Airwar surge felt by Iraqi civilians

Conn Hallinan writing for Foreign Policy In Focus:

These assaults are part of what may be the best kept secret of the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts: an enormous intensification of US bombardments in these and other countries in the region, the increasing number of civilian casualties such a strategy entails, and the growing role of pilot less killers in the conflict.

According to Associated Press, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of bombs dropped on Iraq during the first six months of 2007 over the same period in 2006. More than 30 tons of those have been cluster weapons, which take an especially heavy toll on civilians.

...The result of the stepped up air war, according to the London-based organization Iraq Body Count, is an increase in civilian casualties. A Lancet study of “excess deaths” caused by the Iraq war found that air attacks were responsible for 13% of the deaths - 76,000 as of June 2006 - and that 50% of the deaths of children under 15 were caused by air strikes.

Superb analysis of Iraq War by conservative scholar

Robert Higgs of The Independent Institute responds to the news headline “Citing Vietnam, Bush Warns of Carnage if U.S. Leaves Iraq”:

what does he [President Bush] suppose will happen if U.S. forces do not leave Iraq? Surely the answer must be: carnage on a vast scale, carnage with no end in sight. Regardless of how deeply the president may immerse himself in wishful thinking, no other outcome may reasonably be expected.

Bush reminded the listeners of his “carnage warning” speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City that when U.S. forces pulled out of Vietnam, “the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens.” So it was. Yet, once the U.S. forces had done what they had done prior to 1973, what would have happened had they remained in Vietnam, continuing to carry on their war business as usual? The only reasonable answer is: more of the same, on a vast scale-carnage that would have continued as long as U.S. forces remained in the country.

In Iraq, as in Vietnam earlier, we must expect that if U.S. forces were to leave, more carnage would occur. It is conceivable that the Iraqis would devise a way to settle their differences without enormous violence, but the odds now seem greatly against their doing so. Ultimately, of course, they would find a way; no society can persist forever in a state of civil war on the scale that now prevails in Iraq. Yet many more people are almost certain to die and to suffer wounds and the destruction of property before a peaceful resolution is effected. And that resolution itself may be dreadful in other regards. The United States, however, cannot prevent this distressing outcome. Indeed, its invasion and occupation have created conditions that make such an outcome virtually unavoidable. In short, the U.S. adventure in Iraq cannot have a happy ending. Just because the president unleashed the demons now raging across Iraq does not mean that he or anyone else can chain them now.

Unless the U.S. forces leave, however, their containment will never really get started, because aside from a small group of collaborators and puppet officials, all Iraqis agree on the desirability of getting U.S. and other foreign forces out of the country.

Jimmy Breslin has had enough

I have here in front of me a large number of pages that I keep for their significance. They are from a United States Senate hearing and are titled, “In Re Impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.”

He was only the 42nd person in our nation to make the commitment to “faithfully execute” the Office of the President and to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.”

He was being impeached over lying about girls.

Bush the President is our 43rd. He lied to the nation to get us into a war in Iraq that is without end. Every young person who has died leaves drops of blood on Bush’s hands and those of everyone around him. He lied to the nation and daily he tries every greasy way to undermine the Constitution he is sworn to uphold. Thus making his oath false.

Clinton’s charges seem frivolous. But Bush appears to have committed high crimes and misdemeanors and must be thrown out of office in the disgrace that he is.

Jimmy Breslin

IAEA: Iran No Nuclear Threat

Contrary to Bush administration scare tactics, a report of the the International Atomic Energy Agency obtained byReuters suggests that Iran is not hell-bent on producing nuclear weapons:

Iran’s uranium enrichment program is operating well below capacity and is far from producing nuclear fuel in significant amounts, according to a confidential U.N. nuclear watchdog report obtained by Reuters.

If there is a confrontation, it will be because our leaders see Iran as an obstacle to US domination of the Middle East, not because Iran poses any kind of even remotely plausible nuclear threat.

