Rejecting the language of terrorism

There is no "war on terror," says Mike Whitney. It's really "just a shabby public relations ploy to achieve an alternate political objective."

Neocons still in control

From Cursor:

A Guardian report that the U.S. will transfer power in Iraq to a hand-picked prime minister, leads Robert Dreyfuss to predict a PM Chalabi. He also reports the rumor that the first U.S. ambassador to Iraq will be James Woolsey, who last week was seen on TV asserting a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.

Nice to know that the neocons are going to continue running the asylum...

And, pray tell, why is the US government still dealing with Chalabi? The man helped con the nation into war and has come this close to boasting about it, publicly. Yes, yes, he's the neocon stooge, and has been for some time, but why aren't Democrats at least demanding that this guy get thrown to ash heap of history, as far as the US is concerned?

Speed up that investigation, please.

A decade later

The Economist: "Ten years after Rwanda's genocide, what has the world learned?"

The perils of the black box

Wired News has a decent summary of "How E-Voting Threatens Democracy." If you want specifics on this issue, periodically check in with Black Box Notes and BlackBoxVoting.org.

Ignoring the fundamental issues

Bill Christison has some words of wisdom regarding how the 9/11 investigation is unfolding:

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, chaired by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and better known as the 9/11 Commission, entertained news junkies across America with two full days of hearings last week. The ex-governor, chosen in part for his low visibility when a replacement had to be found for the controversial Henry Kissinger, did a creditable enough job as the entertainment MC. He and his mixed crew of good and not-so-good ex-officials, politicians, and perpetual staff aides spread before us not one but several partisan versions of how well or how badly the intelligence and foreign-policymaking arms of a Democratic and then a Republican administration performed over the past decade.

For students of politics and the internal workings of governments and bureaucracies, the exercise undoubtedly provided a few useful historical insights. The commission's final report, when issued in the summer of 2004, may even contain helpful recommendations for reorganizing governmental intelligence and foreign-policymaking mechanisms -- helpful, that is, to the leaders of the world's only nation-state that presently seeks military domination over the entire globe.

To the remaining citizens of the U.S. and the world, however, it was at best one more Roman circus distracting us from what should be our main goal: PERSUADING WASHINGTON TO SCRAP ITS FOREIGN AND MILITARY POLICIES THAT FOSTER U.S. GLOBAL DOMINATION AND AN AGGRESSIVE ISRAELI-U.S. PARTNERSHIP IN DOMINATING THE MIDDLE EAST. These are the dangerous policies that both Bill Clinton's and George W. Bush's administrations, with only minor differences of emphasis, have pressed on an unwilling world. Earlier administrations had similar goals, but serious policy steps toward fulfilling those goals became much more feasible -- or at least seemed to U.S. leaders to be more feasible -- after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. These policy steps also fitted nicely with the needs of the principal financial backers of both major U.S. political parties for more aggressive U.S. policies that would encourage a continuation and expansion of their own profits.

Likewise, the editorial board of the WSWS charges that, judging from last week's testimony, the commission is "engaged in a cover-up of the fundamental questions" surrounding 9/11:

Notwithstanding the heated controversy surrounding [Richard] Clarke’s appearance, the entire line of questioning from both the Democratic and Republican members of the commission showed that the basic premises of their investigation exclude any examination of the political and historical roots of the attacks that took the lives of some 3,000 innocent civilians.

Not one panel member broached the issue of US foreign policy in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and its role in fostering the growth of Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda. Nor was there any probing of the economic and geo-strategic interests that underlie the policy of succeeding US administrations toward Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. The word “oil” went virtually unuttered in the course of hours and hours of testimony.

Instead, the framework for the hearings was the assumption that 9/11 was the result of a “failure” of intelligence, or diplomacy, or military policy—or a combination of all three. From this narrow and disingenuous starting point, the thrust of both the witnesses’ testimony and the questioning by the panel followed: namely, that the proper response to the threat of terrorist attacks is to remove all remaining restrictions on US spying and covert operations abroad, including assassinations, intensify government spying within the United States, and apply the Bush doctrine of preventive war on an even more massive and bloody scale in the future.

The gist of the criticisms made of both the Clinton and Bush administrations—including those made by Clarke—was that they were too timid and squeamish in the pre-9/11 period, and too bogged down by considerations of US and international law. They should have used military force and covert violence sooner, more often and on a larger scale.

These analyses, I'm afraid, are on point. Unfortunately, the received wisdom seems to be that the US needs to pursue even more violent means to hunt down the evil ones, when the only thing that will temper the threat of terrorism is for the United States to relinquish its dreams of global domination and back away from the Israel-Palestine conflict so that some kind of just solution can be implemented.

Far from needing to get involved more in the activities of other states and regions, the world would be best served if the US retreated to, yes, an isolationist position. This is, of course, heresy for the globalists and the proponents of "benevolent hegemony," but it is the only course of action that will break the cycle of terror, force projection, and retaliation that is providing the perfect cover for policies which serve the military-industrial-petroleum complex. It would likely save an untold number of lives, as well.

Baseworld

Tom Engelhardt surveys the American imperium of the 21st century:

Today, gunboat diplomacy seems like a phrase from some antiquated imperial past (despite our thirteen aircraft carrier task forces that travel the world making "friendly" house calls from time to time). But if you stop thinking about literal gunboats and try to imagine how we carry out "armed diplomacy" -- and, as we all know, under the Bush administration the Pentagon has taken over much that might once have been labeled "diplomacy" -- then you can begin to conjure up our own twenty-first century version of gunboat diplomacy. But first, you have to consider exactly what the "platforms" are upon which we "export force," upon which we mount our "cannons."

What should immediately come to mind are our military bases, liberally scattered like so many vast immobile vessels over the lands of the Earth. This has been especially true since the neocons of the Bush administration grabbed the reins of power at the Pentagon and set about reconceiving basing policy globally; set about, that is, creating more "mobile" versions of the military base, ever more stripped down for action, ever closer to what they've come to call the "arc of instability," a vast swath of lands extending from the former Yugoslavia and the former SSRs of Eastern Europe down deep into Northern Africa and all the way to the Chinese border. These are areas that represent, not surprisingly, the future energy heartland of the planet. What the Pentagon refers to as its "lily pads" strategy is meant to encircle and nail down control of this vast set of interlocking regions -- the thought being that, if the occasion arises, the American frogs can leap agilely from one prepositioned pad to another, knocking off the "flies" as they go.

Engelhardt covers many of the recent articles that have appeared on US military bases abroad, so read his whole essay for a succinct summary of what they have to say.

Diverting resources

Did the war on Iraq distract from efforts to pursue Al Qaeda? This question "lingers," according to USA Today.

Israel's handling of Iraq intel

Peter Hermann of the Baltimore Sun reports that the Knesset has completed its internal review of how the Iraq intel was handled by Israel:

Israeli officials overestimated the military threat posed by Iraq because of faulty intelligence that was derived from conjecture rather than based on fact, an investigation by Israel's parliament concluded in a report released Sunday.

A special parliamentary committee, basing its findings on eight months of closed hearings, recommended restructuring Israel's intelligence services, including the Mossad spy agency, but said there had been no deliberate attempt to falsify information about Iraq before the U.S. and British invasion of the country in March 2003.

Hmm. Perhaps that's because the "deliberate attempt to falsify information" was conducted outside of the normal Israeli intelligence channels, in a side office for Ariel Sharon that mirrored the OSP. As Robert Dreyfuss reported in The Nation:

...also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled [Abram] Shulsky's--and which has not previously been reported--prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad--which prides itself on extreme professionalism--had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa...

