Blog For Free!
Archives
Home
2005 January
2004 December
2004 November
2004 October
2004 September
2004 August
2004 July
2004 June
2004 May
2004 April
2004 March
2004 February
2004 January
My Links
Guerrilla News
MoveOn.Org
The Nation
Winston Smith's Daily Journal
Sam Adams' CounterPoint
tBlog
My Profile
Send tMail
My tFriends
My Images
Sponsored
Blog
|
| BushCo just really, really loathes this planet |
| 02.29.04 (7:34 am) [edit] |
[b]Mother Nature, The Hate Crime
[i]More than 60 world-class scientists agree: BushCo just really, really loathes this planet [/i][/b]
Today's question: What do you get when more than 60 of the world's top scientists, 20 Nobel Laureates among them, get together and write one of the most scathing, damning reports in the history of modern science, aimed squarely at BushCo's thoroughly atrocious record of cover-ups and obfuscations and outright lies regarding the health of the planet?
What do you get when those very scientists, a highly respected, nonpartisan group called the Union of Concerned Scientists, go on to claim that no other president in modern history has so openly misled the public or been so flagrantly disrespectful of scientific fact and mountains of irrefutable research, deliberately and systematically mutilating scientific data in the service of its rather brutal, pro-corporate, antienvironment agenda?
If you answered, "Why, you get even more painful polyps of sadness and disgust on your soul due to the BushCo onslaught," consider yourself among the millions who are right now rather horrified and appalled and who are wondering just what sort of human -- not what sort of politician, mind you, not what sort of power broker, not what sort of failed Texas oilman corporate lackey -- but what sort of human being you have to be to enact such insidious ongoing planet-gouging legislation, smirking and shrugging all the way.
It is not an easy one to answer, as you can only wonder what has gone so horribly wrong, what sort of line has been crossed so that not even the basic dignity of the planet, not even a modicum of respect for it, is the slightest factor anymore in modern American right-wing politics. What, too extreme? Hardly.
The story about the scientist's report is here. It was broadcast over many major media channels, somewhat loud and mostly clear, though most media was far more eager to bury it under all those more hotly controversial pics of happy gay people smooching on the steps of S.F.'s city hall than they were to trumpet the dire claims of a bunch of boring genius scientists.
Such is the national priority. After all, no one wants to hear how badly we've been duped by this administration, again. Given the nonexistent WMDs and the complete lack of Iraqi nukes and the bogus wars and manufactured fear and a galling budget deficit and nearly 3 million lost jobs and a raft of BushCo lies so thick you need a jackhammer to see some light, no one wants to know that even the world's top scientists are disgusted with our nation's leadership.
We can, after all, take only so much abuse, can be only so karmically and ideologically hammered, before we become so utterly exhausted that we just stop caring.
And, in fact, BushCo would love nothing more than to cripple our outrage and deflect attention away from all the dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq and his overall atrocious record on the war, jobs, the environment and foreign policy, and center it all on divisive issues of God-centric moral righteousness, like all those sicko gay people trying to dignify their sinful love.
This is a president, after all, who truly believes he is doing God's will by turning this country into the most lawless, internationally loathed aggressor on the planet, something I'm sure is very reassuring to those countless thousands of dead Iraqi civilians.
Does it really matter anymore? After all, as any child can tell you, politics has always been a wildly corrupt and slimy profession, valued somewhere between professional wrestler and professional baby-seal clubber on the moral and spiritual scale o' delicious karmic significance.
And, yes, it must be noted that there isn't a U.S. president on record who hasn't somehow deliberately mangled scientific data and covered up important reports during his term in order to further favored policies. Goes almost without saying.
But, as the Union of Concerned Scientists point out, never has the oppression of fact been so systematic, so widespread, so repulsive as that which Bush has wrought. Never has the abuse been so flagrant, the border marking what's morally acceptable so shamelessly crossed.
Maybe you don't believe the hippie environmentalists who are always spouting off about saving the whales and protecting the forests. Maybe you like to hiss at and dismiss, say, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s outstanding, powerfully researched articles in the recent issue of Rolling Stone and the latest issue of The Nation that carefully delineate just how Bush's enviro record is the worst in history, and call Kennedy just another typical left-wing liberal. You wish to be that small and boorish? Fine.
Not so easy, however, to dismiss a small army of nonpartisan, internationally respected scientists as just more agenda-thick political BS, as BushCo has done. To do so reeks of something far beyond mere name calling and dumb party maneuvering. It reeks of sheer heartlessness regarding the planet. It reeks of abuse. It reeks of hate.
This, then, is the gist of the BushCo attack on the planet: a hate crime. An intentional, ferocious dismantling of protections and guidelines, a view that Mother Nature is nothing but a cheap resource to be exploited, a giant oil can to be suckled, a hunk of toilet paper for Dick Cheney to -- well, let's not imagine.
Look at it this way. It's like music videos. Over and over again, endless droning shots of gyrating sweating booty-pumping faux-sexy bodies pretending to writhe in bogus orgasmic bliss, video after video and hour after hour where you watch and watch and go slowly numb and say, Jesus with a skimpy thong and a spray bottle of baby oil, how much further can they go?
How much more naked and sexist and overblown and abusive can they get before they say oh screw it and just strip down and have sex with a live chicken as 50 Cent downs a bottle of Crystal and grins maniacally?
This is like the saturation level of BushCo. Something's gotta give, you say. Surely some sort of ugly orgiastic critical mass has been reached wherein Bush and his planet-reaming policies simply cannot go any further without some sort of meltdown, some sort of massive international cosmic recoil whereby we finally see the Bush admin for what it is, quite possibly the most self-serving, egomaniacal cluster of enviro thugs in modern history.
But with the Union of Concerned Scientists report, this sentiment goes one step further -- this is not just hate for the planet, not merely a blatant right-wing revulsion for those much-loathed intangible New Age-y touchstones like earthly vibration, energy, true spiritual connection and a deep veneration and sense of profound awe for the raw divinity of nature.
This is more sinister, and more disturbing. BushCo's ugly rejection of not merely the "liberal" environmental politicking but also of the factual science of the natural world is, ultimately, a form of self-loathing.
It is a snide and self-destructive rejection of the human-nature connection, of the very real and very direct correlation between how we treat our world and how we view ourselves, between what we choose to celebrate/annihilate in nature and what we venerate/devastate in own spirits. After all, the less regard you have for one, the less you care about the other. Simple, really.
Look. We reflect the planet. The planet reflects us. And 60 out of 60 scientists agree: BushCo's time of reflecting nothing but cruel blackness and abuse needs to come to an end, right now.
[i][b]- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist[/b][/i], http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/art...
|
|
|
| |
| Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: 'The junk science of George W. Bush' |
| 02.28.04 (5:35 pm) [edit] |
[b]Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: 'The junk science of George W. Bush'[/b]
As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history we learned that Copernicus and Galileo self-censored for many decades their proofs that the earth revolved around the sun and that a less restrained heliocentrist, Giordano Bruno, was burned alive in 1600 for the crime of sound science. With the encouragement of our professor, Father Joyce, we marveled at the capacity of human leaders to corrupt noble institutions. Lust for power had caused the Catholic hierarchy to subvert the church's most central purpose--the search for existential truths.
Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration--aided by right-wing allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to further their goals--are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes, rather than suppress good science, they simply order up their own. Meanwhile, the Bush White House is purging, censoring and blacklisting scientists and engineers whose work threatens the profits of the Administration's corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda.
Indeed, so extreme is this campaign that more than sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates and medical experts, released a statement on February 18 that accuses the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific fact "for partisan political ends."
I've had my own experiences with Torquemada's modern successors, both personal and related to my work as an environmental lawyer and advocate working for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Waterkeeper Alliance.
At the time of the World Trade Center catastrophe on September 11, 2001, I had just opened an office at 115 Broadway, cater-corner from the World Trade Center and within the official security zone to which access was, afterward, restricted for several months. Upon returning to the office in October my partner, Kevin Madonna, suffered a burning throat, nausea and a headache that was still pounding twenty-four hours after he left the building. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency's claims that air quality was safe, Kevin refused to return and we closed the office. Many workers did not have that option; their employers relied on the EPA's nine press releases between September and December of 2001 reassuring the public about the wholesome air quality downtown. We have since learned that the government was lying to us. An Inspector General's report released last August revealed that the EPA's data did not support those assurances and that its press releases were being drafted or doctored by White House officials intent on reopening Wall Street.
On September 13, just two days after the terror attack, the EPA announced that asbestos dust in the area was "very low" or entirely absent. On September 18 the agency said the air was "safe to breathe." In fact, more than 25 percent of the samples collected by the EPA before September 18 showed presence of asbestos above the 1 percent safety benchmark. Among outside studies, one performed by scientists at the University of California, Davis, found particulates at levels never before seen in more than 7,000 similar tests worldwide. A study being performed by Mt. Sinai School of Medicine has found that 78 percent of rescue workers suffered lung ailments and 88 percent had ear, nose and throat problems in the months following the attack and that about half still had persistent lung and respiratory illnesses nine months to a year later.
Dan Tishman, whose company was involved in the reconstruction at 140 West Street, required his crews to wear respirators but recalls seeing many rescue and construction workers laboring unprotected--no doubt relying on the government's assurances. "The frustrating thing is that everyone just counts on the EPA to be the watchdog of public health," he says. "When that role is compromised, people can get hurt."
I also recall the case of Dr. James Zahn, a nationally respected microbiologist with the Agriculture Department's research service, who accepted my invitation to speak to an April 2002 conference of more than 1,000 family farm advocates and environmental and civic leaders in Clear Lake, Iowa. In a rigorous taxpayer-funded study, Zahn had identified bacteria that can make people sick--and that are resistant to antibiotics--in the air surrounding industrial-style hog farms. His studies proved that billions of these "superbugs" were traveling across property lines daily, endangering the health of neighbors and their herds. I was shocked when Zahn canceled his appearance on the day of the conference under orders from the Agriculture Department in Washington. I later uncovered a fax trail proving the order was prompted by lobbyists from the National Pork Producers Council. Zahn told me that his supervisor at the USDA, under pressure from the hog industry, had ordered him not to publish his study and that he had been forced to cancel more than a dozen public appearances at local planning boards and county health commissions seeking information about health impacts of industry mega-farms. Soon after my conference, Zahn resigned from the government in disgust.
[b]Ignoring Bad News [/b]
The Bush Administration's first instinct when it comes to science has been to suppress, discredit or alter facts it doesn't like. Probably the best-known case is global warming. Over the past two years the Administration has done this to a dozen major government studies on global warming, as well as to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its own efforts to stall action to control industrial emissions. The list also includes major long-term studies by the federal government's National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences, and by scientific teams at the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, and a 2002 collaborative report by scientists at all three of those agencies.
The Administration has taken special pains to shield Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton, which is part of an industry that has contributed $58 million to Republicans since 2000. Halliburton is the leading practitioner of a process used in extracting oil and gas known as hydraulic fracturing, in which benzene is injected into underground formations. EPA scientists studying the process in 2002 found that it could contaminate ground-water supplies in excess of federal drinking water standards. A week after reporting their findings to Congressional staff members, however, they revised the data to indicate that benzene levels would not exceed government standards. In a letter to Representative Henry Waxman, EPA officials said the change was made based on "industry feedback."
As a favor to utility and coal industries, America's largest mercury dischargers, the EPA sat for nine months on a report exposing the catastrophic impact on children's health of mercury, finally releasing it in February 2003. Among the findings of the report: The bloodstream of one in twelve US women is saturated with enough mercury to cause neurological damage, permanent IQ loss and a grim inventory of other diseases in their unborn children.
The list goes on. In October 2001 Interior Secretary Gale Norton, responding to a Senate committee inquiry on the effects of oil drilling on caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, falsely claimed that the caribou would not be affected, because they calve outside the area targeted for drilling. She later explained that she somehow substituted "outside" for "inside." She also substituted findings from a study financed by an oil company for some of the ones that the Fish and Wildlife Service had prepared for her. In another case, according to the Wall Street Journal, Norton and White House political adviser Karl Rove pressed for changes that would allow diversion of substantial amounts of water from the Klamath River to benefit local supporters and agribusiness contributors. Some 34,000 endangered salmon were killed after National Marine Fisheries scientists altered their findings on the amount of water the salmon required. Environmentalists describe it as the largest fish kill in the history of the West. Mike Kelly, the fisheries biologist on the Klamath who drafted the biological opinion, told me that under the current plan coho salmon are probably headed for extinction. According to Kelly, "The morale is very low among scientists here. We are under pressure to get the right results. This Administration is putting the species at risk for political gain. And not just in the Klamath."
Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, told me that the alteration and deletion of scientific information is now standard procedure at Interior. "It's hard to decide what is more demoralizing about the Administration's politicization of the scientific process," he said, "its disdain for professional scientists working for our government or its willingness to deceive the American public."
[b]Getting the Right Answer[/b]
But suppressing or altering science can be a tricky business; the Bush Administration has found it easier at times simply to arrange to get the results it wants. A case in point is the decision in July by the EPA's regional office overseeing the western Everglades to accept a study financed predominantly by developers, which concludes that wetlands discharge more pollutants than they absorb. There was no peer review or public comment. With its approval, the EPA is giving developers credit for improving water quality by replacing natural wetlands with golf courses and other developments.
The study was financed by the Water Enhancement and Restoration Committee, which was formed primarily by local developers and chaired by Rick Barber, the consultant for a golf course development for which the EPA had denied a permit because it would pollute surrounding waters and destroy wetlands. The study contradicts everything known about wetlands functioning, including a determination by more than twenty-five scientists and managers at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program that, on balance, wetlands do not generate nitrogen pollution. Bruce Boler, a biologist and water-quality specialist working for the EPA office, resigned in protest. Boler says the developers massaged the data to support their theory by evaluating samples collected near roads and bridges, where developments discharge pollutants. "It was like the politics trumped the science," he told us.
In a similar case, last November the EPA cut a private deal with a pesticide manufacturer to take over federal studies of a pesticide it manufactures. Atrazine is the most heavily utilized weedkiller in America. First approved in 1958, by the 1980s it had been identified as a potential carcinogen associated with high incidences of prostate cancer among workers at manufacturing facilities. Testing by the US Geological Survey regularly finds alarming concentrations of Atrazine in drinking water across the corn belt. Even worse, last year scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that Atrazine at one-thirtieth the government's "safe" 3 parts per billion level causes grotesque deformities in frogs, including multiple sets of organs. And this year epidemiologists from the University of Missouri found reproductive consequences in humans associated with Atrazine, including male semen counts in farm communities that are 50 percent below normal. Iowa scientists are finding similar results in a current study.
The Bush Administration reacted to the frightening findings not by banning this dangerous chemical, as the European Union has, but by taking the studies away from EPA scientists and, in an unprecedented move, giving the chemical's manufacturer, Switzerland-based Syngenta, control over federal research. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sherry Ford, a spokesperson for Syngenta, praised without irony the advantages of having the company monitor its own product. "This is one way we can ensure it's not presenting any risk to the environment."
In a dramatic expansion of this disturbing strategy, the Bush Administration now plans to systematically turn government science over to private industry by contracting out thousands of science jobs to compliant consultants already in the habit of massaging data to support corporate profits. The National Park Service is preparing a first phase of contracting reviews, involving about 1,800 positions, including biologists, archeologists and environmental specialists. Later phases may entail replacement of 11,000 employees, more than two-thirds of the service's permanent work force.
At least federal employees enjoy civil service and whistleblower protection intended to allow them to operate professionally and independently. Private contractors don't enjoy the same level of protection. "You can shop for the right contractor to give you the kind of result you want," says Frank Buono, a retired Park Service veteran who now serves on the board of a nonprofit whistleblower protection organization.
[b]As a Last Resort, Fire the Messenger[/b]
Most federal employees have gone along with the Bush Administration's wishes, but a few have tried to stand up for sound science. The results are predictable. When a team of government biologists indicated that the Army Corps of Engineers was violating the Endangered Species Act in managing the flow of the Missouri River, the group was quickly replaced by an industry-friendly panel. (In an unexpected--and fortunate--development, the new panel ultimately declined to adopt the White House's pro-barge-industry position and upheld the decision to manage the river to protect imperiled species.) Similarly, last April the EPA suddenly dismantled an advisory panel that had spent nearly twenty-one months developing rules for stringent regulation of industrial emissions of mercury [see Alterman and Green, page 14].
Or consider the case of Tony Oppegard and Jack Spadaro, members of a team of federal geodesic engineers selected to investigate the collapse of barriers that held back a coal slurry pond in Kentucky containing toxic wastes from mountaintop strip-mining. The 300-million-gallon spill was the largest in American history and, according to the EPA, the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the Eastern United States. Black lava-like toxic sludge containing sixty poisonous chemicals choked and sterilized up to 100 miles of rivers and creeks and poisoned the drinking water in seventeen communities. Unlike in other slurry disasters, no one died, but hundreds of residents were sickened by contact with contaminated water.
The investigation had broad implications for the viability of mountaintop mining, which involves literally lopping off mountaintops to get access to the underlying coal. It is a process beloved by coal barons because it practically dispenses with the need for human labor and thus increases industry profits. Spadaro, the nation's leading expert on slurry spills, recalls, "We were geotechnical engineers determined to find the truth. We simply wanted to get to the heart of the matter--find out what happened and why, and to prevent it from happening again. But all that was thwarted at the top of the agency by Bush appointees who obstructed professionals trying to do their jobs."
The Bush Administration appointees all had coal industry pedigrees. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (the wife of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate's biggest recipient of industry largesse) appointed Dave Lauriski, a former executive with Energy West Mining, as the new director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which oversaw the investigation. His deputy assistant secretary was John Caylor, an Anamax Mining alumnus. His other deputy assistant, John Correll, had worked for both Amax and Peabody Coal.
Oppegard, the leader of the federal team, was fired on the day Bush was inaugurated in 2001. All eight members of the team except Spadaro signed off on a whitewashed investigation report. Spadaro, like the others, was harassed but flat-out refused to sign. In April of 2001 Spadaro resigned from the team and filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Labor Department. Last June 4 he was placed on administrative leave--a prelude to getting fired.
Bush Administration officials accuse Spadaro of "abusing his authority" for allowing a handicapped instructor to have free room and board at a training academy he oversees, an arrangement approved by his superiors. An internal report vindicated Spadaro's criticisms of the investigation, but the Administration is still going after his job. "I've been regulating mining since 1966," Spadaro told me. "This is the most lawless administration I've encountered. They have no regard for protecting miners or the people in mining communities. They are without scruples."
Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths about a changing world. At their best, scientists are moral individuals whose business is to seek the truth. Over the past two decades industry and conservative think tanks have invested millions of dollars to corrupt science. They distort the truth about tobacco, pesticides, ozone depletion, dioxin, acid rain and global warming. In their attempt to undermine the credible basis for public action (by positing that all opinions are politically driven and therefore any one is as true as any other), they also undermine belief in the integrity of the scientific process.
Now Congress and this White House have used federal power for the same purpose. Led by the President, the Republicans have gutted scientific research budgets and politicized science within the federal agencies. The very leaders who so often condemn the trend toward moral relativism are fostering and encouraging the trend toward scientific relativism. The very ideologues who derided Bill Clinton as a liar have now institutionalized dishonesty and made it the reigning culture of America's federal agencies.
The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, "If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster."
[i][b]By Robert F. Kennedy Jr[/b][/i]., http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
|
|
|
| |
| Bush dismisses 2 members of bioethics panel; replacements are compliant shills |
| 02.28.04 (5:32 pm) [edit] |
[b]Bush dismisses 2 members of bioethics panel; replacements are compliant shills[/b]
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Friday dismissed two members of his Council on Bioethics -- a scientist and a moral philosopher who had been outspoken advocates for research on human embryo cells.
In their places he appointed three new members, including a doctor who has called for more religion in public life, a political scientist who has spoken out precisely against the research that the dismissed members supported, and another who has written about the immorality of abortion and the "threats of biotechnology."
One of the dismissed members, Elizabeth Blackburn, is a renowned biologist at the University of California at San Francisco. She said she received a call Friday morning from a person in the White House personnel office.
"He said the White House had decided to make some changes on the council. He wanted to express his gratitude and said I'd no longer be on the council," Blackburn said.
[b]The Full Story on [/b] http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
|
|
|
| |
| CIA Admits It Didn't Give Weapon Data to the UN |
| 02.23.04 (6:20 am) [edit] |
[b]CIA Admits It Didn't Give Weapon Data to the UN [/b]
By [i]Douglas Jehl and David E Sanger[/i], http://www.commondreams.org/h...
WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled out by American intelligence before the war as the most highly suspected of housing illicit weapons.
The acknowledgment, in a Jan. 20 letter to Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, contradicts public statements before the war by top Bush administration officials.
Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on all of the sites identified as "high value and moderate value" in the weapons hunt.
The contradiction is significant because Congressional opponents of the war were arguing a year ago that the United Nations inspectors should be given more time to complete their search before the United States and its allies began the invasion. The White House, bolstered by Mr. Tenet, insisted that it was fully cooperating with the inspectors, and at daily briefings the White House issued assurances that the administration was providing the inspectors with the best information possible.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Senator Levin said he now believed that Mr. Tenet had misled Congress, which he described as "totally unacceptable."
Senior administration officials said Friday night that Ms. Rice had relied on information provided by intelligence agencies when she assured Senator Levin, in a letter on March 6, 2003, that "United Nations inspectors have been briefed on every high or medium priority weapons of mass destruction, missile and U.A.V.-related site the U.S. intelligence community has identified." Mr. Tenet said much the same thing in testimony on Feb. 12, 2003.
U.A.V.'s are unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly called drones.
Asked about the contradiction between the C.I.A.'s current account and Ms. Rice's letter, the spokesman for the national security council, Sean McCormack, said, "Dr. Rice provided a good-faith answer to Senator Levin based on the best information that was made available to her."
This is not the first time the White House and the C.I.A. have engaged in finger-pointing about the quality of the intelligence that formed the basis of administration statements.
Last summer, Dr. Rice noted that Mr. Tenet had not read over the State of the Union address in which Mr. Bush said Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium from Africa, a statement the White House later acknowledged was based on faulty intelligence. That began a prolonged period of tension between the agency and the White House that has never fully abated, and may be inflamed by the C.I.A.'s acknowledgment to Senator Levin.
The letter to Senator Levin, from Stanley M. Moskowitz, the agency's director of Congressional affairs, disclosed that the agency had shared information on only 84 of the 105 suspected priority weapons sites.
Mr. Moskowitz did not directly account for the sites omitted. But he cited an earlier letter from the agency to the senator that said the agency had sought to help the United Nations by providing "the intelligence that we judged would be fruitful in their search for prohibited material and activities in Iraq."
In a letter to Senator Levin on May 23, 2003, Mr. Tenet had also said that "in hindsight, we could have been more precise in the words we chose to describe which of the high and medium sites that we gave" to United Nations inspectors.
Mr. Tenet added in that letter, "We were focusing on the intelligence we had that we believed would lead to fruitful efforts by the inspectors, rather than trying to specifically decipher our `list of lists' and the process by which we shared information."
An intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity described Senator Levin as "obsessed with this particular issue" and said the C.I.A. had done nothing inappropriate. "We provided the best information that we had, and the notion that we held back information that would have been useful is just absurd," the official said.
Mr. Moskowitz suggested that the sites about which the C.I.A. had not provided information were already known to United Nations inspectors.
The acknowledgment by the agency came after more than a year of questions from Senator Levin. He said he believed that the Bush administration had withheld the information because it wanted to persuade the American people that the United Nations-led hunt for weapons in Iraq had run its full course before the war.
|
|
|
| |
| An Occupation by Any Other Name |
| 02.22.04 (6:51 am) [edit] |
[b]An Occupation by Any Other Name [/b]
By [i]Charley Reese[/i], http://antiwar.com/reese/?art...
U.S. policy toward the most destabilizing factor in the Middle East – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – is to support Israel and to never offend the Israeli lobby.
US politicians use a number of rhetorical devices to disguise this policy, since it guarantees not only a continuation of the conflict, but a continuing supply of terrorists and an increasing hostility toward American foreign policy in the region. They use rhetoric to pretend to be interested in a solution.
For example, they do not call things by their correct names. East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza are not "disputed territories," nor are they Judea and Samaria. They are occupied territories. They were occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. There is a long-standing United Nations Security Council resolution calling on Israel to return those territories to the Palestinians.
The proper name for Jewish settlements in the occupied territory is "illegal" settlements. The Geneva Accords, to which Israel is a signatory, forbid the settlement of occupied territory, as well as the expulsion of the native population.
The proper name for Israeli tactics, such as the demolition of homes, the destruction of agricultural property, the confiscation of property, the imposition of curfews, the assassination of political opponents and the blocking of roads, is "collective punishment," which in most parts of the world is a considered a war crime. No civilized country punishes innocent people for the misdeeds of an individual. No civilized country condones murder.
Another rhetorical device American politicians – without a doubt the most cowardly in the world – hide behind is the proposition that the "parties involved must reach a settlement." This is the equivalent of a cop showing up at the door of a family whose 6-year-old daughter has been raped and saying, "Your daughter and her rapist will have to work this out between themselves."
There is such an enormous disparity in power – Israel has all of it, and the Palestinians have none – that to put the burden on Palestinians to negotiate with their oppressors is obscenely unrealistic. It is exactly the same as if President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had said to Poland, after it was invaded and conquered by the Nazis, "You'll have to negotiate a settlement with the Third Reich."
It is even more obscenely unrealistic to tell the Palestinians that they are responsible for the security of Israel. The Palestinians, of course, have no state, no army, no air force and no nothing, while Israel is ranked by many as being among the top 10 of military powers in the world.
It is Israel, under international law, as the occupier that has the responsibility to provide security for the Palestinians. That, of course, is a laugh. For 37 years Israel has ruled the Palestinians in the occupied territories as a conquered people with essentially no rights at all.
Finally, one of the things that most infuriates people in the Arab world is the habit of American politicians taking note of every Israeli death while ignoring the far more numerous deaths of Palestinians. The death of any human being is a cause for grief, but the American habit of ignoring Palestinian suffering leaves the impression that Americans consider Jewish lives far more valuable than Palestinian lives. And the truth is, many Americans do.
You will note that all of the Democratic candidates avoid talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or if they can't avoid it, they make the ritualistic pledge of undying support for Israel.
This is no way for a great power to act. The effect of this enormous act of political cowardice on the American people is that we will have to live with the terrorism it has already spawned and will continue to spawn for generations and generations to come. The price of American political cowardice is the blood of innocent people.
|
|
|
| |
| The Madman in Iraq |
| 02.22.04 (6:49 am) [edit] |
[b]The Madman in Iraq[/b]
By [i]Christopher Preble, CATO Institute[/i], http://www.cato.org/dailys/02...
In his nationally televised interview Feb. 8 with [i]NBC's[/i] Tim Russert, President Bush tried to justify his decision to take the country to war in Iraq. He failed miserably.
First, he cited the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the people of the United States. And, second, he asserted that war was the best option for dealing with this threat. As he said, the president's "most solemn responsibility is to keep this country secure."
But if military action was not needed to do that and if, inadvertently, his actions have made America less secure, then the war in Iraq was not simply unnecessary -- it is disastrous for U.S. security.
According to the president, Hussein was a threat to the United States because he was "a dangerous man in a dangerous part of the world." The president later said, "I don't think America can stand by and hope for the best from a madman." Repeating what many senior officials in his administration have said in recent days, the president stressed the need to deal with threats "before they become imminent."
Threat, by definition, combines an enemy's intent to do harm with the capability to inflict harm. But the Bush administration focused almost exclusively on Hussein's intent rather than his capability. Saddam may have wanted weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but the latest evidence indicates that Iraq did not have an arsenal of such weapons. Moreover, mere possession of WMD does not constitute a threat. If it did, we would be preparing to go to war against the many other countries that have such weapons, including India, China, Pakistan, France, or even the United Kingdom.
So, it matters not that Saddam might have had WMDs -- it does matter what he was likely to do with them. Saddam hated the United States. But an enemy must also have a capability for doing us harm, for translating that hate into action. Here, Saddam was practically impotent. Saddam may have had missiles -- even missiles not allowed under the terms imposed after the 1991 Gulf War -- but he didn't have long-range missiles that could hit a target in the United States. He had no air force. He had no blue water navy. His supposedly threatening unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could hardly get off the ground in Baghdad, let alone fly the thousands of miles to New York City or Washington, D.C.
He had one other option. Hussein could have harmed Americans by aligning with terrorists. He was unlikely to do that because, as a secular leader of a country divided along religious lines, Saddam represented everything that the global jihadists and Islamic fundamentalists hate.
Saddam was deterred from cooperating with terrorists because he feared the terrorists. He was deterred even more from aligning with them because he feared us: while the world speculated that Saddam might have had terrible weapons, the world knows that we do, and that we have the means to deliver them. Anywhere. Anytime.
An individual may take preemptive action against another threatening person. When a homeowner kills an intruder brandishing a gun, the homeowner reasons there is nothing to prevent the intruder from shooting first. Indeed, there is a powerful incentive for the intruder to shoot first. The intruder reasons: "If I shoot first, and the homeowner falls dead (or is badly wounded), I run away." Knowing this, the homeowner doesn't depend upon legal niceties to stop his assailant. Preemptive action is a logical solution.
But no foreign government, no leader in a foreign government, can initiate action against the United States without the certainty of knowing that we retain the capability to retaliate. There are no lucky shots. There are no, "if I get off this round first, I'll get away."
Deterrence still works against governments, and against the leaders of governments. It did against Saddam -- repeatedly. He never attacked the United States directly because he knew such actions to be suicidal.
Which is why the war on Iraq is so tragic, not simply because it was unnecessary, but because the war and the aftermath are so dangerous. We chose to take action against an evil and despicable person who had been, and could be in the future, deterred from taking action against us. Now, our actions in Iraq play into the feelings of resentment, humiliation, and anger that bin Laden uses to recruit new fighters in his global jihad against Americans.
By toppling Saddam's regime, and by initiating a U.S. military occupation in a foreign land, the president has strengthened the one group of people who cannot be deterred, and who have repeatedly demonstrated both the intent and the capability to do us harm. That is the threat. It is imminent. And it is not going away.
|
|
|
| |
| Richard Perle, Walking Disaster |
| 02.22.04 (6:46 am) [edit] |
"War is the unfolding of miscalculations." – Barbara Tuchman
[b]Richard Perle, Walking Disaster [/b]
By [i]Christopher Deliso[/i], http://antiwar.com/deliso/?ar...
You would think Richard Perle would have learned by now. Even after having been implicated twice for insider strong-arming and profiteering over security contracts – and after having been caught with his fingers deep in the Hollinger honey pot of self-awarded, multimillion dollar bonuses – he still cannot seem to keep his mouth shut, instead lashing out blindly in every direction and thundering against the entire world in his over-the-top new book. Still, while it's admittedly getting increasingly hard to separate the man from the parody, there is nothing funny at all about the sordid story of Richard Perle.
[b]Has Perle Gone Too Far in Antagonizing the CIA?[/b]
If Perle's slick dealings aren't enough to end him, the fallout of his small war with the CIA and State Department just might do the trick.
Everyone knows that Perle and the neocons, including Vice President Cheney's office, have long detested the "weak" CIA and State Department. They have philosophical differences-literally – with the agency's "unimaginative" methodology, and they have made Colin Powell's tenure as Secretary of State a thwarted, humiliating tragedy. Still, Perle cannot seem to go one peroration without attacking either or both bodies. As he recently told the [i]Christian Science Monitor [/i]about the CIA:
"…[i]heads should roll, not in a punitive or vindictive way. But when you discover you have an organization that doesn't get it right time after time, you change the organization, including the people.... I would start with the head. George Tenet has been at the CIA long enough to assume responsibility for its performance[/i]."
Perle and his gang loved it when the much-maligned CIA director heroically took the fall for President Bush last July over faulty Iraq intelligence. Tenet and his agency – already on the ropes over the intelligence failures that allowed the 9/11 terrorist attacks to happen – were clearly on the defensive.
But the neocons couldn't let well enough alone. After all, to do so would have meant the repudiation of all the bellicose ideals they hold so close to their nasty little hearts. And so after their "Office of Special Plans" sham was revealed, and former ambassador Joseph Wilson debunked their Niger uranium fairy tale, someone in the war party decided to seek revenge. Yet this revenge (the "outing" of Wilson's wife and CIA employee Valerie Plame to the press) was downright stupid; it amounted, essentially, to an act of treason. A fine result, considering the pre-existing doubts about the neocons' patriotism, in light of their obsessive allegiance to Israel and Perle's French/British schizophrenia. The resulting furor has engulfed the Bush Administration, with an FBI investigation now centering on Vice President Cheney's office – a key backer of the OSP, and key ally of Perle's.
[b]Who, Me?[/b]
When the[i] Christian Science Monitor [/i]casually asked Perle if the FBI had interrogated him in regard to the Plame investigation, he indignantly snapped:
"…[i]I have not been questioned about it, and I wish whoever is putting this out would cease and desist and [reporters] not be such willing consumers of that kind of information[/i]."
Really, the [i]nerve[/i] of them to ask such a question! Perle's angry dismissal of "that kind of information" is telling indeed. Indeed, why[i] would [/i]federal investigators have any interest in talking to Citizen Perle? It's not as if his case for war – and reputation – depended largely on "evidence": evidence that Wilson and many others had rubbished, evidence manufactured by the neocons' OSP, evidence that the CIA and DIA would not buy. An innocent, uninformed bystander? Richard Perle is more like Col. Mustard in the study with the lead pipe.
Yet Perle's hubris will most likely prove his demise. And his greatest foreign ally – Ahmad Chalabi – is clearly not helping matters.
[b]"…We Are Heroes in Error"[/b]
In the same exchange with the CSM on Tuesday, Perle defended Chalabi thus:
"… [i]his detractors, by and large… are the people who know him least, and his defenders are the people who know him best.... The CIA has been engaged in a character assassination of Ahmad Chalabi for years now, and it is a disgrace[/i]."
Once again, Perle has shown exquisitely poor timing with his statements. Barely two days after reassuring us about the integrity of his ally and Iraqi National Congress godfather, Chalabi himself gleefully admitted pushing false intelligence to start a war:
"…[i]We are heroes in error… as far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important[/i]."
Not important for him, that is. As a foreign lobbyist and international shyster, Chalabi was just doing what he does best. For him, the ends clearly justified the means. And he could care less if the ends are ever justified. That's a problem for his American friends, not him.
With characteristic British understatement, the [i]Telegraph[/i] stated that these comments are "likely to inflame the debate" over the "quality of pre-war intelligence and the spin put on it by President George W. Bush and Tony Blair as they argued for military action."
That's putting it mildly. As the controversies mount, and the full scale of the deception is revealed, it's becoming increasingly clear that this may be the end of the line for Perle and the neocons.
[b]Going Down in a Blaze of Glory[/b]
Nevertheless, Perle apparently wants to go down in a blaze of glory, rhetorical guns blazing like some B-rate cowboy in a hackneyed Spaghetti Western. The fact that he[i] still [/i]refuses to admit he lied comes as a patronizing affront to both the American public and reality. Having boxed himself into a massive corner, Perle's only strategy is to turn up the volume – and boorishly drown out any remotely threatening questions.
At least [i]Fox News' [/i]Bill O'Reilly – a dyed-in-the-wool war supporter if ever there were one – could summon up a little humility and contrition, and apologize to viewers for accepting the neocon justifications for war. Yet by being so relentlessly overbearing and duplicitous, Perle has eliminated any way out. He's fighting so hard now because he has no other choice. Indeed, as [i]Antiwar.com's [/i]Justin Raimondo pointed out yesterday, the new congressional investigations mean that now
"…[i]there is a four-pronged assault on the neoconservative redoubt in this administration. The chutzpah strategy is a desperate attempt to deflect this all-sided attack, by launching a preemptive – some would say suicidal – strike against the enemy[/i]."
[b]As If One Chalabi Weren't Enough – Perle's New Partners for the Iran Takeover[/b]
A recent [i]New York Times [/i]op-ed, penned by one Ali Safavi, cites another vintage Perle peroration. It dates from an appearance Perle made before "a gathering of some 5,000 Iranian-Americans last month," and the fact that a conscious effort is being made to remind the people of it shows that Perle has indeed lost all contact with reality, and his own best interests.
On 24 January Perle spoke at an innocuous enough fund-raiser at the Washington Convention Center, apparently dedicated to helping victims of the Bam earthquake. Perle denied any activist purpose of the event: "all of the proceeds will go to the Red Cross," he promised.
Actually, the Red Cross didn't accept any money, knowing (as Perle must have) that the event was organized by diaspora groups linked to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a blacklisted terrorist organization that killed Americans in the 1970's and fought for Saddam Hussein thereafter.
The MEK's goal is to overthrow the Iranian government. Incidentally enough, Perle just happened to have such a speech in his back pocket. Funny that.
In his commentary, Safavi grumpily refers to the terrorist designation: "…the [State] department has even classified the Iranian National Council of Resistance, an exile group of which I am a former official, as a 'terrorist organization.'"
The Council, headed by Mrs. Maryam Rajavi and her husband Massoud, is the MEK's political wing. A long-time Washington lobbyist, it is also known as the People's Mojehedin Organization of Iran (PMOI). Safavi, in a 1992 overture to the Clinton Administration, deemed the Council "the antipode to the current Iranian government." Simultaneously, future INCR foreign affairs committee Chair Mohammed Mohaddessin is recorded as having "ambushed" Vice President Gore with his revolutionary requests. Mohaddessin's 2001 book, [i]Islamic Fundamentalism: The New Global Threat [/i]harmonizes perfectly with Perle's recent masterpiece. And Perle is on the board of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is apparently (the Times is a bit vague) Safavi's gig, too.
The Council has regularly patronized the American mass media, for example in a full-page ad backed by friendly congressmen in the [i]Times[/i] a year ago. Mrs. Rajavi indeed has plenty of backers in the Iranian Diaspora and US congress. And several websites set up in the past few months indicate the neocons intend to step up the battle for invading Iran – at the behest of an opportunistic terrorist organization that makes Chalabi look like a kitten in comparison.
[b]All's Well That Ends[/b]
Perle, however, must think it will work. Having the relatively appealing Mrs. Rajavi as a figurehead is certainly an improvement over Chalabi's leering, contented mug. Plus, the Rajavi cause gives him yet another reason to hate France, which detained Mrs. Rajavi in 2003, and where he owns a chateau in lovely Gordes.
Yet as he continues to foment revolution in Iran with fulsome appeals to democracy and human rights, Perle proceeds at his own risk. All things considered – the Hollinger mess, faulty intelligence furor, Plame-Gate, Chalabi's mischievous admission, and [i]now[/i] Iranian terrorist ties – we may, with any luck, soon be rid of Perle's insufferably odious political presence once and for all.
|
|
|
| |
| Ralph Nader, Latter-day Political Narcissist |
| 02.21.04 (7:22 am) [edit] |
[b]Ralph Nader, Latter-day Political Narcissist [/b]
[i]The Bush gang must be celebrating ...[/i]
By [i]Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo[/i], http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
I truly hope that Democrats will not spend too much abasing http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPO... hemselves, begging Ralph Nader not to run again for president in 2004, as he seems likely to announce http://www.reuters.com/newsAr...;jsessionid=WEUAEGCMEGJ2I CRBAEOCFFA?type=topNews&s toryID=4406702 he will do on [i]Meet the Press [/i]this Sunday.
Certainly, this latter-day political narcissist has already made up his mind what he's going to announce. So there's no point waiting to call him what he is: an enemy of progressive change in this country and a [i]cat's paw [/i]of the Republican party.
