Things are tough in Iraq these days. The US is caught in a three-way tug of war with the Muqtada al-Sadr, whose organization, the largest of the Shiite power blocs, comprises much of the political support Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki enjoys. Sadr’s Mahdi Army is the largest private armed force in the country, and it is believed that members of this army have heavily infiltrated the national police and Iraqi army. It is rumored to have as many as 70,000 fighters, but no one is really sure. Then there is the Sunni contingent, which is reinforced by a large contingent of Ba’athists and former members of the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard – battle hardened veterans of eight years of war with Iran. Estimates of this force run as high as 50,000. These two groups shoot and kill each other, and collect the occasional American scalp when opportunity presents itself. The third group is the legendary and almost mythical al-Qaeda in Iraq. Long pointed out by Bu$hCo and CENTCOM as the greatest danger facing humanity since Noah’s flood, realistic estimates place its strength at perhaps 1,500 fighters.

A recent Marine Corps report admitted that Anbar province was basically lost, and unrecoverable, given the US troop strength available to fight there. There are perhaps 15,000 US troops in the immediate vicinity of Baghdad, and, joined with the 12,000 or so Iraqi Army and National Police forces, they are hard-pressed to maintain any real semblance of order and security. Recently there has been talk of surging 20,000 to 50,000 troops into Iraq to get a handle on all the death and killing and bring some semblance of peace to the capital city at least. This talk emanates primarily from John McCain and Joe Lieberman, two morally corrupt politicians who would consign their grandchildren to walk point in Sadr City if it guaranteed them the White House. General John Abizaid recently appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee and said he didn’t need the troops that Senators McCain and Lieberman have been posturing for.

Since we don’t have 600,000 troops to adequately police Iraq and train up its army, we should start planning for our inevitable evacuation. Some have postulated this will be an orderly, calm withdrawal “over the horizon,” while others have compared it to a Chosin Reservoir retreat, but with much more fighting to escape.

Since Mr Bu$h will never permit an American evacuation of Iraq because that would be an explicit sign of yet another failure in a lifetime of failures, some people have even compared the situation to the German Sixth Army’s position at Stalingrad, although that’s probably a bit extreme.

Steve Gilliard has examined some of the possibilities here, here, and here.

He doesn’t make it look attractive.

That madcap scamp Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, has written another public letter to the American people. Among other things, he told the American people on Wednesday that he was certain they detested President Bush’s policies — his support for Israel, war in Iraq and curtailed civil liberties — and he offered to work with them to reverse those policies.

The call came in the form of a six-page letter in English, published online and addressed to “noble Americans” that discussed “the many wars and calamities caused by the U.S. administration.” It suggested that Americans had been fooled into accepting their government’s policies, especially toward Israel.

“What have the Zionists done for the American people that the U.S. administration considers itself obliged to blindly support these infamous aggressors?” Mr. Ahmadinejad wrote. “Is it not because they have imposed themselves on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural and media sectors?”

This was the latest public step by Iran’s president to promote a dialogue with the United States. He wrote a letter to Mr. Bush in May, calling on him to shift his policies and open a discussion, but it was dismissed by the White House as irrelevant to the central issue dividing them — Iran’s nuclear program. Then Mr. Ahmadinejad challenged Mr. Bush to a public debate, also dismissed by the White House.

It’s actually nice that this sort of communication can go on in the world today, fraught with so much danger, death and destruction. Of course, during the next couple of days the internet tubes will be overflowing with outraged howls from our wrongwing colleagues, because they will insist that a man with such evil intent should not be allowed to address peoples on another country. Let’s note in passing no one was too put out when Mr Bu$h addressed the Iranian people directly while addressing the United Nations in September. This is merely poof that Mr Ahmadinejad is considered a serious man by our wingers, whereas Mr Bu$h apparently is not.

The six page letter addressed many topics, including poverty, homelessness and the loss of civil liberties in America, religion and its practice, and the actions of the Bu$h malAdministration in the Middle east.

While Americans tend to focus on foreign officials like Mr Aghmadinejad as some sort of official spokesman, real political power resides in the council of imams and mullahs who make up the Council of Guardians. The President is somewhat of a figurehead position. Some people say the American form of government is wrong, and that, especially these days, our President should also be a figurehead with no practical power.

In what may be one of the Republican Party’s last sloppy wet kisses to Big Business and Wall Street for a while, an “independent” committee formed by Treasury Secretary Henry M Paulson Jr has recommended the US adopt new rules to allow the Republicans’ big campaign donors to steal as much money as they possibly can.

Among the recommendations:

It recommends making it harder for companies to be indicted by the government or sued by private lawyers, and urges policies to keep the Securities and Exchange Commission from adopting rules that impose high costs on business.

[Insisting the] S.E.C. should be required to perform cost-benefit analyses on all rules before they were adopted. It said the S.E.C. should also take steps to rein in private securities litigation and adopt policies to shield corporate directors and auditors from some lawsuits.

The report said President Bush should direct the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets — composed of Mr. Paulson and the chairmen of the Federal Reserve, the S.E.C. and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission — “to examine the legal and regulatory concerns we raise and to propose whatever reforms it views necessary.”

That could include permitting the group to review cost-benefit analyses before S.E.C. rules take effect, providing businesses with one more avenue of appeal against new rules they oppose.

The report also calls for relatively modest changes in the enforcement of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and supports greater shareholder democracy by limiting antitakeover defenses of companies.

After all, why should they be inconvenienced with silly laws designed to prevent more Enrons? And we certainly should require corporate officers and Directors to be held accountable for the actions of the companies they lead, should we?

And of course, these changes should be made NOW

With Congress soon to be under control of the Democrats, the report recommends changes that can be made without legislation. Even so, it remains unclear how much of the report will be adopted by the Treasury or the S.E.C. While the committee said its recommendations would help investors, they drew immediate criticism from one former member of the S.E.C., who said the recommendations would damage the commission and roll back needed regulation. [emp added]

By all means, let’s unlock the safe and allow one last grand smash-and-grab for the corporate millionaires before the adults take over.

Newt Gingrich, the disgraced ex-Speaker of the House, who was required to resign under three clouds of scandal, signaled his willingness to continue Mr Bu$h’s plan of destroying the US Constitution on Monday. Speaking at a Manchester, New Hampshire awards dinner Mr Gingrich said that it may be necessary to destroy the Constitution in order to save it.

Did we say “willingness’? Perhaps a better description is “eagerness.”

NEWT GINGRICH ®, FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER: My (INAUDIBLE) view is that either before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that we use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us, to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.

Why is it always Republicans who want to limit freedoms? Some people would say that Mr Gingrich was fairly salivating with anticipation as he described to need to shut down the internet before some unnamed people who “want to kill us” cause us to lose a city.

Because, of course, we wouldn’t want the smoking gun to be a smoking city. And heaven knows the Republicans have no idea whatsoever how to protect our borders, ports, and airports, or they would surely have done so, no? So the obvious answer is to prevent people from talking to one another.

Perhaps Mr Gingrich wasn’t referring to “the terrorists” but rather people who just oppose the elitism, corruption, criminality, greed, misogyny, and racial and religious discrimination which is so rampant in the Republican Party today? If that were the case one can easily understand why clamping down on the internet would be a good way to preserve the Republican Way of Life.

Ironically, Mr Gingrich was speaking at a dinner honoring Freedom of Speech. Cancel that. Any man who would ask a wife in a hospital bed dying of cancer for a divorce is incapable of understanding irony if it bit him in his wallet.

The Keith Olbermann show featured a video clip of some of Mr Gingrich’s remarks, complete with still shots of facial grimaces appropriate for a great leader and statesman regretfully explaining why the chocolate ration has been raised to 20 grams. This clip can be found at the always reliable Crooks & Liars, along with a brief discussion between Mr Olbermann and the Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley.

Mr Bu$h instructed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to meet him in Amman, Jordan in order to give him some of that world-renowned “look into the eyes” counseling. Muqtada al-Sadr told Mr Maliki, who derives much of his political support from al-Sadr, not to go there.

Mr Maliki went to Amman.

Via AMERICAblog, we learn that the AP is reporting Mr Maliki will return to a much smaller base of support:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Lawmakers and Cabinet ministers loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said Wednesday they have carried out their threat to suspend participation in Parliament and the government to protest Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's summit with U.S. President George W. Bush.