Coming soon to a Campus near you

it's ...
[drumroll]...

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

No fooling.

According to A Student's Guide to Hosting Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week:

During the week of October 22-26, 2007, the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever – Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses.

Wow. We'll be rocked. Woken up even. It'll be, like, a Million Mook March.

And the truth will finally be told on campus:

In the face of the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted, the academic left has mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy and to fight anyone who rallies Americans to defend themselves. According to the academic left, anyone who links Islamic radicalism to the war on terror is an "Islamophobe." According to the academic left, the Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are tolerant and free, but because we are "oppressors." Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is a national effort to oppose these lies and to rally American students to defend their country.

And guess who's organizing that? That political entrepreneur and champion of religious, intellectual, and every other kind of tolerance and freedom, David Horowitz:

Horowitz, president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (previously the Center for the Study of Popular Culture) editor-in-chief of FrontPageMag.com, and founder of Students for Academic Freedom, is, of course, a former leading New Leftist who has found fame and fortune – he made $352,647 in 2005, according to tax records – on the extreme right and has done particularly well since 9/11 when he got in on the “Islamo-fascist” ground floor.

...According to tax records obtained through the Foundation Center, Horowitz has been the beneficiary in recent years of a number of far-right foundations, including the Allegheny ($575,000 since 2001), Carthage ($125,000) and Sarah Scaife Foundations ($800,000) – all three are part of Richard Scaife’s empire and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (nearly $1.3 million). The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation ($475,000) also contributed nearly $500,000 to Horowitz’s enterprises over the same period.

More on Horowitz and his lucrative pursuit of Truth, Justice and The American Way here. And an essay on why Horowitz is (both literally and figuratively) such a tool.

This would also seem an opportune moment to recall Operation Yellow Elephant in case any of the patriotic young anti-Islamo-fascists might want to, you know, enlist or something.

These dang wars just keep happening to us

Bush to American Legion:

Once again, America finds itself a nation at war.

Hm. Wonder how that happened. It's not like anybody really wanted it to happen. Yet, here we find ourselves, at war.

Kinda puzzling.

Wonder if it could happen again. Who would want that?

You just can't have too many guns

Or can you?

Bush vs Zombie menace

Thanks to Crooks and Liars for highlighting this guy's work.

Salon's Gary Kimiya on the waning power of the War Myth:

Bush's entire presidency has been propped up by the War Myth. By aggressively presenting himself as a war leader, by wrapping himself in the sacred robes of patriotism, the military and national honor, Bush has taken refuge in the holy of holies, the ultimate sanctuary in American life. He has made criticism of his policies tantamount to criticism of the one institution in American life that is untouchable: the military. He uses the almost 4,000 new crosses in military cemeteries as a talisman against his opponents -- notwithstanding the fact that he is wholly responsible for those crosses.

...We are now approaching an endgame in Iraq that has its own inexorable logic, which not even Bush's appeals to the War Myth will be able to stop.

In some part of his brain, Bush knows this -- which explains his other motivation for invoking Vietnam and attacking war critics as defeatists. As a partisan Republican, still dreaming of Karl Rove's permanent Republican majority,he wants to ensure that the Democrats take the blame in the coming argument over "who lost Iraq?" By defiantly insisting, contrary to all evidence, that victory is within grasp, he is planting the seeds of a resentful revisionism, a stab in the back II, which he hopes will come to fruition in the future.

The climax of the slow-motion debate over Iraq is approaching. At some point in the near future, it will become inescapably obvious even to congressional Republicans, who hold the key to the decision to stay or go, that the war cannot be won. Bush will continue to proclaim that victory is within sight and accuse his critics of being defeatists.

But the War Myth cannot save him forever, because he's overused it. It will buy him a few weeks or months of breathing space, but even the talismanic power of the War Myth dissipates if people realize it has been used in a cheap, propagandistic way.

...The president has lived by propaganda. But now that the end is approaching, even propaganda can no longer save him.