If anything, calling him a 'cat's paw' is too generous since a dupe at least doesn't know he's being used.
In any case, I have a rough confidence that this won't be as damaging to Democratic prospects as some fear. Because after the last four years I just don't think that many people will get in line again behind this pied piper of political oblivion.
[b]Late Update[/b]: A reader notes that since Nader now isn't even running as a Green, he has apparently abandoned even the pretense that he is in the race to create a viable third party in American politics. If he runs, it would now be strictly on a platform of vacuous moral posturing and self-aggrandizement.
|
|
|
| |
| The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy |
| 02.21.04 (7:06 am) [edit] |
[b]The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy[/b]
By [i]Mel Goodman[/i], http://www.guerrillanews.com/...
The fall of the Soviet Union handed the U.S. a unique opportunity, as the surviving superpower, to lead the world toward a period of greater cooperation and conflict resolution through the use of diplomacy, global organization, and international law. This great opportunity is being squandered, as the world becomes a more dangerous place. Military force is now looming larger than ever as the main instrument and organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. In our new national security doctrine, in the shape of our federal budget, and in the missions of the agencies the budget funds, our government is being reshaped to weaken controls on its use of force and further incline our country toward war.
The U.S. decision to use force against Iraq was both rash and senseless, ignoring the fundamental premise that force should be the last, not the first, option. There was no near-term threat to the U.S. or to U.S. interests, let alone a clear and present danger. Yet Washington repeatedly passed up opportunities to use diplomacy or to build a coalition. Rather, it approached the problem assuming that, as the world’s dominant military power, it had no need to gain the cooperation of the international community already organized to meet such challenges.
Since the 2000 election, and particularly in the wake of the Afghan War and the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, diplomacy has been shamefully abused. Rather than using international law to deal with suspected terrorists captured during the Afghan War, the U.S. opted for its own military tribunals and the suspension of accepted judicial procedures. It ignored such institutions as the United Nations International Court of Justice, which could have provided legal procedures based on international law. And it rejected established judicial civil procedures that guarantee the rights of the accused, including the representation by an attorney, a speedy trial, and access to evidence and witnesses for defense. In conducting a campaign of deceit to justify the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration created the greatest intelligence scandal in U.S. history.
With the invasion and occupation of Iraq, we have witnessed the end of the so-called post-cold war era and the escalation of a continuous, worldwide war on terrorism that has increased global insecurity. Nearly 150,000 American forces are occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and the result is growing anarchy in both countries. President Bush has declared that the war against terrorism centers on Iraq. This has the ring of self-fulfilling prophecy, since Iraq had no terrorism problem the U.S. invasion. A growing number at home and abroad are concerned Washington will resort to the use of preemptive force again, perhaps against other so-called “axis of evil” members, North Korea or Iran, before this year’s election.
Reversing a trend that predicated the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has increased its military budget to more than $400 billion and its intelligence budget to more than $40 billion. Current projections point to a defense budget of more than $500 billion before the end of the decade, with another $50 billion for the intelligence community. Led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Department of Defense has moved aggressively to eclipse the State Department as the major locus of U.S. foreign policy, arrogating management of the intelligence community, and abandoning bipartisan policies of arms control and disarmament crafted over the past four decades. Funding cuts have prompted the Department of State to close consulates around the world and assign personnel of the well-funded CIA to diplomatic and consular posts. Though current defense costs represent nearly 20% of Washington’s expenses, less than 1% of the federal budget is devoted to the needs of the State Department.
The misuse of sensitive information to justify the war against Iraq has precipitated the worst intelligence scandal in U.S. history, compromising the Bush administration’s integrity. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argued, this intelligence failure has been “fueled by a demagogy that emphasizes worst-case scenarios, stimulates fear and induces a dichotomous view of world reality.”
So instead of living in a new era of conciliation and conflict resolution, we are witnessing an ugly epilogue to the cold war that finds Washington acting alone instead of working with its traditional allies. It is important to understand how the U.S. was lured into this terrible cul-de-sac and how the nation should debate and adopt policies to reverse the Bush administration’s dangerous neoconservative course.
[b]Problems with Current U.S. Policy[/b]
The Bush administration has placed the Pentagon atop the national security policy decisionmaking ladder, thus weakening the role of the State Department and other agencies dealing with foreign policy. As a result, the long-term security interests of the U.S. have been imperiled, weakening the international coalition against terrorism and compromising the pursuit of arms control and counter-proliferation. The actions of the administration have often not been discussed with congressional committees or debated in the foreign policy community, and many have reversed major tenets of American foreign policy involving multilateralism, collective security, and détente.
The militarization of the intelligence community has been particularly profound. Nearly 90 % of the $40 billion budget for intelligence activity is allocated to and monitored by the Pentagon, and more than 90 % of all intelligence personnel report to the Pentagon. The Pentagon controls the tasking, collection, and analysis of all satellite photography. Moreover, such key intelligence bodies as the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (formerly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency), and the National Reconnaissance Office are designated as “combat support” agencies. This is exactly what President Harry S. Truman was trying to avoid in 1947 when he created the Central Intelligence Agency separate from the Pentagon, and made the CIA director of central intelligence as well.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has gone further than any other defense secretary to control intelligence collection and analysis. He created the position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence without vetting this move with the Senate intelligence committee. In preparing the case against Iraq, he created the Office of Special Plans, which collected specious intelligence and misused intelligence community collection to justify the war and to create a congressional consensus in favor of war. Rumsfeld’s moves received rubber stamp approval from the Senate Armed Forces Committee, undermining the oversight roles of the Senate and House intelligence committees.
Despite marked decline in the strategic threat to the U.S. since the collapse of the Berlin War in 1989, the Warsaw Pact in 1990, and the Soviet Union itself in 1991, military influence over national security policy has grown substantially, and congressional support for the Pentagon has never been greater. The influence of the military has led to the Senate’s defeat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), the cornerstone of deterrence for 30 years; U.S. rejection of the International Criminal Court and the ban on the use of land mines; and the weakening of the bipartisan Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act, which contributed to the demilitarization and denuclearization of the former Soviet Union. The only arms control treaty that the Bush administration has negotiated with Russia, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty of May 2002, calls for no specific reductions before 2012, contains no provision for verification or monitoring, and allows missiles and warheads taken off the front line to be placed in storage rather than destroyed or dismantled. The treaty thus preempts any real disarmament agreement.
The doctrinal policies of the Bush administration have helped to make the international arena a more dangerous place. In his commencement address at West Point in June 2002, President Bush endorsed preemptive attacks, and several months later, the White House issued its National Security Strategy, which discarded the policy of détente and containment and endorsed preemptive or preventive military actions against states with which the U.S. is at peace. Ominously, the strategy report warned that the U.S. would “make no distinction between terrorists and those who knowingly harbor or provide aid to them.” The Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance and the Quadrennial Defense Review projected an indefinite future of continuous and worldwide war, endorsed the policy of regime change, and championed preemptive attack as the means for securing peace through international acceptance of U.S. hegemony. The Nuclear Posture Review of 2002 lowered the threshold for using nuclear weapons, and the 2003 defense bill eliminated restrictions on researching low-yield nuclear weapons and provided additional funds for research on high-yield nuclear bombs for use against deeply buried targets. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the U.S. has demonstrated over the past three years that “if the only tool in our toolbox is a hammer, then all of our problems will soon look like nails.”
[b]Toward a New Foreign Policy[/b]
U.S. foreign policy under the stewardship of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld has been based on unilateralism and militarism. The condition of continuous, worldwide war has created an operational tempo for the military that the U.S. cannot afford and the Pentagon cannot endure. With so many “boots on the ground,” the U.S. has triggered a series of diplomatic and political problems with both allies and adversaries. Moreover, the U.S. doctrine of preemptive war has set a dangerous precedent for other nations, validating the first Israeli attack against Syria in thirty years in October 2003 and perhaps justifying an Indian attack against Pakistan in the not-too-distant future. The radicalism of this doctrine is indicated by the spectrum of its opponents; in August 2002, for example, Henry Kissinger pointed out that “It is not in the American national interest to establish pre-emption as a universal principle available to every nation.”
The major international problems that the U.S. faces today, particularly international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) cannot be addressed unilaterally and cannot be resolved by the use of force. The same can be said for nontraditional security issues dealing with demographics, the environment, and AIDS. All of these problems require multilateral involvement and solutions.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, nation-building and peacemaking must be internationalized under civilian—not military control—as quickly as possible. The Bush administration has commandeered more than half of America’s ground forces to pacify Afghanistan and Iraq, and the U.S. is spending $5 billion a month in this effort with no end in sight. Neither the U.S. government nor the American people are prepared for the burdens of empire; U.S. military forces are overextended and are in no position to deal with emergencies that may arise, such as the a genuine crisis on the Korean Peninsula.
The United Nations and non-government organizations (NGOs) must be involved far more extensively in order to share the burden of governance and elicit collective resources for the job of reconstruction. Many countries most experienced in the field of peacemaking are prepared to commit troops and treasure, but only if Washington is willing to yield its domination of the transition process. The U.S. must participate with both the UN and NATO as group member—not hegemonic power. As Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) put it: “America needs more humility than hubris in the applications of American military power and the recognition that our interests are best served through alliances and consensus.”
International diplomacy, not military action, must be the first option in crisis management. The Bush administration has downplayed the role of international diplomacy in all crisis situations, including the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the North Korean and Iranian nuclear challenges. In the Middle East, our aim should be the creation of a viable Palestinian state and security for Israel. This is probably best pursued by insisting that Israel abandon settlements in the occupied territories and by fostering Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. The U.S. should also insist on an end to terrorism against Israelis, support of such a policy by members of the Arab League, and diplomatic recognition of Israel. In North Korea and Iran, the U.S. must establish or reestablish diplomatic relations, offer a combination of security guarantees and economic arrangements, and forge regional alignments to end the isolation of Pyongyang and Tehran. And Washington will need the cooperation of Iran and Syria to find a workable solution to the Iraqi crisis.
Intelligence and law enforcement must be the first options against terrorism; military force should be the last. West Europeans had to deal with terrorist organizations throughout the 1980s, and they did so effectively with law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Now that the terrorism problem is international, close relations with intelligence bodies are essential, as are knowledge of languages and regional studies in key areas. In the post 9/11 period, there have been no arrests or captures of key al Qaeda leaders that have not been relied on liaison intelligence and support. Cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence agencies—not the application of unilateral force—is the key to success.
The U.S. must support arms control and disarmament in order to stop the proliferation of WMDs. The White House must preserve and enhance an effective arms control regime, not dismantle it. This means adhering to outstanding agreements, not abrogating treaties that previous administrations have signed. And it means desisting from actions that compromise agreements or open new areas for competition.
A militarized foreign policy offers Americans a country on a perpetual war footing, but not one that is more secure. The U.S. must return to the ABM Treaty, end the deployment of national missile defense, and abide by Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to end underground testing. U.S. support for arms control could end nuclear testing worldwide and even attract India and Pakistan to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The current administration must commit itself to the agendas of Bush I and Bill Clinton to significantly reduce nuclear weapons and embrace international conventions on chemical and biological weapons. Washington must also end its development of low-yield nuclear weapons, such as bunker busters, and must prevent the weaponizing of outer space in order to return to the high moral ground in the quest for disarmament.
[i]Melvin A. Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and co-author of the forthcoming "Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk" (Prometheus Books, March 2004). This article is reprinted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus[/i]. http://www.fpif.org/
|
|
|
| |
| NOT A SHRED OF EVIDENCE |
| 02.20.04 (6:32 am) [edit] |
[b]Not a shred of evidence[/b]
By [i]Brendan O’Neill, The Spectator[/i], http://www.antiwar.com/specta...
Forget the no-show of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Even George Bush no longer believes that they are there. Ask instead what happened to Saddam’s ‘people shredder’, into which his son Qusay reportedly fed opponents of the Baathist regime. Ann Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley and chair of Indict, a group that has been campaigning since 1996 for the creation of an international criminal tribunal to try the Baathists, wrote of the shredder in the Times on 18 March — the day of the Iraq debate in the House of Commons and three days before the start of the war. Clwyd described an Iraqi’s claims that male prisoners were dropped into a machine ‘designed for shredding plastic’, before their minced remains were ‘placed in plastic bags’ so they could later be used as ‘fish food’. Sometimes the victims were dropped in feet first, reported Clwyd, so they could briefly behold their own mutilation before death.
Not surprisingly the story made a huge impact. Two days after Clwyd’s article was published, the Australian Prime Minister John Howard addressed his nation to explain why he was sending troops to support the coalition in Iraq; he talked of the Baathists’ many crimes, including the ‘human-shredding machine’ that was used ‘as a vehicle for putting to death critics of Saddam Hussein’. Clwyd received an email from the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, who expressed admiration for her work and invited her to meet him at the Pentagon. Her Times article on the shredder is still on the US State Department’s website, under the heading ‘Issues of International Security’.
Others, too, made good use of the story. Andrew Sullivan, the British-born journalist who writes a weekly column from Washington for the Sunday Times, said Clwyd’s report showed ‘clearly, unforgettably, indelibly’ that ‘the Saddam regime is evil’ and that ‘leading theologians and moralists and politicians’ ought to back the war. The Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips wrote of the shredder in which ‘bodies got chewed up from foot to head’, and said: ‘This is the evil that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican bishops refuse to fight.’ In the Telegraph, Mark Steyn used the spectre of the shredder to chastise the anti-war movement: ‘If it’s a choice between letting some carbonated-beverage crony of Dick Cheney get a piece of the Nasiriyah soft-drinks market or allowing Saddam to go on feeding his subjects feet-first into the industrial shredder for another decade or three, then the “peace” activists will take the lesser of two evils — i.e., crank up the shredder.’
In his book Allies: The United States, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq, published in December 2003, William Shawcross wrote of a regime that ‘fed people into huge shredders, feet first to prolong the agony’. Earlier this month, Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of the Sun, claimed that ‘British resistance to war changed last year when we learned how sadist Saddam personally supervised the horrific torture of Iraqis. Public opinion swung behind Tony Blair as voters learned how Saddam fed dissidents feet first into industrial shredders.’
Nobody doubts that Saddam was a cruel and ruthless tyrant who murdered many thousands of his own people (at least 17,000 according to Amnesty; 290,000 according to Human Rights Watch) and that the vast majority of Iraqis are glad he’s gone. But did his regime have a human-shredding machine that made mincemeat of men? The evidence is far from compelling
The shredding machine was first mentioned in public by James Mahon, then head of research at Indict, at a meeting at the House of Commons on 12 March. Mahon had just returned from northern Iraq, where Indict researchers, along with Ann Clwyd, interviewed Iraqis who had suffered under Saddam’s regime. One of them said Iraqis had been fed into a shredder. ‘Sometimes they were put in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 die like this.... On one occasion I saw Qusay Hussein personally supervising these murders.’ In subsequent interviews and articles, Clwyd said this shredding machine was in Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam’s most notorious jail.
What was done to corroborate the Iraqi’s claims? Apparently nothing. Indict refuses to tell me the names of the researchers who were in Iraq with Mahon and Clwyd; and, I am told, Mahon, who no longer works at Indict, ‘does not want to speak to journalists about his work with us’. But Clwyd tells me: ‘We heard it from a victim; we heard it and we believed it.’ So nothing was done to check the truth of what the victim said, against other witness statements or other evidence for a shredding machine? ‘Well, no,’ says Clwyd. ‘[Indict researchers] didn’t have to do that; they were just taking witness statements.’
But surely, before going public with so shocking a story, facts ought to have been checked and double-checked? Clwyd clearly doesn’t think so. ‘We heard it from someone who had been released from the Abu Ghraib prison....I heard his account of what went on in the prison. I was there when [Indict’s] cross-examination of the witness took place, and I am satisfied from what I heard that shredding was a method of execution. We knew he wasn’t making it up.’
This is all that Indict had to go on — uncorroborated and quite amazing claims made by a single person from northern Iraq. When I suggest that this does not constitute proof of the existence of a human shredder, Clwyd responds: ‘We heard a victim say it; who are you to say that chap is a liar?’ Yet to call for witness statements to be corroborated before being turned into the subject of national newspaper articles is not to accuse the witnesses involved of being liars; it is to follow good practice in the collection of evidence, particularly evidence with which Indict hopes to ‘seek indictments by national prosecutors’ against former Baathists.
An Iraqi who worked as a doctor in the hospital attached to Abu Ghraib prison tells me there was no shredding machine in the prison. The Iraqi, who wishes to remain anonymous, worked at Abu Ghraib in late 1997 and early 1998; he left Iraq in 2002 and now lives in Britain, where he is taking further medical examinations so that he can practise as a doctor here. He describes Saddam’s regime as ‘very, very terrible, one of the worst regimes ever’, and Abu Ghraib prison as ‘horrific’. Part of a doctor’s job at Abu Ghraib was to attend to those who had been executed. ‘We had to see to the dead prisoners, to make sure that they were dead. Then we would write a death certificate for them.’ Doctors did not witness executions; after an execution had taken place the victim would be ‘dropped into a kind of hole, and the doctor would go downstairs with the policemen or the security guards, into the hole, to confirm the death’.
Did he ever attend to, or hear of, prisoners who had been shredded? ‘No.’ Did any of the other doctors at Abu Ghraib speak of a shredding machine used to execute prisoners? ‘No, no, never.’ He says: ‘The method of execution was hanging; as far as I know that was the only form of execution used in Abu Ghraib. Maybe sometimes there were shootings, but I think these were rare.’ However, the doctor tells me that he did once hear a story about a shredding machine, from a friend who had nothing to do with Abu Ghraib — but in the version he heard, the shredder was in ‘one of Saddam’s main palaces’. Does he think this was a rumour, or an accurate description of a method of execution used in Saddam’s palaces? ‘Because of what the Saddam regime was like, anything is possible,’ he says. ‘It might be a rumour, it might be true.’
Cryptically, Ann Clwyd tells me: ‘I heard other people talk about a shredding machine, but I can’t tell you who they are.’ However, one other person who talked about a shredder was Kenneth Joseph, an American who claimed to have visited Iraq as an antiwar human shield before concluding that he was wrong and the war was right. Joseph’s Damascene conversion was first reported by United Press International (UPI) on 21 March. He told Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI’s editor-at-large, that what he had heard in Iraq had ‘shocked me back to reality’, that Iraqis’ tales ‘of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as their bodies got chewed up’. He also claimed to have ‘made it across the border’ with 14 hours of uncensored video containing interviews with Iraqis.
Yet many have since questioned Joseph’s claims. When Carol Lipton, an American journalist, investigated his story in April for CounterPunch, she reported that ‘none of the human shield groups whom I contacted had ever heard of Joseph’. She also noted that ‘incredibly, nowhere has a single photo or segment from [Joseph’s] 14 hours of interviews been published’. These discrepancies led some to speculate whether the Reverend Sun Myung Moon played a part in ‘the Joseph story’. Moon, head of the Unification Church (Moonies), owns UPI. Private Eye suggested that Joseph’s story was ‘a propaganda fabrication by right-wingers associated with the Revd Moon’s Unification Church’. Even Johann Hari, a pro-war columnist on the Independent who wrote a sycophantic account of Joseph’s conversion, has since declared that Joseph ‘was probably a bullshitter’.
Clwyd insists that corroboration of the shredder story came three months after her first Times article, when she was shown a dossier by a reporter from Fox TV. On 18 June, Clwyd wrote a second article for the Times, describing a ‘chillingly meticulous record book’ from Saddam’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which described one of the methods of execution as ‘mincing’. Can she say who compiled this book? ‘No, I can’t.’ Where is it now? ‘I don’t know.’ What was the name of the Fox reporter who showed it to her? ‘I have no idea.’ Did Clwyd read the entire thing? ‘No! It was in Arabic! I only saw it briefly.’ Curiously, there is no mention of the book or of ‘mincing’ as a method of execution on the Fox News website. Robert Zimmerman, a spokesman for Fox News in New York, tells me: ‘That story does not ring a bell with our foreign editor here, and it is something you expect would ring a bell. It sounds like something we would have gone to town with, in terms of promotion and PR.’
And there you have the long and short of the available evidence for a human-shredding machine — an uncorroborated statement made by an individual in northern Iraq, hearsay comments made by someone widely suspected of being a ‘bullshitter’ (who, like the Australian Prime Minister, made his comments about the shredder shortly after Clwyd first wrote of it in the Times), and a record book, in Arabic, that mentions ‘mincing’ but whose whereabouts are presently unknown. Other groups have no recorded accounts of a human shredder. A spokesman at Amnesty International tells me that his inquiries into the shredder story ‘drew a blank’. ‘We checked it with our people here, and we have no information about a shredder.’ Widney Brown, deputy programme director of Human Rights Watch, says: ‘We don’t know anything about a shredder, and have not heard of that particular form of execution or torture.’
It remains to be seen whether this uncorroborated story turns out to be nothing more than war propaganda — like the stories on the eve of the first Gulf war of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait taking babies from incubators and leaving them to die on hospital floors. What can be said, however, is that the alleged shredder provided those in favour of the war — by no means an overwhelming majority in Britain last March — with a useful propaganda tool. The headline on Ann Clwyd’s 18 March story in the Times was: ‘See men shredded, then say you don’t back war’.
|
|
|
| |
| Bush Under The Bright Lights |
| 02.20.04 (6:28 am) [edit] |
[b]Under The Bright Lights [/b]
By [i]David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers)[/i], http://www.tompaine.com/featu...
[b]George W. Bush [/b]has finally agreed to be interviewed by the independent 9/11 commission. Well, sort of. The White House says he will only meet with a limited number of the commission's 10 members. After the commission asked to talk privately to Bush—and to Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton and Al Gore—White House press secretary Scott McClellan on Feb. 13 said that his boss had "agreed to the request." But the following day an unnamed White House official said that Bush was not planning on meeting with the entire commission, which includes five Republicans and five Democrats.
This was hardly surprising, given Bush's history with the panel. He first opposed creating a commission to investigate what went wrong before and on 9/11. Then, as political pressure mounted, he went along—but only after winning the right to name the head of the commission. For that slot he selected Henry Kissinger, the poster boy for government secrecy. Kissinger ended up turning down the appointment to avoid having to name the clients of his international consulting firm. (What a patriot!) Bush then anointed Thomas Kean, a former moderate Republican governor from New Jersey. And several weeks ago when the commission, which has been facing a May 2004 deadline for the completion of its work, requested two additional months, the Bush White House said no. Once again, it retreated in the face of opposition—particularly from the 9/11 family members. (Still, the House Republican leadership says it is dead-set against any extension, and the committee can only obtain extra time if Congress passes the appropriate legislation.)
It's understandable that Bush is not eager to appear before the entire commission. It does contain several feisty members—most notably, former Rep. Timothy Roemer and former Sen. Bob Kerrey, both Democrats. More importantly, there are several obvious questions that could cause Bush to squirm. Here is an abbreviated list:
*** Mr. President, as the joint inquiry into 9/11 conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees first noted, in early July 2001, U.S. intelligence officers prepared a warning that read:
[i]Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that UBL [Usama bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."[/i]
The joint inquiry's final report noted that this warning had been handed to "senior government officials." But it didn't specify who saw it because your administration claims that the names of the recipients are classified information. Yet committee sources have told journalists (including David Corn) that this briefing did reach the Oval Office. Did you see this briefing? Did your national security adviser Condoleezza Rice see it? What, if anything, did you or your national security team do in response? Did you take it seriously? Did you order any action? And why wouldn't you let the American public know who received this warning? Don't American citizens have the right to know?
*** In May 2002, the public learned that an Aug. 6, 2001, highly classified intelligence report prepared for you included references to bin Laden and his desire to hijack airplanes. In the media maelstrom that ensued, Rice told reporters that this President's Daily Brief contained only information about bin Laden's methods of operation from a historical perspective and referred to no specific warnings. Your administration refused to release this PDB to the congressional intelligence committees. But the committees managed to find a source in the intelligence community who informed them that "a closely held intelligence report" in August 2001 (read: this particular PDB) said that bin Laden was seeking to conduct attacks within the United States, that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure here, and that information obtained in May 2001 indicated that a group of bin Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with explosives. This was dramatically different from Rice's characterization of the PDB as including only the same-old/same-old. Did she mislead the public about it? And how did you react to this information? Was anything done in response to it?
*** After 9/11, you said, "No one could have conceivably imagined suicide bombers burrowing into our society and then emerging all in the same day to fly their aircraft—fly U.S. aircraft into buildings full of innocent people, and show no remorse." Yet since the mid-1990s, U.S. intelligence had collected reports noting that Al Qaeda was interested in precisely this type of attack. One example of many: in 1999, a public report prepared for the National Intelligence Council, an affiliate of the CIA, by the research division of the Library of Congress noted, "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft... into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House." Before 9/11, were you unaware that such a threat did exist? After 9/11, did anyone tell that the U.S. had previously received intelligence suggesting Al Qaeda might try to hijack airplanes and slam them into American targets (including your temporary home)? Also after 9/11, did you ever inquire why these intelligence reports were never acted upon—that is, why there were no contingency plans created for defending the United States from such an assault?
*** Richard Clarke, who handled counter-terrorism at the National Security Council during the Clinton years and during the first few months of your administration, devised a comprehensive plan to "roll back" Al Qaeda. Yet your national security team ignored it. Why was that? Were your aides so put off by the previous administration that they wanted nothing to do with any national security ideas developed before you entered the White House? In the first half of 2001, how much pressure did you place on your aides to develop their own plan for dealing with Al Qaeda?
*** One of the great tragedies of 9/11 is that the FBI had an active informant in San Diego who had numerous contacts in 2000 with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. And he may also have had more limited contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. In 2000, the CIA had information that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar—who had already been linked to terrorism—were or might be in the United States. Yet it had not placed them on a watch list for suspected terrorists or shared this information with the FBI. The intelligence committees reported, "What is clear... is that the informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on, would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the intelligence community's best chance to unravel the September 11 plot. Given the CIA's failure to disseminate, in a timely manner, the intelligence information on...al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, that chance, unfortunately, never materialized." This was a major screw-up on the CIA's part. Yet in Feb. 2002, CIA chief George Tenet said 9/11 "was not the result of the failure of attention and discipline and focus." Given what it is known now, doesn't Tenet's remark seem terribly wrong? Why didn't you order any disciplinary action for those who failed at the CIA?
*** According to the intelligence committees' report, an FBI budget official said that counter-terrorism was not a priority for Attorney General John Ashcroft prior to 9/11, and the FBI faced pressure to cut its counter-terrorism program to satisfy Ashcroft's other priorities. Why wasn't that a firing offense?
*** Why did your administration insist on classifying the chapter on Saudi Arabia in the intelligence committees' final report? Republican and Democratic members of Congress urged you to release at least portions of it. So did the Saudi government. According to the final report, a July 2002 CIA cable included a CIA officer's concerns that persons associated with a foreign government-meaning Saudi Arabia—may have provided financial assistance to the hijackers. Doesn't the American public deserve to know if there was a Saudi connection?
*** The final report of the intelligence committees—which, of course, was approved by Republicans and Democrats, concluded:
[i]The intelligence community failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information.... As a result, the community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack. No one will ever know what might have happened had more connections been drawn between these disparate pieces of information.... The important point is that the intelligence community, for a variety of reasons, did not bring together and fully appreciate a range of information that could have greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing Osama bin Laden's plan to attack the United States on September 11, 2001.
Did you ever hold anyone in the intelligence community accountable for this failure?[/i]
There is much to ask Bush. He may even have much to tell the commission. And 9/11 family members, historians and other citizens who desire a full accounting of what happened that horrific day can hope that the commission will make public the transcripts of its sessions with Clinton, Gore, Cheney and especially Bush. After all, with Bush running for re-election on his national security credentials, all of this is an essential part of that record.
|
|
|
| |
| UNTRUE RIGHT-WING SMEARS OF JOHN KERRY TURN OUT TO BE LIES |
| 02.19.04 (6:44 am) [edit] |
[b]Klute-less[/b]
By [i]Evan[/i], http://www.alternet.org/elect...
What next? First came the Drudge-spawned rumor of a Kerry affair with a woman improperly dubbed an 'intern' (do smear campaigns just make templates?). She was tracked down, interviewed, the story was false, no affair. You’d think as long as they’re making this stuff up they could spice it up and make it timely: a gay fiancé let’s say. Then came the Hanoi Jane-John Kerry sightings. Two photos pairing Kerry with Jane Fonda, the bete noir of Vietnam Vets, are circulating the web. One has Kerry seated several rows behind Fonda in what appears to be a sizable crowd. The other shows them together on stage at an antiwar rally. The second, according to the Guardian UK, http://www.guardian.co.uk/use...,13918,1150509,00.html is a forgery. More on » http://www.alternet.org/elect...
|
|
|
| |
| NO END TO WAR |
| 02.19.04 (6:40 am) [edit] |
[b]No End to War[/b]
By[i] Patrick J. Buchanan[/i], http://www.amconmag.com/3_1_0... :
[i][b]The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict[/b][/i].
On the dust jacket of his book, Richard Perle appends a [i]Washington Post [/i]depiction of himself as the “intellectual guru of the hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy.”
The guru’s reputation, however, does not survive a reading. Indeed, on putting down Perle’s new book the thought recurs: the neoconservative moment may be over. For they are not only losing their hold on power, they are losing their grip on reality.
[i]An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror [/i]opens on a note of hysteria. In the War on Terror, writes Perle, “There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.” “What is new since 9/11 is the chilling realization that the terrorist threat we thought we had contained” now menaces “our survival as a nation.”
But how is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? Are we really in imminent peril of a holocaust like that visited upon the Jews of Poland?
“[A] radical strain within Islam,” says Perle, “ ... seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws.”
Well, yes. Militant Islam has preached that since the 7th century. But what are the odds the Boys of Tora Bora are going to “overthrow our civilization” and coerce us all to start praying to Mecca five times a day?
In his own review of [i]An End to Evil[/i], Joshua Micah Marshall picks up this same scent of near-hysteria over the Islamic threat:
[i]The book conveys a general sense that America is at war with Islam itself anywhere and everywhere: the contemporary Muslim world .... is depicted as one great cauldron of hate, murder, obscurantism, and deceit. If our Muslim adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we must gird for more battles[/i].
To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or container ship. Yet even this will never “overthrow our civilization.”
In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber?
In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s side. Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.
In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man. Sudan is a failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected them in back-to-back landslides. The Iranian Revolution has reached Thermidor. Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does not work.
Yet, assume it makes a comeback. So what? Taken together, all 22 Arab nations do not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the size of Finland’s. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone the United States. The Islamic threat is not strategic, but demographic. If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of death—birth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate.
Said young Lincoln in his Lyceum address, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
In his first inaugural address, FDR admonished, “[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling to stampede America into serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq, though, we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to attack us. Iraq was never “the clear and present danger” the authors insist she was.
Calling their book a “manual for victory,” they declaim:
[i]For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust[/i].
But no nation can “end evil.” Evil has existed since Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him. A propensity to evil can be found in every human heart. And if God accepts the existence of evil, how do Frum and Perle propose to “end” it? Nor can any nation “win the war on terror.” Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants for political ends.
Revolutionary terror has been around for as long as this Republic. It was used by Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety and by People’s Will in Romanov Russia. Terror has been the chosen weapon of anarchists, the IRA, Irgun, the Stern Gang, Algeria’s FLN, the Mau Mau, MPLA, the PLO, Black September, the Basque ETA, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, the Tupamaros, Shining Path, FARC, the ANC, the V.C., the Huks, Chechen rebels, Tamil Tigers, and the FALN that attempted to assassinate Harry Truman and shot up the House floor in 1954, to name only a few.
Accused terrorists have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Begin, Arafat, Mandela. Three lie in mausoleums in the capitals of nations they created: Lenin, Mao, Ho. Others are the fathers of their countries like Ben Bella and Jomo Kenyatta. A terrorist of the Black Hand ignited World War I by assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand. Yet Gavrilo Princep has a bridge named for him in Sarajevo.
The murder of innocents for political ends is evil, but to think we can “end” it is absurd. Cruel and amoral men, avaricious for power and “immortality,” will always resort to it. For, all too often, it succeeds.
[i][b]But what must America do to attain victory in her war on terror?[/b][/i]
Say the authors: “We must hunt down the individual terrorists before they kill our people or [i]others[/i] .... We must deter [i]all regimes [/i]that use terror as a weapon of [i]state against anyone, American or not[/i]” [emphasis added].
Astonishing. The authors say America is responsible for defending everyone, everywhere from terror and deterring any and all regimes that might use terror —against anyone, anywhere on earth.
But there are 192 nations. Scores of regimes from Liberia to Congo to Cuba, from Zimbabwe to Syria to Uzbekistan, and from Iran to Sudan to the Afghan warlords of the Northern Alliance who fought on our side—have used torture and terror to punish enemies. Are we to fight them all?
Well, actually, no. Excepting North Korea, the authors’ list of nations that need to be attacked reads as though it were drawn up in the Israeli Defense Ministry. By the second paragraph, Perle and Frum have given us a short list of priority targets: “The war on terror is not over, it has barely begun. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder.”
Now al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. But when did Hamas attack us? And if Israel can co-exist and negotiate with Hezbollah, why is it America’s duty to destroy Hezbollah? Iran and North Korea, the authors warn, “present intolerable threats to American security. We must move boldly against them both and against all other sponsors of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia. And we don’t have much time.”
“Why have we put up with [Syria] as long as we have?” the authors demand. They call for a cut-off of Syria’s oil and an ultimatum to Assad: Get Syrian troops out of Lebanon, hand over all terrorist suspects, end support for Hezbollah, stop agitating against Israel, and adopt a “Western orientation”—or you, too, get the Saddam treatment.
But what has Syria done to us? And if Assad balks do we bomb Damascus? Invade? Where do we get the troops? What if the Syrians, too, resort to guerrilla war?
Bush’s father made Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War. Ehud Barak offered Assad 99.5 percent of the Golan Heights. Why, then, must Bashir Assad’s regime be destroyed—by us?
“We don’t have much time,” say Frum and Perle. But what is Assad doing that warrants immediate attack? Is he, too, buying yellowcake from Niger?
Colonel Khaddafi is now paying billions in reparations for Pan Am 103, giving up his weapons of mass destruction, and inviting U.S. inspectors in to verify his disarmament. Why is it imperative we overthrow him?
While the Saudis have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they are not America’s enemies. They pumped oil to keep prices down in the first Gulf War. They looked the other way as U.S. fighter-bombers flew out of Prince Sultan Air Base in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the Saudis are directed to provide us “with the utmost cooperation in the war on terror,” or we will invade, detach their oil-rich eastern province, and occupy it.
But why? If the monarchy falls and bin Laden’s acolytes replace it, how would that make us more secure in our own country?
What did Iran do to justify war against her? According to Perle and Frum,
[i]Iran defied the Monroe Doctrine and sponsored murder in our own hemisphere, killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires—and our government did worse than nothing: It opened negotiations with the murderers[/i].
But that atrocity occurred a dozen years ago, long before the reform government of President Mohammad Khatami was elected. And if Iran was behind an attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, why did Argentina and Israel not avenge these deaths? Why is retribution our responsibility? It was not Americans who were the victims, and the attack occurred 5,000 miles from the United States.
The Frum-Perle invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is both cynical and comical. If they were genuinely concerned about violations of the Monroe Doctrine, why did they not include Cuba on their target list, a “state sponsor of terror” 90 miles from our shores that has hosted Soviet missiles and, according to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, is developing chemical and biological weapons? Why did Saudi Arabia make the cut but not Cuba? Might it have something to do with proximity and propinquity?
For Iran, there can be no reprieve. “The regime must go,” say our authors, because Ayatollah Khamenei has
…[i] no more right to control ... Iran than any other criminal has to seize control of the persons and property of others. It’s not always in our power to do something about such criminals, nor is it always in our interest, but when it is in our power and interest, we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker[/i].
But where in the Constitution is the president empowered to “toss dictators aside”? And if it took 150,000 U.S. soldiers to toss Saddam aside, how many troops do Frum and Perle think it will take to occupy the capital of a nation three times as large and populous and toss the ayatollah aside? How many dead and wounded would our war hawks consider an acceptable price for being rid of the mullahs?
As South Korea favors appeasement, they write, we must take the lead, demand that North Korea surrender all nuclear materials and shut down all missile sites. If Kim Jong Il balks, we should move U.S. troops back to safety beyond artillery and rocket range of the DMZ and launch preemptive strikes on known North Korean nuclear sites and impose a naval and air blockade. As for the South Koreans, they should probably brace themselves. “We have no doubt how such a war would end,” say the authors. They also had no doubt how the Iraqi war would end.
Is the Perle-Frum vision for the suffering people of North Korea a future of freedom and democracy? Not exactly:
[i]It may be that the only way out of the decade-long crisis on the Korean peninsula is the toppling of Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North Korean communist who is more subservient to China. If so, we should accept that outcome[/i].
Swell. America is to fight a second Korean War that could entail a nuclear strike on our troops, but, when we have won, we should accept a communist North Korea that is a vassal of Beijing. How many dead and wounded are our AEI warlords willing to accept to make Pyongyang a puppet of Beijing?
But the Frum-Perle enemies’ list is not complete. France, if she does not shape up, is to be treated as an enemy.
From every page of this book there oozes a sense of urgency that borders on the desperate for action this day: “We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington, we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial.”
The neocons are not wrong here. With the cost of war at $200 billion and rising, with deaths mounting, and with the possibility growing that Iraq could collapse in chaos and civil war, President Bush appears to be experiencing buyer’s remorse about the lemon he was sold by Perle and friends.
They promised him a “cakewalk,” that we would be hailed as “liberators,” that democracy would take root in Iraq and flourish in the Middle East, that Palestinians and Israelis would break bread and make peace. With Lord Melbourne, Bush must be muttering, “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to pass.”
[i][b]What do Perle and Frum see as our decisive failing in Iraq?[/b][/i]
[i]But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to allow the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq’s leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, to form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad. In 1944, we took care to let French troops enter Paris before U.S. or British forces. We should have shown equal tact in 2003[/i].
Thus, we are in trouble because Ahmad Chalabi was not allowed to play de Gaulle leading his war-weary, battle-hardened Free Iraqis into Baghdad.
Why was Perle’s protégé passed over? Because the “INC terrified the Saudis and therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate the Saudis.” The damned Arabists at State did it again.
Hastily written, replete with errors, with no index, An [i]End to Evil [/i]is a brief in defense of neoconservatives against their impending indictment on charges they lied us into a war that may prove our greatest disaster since Vietnam. And the charge of deliberate deceit is not without merit.
In mid-December 2001, in a column distributed by Copley News, Perle asserted that Saddam “is busily at work on a nuclear weapon .... it’s simply a matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons.”
Naming Khidir Hamza, “one of the people who ran the nuclear weapons program for Saddam,” as his source, Perle gave credence to Hamza’s tale of 400 uranium enrichment facilities spread all over Iraq. “Some of them look like farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like warehouses. You’ll never find them.” Only “preemptive action” can save us, said Perle.
By the end of 2001, according to Perle, the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam was imminent:
[i]With each passing day he comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal. We know he has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade .... And intelligence sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years, tomorrow even[/i]?
When he wrote this, Perle, as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, had access to secret intelligence. So the question cannot be evaded: did Hamza deliberately deceive Perle, or did Perle deliberately deceive us?
For those unpersuaded that Saddam was a strategic threat, there were his links to the 9/11 massacre. Saddam’s “collaboration with terrorism is well documented,” wrote Perle, “Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the September 11 ringleader, is convincing.”