The 30 lawmakers and five Cabinet ministers said their action was necessary because the meeting in Jordan constituted a "provocation to the feelings of the Iraqi people and a violation of their constitutional rights." Their statement did not explain that claim.

…

"We are sticking to our position. ... The boycott is still valid," Falih Hassan, a Sadrist legislator, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "Bush is a criminal who killed a lot of Iraqis and we do not want him to interfere in Iraq's affairs. The Iraqi government should negotiate with the U.N. Security Council, not with the leader of the country that is occupying Iraq."

This ought to give them something interesting to talk about in Amman.

Diana McWhorter, writing in today’s Slate< discusses the comparisons no one is permitted to make: post-Weimar Germany and post-2001 United States.

The taboo is itself a precept of the propaganda state. Usually its enforcers profess a politically correct motive: the exceptionalism of genocidal Jewish victimhood. Thus, poor Sen. Richard Durbin, the Democrat from Illinois, found himself apologizing to the Anti-Defamation League after Republicans jumped all over him for invoking Nazi Germany to describe the conditions at Guantanamo. And so by allowing the issue to be defined by the unique suffering of the Jews, we ignore the Holocaust's more universal hallmark: the banal ordinariness of the citizens who perpetrated it. The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today's America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It's that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny.

Others have compared the steady erosion of civil liberties under Mr Bu$h’s rule to the theme of the frog in a pot of water that does not notice the flame until suddenly the boiling water kills it. Thus, we find ourselves in 2006 a nation debating just which sorts of torture are acceptable when interrogating people innocent of any crime. The word-masters have successfully shifted the topic from the pure evil of torture to one of degrees of bestiality. We discuss under which circumstances Mr Bu$h is allowed to violate the Constitution by authorizing the NSA to wiretap Americans without a court order rather than the evil criminality of the authorization itself. The point of Godwin’s Law is not that comparing Mr Bu$h to Adolph Hitler is beyond the pale. The real foundation is the discussion of the apparatchiki and bureaucrats who turn his sociopathic inclinations into laws, orders and policies. Documents recently surfaced that point to Mr Rumsfeld at the instigator of the torture policies in force at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but that is not accurate of course. At some point we will find documentation that he drew his authority from an approval by Mr Bu$h himself. This is undoubtedly as certain as green apples, Mom’s apron, and Lassie’s ability to find Timmy each week.

The most literal shock of recognition was the repulsively callous arrogance of the term "shock and awe." (The Iraqi people were supposed to pause and be impressed by our bombs before being incinerated/liberated by them?) Airstrikes as propaganda had been the invention of the German Luftwaffe, whose signature work, the terror-bombing Blitz of England, did not awe the British people into submission, either. Then there were subtler reverberations. When Bush's brain trust pushed through its executive-enhancing stratagems, I happened to be reading about brilliant German legal theoretician Carl Schmitt, who codified Hitler's führerprincip [sic] into law. (In the Balkans of cyberspace, I discovered, lurked an excellent article by Alan Wolfe detailing how Schmitt's theories also predicted the salt-the-ground political tactics of the Karl Rove conservatives.) When the administration established a class of nonpersons known as the "unlawful enemy combatant," I flashed on how the Nazis legalized their treatment of the Jews simply by rendering them stateless. And then in 2004, the Republicans threatened to override Senate rules and abolish the filibuster in order to thwart the Democrats' stand against Bush's most extremist nominees for federal judgeships. This "nuclear option" (so named by Trent Lott in acknowledgment of his party's willingness to destroy the Congress in order to save the country) struck me as a functional analog of the Enabling Act of 1933, which consolidated the German government under Chancellor Hitler and effectively dissolved the Reichstag as a parliamentary body.

We had a little fun with the Fuehrerprinzip issue here, when we discussed the turning away from the Dark Force by MG Paul Eaton (ret). It drew an interesting comment from a concern troll who seemed to argue that because Iraq didn’t immediately turn into a G-rated version of Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi’s Perfumed Garden under General Eaton’s stewardship, his criticism of Mr Bu$h’s most excellent Iraq adventure is obviously flawed.

A quick note to concern trolls: It is not necessary to mirror something in order to mimic it. The fact that we have no Hitlerjugend nor Reicharbeitsdienst does not invalidate the comparison.

There’s lots more good comparisons in Ms McWhorter’s essay and a relaxed reading will hammer home the point that Godwin’s Law is sometimes not an issue.

This sweet little bit is lifted in its entirety from Tom Tomorrow's Modern World:

Anyone who’s spent any time reading right wing blogs already understood this to be true:

Lohse, a social work master’s student at Southern Connecticut State University, says he has proven what many progressives have probably suspected for years: a direct link between mental illness and support for President Bush.

Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.

But before you go thinking all your conservative friends are psychotic, listen to Lohse’s explanation.

“Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,” Lohse says. “If your world is very mixed up, there’s something very comforting about someone telling you, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’”

The study was an advocacy project of sorts, designed to register mentally ill voters and encourage them to go to the polls, Lohse explains. The Bush trend was revealed later on.

The study used Modified General Assessment Functioning, or MGAF, a 100-point scale that measures the functioning of disabled patients. A second scale, developed by Rakfeldt, was also used. Knowledge of current issues, government and politics were assessed on a 12-item scale devised by the study authors.

“Bush supporters had significantly less knowledge about current issues, government and politics than those who supported Kerry,” the study says.

If there are no questions, class is dismissed for the day.

A certain segment of our political discourse – the Likudnik operatives inside our government and those who advise and support them from organizations like AIPAC, JINSA, CSIS, AEI, Heritage, Weekly Standard, National Review – are determined to prove they were right all along about Iraq by getting us involved in a war with Iran.

It’s hard to explain why this is happening. A visitor from another planet would scratch his head in wonder (assuming they had heads.) One of the primary rules of warfare is to never reinforce failure. Yet, here we are, paying serious attention to these unserious men whose ridiculous advice and ideological loyalty to another country and got us stuck in this swamp, surrounded by alligators.

The rules of war were actually established by the historical character known as Sun Tzu in the 2nd century B.C. His work The Art of War is considered so basic and revelatory that it is required reading at most military training schools, and enjoyed a period of hipness in the business world after the Japanese business model swamped the US automotive industry in the 1970s and 1980s. But Sun Tzu seems to no longer be relevant in the Age of Bu$h.

Thus we find the Bu$h malAdministration, which will certainly someday be held up as an example of incompetent and blindly self-serving government, going around the Middle East once again trying to enlist others to get the country separated from the tar baby of Iraq. James Baker and his associates in the Iraq Study Group2 have been traveling around the Middle East, trying to find a face-saving method of extricating what’s left of our army before it falls apart from exhaustion. (Iraq Study Group1 was Mr Cheney’s group of elves charged with inventing excuses to justify attacking Iraq.)

Despite the ideological protests of the always-wrong neocons, Mr Baker has even been in discussions with Syria and Iran. Since Iran is in fact a regional power it’s confusing why they should not be talked with. A cynical man would wonder whether the issue at hand is something that happened 27 years ago or Israel’s aspirations of regional dominance.

Dick “dick” Cheney has been in Saudi Arabia trying to get them to invest some of their oil billions in paying for Iraq reconstruction, since we let HalliCheneyBurton take all of our money while painting those three schools and giving tainted food and water to our troops.

Meanwhile Mr Bu$h has been busy visiting the Baltic, making happy speeches about emerging democracies, apparently in the vague hope that people will confuse this talk with what his ego has fostered in Iraq. There has been talk in the last week that NATO is losing control of Afghanistan, and another of My Bu$h’s talking points is that members must invest more money and troops to regain the initiative there. Oddly enough our NATO allies, who were steadfastly devoted to our cause in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, are somewhat leery now, in the aftermath of Iraq.

RIGA (Reuters) - President Bush appealed to NATO allies on Tuesday to provide more troops with fewer national restrictions for the alliance's most dangerous mission in Afghanistan, hours before a summit of allied leaders.

"To succeed in Afghanistan, NATO allies must provide the forces NATO military commanders require," Bush told a joint news conference with Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves in Tallinn on his way to the NATO meeting in neighboring Latvia.

