No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

Right of Privacy Wins

The Houston Chronicle reports on today's Supreme Court decision. By a decision of 6 to 3, the Supreme Court threw out the conviction of two homosexual men having sex. This effectively gets the police out of the bedroom of homosexuals, a place they didn't belong in the first place.

I am a bit curious, however. According to the majority decision written by Kennedy Kennedy and four other justices said the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause guarantees the privacy rights of all Americans, regardless of their sexual orientation, much as it guarantees the privacy right of women to decide whether to seek abortions.

From Findlaw, here is the fourteenth Amendment. U.S. Constitution: Fourteenth Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment - Rights Guaranteed Privileges and Immunities of Citizenship, Due Process and Equal Protection

Amendment Text - Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section. 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Section. 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Section. 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

My guess is that the underlined portion is the critical part of the amendment, with a particular focus on the definition of 'Liberty'.

[Footnote 45] ''Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are equivalent to the rights of life, liberty, and property. These are fundamental rights which can only be taken away by due process of law, and which can only be interfered with, or the enjoyment of which can only be modified, by lawful regulations necessary or proper for the mutual good of all. . . . This right to choose one's calling is an essential part of that liberty which it is the object of government to protect; and a calling, when chosen, is a man's property right. . . . A law which prohibits a large class of citizens from adopting a lawful employment, or from following a lawful employment previously adopted, does deprive them of liberty as well as property, without due process of law.'' Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 116 , 122 (1873) (Justice Bradley dissenting

[Footnote 77] 165 U.S. 578, 589 (1897). ''The liberty mentioned in that [Fourteenth] Amendment means not only the right of the citizen to be free from the mere physical restraint of his person, as by incarceration, but the term is deemed to embrace the right of the citizen to be free in the enjoyment of all his faculties, to be free to use them in all lawful ways; to live and work where he will; to earn his livelihood by any lawful calling; to pursue any livelihood or avocation, and for that purpose to enter into all contracts which may be proper, necessary and essential to his carrying out to a successful conclusion the purposes above mentioned.''

The discussion of Privacy on findlaw is rather lengthy. One thing I find quite interesting is Privacy has in a number of cases been identified as a core value of the Bill of Rights,250 but it was not until Griswold v. Connecticut251 that an independent right of privacy, derived from the confluence of several provisions of the Bill of Rights or discovered in the ''penumbras'' of these provisions, was expounded by the Court and actually used to strike down a governmental restraint.

''The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, . . . the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. . . . These decisions make it clear that only personal rights that can be deemed 'fundamental' or 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,' Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 325 (1937), are included in this guarantee of personal privacy. They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage, Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967); procreation, Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541- 42 (1942); contraception, Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. at 453-54; id. at 460, 463-65 (White, J., concurring in result); family relationships, Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166 (1944); and child rearing and education, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535 (1925), Meyer v. Nebraska, supra.''254 In the pornography cases decided later in the same Term, the Court denied the existence of any privacy right of customers to view unprotected material in commercial establishments, repeating the above descriptive language from Roe, and saying further: ''the constitutionally protected privacy of family, marriage, motherhood, procreation, and child rearing is not just concerned with a particular place, but with a protected intimate relationship. Such protected privacy extends to the doctor's office, the hospital, the hotel room, or as otherwise required to safeguard the right to intimacy involved.''255


What is apparent from the Court's approach in these cases is that its concept of privacy is descriptive rather than analytical, making difficult an assessment of the potential of the doctrine. Privacy as a concept appears to encompass at least two different but related aspects. First, it relates to the right or the ability of individuals to determine how much and what information about themselves is to be revealed to others. Second, it relates to the idea of autonomy, the freedom of individuals to perform or not perform certain acts or subject themselves to certain experiences.256 Governmental commands to do or not to do something may well implicate one or the other or both of these aspects, and judicial decision about the validity of such governmental commands must necessarily be informed by use of an analytical framework balancing the governmental interests against the individual interests in maintaining freedom in one or both aspects of privacy. That framework cannot now be constructed on the basis of the Court's decided cases.

Look at the rest of the discussion in The discussion of Privacy on findlaw
It is an interesting discussion. If you can make any real decision based on the discussion, I would be interested in hearing it. It is, to say the least, confusing. It does appear to me that all the decisions are moving towards a right of privacy, but it is not at all clear to me what the parameters of that right are.

Let me make a clear statement here - I am not a lawyer and I don't even play one on the internet. This just seems to me to be an interesting question. Given a choice, I will decide in favor of a right of privacy from government (and religious) interference in the lives of individuals. I am reasonably sure such a right needs to include the sexual practices of informed and consenting adults. Beyond that, I don't know where it should go. Since Roe vs. Wade which is based on this right of privacy found in the fourteenth amendment is still upsetting so many troglodytes, I suspect we will all be looking at these questions again in the near future.

No bias here. I have no prejudices against troglodytes or dinosaurs. I just don't want them in my bedroom. Or my house. Or on my planet. Or .... Yeah.
posted by Richard at 10:35 PM

 

The Real Clash Of Civilizations: Liberals Versus The Crypto-Nazis

From Scoop we get this view of what is happening politically in the US.

I agree that the US political establishment has been taken over by a strange group using piles of money and control of major parts of the media. According to several editorials, Grover Norquist has described how the Republicans intend to put all federal taxes on labor while exempting capital from any taxation, which would be rather like what is described in the Scoop article.

How much of the article is hyperbole? Looks to me like a lot less than I would have guessed a year ago.
posted by Richard at 11:47 PM

 

Robert Reich on the Possibility of Deflation

Robert Reich in USA Today describes the factors that may be leading us into deflation and the way it would effect us (higher unemployment, more loan defaults).

He also describes the Bush administration policy in place to prevent deflation - None - Nada - Zip. There isn't any.
posted by Richard at 3:40 PM

 

Where Was the Press? Joining Starr in his Fake Moralistic Crusade against Clinton.

Richard Cohen asks the real question about the Starr investigation and the Clinton impeachment: How is it that the Press got so caught up by the illegal media leaks orchestrated to bring down the President by a moralistic prig of a partisan Independent Prosecutor who was unable to differentiate between sin and crime?

Cohen points out that Blumenthal's book has been given to the Clinton haters in the media to review.

I can tell you that he pulls together his own experience of the period, some original interviews and a synthesis of what has been written about the time to provide an excellent view of what was going on. Blumenthal is an excellent writer, and the book is gripping. It should be widely read - and the Republicans and much of the media really, really don't want you to. They do not come off well in the book.

Samuel Dash, Starr's ethics counselor in the book characterizes the special prosecutor as a morally obsessed inquisitor. "He lacked a lot of judgment," Dash told Blumenthal. "Starr didn't see the difference between a sin and a crime. His judgments were distorted." Dash says that Starr could have ended his investigation much earlier than he did. He had, really, nothing.

Blumenthal makes a good case that Starr's office was leaking reports from Grand Jury proceedings (a federal crime) to build media pressure against Clinton when Starr was unable to find any evidence that a crime had occurred. Reporters such as Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post would report the skewed and unflattering leaked material together with predictions that Starr was about to bring the criminal indictment. Then when the truth was clear and starr's lies exposed, such reporters would ignore it or gloss over it for fear of losing access to the leakers in Starr's office.

Ultimately Starr was never able to find evidence of any crime, and had to take a pornographic report of alleged sex to Congress to try to Impeach Clinton. The Republican majority of the House was unable to do anything except vote for impeachment since they were so invested in the whole business of Clinton-hating and dominated by the likes of Newt Gringrich, Dan Burton, Dick Armey and Tom Delay.

So why does that matter today? Again the media is trapped by its desire for access to official leaks. That is why you are seeing so little reporting on the way Bush bamboozled the US into its first preemptive war on a nation that was not threatening us.

Read Cohen's review. Then buy and read "The Clinton Wars."

posted by Richard at 2:59 PM

 

Krugman on Bush's Statements to Start the War in Iraq

June 24, 2003
Denial and Deception
By PAUL KRUGMAN


olitics is full of ironies. On the White House Web site, George W. Bush's speech from Oct. 7, 2002 — in which he made the case for war with Iraq — bears the headline "Denial and Deception." Indeed.

There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war. The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious.

About the deception: Leaks from professional intelligence analysts, who are furious over the way their work was abused, have given us a far more complete picture of how America went to war. Thanks to reporting by my colleague Nicholas Kristof, other reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and a magisterial article by John Judis and Spencer Ackerman in The New Republic, we now know that top officials, including Mr. Bush, sought to convey an impression about the Iraqi threat that was not supported by actual intelligence reports.

In particular, there was never any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda; yet administration officials repeatedly suggested the existence of a link. Supposed evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program was thoroughly debunked by the administration's own experts; yet administration officials continued to cite that evidence and warn of Iraq's nuclear threat.

And yet the political and media establishment is in denial, finding excuses for the administration's efforts to mislead both Congress and the public.