Thus did the neocons get the war they wanted. And after America fought the war for which they had beaten the drums, how do Perle & Co. explain why it did not turn out as they assured us it would?
Answer: any disaster in Iraq, the authors argue, will be due to the venality and cowardice of the State Department, CIA, FBI, retired generals, and ex-ambassadors bought off by the Saudis. “We have offered concrete recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the softliners have not, because we have wanted to fight and they have not.”
Which brings us back to the point made at the outset: the neocon moment may be passing, for they appear to be losing their grip on reality as well as their influence on policy. Rather than looking for new wars to involve us more deeply in the Middle East, Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be looking for the next exit ramp out of our Mesopotamian morass. “No war in ‘04” is said to be the watchword of Karl Rove.
Moreover, Americans are coming to appreciate that, all that bombast about “unipolar” moments and “American empire” aside, there are limits to American power, and we are approaching them. U.S. ground forces of 480,000 are stretched thin. There is grumbling in Army, Reserve, and National Guard units about too many tours too far from home. Backing off his “axis-of-evil” rhetoric, Bush said in this year’s State of the Union, “We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.”
[i][b]The long retreat of American empire has begun[/b][/i].
In Washington, there are rumors of the return of James Baker and the imminent departure of Paul Wolfowitz. As Frederick the Great, weary of the antics and peculations of his house guest Voltaire, said, “One squeezes the orange and throws away the rind.”
Moreover, the radicalism of their schemes for two, three, many wars, seems, given our embroilment in Iraq, not only rash but also rooted in unreality. Before Bush could take us to war with any of these regimes, he would have to convince his country of the necessity of war and persuade Congress to grant him the power to go to war. Yet absent a new atrocity on the magnitude of 9/11, directly traceable to one of the regimes on the Perle-Frum list, the president could not win this authority. Nor does it appear he intends to try. And were the United States to attack Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, we would alienate every ally in the Islamic world and Europe—including Tony Blair’s Britain. To fight these wars and occupy these nations would bleed our armed forces and mandate a return to the draft. But how would any of these wars make us more secure from terrorism here at home?
Indeed, it is because Americans cannot see the correlation between the wars the authors demand and security at home that Frum and Perle must resort to fear-mongering about holocausts, the end of civilization, and our demise as a nation.
If it is America we defend, An [i]End to Evil [/i]makes no sense. The Perle-Frum prescription for permanent war makes sense only if it is the mission of the armed forces of the United States to make the Middle East safe for Sharon—and here we come to the heart of the quarrel between us.
On Sept. 11, al-Qaeda attacked us. Al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Syria, Libya, or Saudi Arabia. And the way to cut off al-Qaeda and kill it is to isolate it from all Arab and Islamic nations and centers of power including Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
None of these nations had a hand in 9/11. All have a vital interest in not being linked to an al-Qaeda for whom an enraged superpower is on the mortal hunt. Thus, no matter the character of these regimes, we have interests in common. And if Bush can use carrots to get Bashir Assad to help us find and finish al-Qaeda—as his father got Assad’s father to help us expel Iraq from Kuwait—let us make Syria an ally rather than another enemy of the United States.
But here is the rub: The neocons do not want to narrow our list of enemies. They do not want to confine America’s war to those who attacked us. They want to expand our list of enemies to include Israel’s enemies. They want to escalate and widen what Chris Matthews calls “the Firemen’s War” into a war for hegemony in the Middle East. They had hoped to exploit 9/11 to erect an empire, and as they see the vision vanish, their desperation knows no bounds.
That great American military mind Col. John Boyd once described strategy as appending to yourself as many centers of power as possible and isolating your enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
This was the strategy used by Bush I in the Gulf War. He persuaded Russia and China to sign on in the Security Council, Germany and Japan to finance his war, Syria and Egypt to send soldiers, Britain and France to help us fight it. By giving everyone a stake in an American victory—call it imperial bribery, if you will—Bush I lined up the world against Iraq. As did George W. Bush, brilliantly, in Afghanistan.
But what Frum and Perle are pressing on him now is an altogether opposite strategy. They want Bush to expand the war, broaden the theater of operations, multiply our enemies, and ignore our allies. If Bush should adopt this strategy, it would be America and Israel against the Arab and Islamic world with Europe neutral and almost all of Asia rooting for our humiliation.
Let it be said: it is vital to victory over al-Qaeda, to the security of our country, the safety of our people, and our broader interests in an Arab and Islamic world of 57 nations that stretches from Morocco to Malaysia that we not let the neocons conflate our war on terror with their war for hegemony.
Neocons believe the Palestinian Authority must be crushed, Arafat eliminated, and the Golan Heights, West Bank, and East Jerusalem held by Israel forever. They want Hezbollah eradicated, Syria denatured, the Saudi monarchy brought down. Let them so believe. But their agenda is not America’s agenda, and their fight is not America’s fight.
There is no vital U.S. interest in whose flag flies over the Golan or East Jerusalem, when Barak was willing to give up both. But if we allow the neoconservatives to morph our war on al-Qaeda into Israel’s war for Palestine, our war will never end. And that is the hidden agenda of the neoconservatives: permanent war for their permanent empowerment. As Frum and Perle concede, this is “our generation’s great cause.”
“Who are those guys?” Butch and Sundance asked. Indeed, who are these men who would plunge our country into serial wars of preemption and retribution across the arc of crisis from Libya to Korea?
Frum is not even an American. He is a Canadian who did not become a citizen until offered a job in the Bush speechwriting shop. He was cashiered after one year when his wife bragged on the Internet that David invented the “axis-of-evil” phrase. Expelled from the White House, Frum ratted out his old colleagues in a “hot” book and got himself hired by [i]National Review[/i], where he produced a cover story about a dirty dozen “Unpatriotic Conservatives” who hate neocons, hate Bush, hate the GOP, hate America, and “wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror.”
Frum ordered all 12 purged from the conservative movement. (And we must, in fairness, report that all three editors of this magazine and four regular writers were among the 12 who went to the stake.)
Who is Perle? Unlike Frum, a cipher on foreign policy, Perle has been a serious player since the Nixon era. But throughout those years he has betrayed a passionate attachment to a foreign power. In 1996, Perle co-authored “[i]A Clean Break[/i],” a now-famous paper urging Benjamin Netanyahu to dump the Oslo Accords, seize the West Bank, and confront Syria. The road to Damascus lies through Baghdad, Perle told the receptive Israeli Prime Minister.
Then an adviser to Republican candidate Robert Dole, Perle was thus secretly urging a foreign government to abrogate a peace accord supported by his own government. In 1998, he and other neoconservatives signed a letter to then President Clinton urging the United States to initiate all-out war on Iraq and pledging neoconservative support if Clinton would launch it.
Query: why is Perle permitted to retain his post at the Department of Defense while agitating for wars on four or five countries, including Saudi Arabia, a friend of the United States? Why does President Bush put up with this? His father would never have tolerated it.
The neocons have also begun to injure their reputations and isolate themselves with the nastiness and irrationality of their attacks. French cannon once bore the inscription [i]ultima ratio regum[/i], the last argument of kings. The toxic charge of “Anti-Semite!” has become the last argument of the neocons. But they have wheeled out that cannon too many times. People are less intimidated now. They have seen men look into its muzzle and walk away.
Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Centcom, is a hero of Vietnam. He opposed war with Iraq, arguing that the U.S. military was overstretched and we would unleash forces we could not control. In an interview, Zinni related his astonishment at the vapidity of the Wolfowitz clique with which he had to deal at the Department of Defense:
[i]The more I saw, the more I thought that this [war] was the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had had an idea that worked on the ground .... I don’t know where the neocons came from—that was not the platform [Bush and Cheney] ran on .... Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president[/i].
[i]National Review’s [/i]response was to brand Zinni an anti-Semite. In a separate column, [i]NR [/i]regular Joel Mowbray not only accused the general of having “blamed the Jews,” he insisted that the term neocon, in common usage for 25 years, is now an anti-Semitic code word for Jews:
[i]Neither President Bush nor Vice-President Cheney ... was to blame. It was the Jews. They captured both Bush and Cheney …. Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say ‘Jews.’ He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: ‘neoconservatives[/i].’
Mowbray and[i] National Review [/i]thus slandered a brave and brilliant soldier who has bled for his country. Such slanders do the neocons no good but only add to their isolation and the burgeoning detestation of their tactics.
[i]New York Times [/i]columnist David Brooks has also begun to smear critics of the neocons as anti-Semites. In the word “neocon,” he writes, the “con” stands for conservative and the “neo” stands for Jewish.
But the problem for neocons is not that so many are Jewish, but that so few are conservative. Lawrence Kaplan, a Perle colleague who co-authored a book with William Kristol, after reading [i]An End to Evil[/i], declared: “This is not conservatism. It is liberalism, with very sharp teeth.”
If the neocons purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else’s motives, is it unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does every grand strategy neocons advance, from “American empire” to “benevolent global hegemony” to “a [i]Pax Americana[/i]” to “world democratic revolution” have as its centerpiece solidarity with Sharon and a vigorous wielding of American power against all the enemies of Israel?
Why is every peace plan proposed or endorsed by a president to give the Palestinians a home of their own—the Rogers Plan, the Oslo accords, Camp David, the Taba Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Road Map—a Munich sellout? Why is any American patriot, who demands that Ariel Sharon stop building settlements on Palestinian land and walling off Jerusalem, a State Department Arabist, a pawn of the Texas oil lobby, a Coughlinite, an anti-Semite, or a bought-and-paid-for lickspittle of the Saudis?
The United States remains committed morally and politically to the security and survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to guarantee it. No president is going to back off that commitment. But because Israel is a friend does not mean that the Sharonites have preemptive absolution to settle or seize Arab lands or permanently to deny Arab peoples the rights we preach to the world. In our own national interests, we must say so—in the clear.
This is a time for truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no longer militarily present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli strategic interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of Palestinian suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide.
Thus between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives a breach has been opened and an irreconcilable conflict has arisen. We of the Old Right only have one country. We believe U.S. foreign policy must be determined by what is best for America. And what is best for America is what our forefathers taught: If you would preserve this Republic, stay out of foreign wars, avoid “permanent alliances,” beware of “passionate attachments” to nations not your own.
In 1778, Washington rejoiced in the alliance with France. But when victory was won, that alliance became an entanglement that could drag the Republic into Europe’s wars. American statesmen who had celebrated the French alliance now sought to sever it, and, under Adams, succeeded.
With the end of the Cold War, an alliance with Israel has ceased to be central to U.S. interests. Indeed, our reputation as armorers and allies of Israel only damages us as Sharon rampages through the West Bank and Gaza walling off Arab land and denying to Palestinians that very right of self-determination we Americans espouse. Sharon is making hypocrites of us, and we are cowards for permitting it.
To the neocons, however, Zionism is second nature. They cannot conceive of a foreign policy that is good for America that does not entail absolute solidarity with Israel. They are dangerously close to imbibing the poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good for Israel, it cannot be bad for America.
To evade admission of the transparent truth, neocons have begun to rationalize their passionate attachment, to sublimate it. “The Arab-Israeli quarrel is not a cause of Islamic extremism,” Frum and Perle protest.
But when every returning journalist and diplomat and every opinion survey says it is America’s uncritical support for Israeli repression of the Palestinians that makes us hated in the region, how can honest men write this? Have they blinded themselves to the truth because it is too painful?
We stand by Israel, writes Irving Kristol, because America is an “ideological” nation, “like the Soviet Union of yesteryear.” We and Israel are democracies, the Arab countries are not, and that is all there is to it.
[i]That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary[/i].
But this is nonsense, and Kristol knows it. When Britain and France declared war on Hitler on September 3, 1939, FDR did not “come to the defense of France and Britain.” He delivered a fireside chat that night promising the nation America would stay out. There will be “no blackout of peace” here, FDR promised us.When France fell in May-June of 1940, pleading for planes, FDR sent words of encouragement. Not until 18 months after the fall of France did we declare war on Hitler and not until after Hitler declared war on us. Thus, we did not go to war to defend democracy in Britain or France. We went to war to smash the Japanese Empire that attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Kristol is parroting liberal myths.
In the Cold War the United States welcomed as allies Chiang Kai-shek, Salazar, Franco, Somoza, the Shah, Suharto, Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee and the Korean generals, Greek colonels, military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, and Turkey, Marcos, and Pinochet because these autocrats proved far more reliable than democratists like Nehru, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, and Pierre Trudeau. When it comes to wars that threaten us, hot or cold, we Americans are at one with Nietzsche, “A state, it is the coldest of all cold monsters.”
India is democratic and 200 times the size of Israel. Yet in India’s wars with Pakistan, we tilted toward Pakistan. Why? Because the Pakistanis were allies, and India sided with Moscow. That India was democratic and Pakistan autocratic made no difference to us.
As for Israel, has America really given her $100 billion and taken her side in every Arab quarrel because she is a democracy?
Tell it to Tony Judt. When this British historian proposed—given the impossibility of separating Arabs from Jews on the West Bank—that Israel annex the West Bank, become a bi-national state, and give Palestinians equal rights, neocons went berserk.
Frum called Judt’s idea “genocidal liberalism” that would leave Jews exposed to slaughter. John Podhoretz declared it “unthinkable” and “the definition of intellectual corruption.” “[H]aughty and ugly,” said the [i]New Republic[/i], which hurled Judt from its masthead.
But if the just solution to the South African problem was to abolish bantustans and create a one-man, one-vote democracy, why is that not even a debatable solution to the Palestinian problem?
In temperament, too, neoconservatives have revealed themselves as the antithesis of conservative. In the depiction of scholar Claes Ryn, they are the “neo-Jacobins” of modernity whose dominant trait is conceit.
[i]Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up a voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a new kind of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired to modesty and self-restraint[/i].
The Perle-Frum book is marinated in conceit, which may prove the neocons’ fatal flaw. In the run-up to the invasion, when critics were exposing their plotting for war long before 9/11, the neocons did not bother to deny it. They reveled in it. They boasted about who they were, where they came from, what they believed, how they were different, and how they had become the new elite. With Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush marching to their war drums, one of them bellowed, “We are all neoconservatives now!”
But it is always unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with the prince. And now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who they are. We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed.
With the heady days of the fall of Baghdad behind us and our country ensnared in a Lebanon of our own, neocons seem fearful that it is they who will be made to take the fall if it all turns out badly in Iraq, as McNamara and his Whiz Kids had to take the fall for Vietnam.
And this one they’ve got right.
|
|
|
| |
| Is the Tide Turning? ... Yes, but ... |
| 02.18.04 (6:34 am) [edit] |
"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason." – Ernest Hemingway
[b]Is the Tide Turning?
[i]Yes, but [/i]…. [/b]
By [i]Justin Raimondo[/i], http://antiwar.com/justin/?ar...
You know something is up when even Bill O'Reilly, the Fox network's champion bloviator, is admitting that he was wrong about the "weapons of mass destruction" he and the rest of the War Party insisted were in Iraq. Of course, it was still a good idea to go to war, in his view, because Saddam was a Bad Guy, and, well, you know the drill. But what is amazing, at least to me, is that he not only admitted his utter and complete wrongness on the air, but he also apologized to his audience.
Now if only President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the editors of the [i]Weekly Standard [/i]would follow O'Reilly's good example!
Don't hold your breath, though. Humility is hardly their strong suit. This crew currently in power never admits to error, and certainly never apologizes for anything. Yet, in their unyielding insistence that, as the President put it recently, we invaded Iraq because "there was no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a danger to America," the War Party is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the country. Antiwar sentiment is springing up in the most unlikely places, resonating in comments like Mel Gibson's answer to Diane Sawyer when she asked him what comes after his Passion flick:
"[i]I was thinking of pitching my tent right next to the weapons of mass destruction, then no one will find me[/i]."
To read the hysterical denunciations of antiwar protestors regularly emitted by the neocons one would think that the opposition to our Iraqi adventure consists entirely of Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and the Dixie Chicks. This caricature, if it was ever true, doesn't come close to describing what is going on now. I knew the tide had turned when I read the following item in Cindy Adams's gossip column the other day:
"[i]ANTI-WAR GOPERS JUST SAY 'NO VOTE' [/i]
"[i]A columnist is the eyes, ears and mouth of the world. Today, Presidents Day, I'm not the Mouth. I'm the Ears. I report exactly what I heard at a corralful of Republicans. Types who've Made It. Successful. Comfortable. Two homes, two cars, mostly two marriages. They weren't speaking to the economy, outsourcing of jobs, Halliburton thing, abortion, gay marriage, cloning or old boy stuff as in why no one at Enron's gone to jail. Weren't interested in Bush's National Guard war record since they recognized that as Dem political trashing[/i].
"[i]They were hot only about this war. About American and other foreign lives being lost. About non Weapons of Mass Destruction hysteria slowly osmosing into the well-Saddam's-a-bad-dude- so-it's-right-we-took-him -down-anyway philosophy. One staunch flag-waving patriotic rah-rah-America soul who'd never voted Democrat and doubted he ever would said he simply wanted not to vote for Bush. I now report on something I'd not heard before. He was told: 'Just don't vote.' Don't vote?! The realization suddenly occurred that violating our nation's greatest privilege might be President Bush's newest opposition. Antiwar Republicans who believe he's vulnerable won't vote[/i]."
Cindy protests: "Don't pick on me. Me, I make no comment. Me, I just report." No "spin" there: just good honest reporting -- and in the ultra-hawkish Murdoch-owned New York Post, yet! Forget David Broder, Dick Morris, and the rest of the talking heads brigade: The Bushies pay attention to Bill Kristol and ignore Cindy Adams at their peril.
The biggest expansion of discretionary spending since Lyndon Baines Johnson and the "Great Society," added on to the exponential growth of military expenditures under the general rubric of the "war on terrorism," all of it funded by debt – it's a fiscal conservative's worst nightmare. And many of them, including these folks, and these folks, and even some of these guys, are joining the ranks of the boycotters – the fiscal and stylistic conservatives who abhor the radicalism of American foreign policy even more than the staggering expense.
As the Old Right journalist John T. Flynn pointed out in 1944, Franklin Roosevelt garnered support for his revolutionary program from the mainstream and even some conservative elements by melding the Welfare State with the Warfare State. "That man in the White House," as his enemies dubbed him, accumulated enough power to dream of packing the Supreme Court and becoming the closest thing to an American dictator as ever existed. As a wartime President, he nearly succeeded in achieving his ambition.
In styling himself a "wartime President," and implicitly comparing himself to Roosevelt – or, worse, Wilson – Bush is scaring those two-home twice-married Republicans, who are beginning to wonder what's next on the neocon agenda. If they turn out and give the President a second term, won't they be unleashing the warhawks in the Defense Department to go after Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and then on to Saudi Arabia?
The big question this election season when it comes to the war has to be: [i]who's got an exit strategy[/i]? General Jay Garner, former Iraq administrator, says we'll be occupying that country for "the next few decades," and one wonders if either George W. Bush or the Democratic nominee will own up to that. The Democrats will smugly assert that the American people were sold a bill of goods when they were told we must go to war. But the issue is: what do they intend to do about it now?
The answer is, unfortunately, nothing much different from what the Republicans are doing. The whole point of rushing us into war, of emphasizing the imminence of the threat and insisting that we couldn't wait for UN inspectors to go back in there and verify the existence of Iraqi WMD, was to to ensconce a massive U.S. military presence in the Middle East as a permanent feature of our regional policy. Now that we are there, the conventional wisdom is that there is no turning back.
The conventional wisdom, however, is dead wrong. A mistake, if it isn't corrected, can only lead to other and even bigger mistakes, and in this case we are just beginning to see the consequences of Bush's error. Americans are supposed to believe that implanting the seeds of "democracy" in the inhospitable soil of Iraq is rationale enough for the invasion and occupation. But if Iraq is truly democratic and allows the majority to rule, then the results are far more likely to resemble, at best, neighboring Iran: at worst, a three-or-four-way civil war. In either case, we have to ask: is it worth the number of casualties, including thousands of horribly maimed wounded?
The untenable nature of our position is constantly balancing on the thin edge between tragedy and comedy. For example, Bremer maintains that he will veto the imposition of Islamic law, but this is a) impossible, and b) a lie. Will he do this even after the much-heralded "handover" of sovereignty to the Iraqis? We know it's a lie because he [i]didn't[/i] veto the recent law on marriage passed by the Iraqi Governing Council which handed the regulation of marriage over to Islamic religious authorities.
Recent polls show that half of the American people disapprove of the way the President is handling Iraq, and well over half believe he and his advisors were exaggerating or outright lying about the reasons for the war. For the first time, according to an [i]ABC News-Washington Post[/i] survey, a majority (50 percent versus 48 percent) believe the war wasn't worth fighting. Whoever wins these voters over wins the election – which is why George W. is hoping they'll stay home, and sit on their hands, rather than pull the lever for a Democrat.
The War Party may be in retreat, with a few of the more impolitic about to be cut down a few notches – and perhaps even indicted – but they did manage to accomplish their goal. We are stuck fast to the Iraqi tar-baby with no hope of extrication anytime soon. Both parties are eager, now, to cash in on this government-expanding bureaucratic bonanza of "nation-building." The occupation of Iraq, and our perpetual wartime footing, mean power and money for those with connections, and contracts galore to hand out to their friends. A nation at war is a politician's paradise, and that is why we are in for a long one.
[b]NOTES IN THE MARGIN[/b]
Check out the March 1 issue of The American Conservative, and not only because of my review of Gore Vidal's latest book, [i]Inventing a Nation[/i]. Pat Buchanan drops a [i]bunker-buster [/i]of a review on the Richard Perle-David Frum manifesto, [i]An End to Evil[/i]. My favorite paragraph:
"[i]Bush's father made Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War. Ehud Barak offered Assad 99.5 percent of the Golan Heights. Why, then, must Bashir Assad's regime be destroyed – by us? We don't have much time, say Frum and Perle. But what is Assad doing that warrants immediate attack? Is he, too, buying yellowcake from Niger[/i]?"
Frum is so riled http://www.nationalreview.com... (scroll down) that he's promising a rebuttal. See what all the brouhaha is about and get your copy on newsstands now. (See? You should've subscribed http://www2.starrcorp.com/acm... a long time ago!)
As I said in today's column, we're in this for the long haul, and that's why your continuing support for Antiwar.com's mission is vitally important, especially at this juncture. As your watchdog constantly surveying the world scene for war and rumors of war, we're working to ensure the continuity of our comprehensive coverage. By slowly but surely expanding our Sustainers Program, whereby donors give an automatically deducted amount each month to help keep this site going, we're building a solid foundation on which to oppose the empire-builders and their journalistic amen corner.
That's why I'm urging my readers – especially my regular readers – to sign up today. We won't bother you with billing: it'll be automatically paid out, in any amount you choose. And it's easy to sign up online: just go here https://securecommanders.com/antiwar/secure.asp .
|
|
|
| |
| Dear Mr. Prosecutor |
| 02.18.04 (6:25 am) [edit] |
"Every nation has its war party...It is commercial, imperialistic, ruthless. It tolerates no opposition." – Senator Robert M. La Follette
[b]Dear Mr. Prosecutor[/b]
By [i]Jim Lobe[/i], http://www.alternet.org/story...
[i]Editor's Note: Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago, is heading a Justice Department probe into the administration leak exposing the identity of Valerie Plame as a CIA undercover operative. The information, which was revealed to syndicated columnist Robert Novak (and possibly as many as five other reporters), was designed to discredit her husband, Amb. Joseph Wilson. The former ambassador went public with the information that the White House knew that there was no evidence that Iraq was buying uranium yellowcake from Africa, but still included the claim in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address[/i].
Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:
Please forgive my presumptuousness in writing to you, but as a concerned citizen I could not help but notice that the White House has been less than cooperative in your efforts to identify the source of the Plame leak. I think I may have a solution to your problems. His name is Clifford May.
According to the news reports, several key members of the senior White House staff questioned by your investigators have refused to sign waivers that would release reporters, presumably including Mr. Novak, from any promise they made to maintain the secrecy of their sources. It is a serious blow to your efforts since such information could well be critical to the outcome of your investigation. Compelling journalists to disclose their sources in the absence of a waiver is a very sensitive issue which threatens the foundations of a free press. It is the reason why Justice Department attorneys must first show that all other methods of obtaining the essential information have already been exhausted.
Here is a possible way out of this thorny dilemma. There is at least one person who knew of Valerie Plame's relationship to the CIA even before Novak published his column: Clifford May. He is the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a non-profit organization founded two days after the 9/11 attacks that, in its words, "conducts research and education on the war on terrorism." More importantly, there is no reason why Mr. May should have known about Plame's CIA credentials, nor did he possess the requisite security clearances to do so. Tracking down the source of his "leak" could well bring us closer to identifying the culprits who gave the same information to the likes of Bob Novak.
Mr. May has not been coy about sharing his knowledge of Plame's CIA background. On Sept. 29, the same day that the Washington Post confirmed that the CIA had asked for a criminal investigation of Novak's sources, the National Review Online published a column by Mr. May claiming to be in the know long before Novak blew her cover. "That wasn't news to me," he wrote. "I had been told that – but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of." Mr. May later told Fox News the same day that Plame's identity was "something of an open secret."
Mr. May's assertions raise some troubling questions. Exactly who were the "insiders" for whom this was "something of an open secret?" How did they obtain this information and why did they pass it on so readily to someone like him?
Mr. May is, of course, a longtime Republican operative. Once the director of communications at the Republican National Committee, he also worked for BSMG Worldwide, one of the world's largest and most politically connected public and media relations firms, before founding the FDD in 2001. His organization is packed with Republican "insiders." The board of directors includes Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former CIA director R. James Woolsey are on its list of "Distinguished Advisors."
His close relationships with prominent neoconservatives are also hard to miss. FDD's board of advisers includes the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board (DPB), Richard Perle; Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney; Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer; and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. So it is no surprise that Mr. May is a major war-booster and White House defender in his own right, or that he would receive advice and help from the same clique of war hawks who lead the campaign for the Iraq war.
Of course, the "insiders" Mr. May referred to in his column need not be members of his own board. But it isn't unreasonable to view them as likely candidates for that role. Gingrich, Woolsey, and Perle all serve on the DPB and carry high-level security clearances. Although it is difficult to imagine how or why Plame's identity would come up in official DPB deliberations, but these three men also have close informal relationships with the offices of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney – the two men who were most annoyed by Wilson's revelations. Woolsey, Perle and Gaffney also fit the description of "someone who formerly worked in the government."
But why not ask. Mr. May who his informant(s) was? He told me just last week that he had not even been contacted by the FBI or any other investigators about the case. Though I must warn you, as much as Mr. May would like to help, he is reluctant to talk. In his words, "I'm happy to tell anybody what I know, but, in my capacity as a journalist, I would not want to disclose confidential sources."
Now I'm not sure why Mr. May thinks he is entitled to the same constitutional protections as a member of the media. While he did previously work for the New York Times and still writes a column for Scripps-Howard, his primary job is working for a non-profit think-tank. Moreover, he received information about Plame before he became a columnist. In other words, he did not receive the information as a journalist. You can say what you want about Robert Novak (and there are many things to be said), but what distinguishes him from other columnists is that he often provides "news" of public interest and import. Mr. May cannot make the same claim, certainly not under these circumstances.
Moreover, the information was not given to him under any formal agreement of confidentiality, the likes of which exists between a reporter and his source. According to Mr. May's original account, the remarks were "offhand" and freely volunteered, without any injunctions about their disclosure.
Mr. May and his organization have long expressed great concern about the threats posed by terrorism and nuclear proliferation – indeed that has been FDD's very raison d'etre. And although he insists that Plame was not working undercover at the time of Novak's column, he has personally expressed outrage at any attempt to "out" an active covert agent. Given his protestations, he really ought to volunteer to reveal his sources to you.
But rather than wait for him to fulfill his civic duty, I suggest you give Mr. May a call. I suspect that a nice, long chat with Mr. May will make it a lot easier to obtain those White House waivers – that is, if you still need them.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Jim Lobe
[i]Jim Lobe writes regularly on foreign policy for Foreign Policy In Focus, TomPaine.com, and Inter Press Services[/i].
|
|
|
| |
| Have the Neocons Killed a Presidency? |
| 02.17.04 (6:46 am) [edit] |
"In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons." – Herodotus
[b]Have the Neocons Killed a Presidency?[/b]
By [i]Patrick J. Buchanan[/i], http://antiwar.com/pat/?artic...
George W. Bush "betrayed us," howled Al Gore.
"He played on our fear. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure, dangerous to our troops, an adventure that was preordained and planned before 9-11 ever happened."
Hearing it, Gore's rant seemed slanderous and demagogic. For though U.S. policy since Clinton had called for regime change in Iraq, there is no evidence, none, that Bush planned to invade prior to 9-11.
Yet, the president has a grave problem, and it is this: Burrowed inside his foreign policy team are men guilty of exactly what Gore accuses Bush of, men who did exploit our fears to stampede us into a war they had plotted for years. Consider:
– In 1996, in a strategy paper crafted for Israel's Bibi Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser urged him to "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power" as an "Israeli strategic objective." Perle, Feith, Wurmser were all on Bush's foreign policy team on 9-11.
– In 1998, eight members of Bush's future team, including Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, wrote Clinton urging upon him a strategy that "should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein."
– On Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9-11, Wurmser called for U.S.-Israeli attacks "to broaden the (Middle East) conflict to strike fatally ... the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Teheran and Gaza ... to establish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal."
"Crises can be opportunities," added Wurmser.
On Sept. 11, opportunity struck.
On Sept. 15, according to author Bob Woodward, Paul Wolfowitz spoke up in the War Cabinet to urge that Afghanistan be put on a back burner and an attack be mounted at once on Iraq, though Iraq had had nothing to do with 9-11. Why Iraq? Said Wolfowitz, because it is "doable."
On Sept. 20, 40 neoconservatives in an open letter demanded that Bush remove Saddam from power, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the (9-11) attack." Failure to do so, they warned the president, "would constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."
While Bush had taken office as a traditional conservative skeptical of "nation-building" and calling for a more "humble" foreign policy, after 9-11, he was captured by the neocons and converted to an agenda they had worked up years before. Suddenly, he sounded just like them, threatening wars on "axis-of-evil" nations that had nothing to do with 9-11.
And here is where Bush's present crisis was created.
Though he had internalized the neoconservative agenda for war, he had no rationale, no justification, no casus belli. Iraq had not threatened or attacked us.
Enter the WMD. Neoconservatives pressed on Bush the idea that Iraq must still have weapons of mass destruction and must be working on nuclear weapons. And as Saddam was a figure of such irrationality – i.e., a madman – he would readily give an atom bomb to Al Qaeda. An American city could be incinerated.
Therefore, Saddam had to be destroyed. Bush bought it.
The problem, however, was this: While there is much evidence Saddam is evil, there is no evidence he was insane. He had not used his WMD in 1991, when he had them. For he was not a fool. He knew that would mean his end. Why would he then build a horror weapon now, give it to a terrorist and risk the annihilation of his regime, family, legacy and himself, a fate he had narrowly escaped in 1991?
Made no sense – and there was no hard evidence on the WMD.
Thus, when the CIA was unable to come up with hard evidence that Saddam still had WMD, or was building nuclear weapons, neocon insiders sifted the intelligence, cherry-picked it, presented tidbits to the media as unvarnished truth, and persuaded Powell and the president to rely on it to make the case to Congress, the country and the world. Powell and the president did.
Now the WMD case has fallen apart. Powell has egg on his face. And the president must persuade Tim Russert and the nation that Iraq was a "war of necessity" because we "had no choice when we looked at the intelligence I looked at."
But, sir, the intelligence you "looked at" was flawed. Who gave it to you?
To its neocon architects, Iraq was always about empire, hegemony, Pax Americana, global democracy – about getting hold of America's power to make the Middle East safe for Sharon and themselves glorious and famous.
But now they have led a president who came to office with good intentions and a good heart to the precipice of ruin. One wonders if Bush knows how badly he has been had. And if he does, why he has not summarily dealt with those who misled him?
|
|
|
| |
| War Hawks Undermined by Zarqawi Letter |
| 02.17.04 (6:42 am) [edit] |
"You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it." – Noam Chomsky
[b]War Hawks Undermined by Zarqawi Letter [/b]
By [i]Jim Lobe[/i], http://antiwar.com/lobe/?arti...
A letter http://www.newamericancentury... purportedly written to senior al-Qaeda leaders by a key associate, Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, appears to undermine a major thesis of hard-core neo-conservatives who led the U.S. drive to war in Iraq.
The letter, which is essentially an appeal for help in launching a "sectarian war" against Iraq's Shi'a Muslim population, was circulated by the Pentagon after it was allegedly seized in a raid on a safe house in Baghdad on Jan. 23 that netted a prominent courier of the al-Qaeda terrorist group. It was leaked to the[i] New York Times[/i], which reported on it Feb. 10.
US war planners clearly saw the 17-page letter as confirmation that their strategy for pacifying Iraq, particularly the so-called "Sunni Triangle," was working.
Its quick declassification and wide dissemination suggested the message was one the Pentagon was eager to get out, precisely because it corresponded to the military's own claims that it was grinding down the armed opposition in the occupied country.
The writer, identified by the Pentagon as Zarqawi, a Palestinian Jordanian who the administration has long alleged is closely linked to al-Qaeda – the group led by Osama bin Laden – admits that the U.S.-led occupation is making steady progress.
"There is no doubt that our field of movement is shrinking and the grip around the throat of the mujahidin has begun to tighten," the letter, which was found on a compact disc, states. "With the spread of the army and police, our future is becoming frightening."
The author takes credit for 25 "martyrdom operations" directed against Shi'a targets and US and other coalition forces, suggesting that foreign Islamist fighters, rather than indigenous groups, might indeed be responsible for suicide bombings, as the US military has argued.
The letter writer also reports that his forces are planning to carry out more attacks against Iraqi military and security forces. Since the letter's date, suicide attacks against these targets have indeed escalated sharply.
So far so good.
At the same time, however, the letter, excerpts of which were published by the[i] Project for the New American Century [/i](PNAC) http://www.newamericancentury... and the[i] Weekly Standard[/i], tends to debunk several of the neo-conservatives' own myths.
First, it contains no suggestion at all of any preexisting cooperation or relationship between ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and either Zarqawi or al-Qaeda, as the neo-conservatives have long contended.
It expresses great disappointment at the absence of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a disappointment that undermines the administration's insistence that it is that group that is behind a growing number of attacks in Iraq.
Indeed, the tone suggests, according to Middle East expert Juan Cole http://www.juancole.com/ of the University of Michigan, that the writer, if it is Zarqawi, has not been in close contact with al-Qaeda for quite some time.
More important, the letter's thrust – the necessity for carrying out attacks against Shi'a Muslims in Iraq – serves also to undermine a major neo-conservative thesis – that Islamist extremists work together to accomplish their goals regardless of their own sectarian affiliation.
This "terror masters" thesis – named for the book, [i]The War Against the Terror Masters,[/i] by the theory's foremost Washington proponent, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – argues that western intelligence agencies have been naive to think that Shi'a groups like Hezbollah and Iran would not work closely with extremist Sunni groups, like al-Qaeda or Zarqawi's network, because of their sectarian differences.
In Ledeen's view they all form one "coherent terror network" in which Iran plays the dominant role.
Among others, Richard Perle – also based at AEI but better known for his close ties to Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon's civilian leadership – has publicly propounded this thesis.
"The terror network is more complex, and far more united, than most our analysts have been willing to accept," he wrote last September in an article in National Review Online.
"The divisions and distinctions of the past no longer make sense; the terror mafias are working together, and their missions are defined by the states that protect, arm, fund and assist them: Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia."
According to Ledeen, Iran is the "linchpin of the terror network," and routinely hosts or organizes meetings of the network's major leaders. Tehran has strongly denied any connection or support to al-Qaeda or any other radical Sunni group.
In his September article, Ledeen wrote that Tehran hosted a terrorist summit last August that included Hezbollah's chief of operations Imad Mughniyah; Zarqawi; al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawarhiri; bin Laden's son Saad, and Iranian intelligence officials.
Zarqawi promptly relocated to Iraq several days later, presumably to begin carrying out operations of the kind that he reports in the Jan. 23 letter, Ledeen added.
The problem with that theory is that the letter attributed to Zarqawi fails to provide even the slightest hint of an Iranian connection, and consistently refers to the Shi'a population in Iraq – to which Iran has long provided strong support – as if it, perhaps even more than Washington, is the ultimate enemy.
"The Shi'a have declared a subtle war against Islam," the letter states. "Even if the Americans are also an archenemy, the Shi'a are a greater danger and their harm more destructive to the nation than that of the Americans."
"They are the most cowardly people God has created. Killing their leaders will weaken them and with the death of the head, the whole group dies," Zarqawi writes of the Shi'as, whose religion he describes as a "perverse sect."
Such references to Shi'as and the lack of any reference at all to Iran in such a long letter, Cole told IPS, simply add to the view among most regional specialists both in and outside the U.S. government that Ledeen's "terror master" theory is as questionable as the notion of an operational link between Hussein and al-Qaeda.
"The document undermines all the conspiracy theories about Iranian support for al-Qaeda or an al-Qaeda-Hezbollah link," says Cole. "The Iranians would as soon shoot those people (Zarqawi and al-Qaeda) as look at them."
In that respect, the letter and its widespread distribution, particularly by neo-conservative groups and publications, mark a potentially serious setback to those in and out of the administration who have adopted Ledeen's view.
Not coincidentally, it is the same group, both within and outside the administration, which argued before the war that Hussein and al-Qaeda were closely linked.
The same group has been the major obstacle to any steps by Washington to improve relations with Tehran since talks were suspended last May, after an al-Qaeda attack on a western compound in Tehran that US officials charged had been ordered from somewhere in Iran.
|
|
|
| |
| Tenet and the King's New Clothes |
| 02.15.04 (6:58 am) [edit] |
[b]Tenet and the King's New Clothes[/b]
By [i]RAY McGOVERN[/i], http://www.counterpunch.org/m...
[i][b]A Disingenuous Tour de Force[/b][/i]
[b]US[/b] President George W. Bush seemed quite nervous on TV last Sunday as he defended his policy on Iraq. The American press now has its hands full in trying to draw something positive from the president's appearance on "Meet the Press."
But still more irony can be seen in the fact that February 5 has been chosen two years running for rhetoric aimed at what Socrates termed "making the worse cause appear the better"--last year by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN and Thursday by CIA Director George Tenet at Georgetown University.
As in the case of Powell's spurious depiction of the threat from Iraq, Tenet's disingenuous tour de force becomes more embarrassing the closer you look.
Tenet chose to defend the indefensible--the bogus National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) hurriedly conjured up in September 2002 to support spurious charges made by Vice President Dick Cheney on August 26, 2002 in beating the drum for war on Iraq. The conclusions of that estimate have now been proven --pure and simple--wrong.
Even so, that is not the most important point. What all should know is that the Bush administration's decision for war against Iraq came well before any intelligence estimate. There is ample evidence that that decision was made, at the latest, by spring 2002.
That there was no NIE before that speaks volumes. During my 27 years of service as a CIA analyst, never was a foreign policy decision of that magnitude made without FIRST commissioning a National Intelligence Estimate. Why did Tenet not take the initiative and see that one was done? Surely, if he did not know that decisions on war and peace were being made at the White House and Pentagon in early 2002, he was the only one in Washington so unaware.
There was no NIE because Tenet realized that an honest one would show how little the intelligence community knew about the threat from Iraq and would hardly support a case for war. And so, consummate bureaucrat that he is, he kept his head down for as long as he could.
