit
Published in the July/August 2007 issue of Orion magazine
Chances are good, gentle reader, that you are going to have to sit next to someone in the coming year who will assert that nuclear power is the solution to climate change. What will you tell them? There’s so much to say. You could be sitting next to someone who hasn’t really considered the evidence yet. Or you could be sitting next to scientist and Gaia theorist James Lovelock, a supporter of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy™, which quotes him saying, “We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear—the one safe, available, energy source—now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.”
If you sit next to Lovelock, you might start by mentioning that half the farms in this country had windmills before Marie Curie figured out anything about radiation or Lise Meitner surmised that atoms could be split. Wind power is not visionary in the sense of experimental. Neither is solar, which is already widely used. Nor are nukes safe, and they take far too long to build to be considered readily available. Yet Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame, has jumped on the nuclear bandwagon, and so has Greenpeace founding member turned PR flack Patrick Moore. So you must be prepared.
Of course the first problem is that nuclear power is often nothing more than a way to avoid changing anything. A bicycle is a better answer to a Chevrolet Suburban than a Prius is, and so is a train, or your feet, or staying home, or a mix of all those things. Nuclear power plants, like coal-burning power plants, are about retaining the big infrastructure of centralized power production and, often, the habits of obscene consumption that rely on big power. But this may be too complicated to get into while your proradiation interlocutor suggests that letting a thousand nuclear power plants bloom would solve everything.
Instead, you may be able to derail the conversation by asking whether they’d like to have a nuclear power plant or waste repository in their backyard, which mostly they would rather not, though they’d happily have it in your backyard. This is why the populous regions of the eastern U.S. keep trying to dump their nuclear garbage in the less-populous regions of the West. My friend Chip Ward (from nuclear-waste-threatened Utah) reports, “To make a difference in global climate change, we would have to immediately build as many nuclear power plants as we already have in the U.S. (about 100) and at least as many as 2,000 worldwide.” Chip goes on to say that “Wall Street won’t invest in nuclear power because it is too risky. . . . The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island taught investment bankers how a two-billion-dollar investment can turn into a billion-dollar clean-up in under two hours.” So we, the people, would have to foot the bill.
Nuclear power proponents like to picture a bunch of clean plants humming away like beehives across the landscape. Yet when it comes to the mining of uranium, which mostly takes place on indigenous lands from northern Canada to central Australia, you need to picture fossil-fuel-intensive carbon-emitting vehicles, and lots of them—big disgusting diesel-belching ones. But that’s the least of it. The Navajo are fighting right now to prevent uranium mining from resuming on their land, which was severely contaminated by the postwar uranium boom of the 1940s and 1950s. The miners got lung cancer. The children in the area got birth defects and a 1,500 percent increase in ovarian and testicular cancer. And the slag heaps and contaminated pools that were left behind will be radioactive for millennia.
If these facts haven’t dissuaded this person sitting next to you, try telling him or her that most mined uranium—about 99.28 percent—is fairly low-radiation uranium-238, which is still a highly toxic heavy metal. To make nuclear fuel, the ore must be “enriched,” an energy-intensive process that increases the .72 percent of highly fissionable, highly radioactive U-235 up to 3 to 5 percent. As Chip points out, four dirty-coal-fired plants were operated in Kentucky just to operate two uranium enrichment plants. What’s left over is a huge quantity of U-238, known as depleted uranium, which the U.S. government classifies as low-level nuclear waste, except when it uses the stuff to make armoring and projectiles that are the source of so much contamination in Iraq from our first war there, and our second.
Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel was supposed to be one alternative to lots and lots of mining forever and forever. The biggest experiment in reprocessing was at Sellafield in Britain. In 2005, after decades of contamination and leaks and general spewing of horrible matter into the ocean, air, and land around the reprocessing plant, Sellafield was shut down because a bigger-than-usual leak of fuel dissolved in nitric acid—some tens of thousands of gallons—was discovered. It contained enough plutonium to make about twenty nuclear bombs. Gentle reader, this has always been one of the prime problems of nuclear energy: the same general processes that produce fuel for power can produce it for bombs. In India. Or Pakistan. Or Iran. The waste from nuclear plants is now the subject of much fretting about terrorists obtaining it for dirty bombs—and with a few hundred thousand tons of high-level waste in the form of spent fuel and a whole lot more low-level waste in the U.S. alone, there’s plenty to go around.
By now the facts should be on your side, but do ask how your neighbor feels about nuclear bombs, just to keep things lively.
The truth is, there may not be enough uranium out there to fuel two thousand more nuclear power plants worldwide. Besides, before a nuke plant goes online, a huge amount of fossil fuel must be expended just to build the thing. Still, the biggest stumbling block, where climate change is concerned, is that it takes a decade or more to construct a nuclear plant, even if the permitting process goes smoothly, which it often does not. So a bunch of nuclear power plants that go online in 2017 at the earliest are not even terribly relevant to turning around our carbon emissions in the next decade—which is the time frame we have before it’s too late.
If you’re not, at this point, chasing your poor formerly pronuclear companion down the hallway, mention that every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle is murderously filthy, imparting long-lasting contamination on an epic scale; that a certain degree of radioactive pollution is standard at each of these stages, but the accidents are now so many in number that they have to be factored in as part of the environmental cost; that the plants themselves generate lots of radioactive waste, which we still don’t know what to do with—because the stuff is deadly . . . anywhere . . . and almost forever. And no, tell them, this nuclear colonialism is not an acceptable sacrifice, since it is not one the power consumers themselves are making. It’s a sacrifice they’re imposing on people far away and others not yet born, a debt they’re racking up at the expense of people they will never meet.
Sure, you can say nuclear power is somewhat less carbon-intensive than burning fossil fuels for energy; beating your children to death with a club will prevent them from getting hit by a car. Ravaging the Earth by one irreparable means is not a sensible way to prevent it from being destroyed by another. There are alternatives. We should choose them and use them.
An antinuclear activist in Nevada from 1988 to 2002, Rebecca Solnit just put up a clothesline in the backyard and will get around to installing the solar panels any day now. National Book Critics Circle award-winner Solnit's most recent book is Storming the Gates of Paradise.