Julian Borger of the Guardian pretty much reported the same thing last July.

It is thus no surprise that the Israeli investigation failed to identify any falsification or impropriety. The "creative" intelligence work probably happened outside the purview of the oversight committees.

Don't mention the L-word

"Over the past four years," writes Nat Parry, "one of the most powerful U.S. media taboos has been against calling George W. Bush’s pattern of false statements lies. Among Washington journalists, the L-word is casually applied to people who have gotten in the way of the Bush Dynasty – from Bill Clinton and Al Gore to more recently John Kerry and now Richard Clarke – but almost never to Bush."

Shutting a paper in Iraq

The US authorities have closed down a Shi'ite paper in Iraq because it allegedly printed false stories which encouraged violence against the occupying forces.

Not only have the Americans trampled on the freedom of the press, but the case for American violence in Iraq -- ya know, last year's war -- was constructed by a dutiful press parroting false and misleading stories which encouraged Americans to endorse the invasion. The irony here is rich.

Failures all around

Richard Clarke's revelations of last week have shed light on the failures of the Bush and Clinton adminstration to adequately deal with the threat of terrorism before and after 9/11. Clarke even went as far as to apologize to the victims' families and the American people for these failures.

This prompts Danny Schechter to ask, when will the media apologize for failing to seriously probe the background and context of 9/11?

Pakistani offensive over

The Pakistani-led offensive against Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Waziristan province has come to an end. The massive military operation failed to uncover any major Al Qaeda figures, like Zawahiri, and has probably only made Musharraf's "Bin Laden headache" worse.

The Iraqi "Curveball"

A LA Times investigation has revealed that:

The Bush administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now-discredited Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," according to current and former intelligence officials.

U.S. officials never had direct access to the defector and didn't even know his real name until after the war. Instead, his story was provided by German agents, and his file was so thick with details that American officials thought it confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Iraqis had developed mobile germ factories to evade arms inspections.

In actuality, "Curveball," the brother of a top aide to Ahmed Chalabi, spewed lies which led the CIA and UN on a wild goose chase for a "phantom weapons system," which, crucially, could not be proven to not exist. That sounds awkward and Orwellian now, but it was the insane logic deployed by the Bush administration during the run-up to war.

Proving that Iraq didn't have weapons was a virtual impossibility since the administration contended that the "lack of evidence" was proof in itself that Hussein was hiding something and being deceptive.

The end of "two murderous regimes"

In an entry on his new "blog" -- more a compendium of his contributions to ZNet's Sustainer Forum, than a blog -- Noam Chomsky reminds us of a fundamentally important detail that was mostly lost in the haze of the Iraq war debate: the "genocidal" effects of the sanctions during the 1990s.

Iraqi detainees fuel anger

The detention of more than 8,000 Iraqis by the US military is "proving disastrous to the public image of the US-led occupation authority," according to the Boston Globe.

US officials claim that the policy of detainments is fair and just, but many Iraqis, especially those that have been detained, think such tactics are eerily reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's regime.

AIDS fight falls short

"Three years after the United Nations declared a worldwide offensive against AIDS and 14 months after President Bush promised $15 billion for AIDS treatment in poor countries," reports the NY Times, "shortages of money and battles over patents have kept antiretroviral drugs from reaching more than 90 percent of the poor people who need them."

Outflanking Bush on Latin America

Larry Birns and Jessica Leight contend that recent statements on Latin America by John Kerry "appear to outflank on the right the Bush administration's extremist regional policymakers."

[Kerry's] two primary targets have been President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Cuba's Fidel Castro. While commendably finding fault with Bush policy regarding Secretary of State Powell's failure to protect the Aristide government in Haiti, Kerry's rhetoric regarding Cuba and Venezuela is reminiscent of barren Cold War strictures which, for all purposes, places him in the same extremist ideological bracket as the administration's two chief Latin American policy makers; the State Department's Roger Noriega and the Bush White House's Otto Reich.

All is not lost, however, and Kerry has a chance to rethink these positions. Say Birns and Leight,

There is still time for Kerry to review his simplistic and unimaginative formulations on regional issues and abandon his mimicking of Roger Noriega and Otto Reich's positions by beginning to articulate a clear alternative to the Bush administration's disastrous Latin America policy. This approach would be far more enlightening than his present one in which Kerry accused Bush of "sending mixed signals by supporting undemocratic processes in our own hemisphere." Kerry should also be denouncing the administration's involvement in a coup attempt in Venezuela, its stubbornness in maintaining a Cuba policy that has not been reviewed since its inception almost five decades ago, and its persistent ignorance of social justice concerns. Kerry also should be condemning the White House's bankrupt trade policy, its attempt to arm-twist its hemispheric counterparts into supporting its Middle East misadventures, and the general direction of Bush's high-handed regional policy, including its fundamental intolerance for differing points of view.

The outline of Kerry's foreign policy stances, as I've noted before, is rather remarkable for its congruence with George Bush's. A fundamental change would be a welcome development, but is not likely to happen.

Complicity

As usual, Charley Reese explains, in very simple terms, the madness that is the Israel - Palestine conflict:

The murder of Hamas' spiritual leader, Sheik Yassin, makes perfect sense as long as you understand Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's strategy.

That strategy is to make peace impossible.

For three years, Sharon has done everything to prevent peace. He himself provoked the new uprising, re-invaded the occupied territories, destroyed the Palestinian Authority, forced Yasser Arafat into house arrest and launched an unprecedented, brutal campaign of assassinations, curfews, fences, destruction of property and random killing of Palestinians. The Israelis have killed about 2,700 Palestinians in the past three years, in contrast to about 700 Israelis killed in the same period.

At the same time, Sharon has refused all offers to negotiate, and whenever the Palestinians arranged a cease-fire on their side, Sharon broke it with a provocative raid or assassination. No other rogue state or rogue leader would have been allowed to get away with such behavior, but Israel has the U.S. government in its pocket. That's the answer to the question posed by the French ambassador to Great Britain as to why the world allows "this (expletive deleted) little country to cause the world so much trouble."

Sharon doesn't want peace, because he knows that any peace settlement would involve returning nearly all of the occupied territories to the Palestinians. Israel's goal has always been Palestine without Palestinians. He is greatly afraid that the world will lose patience and impose a settlement on Israel. Hence, his strategy is to make peace impossible so that he can impose unilaterally his own settlement – a settlement, of course, that will condemn the Palestinians to unlivable conditions.

Moreover, Reese contends, the US better wake up to the fact that its knee-jerk suppot for Israel is one of the prime reasons a good portion of the Arab world "hates America":

The Arab world sees us – correctly – as an accessory before and after the fact to all the crimes Israel commits against the Palestinians and other Arabs in the area. We cannot load Israel down with modern weapons, with gifts of more than $90 billion of American tax dollars, with absolute protection from all attempts to hold it accountable under international law, and then pretend we are innocent. We are guilty by proxy of murder, land theft, destruction of property and all the other human misery that Israel has caused in the region.

So, if you're one of those rah-rah Israel First supporters, don't complain when the terrorists come looking for you. You've allowed your politicians to enlist you in somebody else's war, and in war there are always casualties on both sides.