For example, some commentators have suggested that Mr. Bush should be let off the hook as long as there is some interpretation of his prewar statements that is technically true. Really? We're not talking about a business dispute that hinges on the fine print of the contract; we're talking about the most solemn decision a nation can make. If Mr. Bush's speeches gave the nation a misleading impression about the case for war, close textual analysis showing that he didn't literally say what he seemed to be saying is no excuse. On the contrary, it suggests that he knew that his case couldn't stand close scrutiny.

Consider, for example, what Mr. Bush said in his "denial and deception" speech about the supposed Saddam-Osama link: that there were "high-level contacts that go back a decade." In fact, intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and an infant Al Qaeda in the early 1990's, but found no good evidence of a continuing relationship. So Mr. Bush made what sounded like an assertion of an ongoing relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but phrased it cagily — suggesting that he or his speechwriter knew full well that his case was shaky.

Other commentators suggest that Mr. Bush may have sincerely believed, despite the lack of evidence, that Saddam was working with Osama and developing nuclear weapons. Actually, that's unlikely: why did he use such evasive wording if he didn't know that he was improving on the truth? In any case, however, somebody was at fault. If top administration officials somehow failed to apprise Mr. Bush of intelligence reports refuting key pieces of his case against Iraq, they weren't doing their jobs. And Mr. Bush should be the first person to demand their resignations.

So why are so many people making excuses for Mr. Bush and his officials?

Part of the answer, of course, is raw partisanship. One important difference between our current scandal and the Watergate affair is that it's almost impossible now to imagine a Republican senator asking, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

But even people who aren't partisan Republicans shy away from confronting the administration's dishonest case for war, because they don't want to face the implications.

After all, suppose that a politician — or a journalist — admits to himself that Mr. Bush bamboozled the nation into war. Well, launching a war on false pretenses is, to say the least, a breach of trust. So if you admit to yourself that such a thing happened, you have a moral obligation to demand accountability — and to do so in the face not only of a powerful, ruthless political machine but in the face of a country not yet ready to believe that its leaders have exploited 9/11 for political gain. It's a scary prospect.

Yet if we can't find people willing to take the risk — to face the truth and act on it — what will happen to our democracy?

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

This material is posted as a basis for discussion which I consider to be fair use.
posted by Richard at 2:21 PM

 

The Supreme Court Has Decided Race Can Be A Factor in College Admissions

Today we got a rather nuanced decision on the case against the University of Michigan for its consideration of race as a factor in admissions. Better than I expected, actually. Supreme Court Decision

I think the key is Here: THE COURT made it clear that the reason it upheld the law school admission policy while rejecting the undergraduate policy was that the law school gave what Justice Sandra Day O’Connor called “meaningful individualized review” to each applicant.

Keep in mind that America draws its upper class from these Universities. For most of us, the last major changes in our attitudes will occur there. So why do we want diversity in our Universities? Consider what the extremists are doing.
Read this article. MSNBC News Then remember - if we do not continually work to keep this nation and society diverse and unified, these people are out there ALWAYS working to split us into separate groups and make theirs dominant over everyone else. We MUST continue to work to keep them from winning again, as they did before.


posted by Richard at 12:47 AM

 

What is Wrong in Iraq Today?

Published on Sunday, June 22, 2003 by the Observer/UK
US General Condemns Iraq Failures
by Ed Vulliamy in New York

One of the most experienced and respected figures in a generation of American warfare and peacekeeping yesterday accused the US administration of 'failing to prepare for the consequences of victory' in Iraq.

At the end of a week that saw a war of attrition develop against the US military, General William Nash told The Observer that the US had 'lost its window of opportunity' after felling Saddam Hussein's regime and was embarking on a long-term expenditure of people and dollars for which it had not planned.

'It is an endeavor which was not understood by the administration to begin with,' he said.


Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, U.S. Army, is the retired Commanding General, 1st Armored Division

Now retired, Nash served in the Vietnam war and in Operation Desert Storm (the first Gulf War) before becoming commander of US forces in Bosnia and then an acclaimed UN Civil Affairs administrator in Kosovo.

He is currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, specializing in conflict prevention.

In one of the most outspoken critiques from a man of his standing, Nash said the US had 'failed to understand the mindset and attitudes of the Iraqi people and the depth of hostility towards the US in much of the country'.

'It is much greater and deeper than just the consequences of war,' he added. 'It comes from 12 years of sanctions, Israel and Palestinians, and a host of issues.'

As a result, he says, 'we are now seeing the re-emergence of a reasonably organized military opposition - small scale, but it could escalate.'

It was insufficient for the US to presume that the forces now harassing and killing American troops were necessarily confined to what he called a residue of the Saddam regime. 'What we are facing today is a confluence of various forces which channel the disgruntlement of the people,' said Nash.

'You can't tell who is behind the latest rocket propelled grenade. It could be a father whose daughter has been killed; it could be a political leader trying to gain a following, or it could be rump Saddam. Either way, they are starting to converge.'

He said: 'the window of opportunity which occurred with the fall of Saddam was not seized in terms of establishing stability'.

'In the entire region - and Iraq is typical - there is a sense that America can do whatever it wants. So that if America decides to protect the oilfields and oil ministry, it can.

'And if America doesn't provide electricity and water or fails to protect medical supplies, it is because they don't want to or they don't care.'

Nash is reluctant to make comparisons with Vietnam: 'There are far more things that were different about Vietnam than there are similarities. Except perhaps the word "quagmire". Maybe that is the only thing that is the same.'

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

Common Dreams News Center
posted by Richard at 6:27 PM

 

How Bush convinced America to Go To War

After 9/11 America was shocked and frightened, but after the invasion of Afghanistan a lot of people felt that Iraq was not an imminent threat against the US. Bush, however, had published the new strategic doctrine that in the case of an imminent threat we would resort to preemptive war. Neither Congress nor the people were convinced that Iraq was an imminent threat.

The New Republic Online has an excellent article on the sequence of events and the Intelligence available that led to the Second Gulf War. It was not only Congress and the people who were doubtful about the threat from Iraq.

he Bush administration decided to go to war with Iraq in the late fall of 2001. At Camp David on the weekend after the September 11 attacks, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz floated the idea that Iraq, with more than 20 years of inclusion on the State Department's terror-sponsor list, be held immediately accountable. In his memoir, speechwriter David Frum recounts that, in December, after the Afghanistan campaign against bin Laden and his Taliban sponsors, he was told to come up with a justification for war with Iraq to include in Bush's State of the Union address in January 2002. But, in selling the war to the American public during the next year, the Bush administration faced significant obstacles.

there was no consensus within the American intelligence community that Saddam represented such a grave and imminent threat. Rather, interviews with current and former intelligence officials and other experts reveal that the Bush administration culled from U.S. intelligence those assessments that supported its position and omitted those that did not. The administration ignored, and even suppressed, disagreement within the intelligence agencies and pressured the CIA to reaffirm its preferred version of the Iraqi threat. Similarly, it stonewalled, and sought to discredit, international weapons inspectors when their findings threatened to undermine the case for war.

Had the administration accurately depicted the consensus within the intelligence community in 2002--that Iraq's ties with Al Qaeda were inconsequential; that its nuclear weapons program was minimal at best; and that its chemical and biological weapons programs, which had yielded significant stocks of dangerous weapons in the past, may or may not have been ongoing--it would have had a very difficult time convincing Congress and the American public to support a war to disarm Saddam. But the Bush administration painted a very different, and far more frightening, picture.

The Bush administration displayed an acute case of willful blindness in making its case for war. Much of its evidence for a reconstituted nuclear program, a thriving chemical-biological development program, and an active Iraqi link with Al Qaeda was based on what intelligence analysts call "rumint." Says one former official with the National Security Council, "It was a classic case of rumint, rumor-intelligence plugged into various speeches and accepted as gospel."

In some cases, the administration may have deliberately lied. If Bush didn't know the purported uranium deal between Iraq and Niger was a hoax, plenty of people in his administration did--including, possibly, Vice President Cheney, who would have seen the president's State of the Union address before it was delivered. Rice and Rumsfeld also must have known that the aluminum tubes that they presented as proof of Iraq's nuclear ambitions were discounted by prominent intelligence experts. And, while a few administration officials may have genuinely believed that there was a strong connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, most probably knew they were constructing castles out of sand.

The article provides a great deal of detail to back up the statements I have excerpted here. What the Bush people did was to exaggerate the slightest rumors that supported the invasion and suppressed any evidence that did not support that invasion. They manipulated the public perception, based on their monopoly of access to the Intelligence sources and control of the analysis and reporting process. They probably knew they were going to do that at the time they announced the preemptive attack doctrine.

If we actually need to preemptively attack a nation in the future, do you think anyone will believe them? I won't.

posted by Richard at 8:05 PM

 

US Troops may be in Iraq as long as ten years

USA Today reports that US troops may be in Iraq as long as ten years. We will need to spend the money to build permanent facilities for them.