It was only when the somnolent Senator from Florida, Bob Graham, then Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was nudged awake by committee colleague Dick Durbin that Graham nodded, yes it did seem odd that no NIE had been prepared. And especially odd at a time when Congress was being asked to cede to the president its constitutional prerogative to declare war.
So Graham called Tenet, and Tenet got the go-ahead from his masters in the White House--WITH THE PROVISO that the estimate's conclusions dovetail with the case for war just made by Cheney. Tenet saluted, and then picked his most malleable manager, Robert Walpole, to ensure that a politically correct NIE was produced.
In other words, the purpose of the estimate was not to inform an (already reached) decision on whether war was necessary. Rather, it was to enlist intelligence in the campaign to deceive Congress into thinking that Iraq posed such a threat that the legislative branch's prerogative must be surrendered to the president, and--not incidentally--to make so persuasive a case to the nation that those who dared vote against the president would be highly vulnerable in the mid-term election of 2002. That worked too.
Thanks to inspector David Kay's refreshing honesty, we now know that Cheney's charges, and the cognate conclusions of the estimate, were bogus.
[b]The NIE: Lynchpin or Window-Dressing?[/b]
Am I saying that the fall 2002 Estimate on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" was irrelevant? In the narrow sense that it was ex post facto the decision for war, yes. It was decidedly NOT the "linchpin of the Bush administration's case for invasion," that former CIA analyst and Iraq specialist Kenneth Pollack recently claimed it was.
But enlisting the intelligence community in a deliberate campaign to mislead our elected representatives into surrendering their power under the Constitution--that is highly relevant, and unconscionable. In 40 years of following such issues quite closely, I have never seen politicization of intelligence so cynical, so sustained, so consequential. And I was there for Vietnam.
Bob Graham voted against the war. But he was never able to stay awake long enough tell his colleagues they were being conned. His behavior, and that of House Intelligence Committee Porter Goss, give an entirely new meaning to the word "oversight" customarily used to describe their committees' function.
[b]The Tenet Speech on Thursday[/b]
"Now I am sure you are asking: Why haven't we found the weapons? I have told you the search must continue and it will be difficult."
But, Mr. Tenet, it has been over ten months since we invaded Iraq. Your former chief inspector David Kay concluded "probably 85 percent of the significant things" have now been found--but no WMD. And his successor, Charles Duelfer told the press four weeks ago "the prospect of finding chemical weapons, biological weapons is close to nil at this point." On what basis do you now say "we are nowhere near 85 percent finished"?
Tenet is obediently arguing the administration's brief that the search for WMD is far from over and that it will, in Cheney's words, "take some additional considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubbyholes and ammo dumps." A safe guess is that the administration's current plan is to drag out the quest until after the election in November.
Taking his cue from Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, in testimony before Congress on Wednesday, also stressed the need for additional time. And yesterday, in an unguarded moment, Rumsfeld gave the game away, when he disparaged David Kay's judgment on the status of the search for WMD:
"Kay said we're about 85 percent complete. Tenet said what I said: there's work yet to be done."
Indeed, Tenet says what Rumsfeld and Cheney say. Tenet is the quintessential "team player," an attribute antithetical to his statutory duty to tell the emperor when he had no clothes on. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, like Cheney a frequent visitor to CIA Headquarters, recently told the press "George Tenet is so grateful to the president [presumably for not firing him on Sept. 12, 2001] that he will do anything for him."
Are you surprised that intelligence has been politicized?
[i]Ray McGovern is a 27-year veteran CIA analyst whose duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in the inner city of Washington, DC. He can be reached at: rmcgovern@slschool.org [/i]
|
|
|
| |
| Bush Gang Lied: Majority of Iraqi Exiles Gave False Info ... |
| 02.15.04 (6:55 am) [edit] |
The Bush gang rejected warnings by intelligence agents and experts that the Iraqi exiles were misleading them in the lead-up to the war because they wanted to deceive the American people.
[b]Majority of Iraqi exiles slanted stories[/b]
BY [i]WARREN P. STROBEL AND JONATHAN S. LANDAY[/i], http://www.miami.com/mld/miam...
[i][b]U.S. officials have concluded that almost all Iraqi defectors provided questionable information in the run-up to war with Iraq[/b][/i].
WASHINGTON - U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that almost all of the Iraqi defectors whose information helped make the Bush administration's case against Saddam Hussein exaggerated what they knew, fabricated tales or were ''coached'' by others on what to say.
As investigations expand into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq, questions are growing about the defectors' role in building the momentum toward last spring's invasion.
Most of the former Iraqi officials were made available to U.S. intelligence agencies by the Iraqi National Congress, a coalition of exile groups with close ties to the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office. The INC had lobbied for years for a U.S. military operation to oust Hussein.
The defectors claimed, among other things, that Hussein had built mobile biological weapons facilities, was rapidly rebuilding his nuclear weapons program and had trained Islamic warriors at a camp south of Baghdad.
None of those allegations has been borne out so far.
At least one defector provided by the INC -- an Iraqi engineer named Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri -- provided valuable information on Hussein's underground military facilities, U.S. officials said.
But most of the information provided by the INC's defectors ''was shaky'' at best, said a senior Bush administration official. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.
The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, which handled the INC-supplied defectors, has since concluded that they provided little worthwhile information on Hussein's weapons programs or alleged ties to Islamic terrorism, a defense official said.
[b]'COACHING' SIGNS[/b]
The officials said some of the defectors showed signs of ''coaching'' because they used similar language. That raised suspicions that the INC had prepped them before their debriefings.
Much of the defectors' testimonies were discounted in the run-up to the war by analysts at the CIA and State Department, which soured on the INC and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, during the 1990s.
Nonetheless, some of the information found its way into the most critical prewar intelligence assessment on Iraq's illicit weapons program, known as a National Intelligence Estimate; media reports; statements by top U.S. officials and, in one instance, Secretary of State Colin Powell's watershed presentation to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003.
[b]'PERSISTENT' EXILES[/b]
Senior U.S. officials said that despite doubts about the defectors' reports, they continued to be sought by top civilians in the Defense Department and other officials eager to make the case for war.
''These guys were persistent,'' the senior administration official said of the Iraqi exiles.
Defectors were one of several sources of information on Hussein's Iraq. Their reports were combined with those from human spies, satellite photographs and electronic snooping.
Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, two principal advocates for a U.S.-led invasion, underscored the importance placed on defectors and other human sources.
In a January 2003 speech, Wolfowitz said, ``For a great body of what we need to know, we are very dependent on traditional methods of intelligence -- that is to say, human beings who either deliberately or inadvertently are communicating to us.''
Cheney, opening the administration's drive for public support for Hussein's ouster, said in an Aug. 26, 2002, speech that ''firsthand testimony'' from defectors had disclosed that Hussein had resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
Those defectors, Cheney said, included Gen. Hussein Kamal, Hussein's son-in-law, who fled to Jordan in 1995 and was murdered when he returned to Baghdad in 1996.
Cheney's assertion, however, conflicts with Kamal's comments in an interview conducted by Rolf Ekeus, the then-head of a U.N. weapons inspection program.
''All weapons -- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear -- were destroyed,'' Kamal said, according to an official U.N. transcript of the Aug. 22, 1995, session.
Cheney's office did not explain the apparent discrepancy.
Instead, Cheney's spokesman Kevin Kellems referred Knight Ridder on Friday to an interview earlier this month with St. Louis radio station KMOX, in which Cheney stood by his comments about Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
[b]`NEVER PERFECT'[/b]
''The fact is that if you look at the statements I made, they track almost perfectly with the National Intelligence Estimate'' on Iraq's weapons programs, Cheney told the interviewer. Intelligence is never perfect, Cheney said, adding, ``This is a business where you don't have absolute proof on these subjects.''
In addition, a report issued by the White House on Sept. 12, 2002, said former Iraqi military officers described how Iraq had been training Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs in ''hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage and assassinations'' at a secret terrorist facility in Iraq, Salman Pak.
No information has surfaced since the war to support those claims, defense and intelligence officials said.
|
|
|
| |
| COST OF EMPIRE: Counting the Dollars and Cents ... |
| 02.15.04 (6:48 am) [edit] |
[b]Counting the dollars and cents[/b]
By [i]David Isenberg[/i], http://atimes.com/atimes/Fron...
To paraphrase the well-known saying of former US Senator Everett Dirksen, a division sent here, a division over there, and pretty soon you are talking about real empire.
However, a real empire costs money, lots of money; especially when it involves stationing or deploying military forces around the world.
How much money? Let's turn to the budget. For fiscal year (FY) 2004, Congress approved about US$400 billion for "national defense", or in plain English, military spending. But hold on to your hats because, as they say on Broadway, you ain't seen nothing yet.
In FY 2004, military spending accounted for over half of all US federal discretionary spending. The annual military appropriations bill is expected to grow from $369 billion this year to nearly $600 billion by 2013, according to the US Congressional Budget Office.
Despite concerns about rising deficits, protracted wars and costly weapons, budget and political analysts predict that President George W Bush will ask Congress for about $470 billion in military spending for 2005. True, the request will not come all at once: The first installment was delivered to Congress February 2 in the form of a just over $420 billion budget request ($401.7 billion for the Defense Department and $19.0 billion for the nuclear weapons functions of the Department of Energy). This is an increase of 7.9 percent above current levels. The second installment, a $50 billion supplemental bill to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan war costs, won't come until after the November 2 presidential election.
That would be the third massive supplemental spending bill sought to support the wars. Congress approved a $62.6 billion supplemental last spring and an $87 billion supplemental in November.
The financial costs of maintaining US forces in Iraq are currently running at $4 billion per month, or an annual rate of $48 billion. Last September, the White House informed congressional leaders that it was preparing a new budget request of $60-70 billion to cover mounting military and reconstruction costs in Iraq. Then Bush announced a $7 billion supplemental request to cover Iraq and Afghanistan. Less than a week later, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that Iraq's postwar reconstruction costs were likely to run another $35 billion above and beyond those contained in the $87 billion supplemental.
And an assessment in the Wall Street Journal last September predicts further spirals in future Iraq postwar costs attributable to gross overestimation of near-term Iraqi oil revenues; surprise at the decrepit state of Iraq's basic infrastructure; extensive and continued looting; sabotage of oil pipelines, electrical power lines, and other key reconstruction costs; downstream costs of financing expanding Iraqi government and security forces; and poor prospects for significant international donor support.
But wait, there's more. British historian Niall Ferguson noted last July: "The United States is attempting 'nation-building' - the fashionable euphemism for empire-building - on a shoestring." In other words, the US is cheap. He asks:
"[i]Is it possible to run an empire on the Wal-Mart principle of 'always low prices'? Maybe. But that was not the way it was done in West Germany and Japan after World War II. And since those are President Bush's favorite examples of successful nation-building, he will only have himself to blame when the hoped-for economic miracle in Iraq becomes an economic debacle[/i]."
Another cost of Iraq is its effect on military force structures. As should be apparent to all by now, fighting "major combat operations" is relatively easy. Occupations are a whole other story. As military analysts Charles Knight and Marcus Corbin wrote in January:
"[i]Our total deployable ground forces (Army and Marines) number about 400,000 active duty men and women and another 500,000 reservists. Together these numbers are more than enough to fight America's wars of short duration, such as the 1991 war with Iraq. But when policy choices result in long occupations, such totals quickly become insufficient - a result of the dismal math of force rotations. It takes four troop units on active duty to sustain deployment of one active unit in the field for multiple years, and it takes nine reserve units to sustain deployment of one reserve unit. A four or five year occupation of Iraq by 65,000 regular and 35,000 reserve troops - a realistic possibility - will require a rotation base of 260,000 active troops (65 percent of our deployable active ground forces) and 315,000 reserve troops (63 percent of our deployable reserve ground forces.) This illustration does not properly capture the full effect of our broader 'war on terror' on our reservists. Currently, more than 130,000 reserve ground troops are serving in homeland security roles, 'back filling' for active-duty soldiers elsewhere abroad and deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. For the reservists, this level of mobilization is already more than twice the long-term sustainable rate[/i]."
There has been much hand wringing in Congress of late over the "stretched too thin" military. Cries of not enough bodies are everywhere. While in strict terms this is not true, as you could halve the active army from 10 to five divisions and still have more than enough for defense of the country, it is true that defending an empire is different.
In a hearing last November Representative John Spratt said:
"[i]Our forces were stretched thin before Iraq, and the engagement there has only exacerbated that trend. The administration has come forward with a plan for force rotation in Iraq that relies upon several assumptions. First, it assumes one-year deployments of more US troops - active, reserve and guard. Second, it assumes the influx of more multinational forces to relieve some of the pressure on American forces at least during 2004. And, third, it assumes the rapid training of Iraqi security forces of all kinds, and the eventual turnover of many security missions to these Iraqi forces. It's unclear whether the last two of these three assumptions will come to pass. We continue to train Iraqi police and army forces, but it's unclear what missions they will be able to take on and handle capably and just when. Other nations have not committed forces in substantial numbers, unfortunately, and some that have, such as Turkey, have met with difficulties that make that deployment at this point doubtful[/i]."
Recently, Lieutenant-General John M Riggs, who runs the task force charged with fashioning the army of the future, told the Baltimore Sun in an interview that the army was too small and must be increased "substantially" by more than 10,000 soldiers.
Keep in mind that January saw the start of the US military's biggest unit rotation since World War II. Eight of the 10 active-duty army divisions are now rotating in and out of Iraq, while one-third of the Army National Guard's combat battalions have been called to active duty, Riggs said. There are not enough soldiers in the army to provide for a reasonable rotation schedule of fresh troops into Iraq and for other missions, such as Afghanistan.
Of course, managing the military forces to maintain empire can be complicated. Inevitably mistakes are made. On January 20, Lieutenant-General James R Helmly, the chief of the Army Reserve, said that a series of mistakes in mobilizing and managing reserves for the war in Iraq had put the army on the brink of serious problems in retaining those soldiers. About 10,000 reserves were called up for active duty on less than five days' notice. An additional 8,000 were called up but never deployed. And of those 8,000, about half were remobilized not long after they were taken off active duty. Helmly said that serious problems are being "masked" temporarily because reservists are barred from leaving the military while their units are mobilized in Iraq. He said that the reserve force bureaucracy bungled the mobilization of soldiers for the war in Iraq, and gave them a "pipe dream" instead of honest information about how long they might have to remain there.
To rectify things, and to let reserve personnel know up front that those halcyon days of service without actually being deployed are now a historical memory, Helmly wants to change the mobilization system so members may be called to active duty for nine to 12 months every four or five years.
More bodies, whether US, foreign soldiers, or mercenaries, as in private military companies, are necessary. A bill by Representative Ellen Tauscher, currently under consideration in the House of Representatives, would add 40,000 to the army, 28,700 to the air force and 15,000 to the Marines. This overall increase of 83,700 can be compared with the entire strength of the British army, namely 114,000.
Newhouse News reported that the rising cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with expensive new weapons systems and other growing commitments, is pushing military spending inexorably upward, part of a pattern of federal spending that some economists say threatens American and global economic stability. That unanticipated cost is $12 billion to $19 billion this year and each year into the future as forces rotate through the combat zones. And the Pentagon is paying billions more for the health care of troops mobilized from National Guard and reserve units, a recurring charge expected to grow in the coming years.
[i]David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in arms control and national security issues[/i].
|
|
|
| |
| A Cynical Manipulation ... "Bush is a Mental and Moral Midget" ... |
| 02.14.04 (8:09 am) [edit] |
[b]A Cynical Manipulation [/b]
By [i]Charley Reese[/i], http://antiwar.com/reese/?art...
Following President Bush's hour-long interview with [i]NBC's [/i]Tim Russert, we can now state conclusively that President Bush deliberately misled the American people and continues to do so.
[b]Item[/b]: [i]Bush claims he was acting on the best intelligence there was when he decided to go to war[/i].
[b]Fact[/b]: [i]The intelligence given to Bush was full of warnings, caveats, disagreements and doubts as to its reliability. All of this was expunged, and Bush and his crew stated as a dead certainty that Saddam Hussein had a large stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
The aluminum tubes, for example, were claimed by Bush to be necessary to make a nuclear weapon. The State Department intelligence people and the Energy Department intelligence people flatly disagreed. They also expressed disagreement about the prospects of Iraq developing a nuclear weapon.
Even the CIA warned Bush that the report of Iraq's attempt to buy yellow cake from Niger was unreliable, but it went into the president's State of the Union speech anyway[/i].
[b]Item[/b]: [i]Bush repeated his claim that Iraq was in violation of Security Council resolutions[/i].
[b]Fact[/b]: [i]If indeed there are no weapons of mass destruction, as it now appears there are not, then Iraq had complied with U.N. resolutions. The Iraqis had been saying for years that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and they were just called liars by American administrations. Moreover, Israel is in violation of more than 60 UN resolutions. Thus, UN resolutions are hardly a cause of war[/i].
[b]Item[/b]: [i]Bush says that Saddam Hussein was a madman and that a madman "can't be contained[/i]."
[b]Fact[/b]: [i]Saddam Hussein had been successfully contained since 1991. Since the first Gulf War, Saddam had not attacked anyone, fired any weapons at any of his neighbors or threatened to attack anyone[/i].
[b]Item[/b]: [i]Bush claimed that Iraq was a threat to its neighbors as well as to the United States and its friends (read Israel).[/i]
[b]Fact[/b]: [i]All of the countries adjacent to Iraq said publicly during the buildup to war that they did not, I say again, did not consider Iraq a threat[/i].
[b]Item[/b]: [i]Bush keeps repeating that Saddam had used weapons of mass destruction[/i].
[b]Fact[/b]: [i]That was true. They were used in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War and not since. One can easily say the same thing of the United States. We used weapons of mass destruction – nukes during World War II and poison gases during World War I. Other facts Bush omits are that during the Iran-Iraq War, the United States was backing Saddam Hussein, and the U.S. intelligence agencies published a report exonerating Iraq from the gas attack that killed a village of Kurds[/i].
[b]Item[/b]: [i]Bush claims his administration has been "extraordinarily cooperative" with the commission examining the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001[/i].
[b]Fact[/b]: [i]There has been news story after news story about the Bush White House's extraordinary lack of cooperation and stonewalling. Bush, of course, admits to never reading any newspapers, so perhaps he is just disconnected from reality[/i].
One could go on and on. Bush does not seem to grasp that a policy of pre-emptive wars requires dead-on accurate intelligence. Despite all the errors in his so-called war on terrorism, Bush has not fired a single person. He absolutely refuses to hold himself or anybody in his administration accountable.
Furthermore, he does not seem to grasp the enormous damage he has done to the image and credibility of the United States. Bush seems to exist in a deluded state of mind in which he imagines himself as Roosevelt or Churchill confronting global evil. That's a dangerous state of mind for a president. Compared with those two leaders, [b]Bush is a mental and moral midget[/b].
|
|
|
| |
| Bush Playing Us for Fools on WMDs ... |
| 02.14.04 (8:04 am) [edit] |
[b]Bush Playing Us for Fools on WMDs[/b]
BY [i]ANDREW GREELEY[/i], http://www.suntimes.com/outpu...
The argument goes something like this: We didn't deceive you about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The CIA deceived us. Therefore we will investigate them, but the investigation will be not be finished till after the election. The weapons of mass destruction should not be an issue in the election. Neither should the billions of dollars for Iraq that will be in next year's budget.
Pretty slick. On the basis of past performance, it will probably work. The administration has delayed and stonewalled the commission investigating the World Trade Center attack, and no one seems to question what they're trying to cover up. Now they blame the ''intelligence community'' for failure to provide accurate information about Iraq and ducking responsibility for their own deception of the American people. No one gets the chance to ask whether Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff chewed out CIA analysts because of their failures to find the kind of evidence that the administration wanted.
In fact, it was pretty clear all along that the evidence was weak. Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations (which was billed as rerun of Adlai Stevenson's display of photos of Russian missiles in Cuba) was not persuasive. The best he could provide was hints and clues -- hardly enough to start a war in which many young Americans and thousands of Iraqis would die.
As many of us knew all along from reading and hearing the neo-conservative intellectuals who do foreign policy thinking for the administration and as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has confirmed, the administration from the beginning wanted to invade Iraq for a number of possibly good reasons. Bernard Lewis (an Islamic scholar who is a kind of guru to the neo-cons) thought that a democratic state in Iraq would tip the balance toward ''modernization'' in the Arab world. It would take pressure off Israel. Saddam Hussein was a very nasty man who might eventually develop nuclear weapons. Anyone who reads the Wall Street Journal or William Safire's column in the New York Times was familiar with these arguments. Unfortunately, for those who supported such a war, the idea would not have been acceptable to the American people.
The Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center changed the climate of opinion in this country. The American people, it was assumed, would support an invasion of Iraq, if the idea could be developed that Saddam was somehow allied with the attack. Hence, it was important to assemble evidence that an attack from him might be imminent.
The CIA, which is being blamed for the bad intelligence, was reluctant to make too much of its own clues, but it gave the administration the best it could provide, which wasn't very good to begin with and now is perceived as worthless. Perhaps there was ''yellow cake'' uranium being imported from Niger. Perhaps those aluminum cylinders were for shells of nerve gas. Perhaps there was a nuclear weapons program in that suspicious-looking factory. There had to be missile launchers somewhere. President Bush presented this ''intelligence'' in somber tones in his State of the Union speech a year ago. Thereupon the United States invaded Iraq with the solid support of the citizenry, the media and the Congress. (Sen. John Kerry must wish every day that he had been more skeptical.)
Now that the WMD argument has failed, the administration falls back on its original arguments. The men around the president must assume that the American people are too dumb to catch on to this ploy and to their attempt to take WMD off the table for election campaigns. Having fooled most of the people most of the time, they might well be right.
Yet the latest Gallup Poll makes one wonder. Half the people now believe that the Iraq war wasn't worth it; 43 percent believe the president deliberately deceived them about the war, and Kerry has a 53 percent to 46 percent lead over the president in Gallup's election poll. Maybe you can't fool all the people all the time
|
|
|
| |
| THE COST OF EMPIRE: Starting With A Solid Base ... |
| 02.14.04 (8:00 am) [edit] |
"War is just a racket...I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else." – General Smedley Butler
[b]Starting with a solid base[/b]
By [i]David Isenberg[/i], http://atimes.com/atimes/Fron...
Somewhere on the Yale University campus, Paul Michael Kennedy must be smiling. Remember Paul Kennedy? Back in 1987 the then relatively unknown history professor published the book [i]The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers[/i], and almost instantaneously introduced the expression "imperial overstretch" into popular discourse. Although it did not take long for right-wing commentators to attack him, saying that it was the Soviet, not the US empire that had overstretched, his basic point remains the same.
As he wrote 10 years later in Atlantic Magazine: "The United States now runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of Great Powers, of what might be called 'imperial overstretch': that is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the total of the United States's global interests and obligations is nowadays far too large for the country to be able to defend them all simultaneously."
Well, now talk of empire is back in vogue since the war in Iraq has focused the attention of the American public, normally caught up in the soma of reality television, to an unusual degree on the burdens and costs of empire.
But while empire in all its imperial, multicolored, geopolitical hues may be an alluring sight, there is one thing to keep in mind. The process of creating and maintaining an empire, like making sausage or passing congressional legislation, is not a pretty process. In fact, it is costly, very costly, in terms of lives, money and liberty. It requires a large military establishment, which can consume a substantial, if not disproportionate amount of the national treasury. And it requires stationing and deploying forces around the world.
[b]A base for every need[/b]
It is not easy being a global military power. It takes a lot of behind the scenes work to allow the F-15s and F-16s to fly over Iraq airspace, for the soldiers and Marines to deploy to Japan and South Korea, and to get the M-1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and a myriad of other military equipment to the far-flung corners of the empire. Despite the rush to outsource federal programs, this is not yet a job that the Pentagon is willing to entrust to Federal Express or DHL.
Even in the 21st century, with jet and space travel, the world is a large place. The division of the world into military fiefdoms, or what US military planners euphemistically call the Unified Command Plan, requires something very old-fashioned: a network of overseas military bases.
True, the contours of the network change, waxing and waning over time. Many overseas US military bases overseas have closed since the end of the Cold War, and the number of US troops permanently stationed overseas has dropped by more than 250,000 since the Berlin Wall fell. But preparations to deploy American legions remain a primary Pentagon concern.
In fact, a number of individuals who now are part of the Bush administration (including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) produced in the fall of 2000 a 90-page blueprint for transforming the US military and the nation's global role. The report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century" released by the Project for the New American Century, argued that the US should not only attain and maintain military dominance, but should also project it with a worldwide network of forward operating bases over and above the country's already extensive overseas deployments.
That is why the Pentagon plans to dramatically change the shape of US military basing abroad. Unlike the Cold War era with its large permanent garrisons - like the over 200,000 troops that were kept in Germany - the fashion nowadays is for more temporary forward deployments to Spartan bases. While such plans were in the works before President George W Bush took office, September 11, 2001, did much to accelerate them. The goal is to create a web of far-flung, lean, forward-operating bases, maintained in peacetime only by small permanent support units, with fighting forces deployed from the US when necessary. To that end, a large reduction of the traditional US military presence in Europe is necessary.
The Pentagon is quite open and candid about it. In a speech last December 3, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith said: "President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld likewise are thinking about the relatively distant future. In developing plans to realign our forces abroad they're not focused on the diplomatic issues of the moment but on the strategic requirements and opportunities of the coming decades. Let's be clear about what we are and what we're not aiming to achieve through transforming our global defense posture.
"We are not aiming at retrenching it, curtailing US commitments, isolationism or unilateralism. On the contrary, our realignment plans are motivated by appreciation of the strategic value of defense alliances and partnerships with other states. We are aiming to increase our ability to fulfill our international commitments more effectively. We're aiming to ensure that our alliances are capable, affordable, sustainable and relevant in the future. We're not focused narrowly on force levels that are addressing force capabilities. We are not talking about fighting in place but moving to the fight. We are not talking only about basing, we're talking about the ability to move forces when and where needed.
"In transforming the US global defense posture we want to make our forces more responsive, given the world's many strategic uncertainties. We want to benefit as much as possible from the strategic pre-positioning of equipment and support. We want to make better use of our capabilities by thinking of our forces globally rather than as simply regional assets. We want to be able to bring more combat capabilities to bear in less time that is, we want to have the ability to surge our forces to crisis spots from wherever those forces might be."
Feith reiterated the point during a speech a week later in Romania. He said: "What we are interested in doing as we realign our global posture is taking advantage of the opportunity, with a much lighter footprint, to have the kinds of capabilities around the world that will allow us to react quickly with easily deployed forces, with lighter forces, to provide security and shore up our commitments around the world."
Last year saw the removal of some US troops from Germany and the establishment of new bases in, as Rumsfeld phrased it, "New Europe", the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization members Romania and Bulgaria.
Also it was reported that the 1st Armored Division, half the US Army's Europe combat force, traditionally based in Europe, would not return to its German bases. During the invasion of Iraq, air bases opened up for US use in Bulgaria's Sarajevo airfield, where refueling aircraft were based; the Bulgarian port of Burgas, the Romanian port Constanta and the Romanian military airfield of Mihail Kogalniceanu.
US military plans also include huge ex-Warsaw Pact training ranges and other bases in Poland and Hungary. Thousands of American and British troops have been conducting exercises on the Drawsko Pomorskiy and Wedrzyn training areas since 1996, taking advantage of the lack of restrictions compared to Germany. Use of the Krzesiny airbase outside Poznan, Poland, is also anticipated. In January Poland's Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski announced that Poland had launched negotiations with Washington on hosting US military bases on its territory.
The Taszar airbase in Hungary is also a possible candidate for an increased US presence, as it has supported US operations in the region since the US entry into Bosnia in 1995.
During his recent Asian tour, General Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the US is likely to use the joint military training facility it is seeking to establish in northern Australia to pre-position equipment and material.
The Air Force wants to return to the Cold War-era practice of basing fighter jets and other strike and support planes on Guam, the Pacific island that is in ready striking distance of the Korean peninsula, according to General William J Begert, commander of Pacific Air Forces.
[b]An empire that spans the world[/b]
Despite this restructuring, the US military empire is still staggeringly large. The global "footprint" as it is called, conjuring up interesting images of just who and what the US treads on, spans the world.
Currently Pentagon officials are in the final throes of crafting an updated National Military Strategy that is expected to acknowledge a need to redistribute US forces and revamp their chains of command throughout the globe. "Global sourcing", a term used to describe the distribution of US forces across the Earth, is also an issue to be addressed in the new national military strategy. The new posture is expected to carry with it a new lingo for bases, including "power projection hubs", main operating bases and more flexible and agile "forward operating sites".
Under the plan, US troops, rather than inhabiting a small number of large garrisons, would rotate through dozens of small bases throughout the world on exercises, staying for only a few weeks or months at a time. Those bases could serve as launching points for military strikes to protect US interests or quickly strike out at terrorists.
Part of this redistribution is what author Chalmers Johnson calls "Baseworld". Johnson writes: "It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department's annual 'Base Structure Report' for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic US military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6,000 bases in the US and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least [US]$113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases - surely far too low a figure, but still larger than the gross domestic product of most countries - and an estimated $592 billion to replace all of them. The military high command deploys to its overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases 4,844 more.
"These numbers, although staggeringly large, do not begin to cover all the actual bases that we occupy globally. The 2003 Base Status Report fails to mention, for instance, any garrisons in Kosovo - even though it is the site of the huge Camp Bondsteel, built in 1999 and maintained ever since by Kellogg, Brown & Root. The report similarly omits bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar and Uzbekistan, although the US military has established colossal base structures throughout the so-called arc of instability in the two-and-a-half years since September 11."
Nor does it include new facilities being built. In Iraq engineers from the 1st Armored Division are midway through a $800 million project to build half a dozen camps for the incoming 1st Cavalry Division. The new outposts, dubbed enduring camps, will improve living quarters for soldiers and allow the military to return key infrastructure sites within the Iraqi capital to the emerging government. According to GlobalSecurity.org these include such places as Camps Anaconda, Dogwood and Falcon, just to name a few.
The largest of the new camps, Camp Victory North, will be twice the size of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo - currently one of the largest overseas posts built since the Vietnam War.
Also bear in mind that the deployment of military forces abroad means negotiating complicated legal arrangements, euphemistically called Status of Forces agreements, so that US forces remain largely immune from host country laws. The United States has yet to begin serious negotiations with Iraqis on an agreement to guarantee that American troops in Iraq will remain immune from arrest and prosecution by local authorities once a new Baghdad government takes over in June.
This was a way of life for 19th century imperialists, who, for example, carved out little extraterritorial enclaves all along the coast of China. This was certainly the case of the collapsed empire of the Soviet Union, whose military men led privileged lives elsewhere in the communist bloc. This is the peacetime way of life of the US military, whose forces abroad are largely shielded from local judgments. Increasingly, if the Bush administration has its way (thanks to bilateral agreements forced on other nations), American soldiers in wartime will be responsible to no other body, certainly not to the new International Criminal Court, for crimes of war or crimes against humanity.
[i]David Isenberg, a senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background in arms control and national security issues[/i].
|
|
|
| |
| Conservative Says "STRIKE TWO FOR BUSH" |
| 02.13.04 (7:15 am) [edit] |
[b]Strike Two for Bush[/b], [i]Robert Novak[/i], http://www.townhall.com/colum...
WASHINGTON -- All week long in the capital, worried Republicans buzzed about George W. Bush's Sunday interview on NBC's "Meet the Press." Supporters of the president were surprised that he would ask to be questioned by Tim Russert. What flabbergasted them was the absence of any plan to use this event to stop being the target as the 2004 campaign began.
This failure was Strike Two for President Bush. Strike One was his humdrum State of the Union address. Fortunately for the president, this is not baseball where three strikes are out. During more than eight months before Election Day, Bush will have many opportunities for recuperation. For now, however, the president is in political retreat, with Democrats unimpeded in challenging his competency and credibility.
The "Meet the Press" performance raised disturbing questions for Republicans. How could Bush be put out to confront the most feared questioner in Washington without a careful scenario? How could he face Russert without precise answers on the decision to go to war in Iraq and on his National Guard service? The suspicion is that his 2004 campaign organization, a fund-raising juggernaut, is otherwise inadequate.
The Bush White House is cloistered, where even Bush aides seem restrained from debating strategy even behind closed doors. The belief in Republican circles is that Bush, tired of battering by Democrats and alarmed by his descent in the polls, asked for an hour on television. This questions how it could be possible for a president who claims to neither read newspapers nor watch television. In any event, no aide dissuaded Bush from embarking on this course or devised a plan to make the most of it.
Democratic operatives, including Sen. John Kerry's advisers, groused that Russert permitted Bush to escape -- reflecting presidential bloodlust by Democrats in the sight of Bush's wounds. Actually, no president ever before had been subjected to such tough questioning in the Oval Office.
The private Republican complaint is not with Russert but with Bush. It was thought the president would have sat down with carefully structured language to defend himself or even produce news. Yet, the newsiest tidbit contained in excerpts of the taped interview distributed last Saturday was the unsurprising declaration he would not fire CIA Director George Tenet.
While gay marriage embarrasses Democrats because of their homosexual constituency, Bush did not try to capitalize on this Sunday. He was informed in advance that Russert had no plans to bring it up but that the president, of course, could raise this important social issue. He did not.
Most disturbing to the president's supporters was his reaction to whether young Lt. Bush skipped Alabama National Guard duty in 1972. This chestnut from the 2000 campaign dropped when leftist agitator Michael Moore called Bush a military "deserter" and Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe labeled him AWOL. Kerry linked Bush's National Guard service with "going to Canada, going to jail, being a conscientious objector" as forms of draft avoidance he would not criticize.
"The political season's here," Bush told Russert, launching a tepid defense of his service record. The president did not lash back by exposing Kerry's unsavory record in the antiwar movement's extreme wing following his heroic service in Vietnam. That reluctance might have been prudent, but it maintained the protective shell around Bush's probable challenger.
The president would not deign to even touch the senator. Nearly a year ago in March, Vogue magazine reported Kerry as denigrating Bush's "lack of knowledge," adding: "He was two years behind me at Yale, and I knew him, and he's still the same guy." I reported the president telling aides he did not know Kerry at Yale. On Sunday, Russert cited the Vogue quotations and asked: "Did you know him at Yale?" "No," Bush replied. "How do you respond to that?" Russert persisted. The president answered with one word: "Politics."
That's not nearly an adequate retort to John Kerry. Republican heavy thinkers regard him as second only to Howard Dean as a vulnerable nominee. But Kerry, merciless in slashing at the president, remains untouched. It seems difficult for an incumbent president to lose amid economic recovery, but George W. Bush is showing it might be possible.
|
|
|
| |
| Bush's Economic Fiasco Is A DISASTER For Middle-Class Families!!! |
| 02.13.04 (7:14 am) [edit] |
[b]Bush's Economic Fiasco Is A Disaster For Middle-Class Families ...[/b], http://www.tblog.com/template...
[b]Bush's economic fiasco is the worst since the Great Depression because it is leading this nation towards the largest deficits and debts in our history-- with nothing to show for his reckless spending on unconscionable [i]welfare giveaways [/i]to corporations and the richest among us, except a massive gluttonous swindle of America by the wealthy amassing mountains of obscene [i]treasure & booty [/i]in their greed-ridden plunder and looting of our people.[/b]
Tragically, the [i]gap[/i] between the [i]Hyper-Rich-Haves [/i]& the increasingly [i]Impoverished-Slavish-H ave-Nots [/i]is skyrocketing at a level not seen in our nation for over 75 years. Instead of investing in our nation's well-being and the welfare of our citizenry, the corrupt Bush regime has awarded massive tax cuts, tax loopholes & boondoggles to their corrupt corporate cronies, and wealthy oligarchs & plutocrats-- Meanwhile, poverty and misery in the U.S.A. is rising sharply with:
* Over 4 million citizens who are homeless;
* Over 9-15 million citizens without jobs in the biggest 'job loss' since Herbert Hoover ([i]Contrast the destruction of 3.3 million jobs under Bush with the creation of over 22 million jobs under Clinton[/i].);
* Over 25 million families living below an out-dated poverty line set back in the 1960s;
* Over 45 million citizens without health care and over 18,000 of whom die each year because we are the only industrialized nation (...[i] for the moment, as Bush is turning us into a 3rd world-style military junta & slave state [/i]...) without a National Health Care System;
* Our systems of education, food-and-drug administration, environmental protections, as well as services that render us a civilized nation, are being disbanded by Bush in favor of a vastly over-bloated Military Industrial Complex that is starving our nation, in order that the insane neo-cons can wage their blood-thirsty war adventures in pursuit of vast power and obese riches ... leaving our citizens bereft of a decent standard of living and suffering as dire needs are neglected ...
"We the People" must demand a return to a sane and rational course, for the disastrous route that the neo-fascist Bush regime has set-upon will lead us to even further tragic chaos, misery and desperation.
Refer to "[b]Kicking the Middle Class When It's Down[/b]" by [i]Elizabeth Warren [/i]on http://www.americanprogress.o... :
With consumer debt higher than ever, many thousands of middle class families face financial disaster. Home mortgage foreclosures, car repossessions, and credit card defaults are all at record levels. Last year alone, 9 million families entered credit counseling in an effort to straighten out their finances, and 1.6 million just gave up and filed for bankruptcy. Congress’s response? The House of Representatives decided it was time to try once more to push a bankruptcy bill that credit industry lobbyists have been peddling since 1997, a bill designed to boost profits for consumer lenders by making it tougher for troubled families to get any relief in bankruptcy.
The bankruptcy bill is more than 400 pages of virtually impenetrable text, with literally hundreds of changes to an already-complex statute. A well-financed lobbying effort has reduced it to a tasty sound bite: People should repay their debts if they can. The problem, of course, is that the sound bite deliberately obscures the reality. The biggest problem is not people who can repay, it is people who are desperately trying to repay and who can’t make it — families filing bankruptcy to try to make up mortgage payments and past-due car payments but who don’t have steady enough incomes to make even a minimal repayment plan and keep groceries on the table. But the proposed bankruptcy bill would impose more than a hundred new constraints on all families — whether they are trying to repay or not — increasing costs, decreasing protection, and leaving creditors with more leverage than ever to squeeze a few dollars more out of all these families.
If this bill passed, who would pay the price? First, families with children. Today, people with children at home are nearly three times more likely to file for bankruptcy. Married couples are in trouble, and those trying to raise a child alone are in even more trouble. A single woman raising a child is nearly four times more likely to file for bankruptcy than a single woman alone. Divorced dads are having a hard time too, heading into bankruptcy at much higher rates than their single friends without children.
Among older Americans, the most likely filers are those who cannot pay for prescription drugs or meet other medical costs. Older Americans are also more likely to have been the victims of fraud and unscrupulous lenders who are trying to trick them out of their homes. For a growing number of seniors, bankruptcy is their last hope.
If American families were simply on a spending spree, perhaps the fact that millions are in trouble with debt should be treated as little more than their just desserts. But the data are irrefutable: families are in financial trouble for the most basic reasons. Among those who have filed for bankruptcy, two-thirds have suffered a job loss — that means last year alone 1.1 million families walked into the bankruptcy courts after mom or dad (or both) was laid off, downsized, or otherwise put out of work.
Lack of health insurance is also taking its toll. About 800,000 of the families in bankruptcy have had serious medical problems — a husband who had a heart attack, a wife with breast cancer, an elderly parent who needs long-term care, or a child with leukemia. About 160,000 people filed for bankruptcy after the family broke apart, a condition that fell disproportionately on women trying to raise their children. Altogether, more than 90 percent of the families fell into one or more of these three categories — job loss, medical problems or family break up. The remaining families were beset by a variety of other problems and circumstances — including crime, natural disaster, and a call up to military service. In short, families are heading to bankruptcy when their incomes and debts get badly out of balance following a serious economic disruption.