America has become a nation of pathological irresponsibility. Nobody wants to take responsibility for his or her own actions, which is the basic cause of the litigation flood. Least of all do American politicians wish to do so. They would rather heap on the manure that the terrorism directed at us has nothing whatsoever to do with the policies they have followed for the past 30 years or more. In truth, it has everything to do with those policies.

High-end consumers are spending big

It sure is nice being rich in Bush's America.

The Clarke circus

Richard Clarke's hit a nerve, cause the Bushies are hitting back hard, throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the former "terrorism czar" in order to impugn his credibility. This political circus is pretty amusing to witness, since I really don't think Clarke has added much to our understanding of how this administration has functioned during its time in office.

Of course, considering his position of authority, I suppose you can say Clarke adds credibility to the charges that the Bushies have never handled the threat of terrorism properly, or that Iraq was a distraction and part of an ideological crusade that has nothing to do with terrorism, and which actually puts the United States at greater risk of terrorist reprisal by inflaming sentiment around the world and creating a groundswell of support for Islamist causes. But these allegedly controversial charges have been uncontroversial for quite some time, I think.

Condi Rice's performance throughout this charade has been pretty funny, too, as she incessantly lobs comments that dispute Clarke's testimony and book, all the while trying to avoid being held accountable -- under oath, that is -- for anything she's said or done.

Lastly, Josh Marshall has been keeping on top of the efforts to smear Clarke. It's dirty work, but someone has to do it. Thus far, media figures on the right have sunk so low as to suggest Clarke might be a racist, and Bill Frist, the Senate Majority leader, is floating charges that Clarke maybe -- just maybe -- perjured himself.

Ha, ha

The Dear Leader thinks the WMD issue is something to joke about, apparently.

Not going anywhere

The US has found a loophole that will enable it to continue to control Iraq militarily, even once political sovereignty is transferred on June 30.

Army survey reports low morale

The US Army has finally released its report on the mental health issues soldiers are grappling with in Iraq. Amongst a variety of details, the Army has found a suicide rate of 17.3 per 100,000 soldiers in Iraq, which tops the Vietnam war rate of 15.6 and the first Gulf war rate of 3.6. Additionally,

The report also detailed low morale among Army soldiers, with 72 percent of those questioned characterizing morale as either low or very low in their unit and 52 percent saying their personal morale was either low or very low.

Combat stress was caused by seeing dead bodies, personally coming under attack or knowing someone who was killed or seriously wounded, the report said. Other factors included soldiers' uncertainty over when they would go home.

The report found that soldiers who showed signs of depression, anxiety or traumatic stress were more likely to say it was too difficult to get help from the Army.

About 57 percent of personnel in combat stress-control units and 67 percent in mental health offices attached to Army divisions in Iraq cited insufficient supplies of key medications, including antidepressants and sleep medications.

I also ran across, via the MojoBlog, an article by a former Army commander who served in Iraq. Initially published in January, it illustrates rather vividly the chaos soldiers have been experiencing:

An explosion rocks the vehicle in front of you, throwing soldiers onto the street. You see the vehicle rise up onto two wheels before settling and rolling to a stop. AK-47 fire and RPGs are heard almost simultaneously. Your soldiers stagger about trying to shake off the effects of the concussion. Some fire wildly in different directions because the cracking of the AK-47s are echoing off the buildings, so you cannot pinpoint the direction of fire. The battle drill says to clear the kill zone, but you have competing priorities. First, you have casualties that need to be secured, assessed and stabilized. Second, if you run, you won’t kill the enemy or deter them. You must fight back and hopefully kill them. Do you stay in the kill zone and fight?

This happened to my soldiers and me. Sadly, this has happened to my company and me on several occasions in various forms. On this day, I lost a platoon sergeant and it was a devastating experience to many soldiers. He is alive but when I got to that truck he was a pile of blood and matter. His leg was completely blown off with shrapnel wounds all over him. He stayed there as we secured everything, trying to still lead his soldiers. We fought back that day, killing one suspected enemy and detaining two more. This reaction occurred due to rehearsals, AARs, aggressive leadership at every level, and discipline.

...American soldiers are facing men with a cell phone is one hand, a RPG in the other, and ill-conceived hatred in their heart. This enemy is asymmetric in the most unpredictable way. US forces will face this threat for months in Iraq, if not years...

No wonder stress levels are so high.

Boy bomber becomes propaganda

Launching broadsides from the shadows

Meet Condoleeza Rice, paragon of truth, nobility, and courage, "shooting spit balls" from the "peanut gallery."

Flawed poll

The highly touted poll from Oxford Research International that paints popular sentiment in Iraq in generally rosy terms is riddled with problems, says Brendan O'Neill.

‘Your Government Failed You’

As the firestorm over Richard Clarke evolves with attacks and counterattacks not likely to cease any time soon, his testimony before the 9/11 commission has revealed that the assaults of that day might have been preventable.

Girding the globe

"One year after U.S. tanks rolled through Iraq and more than two years after the United States bombed the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan," writes James Sterngold of the SF Chronicle, the Bush administration "has instituted what some experts describe as the most militarized foreign policy machine in modern history.

"The policy has involved not just resorting to military action, or the threat of action, but constructing an arc of new facilities in such places as Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Qatar and Djibouti that the Pentagon calls 'lily pads.' They are seen not merely as a means of defending the host countries -- the traditional Cold War role of such installations -- but as jumping-off points for future 'preventive wars' and military missions."

Black deaths in Iraq higher than in Vietnam

The percentage of black fatalities in the military is higher in Iraq than it was even during the Vietnam war, according to Sherrel Wheeler Stewart of BlackAmericaWeb.com.

Engineering consent

The Sydney Morning Herald's Antony Loewenstein examines the NY Times' role in promoting the war on Iraq.

Keeping tabs on a dissident

The LA Times has discovered that the FBI spied on John Kerry during his protest campaign against the Vietnam war in the 1970s.

Medicare in worse trouble than thought

If the current trend of rising medical costs and diminished treasury receipts continues, this year's annual report from the Medicare board of trustees warns that the federal health insurance program for the elderly will go bankrupt by 2019.

Peaking oil?

When will the oil spigot start drying up? asks Verne Kopytoff in the SF Chronicle.

"Mounting evidence suggests that an important turning point may be close," he writes. "According to several studies, oil production is expected to begin a permanent decline within a few years, prompting social and economic upheaval across the globe.

"Or maybe not. A rival school of thought says that oil's imminent demise is exaggerated and that crude will be plentiful into the near future."

Cornered?

The reports that a major Al Qaeda figure -- presumably Ayman al-Zawahiri -- was cornered in Pakistan last week seem to have deflated. "It now appears," according to Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times Online, "that world public opinion fell victim to a Musharraf-inspired web of disinformation."

Sham of a democracy

This is a pretty telling report from the Associated Press about how Iraq's fledgling government is expected to mature over the next year or so.

Virtually every step of the way will be dominated by the American presence -- "nonpartisan Iraqi technocrats" will be groomed by US troops and advisers, Iraqi leaders will take their cues directly from the massive US Embassy being built in Baghdad, and the general budget will be lorded over by US officials like Paul Bremer.

"Democracy" will indeed flourish, but it will be the kind of democracy that is ultimately deferential to American interests.

On Clarke

Rand Beers, John Brady Kiesling, John Brown, Greg Thielmann, Joseph Wilson, Karen Kwiatkowski, Paul O'Neill -- the list of former government workers who have indicted the Bush administration upon leaving their posts is lengthy. And now add perhaps the most damaging name: Richard Clarke.