Bush's attempt to claim he was stabbed in the back is certain to meet the same fate. That notion will live on only where it always has, in the danker corners of the extreme right wing.

I think Kamiya underestimates the power of these deep-seated popular beliefs in American righteousness and power, the militaristic side of the myth of American exceptionalism. Bush and his minions may have lost credibility among much of the public (I certainly hope so), but that doesn't mean that this bedrock of American political culture has been abandoned or fundamentally revised. "The danker corners of the extreme right wing" serve as a reservoir of these kind of nationalist narratives, but they have a much wider resonance because these beliefs and hopes are widely shared. They are taught in American schools, dramatized in popular media, reinscribed by a recurrent series of public holiday commemorations, and rarely challenged or even questioned. As much as I wish it were so, I doubt very much that Bush's mendacity and ineptitude will have put an end to this powerful, if also destructive, American myth.

The implication here is that the Bush administration is not exclusively responsible for American imperialism. To the extent that Americans accept and propagate mythic narratives of the righteousness of our national power, we will make future Bushes, and future Iraqs, possible. Our responsibility, then, is to question and challenge the myth at every opportunity.

Surrrealist War Stories

As it bleeds into its fifth year, the Iraq war is excelling only in savagery and surrealism. We now have an American President publicly citing the similarities to Vietnam as a reason why the US must not withdraw - and he is merrily quoting Graham Greene’s anti-war masterpiece The Quiet American in his defence. Far from thinking anything has gone wrong, he declares: “The Iraqi people owe the American people a great debt of gratitude. That’s the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”

Meanwhile, the Iraqi psyche is so wrecked by the 7/7 blasting on to their streets 24/7 that my Iraqi friends report mass hysteria gnawing into the survivors. After a small string of attacks by badgers - you know, the little furry creatures - in Basra, so many people were convinced this was a new weapon of war that UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer had to announce publicly: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.”

Johann Hari writing for the Independent.

Who's Bad?

Al Qaeda in Iraq? Not so much.

Al Qaeda in Waziristan? You bet.

Weimar President: Opposition to war = betraying the troops

Bush speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars:

There is one group of people who understand the stakes, understand as well as any expert, anybody in America -- those are the men and women in uniform. Through nearly six years of war, they have performed magnificently. (Applause.) Day after day, hour after hour, they keep the pressure on the enemy that would do our citizens harm. They've overthrown two of the most brutal tyrannies of the world, and liberated more than 50 million citizens. (Applause.)

In Iraq, our troops are taking the fight to the extremists and radicals and murderers all throughout the country. Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year. (Applause.) We're in the fight. Today our troops are carrying out a surge that is helping bring former Sunni insurgents into the fight against the extremists and radicals, into the fight against al Qaeda, into the fight against the enemy that would do us harm. They're clearing out the terrorists out of population centers, they're giving families in liberated Iraqi cities a look at a decent and hopeful life.

Our troops are seeing this progress that is being made on the ground. And as they take the initiative from the enemy, they have a question: Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they're gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq? Here's my answer is clear: We'll support our troops, we'll support our commanders, and we will give them everything they need to succeed. (Applause.) .

The administration's repeated invocation of proto-fascist "stab-in-the-back" mythology is getting increased attention.

Here's conservative writer Andrew Sullivan on the Atlantic's web site, and Scott Horton at Harper's.

The myth of the successful US surge in Anbar

Kevin Drum:

The Sunni tribes began turning against AQI nearly a year ago. They did it on their own, not as part of any American military plan. They did it before the surge started. They did it before Gen. Petraeus was even a gleam in George Bush's eye. Here's the truth:

The turnabout began last September, when a federation of tribes in the Ramadi area came together as the Anbar Salvation Council to oppose the fundamentalist militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
....The council sought financial and military support from the Iraqi and American governments. In return the sheiks volunteered hundreds of tribesmen for duty as police officers and agreed to allow the construction of joint American-Iraqi police and military outposts throughout their tribal territories.
....Beginning last summer and continuing through March, the American-led joint forces pressed into the city, block by block, and swept the farmlands on its outskirts. In many places the troops met fierce resistance. Scores of American and Iraqi security troops were killed or wounded.
....The fact that Anbar is almost entirely Sunni and not riven by the same sectarian feuds as other violent places, like Baghdad and Diyala Province, has helped to establish order. Elsewhere, security forces are largely Shiite and are perceived by many Sunnis as part of the problem. In Anbar, however, the new police force reflects the homogeneous face of the province and appears to enjoy the support of the people.