Real abuses, however, escape attention in this legislation. Despite all the provisions to make personal bankruptcy more difficult, the amendments were carefully tailored to preserve loopholes for corporate executives because they have "business debts" instead of "consumer debts." Similarly, provisions to protect multimillion dollar homes in Texas, Florida, and other states remain virtually intact. Special exemptions for the rich remain because they rarely owe credit card debt, while the bill zeroes in on ordinary, wage-earning families.
This bill treats bankruptcy as something debtors alone create; creditors are treated as innocent victims. Last year, the credit industry mailed five billion credit card solicitations, but the bill imposes not a single new constraint on the credit industry. Instead, the House has embraced a bill that is widely described as “a creditor’s wish list” to help companies increase the odds of collecting from even the most financially troubled families.
What gives this bill renewed momentum at a time when tens of millions of families are out of work and have no health insurance? The financial services industry has pressed a well-funded lobbying effort, giving more money in Washington than almost any other interest group. The Washington Post reports that credit issuers even offered a sweetheart loan deal for an influential Congressman. And the money has paid off. Princeton researchers concluded that voting "strongly reflects campaign contributions" by the coalition of creditors supporting the bill. Executives from credit card giant MBNA were the single largest contributors to George Bush’s presidential campaign, and he too has announced his unwavering support for the bill.
In a brazen abuse of the language, the bill has been named a "reform" act. Its supporters claim that it will help women, support families, and cut abuse. In fact, this bill is designed to do just one thing: Squeeze middle class families a little harder to increase the profits for already-profitable consumer lenders.
[i]Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She specializes in commercial law and bankruptcy and is the author of several books, studies and articles on the subject. Warren is currently vice president of the American Law Institute[/i].
[b]Sources[/b]:
The[i] Center for American Progress [/i]on http://www.americanprogress.o...
[i]WinstonSmith's Blog[/i], http://www.tblog.com/template...
|
|
|
| |
| New Poll: Most Think Dubya Stretched the Truth (Lied) to Justify Iraq War |
| 02.13.04 (6:34 am) [edit] |
[b]Most Think Truth Was Stretched to Justify Iraq War[/b], http://www.washingtonpost.com...
A majority of Americans believe President Bush either lied or deliberately exaggerated evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify war, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The survey results, which also show declining support for the war in Iraq and for Bush's leadership in general, indicate the public is increasingly questioning the president's truthfulness -- a concern for Bush's political advisers as his reelection bid gets underway.
Barely half -- 52 percent -- now believe Bush is "honest and trustworthy," down 7 percentage points since late October and his worst showing since the question was first asked, in March 1999. At his best, in the summer of 2002, Bush was viewed as honest by 71 percent. The survey found that nearly seven in 10 think Bush "honestly believed" Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Even so, 54 percent thought Bush exaggerated or lied about prewar intelligence.
Honesty and credibility have been central to Bush's appeal since the 2000 campaign, when he benefited from disgust over President Bill Clinton's lies about the Monica S. Lewinsky affair and when Bush's campaign accused then-Vice President Al Gore of "saying one thing and doing another." But a number of factors, including the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq and the administration's underestimating of its Medicare prescription drug plan's costs, appear to have undermined perceptions of his credibility.
Bush's possible Democratic opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), has begun to talk about a "credibility gap." Even some Bush allies say they have been misled about Iraq's weapons, and the current Time magazine cover story asks: "Believe him or not -- does Bush have a credibility gap?"
Questions about Bush's use of prewar intelligence, in addition to feeding doubts about his honesty, have sent his performance rating plummeting. Fifty percent of Americans approve of the job he is doing, the lowest level of his presidency in Post-ABC polling and down 8 percentage points from January. The survey found that, for the first time since the war ended, less than half of Americans -- 48 percent -- believe the war was worth fighting, down 8 points from last month. Fifty percent said the war was not worth it.
These doubts have affected Bush's reelection prospects. In a head-to-head matchup, Kerry beat Bush, 52 percent to 43, percent among registered voters. Bush had more passionate support -- 83 percent of his backers said their support was strong, while 59 percent of Kerry supporters said so -- and retains an advantage over Kerry in dealing with Iraq and the war on terrorism. But the Democrat was seen as better able to handle the economy and jobs, education, and health care -- all top issues with voters this year.
The survey found a steep drop in public perceptions of Bush as a president and as an individual. In a sign that Bush has been set back by recent controversies over Iraqi weapons, his National Guard record and the federal budget, the number of Americans viewing him as a "strong leader" has slipped to 61 percent, down 6 points from December and the lowest level since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Bush's rating on handling the economy stood at 44 percent, down 7 percentage points, with nearly half of the public saying they are worse off now than they were when Bush became president three years ago. Six in 10 disapprove of the job Bush is doing creating jobs. On education, 47 percent said they approve of the job Bush is doing, down 8 points from January. And his rating on health care has also fallen.
But the president's declining ratings related to Iraq were the most striking. Approval of his handling of the situation there has fallen to 47 percent, down 8 percentage points in the past three weeks. About half of Americans -- 51 percent -- said they would prefer a report evaluating the accuracy and use of prewar intelligence before the election, while 35 percent favor what Bush has ordered: a broader study of the overall accuracy of U.S. intelligence-gathering operations that will report its findings after the election.
While 21 percent said they believe that Bush lied about the threat posed by Iraq, a larger number -- 31 percent -- thought he exaggerated but did not lie. Indeed, six in 10 Americans believed, as Bush did, that Iraq had such weapons.
Three in four Democrats said Bush either lied or exaggerated about what was known about Iraq's weapons, while an equally large majority of Republicans said the president did neither. Slightly more than half of all independents believed Bush had misled the public about Iraq's weapons cache.
"I think he was believing what he wanted to believe," said one respondent, Ron Perholtz, an accountant from Jupiter, Fla. "I can't say he's dishonest. He heard what he wanted to hear. He's manipulatable by [Vice President] Cheney and others."
Many respondents expressed regrets about the Iraq war. For example, Mike Richcreek, 52, of Warner Robbins, Ga., said he believes Bush neither exaggerated nor lied. "He went by what the intelligence given to him showed," Richcreek said. But, at the same time, Richcreek said he has begun to doubt the merits of the war.
"I'm not sure now we should have gone to war in the first place," he said. "You think of all of our young kids getting killed. That's a problem. I'm glad I didn't have to make the decision."
A total of 1,003 randomly selected adults were interviewed Feb. 10 to 11. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
[i]By Richard Morin and Dana Milbank, Washington Post, Assistant polling director Claudia Deane contributed to this report[/i]., http://www.washingtonpost.com...
|
|
|
| |
| For Bush, It's All Unraveling |
| 02.13.04 (6:24 am) [edit] |
[b]For Bush, It's All Unraveling[/b], http://antiwar.com/bock/?arti...
One must be careful not to crow too quickly. Perceptions in a large and complex society can shift quickly, often for reasons that seem to make little sense to those of us inclined to be excessively rational or coldly analytical. But it seems more than possible that events and perceptions are converging in such a way that while it might be difficult to correct the mistakes made in the attack on Iraq, the American people might just be insulated or even immunized from the seductive call to go to war again in the near future.
In short, the enthusiasts for war and empire may have overplayed their hand – as people who combine power with arrogance generally do eventually – and made it more difficult to stir up support for future war and empire-building. Such immunization is unlikely to be permanent, and it will behoove friends of liberty to follow up aggressively on the advantages circumstances seem to have presented us, and to press home how mistaken were the assumptions of those who cajoled us into the war on Iraq, how dishonestly the campaign was waged, and how we should have learned the lesson that leaders with global ambitions are seldom to be trusted.
In short, although I don't know if Bush 43 will follow in the footsteps of Bush 41 and be turned out of office shortly after a war that saw his approval ratings shoot to improbable heights, I suspect it will be harder to sell the next war to the American people. Even some of the president's best friends implicitly acknowledge this.
Many pundits suggest that if Dubya is reelected he will have something of a free hand in a second term, and the neocons, playing to his sense of mission and self-importance, could bamboozle him into several next steps in the grand project of reshaping the Middle East. However, second terms for American presidents have seldom turned out to be the open road to freedom of action that some presidential supporters would like them to be. This is only in part because a second-term president becomes an instant lame duck, and the dedicated politicos are already paying more attention to the question of a successor than to any initiatives the denizen of the Oval Office has in mind.
I remember conservatives telling me that if Nixon were reelected in 1972 they had it on good authority that he would get serious about trimming the size of government. Instead we got Watergate. Instead of aggressive action during Reagan's second term – though it did feature the ongoing crumbling of the Soviet empire, for which he deserves some credit but not as much as his partisans want to grant him – we got Iran-Contra. During Clinton's second term we got Monicagate and an impeachment proceeding that was about much more than a stain on a dress.
[b]FUMBLING ON MEET THE PRESS[/b]
Even the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for Bush 41 and seldom passes up a chance to praise the president, thought the president did poorly in the "Meet the Press" interview with Tim Russert. She put it down to a lack of facility at sticking with talking points, a characteristic the "great communicator," Ronald Reagan, shared. Both are better at speeches, she wrote.
I happened on Monday to talk with Ed Feulner, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, who supported the war and (within the confines of heading a "non-political" think tank – which has, to be fair, been aggressive on the emerging issue of discretionary domestic overspending) a Bush enthusiast with only mild reservations. He said he was pleased with "the fact that he took the initiative, answered every question, took on every issue. It shows he's raring to go in the Fall."
Maybe. I think Peggy Noonan, a veteran of the presidential speechwriting game and no mean writer herself, offered the more accurate assessment. The president did not do himself any favors with this performance. David Brooks, in the New York Times, tried to help him out by rephrasing some of the key paragraphs in his own column, to make what he hoped President Bush was trying to say more persuasive. That very effort suggested a perception that Bush had blown it in the actual appearance.
Robert Novak, a skeptic on the war but well plugged-in with Capitol Republicans, titled his Thursday column "Strike Two for Bush," writing that "Strike One was his humdrum State of the Union address." He noted that Capitol Republicans were struck by the apparent absence of a plan going into the Russert interview, facing a generally tough interviewer "without precise answers on the decision to go to war in Iraq and on his National Guard service. The suspicion is that his 2004 campaign organization, a fund-raising juggernaut, is otherwise quite inadequate."
Peggy Noonan returned to the fray on Thursday also, fascinated by the angry e-mails she got from Bush supporters but also sensing a certain desperation amongst them. "They're nervous out there, the Bush people. If they weren't so nervous they wouldn't have cared about bad reviews." After discoursing on how difficult it is to come up with the paragraph that explains why a president should be reelected and making it sound new, she challenged her readers to come up with one.
It will be difficult because of the qualifications she put on it: It must be "fresh, and succinct, something you believe and remember. And it's got to be true. When the paragraph a president's men come up with is not true, they lose. Jimmy Carter's paragraph in 1980 was: We're not so bad, and at least you know us, and Jimmy is a nice man, and by the way that Reagan guy is just too extreme and radical and right-wingy and nutty. People didn't find Ronald Reagan too extreme. And he wasn't too extreme. He seemed like a possible antidote to failure – Jimmy Carter's failure in the world. The paragraph wasn't true. Mr. Carter lost in a landslide."
So the Bush reelection paragraph actually has to be true? That makes it a lot tougher than even Ms. Noonan might understand.
[b]SELLING A FLAWED POLICY[/b]
It is probably true that a one-on-one interview is not the strongest possible forum for George W. Bush, but that's not the fundamental reason he didn't come off well in the interview with Tim Russert. He came off poorly because he was defending a flawed set of policies regarding Iraq – policies that were apparently decided independently of intelligence (or lack of it) about Saddam possessing certain nasty weapons but presented to the American people as a response to the near-certainty that he had them. Even the most eloquent salesperson is likely to appear a bit clumsy when selling a flawed or incoherent policy.
And when the evidence one convinced oneself was valid doesn't pan out, you have to do a certain amount of tap dancing. Tap dancing looks easy, but the line between amateurs and professionals is readily visible.
That a sitting president would go on "Meet the Press" is unusual. It suggests that the president and his political team think he is in trouble – an impression backed by recent polls and the stubborn refusal of "weapons of mass destruction" or other evidence of an imminent threat to materialize in the sands of Iraq.
Mr. Russert asked about a "preemptive" war, but what the administration initiated was a "preventive" war, designed to prevent a potential or speculative threat from emerging.
Administration figures have developed some clever soundbites to justify this policy – "do we want to find weapons in the form of a mushroom cloud over Manhattan?" and the like – but they have yet to develop a coherent rationale for such a policy – The National Strategy statement of August 2002 might have done it for specialists, but it has yet to be explained in more popularized terms.
Most important, they have failed to explain how it differs from plain old aggression against any regime the president or his minions decide is sufficiently evil or unpleasant. They have certainly failed to discuss in any way that goes beyond obviously fallacious and not especially credible slogans some of the implications for what is, in fact, a revolutionary break with American tradition and international theories (if not always practice) about national sovereignty.
[b]MORE QUESTIONS NEEDED[/b]
Here are a few questions that will require answers, especially since the first effort in preventive war has not gone anywhere near as well – the failure to find WMDs has emerged as a symbol but it may be the least important failure – as the enthusiasts tried to tell the American people it would go.
Would we like it if every country believed it had the right to enforce "regime change" though military force on countries halfway around the world? Are we ready to stay for the years and decades it might take to enforce "stability" in countries we invade? Are we ready to take casualties almost indefinitely? Does running another country enhance freedom for American citizens? Does beating up on Iraq amount to a victory in or a diversion from the struggle against more genuinely dangerous threat of al Qaida?
Those are only a few of the kinds of questions that need to be discussed during the upcoming campaign. With all due respect to the argument, which has some merit, that the United States has acted like an imperial power for decades now, and especially since the demise of the Soviet Union, the war on Iraq was a revolutionary departure from traditional American concepts of foreign policy.
I suspect that if questions are raised, the American people will reject this kind of aggressive imperialism – indeed, they may already have rejected it. The fact that the Bushies seek to hand over at least symbolic sovereignty to an Iraqi entity this year – an election year – suggests that the political planners in the Bush campaign have decided their man will do better if there are not wars or rumors of wars during the election season.
Unfortunately, I don't expect Sen. Kerry – if he is the nominee – or Sen. Edwards or any of the Democrats to be much more probing or enlightening than President Bush.
[b]INEVITABLE DISILLUSIONMENT?[/b]
It just may be, however, that we do not need the Democrats to develop a certain aversion to wars among the general populace. Weapons inspector David Kay continues to say, to anyone who asks him, that there is no point to continuing to look for nasty weapons caches in Iraq. He has blamed intelligence failures rather than political leaders for the misperceptions (all right, falsehoods) before the war, but many Americans are ready to blame political leaders or their political advisers.
Last week we had that remarkable speech by CIA chief George Tenet, distancing himself from any blame but confirming that our intelligence apparatus is in extremely sad shape. We've already started to have some neocons try to argue that it is precisely when intelligence is partial or faulty that it is most important to be ready to attack first, but I suspect that's so absurd nobody will buy it and they'll quickly drop it.
As casualties continue to mount, as it becomes increasingly apparent that Afghanistan is not a model democracy and Iraq is in worse shape, as the military steps up its campaign of reminding the political enthusiasts that one war after another costs money and lives, the appetite of the American people for future wars of choice rather than necessity is likely to abate – at least for a while. We would do well to take advantage of the phenomenon by explicating and popularizing alternate approaches to foreign policy, like war avoidance and genuine defense against real rather than exaggerated threats.
[i]Alan Bock is Senior Essayist at the Orange County Registerand a weekly columnist for WorldNetDaily. He is the author of Ambush at Ruby Ridge (Putnam-Berkley, 1995). He is also author of the new book Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana(Seven Locks Press). His exclusive column appears every Tuesday on Antiwar.com[/i].
|
|
|
| |
| Pentagon's Present to Powell |
| 02.12.04 (7:11 am) [edit] |
[b]Pentagon's Present to Powell[/b], http://www.realcities.com/mld...
With Iraq hurtling toward civil war, the Pentagon is trying to [i]pass the buck[/i]. http://www.realcities.com/mld... At a recent high-level meeting, Donald Rumsfeld looked over at Colin Powell and said, "Jerry [i](Ambassador Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian in Iraq) works for you, right[/i]?" Powell apparently looked thunder-struck. A senior administration official told Knight Ridder, "Iraq is now a contaminated environment and Rumsfeld and his people .. can't wait for July 1 when the CPA (Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority) turns into the U.S. Embassy and the whole mess they have made becomes Colin Powell's."
|
|
|
| |
| A Win for Civil Liberties |
| 02.12.04 (7:08 am) [edit] |
[b]A Win for Civil Liberties[/b], http://desmoinesregister.com/...
Responding to pressure from civil liberties groups, federal authorities[i] retreated [/i] http://desmoinesregister.com/... Tuesday in their investigation of an Iowa anti-war demonstration, withdrawing grand jury subpoenas delivered last week to four peace activists and Drake University. A federal judge also lifted a gag order on Drake, where employees had been ordered not to discuss an inquiry into a meeting the anti-war activists held there Nov. 15.
|
|
|
| |
| Bush's Campaign "Cleansed" His AWOL Records Back in 1999! |
| 02.12.04 (7:05 am) [edit] |
[b]There are several new story lines opening up tonight on the Guard issue[/b]. In addition to the bizarre dental records http://www.washingtonpost.com... release noted here on http://www.talkingpointsmemo.... a number of news outlets are running with the allegations of former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett, who has said for some time that [b]the president's Guard records [i]were "cleansed" by campaign staffers [/i]back in 1999[/b].
The most detailed run-down http://www.usatoday.com/news/... seems to be in [i]USAToday[/i].
Kevin Drum notes how the authors of the piece have a (good) history with the source, Burkett, thus arguably lending his story more credibility.
In general, Drum's site, [i]Calpundit.com[/i], http://www.calpundit.com/ continues to be the invaluable source in making sense of all the different moving parts of this story -- which documents mean what, who says the president did what when, etc.
[i]Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo[/i], http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
|
|
|
| |
| Pentagon Eager to Wash Hands of Iraq Mess it Created |
| 02.11.04 (6:51 am) [edit] |
[b]Pentagon eager to wash hands of Iraq mess it created[/b], http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/...
[b]WASHINGTON - ([i]KRT[/i])[/b] - What a difference a year can make. If you don't believe it, ask Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
A year ago, testifying before Congress, Wolfowitz predicted that securing postwar Iraq would be an easier job than the United States and its allies faced in Bosnia or Afghanistan. After all, the deputy secretary said, there's no ethnic tension in Iraq.
The immediate reaction of virtually everyone who knew even a little bit about Iraq and its long-simmering tensions, repression, bloodshed and just plain bad blood among Kurds and Turkomen in the north, Sunni Arabs in the middle and Shiite Muslims in the south, was: Say what?
Not since President Ford prematurely declared Soviet-dominated Poland a free country has a public official stuck his foot so deeply and so publicly in his mouth.
Wolfowitz visited Iraq early this month and, at a meeting in the northern city of Kirkuk, he got a long, painful ear pounding on the subject of tension and fear among the country's ethnic groups.
The Sunni Arabs complained that they were being abused and mistreated by the Kurds. The Shia made it clear that the only thing would satisfy them - the long-oppressed majority in this nation of 25 million people - was free and open elections, which they would, of course, win. Other Iraqis complained that local militias, who owe no loyalty to the central government, are intimidating and frightening people.
Central Intelligence Agency officers in Baghdad Station have reported to the home office their own fears that Iraq is on a "glide path to civil war."
The Department of Defense, which is to say Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, is skinning back the U.S. force in Iraq from 130,000-plus today to 105,000 by late spring, when the current round of troop rotations ends. However many soldiers and Marines we have in Iraq, they could end up in the crossfire of a civil war.
Rumsfeld and his key aides, meanwhile, are running for cover.
In one recent high-level meeting, Rumsfeld looked at Secretary of State Colin Powell and said, "Jerry (Ambassador Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian in Iraq) works for you, right?"
Powell looked as if he'd been struck by lightning. Bremer and every other U.S. official in Iraq reports directly to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. Rumsfeld demanded and got complete authority over the military, over the civilian authority in charge of rebuilding the country, over the administration's $87 billion Iraq budget, over every line of every contract let. And suddenly he forgot that Bremer works for him?
That same week, Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage were summoned to a closed-door session of the Senate Armed Services Committee to discuss how the U.S. contracting system is working in Iraq.
When Wolfowitz was asked a tough question about the controversies surrounding the U.S. contracting efforts in Iraq, he turned to Armitage and said: "You can answer that one, right, Rich?" Armitage answered by noting that the Department of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of Defense control every American contract let in Iraq, and that the State Department has authority over none of those contracts.
"Iraq is now a contaminated environment and Rumsfeld and his people want out," said one senior administration official. "They can't wait for July 1 when the CPA (Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority) turns into the U.S. Embassy and the whole mess they have made becomes Colin Powell's."
The only question is whether Rumsfeld and Company can keep the lid on all the boiling pots until they can pass the CPA and the whole nation-rebuilding buck to the State Department.
The investigations and audits of Halliburton's and Halliburton subsidiaries' alleged contract overcharges, with their uncomfortable proximity to Vice President Dick Cheney, Halliburton's former chief, are just the tip of the iceberg.
The real action, knowledgeable American officials say, is in local contracts that are being let under authority of the ruling Iraqi Governing Council. U.S. officials say some less savory Council members are demanding kickbacks on some contracts in hopes of investing the ill-gotten gains in buying or bending the selection of local and regional councils who will help choose a new government and bolstering their own distant hopes of holding onto power.
[i]Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045[/i].
|
|
|
| |
| Cheney's Future at Stake After Leaking of CIA Agent's Name |
| 02.11.04 (6:47 am) [edit] |
[b]Cheney's future at stake after leaking of CIA agent's name[/b], http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa...,12271,1145390,00.html
Vice President Dick Cheney's political future was at stake yesterday in Washington, where a grand jury investigation was questioning administration officials about his office's role in leaking the name of a CIA operative for political motives.
The inquiry has already questioned the president's spokesman and one of his media advisers over the identification of Valerie Plame, which is developing into one of the administration's main headaches in an election year.
However, informed sources said last night that three of the five officials who are the real targets of the probe work or worked for Mr Cheney.
Until recently, President Bush has insisted that Mr Cheney would be his vice-presidential candidate in the November elections, despite his history of heart trouble.
But recent polls conducted by the White House have suggested that growing unpopularity of the taciturn ex-businessman and powerful administration hawk threatens to sink the president.
Mr Cheney is already under intense fire from Democrats for his personal role in shaping the case for war against Iraq, frequently visiting the CIA to question assessments that played down Saddam Hussein's arsenal.
His former role as head of a giant oil services corporation, Halliburton, is also under scrutiny, as the company is under investigation for bribery when Mr Cheney was in charge and, more recently for war-profiteering in Iraq.
But the grand jury investigation into the CIA leak is potentially the most explosive threat to his long-term political survival.
The case centres around the leaking to the press in July of the name of Valerie Plame, apparently in response to public questioning of the US case for war against Iraq by her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador.
The leaking of an undercover agent's identity is a serious crime under US law. The hearings are leading justice department investigators towards the vice president's office, according to a source familiar with the investigation.
"Three of the five people who are targets work or worked in Cheney's office," the source said.
He added that members of the defence policy board, a Pentagon advisory group, are also under scrutiny. Sensing the danger to the administration, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman, Terry McCauliffe issued a statement to say: "Now that the FBI is getting closer to finding out who inside the Bush White House put the lives of CIA agents in danger, we hope that President Bush will keep his word and hold accountable those responsible for the White House leak - no matter how high their post."
The chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, outlined the president's position. "The leak of classified information is a very serious matter," he said
A parallel grand jury is looking into the forgery of a document that surfaced in Italy before the war, purporting to show Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Niger. Despite doubts over its authenticity, the document underpinned US and British claims, since proved groundless, that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons programme.
A third grand jury in Washington is looking into allegations that a Halliburton subsidiary paid $180m in bribes to secure lucrative contracts to build a gas plant in Nigeria, at the time Mr Cheney was chief executive, from 1995 to 2000.
More recently the corporation has been caught overcharging millions of dollars for the delivery of petrol to the US military in Iraq.
The vice president claims to have severed his ties with the controversial company but he continues to receive payments of about $150,000 a year in tax-minimising "deferred compensation" from his time as an executive.
[i]Julian Borger in Washington, Guardian Unlimited[/i], http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa...,12271,1145390,00.html
|
|
|
| |
| A MATTER OF TRUST ... |
| 02.11.04 (6:45 am) [edit] |
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." –[i] Hermann Goering [/i]
[b]A matter of trust[/b],[i] Pat Buchanan[/i], http://www.wnd.com/news/artic...
Most Americans yet believe President Bush did the right thing in ridding Iraq and the world of Saddam Hussein. Yet, how we were persuaded to go to war raises grave questions about the character and competence of those who led us into it.
As we now know, Iraq had no tie to Osama, no role in 9-11, no nuclear program, no weapons of mass destruction, no plans to attack us. Its people did not threaten us and did not want war with us.
By what right, then, did we invade their country, destroy their army and inflict thousands of casualties upon their people?
Comes the answer: We acted under the Bush Doctrine, under which we will not permit the world's worst dictators to acquire the world's worst weapons. To eliminate such threats before they go critical, we reserve the right to take pre-emptive military action and to wage preventive wars.
We cannot wait for tumors to become malignant before cutting them out, Bush was saying. After 9-11, most of America agreed.
But why did Bush choose Iraq? Why not Iran, whose hand in terror attacks was more demonstrable and whose missile and nuclear programs were more advanced? Why not North Korea?
The neoconservatives – Wolfowitz, Perle & Co. – we know, had been plotting war on Iraq and propagandizing for a U.S. invasion for years. But why did Bush sign on? Why did he make Iraq the first target of his doctrine? There was no tie between Saddam and 9-11, and Iraq seemed neither a grave nor an imminent threat.
What appears to have happened is this. Sometime soon after 9-11, the neocons persuaded the president that invading Iraq was the next crucial step in winning the war on terror and evil in which Divine Providence had chosen him to be the Churchill of his generation. And if the country and Congress were unconvinced of the need for war, it was his job to convince them.
And here is where the administration began to cross the line. To persuade us that Saddam was a mortal threat to which the only recourse was war, they needed evidence. But, apparently, there was little or no hard evidence to be had. No smoking guns. Saddam had been corralled in his box for a dozen years. America had flown 40,000 sorties over his country without losing a plane.
The only case that could be made was by extrapolating from the weapons Iraq had had before the Gulf War, which the U.N. had failed to find before it left in 1998. What seems to have happened is this.
Frustrated hawks in the Pentagon, impatient with the CIA's inability to find the evidence to clinch the case for a war they had already decided on, began demanding access to raw intelligence.
They set up their own intelligence unit in the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans. They solicited foreign intelligence agencies and Iraqi exiles to discover evidence that Saddam not only had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, he was working on nuclear ones.
First, they decided on war. Then they sent everyone out on a global scavenger hunt to find the evidence to prove we had no alternative but war. And though the information that came back was suspicious and the sources suspect, at least it pointed, as desired, in the right direction.
And, so, the hawks fed it to their propagandists in the press and "stovepiped" it to the White House, where it soon began to appear in the statements and speeches of the president and his War Cabinet.
Thus, we were told an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague had met with Muhammad Atta before 9-11, that Saddam was buying raw uranium for atomic bombs in Africa, that Iraq was testing drones and fitting them with biological weapons.
Vice President Cheney told "Meet the Press" that Saddam "has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Condi Rice warned us that if we waited too long for proof it might come in a "mushroom cloud" over an American city.
Upon such "evidence," the White House stampeded Congress and the country into war, a war we now know was utterly unnecessary. We were misled, and the only question that lingers is: Were we deceived?
For if Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and the president were truly relying on the ambiguous intelligence the CIA was providing, whence came their absolute certitude as to the gravity and immediacy of the threat? For the CIA was saying there was no imminent threat.
History will record this as Bush's War. And he seems content with that judgment. But the price of victory has been the lost trust of many of his countrymen and of much of the world. The credibility of yet another administration has been compromised. Was it worth it?
[b]And if it was not the weapons, what was the real reason America went to war on Iraq?[/b]
[i]Patrick J. Buchanan[/i]
|
|
|
| |
| Institute Calls For Universal Health Care |
| 02.10.04 (7:00 am) [edit] |
[b]Institute Calls For Universal Health Care[/b], http://www.kron.com/Global/st...
BAY AREA (KRON) -- It's estimated that almost 44 million Americans lack health care insurance. Now for the first time ever, The Institute of Medicine is calling for the government to offer health insurance for every American, saying we can no longer afford not to.
Robert Schwartz works long hours as a house framer. It's steady work but it doesn't have health benefits. So when Robert developed kidney disease, he had to pay everything out of pocket. "My medical bills are now more than my house payments and that definitely puts a burden on you," says Robert.
A new report by the Institute of Medicine says that kind of story is all too common. The report says one in six Americans under the age of 65 lack health insurance, more than 8 million of them are children.
Doctor Sandra Hernandez is with the San Francisco Foundation and served on the committee that produced the report. She says this really is a matter of life and death. "The committee estimated 18,000 Americans die prematurely because of the lack of health insurance every year. People tend to delay care until they can't delay it any longer. They're in emergency rooms when things could be managed better in an outpatient and a primary care setting," says Dr. Hernandez.
The report concludes that we cannot afford not to do it. "There's a financial burden that we estimated being somewhere between $65 billion and $115 billion of economic productivity that we lose because of the unnecessary morbidity and mortality that we have by people being outside of the insurance system," says Hernandez.
The Institute of Medicine report calls on the government to provide universal health insurance by 2010. That does not mean everything for everybody, but a plan to make sure everyone has at least basic coverage.
The report is based on science but it is going to take political action to put it into effect. "You can take a moral position, you can take the position that health care should be a right or a human right. The beauty of this work is it's an evidence-based, scientific-based conclusion and set of recommendations," says Dr. Hernandez.
They hope that releasing it in an election year will at least start a debate that could make it happen.
The Institute of Medicine is also hoping that people use the report to compare political candidates and the position they take on universal health coverage.
[i]KRON[/i]
|
|
|
| |
| Bush Aides Testify in Leak Probe |
| 02.10.04 (6:57 am) [edit] |
[b]Bush Aides Testify in Leak Probe[/b], http://www.washingtonpost.com...
A federal grand jury has questioned one current and two former aides to President Bush, and investigators have interviewed several others, in an effort to discover who revealed the name of an undercover CIA officer to a newspaper columnist, sources involved in the case said yesterday.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday that he talked to the grand jury on Friday. Mary Matalin, former counselor to Vice President Cheney, testified Jan. 23, the sources said. Adam Levine, a former White House press official, also testified Friday, the sources said.
None is suspected by prosecutors of having exposed undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame, but they were questioned about White House public relations strategy, the sources said.
FBI agents have interviewed those and at least five other current and former Bush aides and have questioned them about thousands of e-mails that the White House surrendered in October, along with stacks of call logs and calendars, the sources said.
The logs indicate that several White House officials talked to columnist Robert D. Novak shortly before July 14, when he published a column quoting "two senior administration officials" saying that Plame, "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction," had suggested her husband for a mission to Niger to investigate whether Iraq tried to acquire uranium there as part of an effort to develop nuclear weapons.
White House witnesses have been asked about cell phone calls and have been shown handwritten, diary-style notes from colleagues, as well as e-mails from reporters to administration officials. In at least a few cases, the FBI questioning was portrayed as very aggressive, with agents homing in on specific conversations with journalists. "Even witnesses that they describe as being potentially helpful are being treated as adversaries," a source close to the investigation said.
Plame is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, former U.S. ambassador to Gabon. He became a prominent critic of Bush's case for war after conducting the mission in 2002 and finding no proof that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear materials.
The White House e-mails include criticism of Wilson, the sources said. Wilson is an unpaid foreign policy adviser to the front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), and has made campaign stops for him in Iowa, New Hampshire, Maine, New York, Massachusetts and Washington state.
A parallel FBI investigation into the apparent forgery of documents suggesting that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger is "at a critical stage," according to a senior law enforcement official who declined to elaborate. That probe, conducted by FBI counterintelligence agents, was launched last spring after U.N. officials pronounced the documents crude forgeries.
Several sources involved in the leak case said the questioning suggests prosecutors are preparing to seek testimony from Novak and perhaps other journalists. "There's a very good likelihood they're going to litigate against journalists," one source said.
News organizations typically resist subpoenas or other methods of obtaining information about confidential sources. In the Plame case, prosecutors have tried to overcome that obstacle by asking several White House officials to sign waivers requesting "that no member of the news media assert any privilege or refuse to answer any questions from federal law enforcement authorities on my behalf or for my benefit."
The sources said most officials declined to sign the form on the advice of their attorneys. "It would just be helping the government to put more pressure on journalists to reveal sources," one of the lawyers said.
Legal experts said the request for waivers may be intended to show that the FBI has used all possible means to get the information, as Justice Department regulations require, before bringing reporters before the grand jury. The reporters' news-gathering privilege is limited, and "it's most vulnerable in the course of a criminal probe," said Washington defense lawyer Solomon Wisenberg.
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a felony to disclose a covert agent's identity if the person making the disclosure knew the covert status of the employee and revealed it intentionally.
Officials interviewed by the FBI include Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser; McClellan; Matalin; Levine; White House communications director Dan Bartlett; former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer; I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; and Cathie Martin, a Cheney aide, according to the sources.
McClellan said at a briefing on Oct. 10 that Rove and Libby, the only interview subjects about whom he had been publicly questioned, "assured me they were not involved in this."
McClellan told reporters on Air Force One yesterday that his appearance was a matter of "doing my part to cooperate, as the president directed all of us to do."
Matalin, reached by telephone, said, "I can't comment."
Wilson has said his CIA mission was undertaken in response to questions raised by the vice president. But administration officials have said Cheney knew nothing about Wilson or his trip.
Officials said authorities are very interested in who had the security clearance to know about Plame's identity, and how that information might have come into the White House or have been spread once it did.
The investigators have also studied how the White House reacted to Wilson's first public attack on Bush's case about Iraq. Eight days before Novak's column, Wilson was quoted in The Washington Post, published an opinion article in the New York Times and appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press."
[i]By Mike Allen and Susan Schmidt, Washington Post [/i]
|
|
|
| |
| A Progressive's Guide to Populist Economics |
| 02.10.04 (6:52 am) [edit] |
[b]A Progressive's Guide to Populist Economics[/b], http://www.alternet.org/story...
[b]The American economy is doing badly[/b]. The boom of the "roaring '90s" has vanished, replaced by a fragile "jobless recovery" with insecure foundations. The end of prosperity – of growing wealth, rising pay and plentiful jobs – coincided with the arrival of George Bush in the White House, raising inevitable questions about whether the new President is to blame for the country's changing fortunes.
The short answer is yes. The boom of the '90s was bound to end sometime, but the Bush administration took a bad situation and made it much worse by cutting taxes, loosening regulation over corporations, imposing destructive protectionist measures and spending freely on foreign wars.
Democrats ought to make hay over Bush's economic failures, but they are failing to do so for two reasons: Bush has engineered a phony economic recovery; and the progressive remedies for American economic weakness are hard to sell politically.
[b]The Phony Recovery [/b]
Bush engineered rapid growth in the second half of 2003 through enormous borrowing by the federal government coupled with tax cuts. Combined with low interest rates, the easy money got consumers spending, but because there remains a glut of capacity in both industry and services, corporations have responded by continuing to pare jobs and restrain their own investments. The result is jobless economic growth.
For the moment, Bush gets to claim that he has righted the economy. But only for the moment. The Federal Reserve, in late January, signaled that it may soon raise interest rates, because of growing concerns over inflation. The mere specter of a rate-increase appears to have ended the latest stock boom. Meanwhile, the outlook for new employment is poor, raising the odds that when voters go to the polls in November the Democratic presidential candidate will be able to say that Bush's first term cost 2.5 million American jobs.
[b]The Hard Sell [/b]
Despite America's dismal economic performance under Bush, restoring policies that promote equitable and sustainable growth remains difficult. The remedies – higher taxes, more government regulation of business, and the restructuring of government programs to benefit the swelling ranks of the poor and lower-middle class – are not generally viewed as politically attractive. How can Democrats present a progressive economic program that is at the same time politically popular? The outcome of the presidential election will likely turn on this question.
Bashing greedy corporations and unethical executives will only get Bush's opponents so far. A positive plan is needed. Democratic candidates for President are, significantly, calling for a reversal of some of Bush's tax cuts. Such a reversal would help undo the economic damage of Bush's presidency. More taxes will raise government revenues, thus reducing the huge deficits that are otherwise likely to burden the government for many years. But in order to succeed with a tax-increase message, Democrats must re-frame the issue of taxes as one about investment in the country's future. Paying taxes must also be framed as a variety of patriotism – and an especially important symbolic act in a time of threats to U.S. security.
Merely calling for an increase in taxes isn't enough. Democrats need an array of fresh economic ideas that excite voters who are listening to a barrage of dissembling from the Bush administration. Without new ideas suited to a new economic moment, Democrats won't defeat Bush in November. Before we address ways in which Democrats can frame economic alternatives in ways that make them popular politically, let's review the core economic principles that distinguish progressive Democrats from profligate Republicans.
[b]Understanding the Principles [/b]
Democratic economic principles are defined by the following:
[i]Equity[/i]: For Democrats, equity ought to be the byword of their economic thinking. Wealth inequality is rising again in America. The work force is increasingly dominated by high-wage and low-wage jobs. Unions remain marginalized, growing weaker by the day. Worker rights are solely protected by the courts, whose remedies often deliver too little and come too late. Job destruction is occurring again in the U.S. and at an alarming rate, recalling the 1970s and early 1980s, when both highly educated people and non-unionized blue-collar faced gloom and hardship.
Any economic recovery worthy of its name must benefit all strata of American society. The economic democracy has been an engine of American history and democracy as far back as Thomas Jefferson. Freedom meant nothing if a people lacked the wealth to exercise it. Democrats need a set of policies that will promote the democratization of wealth in America. They need policies that will narrow the economic disparities in the nation, not widen them. They need policies that will promote greater economic opportunities for people without family wealth. They need to help preserve jobs as well as create them.
[i]Corporate governance[/i]: Under the cover of the 1990s economic boom, corporate managers violated the basic rules of business fairness. The corporate sector may once have earned the right to increasing self-policing; corporations have lost that right. Business executives must once again submit to rigorous government regulation of their practices. Democrats must make a case for the re-regulation of a corporate sector that has mortgaged values in its quest for quick bucks. The scandals of Enron and the mutual fund industry are not isolated, but rather reflect the widespread collapse of business values.
Government can help restore these values (with assistance from consumer, investors, employees and a new generation of corporate leaders). Democrats must concentrate on promoting an alternative business ethos rather than lay the blame for corporate misbehavior on Republicans, where it doesn't belong. The boom – as booms always do – undermined business values. Easy money is the enemy of honesty and fairness. With the end of easy money, the stage is set for a revolution in business values and practices, if only the Democrats are brave enough to promote it.
[i]Fair trade[/i]: The economic boom of the 1990s owed much to a dramatic reduction in trade barriers – and an equally dramatic rise in trading partners. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bloc of communist countries in Eastern Europe, capitalist trade greatly widened. The emergence of a pro-capitalist Chinese government also spurred trade. The virtual end of socialist movements in Latin America and the rise of at least officially democratic governments in Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Argentina further expanded the pool of world trade.