"Like Estonia, member nations must accept difficult assignments if we expect to be successful," he said in a veiled reference to numerous so-called national caveats that restrict where, when and how allies' troops can be used.

It would be a great tragedy for the world if the important mission in Afghanistan was lost because of the catastrophe of Mr Bu$h’s ego-war in Iraq. Somehow, it will end up being Speaker Pelosi’s fault.

George W Bu$h is scheduled to leave our White House on January 20th, 2009. and his corrupt, criminal malAdministration is expected to rapidly change, as is normal in our country with new administrations. If the elections were held tomorrow, we’d be seating a Democratic President, and hopefully an even larger Democratic majority in Congress so that we can begin the decades-long repair of what was once the most-respected nation in the world.

Josh Marshall had a thought-provoking post yesterday that should be considered with more than a grain of salt.

Is it just me or has George W. Bush checked out of the stumbling national crisis we know as 'Iraq'?

I know his name shows up in the headlines. He's meeting Iraq Prime Minister Maliki next week in Amman. Vice President Cheney is shuttling to Saudi Arabia. And all of this is being billed as a part of a new and broader 'regional' approach to getting the conflict under some measure of control.

But I don't hear the president. Not his voice. The one thing that's been a constant over the last three and a half years is the president as the voice of American Iraq policy. Whether he's the author of it is another question entirely. But the voice and pitbull of it, always.

And yet since the election he seems to have disappeared from the conversation entirely. Like he's just checked out. It's not his thing anymore.

There’s more in the post and you’d be wise to read and digest all of it. It paints the picture of a very disengaged executive. Proxies are meeting with regional allies like the Saudis, Persians and Syrians to try to get us some slack, or for someone else to pick up part of the enormous tab of the war to placate his ego. And this would be part and parcel of his track record; he starts something up, breaks it, and lets others clean up his mess.

It’s true that after the November elections he presented a facade of bluster and confidence, mouthing platitudes about ‘bipartisanship’ and vowing to press hard to ‘reform’ Social Security, because that’s about the only public money left that he hasn’t pissed away on his ego habit and fattening his crony campaign donors. He then immediately demonstrated that his definition of ‘bipartisanship’ hasn’t changed, renominating John Bolton as UN Ambassador and
some fairly Neanderthal judges to the Federal bench.

But that Social Security theft was DOA last year, and now he’s facing a Democratic majority in both houses, ones we would hope have learned that spine on Capitol Hill is rewarded by votes in the hustings.

The word that struck me reading the piece was “quitter.”

Steve Gilliard comments on the Marshall post:

He's gonna bail.

Mr Bu$h won’t of course even though that’s what could be expected, considering his past history. For one thing Mr Cheney won’t allow him to. Some say Mr Cheney is the personification of all that is evil in the world now that Communism has been pretty well stomped. Others liken him to the Anti-Christ, but that’s missing the key point that for all his blind devotion to corporate greed and self-enrichment he is a smart political operator in the back room sense. He’s not a good public person other than before tame audiences, and he certainly hasn’t the inner qualities to try to face the nation. If he became President, it’s pretty certain there would be a strong surge in public opinion for impeachment.

Barring a pre-arranged pardon to facilitate legal immunity, (such as happened with Richard Nixon) both Mr Bu$h and Mr Cheney will be with us until January, 2009. One reason for this lies in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which provides the legal immunity that the Bu$h people have sought since before the invasion of Iraq. They cloaked the tactic as protecting the uniformed troops from legal consequences in foreign jurisdictions, including the International Criminal Court, but considering the way these people have maltreated our uniformed troops over the last five years does anyone buy that?

The Military Commissions Act is most certainly unconstitutional, and this post is not the place to discuss that. Go put that act’s title in your browser and you’ll find a wealth of discussion about it from learned legal scholars.

If the Military Commissions Act is shot down in courts, then Messers Bu$h, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al, must work diligently to arrange their last-minute pardons from their successors. Failing to do this will lead to events that will tear this country apart, because even after all that has transpired, there is still about 30% of the nation that is just too stupid, or too ideologically hypnotized, to see the damage in this nation, and the rest of the world.

Today’s NY Times has a report about “insurgent” financing in Iraq that is difficult to parse, yet rather dark and melancholy in its tone. It says the “insurgency” is doing just fine, thank you.

The very first thing to note is that this report is classified “Secret – NoForn” and was made available to The Times by the usual unnamed Government sources, so we shouldn’t hear any screams of outrage from the VRWC about revealing secrets. Perhaps those sources really believe foreigners don’t read the US papers?

While such data may have been omitted to protect the group’s clandestine sources and methods — the document has a bold heading on the front page saying “secret” and a warning that it is not to be shared with foreign governments — several security and intelligence consultants said in telephone interviews that the vagueness of the estimates reflected how little American intelligence agencies knew about the opaque and complex world of Iraq’s militant groups.

When analyzing any such “Government” report there are three things to look for: what the report says, what agency produced the report, and who (or which faction) within that agency produced the report. Establishing these three criteria usually tell a reader what the report is aimed at.

Completed in June, the report was compiled by an interagency working group investigating the financing of militant groups in Iraq.

A Bush administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the group’s existence. He said it was led by Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, and was made up of about a dozen people, drawn from the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Treasury Department and the United States Central Command.

Any reader experienced in the ins and outs of the Bu$h malAdministration should ask for the provenance of these people. It’s wise to understand that in the past reports from Bu$hCo have tended to be self-serving and not designed to further the knowledge of the general public. Were the members drawn from the CIA, DIA, and State career professionals or political appointees installed during the purges conducted under the auspices of Messers Goss, Rumsfeld and Ms Rice?

BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 — The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says $25 million to $100 million of that comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry, aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials.

Oil smuggling is of course a key element in this report because oil is The Prize in Iraq as Mr Bu$h recently stated inadvertently. Oil production in Iraq is sketchy at best and in fact Iraq seems to import more oil than it exports, although some of this may simply be facilitation of Bu$hCo political campaign donors. Since for the first year or more oil exported successfully from Iraq was not metered, it’s difficult to determine just how much oil was going out, where it was going to, and who made money from it, but it’s a safe guess that the hands controlling the flow didn’t suffer too much. And, of course, oil production in Iraq hasn’t been to reliable since blowing up pipelines is a important part of “insurgency.” And let’s also remember that Executive Order 13303 pretty well set the gate for Iraq’s oil: the sky’s the limit and there are no controls.

The document tracing the money flows acknowledges that investigators have had limited success in penetrating or choking off terrorist financing networks. The report says American efforts to follow the financing trails have been hamstrung by several factors. They include a weak Iraqi government and its nascent intelligence agencies; a lack of communication between American agencies, and between the Americans and the Iraqis; and the nature of the insurgent economy itself, primarily sustained by couriers carrying cash rather than more easily traceable means involving banks and the hawala money transfer networks traditional in the Middle East.

COL W. Pat Lang, a retired US Army specialist in Middle Eastern affairs commented on this report:

They’re just guessing…“They really have no idea.” He added, “They’ve been very unsuccessful in penetrating these organizations.” He said he was equally skeptical about the report’s assertion that the insurgent and militant groups may have surpluses to finance terrorism outside Iraq. “That’s another guess,” he said.

“A judgment like that, coming from an N.S.C.-generated document,” he said, is not an analytical assessment as much as it is a political statement to support the administration’s contention that Iraq is a central front in the war on terrorism. “It’s a statement put in there to support a policy judgment,” he said.

The report is primarily about financing and makes some fairly remarkable and completely unsubstantiated claims, among them the fact that the “insurgency” is making much more from criminal activities than it needs to sustain itself, and the supposition is that they are exporting money to other countries to sustain other groups, or to foster new enterprises. If Bu$hCo really believes this, they’re admitting that they have been fought to a standstill in Iraq, and are in fact beaten. The premise implies the “insurgents” don’t need to spend all their funds domestically. Time to quit, Mr Bu$h.

Lawrence O’Donnell wrote an opinion piece in the Huffington Post in which he castigated our neocon and Likudnik empty heads who appear on various TV shows and endlessly advocate not only the failed war in Iraq, but in fact urge for a regional widening of the war by attacking Iran. In a round about way he feels that if you aren’t a military veteran, don’t have a relative in the war in Iraq, and don’t intend to personally participate in horrendously expensive wars that violate many international laws and treaties perhaps you ought to modulate your stridency.