The Anbar Awakening is genuinely good news, but (a) it had nothing to do with the surge, (b) it's happening only in homogeneous Sunni areas, and (c) it involves arming
and training Sunni forces who are almost certain to turn against both us and the Shiite central government as soon as they've finished off AQI. Pretending otherwise is simply fraudulent.

This is the "military progress" the administration is going to use to try and sell us on continuing the occupation. Drum has other surge-related evidence here . And then there's this, and this. And this:

I don't see any progress. Just us getting killed.

There are a lot of words to describe whast the US is doing to Iraq, but "progress" is not one of them.

Thanks to Crooks and Liars and Rising Hegemon for calling our attention to Drum's arguments.

Freedom's Watch

I caught one of these ads on my local TV station the other night.



Emotionally effective, if fundamentally misleading in all kinds of ways -- not least of which is suggesting the the Iraq War is all about fighting the people who attacked us on 9-11.

The ad's message "It's no time to quit; It's no time for politics" is especially ironic since this video campaign was produced and funded by Republican operatives and targeted on the districts of wavering and vulnerable Republican legislators, with the clear purpose of putting political pressure on them to continue backing the President's war.

Joe Conason, writing at Slate:

Unlike VoteVets.org, the organization founded by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans that has emerged as one of the most effective critics of the war, Freedom's Watch uses killed and wounded veterans and their families in its advertising, but is not operated or supported by actual veterans. Instead, the founders of Freedom's Watch include notable Republican fundraisers such as Melvin Sembler, the shopping mall magnate whose rewards have included ambassadorial posts in Australia and most recently in Italy; Anthony Gioia, a Buffalo, N.Y., macaroni manufacturer who served as ambassador to Malta; Howard Leach, a wealthy California grocery distributor who served as ambassador to France; and Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire who is among the richest men in the world. The supporters listed in Freedom's Watch's first press release also include at least eight more major Republican donors.

But all those generous gentlemen are probably just providing the money for the national advertising rollout. The brains behind this operation are former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who spent many hours on the press podium repeating the same misleading messages now promoted by Freedom's Watch, and Brad Blakeman, a former White House and campaign scheduling director for President Bush who frequently appears on cable TV to advocate administration policy as a "Republican strategist." Executing their strategy are the sharp public relations consultants at Jamestown Associates, a nationally known Republican firm whose clients have included dozens of GOP officeholders, a variety of conservative organizations and fronts, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Someone with the nom-de-web EnricoFermiTheThird posted a brilliant response on YouTube suggesting (without saying a word) that the Freedom's Watch campaign is a last-gasp propaganda effort by an immoral regime about to lose a major war.



The comparison is apt in another way. The Freedom's Watch campaign clearly suggests that if the US loses in Iraq, it will be because anti-war forces, lefties, Democrats and other weak and disloyal elements sold out American troops and betrayed their sacrifices. This is the core story-line of the classic fascist propaganda weapon, the "stab-in-the-back" myth and a central part of the Republicans' proto-fascist political strategy.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan sees similar tendencies in the President's recent VFW speech.

Friedman: another enabler of this vile war

Check out the revolting video interview over at Eschaton.

Three Pulitzers: this is considered exceptionally thoughtful commentary in the universe of mainstream American journalism.

America to the Rescue

A brilliant bit by Jon Stewart: watch the video hosted by Crooks and Liars.