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http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/316

Iraq tells US 'leave any time'


IRAQ Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has shrugged off US doubts of Iraq's military and political progress, saying its forces are capable and American troops can leave "any time they want".
And one of his top aides accused the US of embarrassing the Government by violating human rights and treating his country like an experiment in a US lab.
On Thursday, the White House reported mixed progress by Iraq's government in meeting 18 benchmarks.
Mr Maliki said difficulty enacting the reforms was "natural" given Iraq's turmoil.
Mr Maliki said his government needed "time and effort", but if necessary, Iraqi police and soldiers could fill the void left by a coalition departure.
"We say in full confidence that we are able, God willing, to take the responsibility completely . . . if the international forces withdraw at any time they want," he said.
Close Maliki adviser Hassan al-Suneid said the US treated Iraq like "an experiment in an American laboratory (judging) whether we succeed or fail".
He said the US military was committing rights violations, embarrassing the Government by its tactics and co-operating with "gangs of killers" in its campaign to recruit Sunnis to help fight al-Qaida.
US airstrikes to hit suspected insurgents also killed civilians, he said.
VETERANS' accounts of war in Iraq have appeared in US magazine The Nation, which devoted an edition to accounts of 50 US troops shocked by civilian casualties.
They said indiscriminate killings were mostly "perpetrated by a minority", but were common, often unreported and almost always unpunished.
"The general attitude was, 'A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi'," said army specialist Jeff Englehart, 26.
- AP, AFP



http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22079368-663,00.html

Vive la Velorution!
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/20070715_vive_la_velorution/
Posted on Jul 15, 2007
By Zuade Kaufman
The French didn’t invent the wheel, but with their latest urban project they’re reinventing how it’ll be used in their beloved capital. On July 15, Mayor Bertrand Delanoë and other green-minded Parisians were on hand at the launching of the “Velib’ ” program, which makes some 10,600 public-use bicycles available at 750 stations throughout the world’s most visited city. Delanoë, once the head of Paris’ Socialist Party, started his campaign to cut down on traffic congestion when he ran for office in 2001. Since then, the city has become less user-friendly for car owners and more so for people using buses and bicycles: Free parking lots have become a thing of the past, parking tickets have gone up in price, and many two-way streets have been whittled down to one-way routes. Also, car lanes have been sacrificed throughout the city to make room for more bike traffic and to widen bus lanes. Around March of this year, the push to set up the program began in earnest. By January 2008 the city plans to double the number of bikes and stations.
The hope of the Velib’ initiative—the name is a combination of the French words velo (bike) and liberté (liberty)—is to make Paris greener and to expand bicycle culture. With Sunday’s Velib launch (a good day for the event, just after Bastille Day and right at the height of Tour de France fever), Paris joins other pedal-pushing European cities like Brussels, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Vienna, all of which have implemented similar programs. Bicycle traffic has been on the rise in recent years, and Paris now boasts 230 miles of bike lanes throughout the city. According to a Velib’ official, a single card allows users to both rent bicycles (with a range of subscription and pricing options) and ride public transportation. The three-speed touring bikes can be left at any of the bicycle stations in Paris. Because the program encourages brief rides of less than half an hour, the bikes are expected to be in heavy rotation.
Depending on their trades and preferred modes of transport, locals weighed in with a range of reactions about the “velorution” and whether it truly will be revolutionary for the average Parisian. Some service and delivery workers are nervous about having so many bikes on the street. Michael Jouer, an employee of the boiler manufacturing company e.l.m. leblanc, said: “It’s going to be a horror—very, very dangerous. Anyone can ride these bikes, and many of them don’t even know how. I’m afraid there’s really going to be a lot of accidents.”
However, taxi driver Homayoun Haghighi said he thinks Velib’ is a good initiative and doesn’t believe it will negatively impact his business. “We have our clientele,” he said, adding that the recent traffic changes have slowed cars down around the city and made travel by bike more efficient during high-congestion hours. “It’s like that; one just has to take their time driving in Paris,” he shrugged.
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A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.Copyright © 2007 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
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