Well over 95% of Americans, including Congress and White House staff, have no personal connection to this war--no relative or friend serving in Iraq. Over 99% of us have made no sacrifice for this war--we have not paid one more penny of taxes nor shed a drop of family blood. One of my military relatives thinks of it this way: "The American military is at war, but America is not at war."

Advocating war is easier when you and your family are not endangered by it. I've reached a Rangel-like breaking point with my TV pundit colleagues who championed the Iraq war and now say we can't leave even if we went there for the wrong reasons. For every one of them, I have a simple question: Why aren't you in Iraq? Or why did you avoid combat in your generation's war? The one unifying characteristic that all of us men in make-up on political chat shows share is fear of combat. Every one of us has done everything we can to avoid combat or even being fitted for a military uniform. Just like George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Dick Cheney, we are all combat cowards. It takes a very special kind of combat coward to advocate combat for others. It's the kind of thing that can get you as angry as Charlie Rangel.

This brought a great deal of discussion around the internet, especially among the wrongwing blogotariat, who deeply resent being called out as cowards, especially when everyone knows they are fighting the war of ideas against IslamoMexicoFascism, and are contributing mightily now. (“Mom! Fix Stove Top stuffing with dinner, OK?”)

In response, Kevin Drum posted an article in the Washington Monthly the next day in which he opines on the O’Donnell op-ed:

Regular readers know that I agree wholeheartedly with him that it's time to get out of Iraq. But this attitude is still pernicious. When nations decide whether to go to war — or whether to continue an existing war — everyone in a democracy is entitled to a view and everyone is entitled to be taken seriously. But if non-veterans, by virtue of having never served, are denied the moral authority to advocate in favor of war, their views will quite rightfully be entirely marginalized. After all, why should anyone care what they think if, as O'Donnell suggests, their non-serving status predetermines their only honorable opinion?

I'm not willing to leave decisions on the use of military force solely to combat veterans, but that's where this sentiment leads us. It leads to a place where military veterans are put on a pedestal and anyone who hasn't served is ipso facto less qualified to hold an opinion on isssues [sic] of war and peace than someone who has. Let's not go there.

It’s a fair point, and one that should be considered, given full weight, because of Mr Drum’s other sensible and thoughtful opinions.

I don’t see O’Donnell’s opinion as giving preference to allowing our foreign policy to be dominated only by military veterans. To establish such a precedent would be anathema to the very foundations of our Democracy. This is not Sparta, was not established as such, and such a view is directly counter to what the Founders intended. Living in an age of standing armies considered as the personal property of kings and used as internal police forces as well as instruments of state policy, they clearly identified the pernicious nature of such a force. They chose instead to plan a country defended by a citizen militia, wherein those who voted and had a say in the practical governance of their nation served to defend it.

In the world we live in today, such a force is impractical for primary military defense, and America has had to modify this concept so that the citizen-soldier provides the second line of defense.

Yet this still does not answer the problem poised by O’Donell’s op-ed, which is that we’re not faced with veterans advocating war in Iraq, Afghanistan and (suddenly) Iran. We are involved in two foreign wars of choice, one likely justified as a counterattack demanded by the brutality of September 11th, and the other a war of choice brought on by the demands of Mr Bu$h’s ego and the desire of Mr Cheney’s business friends and cronies to control all the oil in the Mid East.

Much has been written over the years about the peculiarities of Mr Bu$h’s ego and personal insecurities, so there’s no need to rehash the subject. And while it might be a good thing for America’s future welfare to have free and easy access to foreign oil there is less of an argument to support killing people in aggressive wars in order to maintain the exorbitant and obscene profits of Big Oil.

As Tristero points out at digby’s blog,

I don't object in general to people who advocate war who haven't served. I object to the specific situation we have in regards to Bush/Iraq. I strongly object to the chickenhawks for their warped attitude in regards to this particular war. It is not merely that they are advocating war without having suffered the consequences. It is their loopy, ungrounded-in-reality enthusiasm for this war that I find revolting, an attitude that minimizes war's horrors rather than focusing on them, as any responsible person would.

Chickenhawks rarely if ever try to make the case that as awful as the sufferings of war are for everyone involved, reluctantly, this war is necessary. That is because there simply is no case to be made, never has been. Instead the chickenhawks are happy to go to war; rather than acknowledge that sometimes war is a solemn, unavoidable obligation, we hear about Grand Global Strategies or that Saddam was working with al Qaeda, or war is some kind of of post 9/11 therapy.

What is key in this argument is that when Likudnik agents like Kristol, Kagan, Feith, Podhoretz, Malkin, Coulter, Wolfowitz, Perle, Hadley Adelman, Bolton and others demand preemptive war in the Middle East they are not primarily serving US interests, but those of another nation. And while that nation is more or less an ally, their interests are not always in agreement with ours. Going to war in service to another country is a decision that should be made by those who have fought, bled, held a dying friend, or who have suffered the loss of a loved one in war, and not by people whose ideology places America second.

The NY Times yesterday:

BAGHDAD, Nov. 21 — A bomb exploded in an armored car among those belonging to the speaker of Parliament, wounding the American security guard who was driving it out of a parking area in the government Green Zone and disrupting a meeting of lawmakers nearby, a parliamentary aide said.

Though the speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, was not in the vehicle and was unscathed, the assassination attempt was one of the most serious breaches of security yet within the Green Zone, the heavily fortified government district on the west bank of the Tigris River.

The bomb, which exploded in midafternoon, was planted inside an armored car that resembled the one the speaker uses and was usually used as a decoy car in his convoy, said the parliamentary aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the attack.

Only part of the bomb exploded, the aide said. A police official said investigators believe that the bomb was planted inside the Green Zone and detonated by cellphone. [emph added]

Juan Cole shares a private letter from a friend:

Another friend, a Sunni sheikh of the Shammar tribe noted to me that thousands of former officers are prepared to assault the G[reen] Z[one]. It is no longer a matter of can they do it, they are only mulling over the timing. The breach of the Green Zone security the other day was a test of their ability to get in, and not a real attempt at a coup, though it is reported as such. Every Iraqi I talk to says unambiguously that the resistance attached to the former regime would take out the Shiite militias with barely a fight, but that the resistance will not commit wholesale revenge against the Shiite population. They just want to get rid of the "carpet baggers" from Iran.

Sneaking a bomb into the Green Zone is probably a bit easier than assaulting the Zone with “thousands of former officers” but still, it might not be an impossible task if one is willing to accept massive casualties. An attack like this would be reported, and commented upon adversely by all the empty heads in the electronic news. It should also not be lost that a secondary objective is freeing Iraq from the American “carpet baggers.”

Don’t view this as a massive breach of the concrete blast walls of the Zone and then a wholesale massacre of dozens or hundreds of Americans and Iraqis inside. (If you want to see what the walls look like go view the video program we mentioned here.) It could very well be a situation similar to Tet 1968, where the actual death and physical damage was out of all proportion to the catastrophic impact of the actual attacks. Although fighting in Hue continued for a month after the onset of the attacks, the world was transfixed by the image of VC occupying part of the US Embassy. The fact that the building they occupied was insignificant in the actual operation of the Embassy was lost amid the shock of the action itself. There are some analysts who date the ”loss” of Viet Nam to the Tet offensive.

Atrios and Glenn Greenwald make a number of key connections in considering the upswing to our recent mid-term elections. As we said here Bu$hCo will say anything for political effect, regardless of the transparency of the lie.

It is true. They lie, and they lie about things which should cause revulsion in decent people. They lie and people die, and St. McCain and the Last Honest Man and the rest of the Wise Old Men of Washington somehow manage to make it out of bed each day. I don't know what's wrong with their brains, but they don't seem to work as they should.

Everything they accuse others of doing -- exploiting national security for domestic political gain, being 'unserious' about war matters, playing games with the mission of the troops -- is what they do as transparently as possible. And note how they used a senior military official to make the disgusting claim that the violence in Iraq was related to a desire to help Democrats win the midterm election: "A U.S. military spokesman in Iraq last week attributed the increase in violence at least partly to terrorists who want to influence the American vote."