Bloodthirsty FOX

Here is a link to the study referred to in the film which documents that FOX news viewers were much more likely to believe the administration's falsehoods about Iraq, and therefore more likely to support the war.

Fox was a willing accomplice to a fraudulant war. Now they're enabling another.

UPDATE: Bernie Sanders on Fox's war propaganda.

We must continue to feed the meat grinder because we are grinding meat

Attaturk at Rising Hegemon on the administration's case for perpetuating the occupation of Vietnam-Iraq:

... this argument couldn't be made, just like Vietnam, if the original fuck up based on deception hadn't been made in the first place. The argument of we cannot end this fuck up because we fucked it up and the only way to minimize the fuck up is by telling America troops, "you're fucked" is not exactly the strongest argument ever made.

bel·lig·er·ent

John Fucking Bolton hopes for a US attack on Iran within the next six months. "Absolutely".

I don’t think there’s any doubt, based on the information we have, that Iran is interfering in Iraq and is posing a direct threat to our troops.

So I think if President Bush as commander in chief believes that information is accurate, he is fully entitled to take defensive measures, which could include going after the Revolutionary Guards inside Iran.

Bolton and his fellow war-mongers are trying to manufacture a case for a "defensive" US attack on a country which poses no real threat to US security, just as they did for Iraq. I don't know how these guys can sleep at night.

No such thing

as class in America:

The growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million. The number of such taxpayers grew by more than 26 percent, to 303,817 in 2005, from 239,685 in 2000.

These individuals, who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000. People with incomes of more than a million dollars also received 62 percent of the savings from the reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and dividends that President Bush signed into law in 2003, according to a separate analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, a group that points out policies that it says favor the rich.

The group’s calculations showed that 28 percent of the investment tax cut savings went to just 11,433 of the 134 million taxpayers, those who made $10 million or more, saving them almost $1.9 million each. Over all, this small number of wealthy Americans saved $21.7 billion in taxes on their investment income as a result of the tax-cut law.

The nearly 90 percent of Americans who make less than $100,000 a year saved on average $318 each on their investments. They collected 5.3 percent of the total savings from reduced tax rates on investment income.

NYT.

trag·e·dy

Painful photos of wounded soldiers taken by Nina Berman.

Shout out to loyal reader

Thanks Jamie.

Pondering the possibility of a political Perfect Storm

What if the Peak Oil thesis is right, or close enough to being right that we face severe shortfalls of petroleum supply relative to burgeoning global demand, such that the hydrocarbon era enters its final stages in the next decade or so? What if global climate change disrupts established patterns of social reproduction around the world, creating knife-edge conditions of survival in large areas and destabilizing political orders world-wide? What if, on top of these changes, US imperial policy and conspicuous consumption by our ruling class so infuriates the rest of the world that the only thing not in short supply world-wide is people willing to engage in terrorist attacks against the US? Can our republic (such as it is) survive in that kind of world? -- a world which is, ironically, substantially of our own making rather than a calamity which befalls us out of the blue. In that kind of context, I find it especially chilling to ponder the Bush-Cheney aggrandizement of executive power and open contempt for checks and balances, habeas corpus and civil rights, and public information with even a semblance of truth content. They may have extended executive power in ways which will make it easier for future administrations to do likewise, or to go farther still in the name of some all-too-readily imaginable national emergency.

Naming this blog Premature Anti-Fascist is only half in jest, and sometimes when I think about this it's no joke at all.

Juan Cole on the fundamental dumbness of the administration's campaign to blame Iran for Uncle Sam's failures in Iraq

Informed Comment (scroll down):

The US military hasn't found any Iranian trainers in Iraq or any training camps, but like Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, that you can't find them doesn't mean they are not there. What I cannot understand is why the Pentagon needs Iranians in Iraq as a plot device. The Iraqi Badr Corps, tens of thousands strong, was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and it has been alleged that some Badr corpsmen are still on the Iranian payroll. It is the paramilitary of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, America's chief ally in Iraq. What would the IRGC know that Badr does not? Why bother to send revolutionary guardsmen when the country is thick with Badr fighters anyway (who have all the same training)? I think the US is just embarrassed because Badr is its major ally in Iraq, and Pentagon spokesmen are over-compensating by imagining Iranian training camps inside Iraq. What an idea. I mean, don't we have, like, satellites that would see them? Wouldn't they be visible on google earth? Every day the Pentagon b.s. about Iran gets more fantastic and frantic. Methinks some people, like Patton, are upset that the politicians always pull them back and leave them one more war to fight.