The U.S. economy was a major beneficiary of trade expansion. U.S. hegemony over global finance and technology – the two big winners of the 1990s expansion – meant that both jobs, money and talented people flowed onto American soil. But widening trade, while accelerating growth, brought destabilization. By the 1990s, a series of financial and economic crises – in all parts of the world – exposed the harsh truth: The shift to open borders had occurred too quickly. Poorer nations needed more government protection, while rich nations maintained an array of trade barriers (most egregiously in the areas of agriculture) that worsened the plight of the poorest countries, especially those in Africa.
In its approach to trade, the Bush administration has largely continued the "neo-liberal" policies of the Clinton years. These neo-liberal policies no longer suit the times. Democrats must do more to respond to the dark side of widening trade and the economic crises washed up in the wake of world capitalism. Bush's deviation from neo-liberal orthodoxy has been limited to selective protectionism based on the narrowest political gain.
[i]Fiscal discipline[/i]: In a few short years, the U.S. government has gone from the epitome of fiscal rectitude to the ultimate financial binger, spending without concern for the debts incurred. What's changed? The American president. Former President Bill Clinton sacrificed social programs – and the chance for bold initiatives – in order to restore a balance federal budget, and to even run surpluses.
His administration was helped, of course, by a booming economy, in which rising incomes and staggering capital gains led directly to higher tax revenues. The end of the boom reduced these tax revenues, wringing out the surpluses. But Bush's tax cuts are the chief reason for record budget deficits, which are conservatively estimated to exceed $500 billion this year (meaning government will spend one-third more than it take in). Since the fiscal year 2000, the tax receipts of the U.S. government fell from 20.9 percent of the gross national product to a projected 15.7 percent this year.
According to economist Paul Krugman, about 45% of the fall in tax revenues results from tax cuts. Bush has proposed an additional $1.1 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, further handicapping the federal government.
Tax cuts surely do stimulate the economy, by putting more money in the hands of consumers. But tax cuts do so at a great cost to equity: Rich people have unduly benefited from the tax cuts. Besides, the stimulation from tax cuts was essentially redundant. Low-interest rates, courtesy of the Federal Reserve and low-inflation, mean that cheap money is available for the purchase of homes, cars and other big-ticket items. Spending by Americans, in short, would remain relatively high even in the absence of tax cuts, diminishing the reasons for them.
The tax cuts, of course, came at a cost: big U.S. deficits for the foreseeable future (and a record in the year 2003 alone). These deficits are bad news for future generations of Americans since high deficits always lead to reduced productivity, job growth and wage gains. In short, high deficits suffocate an economy, leading to stagnation. Even worse, high deficits impose a crushing burden on the economies of other nations. The savings of foreigners is covering the debt of the U.S. government. Foreign savers do this by buying U.S. bonds, paying dollars for these bonds (which results in propping up the dollar, making U.S. exports more expensive). Instead of foreigners putting money in their own economy – and spurring growth at home – they are helping to grow the U.S. economy. What's bad about this? The International Monetary Fund worries that big U.S. deficits will weaken so many economies around the world that a global economic crisis will result.
To be sure, Democrats often have favored deficit spending in the past. And indeed there is nothing wrong with running deficits – for the right reasons. Democrats must highlight the economic dangers of deficits, while at the same time recognizing that some government spending must be re-directed toward different ends.
[b]Seven Steps Toward a Healthy Economy [/b]
Economic principles are important. Equity makes sense morally and politically; when wealth is relatively smoothly distributed throughout a society, everyone in the society feels a stake in it and rational politics becomes possible. Sound corporate governance is essential: A game is worth playing only when the rules are fair. Fair trade, especially with poorer nations, will improve America's standing in the world. Fiscal discipline will enable government to take bold initiatives on issues that matter, such as universal health-care and improved education.
But economic principles are abstract. Democrats also need to promote concrete actions that will make a difference in the lives of ordinary Americans. Here are seven:
[i][b]1. Tax the rich[/b][/i].
Higher taxes aren't a way to punish the rich for their success but rather the only available means to bring government revenues in line with its spending obligations. Since the advent of the income tax in the U.S. in the early 1900s, taxes on income were progressive, meaning that the more a person earned the higher a percentage of their income went to the government as taxes.
By the 1970s, tax rates became very high in the U.S. (and in other industrialized countries), with the wealthiest people paying as much in taxes as $8 out of every $10 of additional income earned. Because workers, rich or not, began taking home such a small percentage of their marginal earnings, they rebelled against high levels of federal income taxes. President Ronald Reagan sharply reduced taxes on individual incomes, giving people more incentive to build their earnings but triggering large, persistent government deficits.
In the first years of George Bush's presidency, tax rates were further lowered, and the pattern of the Reagan years has re-occurred. Lower taxes on individual income have resulted in high deficits, with no balanced budget in sight.
The answer to the government's fiscal crisis is to raise taxes, but taxes must be raised in a progressive manner. The rich must pay at a higher rate than the middle class at a higher rate than poor. How much higher is a question for debate, but without a widening of rates between rich, middle and poor, the American tax system will unfairly benefit the few at the cost of the many. Taxing the rich more heavily is the first step towards economic sanity.
[i][b]2. Help workers get better treatment on the job[/b][/i].
American workers have toiled for some decades with fewer job protections than their counterparts in Europe and Japan, where labor unions and paternalistic employer practices are deeply engrained. In hard times, workers are understandably restive.
Those big productivity gains notched by corporations are largely coming from squeezing their employees harder. President Bush has turned a deaf ear to the cries of pain coming from the American workplace. Democratic candidates for president must not do the same. Workers need more legal protection both to complain about corporate outrages and to organize union shops.
Union membership is of course no panacea, but in many sectors of the economy unionization is the only bulwark against untrammeled corporate power. Bush despises unions. Many Democrats don't understand them. Unions are no longer about protecting featherbedding and resisting change. Democratic candidates for president are accustomed to winning the endorsements of leading unions. This election they must do more: They must promote workplace democracy through proposed legislation that protects workers against inhumane and unsafe treatment and permits them – without fear of dismissal – to unionize, take their grievances public and compel management to reform.
In addition to supporting the expansion of formal unions, the federal government can also encourage other forms of workplace organization that improve employee power. Unions have, by definition, the right to bargain collectively for wages and benefits on behalf of a set group of workers. Not all workers need collective bargaining, but most need protections against arbitrary treatment and relentless pressure. Existing labor laws cover some of these abuses, but the laws need strengthening and enforcement should be intensified.
[i][b]3. Tackle the speculative bubbles in housing and stocks[/b][/i].
President Bush is nothing if not a master of the useful distraction. The war in Iraq, as Senator Ted Kennedy has noted, has been a well-timed sideshow, allowing the president to ignore pressing domestic issues. Possibly the most pressing is the persistence of a speculative bubble in housing prices and the resurgent bubble in stock prices. Both of these bubbles have been fueled by a Republican president seemingly blind to the great risks to the U.S. economy of either (or both) of these bubbles popping.
The steep and steady rise in home prices has many causes, not all of them mysterious. There is an underlying supply problem in a country that has seen impressive population growth due to immigration and a much higher rate of births than posted anywhere in Europe or Japan. But home prices now clearly exceed rational levels in many parts of the country. Excessive prices are destructive because too much capital, which might be used for productive purposes, sits idle in real estate.
The government has contributed to the housing boom in two ways. First, low interest rates from the Federal Reserve Bank have effectively made homes less expensive. These same low interest rates have made stocks more attractive than they ought to be. People need to put their money somewhere, and the safest havens for money – - government and corporate bonds – bear an ultra-low return these days. By keeping interest rates low, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan assists both stockowners and homeowners. While many Americans thus benefit, wealthy Americans disproportionately benefit. Somewhat higher interest rates would ease speculation in stocks and real estate, letting some air, so to speak, out of the bubble.
In the same way, reform of the home-mortgage deduction would do the same. The federal subsidy to homeowners has grown to ridiculous proportions given the high level of home prices in many parts of the country. A tighter cap on how interest deductions would help to restrain rises in home prices. The tighter cap would only effect the rich, buyers of the most expensive homes, and have the benefit of increasing taxes paid by the rich.
To be sure, finagling with the home-mortgage deduction might be unpopular. But another collapse in stock prices – or worse, a collapse in home prices – would produce a bumper harvest in suffering in America. No sitting president would easily survive a collapse in home prices, which would wipe the net worth of millions of Americans, literally rendering them paupers. The risk of a home-price collapse is debatable, but no respected economist puts the risk at zero.
By historical standards, neither stock nor home prices are sustainable. President Bush has chosen, to the nation's peril, to ignore the fragility of these markets in the hopes that the speculative party will last long enough for him to win re-election (or safely fade from view). But he may not be so lucky, and Democratic challengers would be wise to address the issue so that they too are not blamed should the roof cave in.
[i][b]4. Improve early and primary education[/b][/i].
American universities are the envy of the world. The best and brightest of the planet vie for places in the top U.S. graduate and undergraduate schools. A large measure of the America's business success – especially in innovation- and science-based industries – flows from the country's unparalleled university system.
The same cannot be said for early and primary education. American public education, from the ages of 3 to 14 (the onset of high school) is abysmal. In certain large states, such as California, spending per pupil is shameful. Private education is little better, except for those schools that openly cater to the super-rich.
Early-childhood education has a great deal to do with economic outcomes. One of the reasons that the U.S. happily accepts the best and brightest of the world into its universities is that the domestic crop is often lacking. Too many young Americans, especially those whose own parents have not attended university, lack the educational achievements necessary to participate in a growing economy.
The answer to poor schools and weak students is not obvious. Nor will the solution be inexpensive. Yet Democrats need to present a variety of possible reforms, tuned to America's staggering diversity. The need is clear. Rebuilding America's schools is essential for economic democracy to take root and thrive. A more educated population will raise the sophistication of political debate as well. To be sure, education initiatives are a graveyard for policymakers and administrators alike. Reform after reform has foundered. But none of the reforms has addressed the basic problem: too little spending on the poorest of students, and no nationwide campaign to raise the educational level of everyone, without reliance on appeals to religious or ethnic affiliation.
America increasingly relies on a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious workforce. Only through a profound reform in secular education can the American workforce improve its skills. Technology does its part in raising productivity, which is the chief of ingredient of new wealth. The other ingredient is improved human inputs in the former of people working smarter. What the U.S. has done on the university level, it can do on the level of early-education. The payoff, in human and economic terms, will be considerable.
[i][b]5. Promote ethical and sustainable innovation[/b][/i].
Bush is spending heavily on research and development, trying to position himself as a President with a vision for America's technological future. But his vision is elitist, corporatist and ultimately symbolic. Bush prefers to campaign for space exploration to a more down-to-earth emphasis on renewable energy. He prefers corporate-dominated medical innovations, where government researchers help corporations profit, forcing the consumer to pay twice (once for the government's research and again for the fruits of that research, controlled by the corporation).
Democrats ought to emphasize the need for government to sponsor innovations that help ordinary Americans: high-speed trains, renewable-energy, cheaper drugs, safer automobiles. Corporations devote enormous resources to a few "sweet spots" in the market, ignoring vast areas where innovations can benefit society more democratically.
[i][b]6. Reform the welfare system for corporate farmers[/b][/i].
Communism is dead, and America is not a socialist country – except for the farm sector. Big agriculture has a secret partner: the American taxpayer. The government pays for anywhere from one-tenth to one-half of the costs of farm production, through tax deductions and outright grants. And not only rice, cotton, peanuts and other essentials get paid for by the government. Wine does too.
Subsidies to farmers began in the Depression, when many farms were run by families and bad times wiped them out. For decades, farm subsidies have smoothed out the uncertainties of farming, spreading the risk across a population of consumers for whom eating is a priority.
But farm subsidies have outlived their usefulness. Rather than helping individual families, they mainly go to large corporations, which have employees (not sons and daughter) tilling their soil. These corporations exist to earn a profit, and if they can't earn a profit from farming, they should get into another line of work – not line up for a handout from the government.
Worse, farm subsidies are harming poor farmers. In dozens of countries around the world – and especially in the Latin America and Africa – farmers could raise their living standards by exporting output to the U.S. Even with the costs of transportation, the farm output from Latin America and Africa could be competitively priced – were it not for the welfare payments given U.S. farm corporations. These welfare payments lower the price of American food so that imports from poor countries can't compete.
The Bush administration defends farm subsidies. What's wrong with that? Isn't cheap food a good thing?
Not always. To start with, the food only seems "cheap." Taxpayers are footing the bill for some of the food. Second, the "cheap" food bites back by reducing agricultural output in the countries that are too poor to defend their agricultural sector as aggressively as the U.S. government does. Farm products from the U.S. today flood into many countries where large portions of the population are farmers – and yet they can't get output to market that matches the American stuff. As a result, rice farmers in Africa have abandoned their fields because "Chicago" rice, imported into their country on ships, is so cheap it no longer pays to grow it.
By abolishing farm subsidies, the U.S. would go a long way toward streamlining its farm sector and raising incomes in the rest of the world. A virtuous circle could result, with the rising wealth in poorer countries converted into increased sales of American technology and other sophisticated goods. To be sure, an end to farm subsidies will lead to some rises in food prices. But in time, these rises will end as foreign producers – especially those in the poorest parts of the world – become more efficient in reaching U.S. markets.
[i][b]7. Stop the flow of jobs out of America[/b][/i].
Both high-wage and low-wage jobs are leaving American shores as corporations seek a better deal in foreign lands where labor lacks basic protections and wages are far lower. To be sure, some job loss is inevitable, but government can slow the outflow by challenging corporations over these transfers, and penalizing them where appropriate.
Just as President Bush has said no government contracts should go to nations that allegedly aren't helping in the war on terrorism, Democrats can say that no government contracts should go to corporations that are moving jobs out of America. Government contracts should reward companies that realize that without healthy workers there are no healthy consumers.
Of course, Democrats should support more training for workers to make them more attractive. But the carrot of training must be matched by the stick of punishments to those corporations that relentlessly shift jobs abroad. Bush wants to make it even easier for U.S. companies to destroy American jobs. Democrats must say no, and give employers incentives to keep jobs in this country.
[b]Today's Economic Populists [/b]
Economic alternatives to the Republican status quo exist. They are sensible, pragmatic and fair. Yet these alternatives involve sacrifice. How do Democrats promote a program of higher taxes and fiscal discipline to American voters in the face of a Republican siren song that promises pain-free economic growth?
Progressives have tried (and largely failed) for decades to convincingly advance a program of economic equity. President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty" was partial and unsatisfying. The drive for a minimum standard of living, modeled on the social democracies of Europe, was roundly defeated in the 1972 election, which saw Richard Nixon defeat George McGovern. In the 1990s, progressives successfully raised the minimum wage, and the Clinton administration oversaw the creation of millions of new jobs. But in victory, Democrats embraced corporate-led growth and trickle-down policies. Political economy, under Clinton, became the task of succoring capitalists.
The end of the '90s boom marks a return to an older populist style of challenging corporate power. In such attacks, progressives are finding an audience. Witness the revulsion against the greed and irresponsibility of top executives and the widespread lawlessness in the fields of finance, for instance.
Overall, corporations are less popular today than anytime since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when populist economics reached a high-water mark in the second half of the last century. In states where job losses are marked and continuing – such as California, South Carolina and Ohio, to name a few – the audience for corporate bashing cuts across ideologies and is truly bi-partisan.
Democrats have an opportunity to create a compelling message for equitable economic reform by building on outrage over executive malfeasance and Enron-style abuses. How can they do so?
First, Democrats must recognize that corporate bashing is a useful beginning but only that. Today's economic populists must be armed with an alternative program that promises to empower government, create jobs and narrow economic difference between Americans, not widen them. To gain credibility with voters, today's economic populists ought to root their campaign in an intelligent assault on corporate privilege, while at the same time shoring up government finances through tax increases under the banner of economic nationalism.
Through better enforcement of existing taxes on corporations, for instance, the federal government can raise at least another $100 billion a year. Beyond more revenues, corporations ought to be challenged to provide greater security and more training to their workers. Unions ought to be assisted in their struggle to resist givebacks to employers and to expand the pool of organized employees.
By attacking corporations where they are weakest, Democrats can rally voters around new economic approaches that call for equitable sacrifices. They can build popular support for hard economic choices. They can shame Republicans for their cozy relations with business. To be sure, populism is no panacea but it allows Democrats to take the battle to the core supporters of Republicans, the beleaguered American middle-class. And out of this engagement, Democrats may succeed, as they have in past economic crises, moving a majority of Americans to consider and ultimately support a new economic agenda.
[i]G. Pascal Zachary is a regular AlterNet contributor and the author of "The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy" (Westview, 2003). [/i]
|
|
|
| |
| Making Money on Terrorism |
| 02.09.04 (7:55 am) [edit] |
[b]Making Money on Terrorism[/b], http://www.thenation.com/doc....
We all know that Halliburton is raking in billions from the Bush Administration's occupation and rebuilding of Iraq. But in the long run, the biggest beneficiaries of the Administration's "war on terror" may be the "destroyers," not the rebuilders. The nation's "Big Three" weapons makers--Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman--are cashing in on the Bush policies of regime change abroad and surveillance at home. [i]New York Times [/i]columnist Paul Krugman was on target when he suggested that rather than "leave no child behind," the slogan Bush stole from the Children's Defense Fund, his Administration's true motto appears to be "leave no defense contractor behind."
In fiscal year 2002, the Big Three received a total of more than $42 billion in Pentagon contracts, of which Lockheed Martin got $17 billion, Boeing $16.6 billion and Northrop Grumman $8.7 billion. This is an increase of nearly one-third from 2000, Clinton's final year. These firms get one out of every four dollars the Pentagon doles out for everything from rifles to rockets. In contrast, Bush's No Child Left Behind Act is underfunded by $8 billion a year, with the additional assistance promised to school districts swallowed up by war costs and tax cuts.
The bread and butter for the Big Three are weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (Lockheed Martin), the F/A-18 E/F combat aircraft (Boeing/Northrop Grumman), the F-22 Raptor (Lockheed Martin/Boeing) and the C-17 transport aircraft (Boeing). Northrop Grumman is also a major player in the area of combat ships, through its ownership of the Newport News, Virginia and Pascagoula, Mississippi, shipyards. All three firms are also well placed in the design and production of target-ing devices, electronic warfare equipment, long-range strike systems and precision munitions. For example, Boeing makes the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), a kit that can be used to make "dumb" bombs "smart." The JDAM was used in such large quantities in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the company has had to run double shifts to keep up with Air Force demand.
The Bush nuclear buildup--large parts of which are funded out of the Energy Department budget, not the Pentagon--is particularly good news for Lockheed Martin. The company has a $2 billion-a-year contract to run Sandia National Laboratories, a nuclear weapons design and engineering facility based in Albuquerque. Lockheed Martin also works in partnership with Bechtel to run the Nevada Test Site, where new nuclear weapons are tested either via underground explosions--currently on hold due to US adherence to a moratorium on nuclear testing--or computer simulations. Late last year, Congress lifted a longstanding ban on research into so-called "mini-nukes"--nuclear weapons of less than five kilotons, about one-third the size of the Hiroshima bomb. It also authorized funds for studies on a nuclear "bunker buster" and seed money for a multibillion-dollar factory to build plutonium triggers for a new generation of nuclear weapons. These new investments will be presided over by Everet Beckner, a former Lockheed Martin executive who now heads the National Nuclear Security Administration's nuclear weapons complex.
The Big Three are also poised to profit from President Bush's plan to colonize the moon and send a manned mission to Mars, both of which are stalking horses for launching an arms race in space. Boeing and Lockheed Martin were already well positioned in the military-space field through major contracts in space launch, satellite and missile defense work, plus a partnership to run the United Space Alliance, the joint venture in charge of launches of the space shuttle. Northrop Grumman bought into the field through its acquisition of TRW, a major space and Star Wars contractor. The new presidential commission charged with fleshing out Bush's space vision is being chaired by Edward "Pete" Aldridge, the Pentagon's former Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and a current member of Lockheed Martin's board of directors. Meanwhile, over at the Air Force, the under secretary in charge of acquiring space assets is Peter Teets, a former chief operating officer at Lockheed Martin. His position was created in accordance with the recommendations of the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization, an advisory panel that published its blueprint for the militarization of space just as Bush was taking office. The group, which included representatives of eight Pentagon contractors, was presided over by Donald Rumsfeld until he left to take up his current post as Bush's Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld has been dutifully implementing the commission's recommendations ever since.
The Big Three are also wired into numerous other sources of federal contracts for everything from airport security to domestic surveillance, all in the name of fighting what the White House now calls the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism). The $20 billion-plus total that Lockheed Martin receives annually is more than is spent in an average year on the largest federal welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a program that is meant to provide income support to several million women and children living below the poverty line. Under Bush and company, corporate welfare trumps human well-being every time.
One would think that with the military budget at $400 billion and counting--up from $300 billion when Bush took office--all would be well in the land of the military-industrial behemoths, especially since the Pentagon budget is only one opportunity among many. (The budget of the Department of Homeland Security is $40 billion and counting, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have racked up $200 billion in emergency spending to date, over and above normal Pentagon appropriations.) Yet in my discussions with industry representatives at the June 2003 Paris Air Show as well as in their recent behavior, I have detected an unmistakable sense of desperation, a sense that even this embarrassment of riches may not be enough to stabilize these massive companies.
On the desperation front, Boeing is head and shoulders above its rivals. After losing the highly touted "deal of the century"--the $300 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program--to its rival Lockheed Martin in 2001, the company took a huge hit to its commercial-airliner business when air travel plummeted in the wake of the September 11 attacks. A bailout was in order, and the company pulled out all the stops to create one in the form of a deal that would have required the Air Force to lease 100 Boeing 767s for use as aerial refueling tankers. As initially crafted, the deal would have cost $26 billion over a decade, $5 billion more than it would have cost to buy the planes outright. Behind it was a group that included Senator Ted Stevens, who used his clout as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee to insert an amendment into the Pentagon's budget specifically requiring the lease arrangement; Secretary of the Air Force James Roche, a former VP at Boeing's sometime partner Northrop Grumman; Boeing senior vice president of Washington operations Rudy deLeon, a former top official in Bill Clinton's Pentagon; and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Like most pork-barrel projects, the deal was a mix of strategic thinking and self-interest. Roche made no bones about the fact that part of the point was to throw some money Boeing's way so that it would remain healthy. What you and I might call a "bailout," folks in the Pentagon call "maintaining the defense industrial base."
Boeing used every possible lever to get the deal done. It hosted a fundraiser in Seattle for Stevens at which Boeing executives threw $22,000 into his campaign coffers. It enlisted Hastert, who had wooed the company to move its headquarters to his home state of Illinois, to weigh in directly with President Bush. Representative Todd Tiahrt, whose Wichita district includes the Boeing plant that would retrofit the 767s for use as tankers, raised the issue so often with Bush that the President nicknamed him "Tanker Tiahrt." Members from Washington State, home of Boeing's main production complex, also lobbied vigorously. Defense Policy Board member and Rumsfeld pal Richard Perle wrote an op-ed in favor of the deal for the [i]Wall Street Journal[/i]--but only after Boeing had invested $20 million in Trireme, a Perle investment firm. Boeing sponsored the 2001 annual dinner of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a neocon redoubt with which Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith was closely associated before joining the Administration. The honorees were the secretaries of the three military services: The Air Force's Roche, Navy Secretary Gordon England (formerly of General Dynamics) and Army Secretary Thomas White (formerly of Enron). The host for the evening was Boeing Washington office head Rudy deLeon.
For once all this influence-peddling may go for naught. The deal is on hold thanks to relentless questioning by Senator John McCain, who has denounced it from the beginning as "war profiteering," and persistent public pressure by good-government groups. The last straw was the revelation that Boeing offered Air Force acquisition official Darleen Druyun a job while she was negotiating the lease deal with the company.
Boeing isn't the only corrupt weapons company; it's just the one that was too desperate for a short-term payoff to cover its tracks. Rumsfeld's preference for industry executives and ideologues of the Perle/Feith variety has created an ethically challenged, politically tone-deaf environment that needs to be opened up to public scrutiny and reform. Some steps are under way. The Pentagon's Inspector General is investigating all Boeing contracts that Druyun was involved in. The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold hearings on the Boeing deal, and McCain has promised hearings on the Pentagon-industry "revolving door."
Much more needs to be done. At the height of World War II, Senator Harry Truman made a name for himself by uncovering profiteering and fraud at companies providing supplies for the war effort. Given the high political and economic stakes in the war on terror, a comparable investigation is in order now. Whether the work is being done in Iraq, Washington or points in between, contracts involving US national security should be opened to true competitive bidding. Profits should be limited, and the books of contractors doing the public's business should be open and available for inspection. Politicians and bureaucrats who are lining their pockets under the guise of fighting terrorism should face criminal penalties, not symbolic fines. The public should demand that all candidates for the presidency and Congress renounce campaign contributions from companies involved in the rebuilding of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan or any of the other far-flung outposts of Bush's war on terrorism.
The culture of cronyism that allows arms-industry executives to pull down multimillion-dollar compensation packages while wounded veterans are shunted into makeshift medical wards has to end. Getting rid of George W. Bush and his gang of neocon profiteers is an excellent place to start. But it's only a start.
[i]By William D. Hartung[/i], http://www.thenation.com/doc....
|
|
|
| |
| MISSION (NOT) ACCOMPLISHED ... |
| 02.09.04 (7:50 am) [edit] |
[b]MISSION ([i]NOT[/i]) ACCOMPLISHED[/b], http://www.thenation.com/edcu...
If Bush hoped to use his appearance on Sunday's "[i]Meet the Press[/i]" to restore his vanishing credibility regarding the war in Iraq, his National Guard stint, and his stewardship of the economy, he failed.
As millions of Americans headed to church, I sat down to watch what Calvin Trillin calls "the sabbath gas bags." The big gas bag this Sunday--President Bush--was questioned by Tim Russert for an entire hour in the Oval Office. Yet, the gravity of the surroundings did little to obscure the fact that Russert's pointed questions were met with the usual Bush meets-the-press treatment: mislead, deny, deflect and hide.
Fortunately, people who want the truth--not whitewashed, rewritten history--can click here http://www.americanprogress.o... to check out the [i]Center for American Progress's [/i]valuable dissection of Bush's appearance, "[i]Claim vs. Fact: The President on Meet the Press[/i]." It's a valuable antidote to Bush's deceptions and well worth circulating to both friends and foes.
[i]Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation[/i], http://www.thenation.com/edcu...
|
|
|
| |
| BEAT THE PRESS ... |
| 02.09.04 (7:47 am) [edit] |
[b]BEAT THE PRESS[/b], http://www.thenation.com/capi...
I take it back. In my last column I referred to [i]Meet the Press [/i]host Tim Russert as the Grand Inquisitor of the Sunday morning talk shows. Not this Sunday. Not when George W. Bush was in his clutches.
Russert is a master of the legitimate gotcha question. I admire his hard-nosed interviewing techniques. But he must have checked them before passing through the metal detectors at the White House. In his Oval Office, hour-long session with Bush, he repeatedly let Bush slide or elide. The few tough queries produced the predictable replies from Bush. And then Russert did not come back with the obvious follow-ups. He was not his usual self: a polite but aggressive quizzer who sticks to specifics, wielding quotes and source material to force his subjects to address previous statements and past actions. Instead, Russert allowed Bush to dish out the all-too familiar, White House-approved rhetoric. It pains me to say, he was more enabler than interrogator.
Russert began by asking Bush about the new commission Bush has created to review the prewar intelligence on Iraq. Bush responded with platitudes about the need for good intelligence. Russert queried Bush on the March 2005 deadline Bush set for the commission's report--which means the report will come out after the election--and noted that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had given a similar British commission a July deadline. Bush said that he didn't want the commission "to be hurried" and that there "will be ample time for the American people to assess whether I made good calls." This sounded like a dodge. Why couldn't the commission, which has to look at a wide range of issues, at least put out before the election an interim report--as commissions often do--on whether the White House exaggerated the prewar intelligence? Wouldn't that help the American people to assess Bush? Russert didn't ask. He took Bush's answer at face value.
On the dicey matter of the absent weapons of mass destruction, Russert reminded Bush that before the war Bush declared the intelligence left "no doubt" that Iraq had WMDs. Faced with this inconvenient quote, Bush offered a defense composed of the assorted lines the White House has been using for months. He said that he had relied upon the best intelligence the US government had at the time, that everyone knew that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous fellow who had used weapons of mass destruction in the past, that former chief weapons hunter David Kay has said that Hussein had the "capacity to produce [WMD] stockpiles," and that the U.N. had declared there were "unaccounted-for stockpiles."
Russert could have challenged Bush on much of this. But he did not point out that U.N. inspectors had not concluded there were unaccounted-for WMD stockpiles in Iraq. (The weapons inspectors, after leaving Iraq in 1998, had said there were discrepancies in Iraq's accounting of its weapons and WMD-related material and that this was worrisome and[i] might [/i]mean some weapons remained.) Kay, who found no evidence of any existing weapons, also reported he had uncovered no signs that Iraq had any significant WMD production capability after the first Gulf War. Kay had indeed unearthed evidence of WMD-related "program activities" that he considered dangerous, but he had concluded Iraq had not possessed a serious production capacity. Bush misrepresented Kay's findings, and Russert did not call him on it.
Russert reminded Bush that before the war Bush had claimed that there was a "unique urgency" to the threat from Iraq and that this threat had to be countered "as quickly as possible." He reasonably asked Bush if Hussein really was an "imminent" threat. Bush tossed out the line that the White House has been deploying for months: Hussein was a "grave and gathering threat" because "he had the capacity to make a weapon." Russert could have asked Bush what was "gathering" about the threat from Hussein, especially since no WMDs have been found and Kay has said Hussein's WMD-making capabilities were minimum. But he did not put this important piece of White House rhetoric on the griddle.
In explaining his decision to go to war, Bush told Russert there had been no other choice. It would have been irresponsible, Bush said, to say, "Let's hope [Hussein] changes his stripes....Let us try to contain him." But when Kay testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee two week ago, he said that the U.N. inspection process had contained Hussein's WMD programs. Russert did not bring that up.
Russert did ask Bush whether he had hyped the prewar intelligence on Iraq. Bush replied, "I and my team took the intelligence that was available to us and we analyzed it and it clearly said Saddam Hussein is a threat to America." But Russert did not then do what he is most noted for: he did not present a series of quotes from Bush and his aides and ask Bush to explain and justify specific statements in which he and his aides had overstated the intelligence. Russert could have chosen from a long list. He could have compared these assertions to portions of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and asked Bush to address the discrepancies between what Bush claimed and what the intelligence actually said.
There are many examples Russert could have thrown at Bush. ([i]I suggested some in a previous column http://www.thenation.com/capi... [/i].) For instance, Russert could have reminded viewers that during a nationally televised speech in October 2002, Bush said that Iraq had a "massive stockpile" of biological weapons. But at the same time the National Intelligence Estimate--what was supposed to be a summation of the intelligence community's best material on Iraq--reported that the intelligence agencies had no information on any bioweapons stockpiles. Mr. President, Russert might have asked, please tell us why you said Iraq possessed bioweapons stockpiles, even though U.S. intelligence had no proof such stockpiles existed?
What would Bush have said? We don't know.
Russert could have done the same regarding Bush's and Cheney's dramatic prewar statements suggesting Iraq was close to producing nuclear weapons. He might have done the same concerning the supposed link between Hussein and al Qaeda. Before the invasion, Bush maintaining Hussein had an operational alliance with al Qaeda, even though the intelligence did not say so. But Russert did not question him on this. Nor did he do so on whether Hussein was a direct threat to the United States. Russert could have put up on the screen the various times Bush made that claim and then cut to the National Intelligence Estimate's finding that it was unlikely Hussein would strike the United States or share any of his weapons with a terrorist outfit unless the Iraqi dictator was about to be attacked by the United States.
Russert posed too many questions that permitted Bush to reach for sounds-good buzz phrases and platitudes--such as, was this "a war of choice or a war of necessity?" He did not often enough attempt to puncture Bush's assertions with facts. When it came to Bush's reasons for war, he did not truth-test Bush's remarks.
The same happened when Russert turned to the controversy over Bush's service in the Air National Guard. There is evidence--documents from Bush's own file and the statements of Guard officials--that indicate Bush did not report for duty for an entire year. Bush's annual performance review, dated May 2, 1973, is rather damning. It noted, "Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit" for the past year. Bush claims that for several months he reported not to his home base in Houston but to a base in Alabama, where he was temporarily living. But the commander of the base has said he never saw Bush. During the 2000 campaign, Bush aides promised they would produce the names of people who served with Bush in Alabama. They did not. And Bush, who says he returned to Houston after November 1972, has never explained why he failed to show up at the base there for six months.
His military record could yield difficult questions for Bush. Why did your campaign not come forward with the name of a single individual who could vouch for your presence at the Alabama base? Why were you not seen at the Houston base after you returned to Texas? Do you deny what was written in your annual performance review? Why did you fail to take a flight physical during that missing year--an act that caused you to be grounded? Why in May, June and July 1973 did you put in extra days of duty? Were you making up for missing time?
Bush has never been grilled by a journalist on this touchy topic. Russert had an opportunity, but he did not, as they say in journalism, advance the story. When he asked Bush about the charge that Bush had been AWOL, Bush dismissed the charge as just "politics." Russert countered that there was no evidence that Bush had reported for duty for a year. But oddly he cited none of the specifics. Bush replied that his critics were "just wrong. I did report....I did show up in Alabama." Russert could have run through the details and pressed Bush to address them. Maybe Bush has decent explanations that he has not yet shared with the public. Instead, Russert merely pushed Bush to make all the available records public. Many key records, though, are already public. So it was no big deal that Bush said, "Sure." The issue is not that Bush is sitting on information; it is that he has not fully discussed and explained the existing record.
Russert next moved to the economy, and Bush said what he always says about his tax cuts: they're great; they're stimulating the economy. But, Russert asked, whatever happened to Bush the fiscal conservative? To make his point, Russert pointed to a[i] General Accounting Office study [/i]that maintains the deficit will be so out of control in the year 2040 that the federal government will either have to cut total spending in half or double taxes in order to balance the budget. What are you doing about this "deficit disaster?" Russert asked.
Bush replied with the current White House mantra: "the budget I just proposed cuts the deficit in half in five years." To viewers who are not well-versed in budget policy, Bush's reply probably seemed sensible. Russert was worrying about the deficit 36 years down the road; Bush said he was reducing the deficit in the next few years. But Bush's budget projections are a scam. They do not include obvious expenses--such as the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan after this coming September. Budget experts across the political spectrum--from Goldman-Sachs, the Concord Coalition, the [i]Center on Budget and Policy Priorities[/i]--have all said that the Bush White House is engaged in fake accounting and that his deficit projections are a fantasy, a dishonest coverup. They agree that the deficits in the coming years will be much higher than Bush is claiming. Just a few days before this interview, The [i]Washington Post [/i]editorialists blasted Bush for engaging in outright budgetary deceit.
I waited for Russert to pounce on Bush. But no pounce came. Russert asked Bush why he insisted on cutting taxes in wartime ([i]when every other wartime president since the Civil War has raised taxes[/i]). Once more Bush had the chance to pull out one of his stock lines: "I believe the best way to stimulate the economic growth is to allow people to keep more of their own money." Haven't we heard this before? Unfortunately, that could be said about much of what came out of Bush this hour.
In the days before the interview, some Republican strategists were telling reporters that they believed the White House had erred in accepting Russert's invitation. Bush might be experiencing political trouble at the moment. The MIA WMDs have tarnished his credibility. His poll numbers are not so hot. He's been pounded by the Democratic presidential candidates. But place him in Russert's crosshairs? Things aren't that bad. Who knows what might happen when that pitbull got hold of him?
It turns out the doubters had nothing to fear. Bush appeared hesitant the first few minutes, but he ended up doing fine. Russert never cornered him, never pinned him. Russert never made Bush sweat, and Bush was able to reel off the same-old/same-old. Was this because Russert was too respectful of the man or the office? Expectations (mine included) were high. After all, It's not too often a president has to submit to being interviewed by a smart, no-holds-barred journalist.
It's certainly easy to be a Sunday evening quarterback. To be fair to Russert, interviewing politicians is not easy. Most are programmed. Few answer questions directly. Many have learned--or been taught--to turn any query into an opportunity for soapbox speechifying. It's difficult to force them to provide straight answers. And Bush is no slouch in ducking questions and staying with the script. But Russert knows how to cut through the bullshit. This time, though, it looked as if he was unsure of how far he could go. It was as if Russert wouldn't let Russert be Russert. Booking Bush was the big "get," but, alas, Russert let this "get" get away.
[i]DON'T FORGET ABOUT DAVID CORN'S NEW BOOK, [i]The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception [/i](Crown Publishers). A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! The [i]Library Journal [/i]says, "Corn chronicles to devastating effect the lies, falsehoods, and misrepresentations....Corn has painstakingly unearthed a bill of particulars against the president that is as damaging as it is thorough." For more information and a sample, check out the book's official website: www.bushlies.com[/i]
[i]David Corn, The Nation[/i], http://www.thenation.com/capi...
|
|
|
| |
| The Day Cheney Was Rocked To The Core ... |
| 02.08.04 (7:17 am) [edit] |
[b]The Day Cheney Was Rocked To The Core[/b], http://www.atimes.com/atimes/...
WASHINGTON - If United States Vice President Dick Cheney was hoping that the cold, crisp air of Davos and his private audience with Pope John Paul II late last month would revive his spirits, as well as his standing in the polls, he must be deeply disappointed.
Since returning home, he has faced a seemingly unrelenting succession of disclosures and attacks that appear to get worse with each passing day. What the albatross was to the ancient mariner, Cheney is fast becoming to George W Bush's re-election chances.
Just consider what happened to Cheney Thursday: the early morning edition of the Wall Street Journal ran an article - first reported by Newsweek - on how Justice Department investigators had asked Halliburton Company for documents relating to US$180 million in allegedly illegal payments by a consortium of companies, including Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, in connection with the construction of a big natural-gas plant in Nigeria in the late 1990s, while Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive officer.
When the Los Angeles Times hit the news stands a couple of hours later, Cheney was right there on the front page with the headline: "Scalia was Cheney Hunt Trip Guest; Ethics Concern Grows." Antonin Scalia is a Supreme Court Justice who was Cheney's guest on a recent and rather costly (to the taxpayer) bird-hunting trip to Louisiana, and who also will soon hear a major case on government secrecy in which the vice president is the defendant.
Legal ethics experts quoted in the story, of course, zeroed in on the question of whether Scalia might best recuse himself from hearing the case, but there were also suggestions that perhaps Cheney could have exercised slightly better judgement. "It is not just a trip with a litigant. It's a trip at the expense of the litigant," noted one law professor.
Finished with the morning papers, Cheney may have tuned in to watch Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet deliver a passionate defense at Georgetown University of the official intelligence community's performance in the runup to the Iraq war, only to find himself a target, if only inferentially.
While Tenet didn't say anything explicitly about Cheney, he certainly didn't do much to dispel the increasingly strong impression in Washington - among Democrats, it's become a conviction - that, of all of Bush's senior advisers, Cheney and his staff worked hardest to hype what the intelligence community was saying about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction programs.
While the intelligence community had concluded that Saddam wanted nuclear weapons, Tenet declared, it also made clear as of late 2002 that Saddam had none, and that he probably would not have been able to make one until some time between 2007 and 2009, at the earliest.