Clarke is filling in the details, but the general thrust of his claims has long been known: Bush paid little attention to terrorism prior to 9/11, despite being warned periodically that a major attack was afoot; 9/11 was used as a pretext to invade Iraq; and, lastly, the war in Iraq has diverted resources, squandered political goodwill, and raised the ire of the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Anyone who doesn't already see this administration as being inept, corrupt, and criminal is either hopelessly clueless or wholly indoctrinated.

Yassin's assassination

Israel's "targeted killing" of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin promises to be a significant turning point in the trajectory of the Israel-Palestine conflict. While Israel claims the move was meant to strike a blow against terror and presumably safeguard its citizens, the assassination is better seen as a remarkably aggressive and reckless move that will only inflame tensions and lead to more attacks by Palestinians on Israelis. Many have noted Hamas' statement that this provocation promises to "open the gates of hell" -- which seems like a very real possibility.

Most significantly, as Rashid Khalidi has observed, Yassin's killing "may well be the last nail in the coffin of the two-state solution." It will also throw a groundwell of support behind Hamas and significantly undercut the Palestinian Authority, particularly in the Gaza Strip.

But if history is any guide, this may be precisely the point. Israel rather notoriously mid-wifed Hamas during the 1970s in order to undercut the PLO, and therefore reduce the possibility of any sustained negotiations that could resolve the conflict. The same rationale is likely at work here, with Sharon hoping to provoke further violence which might then justify harsher measures by the Israelis -- like expulsion -- under the rubric of defending Israelis from further violence.

Israel has signaled a desire to resolve this conflict only with the application of military force. The response from the Palestinians will mirror this militarism. The coming months promise to be very grim, even moreso than usual.

M20

I wound up making my way up to NYC for the antiwar protest on Saturday. It was a great day -- gorgeous weather, people out in droves, and cops as tempered as I've ever seen at a protest.

There were much fewer people than at last year's protest, although the overall environment was much more relaxed. Gone were the cattle pens, thankfully. A circular march down Madison Ave. and up 6th Ave. was even allowed, too. Estimates of the crowd ranged from around 30,000 (city) to 100,000 (march organizers); take the average and you probably have an accurate figure.

Here's a roundup and corresponding pictures from other protests from around the world.

One year later...

Lazy blogging

* US oil prices have hit a 13 year high.

* Are the Balkans set to explode again?

* "A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond," the Washington Post reminds us. Things haven't quite worked out as the Bush administration said they would.

* Thus far, 660 Iraqis have been killed in suicide bombings since the beginning of the war.

* Norman Solomon asks, "Can the United States credibly wage a 'war on terrorism' by engaging in warfare that terrorizes civilians?"

* Pakistani troops are allegedly "closing in" on Bin Laden's right hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The "spring offensive" might be paying off.

* The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, a group which claims to be linked with Al Qaeda, wants Bush to beat Kerry in the 2004 elections.

* "Scientists have produced the first comprehensive evidence that the diversity of butterflies, birds and plants is in decline in the UK," the Guardian reports. "They say their research supports the argument that mass extinction threatens life on Earth."

* The LA Times reports, "The numbers of Hispanics and Asians in the United States will triple over the next half-century as an aging white population slips from its traditional majority perch, according to U.S. Census Bureau projections being released today."

* Par for the course: Bush Medicare Lies and Propaganda.

* Jerry M. Landay outlines the players behind the Bush attack machine.

Accountability for "judicial activism"

Congressional Republicans are taking aim at the Supreme Court with the introduction of HR 3920, says Benedict@Large.

Shock therapy for Iraq

Allegedly, the goal of the Bush administration is "to create a stable, prosperous, and democratic Middle East," observes Joseph Stiglitz. "But America’s economic program for reconstructing Iraq is laying the foundations for poverty and chaos."

Lockstep, or else

I don't know about you, but I can only take so much abuse of the word "appeasement" from the pro-war right following the Spanish elections. We haven't seen this much of a concerted propaganda push from actors in the media and blogs since Saddam Hussein's December capture and the announcement of Libya's abandonment of its WMD program.

Micah Holmquist pretty much nails it when he says that this is convenient politics with no grounding in reality. The claims that the Spanish have capitulated to Bin Laden are repugnant, entirely selective, and wholly unserious. They are meant to metaphorically beat people into a corner so any resistance to Bush policy is deemed to be "supporting the terrorists."

This, writes Holmquist, "is the only conclusion one can reach after looking at the lack of outrage from the usual suspects over the planned pull-out of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia."

The presence of these troops in Saudi Arabia is one of Osama bin Laden's grievances against the United States — perhaps the one that provides real motivation — so how could pulling troops out be anything other than "appeasement"? The answer is that "appeasement" is, in the hawkish parlance of this day, nothing more than an epithet to be used against actions or policies that are disliked. Hence, in a mensnewsdaily.com column, Barbara J. Stock can say Spain is responsible for future terrorist attacks because of that country's "appeasement" (the disliked set of policies and positions) without mentioning or even considering that the United States was to blame for last week's bombing in Spain due to its "appeasement." Similarly, U.S. military aid to the government of Egypt, which treats gay men in a manner that al Qaeda would surely approve of, is not "appeasement" because most of these jingos, to use another epithet, don't care about this one way or another because it has not been raised as an issue.

Along the same lines, nobody accuses the United States of appeasing Iran in 1980 by electing Ronald Reagan. Nonetheless it is obvious that the Iranian Revolution was really an attempt on the part of Ayatollah Khomeini to register disapproval of the Jimmy Carter Administration. When that didn't work, Khomeini attempted to make Carter look weak via the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the public took the bait, electing Reagan and appeasing our enemies in Iran. Just think of the evil that could have been prevented if Carter had been reelected. Iraq may have been able to defeat Iran more decisively, the Contras might not have had to sell drugs and it is even possible that the Soviet Union wouldn't have hung around for more than an additional decade.

The above paragraph is obviously absurd, but no more so than many of the statements that are being made about "appeasement." I suspect the only reason the idea that Reagan's election equaled appeasement isn't touted countlessly by every person who knows that Franco was once in charge of Spain is that, for obvious reasons, it doesn't serve to support any goal of the Bush Administration. Team Bush's friends in the media have therefore not repeated it without end.

Sound familiar?

"You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists!"

Survey finds hope amongst Iraqis

Al Jazeera spins this poll rather differently, here.

Vote Dubya

Recently released: The Top 30 Reasons to Vote Bush-Cheney in 2004

Iraq on the record

Congressman Henry Waxman has started up a project to identify Iraq lies and misstatements from the Bush administration. Thus far, he's found 237 misleading remarks by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice.

Tell us, now!

Josh Marshall has an insightful article on this alleged controversy.

A silly question

Did al-Qaeda win the Spanish elections? Most definitely, say the Bushites.

INC propaganda piped to the press, too

Jonathan Landay and Tish Wells of Knight Ridder confirm a widely-held suspicion about the "intelligence" on Iraq that came from Ahmed Chalabi's INC: it was not only funneled directly to policy circles in the Pentagon, but also to major press organs in the United States, Britain, and Australia.

US "credibility" sinks lower

The Washington Post reports that a new poll from the Pew Center has found that, a year after the invasion of Iraq, "resentment and suspicion of the United States has intensified abroad, with many people saying the war has undermined U.S. credibility and hurt, rather than helped, the war on terrorism."

The survey follows up on the results of a widely-touted Pew poll from last June, which found that anti-American sentiment rose dramatically in the run-up to the war.