The incomparable Juan Cole on the execrable Karl Rove

Juan Cole writing for Salon:

On Fox News Sunday morning, Karl Rove played the victim. He told host Chris Wallace that in the wake of his resignation as White House deputy chief of staff, his enemies were on the hunt. Rove compared himself to a legendary monster whom the ancient Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf sought to slay. "I mean, I'm a myth, and they're ... You know, I'm Grendel ... They're after me."

But Rove, who pursued his Democratic foes with a relentless repertoire of dirty tricks, smears and outright lies, won't win many sympathizers by depicting himself as unfairly maligned. He is likely to be remembered above all for his own expertise at demonization, specifically for his ability to paint his political opponents as unreliable partners in the "war on terror" -- as traitors to the United States. A master propagandist, he portrayed his rivals as fellow travelers with Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Like Cain, from whom Grendel was said to be descended, Rove was more interested in fratricide than in the welfare of his people.

And now a word from the troops

in a remarkable NYT op-ed, seven soldiers reflect on the Iraq War:

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day.

Guiliani poses as a deep political thinker

and fails.

Fred Kaplan:

Rudy Giuliani's essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, laying out his ideas for a new U.S. foreign policy, is one of the shallowest articles of its kind I've ever read. Had it been written for a freshman course on international relations, it would deserve at best a C-minus (with a concerned note to come see the professor as soon as possible). That it was written by a man who wants to be president—and who recently said that he understands the terrorist threat "better than anyone else running"—is either the stuff of high satire or cause to consider moving to, or out of, the country.

...He doesn't seem to know what he's talking about at all. Two months ago, when Giuliani issued some of his first pronouncements on foreign policy, I wrote that he is "that most dangerous would-be world leader: a man who doesn't seem to know how much he doesn't know." Judging from his Foreign Affairs article, the breadth and depth of his cluelessness are vaster than even I had imagined.

Recall the early debate among Republican candidates where Ron Paul quietly pointed how little understanding Guiliani has of the political context of terrorism. Looks like that's just the tip of Rudy's Iceberg of Cluelesness.

President Guiliani would provide lots of red-meat entertainment worthy of professional wrestling fans and the lizard brains of the Republican base, but his foreign policy would be a trainwreck waiting to happen.

More on Karl Rove's dark legacy

In a powerful essay, David Michael Green argues that Rove's reputation as a dark political genius is only half right: he's plenty dark.

Rove is often described as a genius, but the record emphatically demonstrates just the opposite. He destroyed everything in sight, including the political party for whose would-be fortunes he willingly sacrificed all else, not least the things that matter most - peace, truth, democracy, integrity, decency, lives.

No, this was no genius, except in the most nefarious sense. The real genius was of the American Founders, who - with just this scenario in mind - built a political infrastructure that could hope to prevent Karl Roves from happening.

As it was, nearly every intended bulwark in that system, nearly every check and balance both inside and outside the government, failed to perform its intended function these last years, and Karl Rove - the smallest amongst us - ran wild for the better part of a decade, cutting a swath of enormous destruction in his path.