''We are still in a phase where we need some significant combat power to take on these remnants of the old regime,'' Wolfowitz said.

''I can't predict how long they (U.S. troops) will be there,'' he said. ''It's got to be driven by conditions and not the calendar.''

Which is pretty much what a lot of us were saying before they committed troops to Iraq.
posted by Richard at 10:19 PM

 

Republicans want no hearings or closed hearings

A LA Times Editorial considers open hearings on the information provided to authorize the Iraq War II as essential.

So do I.

Without such hearings, the question will simply sit out there and eat away at the government provided by G. Bush. It will not go away while we are getting body bags back from Iraq.
posted by Richard at 9:28 PM

 

Should Bush be Impeached if He Lied about WMDs?

LA Times

Robert Sheer has an editorial in the June 17th LA Times that makes the point.

Perhaps the Republicans think they can stall until fragments of evidence of weapons of mass destruction are found, which would clear Bush's name. However, that won't do the trick. The president persistently claimed that the war was necessitated by the imminent threat of deployed weapons — "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles," as the president put it, capable of dispersing a huge existing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including "missions targeting the United States."

We now know that the threat of deployed WMD was a blatant falsehood. What has not been established is whether the president was in on the lie. If he was, he should be impeached.

Bush has consistently lied about his policies on Social Security, Medicare, everything except tax cuts, and even on those he has been misleading. They are not an economic stimulator. He has other reasons for them.

A listing of some of the lies by Bush and his immediate cohorts is found here

But if he lied to convince the Congress and the American people to support the preemptive war on Iraq, then it is completely clear that he should not be President.
posted by Richard at 4:38 AM

 

Bush and the End of Reason

Nat Perry in consortiumnews.com

His lead - The United States is at a crossroads, with neither route offering an easy journey. In one direction lies a pretend land – where tax cuts increase revenue, where war is peace, where any twisted bits of intelligence justify whatever the leader wants and the people follow. In the other direction lies a painful struggle to bring accountability to political forces that have operated with impunity now for years.

In light of that carnage and the continuing bloodshed, the reaction to Bush’s WMD deceptions can be seen as a measure of how enfeebled the U.S. political system has become. Will the American people demand serious answers from Bush and his administration over what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls "the worst scandal in American political history," taking the nation to war over a series of lies and distortions? Or will the "feel good" Presidency roll on?

It is time to really work for accountability and honesty.
posted by Richard at 9:06 PM

 

Jim Jeffords - Two Years Later

Jim Jeffords at the National Press Club

From his talk:

The promises of candidate Bush, who pledged to bring a new tone to Washington and packaged himself as a compassionate conservative, are unmet. On issue after issue the Bush Administration is not what it claims to be. Since coming into office, the President has dragged the Republican Party into short-sighted positions that maximize short-term gain while neglecting the long-term needs of families and the nation.

Good article. Read it.
posted by Richard at 8:59 PM

 

The Household Music Critic

We have a White West Highland Terrier ("Westie") who is both a sweet dog and really smart. Of course, he barks at strangers, the Postman, the sounds of Harley Davidsons and diesel trucks, low-flying helicopters, Thunder, the voices of small children (live and on TV) .... and bad country and western music.

Did I say he was smart? Brilliant, even. If he doesn't like the music, it should never have been released. He has yet to get it wrong. [Grin]
posted by Richard at 8:42 PM

 

Is Lying to Congress to Justify a Preemptive Attack on Another Nation and impeachable offense under the Constitution?

John Dean has a position in US history that makes his view of what is and what is not impeachable quite important. He was the legal counselor to Richard Nixon during Watergate. This is his view.
posted by Richard at 8:33 PM

 

Arianna Huffington Editorial

Arianna Huffington may very well have hit on the reason the decisions coming out of the White House don't make sense to most of us. She applies the DSM IV to Bush's actions. What intrigues me is that a group with similar self-reinforcing problems seems to be in charge of this country. Her analysis is based on individual psychology, but there is also a social psychological element. What allows individuals with this kind of irrational reaction to group together and function jointly?

Read her editorial. She is reporting what seems to me to be a very accurate analysis. It explains why the reasons the White House has presented for preemptively invading Iraq simply don't add up.

The LA Times requires registration, but it is free, unlike Salon. Give them your hotmail address, not your email address for personal and important purposes. Oh, and lie about your income. [grin]
posted by Richard at 7:42 PM

 

Tax Cuts as a Job Creation Plan

"Hypocritical fraud."

That's what Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal- leaning Washington think tank responded when he was asked to describe the impact of Bush's tax cuts as an economic-stimulus measure.

The San Francisco Chronicle provides numbers that show that the rhetoric from the Bush administration simply does not describe what the tax cuts will really do.
posted by Richard at 12:28 PM

 

Terrorism and Peace in Israel/Palestine

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article today about Nancy Pelosi sending a letter to Bush supporting Sharon's efforts to kill the leader of HAMAS after the recent suicide bombing.

Actually, the increase in terrorist attacks by HAMAS is an indication of their fear that the Path to Peace and the new PLO Prime Minister just might establish a Palestinian nation next to Israel. They have to do what they can to derail the Peace efforts. Sharon is right to attack those in HAMAS who are leading the effort, because HAMAS will never accept the existence of an Israeli state.

In a different article SF Chronicle on HAMAS describes the HAMAS organization. A key is the statement in the HAMAS Charter:
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."

HAMAS has developed a strong grassroots following by providing efficient government services in Gaze when the PLO failed to do so. HAMAS is also seen as better than the PLO because it does not suffer from corruption as the PLO has. It exists for the sole purpose of fighting the existence of Israel.

From the article:
Sharon has pledged that Israel will "fight the terrorist organizations and their leaders to the death." But Ranstorp says that Sharon has a broader vision that precludes dealing the group a death blow.

"Israel knows every Hamas leader, every senior member and how they make their decisions," he said. Eliminating Hamas "is something Israel can do blindfolded if it wanted to, but it's not in Israel's interests to completely clip the wings of Hamas, which is a useful counterweight against the Palestinian Authority."
Even if Israel were willing to decapitate the organization's leadership, as it has threatened, the question remains: Is Israel capable of destroying Hamas?

The group's ability to mount continued attacks, despite Israel's heavy military presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, suggest that the army is not able to stop the group, which has a powerful grass-roots structure and cuts across social and class lines.

Ismail Abu-Shanab, a Hamas leader in Gaza, told Al-Jazeera satellite TV on Thursday that an all-out war "will make Hamas stronger."

"The Israelis experienced this in 1992 when terrorist (former Israeli Prime Minister) Rabin deported Hamas leaders to southern Lebanon," he said. "What results did he get? The resistance escalated and Hamas' capabilities for action were heightened. We are not afraid at all."

No plan is going to bring Peace to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict any time soon. Only the exhaustion of the Palestinians, the effective exclusion of Arafat from the situation and the exclusion of support from the Arab nations will do that. The Israelis are already quite exhausted from the battle, but the US guarantees their existence so they will fight on. The PLO and the Palestinians in general have, I think, accepted that the violence and the resulting low living standards are not worth the price of a religious war they cannot win.

HAMAS, however, is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, the most extreme of the fundamentalist extremists. The Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood joined with Al Quada years ago and provided much of Al Quada's leadership today. We in the US know very well how they use terrorism in the support of their beliefs. The leaders of HAMAS see the conflict much as do the leaders of Al Quada.

I don't know how things will play out, but neither does anyone else in the world. I do think that we may be watching what could be the end-game in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As long as it is clear to the world that we guarantee the existence of Israel, and will equally guarantee the existence of a viable, peaceful Palestinian state, then the end result may be one that the Islamic fundamentalists rail against and spend the lives of their children, but that will only depress the living standards of all the people in the area. It will change nothing important. Sooner or later, cooler heads will prevail.

The current bombs, missiles, blood and funerals do nothing except feed the world TV news. When overwhelming majorities on each side accept that, then the extremists will be caged and the violence will end.
posted by Richard at 4:10 PM

 

Bush's Proposed Drug Plan - More Bush Bait-and-Switch

The LA Times has a good editorial today. They point out that Bush, responding to calls for a drug plan for seniors, has essentially proposed one which will not work.

First, the Drug plan would require seniors to switch to managed care operations run by private insures. The Bush people estimate the 40% of the people on Medicare would switch, but independent surveys indicate that only 1 to 2% would switch. Too many seniors remember the disaster that occurred the last time private insurers offered HMO's through Medicare, then pulled out of the program leaving the seniors without the benefits.

Second, the plan is scheduled to phase in in 2006. The federal government appears to have more revenue predicted them, but this is smoke-and-mirrors. The reason for the apparently more revenue is that many of the tax cuts recently passed are scheduled to phase out at that time. We all know that will never happen.