The new findings confirm that views of the United States continue to spiral downward, with Europeans showing even more skepticism and fear, while anger in countries with large Muslim populations "remains pervasive."

AQ now an ideology

The AP reports:

The al-Qaida terrorist network, its command structure hit hard by Washington's war on terrorism, is mutating into a hard-to-define web of Islamic militants who share Osama bin Laden's ideology and goals even if they operate under other names.

Al-Qaida connections have emerged from terror attacks in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and now Spain, fueled by a recruiting drive by radical Muslims who fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan, security officials told The Associated Press.

For months, especially in Iraq where attacks on coalition forces and Iraqis who work with them are near-daily events, little-known groups have been claiming responsibility.

The veracity of the claims remains unknown, but the attacks bear the hallmarks of this new al-Qaida - a loose-knit cluster of small groups not controlled by a mother organization but well aware of what is expected of them and sometimes even recruited by bin Laden's trainees.

Someone please send Mr. Bush a memo. If he thought fighting a war against a nondescript foe like "terrorism" was a tall task, try fighting an ideology.

And, yes, we've heard this all before.

“X” marks the Israeli-Arab workers

The AP reports that "Israeli-Arab workers building a new wing for Israel's legislature had their helmets marked with red paint to help security guards distinguish them from foreign labourers," but "Parliament Speaker Reuven Rivlin ordered the markings removed after learning of the practice from a report in the Maariv newspaper." Critics charged that the marks were racist and, because of the resonance with Jewish history, highly offensive.

Curiously, the AP report doesn't mention one of the more controversial facets of Maariv's story:

The [Knesset's] Security Department instructed that their helmets be marked so that it would be easier to distinguish them from other, foreign workers and keep a constant watch on their movements. The instructions were issued even though many of the workers were cleared by the General Security Service within the last month. In a story scheduled for the Hebrew magazine section of Friday’s Maariv, the X is explained as a target for security snipers posted on the Knesset balcony, in the event of a riot or attack.

In one word: disgusting.

Palestinians running out of food

The AP reports that a survey by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has found that "40 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip don't have regular access to the food they need, and another 30 percent are at risk of losing that access." Furthermore, "while food is generally available in the Palestinian territories, residents have limited access to it because of their dwindling personal finances and Israeli security measures, such as curfews, closures and the creation of a security barrier in the West Bank."

A bleak trend for media?

A new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism has found that the majority of US news media "are experiencing a steady decline in their audiences and are significantly cutting their investment in staff and resources."

The report claims that this trend has been driven by technological changes, especially in regards to the production and consumption of internet based news content.

Diverging views on Spain

The recent events in Spain -- the ascension of the Socialist Party to power and Zapatero's proclaimation to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq by June 30 -- are getting spun in two entirely different directions.

From one end, the Spanish are becoming appeasers who are unwilling to fight the terrorists. By precipitating an abrubt change in Spain's stance vis-a-vis the Bush-led war on terror, Bin Laden's crew has won a victory.

The other argument is that these developments indicate that the Spanish are waking up to the fact that the war on Iraq, while marketed as part of the war on terror, was actually a foolish and costly sideshow -- an endeavor that only promises more blowback for Spain's citizens.

Coincidentally, David Brooks and Paul Krugman typify these contrasting viewpoints in the NY Times today.

One year later

Today is, in fact, the anniversary of Rachel's death. It should be both a day of remembrance and action.

Raising the specter of invasion

The Guardian's Dan Glaister reports on the fallout from Samuel Huntington's controversial essay in Foreign Policy that warns of Hispanic immigration tearing the United States in half over the coming years.

Huntington is most famous, of course, for his 1996 tome The Clash of Civilizations, which, as Glaister notes, "warned the world about the hordes from the east." With his article in Foreign Policy and forthcoming book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, Huntington is now zeroing in on "the hordes in the south."

A step back for Afghanistan?

The new Afghan constitution, says James Ingalls, is a "step backwards for democracy."

A "special skills" draft?

The draft might be coming back, albeit in limited form:

The government is taking the first steps toward a targeted military draft of Americans with special skills in computers and foreign languages.

The Selective Service System has begun the process of creating the procedures and policies to conduct such a targeted draft in case military officials ask Congress to authorize it and the lawmakers agree to such a request.

Richard Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System, said planning for a possible draft of linguists and computer experts had begun last fall after Pentagon personnel officials said the military needed more people with skills in those areas.

"Talking to the manpower folks at the Department of Defense and others, what came up was that nobody foresees a need for a large conventional draft such as we had in Vietnam," Flahavan said. "But they thought that if we have any kind of a draft, it will probably be a special skills draft."

...Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said he would not ask Congress to authorize a draft, and officials at the Selective Service System, the independent federal agency that would organize any conscription, stress that the possibility of a so-called "special skills draft" is likely far off.

A targeted registration and draft is "is strictly in the planning stage," said Flahavan, adding that "the whole thing is driven by what appears to be the more pressing and relevant need today" -- the deficit in language and computer experts.

Concerns about overstretch, the appearance of two bills in Congress to reinstate the draft (S. 89 & HR 163), and a host of other curious details have many people worried that forced conscription, of some sorts, is in the cards over the next few years.

This news about a focused, selective draft is couched in cautionary language from the Pentagon and SSS, but it could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Cheney's baby

James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, offers a revised version of the early history of the Iraq war plan in a piece for the Washington Post.

Astute commentators have long rooted the drive to Iraq in Paul Wolfowitz's 1992 Defense Policy Guidance plan. The DPG is indeed crucial, says Mann, but it wasn't really Wolfowitz's baby:

A mostly fictional version of that event has been passed down over the years, and it goes like this: Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense, had drafted a version of American military strategy in which the United States would move to block any rival power in Europe, Asia or the Middle East. After the leaked document caused a furor, the first Bush administration retreated. The document was toned down and its key ideas were abandoned.

But interviews with participants show that this version is wrong in several important respects. Wolfowitz didn't write the original draft. While the draft was rewritten, it was not really toned down. Indeed, in subtle ways, using careful terminology and euphemisms, the vision of an American superpower was actually made more sweeping. And although Wolfowitz and his staff played key roles, the ultimate sponsor of the new strategy was Cheney.

Mann goes on to outline how the strategy became the adopted child of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's current Chief of Staff, and quotes Zalmay Khalilzad, the original author of the DPG and now US ambassador to Afghanistan, as saying that Cheney "took ownership" of the plan virtually once it was released.

Massive expenditures

The AP reports that the Pentagon continues to be coy about how much Iraq is going to cost. And, in a related story, many in Congress are starting to worry that the concerns of the 1980s -- huge military budgets, coupled with huge fiscal deficits -- are coming back into play.

Looking to tap the net

The Washington Post reports that John Ashcroft's Justice Department is making moves to increase its ability to monitor internet communications.

Brit prisoners claim torture at Gitmo

Two of the British prisoners who were recently released from the US detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Jamal al-Harith and Tarek Dergoul, claim they were repeatedly beaten and tortured during their time in custody.

Posse Comitatus no more

The Wall Street Journal reports that the US military is getting into the business of domestic spying, ever so quietly.

On to Damascus?

With the President set to impose sanctions on Syria, Tom Barry warns that the same script used on Iraq might make its way into the news again.

If the neocons get their wish, Barry claims, "it's likely that the Syrian regime will be painted with the same fear-mongering brush used to justify the invasion of Iraq. With Osama bin Laden still on the lam and bedlam in occupied Iraq, the Bush administration needs to refocus public attention on another evildoer - which, not so coincidentally, is also the next preferred target of the Likudniks in Israel."