The idea that the sectarian violence in Iraq, which has been spiraling out of control since the beginning of the year, had anything to do with trying to make Democrats win the election was always as transparently false -- stupid even -- as it was repugnant. Yet they say anything, and the media largely lets them get away with it.

Today’s NY Times:

In the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the American-led invasion, explosions from five powerful car bombs and a mortar shell tore through crowded intersections and marketplaces in the teeming Shiite district of Sadr City on Thursday afternoon, killing at least 144 people and wounding 206, the police said. . . .The attacks were the worst in an intensifying series of revenge killings in recent months, in a cycle that has increasingly paralyzed the political process and segregated the capital into Sunni and Shiite enclaves, and threatened to drag Iraq into an all-out civil war.

Not that we can expect the media to actually confront anyone from the Bu$h malAdministration over these blatant lies, but if they did, I expect the response would be something along the lines of “They obviously know so little about true Democracy that they thought the winners would be seated the day after the elections.”

Because today’s lies don’t really have to logically connect with yesterday’s lies.

But there probably was a connection, because the Democrats plan a long hard series of examinations of all the stupidity, carelessness, and pure bloodymindedness of Bu$hCo.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 — Seeking information about detention of terrorism suspects, abuse of detainees and government secrecy, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are reviving dozens of demands for classified documents that until now have been rebuffed or ignored by the Justice Department and other agencies.

“I expect real answers, or we’ll have testimony under oath until we get them,” Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, who will head the committee beginning in January, said in an interview this week. “We’re entitled to know these answers, and in many instances we don’t get them because people are hiding their mistakes. And that’s no excuse.”

Mr. Leahy, who has said little about his plans for the committee, expressed hope for greater cooperation from the Bush administration, which he described as having been “obsessively secretive.” His aides have identified more than 65 requests he has made to the Justice Department or other agencies in recent years that have been rejected or permitted to languish without reply.

Klondike, a diarist at Daily Kos, discusses the “Southern White Guy” phenomenon, which is a way of thinking that precedes the Southern Strategy that Lee Atwater devised for Richard Nixon. His emphasis is on the fact that it’s a mindset, not a geographic identifier, and Southern White Guys can be found in the North. (Probably just about everywhere Fox News is king.)

1. Civil rights are rights, not possessions lent by a benevolent majority to deserving minorities.
2. There are amendments other than the second. They all get the same respect. In the Army they say "we salute the rank, not the man". Well in a constitutional democracy, citizens honor The Law, not the particular statute.
3. We don't all agree on religion and we never will, and because of that it must be kept separate from the one thing that we must work together on - our government.
4. Recognizing that we don't all agree on religion, we can not use the common resources to advance the special interests of any one religion for its own sake at home or abroad. Supporting any of them leads inevitably to childish fighting about fairness and is A Bad Idea.
5. Piety is no more of a qualification for public office than table manners, good grooming or a deep interest in movie trivia.
6. Science is a way of figuring out how the physical world works. It operates according to well accepted principles, and we argue with it on its terms. If your religion conflicts with science, then for the purposes of public policy, your religion is wrong. You are free to disbelieve science in the privacy of your own home.
7. Money doesn't grow on trees, and this principle applies whether you use the money to buy big screen TV for death row prisoners or a really, really, really smart bomb to drop on a mud hut in Anbar province.
8. Our current level and structure of fossil fuel consumption is not working out for us or for anyone else on the planet and must be changed.
9. The military is useful for one thing - protecting us from other countries that have attacked us, or are about to attack us. Everything else in international affairs is the province of diplomats.
10. "Kicking ass" is a tactic, not a strategy. If kicking ass is your strategy then you don't have a strategy and you need to cede control of strategy to someone who has one.
11. The international community is not a bunch of thugs, barbarians and pansies, but groups of people with different interests than ours. We will get the international community we deserve - treat it with contempt and it will act contemptibly.
12. We are a nation of 300 million on a planet of 6 billion. Right now, we're on top, but some day we won't be, and on that day every shitty thing we did when we were on top will come back to haunt us.

Klondike considers Southern White Guy’s view of these principles and sees a major difference:

1. Civil rights are a code phrase for infringing on the natural rights of white people.
2. The right of armed self defense is the basic liberty. All others flow from it.
3. The United States is a Christian nation.
4. The government of a Christian nation should be propounding Christian virtues at home and abroad.
5. Public piety is an indicator of moral fiber and a prerequisite for holding public office.
6. Science is a law of the physical world, but the law of God supercedes it.
7. Tax cuts generate revenue.
8. There's enough oil to last forever.
9. Our country is the best, and our military is the best. No one can beat us, so there's no point considering alternatives - if we set our military to it, it will happen. If our military fails it's undoubtedly domestic betrayal, not inherent weakness or bad policy that caused it.
10. "Kicking ass" is often the simplest way to ensure the national interest is served.
11. Most other countries are primitive failures or decadent has-beens that are based on the wrong religion, jealous of our success, have no interests in common with us, and no perspective worth considering. Most foreigners are going to hell.
12. The United States is the only superpower because God has decreed it and we will stay that way as long as we are more righteous than other nations.

The differences between these two views of life are cultural and nothing less than a cataclysmic event will change the Southern White Guy’s view in a hurry. He also considers it a waste of time for Progressives to court that voting bloc.

The Democratic Party is committed to Governor Dean’s “50 state” strategy, and it’s a prudent policy to follow, as we have seen in the most recent elections since that policy paid us huge dividends not envisioned by the DLC politicians like Rahm Emanuel and James Carville. The US won’t survive as a viable political entity long enough for a strategy of picking off a vulnerable seat here and there to pay off. If we want to take back our country and once again live in a Democracy we must resist the attraction of being “Republican Lite” and speak up for what we hold to be true and meaningful. The vast undecided center voted for Democrats out of revulsion over Republican rule. It is up to us to now show them why we rule better, to keep them votig for Progress.

While the comparisons are humorous and mostly on point, we have to work to prove that our system is better and trust to our hard work to slowly change that troglodytic culture of the Southern White Guy. We have to make those comparisons a snapshot in time and not an ongoing cultural fact.

We’ve said it before: George Bu$h lies. He lies on a daily basis. He lies to hide things: his real agenda; why he chose to invade Iraq; what’s really happening in Iraq; what’s really happening in America, and to America; why he wiretaps all Americans, with special emphasis on what we laughingly refer to in this country as “journalists” and of course Democratic Senators and Congressmen and by extension Democratic, Liberal, and Progressive Americans who speak out publicly about the evil in Bu$hCo.

Some say George Bu$h is incapable of speaking the truth.

Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation, explores this phenomenon of George Bu$h’s unwillingness, or maybe inability, to ever speak the truth, and the inability of the media to call ‘bullshit’.

Once upon a time, only people with bad manners took note of the fact that George W. Bush was an inveterate liar. One such person, pundit Michael Kinsley, observed back in April 2002, "Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother." Back then it was undeniable but all but unsayable in the mainstream media. Even when addressing himself to the very topic of Bush's myriad lies six months later, Washington Post scribe Dana Milbank combed his thesaurus and came up with "embroidering," "taken some flights of fancy," "taken some liberties," "omitted qualifiers," etc. But even this artful linguistic circumlocution so infuriated Karl Rove & Co. that the White House pressured the Post to reassign the reporter. When asked to comment on an incontrovertible, unarguable, prime-time presidential lie--Bush publicly claimed that Iraq would not allow inspections, when in fact the UN inspectors had to be kicked out for his war to begin--on CNN's Reliable Sources program, Milbank said, "I think what people basically decided was this is just the President being the President." What, after all, is the big deal about lying about why you started a war?

There’s much more to read, and it’s well worth taking a gander at one of the more honest and outraged minds in the country today.

Reading the Washington Post used to be like reading the Wall Street Journal. News articles reflected the truth about what was happening in the world while the Editorial pages spewed propaganda, often quite obviously fraudulent, supporting the Republican Party and Facsist thinking about how they plan to drag the country into something not-at-all resembling what the Founding Fathers had originally intended. Slowly whether by ideological design, or through outright economic treat, WaPo’s writers and reporters are buckling under to the demands of fakery and pretense issued by our White House.

We noted it here and the situation certainly hasn’t gotten better.

Via The Agonist we’re directed to a British TV news show telling the truth about the carnage of Mr Bu$h’s personal war of ego. It’s a long show – about 48 minutes – and it’s reality. It’s not mean to be seen immediately before or after dinner.