Green assesses Rove and the administration he drove as "an abject failure, a flaming disaster". Green tallies their accomplishments thus:

Turning a record surplus into a record deficit. Failing to defend the country against the 9/11 attacks. Failing to crush or apprehend the alleged perpetrators of that attack. Failing to win a war in Afghanistan. Launching a completely needless war in Iraq. Failing to win the war in Iraq. Destroying the American military. Failing to rescue an entire American city from destruction. The first president since Hoover to lose jobs on his watch. Wages stagnant. Gas prices doubled. Exacerbating global warming, the worst environmental crisis in human history, and undermining attempts by others to deal with it. Undercutting environmental standards on clean air and water. Leaving the Middle East in shambles. Shredding relations with historical allies. Producing the greatest trade deficit in history. Offering tax credits to corporations assisting them in exporting American jobs. Destroying legal and constitutional doctrines dating back as far as seven centuries. Allowing the assault rifle ban to lapse. Standing by while North Korea went nuclear. Tearing up treaties that have kept the peace for half a century. Undermining international institutions. And more, and more, and more. This is an astonishing, jaw-dropping record of disaster.

Finally, in addition to fucking up our country, RoveCo's crash-and-burn exploits may have done enduring damage to the only thing he ever really cared about - Republican Party dominance. If there is any semblance of reason, justice, or sanity in the political universe (and PAF is not entirely sure that any such semblance exists), Rove's party will face the supremely ironic worst-case scenario Green imagines for them: "It is by no means unimaginable that the GOP could now enter into a tailspin of mortal collapse over the coming years, ultimately joining the Federalists and the Whigs on the ash heap of American political party history."

Blaming Iran for the (predictable) consequences of US strategy

Gareth Porter:

In short, the rise in deaths of U.S. troops in Baghdad in July reflected the increased pace of U.S. operations against the Mahdi Army and the Mahdi Army’s military response. ...Thus it requires no Iranian hand to explain the escalation of the conflict between the Mahdi Army and the U.S. military that accounts for the changing pattern of U.S. casualties in Baghdad.

So if Iran isn't actually responsible for US casualties in Iraq, why push this story so hard? And who's doing the pushing?

Hillary the hawk

Robert Scheer:

...forget the hope that a woman president might prove to be more enlightened than macho men in the matter of peacemaking, and instead rest assured that Hillary would have the cojones to “push the button” that would kill us all.

PAF's hypothesis: Hillary has fully bought into the bipartisan-establishment consensus that the US must pursue an imperial global policy -- including a substantial permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf region -- which enables use of military force as a routine tool of US foreign policy. Of course, she's also under pressure from a gendered culture of hyper-patriotic militarism, but if her core commitments were to a post-imperial foreign policy she would respond differently to those pressures.

In case you're tempted to miss Karl Rove

The Progressive's Matthew Rothschild:

Karl Rove went out the way he came in.

Arrogant, conniving, thieving-a Mayberry Machiavelli, as one former Bush appointee put it so aptly.

Rove was a dirty trickster from the very beginning, and we should have listened to Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. They warned us about him a long time ago.

Early in his career, he even reportedly bugged the office of his own candidate, and then told the press that his opponent had done it.

He sicked the FBI on Jim Hightower to torpedo that populist from gaining higher office.

And, of course, he finagled the election in Florida in 2000, and he designed the plan to disenfranchise millions of people in 2004 by raising the phantom of widespread voter fraud.

He then encouraged Republican state legislators to place hurdles on the path to the voting booth, with onerous voter ID laws, and he encouraged the U.S. attorneys file fraudulent charges against Democrats so as to throw the election to Republicans.

And he made sure that U.S. attorneys who didn’t play ball got the heave ho.

All the while, he did more than any single individual-with the possible exception of Roger Ailes-to poison the political climate in this country.

By relying on the rightwing base, and by feeding its reactionary appetites, Rove made the Republican Party barely recognizable to old, main line, main street, or libertarian party members. That is why, even today, the candidates for the Republican nomination take turns genuflecting before such idols as creationism and spewing bile at immigrants, gays and lesbians, and women who need abortions.

Rove also was there, in the White House, when Bush and Cheney wheeled out their propaganda apparatus, almost five years ago to the day, to bamboozle the Congress and the American people into the Iraq War.

So spare me the buddy-buddy farewell of boy George and pudgy Karl.