Then there is the fact that there is no mechanism for controlling drug prices. Medicare is able to negotiate with drug manufacturers for lower prices. Private insurers cannot get the required market clout to do that, so the already over-priced drugs will simply get higher priced.

In short, it takes too long, will be too expensive for existing revenues, and will immediately suffer from cost over-runs. Something this year with cancellation of tax cuts to pay for it would be much better.
posted by Richard at 3:02 PM

 

Why Was the Department of Defense Briefing the CIA on Intelligence About WMD?

The New Republic

What do you want to bet that the CIA doesn't complete the review of the Intelligence leading to the Iraq War II before the 2004 election? Or at least, it won't be released. Wouldn't wnat to endanger methods and sources used by the DOD office set up to provide the answers the Neocons wanted, now would you?

DOUG FEITH SELF-DESTRUCTS: Forget the Tanenhaus-Wolfowitz transcript. The latest astonishing news out of the Pentagon is yesterday morning's press briefing with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Feith, a leading administration hawk, took to the podium to quash the emerging story that the Pentagon pressured or politicized intelligence on Iraq--particularly as it related to Iraq's ties to terrorism and its weapons of mass destruction--so policymakers (and the public) would only hear information that supported the hawkish argument. Alas, as the transcript reveals, the damage-control project is quickly unraveling.
Feith began by assailing the "goulash of inaccuracies" about the Defense Department's internal intelligence unit. In truth, he said, the tiny office was established a month after 9/11 to review previously collected intelligence about terrorism and "to think through what it means for the Defense Department to be at war with a terrorist network"--not to examine Iraq, and not to examine weapons of mass destruction. Feith conceded that the unit "came up with some interesting observations about the linkages between Iraq and Al Qaeda" and then presented them to the CIA in the summer of 2002. But he insisted that the unit's review of the Iraq-Al Qaeda link was "incidental." Furthermore, Feith said it was "flatly not true" that the unit "developed the case on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction," and argued that the intelligence assessments of the threat from Iraq's WMD stayed consistent with the Clinton administration's. And most important, he said it's "not true" that "the reason this team was created was because we wanted the intelligence looked at in a different way."

You would be forgiven for asking: What? Doesn't that last point contradict most of what Feith just said? And how could Feith say that the intelligence unit was only "incidentally" involved with Iraq if it briefed the CIA on the Iraq-Al Qaeda link, which many inside the intelligence community considered dubious? (His characterization is disputed by numerous current and former officials quoted in today's Washington Post, including one who said "there was a very aggressive search" for links.) What's more, what would be the point of a new intelligence-analysis shop on terrorism if not to explore weapons of mass destruction and state-sponsors like Iraq? And that's exactly what one very alert reporter asked:

Q: But the third point was you said there's no connection between this team and WMD. But you've just said that the relationship between terrorists and terrorist states and WMD has been--is--that was--demonstrated how they--

Feith: No, I didn't mean no connection between the team and WMD. If I said that, I misstated it. What I said is it was not the purpose or the special focus of this team to look at WMD. Its focus was to look at terrorist networks and the connection.

Q: (Inaudible.)--terrorist networks, and you've just explained how what 9/11 demonstrates is that terrorist networks and WMD and their acquisition thereof are importantly intertwined. And so, how do you not look at WMD when you're looking at terrorist networks in the case of Iraq?

Feith: No, I didn't mean to suggest that they didn't look at WMD at all. I'm saying that the mission that this team was given was not: Look at WMD. The mission that they were given was: Help us understand how these different organizations relate to each other and to their state sponsors.

Q: That may not have been their stated mission, but certainly that's one of the things they found, right?

Feith: I imagine--yes, I imagine that they looked at WMD along with other stuff. All I'm saying is it was not as it is portrayed in a number of erroneous press stories that we've read. It was not the purpose of this group to focus on the WMD issue.
At this point, like something out of a movie, a staff aide interjects:
Sir, I hate to bring this to a close, but I know you're at the end of your time here. Maybe you can take one or two more.
Feith went on to non-answer several more questions about why the CIA didn't conduct this terrorism-analysis review and whether there was any pressure from the Pentagon on intelligence analysts ("Who knows what people perceive?") before walking away from the podium. But the damage was done. As Eric Schmitt reports in today's New York Times, one defense official offended by Feith's effort concluded, "There was a lot of doublespeak out there." Even that seems generous to us.
posted by Richard at 10:29 PM

 

Good News - Bad News re: Iraq

Washington Post
Do you want the good news first or the bad news?

OK. Let me give you the Good News. Paul Bremer, the US Proconsul of Iraq, has decided NOT to turn Iraq over to an interim government headed by Chalabi.

"...as a scorching June heat envelops Baghdad, plans to cede power to the former opposition leaders have evaporated. Taking advantage of a recently passed U.N. Security Council resolution that gives the United States and Britain broad authority to run Iraq, the top U.S. civil administrator here, L. Paul Bremer III, said he intends to appoint Iraqis to a council that will advise him on policy decisions instead of endorsing the formation of a full interim government, which the former opposition leaders had hoped to lead. Bremer has promised that the council will include a spectrum of Iraqis and not be dominated by former exiles."

So what is the bad news? Simple. This means that those of us who said invading Iraq would involve a long and expensive occupation were right.

"The decision not to hand over power to the former opposition leaders through a hastily formed transitional government, which U.S. officials here said was made by the White House, means the United States will occupy Iraq much longer than initially planned, acting as the ultimate authority for governing the country until a new constitution is authored, national elections held and a new government installed. One senior U.S. official here predicted that process could last two years or more.

"The idea that some in Washington had -- that we would come in here, set up the ministries, turn it all over to the seven and get out of Dodge in a few months -- was unrealistic," the official said."

The connection with my continued rant that the administration lied to us is this. Much of the 'Intelligence' that Bush and his minions based their invasion of Iraq on (or at least the public justification for it) came from the exiles and especially Chalabi. The CIA and DIA appear to have discounted most of it as unrealistic and self-serving. Rumsfield didn't like that, and set up his own in-house analysis group that did not similarly discount what they were being told.

Rumsfield, Cheney, and Bush knew what they wanted to hear, so when the exiles gave them those answers, they discounted the CIA, DIA and State Department professionals. But the exiles under Chalabi wanted a powerful army that would take Saddam out and put them into power, so the made sure that they said what the Bush administration wanted to hear.

I think I like Paul Bremer. He seems to be realistic and sufficiently ruthless to accomplish the job he has been given. I wonder how long it will be before the Bush administration decides he is taking too long and acting too obstructionist to stay.

Here is a little of what he is facing Bremer, however, has rejected that request, insisting that it would take too long to convene an assembly and that it could be prone to manipulation by former Baathists and radical Islamic clerics. He said he will handpick the council, although he has promised to engage in broad consultations with Iraqis.

In response, one of two Shiite parties among the seven, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, threatened today to boycott the advisory council if members are selected by Bremer.

"If he's going to appoint an administration, we can't be part of that," said Hamid Bayati, a top Supreme Council official. "We will only be part of an administration selected by the Iraqi people. There are certain lines which we cannot cross."

Bayati expressed dismay that Bremer would try to marginalize parties that have pledged to cooperate with the United States and that serve as a link to important segments of Iraqi society. The Supreme Council, which had been based in Iran, is one of the largest parties representing Iraq's politically influential Shiite majority.

"If they sideline the former opposition groups, who are they going to consult with?" he said. "If he doesn't take the view of the seven groups, what other Iraqi groups can replace them?"

U.S. officials in the occupation authority say there are other Iraqis -- who opposed Hussein but did not go into exile -- who could serve as advisers to the United States and as possible future political leaders. As a first step in that direction, Bremer invited 10 more Iraqis to join a meeting on Friday evening with representatives of the seven former exile groups. The additional participants, most of whom stayed in the country during Hussein's rule, included three women, two tribal chiefs, a newly elected local mayor and a Muslim religious scholar.

"Before we got here, we had to depend on the exiles," one U.S. official said. "That's no longer the case."

Nation Building is slow, expensive and not very photogenic for an administration addicted to quick, politically useful cheap projects. The future conflict is very clear.
posted by Richard at 4:42 PM

 

How Does Bush Lie? Fifteen Techniques Listed

Dennis Hans Described and provided examples of fifteen techniques used by George Bush to sell his lies. This article was published in Late January or early February 2003.

In the paragraphs that follow I first will describe the technique of deceit. Then I will illustrate it with one or more quotations or propaganda themes, placing within brackets that portion of the quote that illustrates the technique. Then I will explain how the president applied the technique. Unless otherwise noted, the president's words are from the State of the Union address.

1) Stating as fact what are allegations - often highly dubious ones (this is a staple of Bush's speeches and Powell's U.N. presentation; I'll limit myself to three):

a) 'From three Iraqi defectors [we know] that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein [has not disclosed] these facilities. He [has given no evidence] that he has destroyed them.'