The film makes some excellent points about the joke that American television “journalism” has become. American (and British) television display video clips filed by Iraqi cameramen and reporters, if they are shown at all. The important point on American television is not the content, but the commercials, of course, and more and more, news from Iraq is also a commercial, played for the benefit of the client, Mr Bu$h’s government. Commercials are paid for, and in this case the payment is a much-desired loosening of rules governing how much our already dangerously-concentrated electronic media can further concentrate and expand their profits.

You can view the entire program here.

There’s been much discussion the past few weeks about the tar baby of Iraq, and how to get loose. Those of us on the left, who live in the world of reality, have been observing for well over two years that Mr Bu$h’s personal war of choice is a disaster, and heading towards catastrophe. The neocons, faithful adherents to the Likudnik dream of an imperial Israel joined geographically with the first US overseas dependency in half a century, have maintained a strong steady insistent drumbeat of full speed ahead. This despite the rapidly approaching rocks and shoals. And of course, this approach has great appeal for Mr Bu$h, who has spent a sheltered, shallow life and never had to actually own up for his many failures in life.

The view is so bad that even the most egregious Likudniks and warmongers are abandoning the failed Bu$h malAdministration. As digby points out David Frum, Michael Rubin and Ken Adelman have left the sinking SS Bu$hCo, disgusted that no one followed their most excellent plan, and see what you get when you don’t listen to the self-appointed experts, Mr Bu$h? Frum even rewrites the old horse/water folk wisdom. Nowadays, according to him, if you can get a President to buy into speaking the lines you craft for him, he’ll generally buy into the philosophy behind the lines. A very sardonic line or two about what Mr Bu$h really believes in might be appropriate here, but I doubt Frum reads this blog.

William Kristol signed off on the monstrosity of Iraq two weeks ago. Not his fault, either. On to Iran! Just like Mr Bu$h thinks he can somehow put a better historical face on Viet Nam by sticking it out in Iraq, Kristol now thinks Iraq will fall into line after a little shock and awe all over Iran.

The latest preposterous notion from the White House is the “Go Long, Go Big, Go Home” debate. There is no real debate of course, since we can’t manage more than a very brief quick rush of more combat troops into Baghdad and then we’ll only have three wheels on our cart. This “debate” is really for home consumption, a new bright and shiny toy to hypnotize the childish playpen we call a media in this county.

What’s really happening is that Mr Baker, the Bu$h familty consigliere, has met several times with “Syrian officials” to discuss a regional approach to getting our hands loose from the tar baby so we can unass the country. And, fortunately, Syrian and Iraqi representatives are meeting, perhaps as early as this weekend, in Teheran to discuss options.

Naturally our nine year old is very much against the idea of the US dealing with two of the three members of the “axis of evil” but it just might be that he’s been assured there will still be statues of him after this is all over.

President Bush has refused to open high-level talks with Syria and Iran, countries he has accused of providing financing and weapons to militias in Iraq. But as his administration conducts a broad reassessment of its policy in Iraq, the president has come under increasing pressure to drop his opposition.

Lawrence Kaplan writes in the current New Republic Online:

Last month, at a grubby Italian restaurant near a military base in North Carolina, I had dinner with a senior Army officer I had met in Iraq. We drank, talked about the war, and, on the television above the bar, we watched the fall of Washington. The dueling commentators on the TV screen were saying that the upcoming elections would doom the U.S. enterprise in Iraq. They were sure of themselves: This was unquestionably a Tet moment. Or was it Waterloo? What they were bellowing about was my dinner companion's war--in which he'd presided over entire cities, commanded thousands of soldiers, and, too often, lifted their remains onto helicopters. But he seemed more intrigued by his shrimp scampi. "The place they're talking about," he explained between bites, "I don't even recognize it."

Knowing Mr Kaplan is a “Senior Editor” at TNR, one might make a calculated guess that his dinner companion is fairly well-placed; possibly a Colonel or lower-edge General. Although Mr Kaplan doesn’t mention it, Colonels and Generals happen to have different views of life as it is in a combat area than do corporals, sergeants, and lieutenants. While Mr Kaplan’s dinner companion has a world view of Iraq that is in the vein of a Dwight Eisenhower considering the Big Picture, his lower-ranking soldiers look at Iraq through the eyes of Bill Mauldin’s “Willie and Joe.” Colonel (or General) X is undoubtedly aware of schools painted, hospitals refurbished, college teachers happily plugging away, instructing their eager students about the wonderful mysteries of Freedom, Democracy, and Free Market economics, but I’ll bet he hasn’t lifted too many broken bodies onto helicopters because if he had, he’d have understood the reality of Iraq: it’s bad, getting worse and will soon reach you-ain’t-seen-nothing-yet

I knew what would come next, and it did: his charge that the press purposefully discounts the good news from Iraq. We argued the point, my impression being that, rather than bad news, a typical day relays hardly any news at all. Between segments about blood-pressure pills, the network newscasts offer brisk and requisite mention of the day's war dead. But the minutes they devote to the war each month amount to roughly half the coverage broadcast during Vietnam. Meanwhile, despite having generated essential and vivid war reporting, newspapers have been quietly scaling back or shuttering their Baghdad bureaus.

I wasn’t surprised to see the first, tentative mention of the Dolchstosslegende in Mr Kaplan’s column. It’s pretty well mandatory now as the Pentagon, and the US public in general, slowly realize they were sold a bill of goods by a bunch of cynical conscienceless snake oil salesmen much more interested in an agenda that listed the best interests of the US last. We’re going to see and hear much more of this. The first, and most obvious, target is the corporate press which has scaled back its commitment to Bu$hCo propaganda as it realizes that you can sell waving flags, clarion trumpets of glorious crusade and impending victory only until the butcher’s bill becomes due. There is limited profit in dreary daily recitations of IEDs, AK-47 attacks and heaps of tortured and beheaded corpses every morning. Baghdad bureaus? Very expensive – the shareholders’ needs are much greater than the general public’s. Embedded journalists? Unless they’re willing to tell the Bu$hCo story of continuous success they’re not welcome.

The moment one passes through Iraq's looking glass, all the predetermined conclusions, all the political certainties, all the things that Iraq has come to embody in the American imagination--all of them crumble away. They cannot withstand even the smallest details, which by themselves reveal the most telling truths: the difference between the Iraqi side of the Baghdad airport, which decays by the hour, and the American side, which operates with industrial efficiency; the small-arms fire of a few months earlier tapering off in one Iraqi town but picking up in another; the stench of burning trash and rubber that makes the country even smell like a car wreck. Bearded fanatics populate Iraq the abstraction, but Iraq the place consists mostly of terrified women and children. For the sake of American soldiers who know this, who speak with a sense of ownership about their war and see themselves as a progressive force on the Iraqi landscape--and who, according to surveys by the Military Times and the Pew Research Center, hold opinions on the war that run almost exactly counter to those registered at home--be grateful that the machinery of war overwhelms the din from Washington.

There is no question that many of the troops have a strong sense of purpose over there. They have seen the Iraqis in their native environment and learned they are not all bearded, turbaned baby-rapers eager to sneak under your bed and slide out in the middle of the night to behead you. Many are just men and women with children like Uncle Matt and Aunt Susie, who want desperately to just live. And the troops most likely see these people beset by a cruel and deadly civil war, and feel resentment.

In a combat environment most people do not think clearly about great philosophical concepts. Daily life is consumed by survival. But at some point you can stand down, put aside the daily fear of death and maiming, and put your psyche back together. You start to think about what you saw, what you did, what was done to you. And the anger builds.

The observation that American soldiers inhabit a different world from the Iraqis around them has become a numbing cliché, but it is their remove from their own society that ought to unnerve us. Not so much the demographic lottery that plants one 20-year-old in an infantry platoon and another in a Washington internship--the more striking divide is one of ethos and temperament. In Iraq, the U.S. mission requires sacrifice and killing. At home, the U.S. mission requires easy certainties and narrative simplicity. The dissonance makes it nearly impossible to convey one to the other.

There’s going to be an accounting in the future, and somehow I’m not sure this generation will be as quiet and complacent as the Viet Nam generation.

Faithfully copied from the BTC News:

From the Department of Oh Lord We’re Screwed comes news that Europeans think the US wants to start a civil war in Palestine.

