Even the spooks are spooked

Laura Rozen reports in Mother Jones:

Many current and former US spies expect a McCain administration guided by neoconservatives to treat them with hostility and mistrust. They also say McCain would likely weaken the CIA by giving broad new spying authorities to the Pentagon, which CIA officials believe is more amenable to giving policymakers the intelligence they want, while being subject to less congressional oversight.

These critics point especially to the McCain campaign's top national security adviser Randy Scheunemann—who ran a front group promoting war with Iraq and the fabrications of controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and who has lobbied for aggressive NATO expansion. Scheunemann's record, they argue, encapsulates everything wrong with the past eight years of Bush leadership on intelligence issues, from a penchant for foreign policy freelancing and secret contacts with unreliable fabricators, to neoconservatives' disdain for the perceived bureaucratic timidity of the CIA and State Department, to their avowed hostility for diplomacy with adversaries. If McCain wins, "the military has won," says one former senior CIA officer. "We will no longer have a civilian intelligence arm. Yes, we will have analysts. But we won't have any real civilian intelligence capability."

"McCain would be an absolute disaster," says a second recently retired senior US intelligence operations officer.

The Bush Doctrine is The McCain Doctrine

As Glenn Greenwald points out, Sarah Palin might not know what the Bush Doctrine is, but John McCain knows exactly what it means and has embraced it as his own:



McCain believes in waging wars of regime change in cases where no real threat to US security has been shown to exist.

This can't be said often enough, and it's no joke: McCain and his politics are profoundly dangerous.

Sarah and Hillary

This is as good as anything SNL did in the golden years.

No "Victory" in sight

Aaron Glantz:

The calm we are seeing now will not continue indefinitely, and the longer the U.S. military stays in Iraq the more likely the country is to erupt in horrible violence. In his speech Thursday night, John McCain commended the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, as "brilliant." Petraeus, McCain said, has "succeeded and rescued us from a defeat that would have demoralized our military, risked a wider war and threatened the security of all Americans."

But on the ground, some of the strategies employed by General Petreaus are beginning to unravel. The Sunni "Awakening" militias he founded, armed and funded have begun fighting with the Shi'a-dominated Iraqi Army, which is also bankrolled by the United States.

"The Shiite-led government has recently stepped up a campaign to arrest leaders of the Awakening and dismantle parts of the program, whose members receive $300 a month from the U.S. military," the Washington Post reported Tuesday. "Many fighters have abandoned their posts and fled their homes to avoid detention, stoking fears that some will rejoin the insurgency." On Wednesday, Iraqi troops raided the offices of the influential Sunni clerical group, the Association of Muslim Scholars. In a statement, the Association "denounced this provocative and unjustifiable attack" and blamed the Iraqi government for any negative consequences that may result.

Soon, the United States military will have to take sides in this fight, and when it does, American soldiers will find themselves in the unenviable position of battling with groups armed with American weaponry. The longer the United States stays in Iraq, the worse off the country will be when we finally leave. Today, "victory in Iraq" is as far away as it's ever been.

Question for Candidate McCain: If the surge is "working," why aren't we safer?

General Patraeus himself admitted in Congressional testimony that he could not make a case that this policy in Iraq will make America safer:

Senator John Warner (R-VA), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and former Navy Secretary, asked Gen. Petraeus during testimony in September, “If we continue what you have laid before the Congress ... Does this make America safer?” General Petraeus responded, “Well sir, I don’t know.”

Patraeus quote from here.

Is that because Iraq is not now, and was not before the war, a real threat to the safety of Americans (except the ones we send to Iraq in uniform as occupiers)? Is that because the real threat to the safety of Americans was allowed to escape from Tora Bora, and important military and intelligence resources were prematurely taken out of Afghanistan in order to focus on the needless war in Iraq? Is it because America's ongoing occupation of Iraq has fuleled anti-Americanism and visceral hatred of us around the world, creating new enemies and fostering a supportive political climate for militant Islamists? And by supporting the unnecessary and counter-productive Iraq war as single-mindedly as you have, aren't you partly responsible for the fact that our families remain unsafe? If you are ready to claim credit for the surge, shouldn't you be ready to take credit for the larger consequences of the war you have supported so vehemently?

NYT on Iraq: Still No Exit

While it was itself complicit in helping to launch this stupid war, The New York Times gets this about right. "Victory" and stability are not about to happen because the underlying political issues in Iraq remain unresolved, so for Bush "Mission Accomplished" is when his Iraq quagmire becomes somebody else's problem.

Editorial
Still No Exit

President Bush is nothing if not consistent. In a speech on Tuesday, he made it clear that he has no plan at all for ending the war in Iraq and no serious plan for winning the war in Afghanistan.

Mr. Bush wants to have it both ways — claiming success in tamping down violence in Iraq and yet refusing to make the hard choices that would flow from that.

Speaking at the National Defense University, he said he would withdraw only 8,000 more troops from Iraq by the time he leaves office. That would leave 138,000 troops behind — more than were deployed in Iraq before his January 2007 “surge.”

All of this seems to be driven more by what is happening in American battleground states than any battleground in Iraq.

While Mr. Bush and his party’s nominee, John McCain, both want to stay the course until some undefined “victory” is achieved, American voters have run out of patience. Mr. Bush and his advisers are clearly hoping that this token withdrawal will be enough to keep Iraq out of the news and out of the election debate. (Ironically, Mr. McCain who doesn’t want to withdraw any troops at all, had no choice but to declare his support for the president’s plan.)

Iraq’s leaders have also run out of patience, and they are pushing to have American troops out by 2011. That means the next president — whether it is Mr. McCain or Barack Obama — will have to quickly come up with a plan for a safe and responsible exit.