They can reminisce in Texas only too soon.

But behind bars would be a more fitting place.

Another assessment of Rove's career from the Nation's John Nichols.

Watch Video of young Rove as junior Nixon campaign operative in 1972 (Rove interview begins at about 4:00 into video). Rove was part of the Nixon campaign's efforts to appeal to younger voters by appearing hip, happening, now. No, really. Take a look, and try not to blow coffee out your nose laughing.

The Surge is working

If by that you mean killing more Iraqis and Americans. If you mean creating conditions of stability, facilitating reconstruction and fostering reconciliation, um, not so much.

More telling Iraq numbers from Tom Engelhardt.

UPDATE:
The LA Times reports:

Administration and military officials acknowledge that the September report will not show any significant progress on the political benchmarks laid out by Congress.

Moyers, Fine, and Nichols on impeachment

video here.

No Such Thing

as class in America.

Sunni Surge in Anbar shows Iraqis will determine future of Iraq

Gareth Porter for Inter Press Service:

The dramatic change in Anbar, in which Sunnis have replaced U.S. forces and largely Shiite troops in providing security against al Qaeda, is likely to be a primary theme in Petraeus’s report on the surge next month. It has also become the favourite theme of war supporters, from right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer to the duo of Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack.

But the new situation in Anbar cannot be attributed to U.S. military operations or presence in the province. After five years of unsuccessful U.S. military operations in Anbar, the U.S. military’s agreements with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar represents an acknowledgment that it was dependent on the very Sunni insurgents it once considered the enemy in Iraq to reduce al Qaeda influence in the province.

The apparent success of Petraeus’s shift from relying on U.S. military force to relying on Sunni troops to take care of al Qaeda could be used as an argument against continuation of the U.S. military presence in Anbar.

Recognition that there is a far more effective alternative to U.S. military operations to reduce al Qaeda’s influence would be a major blow to George W. Bush’s argument against a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops, which has relied increasingly on the threat of an al Qaeda haven in Iraq.

It would also contradict the rationale for the Democratic Party leadership’s inclusion in troop withdrawal legislation of a major exception for U.S. troops fighting terrorism in Iraq — a reference to al Qaeda in Anbar Province.

Scary

The New Yorker's Jane Meyer on Uncle Sam's secret gulag and what can happen to those who are "disappeared" by the CIA.

A New Strategic Timeline for Iraq: 2009??

Here is Michael Gordon of the NYT on the new Joint Campaign Plan developed by Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker, which foresees an active role for US troops in Iraq through 2009:

While Washington is mired in political debate over the future of Iraq, the American command here has prepared a detailed plan that foresees a significant American role for the next two years.
The classified plan, which represents the coordinated strategy of the top American commander and the American ambassador, calls for restoring security in local areas, including Baghdad, by the summer of 2008. "Sustainable security" is to be stablished on a nationwide basis by the summer of 2009, according to American officials familiar with the document.
The detailed document, known as the Joint Campaign Plan, is an elaboration of the new strategy President George W. Bush signaled in January when he decided to send five additional American combat brigades and other units to Iraq. That signaled a shift from the previous strategy, which emphasized transferring to Iraqis the responsibility for safeguarding their security.

Slate's Fred Kaplan finds this strategy "confusing in concept and highly impractical." Stephen Biddle, one of the team who developed the strategy, suggested that its chances of success might be no more than about ten percent.

What it will do with near one hundred percent certainty is postpone America's day of reckoning in Iraq until a Democrat occupies the White House and the militaristic jingoes, fair-and-balanced commentators and Republican spinmeisters will then be in a position to claim that Democrats, peaceniks and leftists (not to mention feminists, homos, and academics) "lost" the war.

One "stab in the back", coming up.

No such thing

as class in America.

For three decades, the richest 10 percent of Americans have been growing even richer much faster than everyone else. Over the past five years, real wages for all the rest of American workers have been almost flat.

douche·bag

Need I say more?

more.

Smile

you're on candid camera.