Comment: What we 'know' is that defectors make this unproven claim. We don't know if they were paid or coached to make the claim, or volunteered it on their own. For more on this, see Point 9 of the analysis (http://www.traprockpeace.org/firstresponse.html) of Powell's address by Dr. Glen Rangwala, Lecturer in Politics at Cambridge University, an advisor to Labor Party opponents of Tony Blair and perhaps the world's foremost authority on U.S. claims about Iraq, which may explain why one never sees him in the U.S. media. Rangwala notes that one defector made no mention of the labs in his first press conferences. It was several months later, after 'debriefings' by the U.S. and the Iraqi National Congress, that he started talking about mobile labs. Hans Blix told the Guardian newspaper of Britain (http://truthout.org/docs_02/020603A.htm) he has seen no evidence that these mobile labs exist. Acting on tips from the U.S. about labs disguised as food-testing trucks, he investigated. 'Two food-testing trucks have been inspected and nothing has been found,' he said. That doesn't mean that such labs don't exist, but at this point there simply is no proof of that claim. It is NOT an established fact.

b) 'The British government [has learned] that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'

Comment: Wrong verb. What he should have said is the Brits assert this but have produced no evidence of its veracity. The Brits have offered no date for these efforts, but 'recently,' in this case, may well mean 'the 1980s.' IAEA director Mohamed Elbaradei has for weeks been asking - so far, in vain - for the U.S. and Britain to provide 'specifics of when and where.' He said in a Jan. 12 interview, 'We need actionable information.' (Interview cited by Rangwala in his invaluable 'Counter-Dossier II,' (http://traprockpeace.org/weapons.html). c) 'We've [learned] that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.' (Bush's televised October speech)

Comment: The L.A. Times reported a few days after that speech that CIA director 'Tenet's letter was more equivocal, saying only that there has been 'reporting' that such training has taken place. Unlike other passages of the letter, he did not describe the reporting as 'solid' or 'credible.'' http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/la-na-cia11oct11.story

2) Withholding the key fact that destroys the moral underpinning of an argument (and, in Powell's case, reveals him to be a blood-drenched hypocrite):

'Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant, who [has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people.]' (Bush's October speech)

Comment: The problem here is that much of Bush's national-security team aided and abetted those crimes. After the worst attack, on Halabja in 1988 near the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the Reagan team covered for Saddam by implicating Iran, then prevented Congress from imposing tough sanctions on Iraq. Joost R. Hiltermann, an official with Human Rights Watch, shows in a recent column for the International Herald Tribune (http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0117-01.htm) that Saddam was likely emboldened to use ever more lethal concoctions to polish off the Kurds because he knew from past gassing experience in 1983, 1984 and 1987 that he could always count on the support of Reagan, Powell and George H. W. Bush. The latter?s son has yet to mention this in any of his righteous condemnations of Saddam. There are any number of governments who have the moral standing to condemn Saddam?s gassing of the Kurds. The one headed by George W. Bush does not.

Powell, of course, is the current administration's knight in shining armor, the trusted figure who commands the respect even of the European leaders who cannot stomach Bush. But give a listen to Peter W. Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and now professor of national-security studies at the National War College in Washington, D.C.:

'the Kurds have not forgotten that Secretary of State Colin Powell was then the national security adviser who orchestrated Ronald Reagan's decision to give Hussein a pass for gassing the Kurds.' http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2002/1215/coverstory_entire.htm

3) Misrepresentation/Invention:

a) 'I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied ? finally denied access, a [report] came out of the Atomic - the IAEA that they were [six months away from developing a weapon]. I don't know what more [evidence] we need.' (Bush speaking at a news conference Sept. 7 with Tony Blair)

Comment: As Joseph Curl reported three weeks later in the conservative Washington Times, there was no such IAEA report: 'In October 1998, just before Saddam kicked U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq [actually, they were withdrawn], the IAEA laid out a case opposite of Mr. Bush's Sept. 7 declaration: 'There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance,' IAEA Director-General Mohammed Elbaradei wrote in a report to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan' (http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020927-500715.htm). To this day, the administration has yet to produce a convincing explanation for Bush?s bogus assertion.

4) Delegated lying/Team lying:

Iraq was involved with 9-11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, via an Iraqi agent who met him in Prague in the spring of 2001, and thus the Iraqi regime may have participated in some fashion in 9-11. (summary of major, long-lasting propaganda theme)

Comment: For the most outrageous, easily disproved, yet highly effective lies, such as the Iraqi connection to 9-11, sometimes the wise course is to assign personnel far removed from the president to push the lie. That way, the president's credibility won't suffer when the facts - known to the administration months before it stopped peddling the lie - come out. And in a perverse fashion, the man at the top of this disinformation pyramid, the president, GAINS credibility for the disinformation in his own speeches, because commentators will note what a cautious and careful performance it was, given that he steered clear of the not-yet-confirmed 9-11 connection.

The farther out of the loop the designated lie-pushers are, the better: The administration can more easily keep from them the intelligence data that flat-out refutes the lie, which helps those lie-pushers who are more convincing when they THINK what they?re saying might be true than when they know for a fact it?s not true. For our purposes, whether the speaker believes what he says is irrelevant. What matters is that the administration is consciously deceiving the public.

The most aggressive pushers of this story have been neoconservative extremists Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Ken Adelman and Frank Gaffney, who either serve on the Defense Policy Board or are otherwise tangentially connected to the administration. (Gaffney has even tried to link Iraq to the 1995 terror bombing in Oklahoma City.) See this article (http://slate.msn.com/id/2070410/) for details on how this myth stayed alive long after intelligence pros definitely disproved it. Of course, now that the Atta link has petered out, another al Qaeda 'connection' of comparable validity is being spread - this time by Powell and Bush.

5) Straw man:

'The risks of doing nothing, the risks of assuming the best from Saddam Hussein, it's just not a risk worth taking.'

Comment: Notice that Bush doesn't name anyone who advocates 'doing nothing.' The whole idea behind DOING inspections and containment is that everyone knows we can?t take Saddam at his word. Here, for instance, is former President Jimmy Carter's eminently sensible and non-violent ?do-something? strategy to ensure the security of Iraq?s neighbors as well as the United States: http://alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=15084.

6) Withholding the key fact that would alert viewers that the purported grave threat is non-existent:

'Weve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using UAVs for missions [targeting the United States].' (October speech)

Comment: Bush omits the fact that the vehicles have limited range, thus requiring Saddam to transport the vehicles to our coast line WITHOUT BEING DETECTED. The odds of that happening start at a billion to one. (Dana Millbank exposed this lie last October in the Washington Post. The Post link has expired, but you can read this summary of the lies Millbank exposed: http://www.thedubyareport.com/malleablefacts.html.

7) Using mistranslation and misquotation to plant a frightening impression in the minds of trusting citizens that is the exact opposite of what you know to be true:

'Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls [his ?nuclear mujahedeen? -- his nuclear holy warriors].' (October speech)

Here Bush plays on two fears of the public: of Islamist holy warriors and nuclear weapons. But Saddam runs a secular state and has no ties to Islamist terrorists such as al Qaeda (despite other lies to the contrary). As for nukes, Iraq?s production capabilities had been destroyed completely by 1998, and today Elbaradei is in the process of verifying that Iraq has not taken even the first baby steps in what would be a mammoth effort to rebuild a nuclear infrastructure - an infrastructure that would be virtually impossible to hide.

Equally insidious on Bush's part is the mistranslation and misquotation. In 'Counter-Dossier II' (http://traprockpeace.org/weapons.html), Dr. Glen Rangwala, observes that the speech Bush is referring to was delivered by Saddam 'on 10 September 2000 and was about, in part, nuclear energy. The transcription of the speech was made at the time by the BBC monitoring service. Saddam Hussein actually refers to 'nuclear energy mujahidin,' and doesn?t mention the development of weaponry. In addition, the term 'mujahidin' is often used in a non-combatant sense, to mean anyone who struggles for a cause. Saddam Hussein, for example, often refers to the mujahidin developing Iraq's medical facilities. There is nothing in the speech to indicate that Iraq is attempting to develop or threaten the use of nuclear weapons.'

Was Bush aware of the mistranslation and misquotation? We?d have to inject him with truth serum to find out. Even if some senior intelligence official did the deed and kept the accurate quote and translation from Bush, it's obvious who is setting the deceitful tone in the administration. The official would have every reason to believe that this is just the sort of dirty trick - played on the unsuspecting American citizenry, not Saddam Hussein - that this president would love.

8) Putting the most frightening interpretation on a piece of evidence while pretending that no other interpretation exists:

'Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes [suitable for nuclear weapons production].'

Those tubes, unaltered, happen to be a perfect fit for a conventional artillery rocket program. For details, see the tubes section in my essay 'An Open Letter to the U.N. About Colin Powell' (http://commondreams.org/views03/0204-07.htm).