Like Mr. Bush, Iraq’s leaders want to have it both ways. They want to talk about an American withdrawal, but they are still refusing to make the tough political compromises that are their only hope for keeping things under control once the Americans are gone.

All of these months later, and Iraq’s Parliament has still not adopted an oil revenue-sharing law or a law establishing the rules for provincial elections.

So long as an American president refuses to start seriously planning for a withdrawal, Iraq’s leader will continue on this way.

Mr. Bush was right on one point Tuesday when he said that “Afghanistan’s success is critical to the security of America.”

What he didn’t say is that Washington is in real danger of losing the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda — the war Mr. Bush shortchanged again and again for his misadventure in Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the mountains of Waziristan (or god knows where) Osama bin Laden is laughing his ass off at us.

McCain and the Neocon axis

Remember the neoconservatives, those fine folks who led the way to the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War? I bet you thought they were discredited, exposed to all the world as dangerous zealots and frauds, morally and intellectually bankrupt, banished to the wilderness where they could bicker amongst themselves but do no more real damage to the human race.

Think again.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

If John McCain wins, for all that has happened over the last eight years in Iraq and elsewhere, we would get a new president even more closely tied to the DC neoconservative axis than President Bush has ever been.

You can say that again.

Did I mention that you could say that again?

In fact, this probably can't be said enough. In light of all the damage they've already done, I'm disturbed that McCain's phalanx of neoconservative imperialists is not getting more attention.

Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in The Washington Post, described the neonservatives as "the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history." But Heilbrun also noted that the McCain campaign may enable these flesh-eating zombies to rise from the politically dead and wreak further mayhem upon the living:

Now that Robert Kagan, William Kristol ... and a host of other neocons have hitched their fortunes to McCain, the neocons are poised for a fresh comeback.

Heilbrunn, at Huffington Post, on the neocon-McCain symbiosis:

McCain represents for the neocons the ultimate synthesis of war hero and politician. And McCain, in turn, has been increasingly drawn to the neocons' militaristic vision of the U.S. as an empire that can set wrong aright around the globe. ...If McCain becomes president, the neocons will be in charge.

If you liked the Iraq War, you'll love a McCain administration.

Where does this deadly deja vu come from? Why are we susceptible time and again to the siren song of militaristic jingoism? Here's part of the answer.

Jon Stewart on GOP gender hypocrisy

Thanks to my buddy Bag for calling my attention to this priceless video clip.

JFC: Cindy McCain was wearing about $300,000 at the RNC!

From Crooks and Liars:

Cindy McCain(’s first night of Republican National Convention outfit)

Oscar de la Renta dress: $3,000
Chanel J12 White Ceramic Watch: $4,500
Three-carat diamond earrings: $280,000
Four-strand pearl necklace: $11,000-$25,000
Shoes, designer unknown: $600
Total: Between $299,100 and $313,100

Wow. That’s about 60 times the health care credit McCain proposes to give families for a year. And according to Huffington Post, George W. Bush helped cover the expense:

According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the McCains have received $313,413 thanks to George Bush’s tax cut.

If John McCain were President, she might have been able to add a bracelet to the ensemble. According to the same study under McCain proposed tax cuts they would have received tax breaks of $367,788.

That GOP is the party of the people, all right.

And you know, what this country needs most right now is a national trophy wife. Let's see Mrs Putin pull that off.

McCain campaign is a fraud

This headline from the Christian Science Monitor sums it up:

McCain appeals to moderates with vow to reform GOP
But his policy agenda largely reflects the Bush administration's stands on tax cuts and the Iraq war.

The kind of change the GOP is offering is skin deep: different faces on the same policies of making the rich even richer, and trying to bully the world militarily.

Change, my ass.

Don't look now, [stage whisper] but people are beginning to notice:

Bases?

We don't need no steeenking bases.

But we have em all over the world.

We are an Empire.

God's Own Surge: Sarah Palin proves my point

From Huffington Post:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a "task that is from God."

In an address last June, ...Palin asked the students to pray for the troops in Iraq, and noted that her eldest son, Track, was expected to be deployed there.

"Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God," she said. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's plan."

Now check out the passage I quoted from Walter Hixson in the post right below this one.

from the Introduction to The Myth of American Diplomacy, by historian Walter Hixson

...National identity drives U.S. foreign policy and reinforces domestic hierarchies. Foreign policy flows from cultural hegemony affirming "America" as a manly, racially superior, and providentially destined "beacon of liberty," a country which possesses a special right to exert power in the world. Hegemonic national identity drives a continuous, militant foreign policy, including the regular resort to war.

Having internalized this Myth of America, a majority, or at least a critical mass, of Americans have granted spontaneous consent to foreign policy militancy over the sweep of U.S. history. While specific foreign policies often provoke criticism, to be sure, national identity contains such criticism within secure cultural boundaries.

This is the deep-seated cultural strain that McCain is tapping in to with his macho warrior ethos, triumphalist "victory" talk, and hyper-patriotic posturing. But the implication of Hixson's argument is that we are culturally primed for those kinds of messages, and that's why they resonate with a large chunk of the American public, perhaps enough of us to make an unrepentent neocon militarist our next president.

And even if we don't elect McWar, we'll be receptive to similar messages from other militarist messengers, until we find another way to understand who we are and how we relate to the world. In various ways large and small, each of us should do what we can to challenge the culture of miltarism and compulsory hyper-patriotism.

thoughts prompted by watching the opening ceremony of the republican convention

overt political repression in America

Glenn Greewald on preemptive raids aimed at protesters in Minneapolis:

here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone.

More from arrested journalist Amy Goodman.