AMERICAN proposals to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian security forces with additional guns and fighters have alarmed other Western nations, who argue that it is tantamount to supporting one faction in a potential civil war.

Seems like a good argument those Europeans have, but what do they know? They didn’t want us to invade Iraq either and don’t they have egg on their smug continental faces now.

Nicely put. Weldon has a touch sometimes.

Bonus quote for extra points:

No chance that could backfire, is there? The Bush administration are like sophisticated homing pigeons, trained not just to return to the same bad ideas over and over again but to seek out and roost on new bad ideas wherever they’re to be found. Let’s autopsy them now, find the problem and vaccinate the next generation against it.

A very wise observation. With this move, the Bu$h malAdministration opens yet another civil war on Israel’s borders, giving them another flash point to pour gasoline on with their policy of indiscriminate bombing of civilian Arab populations.

Representative Charles Rangel, appearing today on the CBS News program Face The Nation, announced that he will quickly present a bill to resurrect the draft.

At a time when some lawmakers are urging the military to send more troops to Iraq, "I don't see how anyone can support the war and not support the draft," he told Bob Schieffer.

It has been well-documented that such outstanding military experts as Vice President Dick “dick” Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Senator John McCain, Senator Joe Lieberman, William Kristol, writer and publisher of the Weekly Standard, foreign policy experts like Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Richard Amitage, Doug Feith, Steven Hadley, David Horowitz, James Dobson of the American Family Institute, and various sages and wise men from the Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, among others, have long felt that the plan to invade and conquer Iraq as America’s first overseas colony since 1946 was perfect and would have succeeded if only we had more troops.

The draft plan as envisioned by Congressman Rangel hasn’t been made public yet, but we are pleased to announce that here at Main and Central we have had a hand in working on it. The plan, which will be introduced in January, will mandate some form of Federal service for each and every high school student upon graduation. They will be able to serve their nation, gain some self-pride, and then go on to college.

Everyone goes, unless they are so unfit (e.g. blind, wheelchair, etc) that they would be of no help whatsoever in securing Iraq. The added combat experience of those proud and seasoned warriors will make our economy stronger upon their return from their two year service bringing Democracy and Freedom to the Iraqis and Afghanis. They will be better citizens, more conscious of their abilities and skills, and make a great contribution to our county’s future.

Those deemed not quite fit enough to serve in the arduous and dangerous combat of Iraq and Afghanistan (and coming soon, to a location near you, Iran and Syria) will be able to serve their nation by guarding our precious and sacred national borders for three years. The plan envisions a series of outposts every 60 yards along the entire length, each watchtower equipped with a table, two chairs, two liters of water (sufficient for each eight hour tour) and two radios (one for a backup in case the primary fails.) No more illegal alien infiltration of our borders, which will bring a tremendous relief to our overworked hospitals, schools and other public infrastructure. Standby ready reaction force barracks, stationed every 15 miles or so can be built to house our border guards when they are not on tower duty. Until these towers are built, we can post these border guards under canvas tops, and use card tables and folding chairs as a stop-gap measure.

When John Kerry, who cannot tell a joke, tried to excoriate Mr Bu$h he was roundly reviled by the Republican Party for defaming the US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Claiming that he mocked them for their poor educational skills, he became the laughingstock of every wrongwing blog and TV station in the country. This will give the Republican Party a perfect chance to further insult Senator Kerry, if they should wish to do so. After completion of their Federal service, each veteran will be able to go on to college with the benefits of the Montgomery GI Bill. Thus, Federal service will become a great leveler, treating every trooper as equal, with no chance for complaint that some are as dumb as posts. We will have a nation of combat veterans, college educated, a definite plus for our future.

We have seen a constant series of critical moments in our combat and occupation of Iraq. Invariably these moments have hinged upon a lack of troops. By implementing Congressman Rangel’s plan we will solve the manpower problem once and for all, as soon as the first group of soldiers take up their duties in, say, November 2007.

Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman should be the first to stand behind this measure since they is on public record as advocating an additional 20,000 troops in Iraq. It has been said that one more Friedman Unit (F.U.) should see us through this mess. There has been a series of Friedman Units since this confident statement was first made, but with Congressman Rangel’s draft plan we will truly see some light at the end of the tunnel in another year – just two more F.U.s - when the first of a long line of new boots hits the ground in Iraq.

Yet another benefit of this plan is that it will finally start to heal the grievous breach in our political system. It is certain that the Republicans will join with the Democrats in backing this plan, and send a smoothly enacted bill to Mr Bu$h for his signature. After all, when the Democrats took majority positions in both houses of Congress Mr Bu$h stated that he looked forward to joining with the Democrats in a spirit of true bipartisanship, and this law will provide a perfect example of across-the-aisle unity.

Naysayers who might protest that this plan to snatch victory from defeat is unreasonable because of the costs just haven’t been paying attention. Over the last six years the Republican Party has pioneered new ground in the study of deficit spending, and it can be confidently stated that effects of this can be postponed for many years.

Mr Bu$h visited Viet Nam the other day as part of a photo op swing through Asia. Many of us have seen the ironic photo of Mr Bu$h and Nguyen Minh, the President of Viet Nam, with a huge bust of Grandfather Ho in the background. Today’s NY Times published a story about the trip that neatly and accurately contrasts the differences between the Bu$h and Clinton administrations.

HANOI, Vietnam, Sunday, Nov. 19 — President Bush likes speed golf and speed tourism — this is the man who did the treasures of Red Square in less than 20 minutes — but here in the lake-studded capital of a nation desperately eager to connect with America, he set a record.

On Saturday, Mr. Bush emerged from his hotel for only one nonofficial event, a 15-minute visit to the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command, which searches for the remains of the 1,800 Americans still listed as missing in the Vietnam War.

There were almost no Vietnamese present, just a series of tables displaying photographs of the group’s painstaking work, and helmets, shoes and replicas of bones recovered by the 425 members of the command. He asked a few questions and then sped off in his motorcade.

This key paragraph highlights the Bu$hCo attitude about service members. When they’re of no further use they’re of no interest.

On the other hand,

[T]he mood of this trip could not have been more different from the visit of another president, Bill Clinton, exactly six years ago this weekend, when he seemed to be everywhere.

In 2000, tens of thousands of Hanoi’s residents poured into the streets to witness the visit of the first American head of state since the end of the Vietnam War. Mr. Clinton toured the thousand-year-old Temple of Literature, grabbed lunch at a noodle shop, argued with Communist Party leaders about American imperialism and sifted the earth for the remains of a missing airman.

Mr. Clinton took the two sons of the missing airman, Lt. Col Lawrence G. Evert, to a rice paddy in Tien Chau, a tiny town 17 miles northeast of Hanoi. There, they searched for remnants of the colonel’s F-150D [sic] Thunderchief, which crashed during a bombing run in 1967. Scores of nearby villagers joined in the effort, and the soil gave up the airman’s bones.

Ever mindful of the need to always catapult the propaganda bullshit the America public,

Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, conceded that the president had not come into direct contact with ordinary [emp added] Vietnamese, but said that they connected anyway.

“If you’d been part of the president’s motorcade as we’ve shuttled back and forth,” he said, reporters would have seen that “the president has been doing a lot of waving and getting a lot of waving and smiles.”

He continued: “I think he’s gotten a real sense of the warmth of the Vietnamese people and their willingness to put a very difficult period for both the United States and Vietnam behind them.”

I’m sure the “ordinary” Vietnamese got exactly the correct opinion of a coddled, arrogant elitist who lives in his own special bubble of entitlement.

Mr. Bush…plans to highlight the new Vietnam on Sunday and Monday at its stock exchange in Ho Chi Minh City. Then he moves on to Indonesia for a few hours to meet “civic leaders,” something he did three years ago in a stopover in Bali.

Because dead American pilots are of no use, but a stock exchange is all about money, which is very important to Mr Bu$h.

Mr. Bush is not staying overnight in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, which Washington has portrayed as a critical test in the struggle to promote moderate, democratic Islamic states. The Secret Service said it was too dangerous, so he will spend the night in Hawaii.

I’m sure they consider attacks against the august personage much less likely in Hawaii.