That assertion, of course, raises a major question. If the intelligence community agreed that Saddam had no nuclear weapons, where did Cheney get the information that would substantiate his statement on the very day that the US launched its invasion last March: "And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
The answer, according to Democratic members of the Congressional intelligence committees, who have become increasingly outspoken in recent days, is that Cheney and his staff had an independent source of "intelligence" outside the formal intelligence community. Lodged in the Pentagon's policy shop under Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the now-notorious Office of Special Plans "cherry-picked" raw intelligence, interviewed "defectors", and produced its own talking points and analysis that were "stovepiped" straight to Cheney's office, notably John Hannah, his top Mideast staffer, and I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, his powerful chief of staff.
When asked about this theory by a Georgetown student on Thursday, Tenet answered artfully, asserting: "I can tell you with certainty that the president of the United States gets his intelligence from one person and one community - me ... The rest of it, I don't know."
In the legal profession, Tenet's reply is called a negative pregnant, an apparent denial that suggests that further questioning may be fruitful. Indeed, Republican Jane Harmon, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, noted in a CNN interview on Thursday evening that, in speaking of "one community", Tenet was effectively confirming that the Pentagon-Cheney channel, that provided a much more alarmist view of Saddam's capabilities, may well have been at work
But if Cheney felt displeased by Tenet's performance, things only got worse - much worse - later in the afternoon when United Press International (UPI) reported what has been rumored ever since Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation into the "outing" as a CIA officer by "two senior administration officials" of Valerie Plame, shortly after her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, had published an article in the New York Times charging that the administration knew that its reports of Saddam's alleged attempts to buy uranium yellowcake in Africa were bogus.
Quoting "federal law-enforcement officials," UPI's intelligence correspondent Richard Sale reported on Thursday that the two main suspects were none other than Libby and Hannah. One official reportedly told Sale that Hannah was being advised "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" in order to pressure him to implicate higher-ups - presumably Libby, if not, perhaps, Cheney himself.
A 1982 law makes deliberately revealing the identity of covert intelligence officers a felony punishable by as many as 10 years in prison. If either Hannah or Libby were officially named as suspects or actually indicted, the impact on Cheney's credibility and electability would be devastating.
According to recent polls, Cheney's approval ratings, hovering around 20 percent, are already far below Bush's, which have themselves sunk below 50 percent for the first time in his presidency. Even Halliburton, whose public image has become so tarnished that it has launched a controversial television ad campaign to boost its image, last week listed Cheney's association to the company as a "risk factor" for its shareholders.
Republicans in Congress, particularly on the intelligence and foreign relations committees, find themselves having to devote more time and political capital to defending the vice president, and even some influential Republican donors have privately suggested that Cheney bow out. Speculation about possible replacements - most recently, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (the Republican convention is in New York City, August 30 to September 2.) - is growing steadily.
Of course, there's always another day.
[i]Jim Lobe[/i]
|
|
|
| |
| Two US Officials in Cheney's Office Focus of Criminal Probe |
| 02.08.04 (7:14 am) [edit] |
[b]Lewis "Scooter" Libby and John Hannah Allegedly Focus of Plame Probe[/b], http://www.juancole.com/2004_...
Richard Sale, respected intelligence reporter for UPI, has given credibility to a story that had been rumored for several weeks . It is that the FBI investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame is increasingly focusing on two officials in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and John Hannah. Sale assures me that the information is solid.
Last summer, former ambassador Joseph Wilson went public about his 2002 report refuting the allegation that Saddam tried to buy Niger uranium. Someone in the Bush administration attempted to punish him by identifying his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative involved in trying to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The information was given to the press, but only one reporter, CNN commentator Robert Novak, was sleazy enough to publish it. (Outraged readers should please email CNN http://www.cnn.com/feedback/c... demanding that they fire Novak for having wilfully damaged US national security). Novak did not commit a crime. But whatever Bush administration official leaked the information to him did.
Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory team, sort of a veep NSC, which helps underpin Cheney's dominance in the US foreign policy area. Hannah is a neoconservative and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Middle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Hannah is said to have been behind Cheney's and consequently Bush's support for refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat. But he was also deeply involved in getting up the Iraq war.
If Hannah and Libby initiated the outing of Valerie Plame, why? Of course, both their involvement and their motives can only be speculated about at this point. But on December 9, Newsweek reported that:
"[i]a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two 'U.S. governmental recipients' for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, 'defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed'; the info was then reported to, among others, 'appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.' The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a 'principal point of contact' for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney's staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans[/i]."
It is possible that Wilson posed a special danger to Hannah, since Hannah was at the center of the "cherry-picking bad intelligence" effort that led Cheney to maintain that Saddam and Bin Laden were Siamese twins and that Iraq was floating in biological and chemical weapons and within 3-5 years of having an atomic bomb. (All of these positions, which Cheney has repeatedly alleged, are completely false and were known to be in 2002 by anyone not wearing ideological blinders). Hannah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel came--Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one who fed Cheney the Niger uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the CIA to verify it and thence Joe Wilson's trip to Niamey in spring of 2002, where he found the story to be an absurd falsehood on the face of it.
The WINEP pro-Likud network, which includes Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith in the Pentagon as well as Libby and Hannah at Cheney's office, has virtually dictated Bush administration Middle East policy. Wilson's debunking of one of its central claims might well have led Cheney to fire Hannah or to disregard his opinion. The WINEP crowd takes no prisoners and is very determined, over decades, to get its way. (Josh Marshall notes http://www.cnn.com/feedback/c... that they are already trying to protect Hannah with denials he could possibly have been involved, presumably meaning that they would be willing to throw Libby to the dogs.) Wilson had to be punished, from their point of view, and if possible marginalized, to protect Hannah's position. Being male chauvinist pigs, they appear to have hoped to show that Wilson's trip was the result of nepotism or of female influence, and that Plame had recommended her husband for the job (an unfounded charge). Somehow they seemed to think that this allegation would help discredit Wilson, but to this day I haven't figured out their weird reasoning on the matter.
It is also possible that they were worried that Wilson's opinion piece might encourage more whistle blowers to step forward. Hannah and the Iraqi National Congress are being accused of peddling patently false "intelligence." This is a criminal enterprise, and there was always the danger that others in Plame's department at the agency, which specializes in preventing weapons proliferation, might be tempted to find ways of revealing the extent of Hannah's bad faith. Hannah may have wanted to send a clear signal that whistleblowers would have their careers ruined, as Valerie Plame's was, as a way of ensuring that the details of his operation did not become public.
Sale is digging. Stay tuned.
[i]Juan Cole[/i]
|
|
|
| |
| The Trouble With Handpicked Councils |
| 02.08.04 (7:09 am) [edit] |
[b]The Trouble With Handpicked Councils[/b], http://www.lewrockwell.com/kw...
The White House is putting together a small group of privileged persons to fix a little problem that has Karl Rove in a pickle. George W. Bush will soon select the members of this group, no doubt with Dick Cheney close at hand, guiding his hand. The group will "compare intelligence findings about Iraq produced before the war with the absence of stockpiles of unconventional weapons found by American inspection teams on the ground."
News flash! We already know what happened and why. Some parts of the intelligence community (uh, that would be the top leadership) caved to the incredible political pressure created by some bull-headed politicos with a single well-formulated if nutty paradigm regarding Iraq as center of evil today, center of the American energy empire tomorrow. To the extent that the intelligence community resisted the paradigm, Chalabi’s perspective on the situation in Iraq was passed off as fact directly to the VP and the Presidents’ speechwriters. No harm injecting a little healthy competition, right? Team B and all that, you know.
The goal was to take Saddam out and put Ahmed Chalabi and company in. This little Iraq out-and-in operation was intended to be old news before the 2004 re-election campaign unfolded. It would be called, past tense, a liberation, Iraqi freedom, glorious democracy.
Iraq was to be a Bush-branded success, as well as a brand new frontier for the empire, and a nice little crutch for the ever-struggling dollar, petro and otherwise.
Hand picking councils to conduct sham jobs on the people seems to be an enduring mark of the beast known as the first Bush Junior administration.
We have all certainly enjoyed the delightful performance of the 9-11 Commission, the gyrations of the GAO inquiry into the Cheney-led energy policy task force, the never-ending rainbow of goofball decisions made by the Homeland Security monstrosity, the intrigue of who leaked the identity and occupation of Victoria Plame. With this for entertainment, who needs to watch the Super Bowl halftime show? I mean, ripping our entire Constitution is at least as significant as ripping half of a Victoria Secret’s brassiere.
Actually, given the respective news coverage and national awareness, maybe it isn’t.
Mr. Bush’s tendency to try to solve problems by enlisting his friends into even higher places is fine, but perhaps we can learn a thing or two about how to respond from our new friends, the Iraqis.
Iraqis recognize a handpicked council of stooges when they see it. They understand that the council the Bush Administration selected for them has the power to do only what the stooge-pickers want, and no power to resolve core issues important to the rest of the people.
Their reaction has been, unlike our national reactions to similar stooge operations out of Washington, somewhat effective. They have loudly exclaimed their dissatisfaction in the street, in their communities and in their media. Some have made sure that the United States stooges are unable to travel freely throughout the country, and that they are forced to maintain expensive private or military security. They have rallied to their own homegrown leadership, emerging from existing familial, ethnic or religious groups, or from the dynamic of community meritocracy that chaos fosters.
While the U.S. appointed and supported Iraqi Governing Council whines and rolls to please its master and keep the cash flowing, the big dogs of Iraq begin to growl and pace. The IGC periodically punishes legitimate but critical al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera media enterprises, simultaneously passing "laws" designed to show that they care about the Iraqi people and Iraqi tradition. A future in Baghdad after America grants "elections" and "sovereignty" must be worrisome for members of the IGC. Most will have to go back into exile, maybe forever.
The IGC is worried about their future. It is a sign of the quiet success of democracy in Iraq and a movement toward accountability in government. Like sunspots, eruptions of extreme violence are part and parcel to the continued existence of a nation, or two or three. Our own Thomas Jefferson remarked on this, in his reference to blood spilled periodically by patriots and tyrants.
Junior Bush, impatient to prove not only that he is not his father, but better than him too, would have us believe that he liberated Iraqis. But what Mr. Bush and the whole neoconservative/imperial foreign policy designers don’t understand is that the Iraqis will liberate themselves. They are doing it every single day.
There may yet be some good to come from this most recent example of illegal, costly and deadly preemptive war, drummed up by this administration through a series of lies to Congress and the people, in pursuit of an agenda never fully declared. Perhaps in taking back their country, Iraqis will show Americans how to do it here.
[i]Karen Kwiatkowski is a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, who spent her final four and a half years in uniform working at the Pentagon. She now lives with her freedom-loving family in the Shenandoah Valley, and writes a bi-weekly column on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for militaryweek.com[/i].
|
|
|
| |
| The Tragedy of Addiction ... |
| 02.07.04 (8:57 am) [edit] |
[b]The Tragedy of Addiction[/b], http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
[b]A tough time kicking the 9/11 habit?[/b]
[i]We join this morning's gaggle already in session [/i]...
QUESTION: Director Tenet also said that part of the problem he was having was they had gaps in the intelligence, they had gaps in what they knew about Iraq, and for that reason he feared surprises.
MR. McCLELLAN: That he feared what?
QUESTION: He feared surprises from Iraq. In other words, the unpredictability of the intel, itself, created that threat. Did the President share that view, as well?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, one, I think that Dr. Kay and Director Tenet and others have pointed out the need for the Iraqi Survey Group to complete its work, that there is a lot of work still to do. We are learning more, but it's important that they do as thorough a job as possible, and gather as many facts as possible so that they can draw as complete a picture as possible. Then we can -- and the President has made it very clear -- then we can have as complete a picture as possible so that we can compare what we are learning on the ground with what we knew before the war. But we already know that what we have learned on the ground since the war only reconfirms what we knew before the war, that Iraq was a gathering threat and that the decision that the President of the United States made was the right decision.
QUESTION: -- prove that? What do you mean?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think Dr. Kay has pointed out in his testimony, Helen, that it was possibly more dangerous than we thought.
QUESTION: All these countries that do have nuclear weapons, they're not a threat at all? But the intent, and you're a mind-reader as to what was going to happen? It wouldn't hold up in court.
MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, I know that you do not feel that we are safer because we removed Saddam Hussein from power. I think most people believe the world is safer and better because we removed Saddam Hussein from power.
QUESTION: A lot of people are dead, thousands.
MR. McCLELLAN: And the President remembers those who lost their lives on September 11th. That taught us that we are living in a different --
QUESTION: They had nothing to do with September 11th, the Iraqis.
MR. McCLELLAN: Oh, I beg to differ. September 11th taught us that we are living in a dangerous new world. September 11th --
QUESTION: So you attack somebody who is innocent?
MR. McCLELLAN: September 11th taught us that we must confront gathering threats before it's too late. September 11th changed the equation. And this President -- and this President's highest responsibility is protecting the American people. And he will not wait and rely on the good intentions of Saddam Hussein, given his history, to confront that threat. Saddam Hussein had the choice, and Saddam Hussein continued to defy the international community.
[[i]The following comes later in the Q&A[/i]]
QUESTION: I guess what I'm asking here is how long has the United States known of the nuclear weapons fire sale being run out of Pakistan and --
MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, like I said, there's a lot of -- there are a number of success stories in the intelligence community that often go unseen or unreported or are not reported until quite some time after the fact. You heard from Director Tenet --
QUESTION: Well, tell us.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- you heard from Director Tenet, in terms of what he said on Pakistan. And you've seen, by the actions of the government of Pakistan, that they are committed to stopping proliferation.
QUESTION: It just raises a question. The United States went to war against a leader that we said had these weapons, turned out not to. We're confronting North Korea over what we think are their weapons. Libya is an issue. And, yet, on Pakistan, it sounds as if we've known for a while that they were running this black market on nuclear weapons and haven't done anything.
MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, I don't think it raises the question you are asking. I think it shows that we're confronting threats around the world in a number of different ways. And weapons of mass destruction and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a high priority for this administration. That's one reason why the President is going to be announcing this commission, to do a broad assessment of our intelligence capabilities related to weapons of mass destruction.
But Iraq, remember -- we pointed out -- was unique, given Saddam Hussein's history and given the events of September 11th.
[b]The tragedy of addiction [/b]...
- [i]Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo.com[/i], http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
|
|
|
| |
| Proof That Bush's WMDs Commission Is A Fraudulent Whitewash ... |
| 02.07.04 (8:52 am) [edit] |
[b]Proof That Bush's WMDs Commission Is A Fraudulent WHITEWASH ...[/b]
[i][b]Well, the fix[/b][/i], as they say, is in.
Here's the [i]executive order [/i] http://www.whitehouse.gov/new... the president just signed authorizing his commission which he "established for the purpose of advising the President in the discharge of his constitutional authority under Article II of the Constitution to conduct foreign relations, protect national security, and command the Armed Forces of the United States, in order to ensure the most effective counter-proliferation capabilities of the United States and response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the ongoing threat of terrorist activity."
The commission doesn't appear to have any subpoena power, only the right to "full and complete access to information relevant to its mission as described in section 2 of this order."
If I read this right -- and needless to say I'm no lawyer, notwithstanding that summer in grad school I wasted prepping for the LSAT -- what's 'relevant' is at the discretion of the department heads of the various executive branch agencies.
And if you read the "mission" as defined in the order it seems narrowly framed as looking at pre-war CIA analyses (actually the whole Intelligence Community) and how they stack up against what Kay's guys found on the ground after the war.
Anything the White House did with those CIA analyses, any fisticuffs between the Veep's office and the CIA, anything stovepiped through Doug Feith's operation at the Pentagon, anything that made its way from[i] Chalabi's mumbo-jumbocrats [/i] http://www.talkingpointsmemo.... to the the president's speechwriters -- that's all beyond their brief.
- [i]Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo.com[/i], http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
|
|
|
| |
| TENET TARGETS THE WHITE HOUSE |
| 02.07.04 (8:47 am) [edit] |
[b]TENET TARGETS THE WHITE HOUSE[/b], http://www.americanprogress.o...%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A52 1-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/040205.HTM#1
In a major speech this morning addressing the failure to find WMD in Iraq, CIA Director George Tenet said the [i]intelligence community never told the White House that Iraq was an imminent threat to America [/i] http://story.news.yahoo.com/n... – a stunning blow to the White House, considering its [i]repeated and unequivocal claims that war was necessary because Iraq was an "imminent," "immediate," "urgent" and "mortal" threat[/i]. http://www.americanprogress.o... While the White House has tried to say it never claimed Iraq was an imminent threat, the record proves otherwise. Tenet's speech follows an interview last night on 60 Minutes II with the State Department's top intelligence officer Greg Theilmann, who said, "The main problem [before the war] was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show...[i]They were really blind and deaf [/i] http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community and most of the blame to the senior administration officials."
[u][b]TENET'S REMARKS PUT FOCUS ON WHITE HOUSE[/b][/u]: Tenet's remarks are consistent with the intelligence community's [i]repeated warnings to the White House that the President's WMD case for war was weak[/i]. http://www.americanprogress.o... Not only did the intelligence community not say Iraq was an imminent threat, but in many instances they acknowledged they had no hard evidence about Iraq's WMD at all. Consider this: In 1997, the [i]International Atomic Energy Agency [/i] http://www.nci.org/i/iaea10-8... verified there were "no indications" that Iraq was able to produce nuclear weapons or had "clandestinely acquired such material." The [i]Defense Intelligence Agency told the White House [/i] http://www.ceip.org/files/non... in September 2002, that there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons" and said, "a substantial amount of Iraq's chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UN actions." The State Department's intelligence agency warned the White House against the WMD claims in October 2002, saying, "The activities we have detected do not ... add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons." And just this week, [i]Newsweek exclusively reported[/i], http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4... two separate government panels – including one chaired by Donald Rumsfeld - reported before the war that assertions about Iraq's WMD "were based on suspicions, not hard data." The panels "got access to CIA materials" and concluded that the "absence of hard evidence was so striking" that they specifically developed a "Wizard of Oz theory: that the whole Iraq WMD program was smoke-and-mirrors, and Saddam was just a little guy behind a curtain." See [i]American Progress's complete list of warnings[/i] http://www.americanprogress.o... .
[u][b]WE KNOW WHERE THEY ARE[/b][/u]: In a Senate hearing yesterday, Rumsfeld yesterday tried to [i]dodge his past claims[/i] http://www.washingtonpost.com... about Iraq's supposed possession of WMD. Last March, when asked why troops had yet to find WMD in Iraq, Rumsfeld flatly replied, "[i]We know where they are[/i]." http://www.defenselink.mil/tr... Yesterday, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) pressed him on that statement, leading Rumsfeld to equivocate, conceding "that he had misspoken" and that his claim was actually his shorthand for "suspect sites," where "analysts believed chemical or biological weapons might have been stored." Reading the transcript of his original comments, his answer was to a direct question about WMD themselves, not "suspect sites." And his claim was part of a slew of similar claims by the rest of the Administration. For example, in May 2003, President Bush said, "[i]We found the weapons of mass destruction[/i]." http://www.whitehouse.gov/g8/... And [i]Colin Powell [/i] http://www.state.gov/secretar... further fed the flames, saying, "I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it now." Rumsfeld further dug himself into a hole when he said that David Kay's comments that "we were all wrong" was just a "hypothesis" to explain the difference between the prewar intelligence and what has been found on the ground.
[u][b]THE INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT DIDN'T CHANGE...[/b][/u]: Between August 2001, and January 2002, President Bush drastically changed his tune about whether Iraq possessed WMD. At first, he questioned [i]whether or not [/i] http://www.whitehouse.gov/new... Iraq even had any WMD, saying on 8/7/01, "Saddam needs to open his country up for inspection so we can see whether or not he's developing weapons of mass destruction." But by January, that "whether or not" had veered into a statement of fact, with the President saying, "Saddam Hussein must disarm himself of all weapons of mass destruction." And by March, it was a definitive statement: "[Iraq is] a nation which has weapons of mass destruction." However, there was no significant change in the intelligence assessment of Iraq's arsenal. In fact, Condoleezza Rice admitted this past September that, "this president relied on the same basis of intelligence that three administrations relied on, that was gathered from intelligence services around the world and that the U.N. itself relied on in keeping Saddam Hussein under sanctions for 12 years."
[u][b]...IT'S THE SKEWING OF INTELLIGENCE THAT CHANGED[/b][/u]: Without significant new intelligence, what happened to change his position? One possibility: The [i]New Yorker [/i] http://www.newyorker.com/fact... reports, in September 2001, The Pentagon created the Office of Special Plans "in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true -- that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States." The office, hand-picked by the Administration, specifically "cherry-picked intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest" while officials deliberately "bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence."
[u][b]PRESIDENT CHANGES THE TUNE AGAIN[/b][/u]: President Bush is slowly backing away from his previous insistence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. "Defending his decision to invade Iraq, President Bush in an address Wednesday [i]dropped any explicit reference[/i] http://www.ajc.com/news/conte... to the claim of weapons of mass destruction on which he built his case for war." Instead, he shifted, merely claiming, "Baghdad had possessed 'the intent and capability to inflict great harm.'" The Atlanta Constitution-Journal points out, "For months, Bush regularly mentioned banned weapons in speeches that first called for, then later justified, the war in Iraq, where 528 Americans have died and another 2,600 have been wounded since the U.S. invasion last March." But yesterday, "Bush made no direct mention of Iraqi weapons."
[i]The Center for America Progress [/i]on http://www.americanprogress.o...%7BE9245FE4-9A2B-43C7-A52 1-5D6FF2E06E03%7D/040205.HTM#1
|
|
|
| |
| A Tragedy of Errors |
| 02.06.04 (7:24 am) [edit] |
[b]A Tragedy of Errors[/b], http://www.thenation.com/docp...
About a decade ago, I invented a game with a colleague of mine who, like me, had once worked for Irving Kristol. We called it neoconservative bingo. The idea was that the clichés of neoconservative discourse would be arranged in various combinations on bingo cards: "The World's Only Superpower"; "The New Class"; "The China Threat"; "Decadent Europe"; "Against the UN"; "The Adversary Culture"; "The Global Democratic Revolution"; "Down With the Appeasers!"; "Be Firm Like Churchill." The free space in the center of the bingo card would be "The Palestinian People Do Not Exist" (nowadays it would be "No Palestinian State" or "All Palestinians Are Terrorists"). As you read an essay or a book by a neoconservative, you would check off each slogan on the card in the order in which it appeared.
We never printed our neocon bingo cards. But the neoconservative manifesto by David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil, which is more a collection of talking points than a coherent argument, can serve just as well. The United Nations "has traduced and betrayed" the dream of world peace. The China Threat: "Eventual Korean unification will reinforce the power of the world's democracies against an aggressive and undemocratic China, should China so evolve." There are the Neville Chamberlain appeasers and the Decadent Europe theme: "To Americans, [Europe's doubts about the invasion of Iraq] looked like appeasement. But it would be a great mistake to attribute European appeasement to cowardice--or to cowardice alone." There are the obligatory Churchill references--a chapter is titled "End of the Beginning"--and there is this: "We will never cease to hope for the civilized world's support. But if it is lacking, as it may be, then we have to say, like the gallant lonely British soldier in David Low's famous cartoon of 1940: 'Very well, alone.'"
Bingo.
Paradoxically, Perle and Frum happened to publish their manifesto of neoconservative grand strategy at the very moment many of their colleagues were insisting in print that neoconservatism does not exist, and that the neocons have no influence on US foreign policy. Up until the summer of 2003, neo-conservatives proudly championed their movement against adversaries on the left and against factions on the right (realist, paleoconservative and libertarian) that questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq. That summer, however, the invasion of Iraq--planned for a decade and carried out chiefly by leading neoconservative foreign policy experts like the Bush Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith--went terribly wrong. As of this writing, more US soldiers have died in the unnecessary second war in Iraq than have been killed in any other US military venture since Vietnam, and several thousand Iraqis have died, with many more maimed (the Bush Pentagon does not bother to count Iraqi casualties). As the enormity of the debacle became apparent, neoconservatives abruptly began avowing their own nonexistence. Not since Stalin ordered the US Communist Party to go underground has an American political faction pretended to dissolve itself in public like this.
David Brooks recently claimed in the New York Times that only "full-mooners" believe that neoconservative institutions like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) have any influence on Bush Administration policy because PNAC "has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy." But PNAC disseminates the views not of its paid staffers, receptionists and interns, but of powerful Administration insiders like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, in the same way that the Committee on the Present Danger used to broadcast the views of Paul Nitze and Gene Rostow, who as government officials were guarded in their own public comments.
Brooks continued: "In truth, the people labeled neocons... travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another." In truth--to use Brooks's phrase--among those who have signed PNAC letters are Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Robert Kagan. PNAC is run by William Kristol, who edits The Weekly Standard, for which Brooks writes, and is the son of Irving Kristol, founder of The Public Interest and former publisher of The National Interest, who wrote a book called Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, and is married to the neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, William's mother. Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, is the father of John Podhoretz, a neoconservative editor and columnist who has worked for the Reverend Moon's Washington Times and the New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns The Weekly Standard and Fox Television. Norman is the father-in-law of Elliott Abrams, the former Iran/contra figure and former head of the neocon Ethics and Public Policy Center and the director of Near Eastern affairs at the National Security Council. Elliott's mother-in-law and Norman's wife, Midge Decter, like many older neocons a veteran of the old Committee on the Present Danger, was recently given a National Humanities Medal after publishing a fawning biography of Rumsfeld, whose number-two and number-three deputies at the Pentagon, respectively, are Wolfowitz and Feith, veterans of the Committee on the Present Danger and Team B, the intelligence advisory group that grossly exaggerated Soviet military power in the 1970s and '80s. Perle, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (and its former head), is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and sits on the board of Hollinger International, a right-wing media conglomerate (including the Jerusalem Post and the Daily Telegraph) controlled by Conrad Black, the chairman of the editorial board of The National Interest, which Black partly subsidizes through the Nixon Center. Perle and Feith--both PNAC allies--helped write a 1996 paper called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," on behalf of Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Perle, Feith and the other US and Israeli authors called on Israel to abandon the Oslo process and to restore martial law in the Palestinian territories long before the second intifada began. Co-authorship is common among the neocons: Brooks and Kristol, Kristol and Kagan, Frum and Perle.
These are people who, according to David Brooks, "don't actually have much contact with one another."
According to Brooks, "To hear these people [the alleged conspiracy theorists] describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles." He writes that "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish.'" With this vicious slur, Brooks has now joined Jonah Goldberg, Joshua Muravchik, Joel Mowbray, Robert J. Lieber and other neoconservative writers in accusing all critics of Israel's Likud government and its neoconservative supporters of treating "neoconservative" as a synonym for "Jew." Among those smeared by neocons in this way in the past year are Chris Matthews, William Pfaff, Eric Alterman, Joshua Micah Marshall, Gen. Anthony Zinni and yours truly. When I, the descendant, in part, of Jewish immigrants, exposed Pat Robertson's anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in 1995, Norman Podhoretz denounced me, not Robertson, reasoning that while Robertson was objectively anti-Semitic he could be forgiven because of his Christian Zionist support for Israel, on the analogy of the rabbinical rule of batel beshishim, which governs impurities in kosher bread. The most loathsome libel in this loathsome campaign was written by Mowbray: "Discussing the Iraq war with the Washington Post last week, former General Anthony Zinni took the path chosen by so many anti-Semites: he blamed it on the Jews.... Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn't say 'Jews.' He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: 'neoconservatives.'" In An End to Evil, Perle and Frum--spontaneously, one can only suppose, as neocons "don't actually have much contact with one another"--repeat the new party line: "Most important, the neoconservative myth offers Europeans and liberals a useful euphemism for expressing their hostility to Israel."
It is true, and unfortunate, that some journalists tend to use "neoconservative" to refer only to Jewish neoconservatives, a practice that forces them to invent categories like "nationalist conservative" or "Western conservative" for Rumsfeld and Cheney. But neoconservatism is an ideology, like paleoconservatism and libertarianism, and Rumsfeld and Dick and Lynne Cheney are full-fledged neocons, as distinct from paleocons or libertarians, even though they are not Jewish and were never liberals or leftists. What is more, Jewish neocons do not speak for the majority of American Jews. According to the 2003 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion by the American Jewish Committee, 54 percent of American Jews surveyed disapproved of the war on Iraq, compared with only 43 percent who approved, and American Jews disapproved of the way Bush is handling the campaign against terrorism by a margin of 54-41.
Neoconservatism--the term was Michael Harrington's--originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves "paleoliberals." While there was a pro-Israel wing, the movement's focus was on confrontation with the Soviet bloc abroad and on the defense of New Deal liberalism and color-blind liberal integrationism against rivals on the left at home. With the end of the cold war and the ascendancy of the Democratic Leadership Council, many "paleoliberals" drifted back to the Democratic center. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once spoken of as a possible neoconservative presidential candidate, broke with the movement in the 1980s over its growing contempt for international law and its exaggeration of the Soviet threat. Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition.
Nevertheless, the origins of their ideology on the left are still apparent. The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older ex-leftists. The idea that the United States and similar societies are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois "new class" was developed by thinkers in the Trotskyist tradition like James Burnham and Max Schachtman, who influenced an older generation of neocons. The concept of the "global democratic revolution" has its origins in the Trotskyist Fourth International's vision of permanent revolution. The economic determinist idea that liberal democracy is an epiphenomenon of capitalism, promoted by neocons like Michael Novak, is simply Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for proletarians as the heroic subjects of history.
The organization as well as the ideology of the neoconservative movement has left-liberal origins. PNAC is modeled on the Committee on the Present Danger, which in turn was modeled on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded network of the anti-Communist center-left that sought to counter Stalin's international cultural front groups between the 1940s and the 1960s. Many of the older neocons are veterans of the CCF, including Irving Kristol, who with Stephen Spender co-edited Encounter, the CIA-bankrolled magazine of the movement. European social democratic models inspired the quintessential neocon institution, the National Endowment for Democracy.
Along with other traditions that have emerged from the anti-Stalinist left, neoconservatism has appealed to many Jewish intellectuals and activists, but it is not, for that reason, a Jewish movement. Like other schools on the left, neoconservatism recruited from diverse "farm teams," including liberal Catholics (William Bennett and Michael Novak began on the Catholic left) and populists, socialists and New Deal liberals in the South and Southwest (the pool from which Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Woolsey and I were drawn). There were, and are, very few Northeastern WASP mandarins in the neoconservative movement, for the same reason that there were few on the older American left, which tended to mirror the New Deal coalition of ethnic and regional outsiders.
With the exception of its Middle East strategy--a subject to which I will return--there is nothing particularly "Jewish" about neoconservative views on foreign policy. While the example of Israel has inspired American neocons to embrace tactics like preventive war and "targeted assassination," the global strategy of today's neocons is shaped chiefly by the heritage of cold war anti-Communism. Neocon hostility to the UN, too often explained solely in terms of UN condemnations of Israel, is a relic of the 1970s and '80s, when the General Assembly was dominated by an anti-American alliance of the Soviet bloc and Third World autocracies. The claim that we are waging "World War IV"--made by Elliot Cohen, James Woolsey and Norman Podhoretz--is a reflex of superannuated cold warriors, as are parallels between militant Islam and secular totalitarianism and the attempt to inflate China or post-Communist Russia into threats comparable to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Not only America's cold war history but the British experience in the twentieth century has shaped neocon perceptions. This is not as strange as it seems. Britain was the leading world power until a few generations ago; many neoconservatives are adult immigrants from the British Commonwealth, like the former Canadian subjects of Her Majesty Charles Krauthammer and David Frum; and many neocon thinkers follow Lionel Trilling (whom Irving Kristol has cited, along with Leo Strauss, as one of the greatest influences on his thought) in looking to British culture to explicate American society. The first modern industrial society, Britain reached its peak, neocons believe, as a result of the combination of imperial ruthlessness, bourgeois (not managerial) capitalism and Victorian virtue. Tragically, however, British strength was sapped from within by the postbourgeois elitists of Bloomsbury, who mocked Victorian values even as the work ethic was eroded by the welfare state. As a result, Britain was morally and materially unprepared to fight fascist totalitarianism. The greatest man of the twentieth century, to judge from the number of times he is cited by neocons, was not Franklin Roosevelt but Winston Churchill, the upholder of Victorian values.
In neocon ideology, the United States is reliving the experience of Britain three-quarters of a century ago. Osama bin Laden (or Saddam or the Chinese leadership or Yasir Arafat) is the new Hitler. Bush is the new Churchill, as Reagan was earlier. Moderate Republicans and conservative realists, as well as liberal Democrats, are the new Neville Chamberlains. The working-class Protestant fundamentalists of the rural and suburban American South are equated with the bourgeois dissenting Protestants of Victorian England. The American university is the new Bloomsbury, full of decadent liberals and leftists sapping the morale of young Americans, who many neoconservatives think should be drafted and sent to fight a series of wars abroad to promote democracy. Four years ago, Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan (Robert Kagan's father and brother, respectively) published a book called While America Sleeps, comparing the United States to Britain in the late 1930s. For the neocons, America is the Britain of Churchill and Chamberlain, and it is always 1939.
Something like what Vivian De Sola Pinto wrote of Kipling in Crisis in English Poetry (1968) could be said today of Kipling's admirer Max Boot and most of today's neoconservative imperialists: "There was no Irish or South African problem, only rebels and traitors; there was no aesthetic problem, only wasters and rotters like Sir Anthony Gloster's son who was educated at 'Harrer an' Trinity College' and 'muddled with books and pictures,' and Tomlinson whose sins were entirely literary; there was no problem of war and peace, only foolish liberals and sentimental or knavish pacifists. All the world needed was more discipline, obedience and loyalty, and above all a paternal British Empire with its unselfish and efficient administrators and admirable army licked into shape by perfect N.C.O.s."
Despite its eccentricities, like its un-American nostalgia for British imperialism, neoconservatism, as paleocons and libertarians never tire of insisting, is a movement that shares some of the same values as the center-left. When Richard Perle calls for women's rights in Muslim countries, when David Brooks writes in support of gay marriage, and when The Weekly Standard denounces neo-Confederate racism, there is no reason to question their sincerity. Nor is Irving Kristol being disingenuous when he says that the welfare state is here to stay. Straussian elitism does not disqualify the leftist credentials of the neocons. Many liberal and democratic movements have had doubts about the ability of the majority to govern themselves, and have put their hopes in some sort of enlightened elite--Jefferson's natural aristocracy, the technocrats favored by American Progressives, the vanguard intelligentsia of the Marxist-Leninists. Imperialism, too, has been compatible with a certain liberal messianism. Until the rise of Third World national liberation movements, some of empire's staunchest advocates were liberals, among them British Fabians and American Progressives. Even Marx was willing to acknowledge that underdeveloped countries like India could benefit from imperial tutelage.
The influence of Marxism is particularly evident in neoconservative conceptions of patriotism. In The Weekly Standard of last August 25, Kristol published an essay titled "The Neoconservative Persuasion" (evidently someone had neglected to inform Kristol, "the godfather of neoconservatism," about the new party line that neoconservatism does not exist). Among what Kristol calls "the following 'theses' (as a Marxist would say)" is his claim that "large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal." Therefore the United States should "defend Israel today...no complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary" (an odd sentiment from the former publisher of a magazine called The National Interest, of which I was executive editor from 1991 to 1994). Let us set the question of Israel aside for now, and note that very few Americans think of their country as a version of the USSR with liberal democracy instead of Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology--probably as few as think of American foreign policy in terms of "'theses' (as a Marxist would say)."
A few years earlier in the Wall Street Journal, Irving's son William and David Brooks co-authored a similar call for a "national greatness conservatism" in which American patriotism is emptied of all content except for military crusades on behalf of democracy abroad. As far as empire is concerned, William Kristol and Max Boot embrace the "e-word" while Frum and Perle disavow it. But if the nation has value only as the host or carrier of a potentially universal ideology, which must be spread abroad by force of arms and subversion, then the distinction between "national greatness" and "imperialism" disappears--in the case of American neoconservatism no less than in the comparable cases of Soviet Communism and Napoleonic liberalism. This kind of crusading secular messianism has nothing at all to do with conventional patriotism and nationalism, even in their liberal forms. Many Americans have thought of our country as a model for other liberal democracies, but hardly any view our nation as a mere staging platform for a "global democratic revolution," to be promoted by invading foreign countries and arming foreign insurrections where no "calculations of national interest are necessary."
The distant influence of the Trotskyist Fourth International is apparent, even though the neocons ransack American history in order to provide their movement with a usable past. Max Boot calls himself a "hard Wilsonian," but in his celebration of Kipling-style imperialism it's hard to see much of Wilson, who viewed international law and international organization as the alternative to the militarization of American society that he dreaded, and who is forever identified with national self-determination of the kind claimed by the Palestinians. William Kristol and David Brooks invoke the name of Theodore Roosevelt. But unlike TR's imperial Progressivism, which supported conservation and prolabor reforms, the domestic side of "national greatness conservatism" is vacuous, consisting chiefly of the suggestion by Brooks and Kristol that the United States build more war memorials, perhaps in response to the body count they anticipate from their wars of democracy promotion.
Like Paul Berman, the maître penseur of the liberal hawks, many neocons try to enlist Lincoln for their cause. But Lincoln opposed the Mexican War and rejected the idea that the United States had a duty to spread democracy by force. In 1859 Lincoln ridiculed "Young America," who "is a great friend of humanity; and his desire for land is not selfish, but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom. He is very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided, always, they have land, and have not any liking for his interference."
The redefinition of American patriotism as zealotry on behalf of a crusading, messianic ideology is compatible with a disrespect for actual American institutions, which, if it were expressed by leftists or liberals, would be denounced as un-American by neocon arbiters of American patriotism like Frum, a Canadian who bothered to become a US citizen only after he'd served in the Bush White House. Most of the career professionals in the national security agencies--the military, the intelligence community and the Foreign Service--oppose the grand strategy of Bush and his neocon political appointees. Logically, therefore, Perle and Frum want to replace lifelong public servants with presidential spoilsmen. Of the intelligence community they write, "It may be time to bring all of these secret warriors into a single paramilitary structure ultimately answerable to the secretary of defense"--not to mention Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense Feith. If the intelligence agencies had already been subordinated to civilians in the Pentagon, then Wolfowitz and Feith would not have needed to do an end run around the CIA and the State Department by creating a new intelligence agency, the Office of Special Plans, which tortured data until it supported the policies advocated by the neocons. While neocon appointees in the Pentagon bring the intelligence community to heel, others will colonize the diplomatic service. Perle and Frum, two former political appointees, write, "Next, we should increase sharply the number of political appointees in the State Department and expand their role."
The ideological Gleichschaltung will extend to the US military. The neocons, few of whom ever served in the military, can scarcely conceal their contempt for America's soldiers; Frum and Perle write of "the dead hand of military tradition." (Lieut. Gen. William Boykin, a Christian fundamentalist like so many of Ariel Sharon's American supporters, is acceptable, and has been brought into the Office of the Secretary of Defense to work with civilian appointees Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith.) The career military, so often an obstacle to grandiose neocon schemes, must be transformed into an instrument of preventive wars, argue Perle and Frum: "Will we need to go after a terrorist camp in some remote village in Indonesia? Or raid Syria to retrieve or destroy weapons of mass destruction that may have been sent there by Saddam Hussein for safekeeping? Or strike a decisive blow against a North Korean facility about to produce nuclear weapons for a terrorist customer?"--actions justified, we have reason to fear, on the basis of data doctored by neocon political appointees in the US intelligence community.