The Washington Post's Joby Warrick (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35360-2003Jan23.html) adds this: 'The tubes were made of an aluminum-zinc alloy known as 7000-series, which is used in a wide range of industrial applications. But the dimensions and technical features, such as metal thickness and surface coatings, made them an unlikely choice for centrifuges, several nuclear experts said. Iraq used a different aluminum alloy in its centrifuges in the 1980s before switching to more advanced metals known as maraging steel and carbon fibers, which are better suited for the task, the experts said. Significantly, there is no evidence so far that Iraq sought other materials required for centrifuges, such as motors, metal caps and special magnets, U.S. and international officials said.'

Following Powell's address, Susan Taylor Martin of the St. Petersburg Times (http://www.sptimes.com/2003/02/06/Worldandnation/A_strong_case__but_is.shtml) reported this: 'Powell's speech was 'not quite accurate' on two points, according to the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonpartisan organization in Washington that deals with technical aspects of nuclear proliferation. Contrary to Powell's claim, anodized tubes are not appropriate for centrifuges and the anodization, designed to prevent corrosion, would have to be removed before the tubes could be used, said Corey Hinderstein, assistant director: 'It's not to say it would be impossible to use anodized tubes for centrifuges but it adds an extra step.' She also challenged Powell's comment that the tubes must be intended for a nuclear program because they meet higher specifications than the United States sets for its own rocketry. 'In fact, we found European-designed rockets that had exactly this high degree of specificity,' Hinderstein said.'

9) Withholding highly relevant information that would weaken your case, because what you really want to obtain from the citizenry is 'the UNINFORMED consent of the governed':

North Korea?s 'secret' nuclear-weapons program wasn't a secret to the administration last fall. Yet it kept the information to itself, waiting till very late in the congressional debate over Iraq to inform not the entire public and Congress, but merely a relative few members of Congress. Thus, the Bush team didn't have to explain - well before each House even began to debate the various Iraq resolutions - exactly why the administration had no problem seeking a non-invasion solution to a crisis far more grave and imminent than Iraq.

10) Bold declarations of hot air:

a) '[The only possible explanation], the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate or attack.'

Comment: 'Deterrence' is also a generally understood reason to develop WMD. Just ask the leaders of North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia and the U.S. Deterrence and regional 'balance of power' considerations were obvious factors in Saddam's efforts in the 1980s to develop nuclear weapons. Not the only factors, but factors nonetheless.

b) 'Every chemical and biological weapon that Iraq has or [makes] is a direct violation of the truce that ended the Persian Gulf War in 1991.' (October speech, national television)

Comment: As Rahul Mahajan correctly observes (http://www.accuracy.org/bush/), 'There are no credible allegations that Iraq produced chemical or biological agents while inspectors were in the country, until December 1998. The reason we don?t know whether they are producing those agents or not since then is that inspectors were withdrawn at the U.S. behest preparatory to the Desert Fox bombing campaign.' Visit the Institute for Public Accuracy website (http://www.accuracy.org) for detailed critiques of Bush?s major addresses on Iraq.

11) Creating in the public mind an intense but unfounded fear:

'[Knowing these realities], America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a [mushroom cloud].' (October speech)

Comment: Iraq cannot turn American cities into mushroom clouds because it has no nuclear weapons and no long-range missiles to fire the nukes it does not have. The world is not about to let Iraq under Saddam resurrect its nuclear-weapons program. But even if the world did, Iraq would still be several years away from being able to develop that bomb.

12) Citing old news as if it's relevant today, while leaving out the reason it's not:

a) 'The International Atomic Energy Agency [confirmed] in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein [had] an advanced nuclear weapons development program, [had] a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.'

Comment: IAEA has also confirmed, that they shut the program down and destroyed all the production facilities - seemingly relevant facts: In October 1998, Elbaradei reported to the U.N: 'There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance' (http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020927-500715.htm).

13) Transference:

'[This nation fights reluctantly], because [we] know the cost, and [we] dread the days of mourning that always come.'

Comment: Bush is deliberately confusing the sensible, compassionate American people with his bellicose, bullying self.

14) Hallucinatory lying:

Bush's assertion, based on absolutely no evidence, that Saddam hopes to deploy al Qaeda as his ?forward army? against the West: 'We need to think about Saddam Hussein using al Qaeda to do his dirty work, to not leave fingerprints behind,' he told a Republican audience in Michigan prior to the congressional elections. (See David Corn's report at The Nation's website: http://thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=124.)

Comment: 'We need to think about' Bush using Adelman, Woolsey, Perle and Gaffney to do Bush's dirty work, so as to not leave presidential fingerprints on the hoariest lie of all - that Iraq was an accomplice in 9-11.

15) Withholding the key fact that would show your principled pose to be a pose devoid of principle:

'Saddam Hussein [attacked Iran in 1980] and Kuwait in 1990.' (U.N. speech, Sept. 12, 2002)

Comment: The Swedish government is entitled to condemn Iraq for invading Iran. The current U.S. government featuring key players from the very Reagan administration that supported Iraqi aggression through much of the 1980s' is not. If you surround yourself with officials who supported the aggression in real time, you're not entitled to be angered by it 20 years later.

This really lays it out.
posted by Richard at 2:29 PM

 

Bill Buckley - Who Screwed Up?

National Review Online

The Bush administration has a grave problem in the matter of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Jim Lacey, a Time correspondent embedded with the l0lst Airborne Division, summarizes his analysis in National Review. He writes that "there are some simple truths that many seem to be forgetting: l) At one time, Saddam had an extensive WMD program and enough chemical weapons and toxins to annihilate the eastern United States; 2) in the past, he used those weapons against his enemies, internal and external; and 3) he was an aggressive dictator who tortured and massacred his own people and bullied and periodically invaded neighboring countries."

Agree with all the above and you are still entitled to ask: Where is all that stuff?

[Much of Buckley's article skipped here]

There are those who take an easy position here. It is to conclude, like the New York Times's hysterical Paul Krugman, that Bush and Cheney are, very simply, liars. Those who reasonably doubt that George Bush and Dick Cheney would consciously lie to Congress and the American people and Tony Blair and for that matter the entire world, are, again reasonably, asked to look for other explanations.

We do need to have a much better explanation than any we have had. Going to war to abort Husseinism is justified. But we are nevertheless entitled to know: How was intelligence information, presented as conclusive, so apparently illusory? Who was it, on the assembly line between the first man who spotted what he took to be WMD activity in Iraq, and the Defense Intelligence Agency and the President of the United States who beamed out to the world, not suspicions of WMD activity, but affirmations of it, who screwed up? Who deceived, or was carried away? And what vaccines have our leaders taken to guard against other deceptions of like character?

I don't think that Bush et al see themselves as liars. I see them instead as ideologues who filter the information they accept based on what their ideology says must be right or wrong. Since they "know" what "must be true" and what "must be false", they automatically weight the information they receive based on that knowledge. They also evaluate the people they work with the same way. Those who disagree with things that "must be true" are soon excluded from working groups.

In any case, however, the result is that they have lied to the American people and the world about the justification for the preemptive war against Iraq. No matter how rotten Hussein and his regime was, they didn't sell the war on that basis. They sold it based on the immediate danger of WMDs (which has to mean nukes). When a sales person sells you one thing and delivers another, that is bait-and-switch. They may not see themselves as liars, but those of us who were lied to certainly should recognize that they are.
posted by Richard at 3:34 AM

 

Rumsfield Knows Results He Wants - Then Collects Facts to Support Those Results

New York Times

June 6, 2003
Cloaks and Daggers
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

n Day 78 of the Search for Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing turned up.

Spooks are spitting mad at the way their work was manipulated to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, and they are thus surprisingly loquacious (delighting those of us in journalism). They emphasize that even if weapons of mass destruction still turn up, there is a fundamental problem —not within the intelligence community itself, but with senior administration officials — particularly in the Pentagon.

"As an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, I know how this administration has lied to the public to get support for its attack on Iraq," one of my informants rages. Some others see a pattern not so much of lying as of self-delusion — and of subjecting the intelligence agencies to those delusions.

One has to take the outrage among the spooks with a few grains of salt because the intelligence folks have been on the losing end of a power struggle with the Pentagon. But that's the problem: the Pentagon has become the 800-pound gorilla of the Bush administration, playing a central role in foreign policy and intelligence as well as military matters.

"The basic problem here is that O.S.D. [Office of the Secretary of Defense] has become too powerful," noted Patrick Lang, a former senior official in the Defense Intelligence Agency.

One step came in the Clinton administration, when the defense secretary gained greater control over the handling of images from spy satellites. Mr. Rumsfeld then started up his own intelligence shop in the Pentagon. The central philosophy of intelligence — that it should be sheltered from policy considerations to keep it honest — was deeply bruised.

A commission led by Brent Scowcroft suggested two years ago that intelligence functions be consolidated under the director of central intelligence. It was an excellent idea — killed by, among others, Mr. Rumsfeld.