Bushies ordered Medicare estimates withheld

Boy, the Bush administration sure has a knack of trying to hide the truth in order to further its political agenda. This time it is Medicare costs:

The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.

When the House of Representatives passed the controversial benefit by five votes last November, the White House was embracing an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that it would cost $395 billion in the first 10 years. But for months the administration's own analysts in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had concluded repeatedly that the drug benefit could cost upward of $100 billion more than that.

Withholding the higher cost projections was important because the White House was facing a revolt from 13 conservative House Republicans who'd vowed to vote against the Medicare drug bill if it cost more than $400 billion.

So can you name a major policy area where the administration hasn't deployed a significant number of lies and deceptions? There's your challenge for the day.

Teddy making waves

"Senator Edward Kennedy gave two magnificent speeches last week," writes Katrina vanden Heuvel, "but only one received the attention it deserved. While his blistering attack on the Bush Administration for manipulating and distorting intelligence to justify attacking Iraq was noted in the Washington Post and other papers, the Senator's fiery progressive manifesto--delivered at a New York conference called Re-Imagining the Welfare State--went virtually unreported."

What the world needs: more billionaires

Something's wrong with this scenario, don't you think?

While at least a billion people on the planet subsist on the equivalent of a dollar a day or less, the concentration of wealth among a handful of people at the top has set new records. In its current issue, Forbes magazine lists a record 587 individuals and family units worth $1 billion or more, an increase from 476 in 2003. The combined wealth of this year’s billionaires also reached record levels—a staggering $1.9 trillion, an increase of $500 billion in just one year, due largely to resurging stock prices over the last 12 months.

The wealth of these few hundred people exceeds the gross domestic product of the world’s 170 poorest countries combined, and equals nearly 4 percent of the annual production of the entire world.

And worse: "While the rich continue to accumulate wealth for themselves, millions upon millions of people around the world are trying to survive under conditions of unspeakable degradation. One estimate puts the cost of satisfying the entire world’s need for food and sanitation at $13 billion -- less than 1 percent of the wealth of the world’s billionaires."

Bush stereotypes terrorists in ads

Meet the Bush family's new poster boy, "Muhammad Horton," who's recently appeared in a new set of campaign ads.

A scene-by-scene breakdown of the ad in question is available here.

Promises, Promises

Let's stop with the excuses, too, ok?

Hollywood flick against Bush

Will a summer blockbuster influence the 2004 Presidential elections in the United States? The Guardian thinks the May release of "The Day After Tomorrow" could do precisely that, by raising the issue of rapid climate change in the public imagination.

Facilitating the Venezuelan opposition

The Independent reports that "Washington has been channeling hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the political opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - including those who briefly overthrew the democratically elected leader in a coup two years ago" via the Orwellian-named National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

It's worth noting that the funneling of NED money for the last coup, in 2002, was previously reported. This news thus comes as no surprise.

Brutalizing Afghans

According to the Guardian, a recent HRW report charges that US troops in Afghanistan are acting like brutal occupiers: "operating outside the rule of law, using excessive force to make arrests, mistreating detainees and holding them indefinitely in a 'legal black hole' without any legal safeguards."

The "free market" myth

Thom Hartmann thinks we should come clean about the realities of the "free market."

The idealized depiction of a perfectly functioning neoclassical system of supply and demand is, in reality, an abstraction created by massive state intervention. It is not, as is commonly claimed, an economic climate induced by the retreat of the state from commercial exchanges.

The list of governmental projects that enable commerce is long: issuing currency, providing avenues for legal redress, enforcing contracts, providing public education, subsidizing transportation and technology, using military force to protect investments or seize resources, and so on.

Spanish bombings

Notwithstanding their sheer horror, the recent bombings in Madrid contain a great deal of political significance, depending on how things evolve over the next few days and weeks. The early question of whether ETA or Al Qaeda was behind the attacks seems to be receding now that arrrests have been made and that ETA has forcefully denied responsbility, something it has never done with prior acts of violence. The Al Qaeda link -- or at least inspiration -- looks likely at this point.

This is significant because if there is any connection between the bombings and the Iraq war, which also looks likely, it will bring with it significant repercussions by further eroding support for Aznar's right wing government. It could have a significant fallout in the rest of Europe, too, raising again the voices of those who warned of the potential blowback from support of the Anglo-American invasion.

In the United States, there have been two opposing responses to the bombings. Some have tried to frame the tragedy as an indicator that terrorism remains a grave threat, hoping to revive images of 9/11 in the collective American psyche. Others have taken up the argument that terrorism isn't going away anytime soon, and that recent attempts to wipe it out militarily actually serve to exacerbate the problem. Rahul Mahajan makes precisely this point, suggesting that the bombings "make one thing very clear: terrorism cannot be fought by military means."

Lastly, if there is anything positive to be drawn from the tragedy, outside of the political ramifications, it is the remarkable response of the Spanish people with their repeated, massive shows of solidarity. This has been quite heartening to see.

Libya's actions have nothing to do with Iraq

Martin S. Indyk critiques the Bush's administration's "perfect comback" to the charge of not finding WMD in Iraq: its claim that Libya gave up its WMD program because of the precedent set towards Saddam Hussein.

"Get rid of one dictator because of his supposed WMD programmes," the logic goes, "and others will be so afraid that they will voluntarily abandon their weapons programmes. Therefore, even if no WMDs were found in Iraq, we still made the world a safer place."

This convenient argument doesn't hold up, however. Libya has long been making overtures to abandon its WMD program in order to loosen the economic embargo around its neck.

As Indyk concludes, "Libyan disarmament did not require a war in Iraq."

Faltering empire

"The first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has arrived," Jonathan Schell observes. "By now, we were told by the Bush Administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops' arrival would have long ended; their numbers would have been reduced to the low tens of thousands, if not to zero; Iraq's large stores of weapons of mass destruction would have been found and dismantled; the institutions of democracy would be flourishing; Kurd and Shiite and Sunni would be working happily together in a federal system; the economy, now privatized, would be taking off; other peoples of the Middle East, thrilled and awed, so to speak, by the beautiful scenes in Iraq, would be dismantling their own tyrannical regimes. Instead, 549 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of Iraqis, military and civilian, have died; some $125 billion has been expended; no weapons of mass destruction have been found; the economy is a disaster; electricity and water are sometime things; America's former well-wishers, the Shiites, are impatient with the occupation; terrorist bombs are taking a heavy toll; and Iraq as a whole, far from being a model for anything, is a cautionary lesson in the folly of imperial rule in the twenty-first century."

Ignatieff's "gamble"

Michael Ignatieff, a card-carrying member of the "cruise missile left," has written a retrospective about his personal journey through the Iraq war debate in the NY Times Magazine. The article is a pretty remarkable artifact for displaying the tortured logic of an Iraq war apologist.

Here are just a few of the jaw-dropping assertions:

We thought we were arguing about Iraq, but what might be best for 25 million Iraqis didn't figure very much in the argument. As usual we were talking about ourselves: what America is and how to use its frightening power in the world. The debate turned into a contest of ideologies masquerading as histories. Conservative Republicans gave us America the liberator, while the liberal left gave us America the devious, propping up villainous leaders and toppling democratically elected ones. Neither history was false: the Marshall Plan did show that America could get something right, while the overthrow of President Allende in Chile and support for death squads in Latin America showed that America could do serious wrong. Either way, however, the precedents and the ideologies were irrelevant, for Iraq was Iraq. And, it turned out, nobody actually knew very much about Iraq.