Best part of the story is predictive:

[Viet Nam] is also a place that reminds visitors of who prevailed over the Americans. One building that Mr. Bush zipped past is the Military History Museum, which displays a giant sculpture made of the broken fuselages and wings of downed French and American aircraft. The place was close to empty when Mr. Bush and his colleagues were meeting, but had he stopped by he would have heard a pretty one-sided account of the December 1972 bombing of Hanoi, and seen photographs of a troubled President Lyndon Johnson.

Just down the road, a giant banner mixes old and new. “The Great Ho Chi Minh Is Still Alive in Our Modernizaton and Industrial Progress!” it proclaims of the man who proclaimed Vietnamese independence.

George Bu$h doesn’t want to see museums dedicated to the strength of will of a nation that beat the world’s most powerful military. He doesn’t want to be reminded that his dreams of overseas empire in the Middle East are crumbling to dust on the trash heap that used to be Iraq. He prefers his own fantasy world where he is the Great Warrior Leader, striding victoriously across the flight decks of aircraft carriers, his sock-inflated flight suit wobbling with the false manhood that he projects wherever he goes.

Fixer at Alternate Brain has a column this morning about torture, what it is, how it came to be, why it’s wrong, and why we shouldn’t be doing it. In a few words: It’s not the American Way.

Yet our national “leaders” seem to be gung-ho about the topic. They believe it’s just the ticket – the magic bullet that will bring victory in this war for oil in the Middle East, jazzed up as a war against terror.

On January 9th, 2002, Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and Special Counsel John J Delahunty wrote a memo to William J Haynes II, General Counsel to the Department of Defense in which they take the opinion that you can do just about anything to anyone at any time if you really, really, honest-to-god cross-my-fingers-and-hope-to-die believed (or thought you believed at the time) that they were Taliban or an “intertwined” part of al-Quaeda. They took this concept after some pretty fancy stepping through the Geneva Convention and associated US law.

Armed with this memo, the present Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer wrote a memo to Mr Bu$h, saying he thought torture is perfectly acceptable as a method of obtaining information. He wrote a memo on January 25th 2002 expressing the view of the Department of Justice that torture is an acceptable tool as long as you really really believe etc, etc, etc. In that memo he mentioned that he transmitted this opinion (apparently orally) to Mr Bu$h on January 18th. So the memo of the 25th is really just the paperwork memorializing the discussion and Mr Bu$h’s decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions. A cynical man would be suspicious enough to imagine a great big smile curling across the face of the 8 year old boy that liked to blow up frogs with firecrackers when he had that discussion.

Interestingly enough, the Gonzalez memo, which presented the State Department’s very cogent and humane arguments against torture, states that the US “military culture” is anti-torture. The cognitive disconnect is strong here. Why is the National Command Authority directing the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and hence the entire armed forces) to violate their own training and doctrine?

Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo on January 19th authorizing commanders to do whatever they want. This must have some as a bit of a surprise, considering the US Army’s training and regulations counseled that torture was a violation of international and US law.

All the memos can be read about here, and there are links to .pdf copies.

The wrongwing Commentariat has eagerly seized on this decision to torture people. When the first news broke about the evil of Abu Ghraib, that fat turd Rush Limbaugh likened it to “fraternity hazing.”

Having no real world experience about anything outside their own small, insular, coddled existence they seem to believe that loudly approving the decision to hurt others with pain “up to, but short of, organ failure” makes them real tough soldiers in the war for oil war against terror.

Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online’s resident intellectual and cultural expert, seems to think it’s OK because those horrible Hollywood liberals make movies and TV shows showing it. Nice bit of displacement there, Jonah. Hollywood is doing entertainment - fantasy. Your guys are doing reality. Please learn the difference. This belief brings up an interesting point: these wrongwingers, who’ve mostly spent their lives within an isolated subset of the American cultural experience, view the rest of us through a distorted lens. They don’t have to scramble to make a rent payment. Their weekly/daily bloviating provides a secure paycheck – no need to worry about being one or two checks away from economic catastrophe as long as they don’t stray from the reservation. This failure to perceive the true national zeitgeist is perfectly characterized by Laura Ingraham’s lunatic assertions that since a TV show, based solely on action./adventure designed to keep folks watching each week in order too see the commercials, is popular, it should become the authoritative basis for our foreign policy decisions.

These public expressions perfectly outline the division between them and us. Their goal is to convince us that the barbarity they idolize represents the mainstream of American culture and we are out of step. But 230 years of American history argues they are the outsiders.

When Secretary Rumsfeld resigned left to pursue new opportunities left to spend more time with his family got thrown under the bus by Mr Bu$h in an attempt to show the new, sketchily-thrown-together latest plan for victory in Iraq (cf: course, stay the) we noted on November 13th that his personal alibi DoD webpage which was set up to “correct the record” of all of his errors as they were confronted by the media, had not been updated in for days.

It has in fact now been updated, and in a desire to bring all the latest news, we’d like to present:

Number Confusion

Nov. 16, 2006 — This page is dedicated to correcting and clarifying errors of fact and perception about Department activities—which includes errors of our own.

We would therefore like to extend our appreciation to the Washington Post and particularly columnist Al Kamen for alerting us to an issue related to “Six Years of Accomplishments with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.”

In that compilation, which reflects on the Department’s accomplishments over the past six years, it is noted that the U.S. military has liberated 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. It then stated that 31 million Afghans and 27 million Iraqis were liberated. Adding those two numbers together yields 58 million.

This was obviously confusing. The original 50 million was based on approximate estimates of the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan at the time of their respective liberations. The latter numbers referred to estimates of those populations today.

The document has been updated to reflect this clarification.

So, let’s see how this goes. Liberated 50 million, killed – what? Half a million between Iraq and Afghanistan? That makes 49.5.

But the original estimates were 31 Million Afghanis and 27 million Iraqis, which is 58 million. Where did the other 9.5 million come from? Are they doing that much – you know – baby making over there? That’s 16.379% in three years. Roughly. That’s a lot of baby making. Just how good are those Iraqi hospitals? It’s a cinch they don’t have a lot of hospitals in Afghanistan. They have even less electricity than the Iraqis.

I know if our population was growing at 16.379% every three years we’d have wall-to-wall people and our unprotected borders would be perfectly safe. There’d be no room for terrorists or Mexican farm workers and lawn gardeners to get in.

Poppy harvest at a record level

AFGHANISTAN has produced a record poppy harvest, raising fears that cheaper heroin could soon be flooding the streets of Britain.

….

A Western anti-narcotics official in Kabul said that about 150,000 hectares (257,000 acres) were cultivated this year. In 2005 the figure was 104,000ha, with the previous highest figure being 131,000ha, in 2004. “It is a significant increase from last year . . . unfortunately, it is a record year,” a senior US government official based in Kabul said.

Afghanistan produced 87 per cent of the world’s opium last year.

That’s the explanation, then. Those extra 9.5 million people are illegal aliens smuggled in to Afghanistan to work as farm laborers. Somebody alert Tom Tancredo and the Minutemen and tell them they can stand down.

It isn't really torture.

I am so proud that my Republican Congress and the Bu$h MalAdministration approve of this sort of thing.

Thanks to Crooks and Liars for posting this.

Our good friend Fixer at Alternate Brain highlights the latest in a long series of Fascist Party politicians in trouble because their private lives don‘t match up with their public personas.

State Rep. Mark Olson, just elected to his eighth term in the House, was being held in the Sherburne County jail Monday after being arrested in connection with an alleged domestic assault on his wife Sunday afternoon at their home in Big Lake, Minn.

Shocking, simply shocking.

From the home newspaper, the Minneapolis StarTribune:

Sherburne County deputies were summoned to the home at 5:17 p.m. by Olson's wife, Heidi, 50, according to the Sheriff's Office. Officials would not provide any information about injuries. No one else was home at the time, the Sheriff's Office said.

Olson, 51, a Republican who has chaired the House Local Government Committee, was taken into custody at a school in Blaine without incident. Blaine police had been told they might find him there.

A spokesman for the school, Calvin Christian, said it leases out space to an unaffiliated church on Sunday and it is possible Olson may have gone there for services.

He was booked on fifth-degree domestic assault, a misdemeanor.

For myself I am quite surprised to learn that this particular Fascist Party politician, unlike the many other accused and convicted liars, thieves, sexual predators and perverts of t