My own limited encounters with spies reinforce the idea that intelligence needs to be digested by professionals rather than cherry-picked by ideologues. I remember one spy who would call me up periodically for lunch when I lived in China. He would pass on amazing inside tidbits about China's top leaders — and then ask for copies of classified Chinese documents I had obtained.

I kept putting him off because I wasn't going to share my documents — but I did want his scoops. Unfortunately, I could never confirm them, so they were unusable. Finally, it dawned on me that he was simply fabricating juicy tidbits so he would have something to trade.

That's the way the intelligence game sometimes operates: the information is voluminous, confusing and contradictory, and prone to abuse, and it needs to be protected from policy makers rather than massaged to make them feel good.

"The president is a very powerful guy," said Ray Close, who spent 26 years in the C.I.A. "When you sense what he wants, it's very difficult not to go out and find it."

As best I can reconstruct events, Mr. Rumsfeld genuinely felt that the C.I.A. and D.I.A. were doing a horrendous job on Iraq — after all, he was hearing much more alarming information from those close to Ahmad Chalabi. So the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, and it sifted through everyone else's information and goaded other agencies to come up with more alarmist conclusions.

"He's an ideologist," one man in the spy world said of Mr. Rumsfeld. "He doesn't start with the facts, even though he's quite brainy. He has a bottom line, and then he gathers facts to support the bottom line."

That is not, of course, a capital offense. Pentagon leaders should feel free to disagree strenuously with foolish judgments by the C.I.A. But for the process to work, top C.I.A. officials need to fight back. Instead, George Tenet rolled over.

"Tenet sided with the D.O.D. crowd and cut the legs out from under his own analysts," said Larry Johnson, a retired C.I.A. analyst.

Does this mean that Mr. Tenet should be fired? I don't think so. Despite his failure to stand up for his people, he should not be made a scapegoat for problems that arose primarily from the Pentagon's zealotry — and ousting him would leave O.S.D. more powerful than ever.

"There was a collective failure here," one senior person in the intelligence world said. "At the end of the day, it should not be George left out to dry."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

This seems a fair description of what I have believed of this administration. For all his training in business administration, Bush has not required the various agencies to do their own jobs and leave the jobs of others to those other agencies. Instead, Rumsfield has amassed a great deal of personal power in the federal government, and is taking on to himself jobs for which he is not especially trained and does not have the necessary organizational resources. Particularly, Rumsfield has been setting foreign policy, as well as defense policy. It is also now clear that he is also attempting to determine the results of Intelligence, based not on the intelligence sources and a reasonable evaluation of their reliability, but instead based on the policy he has already decided on and wants the Intelligence to support.

The top Brass of the military haven't made that mistake, so they were able to show their competence in Iraq. Unfortunately, the political levels of this administration have not shown similar competence, and this is a major reason why. They act on their ideology, not on what the facts indicate they should do. This, oddly enough, is exactly the same mistake made by the Communist leaders of the USSR.
posted by Richard at 3:02 AM

 

DIA - 2002 - No Evidence Iraq has WMDs

CBS News
(CBS/AP) The U.S. Defense Department's intelligence service reported last September that it had no reliable evidence that Iraq had chemical agents in weaponized form, officials said Friday.

The skeptical study's release in September coincided with Bush administration efforts to mount a public case for the urgency of disarming Iraq, by force if necessary.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others argued that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical, biological and other weapons and was hiding them.

Two months after major fighting in Iraq ended, U.S. officials have yet to find any chemical or other mass-killing weapons, although they still express confidence that some will turn up.

Despite searches at some 300 sites, and the capture of several high-ranking Iraqis, no evidence has turned up. Two suspected mobile biological weapons factories were found, but showed no sign of having been used to create weapons.

More CBS News In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair took it on the chin, as leaders of the British Parliament handed down some vicious jabs.

“The Prime Minister misled Parliament and the country in the run-up to the war,” said Conservative Leader Duncan Smith. “Nobody believes a word now that the Prime Minister is saying.”

Meanwhile, overseas at the Pentagon, officials found themselves fending off accusations from reporters that they had ordered up tailor-made intelligence findings to justify the Iraqi invasion. U.S. government officials flatly deny any such action

Now critics are questioning whether the intelligence about such weapons was exaggerated as a justification for the three-week war.

In the U.S., the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is investigating. In the British Parliament, a similar probe is underway. And CIA Director George Tenet has ordered an internal review of his own operatives by retired intelligence analysts.

Also at issue is the degree to which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld relied upon a small, Pentagon-based cell of intelligence analysts independent of the CIA.

The investigations could produce more than the usual finger-pointing, as there’s something bigger than blame at stake, that being whether the U.S. intelligence gathering apparatus was politically pressured to see things that weren't there and say things that weren't so.

Congress was stampeded into authorizing war in Viet Nam because of the lie about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. This is no different.
posted by Richard at 3:36 PM

 

Congress Said Bush was Authorized to Go To War With Iraq Because Iraq Was an Immediate Threat to the US

Washington Post By Richard Cohen
Thursday, June 5, 2003; Page A33

Last October, Congress passed a resolution authorizing the president to use force in Iraq. It said nothing about bringing democracy to Iraq, reordering the Middle East or getting the Israelis and Palestinians to make nice -- some of the reasons now retroactively advanced to justify the war. Instead, the resolution talked about the grave threat the United States faced from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his links to al Qaeda. In less than a year, that resolution has gone from a stirring call to war to an outright embarrassment.

The resolution declares that "Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region." It says that Iraq "continues to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability." It says Iraq is "actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations." It says that based on those findings, the president was authorized to go to war. He did. You can look it up.

It's too soon to know if the Bush administration was lying, exaggerating or simply mistaken. But it is not too soon to say that the case it advanced concerning weapons of mass destruction was much more tenuous than the administration admitted. It somehow forgot to mention all the caveats, doubts and contrary evidence. As for the link with al Qaeda, that was just plain hogwash -- not that it was believed by anyone much in Congress. Just the American people.

Nothing Bill Clinton ~ever~ said to the public was this big of a lie. Nothing!

In fact, this even out-lies Nixon at his very worst!

A government that must lie to its people is not a democracy. It is a tyranny.
posted by Richard at 10:51 PM

 

Why Did DoD Set Up Its Own Intelligence Operation?

Here is the explaination of Feith, the guy who ran it. New York Times

Am I sceptical? Yeah, but read it for what it's worth.
posted by Richard at 10:39 PM

 

Army Won't Face Reality

USA Today By Dave Moniz, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The former civilian head of the Army said Monday it is time for the Pentagon to admit that the military is in for a long occupation of Iraq that will require a major commitment of American troops.

Former Army secretary Thomas White said in an interview that senior Defense officials "are unwilling to come to grips" with the scale of the postwar U.S. obligation in Iraq. The Pentagon has about 150,000 troops in Iraq and recently announced that the Army's 3rd Infantry Division's stay there has been extended indefinitely.

"This is not what they were selling (before the war)," White said, describing how senior Defense officials downplayed the need for a large occupation force. "It's almost a question of people not wanting to 'fess up to the notion that we will be there a long time and they might have to set up a rotation and sustain it for the long term."

Looks like if you try to tell the truth to the Bush administration (especially Rumsfield) you get fired. But the State Department leaked a study saying that it was not likely that Iraq would become a democracy before the war, and the experience in Bosnia has been that we are still there and there is no exit in sight. This administration has been talking about us pulling our troops out next Fall. Surely no one has taken that seriously outside the administration! It simply isn't reasonable!

The next thing is that while we are there, there will be a steady low level of attacks on our troops. That's also true in Afghanistan. But we are now there in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We own them. Their governments are ~our~ responsibility.

So why are governments established? Jefferson said they were to provide for "...Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The Bush administration has taken the responsibility for those things for Iraq and Afghanistan onto the US, just as Clinton took them on for Bosnia - and we are still there in Bosnia.

The Taliban clearly did not offer Life, liberty or the Pursuit of Happiness. Neither did Saddam, but the radical Shiites don't either. We can't let the Ba'ath Party have Iraq back, not can we turn it over to the Shiites or the Whahabi Fundamentalist Muslims. Nor can we let the Taliban have Afghanistan back, yet to let the wqrlords have most of the nation is much the same.That is what we are presently doing. In Iraq and Afghanistan we (that is the Bush administration acting in the name of the American People) have grabbed the tarbaby, and now we are stuck. The cost of leaving is now higher than the cost of staying - except perhaps politically in the short term for the Bush administration.

Which has always been the real objection to such nation-building exercises. Is it worth being in control of those countries because we fear the repeat of 9/11? The real question, though, is whether this is even an appropriate response to 9/11.

I guess it comes down to two questions. The first is whether the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are workable responses to the threat posed by 9/11. The second question is whether the two invasions and the resulting nation-building responsibilities are worth the cost.