Apparently, Mr. Ignatieff has been reading comic books over the past two years, not any serious media. This depiction of the run-up to war is such a distorted caricature that one doesn't know where to start critiquing it.

US foreign policy, first of all, is understood through the spectrum of "strategic interests." Human rights and morality are not major considerations. When there is congruence between interests and morality, then expect the latter to be constantly invoked. When there is no congruence, expect it to be ignored.

Ignatieff's examples in this paragraph are telling. The Marshall Plan, in one sense, can be viewed as a gift to Europe from the American people. But there's plenty of evidence suggesting it was implemented to preserve the capitalist system, and reintegrate Europe back into that very system, a crucial aim of the US following WWII. It was, in other words, not created out of altruism. The other example, Chile and Latin America, is also indicative of the same policy inertia that the US does whatever it takes to prevent "irresponsible" Latin Americans -- to quote Kissinger -- from allowing their nations to tread down the road of socialism.

Thus both of the examples Ignatieff offers, which are intended to represent polar ends of the spectrum of US intentions, betray a rather cozy consensus on foreign policy goals.

Says Ignatieff:

A year later, Iraq is no longer a pretext or an abstraction. It is a place where Americans are dying and Iraqis, too, in ever greater numbers. What makes these deaths especially haunting is that no one can honestly say -- at least not yet -- whether they will be redeemed by the emergence of a free Iraq or squandered by a descent into civil war.

News alert: nothing will "redeem" those that have died in this war. This is just a pleasing sentiment made up by the living apologists to justify what's transpired. The war should not be judged in this way. If Iraq becomes a vibrant, successful state with milk and honey flowing everywhere, then fine. Or if it descends further into chaos, fine as well. Judge the events on their own merits. Let the tens of thousands who have died rest in peace.

A more relevant issue at hand is why there is no discussion of the huge number of casualties inflicted by the military campaign. Everyone knows about Hussein's atrocities, which have been copiously documented by self-avowed guardians of morality. Very few know much about the atrocities committed or enabled by US policy -- be they from the campaign of complicity during the 1980s, the campaign of mendacity during the 1990s (read: war and sanctions), or the campaign of violence this past year. Why is this so? If the Iraq policy truly rests on noble foundations, why is it necessary to avoid such inconvenient details?

There is an argument that pops up periodically, usually with a reference to Bush's November 2003 speech to the NED, that the toppling of Hussein was meant to rectify these past injustices. Yet it seems to me that the historical context here provides ample evidence that we should be skeptical of claims from a country that promises to correct the mistakes gone by with even further violence and destruction.

Says Ignatieff:

The real issue [say the critics of the war] was oil. But they got the relevance of oil backward. If all America cared about was oil, it would have cozied up to Hussein, as it had done in the past. Oil was an issue in the war precisely because its revenues distinguished Hussein from the run of other malignant dictators. It was the critical factor that would allow him, sooner or later, to acquire the weapons that would enable him to go after the Kurds again, complete the destruction of the Shiites, threaten Saudi Arabia and continue to support Palestinian suicide bombers and, just possibly, Al Qaeda as well.

No, Mr. Ignatieff has things backwards. Perhaps if he had read the major internal arguments put forward by the Bush administration, he would know that Hussein's regime was perceived to be "a destabilising influence to...the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East," that the US "has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf," and that "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Asserting greater control over Middle Eastern affairs, which implicitly means greater control over the region's oil reserves, was at the heart of the Iraq policy. It was not marginalized for the advancement of a newfound policy of benign interventionism, as Ignatieff would like his readers to believe.

Says Ignatieff:

I still do not believe that American or British leaders misrepresented Hussein's intentions or lied about the weapons they believed he possessed. In his new memoirs, Hans Blix makes it clear that he and his fellow U.N. inspectors thought Hussein was hiding something, and every intelligence service they consulted thought so too. But if lying was not the problem, exaggeration was, and no one who supported the war is happy about how ''a grave and gathering danger'' -- as Bush carefully characterized the Hussein regime in his speech at the U.N. in September 2002 -- slowly morphed into an ''imminent'' threat. The honest case for war was ''preventive'' -- to stop a tyrant with malignant intentions from acquiring lethal capabilities or transferring those capabilities to other enemies. The case we actually heard was ''pre-emptive'' -- to stop a tyrant who already possessed weapons and posed an imminent danger.

I think it's reasonably clear that the appeal to the UN was a charade. The Bush administration was not interested in finding out what Iraq had, but rather trying to muster additional support for its war. The thinking, allegedly championed by Powell and Blair, was that an intensified search would reveal that Saddam was hiding something. This would then provide the momentum for additional Security Council resolutions, which, in their minds, would justify a military assault. The Bush administration realized this was a prudent course of action to take in the Summer of 2002 since they had to wait a few months for a troop buildup and to allow for time to "market the war," because domestic support for an assault was tepid.

And, frankly, if you don't believe "American or British leaders misrepresented Hussein's intentions or lied about the weapons they believed he possessed," then you must be living under a rock. Lying, plagiarizing, excising, conjuring, fabricating, cooking, exaggerating, misrepresenting, you name it -- the Brits and Americans have done it.

Says Ignatieff:

The problem for my side is that if the honest case had been put -- for a preventive as opposed to a pre-emptive war -- the war would have been even more unpopular than it was. But this is also a problem for opponents as well. If they didn't think the case for preventive war was proved this time, what will convince them next time? Unless threats are imminent, democratic peoples don't want to fight, but if they wait till threats are imminent, the costs of war may become prohibitive. The next time an American president makes a case for war to meet a purported W.M.D. threat, almost everyone, members of the Security Council included, will believe he is crying wolf. But what if he's not? What if the example of Iraq leads electorates and politicians to respond too slowly to the next tyrant or terrorist

The first sentence alone speaks volumes. The latter points can only be responded to with an "oh well." If US foreign policy strategists were truly concerned about the threats other nations posed, and not merely trying to use those threats to justify their existing aims of geostrategic dominance, then I'd doubt that they would be so reckless in their application of military force.

The proponents of the Iraq war have lost their credibility, entirely. What's amazing is that Ignatieff is blaming the people that opposed the Iraq war for this situation. The mind boggles.

Says Ignatieff:

So I supported an administration whose intentions I didn't trust, believing that the consequences would repay the gamble. Now I realize that intentions do shape consequences. An administration that cared more genuinely about human rights would have understood that you can't have human rights without order and that you can't have order once victory is won if planning for an invasion is divorced from planning for an occupation. The administration failed to grasp that from the first moment an American tank column took a town, there had to be military police and civilian administrators following behind to guard museums, hospitals, water-pumping stations and electricity generators and to stop looting, revenge killings and crime. Securing order would have meant putting 250,000 troops into the invasion as opposed to 130,000. It would have meant immediately retaining and retraining the Iraqi Army and police, instead of disbanding them. The administration, which never tires of telling us that hope is not a plan, had only hope for a plan in Iraq.

Mea culpa, mea culpa. All that's needed to judge the administration's respect for human rights is its agonizing over the potential humanitarian effects of the war, which was well evident in the media.

Oh, wait. Hmm. That never happened.