Personally, I am convinced that Afghanistan was appropriate and worth it. But the jury is still out on Iraq. The other question is whether the Bush administration is willing to do what is required in either country after the war is over. The history in Afghanistan is not encouraging.
posted by Richard at 10:22 PM

 

O'Reilly Lies

Joe Conason's Journal
Bill O'Reilly enters a real no-spin zone -- and loses.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
June 4, 2003 | O'Reilly in the real no-spin zone
Bill O'Reilly wins almost every argument in the Fox News environment created by Roger Ailes, who manages more fixed fights than the mob ever did. But venturing forth from the Ailes-controlled arena can be quite perilous, as O'Reilly discovered last Saturday afternoon when he showed up for a panel at the L.A. Book Expo with Molly Ivins and Al Franken. The moderator was former Rep. Pat Schroeder. (Tucker Carlson was unavoidably absent, leaving O'Reilly to cope with the kind of odds that liberals invariably face on Fox.)

All three authors went to Los Angeles to promote their new books. Franken's forthcoming tome, sassily titled "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," features a cover photo of O'Reilly among the pack of prevaricating wingers.


So Franken began to tell, almost midway through the panel presentations, how he exposed O'Reilly's fibs about winning the Peabody Award a couple of years ago. (FAIR offers a version of the same tale on its Web site here. "Inside Edition" did win a George Polk Award, which is remarkable enough, but that was after O'Reilly had left the show.)

While O'Reilly sat visibly steaming on the dais, Franken cheerfully exposed his repeated spinning and falsifying about the Peabody, the most prestigious award in broadcasting, which he claimed to have won while working at the "tabloidy" "Inside Edition."

According to Franken, he was so astonished after hearing O'Reilly claim to have won the Peabody that he phoned the people who give out those awards. "Did you guys give 'Inside Edition' a Peabody?" he recalled asking. Pause. "There was some laughter ..."

There was some laughter from the audience in L.A. as well, but the effect of this story when recounted in full is so devastating that one almost had to feel sorry for O'Reilly. Almost, that is, until a few minutes later when he bellowed "Shut up!" at Franken. That was pretty much his entire "rebuttal."

I can't quite do this whole scene justice, particularly because Franken's shtick is so sharp. See it for yourself, either on the Book TV Web site, or when the tape is rebroadcast on C-SPAN next Sunday.

If you're watching on RealPlayer and can't wait for the confrontation, skip ahead 41 minutes from the beginning; then rewind to hear the rest of Franken's presentation and the mighty Molly, who was just plain superb.
[8:12 a.m. PDT, June 4, 2003]

For your regular Joe, bookmark this link Salon.
salon.com
posted by Richard at 9:39 PM

 

Bush Lies

Gordon Livingston of the Baltimore Sun points out that: ...a report by leading economists concluded that the economy would grow by 3.3 percent in 2003 if his tax cut proposals were adopted. No such report exists.

This is just one more lie he has told. Why can't he just lie about sex, instead of stuff like this that will cost me money?
posted by Richard at 9:20 PM

 

Greenspan - No indications of Economic Upturn at This Time

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

WASHINGTON - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Tuesday there is no "major evidence" that U.S. economic growth is accelerating. He hinted again that the central bank may soon cut interest rates to boost growth and guard against a dangerous period of deflation.

Speaking via satellite to a meeting of the world's leading private bankers in Berlin, Greenspan said the Fed has no concerns that a pickup in growth would cause inflation to get worse. Instead, "we would be far more inclined, as we have been over the last couple of years, to be taking out insurance against economic weakness" that could cause what he termed a "corrosive deflation."

Paul Krugman writes on the idiocy of the Bush administration economic policy. Check it out.
posted by Richard at 3:18 PM

 

Texas Governor Perry Ran No-Holds Barred Search for the Democratic Legislators

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported today that Texas Governor Republican Rick Perry was heavily involved in directing the search for the Democratic House Legislators who were preventing the House from considering the redistricting Bill being pushed by Republican Tom Delay (Speaker of the US House of Representatives).

An excerpt from the article:

Records from May 12-13 show that Perry personally ordered the DPS to search for two state representatives who helped break the quorum to kill a GOP-backed congressional redistricting plan. One was Rep. Rene Oliveira, D-Brownsville, who fled to Mexico, and the other was Rep. Craig Eiland, D-Galveston, who went to Ardmore, Okla., along with most of the other House Democrats involved in the walkout.

The notes -- which detail Perry's involvement and the no-holds-barred dragnet for the Democrats -- escaped the destruction order because the DPS wanted to be able to respond to a complaint by Eiland. Eiland has said the DPS went overboard by sending a Texas Ranger to hunt him down, unsuccessfully, at the Galveston neonatal unit where his premature twins were recuperating.

"Lt. [Will] Crais came in to say Governor has ordered two Rangers sent to find Rep. Oliveira & Craig Eiland," said the handwritten notes, taken May 12 from a Texas Ranger who was at the command center set up near the office of House Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland.

Another notation later that night said Perry "wants surveillance on Oliveira's residence and arrested if he exits."

Perry did not deny issuing orders that resulted in troopers searching for Democrats, including going to the Galveston hospital where Eiland's newborn children were being cared for. Eiland says he had told Craddick about the twins' birth in April.

"You betcha, I told the DPS to follow the instructions of this speaker ... follow the law," the governor said Tuesday in Dallas. He said he ordered DPS officials to do "whatever the DPS needed to do ... to retrieve House members."

Perry also said he told troopers to find the lawmakers "no matter where they were." In a previous statement, Perry had downplayed the role of his office, suggesting its only involvement was in trying to determine whether extradition from out-of-state was possible.

The documents contain only hints about the federal role in the search. One notation said the DPS "is attempting to effect arrests via federal authorities, if possible," but it was unclear whether the DPS was initiating the contact with federal authorities or whether the note-taker was simply recording Craddick's publicly stated instructions.

The Republicans have not had control of the Texas Legislature since the 19th Century. Now that they have it, they have been overreaching badly and misusing the power they think they have. This has simply been an example.
posted by Richard at 2:55 PM

 

The Reasons for the Iraq War

Thomas Friedman presents an excellent essay on why the war on Iraq was right.

He also states: But my ultimate point is this: Finding Iraq's W.M.D.'s is necessary to preserve the credibility of the Bush team, the neocons, Tony Blair and the C.I.A. But rebuilding Iraq is necessary to win the war. I won't feel one whit more secure if we find Saddam's W.M.D.'s, because I never felt he would use them on us. But I will feel terribly insecure if we fail to put Iraq onto a progressive path. Because if that doesn't happen, the terrorism bubble will reinflate and bad things will follow. Mr. Bush's credibility rides on finding W.M.D.'s, but America's future, and the future of the Mideast, rides on our building a different Iraq. We must not forget that.

Maureen Dowd makes the point most of us should be focusing on: For the first time in history, America is searching for the reason we went to war after the war is over. [My underlining.]

Friedman suggests that a lot of what has happened in the middle east has resulted from the changed perspective many have after we conquered Iraq. Dowd, however, points out that if we attacked Iraq in order to stabilize the middle east, then the results are certainly quite mixed.

In a Vanity Fair interview, Paul Wolfowitz said another "almost unnoticed but huge" reason for war was to promote Middle East peace by allowing the U.S. to take its troops out of Saudi Arabia — Osama's bête noir. But it was after the U.S. announced it would pull its troops from Saudi Arabia that a resurgent Qaeda struck a Western compound, killing eight Americans.

And it was after the U.S. tried to intimidate other foes by stomping on Saddam that Iran and North Korea ratcheted up their nukes. Iran and North Korea actually do have scary nuclear programs, but if we express our alarm to the world now, will we be accused of crying Wolfowitz?

A new Pew survey of 21 nations shows a deepening skepticism toward the U.S. "The war had widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans, further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the war on terrorism, and significantly weakened global public support for the pillars of the post-World War II era — the U.N. and the North Atlantic alliance," said Pew's director, Andrew Kohut.

Brits may be more upset with Mr. Blair than Americans are with Mr. Bush because they have the quaint idea that even if you think war was a good idea, you should level with the public about your objectives.

I didn't think we were being told the real reasons for the war in advance, and I was right. I didn't think that Saddam and Iraq posed an immediate danger to the US, or even a significant danger in the future. So far the lack of the discovery of nukes proves me right on that. [The issue of ~WMD's~ is a bait and switch technique. Neither chemical nor biological weapons are major threats to the US. The only significant issue for our security is and was nukes - as the North Koreans well know.] Well, we are now in control of both Iraq and Afghanistan. I very much agree with Friedman that the world future and America's security all depend on our building a different Iraq.

Nothing in the rhetoric coming out of the Pentagon (which apparently is currently setting our foreign policy) or the White House gives me any comfort that they plan to spend the time, dollars and lives which will be required to permit the necessary changes in Iraq. Instead I expect them to follow the pattern they have shown in Afghanistan. The minute it is out of the news, they will ignore it.
posted by Richard at 8:13 AM