Ignatieff finally concludes:

Now that we are there, our problem is no longer hope and illusion but despair and disillusion. The press coverage from Baghdad is so gloomy that it's hard to remember that a dictator is gone, oil is pumping again and the proposed interim constitution contains strong human rights guarantees. We seem not even to recognize freedom when we see it: Shiites by the hundreds of thousands walking barefoot to celebrate in the holy city of Karbala, Iraqis turning up at town meetings and trying out democracy for the first time, newspapers and free media sprouting everywhere, daily demonstrations in the streets. If freedom is the only goal that redeems all the dying, there is more real freedom in Iraq than at any time in its history. And why should we suppose that freedom will be anything other than messy, chaotic, even frightening? Why should we be surprised that Iraqis are using their freedom to tell us to go home? Wouldn't we do just the same?

Better apologetics could not come from Rumsfeld, Cheney, or, judging from the first sentence, Chalabi.

Yes, we are in Baghdad now. Yes, things are a mess, but one can point to improvements in certain indicators. Will things continue to improve? For the sake of the Iraqis, hopefully, and, considering how the US helped plunge Iraq down the UN development indice during the 1990s, likely. Following two decades of war, sanctions, and corruption, Iraq has nowhere else to go but up -- assuming, of course, that a civil war doesn't break out in the next few months/years.

But does any of this justify what has been done thus far? Not to me. The administration and its supporters decided to go to war because it promised to yield strategic dividends: to allow the US to gain stronger control over energy resources; to withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia while at the same time increasing the US military footprint in the Middle East via permanent bases in Iraq; to demolish Israel's primary military adversary in the region, paving the way for some kind of "settlement" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (no doubt a settlement to be forced on a cowering Arab world, perhaps via "transfer" and the reconstruction of a "Hashemite kingdom"); and, lastly, something that would trigger wider reforms in the Middle East, hopefully taking down unfriendly regimes and replacing them with ones that were more tolerant of and complicit with US dominance in the region, either militarily, economically, or culturally.

You'll notice here that Hussein's atrocities or the general welfare of Iraqs were, in my view, hardly primary considerations. If they were, they were viewed through the prism that a long term realization of these policy goals would yield a greater standard of living and a regime that doesn't engage in grievous human rights abuses somewhere down the line. I recognize these are respectable goals, but they are couched in so many assumptions about historical development, the moral superiority of the western capitalist model, and, dare I say, racism that they can only be seen as self-satisfying, arrogant delusions that posit the United States and its allies as the sole dispensers of justice in the world.

This piece by Ignatieff is simply amazing for betraying an obliviousness to the true foundations of the Iraq policy. Perhaps I should not be surprised. Michael Neumman dressed Ignatieff down a few months ago and everything he wrote then is relevant here.

Paying the piper

Why is this man smiling? Perhaps because the US government is still paying his political organ $340,000 a month, even after he helped the Bush administration bludgeon the nation to war.

The US miitary's footprint abroad

More than 60% of the US Army is stationed abroad, totaling more than 320,000 troops in 120 countries.

Unpleasant truths lilke these belie the fact that the US military is not in place around the globe to "promote freedom and democracy." It's there to enforce hegemony, gird strategic "hotspots," and secure control over major energy resources. The deployments abroad thus constitute, as Chalmers Johnson puts it, an "empire of bases."

OSP

Amazingly, CIA director George Tenet claims he knew nothing about the work of the Office of Special Plans. This is, of course, a laughable proposition.

In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tenet also admitted to having cautioned the Bush administration, Cheney in particular, about making too many unsupported claims regarding Iraq's alleged threat to the west.

In other OSP news, Salon has published a lengthy article by Karen Kwiatkowski, the former Pentagon official turned whistleblower, which summarizes what she's learned about the OSP. There's little in her piece that hasn't been revealed in her previous columns, but it's nonetheless a good primer of how she views the scandal.

The Washington Post also rings in with a piece that pretty much whitewashes the OSP role in the Iraq mess. The Post article is confined to beaurecratic details and has nothing substantial to say about the funneling of intelligence from the INC. Compare and contrast this article by Dana Priest with Kwiatkowski's Salon essay and Jim Lobe's reporting on this issue and you're left with a startling different picture.

Enabling the invasion

A new study released by the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) has found that the American media dropped the ball on the Iraq WMD issue and abrigated its responsibility "of checking and balancing the exercise of power that the standard theory of democracy requires."

Taliban sticking around

Are the Taliban really "gone"? Of course not. As Mark Sedra of FPIF argues, the group is merely sitting in the wings, biding time with calculated assaults on the Karzai regime, waiting for the West to once again lose interest in Afghanistan.

Bush now to answer all questions from 9/11 commission

The NY Times reports that, in an "apparent shift" due to charges that the President was "hindering the commission's investigation," Bush will now "answer all the questions of a federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks." Bush's aforementioned one-hour time limit for testimony has been dropped, as well.

Forced hiatus

I'm having trouble accessing the net from home, so I won't be posting until I can get things straightened out. Hopefully it won't take more than a day or so. Till then.

Bush or Kerry? On foreign policy, the difference is negligible

In his bid for the Presidency, John Kerry has outlined pretty stark differences between his proposed domestic program and that of George Bush. However, as William Blum, Chris Toensing, and Stephen Zunes have pointed out, Kerry's proposed foreign policy does not offer a radical break with the Bush administration.

John Pilger hammers this point home in an article for the New Statesman that draws heavily on a piece written by Mark Hand last month. Pilger finds, to an even greater degree than the authors mentioned above, Kerry's foreign policy stance to be cut from virtually the same cloth as the "Bush doctrine":

While the rise to power of the Bush gang, the neoconservatives, belatedly preoccupied the American media, the message of their equivalents in the Democratic Party has been of little interest. Yet the similarities are compelling. Shortly before Bush's "election" in 2000, the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative pressure group, published an ideological blueprint for "maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests". Every one of its recommendations for aggression and conquest was adopted by the administration.

One year later, the Progressive Policy Institute, an arm of the Democratic Leadership Council, published a 19-page manifesto for the "New Democrats", who include all the principal Democratic Party candidates, and especially John Kerry. This called for "the bold exercise of American power" at the heart of "a new Democratic strategy, grounded in the party's tradition of muscular internationalism". Such a strategy would "keep Americans safer than the Republicans' go-it-alone policy, which has alienated our natural allies and overstretched our resources. We aim to rebuild the moral foundation of US global leadership ..."

What is the difference from the vainglorious claptrap of Bush? Apart from euphemisms, there is none...

What the New Democrats object to is the Bush gang's outspokenness - its crude honesty, if you like - in stating its plans openly, and not from behind the usual veil or in the usual specious code of imperial liberalism and its "moral authority". New Democrats of Kerry's sort are all for the American empire; understandably, they would prefer that those words remained unsaid. "Progressive internationalism" is far more acceptable.

What Kerry and his minions are trying to do, Pilger argues, is reclaim Wilsonianism from the neocons to counter the Republican charge of being "soft on defense."

It's clear from a close reading of the PPI report that the "New Democrats" have internalized virtually all of the assumptions of Bush's "war on terrorism," leaving them in the position to periodically squabble over means and rhetoric, but not ends. The desirability of a US-dominated world system ruled by a mix of naked aggression, coercive economic policies, and bloviating diplomacy is viewed by both parties as a given.

In the end, "progressive internationalism" can be seen as a prudent policy platform that will give Kerry a shot in the November election, or as proof that the Democrats are unwilling to substantially challenge the Bushite vision of America's role in the world for the 21st century. Pick your poison.