The new American armed forces will be busy, if Perle and Frum get their way. In the course of An End to Evil they call for deposing the governments of Iran and Syria, treating Saudi Arabia as an enemy, blockading North Korea--oh, and let's not forget, France is an adversary, along with "France's pilot fish, Belgium."Down with Belgium, France's Pilot Fish!--this is a new addition to the litany of neoconservatism.
If Frum and Perle are to be believed, a great number of US invasions and US-supported revolutions will be necessary to bring democracy to countries that now lack it: "Kofi Annan complained in July 2003 that democracy cannot be imposed by force. Really?" Annan is a better historian than Perle and Frum. The record is clear--most of the democratic transitions that have taken place in the world in the past two centuries have had nothing to do with foreign military intervention or military pressure, while most US military interventions abroad have left dictatorship, not democracy, in their wake. The two cases that neocons constantly return to, Germany and Japan, are among the few cases where democracy has been restored (not created ex nihilo) as the result of a US invasion. The Soviet bloc democratized itself from within in the 1990s, even though the United States did not bomb Moscow, impose a martial-law governor on the Poles or imprison former Hungarian Communist officials without charges in barbed-wire camps. In Latin America, Mexico became a multiparty democracy instead of a one-party dictatorship without US Marines posing for photos in the presidential mansion in Mexico City, and it was not necessary for American soldiers to kill tens of thousands of Argentines, Chileans and Brazilians for democracy to take root in those countries.
One must hope that American soldiers leave behind a functioning democracy in Iraq--rather than the dysfunctional autocracies and kleptocracies that were the legacy of US military occupations in the Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Mexico. But it is likely that, if and when liberal democracy comes to the Muslim world in general and to the Arab world in particular, the gradual, largely bloodless transition will resemble those in Soviet Europe and Latin America and will not be the result of US military action or intimidation. The neocons--and the humanitarian hawks on the left--are simply wrong about how best to spread democracy.
The global strategy of the neocons, then, is not ethnic but ideological, a crusade in the name of democracy. But the neoconservatives who support Israel's illiberal Likud Party, and Likud's American allies, the Protestant Christian Zionists of the Southern religious right, contradict their own professed principles.
In theory, neoconservative ideology is more compatible with Israeli post-Zionism than with either the Labour Zionist or Revisionist Zionist forms of Israeli ethnic nationalism. The neocons are always denouncing American "paleoconservatives" for claiming that US nationality must be founded on race (Caucasian) or religion (Christianity)--and yet they defend Israeli politicians and thinkers whose blood-and-soil nationalism is even less liberal than the "Buchananism" the neocons denounce in the US context.
In the pages of The Weekly Standard, David Brooks made the astonishing argument that the United States, a Lockean liberal democracy, must defend Israel, another Lockean liberal democracy, against illiberal Palestinian nationalism. The idea that Israeli identity has nothing to do with blood-and-soil nationalism might hearten post-Zionist proponents of Israel as "a state of all its citizens" (not to mention Israel's 1 million Palestinian citizens) but will come as news to Labour Zionists as well as to the Likud, National Religious and Shas parties in Sharon's governing coalition.
Unlike Brooks, Douglas Feith does not lie about the nature of Israeli nationalism. In an address he delivered in Jerusalem in 1997 titled "Reflections on Liberalism, Democracy and Zionism," written before he became the third-most-powerful official in the Pentagon, Feith denounced "those Israelis" who "contend that Israel like America should not be an ethnic state--a Jewish state--but rather a 'state of its citizens.'" Feith argued that "there is a place in the world for non-ethnic nations and there is a place for ethnic nations." Feith's theory, unlike that of Brooks, permits pro-Likud neocons to preach postethnic universalism for the United States and blood-and-soil nationalism for Israel. While solving one problem for the neoconservative movement, Feith creates others. He legitimizes identity politics, which the neocons despise--how can one justify Israel-centered Jewish ethnoracial nationalism while denouncing Afrocentrism or the sinister neo-Nazi idea of an "Aryan-German" or "Nordic" diaspora in the United States? Even worse, Feith's theory seems to endorse the false claim of anti-Semites that Jews are essentially foreigners in the nations in which they are born or reside. Indeed, according to the Jabotinskyite ideology shared by Sharon, Netanyahu and many (not all) of their neocon allies, there are only two kinds of Jews in the world: Israelis and potential Israelis. For generations, many if not most Jewish Americans have rejected this illiberal conception.
A related contradiction is the ever-deepening alliance of the neocons with the Likud's major supporters in the American electorate, the Protestant ayatollahs of the Bible Belt, which inspired Irving Kristol, William Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to open their magazines to religious-right tirades against abortion rights, gay rights, gun control and--my personal favorite--"Darwinism." This apertura to Southern Christian fundamentalism--the opposite of everything that neoconservatism defined as "paleoliberalism" once stood for--led to my departure and that of several other former neoconservatives. We thought we had joined an antitotalitarian liberal movement, not an alliance of American Likudniks and born-again Baptist creationists brought together to support the colonization of "Samaria" and "Judea" by right-wing Jewish settlers.
Neoconservatism--that is, hawkish paleoliberalism--was hijacked by elite American supporters of the Likud, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and their Christian allies, long before the neocons, temporarily, perhaps, hijacked US foreign policy under the second Bush. I can attest that there are neoconservatives, including Jewish neoconservatives, who don't share a love affair with the Likud, but if they said so in public their careers in the movement would end.
The warping of an ideological movement by the ethnic, religious or regional biases of its leaders is not uncommon. For example, there was nothing innately Catholic or even Christian about William F. Buckley Jr.'s "movement conservatism," which attracted many Protestants, Jews and secularists. Nevertheless, the Buckley circle was heavily Catholic and included his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, an American follower of Spanish Carlism (the Carlists were the Catholic answer to the American Likudniks). In the same way that criticizing the Likud Party is a bad career move if you are a contemporary Jewish or non-Jewish neoconservative who doesn't see why Israel shouldn't be a "state of all its citizens" like the United States, so it was not a good idea in the 1950s and '60s to criticize General Franco's Spain if you were a National Review conservative.
The cynical way in which the Bush Administration lied to Congress and the American people to justify an invasion of Iraq planned years before September 11, 2001, by Wolfowitz and many of his PNAC allies came as no surprise to me, a former neocon. In an anthology titled The Fettered Presidency published by the American Enterprise Institute in 1989, Irving Kristol wrote that "if the president goes to the American people and wraps himself in the American flag and lets Congress wrap itself in the white flag of surrender, the president will win.... The American people had never heard of Grenada. There was no reason why they should have. The reason we gave for the intervention--the risk to American medical students there--was phony but the reaction of the American people was absolutely and overwhelmingly favorable. They had no idea what was going on, but they backed the president. They always will."
But too much can be made of the mendacity of the neocons. The influence of Leo Strauss's teachings about the need for the "philosophers" to conceal the truth from the masses can be exaggerated. The conviction on the part of neocons of their own rectitude may be sufficient, in their minds, to justify deception of the public in matters like Iraq's nonexistent threat to the United States. After all, they are waging World War IV against--well, against whomever--a revived Russia this year, China the next, and the next year a vague "Islamist" threat that somehow contains anti-Islamist Baathists and secular Palestinians along with Osama bin Laden. In their own minds, the neocons are Churchillian figures, a heroic minority who, as they battle a generic "totalitarianism" of which radical Islam is the latest manifestation, are handicapped by cowardly establishment "appeasers" and purveyors of a decadent "adversary culture" among the "new class" in the academy and the media. I don't doubt that many leading neocons sincerely wanted to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the Iraqi masses would embrace Ahmad Chalabi as their de Gaulle, that there would be a democratic domino effect in the Middle East, bringing pro-Israel and pro-American secularists to power. Now that they have been proven wrong, at enormous cost in American and Iraqi life, they are disoriented. Instead of acknowledging and taking responsibility for their catastrophic failure, they are desperately trying to avoid blame.
Unfortunately for them, a political ideology can fail in the real world only so many times before being completely discredited. For at least two decades, in foreign policy the neocons have been wrong about everything. When the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the hawks of Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger declared that it was on the verge of world domination. In the 1990s they exaggerated the power and threat of China, once again putting ideology ahead of the sober analysis of career military and intelligence experts. The neocons were so obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat that they missed the growing threat of Al Qaeda. After 9/11 they pushed the irrelevant panaceas of preventive war and missile defense as solutions to the problems of hijackers and suicide bombers.
They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn't. They said he was in league with Osama bin Laden. He wasn't. They predicted that no major postwar insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.
David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right. There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds--only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves. If they now claim that they never existed--well, you can hardly blame them, can you?
[i]By MICHAEL LIND
Review of "[b]An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror[/b]" by David Frum and Richard Perle[/i]
|
|
|
| |
| Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe |
| 02.06.04 (7:20 am) [edit] |
[b]Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe[/b], http://www.insightmag.com/new...
Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.
According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.
The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.
The case centers on Valerie Plame, a CIA operative then working for the weapons of mass destruction division, and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who served as ambassador to Gabon and as a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad in the early 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, he was head of African affairs until he retired in 1998, according to press accounts.
Wilson was sent by the Bush administration in March 2002 to check on an allegation made by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address the previous winter that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from the nation of Niger. Wilson returned with a report that said the claim was "highly doubtful."
On June 12, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus revealed that an unnamed diplomat had "given a negative report" on the claim and then, on July 6, as the Bush administration was widely accused of manipulating intelligence to get American public opinion behind a war with Iraq, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Post in which he accused the Bush administration of "misrepresenting the facts." His piece also asked, "What else are they lying about?"
According to one administration official, "The White House was really pissed, and began to contact six journalists in order to plant stories to discredit Wilson," according to the New York Times and other accounts.
As Pincus said in a Sept. 29 radio broadcast, "The reason for putting out the story about Wilson's wife working for the CIA was to undermine the credibility of [Wilson's] mission for the agency in Niger. Wilson, as the last top diplomat in Iraq at the time of the Gulf War, had credibility beyond his knowledge of Africa, which was his specialty. So his going to Niger to check the allegation that Iraq had sought uranium there and returning to say he had no confirmation was considered very credible."
Eight days later, columnist Robert Novak wrote a column in which he named Wilson's wife and revealed she was "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." Since Plame was working undercover, it exposed her and, in the opinion of some, ruined her usefulness and her career. It also violated a 1982 law that prohibits revealing the identity of U.S. intelligence agents.
On Oct. 7, Bush said that unauthorized disclosure of an undercover CIA officer's identity was "a criminal matter" and the Justice Department had begun its investigation into the source of the leak.
[i]Richard Sale is an intelligence correspondent for UPI, a sister wire service of Insight magazine.[/i]
|
|
|
| |
| CIA Pushes Justice Department on Valerie Plame Case |
| 02.06.04 (7:17 am) [edit] |
[b]Now for a bit more on the Plame matter.[/b]
We've known for some time that the CIA nudged the Department of Justice to look into the Plame matter for some time before an investigation was finally launched in late September of last year.
Now we have a few more details.
On September 30th of last year Rep. John Conyers, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the CIA requesting a description of what contacts the Agency had had with Justice about the Plame matter prior to the commencement of the investigation.
Then last Friday, January 30th, the CIA responded in a letter we've just added to the TPM Document Collection.
According to the letter the CIA first contacted Justice by phone on July 24th, 2003. They followed up on July 30th, 2003 with a letter advising them of a possible violation of criminal law and informing them that they had opened their own investigation.
The folks at the CIA seem not to have gotten an altogether satisfactory response to the July 30th letter because they again sent the letter, by fax, on September 5th, 2003.
Then on September 16, 2003 they contacted Justice yet again to inform them that they (i.e., CIA) had completed their investigation. They provided a memo summarizing their findings and requested that the FBI begin a criminal investigation of the matter.
Finally on September 29th, Justice notified the CIA that they had in fact begun an investigation.
Why did it take so long? Why did the CIA have to press so hard?
See the letter for yourself on http://talkingpointsmemo.com/... .
Much more on this to come.
[i]Joshua Micah Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo.com[/i], http://www.talkingpointsmemo....
|
|
|
| |
| Pentagon Hiding Reality of Toll From War in Iraq |
| 02.05.04 (7:43 am) [edit] |
[b]Pentagon Hiding Reality of Toll From War in Iraq[/b], http://www.palmbeachpost.com/...
Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a Vietnam veteran and senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tried asking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about U.S. troops who have been wounded in Iraq.
He wanted to know the number of battlefield casualties, how the Pentagon was defining "wounded in action," the procedure for releasing information on wounded and how many Americans had received the Purple Heart. Sen. Hagel told National Public Radio that it took six weeks to get a response. A letter from the Pentagon said: "At this time, we were unfortunately lacking in information, and we didn't have the information that you requested." Sen. Hagel found the non-answers "astounding" and criticized a widening credibility gap between the government and the American people over a complete accounting of the war's toll.
The nation reached a sad milestone this month with the 500th death in Iraq. But the numbers of wounded continue to be lost beneath the headlines, as does the severity of the wounds. If Sen. Hagel can't get answers, what chance does the public have? Military records suggest that about 9,000 U.S. troops have been evacuated from Iraq for a wide spectrum of reasons, including combat wounds, accident injuries, psychological problems, infections and illness. At least 21 have committed suicide. About 3,000 U.S. soldiers are counted among the group wounded in battle or injured in accidents since the invasion.
The ratio of wounded to dead -- about 6-to-1 -- is the encouraging news. In the Korean War, for example, it was 3-to-1, and in the Civil War 2-to-1. The improvement comes from the protective body armor modern soldiers wear, the efforts of field commanders to minimize casualties and great advances in battlefield hospital care. Soldiers who would have bled to death in Korea routinely are saved.
The discouraging news is that a higher percentage of those surviving wounds will live out their days with severe disfigurements or disabilities. The nature of warfare in Iraq -- especially vehicle bombings and guerrilla attacks -- have produced large numbers of horrific burns and amputations that cannot be repaired. Unseen damage such as post-traumatic stress disorder or toxic poisoning also can leave lifetime scars. The Pentagon's numbers that show high percentages of survivors do not capture the scope of the losses. The word wounded too often passes for undamaged.
The government still fails to deal with all the casualties of past wars. Vietnam vets await treatment for Agent Orange poisoning, and veterans of the Gulf War complain of neurological problems that the Pentagon won't acknowledge. The Department of Veterans Affairs has 2.7 million clients and a budget that doesn't keep up with the demand for disability benefits, medical care and pensions. President Bush says it's worth spending close to $1 trillion to send a man to Mars at a time when many vets can't make it into a doctor's waiting room. Hundreds of veterans are coming home from Iraq with wounds that will require long rehabilitation and expensive treatment. It will be years before the full cost is counted.
The numbers Americans are able to get do not reflect the war's toll in human suffering. The real numbers are something that Americans deserve to know.
|
|
|
| |
| Gun-Barrel Democracy Has Failed Time and Again |
| 02.05.04 (7:39 am) [edit] |
[b]Gun-Barrel Democracy Has Failed Time and Again[/b], http://fairuse.1accesshost.co...
[i][b]Study suggests U.S. may make Iraq an ally but produce little freedom there[/b][/i].
When it involves itself in the affairs of others, the United States likes to say that it is doing so in defense of freedom and democracy. That's what we said in Iraq, among other things, when we toppled Saddam Hussein. That was part (though not all) of our argument for going after the Taliban in Afghanistan. But it's also what we said in Vietnam in the 1960s, in Grenada in 1983, in Panama in 1989 and in numerous other interventions during the 20th century.
In fact, presidents rarely fail to trot out "democracy" as a justification for their actions abroad. That's because it is popular with Americans, who like to feel they are on the side of the angels. But if it's democracy we're after, we are failing miserably.
Between World War II and the present, the United States intervened more than 35 times in developing countries around the world. But our research shows that in only one case — Colombia after the American decision in 1989 to engage in the war on drugs — did a full-fledged, stable democracy with limits on executive power, clear rules for the transition of power, universal adult suffrage and competitive elections emerge within 10 years. That's a success rate of less than 3%.
After other interventions — such as Guatemala (1954), Nicaragua (1978 and 1982) and Thailand (1966) — various trappings of democracy, such as noncompetitive elections and a limited franchise, were added in the decade that followed but the critical elements of a fully developed democracy simply never emerged.
The results of our engagements in Lebanon (1958), the Republic of the Congo (1967) and, again, Guatemala (1966, 1972) were more dismal still. In these cases intervention actually was followed by deterioration in the modest progress these states had achieved. For instance, the Guatemalan executive was substantially less constrained by law or by the legislature in 1982 than in 1972.
We reached these conclusions by correlating known interventions — including not just large-scale wars but also small actions like flyovers or "advisory" missions — with what is known as the Polity IV Index, an academically accepted measure of the status of democracy and autocracy country by country and year by year.
Though cause and effect cannot always be determined, what is clear is that, time after time, American engagement abroad has not led to more freedom or more democracy in the countries where we've become involved.
Why does the United States show such unimpressive results? Whatever the problem is, it isn't exclusive to the U.S.; the record of other interveners — both democratic and nondemocratic — is no better. Neither Britain, France, Canada nor any other country has an enviable record of creating democracy by military intervention.
Nor can the problems be blamed on the countries in which we chose to intervene. Although it is true that many of these interventions took place in poor countries where the education level was low and where there was little previous experience with democratic institutions, there is scant evidence to suggest that this is why democracy failed to take hold. In fact, neighboring countries generally experienced more progress toward democracy in the ensuing decade than did the states where the intervention occurred. Moreover, even under the best conditions, the chances of success for externally imposed democracy were quite small.
We think a better explanation lies in the inherent tension between America's stated desire to implement democratic processes in the intervened-in nations and its desire to ensure that these nations will pursue policies that reflect U.S. interests.
Conflict between these two goals is almost inevitable, except in the case of primarily humanitarian interventions, which are quite rare and often fail because of a lack of commitment on the part of the interveners (as in the case of Somalia in 1993).
In the typical cases, the United States — like other interveners — has been motivated less by a desire to establish democracy or reduce human suffering than to alter some aspect of the target state's policy. (For instance, the recent invasion of Afghanistan was aimed at ending that country's support for Osama bin Laden more than at bringing democracy to its people.) Although democracy would no doubt be a nice byproduct, it is rarely the most important goal.
In many cases, such as Iraq, American administrations have strong incentives to leave as little as possible to chance. This is because the "Iraq holds the key to winning the war on terror" rhetoric that mobilizes public support for the war leads the same public to expect the Iraqi government that emerges to be an ally in that battle. The creation of a state that is critical of U.S. policy, much less one that is openly sympathetic to enemies of U.S. interests, is simply not an acceptable result.
Unfortunately, the goal of leaving as little as possible to chance is incompatible with the goal of promoting democracy. There's no guarantee that free, fair, open elections in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan will produce governments that back fundamental American policies like opposition to terrorism, a commitment to the free flow of oil to the West and support for the Middle East peace process.
The far more reliable path to a favorable policy outcome is to (a) prop up leaders — usually autocrats — who have a demonstrated track record of sympathy with U.S. goals; (b) appoint a U.S.-interest-dominated "acting government" and then charge it with holding free and fair elections when conditions permit; and (c) design an electoral process that is virtually certain to elect a sympathetic government and promote the dominance of single-party rule or weak central authority for the foreseeable future (the often-forgotten outcome in some of the best cases, like Japan and Germany).
Experience has taught us that these strategies rarely, if ever, lead to anything that looks and functions like a genuine democracy in the short or medium term. But they do give the administration of the intervening country the kind of ally it needs to help achieve its foreign policy goals abroad and its electoral goals at home.
Happy to be free of the burdens of war, voters back home are generally willing to embrace their administration's assurances that however imperfect the new government might appear to "nitpickers," it is now well on the road to democracy. In the case of Iraq, the only ones who will notice that the "model democracy" is really more of an autocracy — or a loose confederation of three separate autocratic states — on the road to nowhere will be its citizens and those of the other Middle Eastern countries.
[i]George W. Downs is dean of social science and professor of politics at New York University. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute.[/i]
|
|
|
| |
| The Great Bait-and-Switch |
| 02.05.04 (7:36 am) [edit] |
[b]The Great Bait-and-Switch[/b], http://www.antiwar.com/articl...
The latest Bush administration spin on the war is that they got the intelligence "wrong." The administration is passing the blame on to the CIA and the rest of the nation’s intelligence apparatus for supposedly feeding them bad information about the WMD threat. In other words, we fought the wrong war because the President listened to the spooks, and we therefore need to start an "independent commission" to study intelligence agency failings.
Don’t buy this latest bait-and-switch game from the administration. The truth is that the administration completely disregarded the consensus conclusion of the intelligence community on the most important aspect of threat assessment: ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. Intelligence was right on the money with its assessment of al Qaeda ties.
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the consensus estimate of major U.S. intelligence agencies such as the military, CIA, NSA and State Department, reported to the President that there was no tangible evidence of links. The [i]Washington Post [/i]on June 22, 2003 summarized the classified NIE study: "While Bush also spoke of Iraq and al Qaeda having had ‘high-level contacts that go back a decade,’ the president did not say ¾ as the classified intelligence report asserted ¾ that the contacts occurred in the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, was living in Sudan and his organization was in its infancy." The NIE concluded no hard evidence linked the Hussein regime with al Qaeda. "[T]he report's conclusion [was] that those early contacts had not led to any known continuing high-level relationships between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda," the [i]Post[/i] explained. Former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann summarized the non-threat for the July 12, 2003 [i]Boston Globe[/i]. ''There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation.''
And British intelligence, considered to be such a reliable source when President Bush made public addresses on Iraq’s supposed uranium purchases from Africa, had also concluded there were no al Qaeda ties. "His [Bin Laden's] aims are in ideological conflict with present day Iraq," proclaimed a British Intelligence dossier on the topic, as cited in the [i]BBC[/i] on February 5, 2003.
Even the United Nations managed to come to the same conclusion: "We have never had information presented to us-even though we've asked questions-which would indicate that there is a direct link [between al Qaeda and Iraq]," Michael Chandler, chief UN investigator of al Qaeda, told the June 27, 2003 [i]New York Times[/i].
Despite the wide consensus of the U.S. and foreign intelligence community, the Bush administration pushed on with unequivocal allegations of supposed ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Bush stated flatly in a major address on Oct. 7, 2002 that:
"We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
But now … well, we don’t really "know."
"There is not -- you know, I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection," Secretary of State Colin Powell fumbled out in a Jan. 8 press conference, adding a little administration spin on the 180-degree reversal: "but I think the possibility of such connections did exist and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."
Of course, President Bush and the rest of his lackeys did not talk about "possibilities" in their public addresses before the war; they told the American people "we know." And they said this despite the consensus that our intelligence agencies had concluded there weren’t any ties.
So how can the administration blame bad intelligence for the war?
While the administration definitely exaggerated the progress of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in their public addresses, the far more important administration scandal is the utterly false allegations of al Qaeda ties. Why? Because most Americans who eventually consented to the war did so because they were spoon-fed the nightmare of Iraqi-armed al Qaeda terrorists detonating nuclear, biological and chemical weapons over American cities.
President Bush summarized the emotional appeal that made the war against Iraq acceptable in that same Oct. 7, 2002 speech: "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." The fact that his administration faced no clear evidence of peril had no impact on the unsuspecting public, because they had no way of knowing Bush was lying. Though Saddam Hussein’s regime did not possess the capability to deliver WMDs to American targets, al Qaeda proved capable of striking American targets on 9/11.
Opponents of the war have been asking "Where are the WMDs?" for months now, but it isn’t getting them anywhere. And it isn’t going to get them anywhere, because it was not an unreasonable to assume that Iraq held chemical weapons. Hussein’s regime unquestionably possessed them and used them in the past, and American intelligence was sketchy on WMDs. That doesn’t justify the war, but many Americans won’t question the justification of the war simply because of missing WMDs.
Unless the al Qaeda tie is cut. Here the intelligence was clear, and the administration disregarded it entirely. Here the administration manufactured false intelligence, such as a mythical meeting between an Iraqi official and an al Qaeda operative in Prague. Here the administration blamed Hussein for al Qaeda training that took place outside of his political control, as they did in the case of the al Qaeda camp in the Kurdish-controlled area of Iraq (which was being patrolled by U.S. jets!).
The Bush inquiry on intelligence "failures" is the great bait-and-switch of his administration. Anti-war activists need to realize that the amount of WMDs actually possessed by Saddam Hussein is inconsequential to most people. As long as the false belief that Hussein was arming al Qaeda persists, the war will be justified in the eyes of many Americans. But exposing the al Qaeda lie will discredit the whole premise for the war. No al Qaeda, no threat. No threat, no justification for war. No justification for war, and the Bush Administration will pay a just price for its unprovoked war of aggression that has needlessly cost the lives of more than 500 Americans.
Is there a better way to "support the troops" than to expose this lie?
[i]Thomas R. Eddlem is a native of the Boston area of Massachusetts and a graduate of Stonehill College. He is currently the editor for two community newspapers south of Boston, and is a frequent contributor to The New American magazine[/i].
|
|
|
| |
| War Finance: Theory and History of a Sink-Hole of Waste |
| 02.04.04 (7:26 am) [edit] |
[b]War Finance: Theory and History[/b], http://www.mises.org/fullstor...
That war is not productive may seem self-evident to Misesians but it is not to the "educated" public who have been taught that World War II ended the Depression and that deficit spending (of whatever kind it doesn't matter) spurs economic growth. Americans show not the slightest awareness that every dollar spent on the ongoing Afghan and Iraqi wars, the continuing occupations, and the rebuilding of those failed societies is one less dollar that can be spent at home, and that the whole adventure represents a giant transfer of American capital to the sweltering deserts and sun-baked slums of the Middle East. If they were aware of these economic realities would they not be more skeptical about administration claims that the terror war is enhancing our security?
[b]The Sinking of Capital[/b]
Thus it bears repeating that warfare, whether victorious or not, retards the accumulation of productive and livable capital. It does this either by destroying capital outright or sinking it in logistics and war production, thereby rendering it incapable of reproducing itself or adding to the complex infrastructure and amenities of civilization. During peace, capital is expended to sustain life, to provide comforts and entertainment, and to create new capital (houses, furniture, autos, machine tools, office building, factories, etc.). During war, capital is squandered building the implements of war and sustaining armies in the field. After the war, capital and labor must be expended in reconstruction and repair. War can give the appearance of prosperity (full employment, busy factories, high prices), but it is not real. During the War Between the States, "the mills, forges, and factories were active in working for the government, while the men who ate the grain and wore the clothing were active in destroying, and not in creating capital. This, to be sure, was war. It is what war means, but it cannot bring prosperity." So wrote Sumner.
[b]Taxation[/b]
From the standpoint of productivity, it matters not whether a war is paid for by borrowing, taxing, or inflating. In all three cases, resources are diverted from the productive economy of wealth creation to the destructive economy of war-fighting. From other standpoints, it makes a great difference. Let us take the political. When government resorts to taxation, it confiscates a portion of the capital and labor of the population. Except for government contractors and officials, everyone is immediately poorer, and they know it. This is why Jefferson insisted that a heavy redemption tax be laid to pay interest and principal of the war debt. He wanted the people to know how much the war was costing them, and he wanted to dampen the spirit of militarism and navalism with a heady dose of reality-enhancing taxation.
[b]Borrowing[/b]
When the government borrows, the case is altogether different. Instead of confiscating resources, the government pays for them, but it does so belatedly. As a result, the sacrifice is deferred, but not for everyone. Capitalists lend their capital to the government for the promise of annual interest and eventual principal. They make no sacrifice at all. On the contrary, they have a secure, interest-bearing investment (that is, if the government is not overthrown or defeated). Those who can afford to buy bonds do so, knowing that it is as secure as the prospect of victory and the efficiency and potential lethality of the government's tax-collecting and enforcing apparatus. Those who cannot afford to buy bonds, or who prefer to invest in productive endeavors, must pay in future taxes for the reprieve of not being taxed in the present. The political benefit for the government is obvious. When the state sells bonds, the public hardly notices. As they do not grasp that they must pay the interest and principal of the borrowed funds, they offer no opposition to the bond issue.
The economic significance is less obvious but no less important. The interest payment represents pure wealth redistribution. The accumulation of government debt renders productive labor tributary to the government's creditors. The inequality of wealth and the formation of distinctive classes might be the natural result of the differentiation of intelligence, the specialization of labor, the accumulation of capital, the protection of property, and family inheritance. It might also be the result of political privilege and power, and fiscal extravagance supported by the funding system.
[b]Inflation[/b]
Inflationary finance combines the political and economic advantages of borrowing with the immediate rewards of confiscatory taxation. It is a disguised form of confiscation, redistributive, and allows government to command immediate resources. When governments finance a war by printing money and using it to buy supplies and pay troops, the resulting depreciation acts as a tax, the amount of which is exactly equivalent to the depreciation. It is taxation by the back door, but it is an unequal and largely regressive tax. The decline in the purchasing power of the money does not impoverish all equally. It plunders the wage-earner and soldier because their wages always lag behind the rise in prices resulting from monetary inflation. It harms the small producer or trader because they receive the new money after it has already circulated and depreciated in value. However, two groups usually benefit from the inflation. Government contractors receive orders that they would not in peacetime, and enjoy the first use of the newly printed money. Large capitalists can invest in government bonds, or they can speculate in stocks and commodities whose price is soaring due to the inflation.
[b]The War Between the States[/b]
The Americans may have been the first to discover the secret of funding a war with paper money. The New Englanders pioneered the way in the 1690s, and the republicans of 1775 could think of no better method of funding their war of independence than by printing money, the ubiquitous Continental. Later, England demonstrated that suspending specie payments during a war (in this case her war with Revolutionary France) need not lead to hyperinflation and financial Armageddon, as long as it was moderate. Thus, the Bank of England's suspension (1797–1821), known as the English Bank Restriction, set the pernicious example that inconvertible bank notes were as "good as gold," and furnished an abundant sea on which to float bonds. The Americans emulated the mother country in 1814–17 and in 1861–79.
The 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln sparked a secession movement in the southern states. In December, South Carolina seceded, and other Deep South states soon followed. Interstate commerce was disrupted, and many northeastern banks suspended specie payments. The atmosphere was one of grave political and economic crisis. Many feared war; many feared the unknown. Consequently, from December through most of the first half of 1861 (the months previous to the war), the business community prepared to weather the coming storm. Banks contracted their loans and increased reserves. Merchants and traders retrenched, and manufacturers deferred new capital investments. Everyone reduced debt and expenses. As a consequence, prices fell, imports slowed, exports boomed, and specie flowed into the country. Sumner estimated that exports exceeded imports by $67 million and specie flows showed a net gain of $16 million during this period. According to him, these developments represented a real opportunity for the government to fund its war without resorting to inflationary finance. "The real financial question of the day was whether we should carry on the war on specie currency, low prices, and small imports, or on paper issues, high prices, and heavy imports." The business community and the banks had done their part; it was now up to the government. The Lincoln administration hesitated as to which choice to make, but it eventually chose inflation and extravagance.
[b]Taxation[/b]
The Lincoln administration feared to rely primarily or even significantly upon taxation as a means to pay for the northern union's invasion of the southern confederacy. Americans had never yet paid for a war by paying more taxes, not even as colonists of Britain; so there was no precedent. Besides, Americans were averse to taxation for any purpose and had not paid internal taxes since the mid-1810s. In addition, at least half of the northern public was either opposed to the war or would give it only a grudging and highly conditional support. Raising taxes significantly would surely increase the vehemence of anti-war sentiment and push those who were undecided or apathetic to favor an armistice. Nevertheless, some taxes would have to be raised, if only to maintain the credit of the bonds.
Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase could not expect to raise much revenue by increasing tariff rates. Even before Lincoln took office, the Republican Congress had passed the Morrill tariff (March 2, 1861). Its purpose was to exclude foreign manufactures, not raise revenue. This tariff represented a major regression in both liberty and economic thought. Sumner wrote: "The country was once more embarked on the protective policy, which received an extension in the following years unexampled save by the most unenlightened nations on earth." By it and subsequent revisions, average rates on dutiable imports rose from 19 percent in 1860 to 54 percent by late 1865.
Chase proceeded cautiously, but every year he recommended new taxes. By the end of the war, Americans were paying higher taxes than they had ever paid before—even as colonists of Britain—and more than most of the nations of Europe. In 1860, Americans paid $53 million in taxes, all in the form of import duties; in 1865, they paid $295 million. In August 1861, Congress passed a property tax to be apportioned among the states, and an income tax. In the first year, the property tax raised $20 million, the income tax nothing. In 1862, the property tax was repealed, and the income tax brought in only $2.7 million, so Chase recommended excise taxes (enacted in July 1862). These were the first internal taxes laid since the War of 1812. It would be tedious to list even a sample of the things that were taxed by the Internal Revenue Act of 1862. Suffice it to say that the general principle was to tax everything. Congressman James Blaine (Me.) praised it as "one of the most searching [and] comprehensive systems of taxation ever devised by any government." In June 1864, Congress raised the duties still more. That year was the first in the history of the republic in which revenue derived from internal taxes exceeded that collected from the tariff. By the end of the war, the income tax had raised $55 million, customs $305 million, and the internal revenue duties $352 million. However, these substantial sums amounted to only 21 percent of the expenses of the war, the other 79 percent having to be borrowed.
[b]Inflation in 1861[/b]
Inflation was moderate in 1861. Secretary Chase issued $33 million in demand notes, which were made receivable for all government dues and then reissued, and which the banks were pressured to receive on deposit and redeem in coin. In addition, he floated a $150 million bond issue in the form of three-year, 7.3 percent treasury notes. Chase insisted that the subscriptions be made in gold or in treasury notes. As the banking system of the time was a fractional reserve one, with a mixed currency of gold dollars, fractional silver coins, bank notes, and demand deposits, the massive transfer of gold to the government, plus the addition of $33 million in convertible government paper currency, drained bank reserves. As a result, the banks suspended specie payments in December, 1861.
This suspension was unprecedented in that it was not preceded by a financial panic or a sudden demand for coin. The banks were under no necessity to suspend, but they did so because of what they anticipated would happen in 1862. Confederate military victories in the summer of 1861 had dispelled the initial expectation of a short war. The banks now rightly expected heavy bond issues and more government paper currency. The results of the suspension were predictable. Gold coins ceased to circulate, and gold rose to a one or two percent premium against paper.
[b]The Legal Tender Act of February 1862[/b]
The Republicans were heirs of the soft-money tradition of Hamilton, Clay, and the Whigs, so they predictably turned to currency inflation to fund their expanding war. In 1862, they proposed a massive legal tender paper issue. Only a handful of hard-money northern Democrats remained in Congress to contest the measure. According to Sumner, "the spirit of the debate was that of panic." Republicans thrust aside economic objections as theoretical nonsense and dismissed historical warnings as irrelevant to American conditions. Many congressmen cited the example of the English Bank Restriction (1797–1821) as a reassuring precedent of the safety of an irredeemable currency. They seemed to be unaware that the pound had depreciated during this period and had never been made a legal tender.
When the catastrophe of the Continental dollar during the American Revolution or the assignats of the French Revolution was cited, Republicans responded by impugning the patriotism of the skeptics. Sumner wrote, "When the lessons of history were quoted they were answered by the flag and the eagle." One Republican congressman indignantly asked why the government should have to demean itself by having to "go into the streets to borrow money." Another intoned, "I prefer to assert the power and dignity of the government by the issue of its own notes." Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a longtime abolitionist and a leading Radical Republican, even made the astonishing and ignorant claim that making the government notes legal tender would prevent any depreciation in its value.
The economic rationale for legal tender paper money was made by Senator John Sherman of Ohio (the brother of General Sherman). His arguments were all disguised forms of the argument from necessity. The government needed money right away. The banks had exhausted their capital in buying bonds. There was not enough money in the country to fund the bonds. Gold and silver coin had ceased to circulate. Interest rates were too high. The issue of legal tender notes was a mere temporary expedient, and it could do no harm. What these arguments really meant was that Sherman wanted to command the full productive resources of the country for the war, and as the public was not willing to make the requisite sacrifice, they had to be coerced.
When Democrats pointed out, correctly, that the Constitution conferred no power to make government paper legal tender, and no one before 1861 had ever suggested it had such a power, Sherman replied that the necessity and righteousness of the cause overruled the Constitution. For him, the end justified the means. "As a member of this body, I am armed with high powers for a holy purpose, and I am authorized—nay, required—to vote for the laws necessary and proper for executing these high powers, and to accomplish that purpose. This is not the time when I would limit these powers. Rather than yield to revolutionary force, I would use revolutionary force." Legal tender paper money was indeed a revolutionary force.
The Legal Tender Act authorized the issue of $150 million in government currency and a bond issue of $500 million. The notes, soon known as "Greenbacks," were made legal tender for all private debts, receivable by the government for taxes and land sales (but not import duties), and were fundable into the bonds. The bonds bore six percent interest and were payable in 20 years, but redeemable after five. The Republican Senate had very cleverly added two specie amendments. One required import duties to be paid in gold, and the other that the interest on the bonds be paid out in gold. Senator Sherman explained their purpose. First, "It was felt that the duty on imported goods should not be lessened by any depreciation of our local currency." The protectionist Republicans were determined to preserve the restrictive character of the tariff by mandating that duties be paid in gold, instead of in a depreciated paper currency. Second, "This security of coin payment would enable the government to sell the bonds at a far higher rate than they would have commanded without it." A gold dividend would enhance the value of the bond.
The consequences of the legal tender law and emission of irredeemable notes were such as any economist would have expected. First, it destroyed American credit abroad. Foreigners dumped their holdings of American bonds and would not buy the war bonds. Second, it drove specie out of the country, much of it going to pay for the augmented imports incident to an inflated currency. Third, they depreciated. Fourth, the Treasury printed more. In July 1862, Congress approved a second issue of $150 million notes, and then a third issue of $100 million in January 1863 (increased by $50 million in March). Altogether, in four years, the government issued $480 million in legal tender notes, $43 million in fractional currency, and $60 million in demand notes. Of this sum, all but $75 million was outstanding in 1865. According to Sumner, the total currency in October 1865 was $704 million: $428 million greenbacks; $185 million national bank notes; $65 million state bank notes; and $26 million in fractional currency. Total currency in 1860 had been only $207 million. The currency supply had thus risen 240 percent in five years, an increase in 28 percent per annum. According to Rothbard, the total money supply (currency plus deposits and coin) rose from $745 million in 1860 to $1.7 billion in 1865, an increase of 128 percent, or 18 percent per annum.
There are two measures of the depreciation of the Greenback. One is to follow its downward spiral on the New York gold market. In March of 1862, a $100 basket of government currency could buy $98 in gold. By December of 1862, it could buy $76. A year later (December 1863) it could buy $66. By the summer of 1864, it reached its nadir, exchanging for $39 in gold. By December 1864, it rebounded to $44. Military victories and the growing certainty of Southern defeat caused it to rise to $74 in May, 1865, but it fell to $68 by December. The second is to mark the general rise in prices. From a base of 100 in 1860, prices rose to 217 in 1865, an increase of 117 percent, or 23 percent per annum. Not surprisingly, wages did not keep up. They rose only 43 percent in five years. Soldiers had it even worse. Their monthly pay remained $13 for the first three years of the war, and Congress did not raise it until May, 1864, and then by only $3 a month. The advance in prices increased both government expenditures and debt.
One of the effects of Greenback depreciation was to effect a massive redistribution of wealth. Soldiers and skilled laborers experienced a dramatic fall in income while government contractors made huge profits. Second, those who had surplus funds could afford to speculate with them, and thus make a profit off the rising and fluctuating prices incident to an inflationary period. Third, they could buy large quantities of government bonds (see below).
[b]Borrowing Phony Money to Fight a Real War[/b]
By the end of 1862, Chase had sold only $23.7 million in bonds out of the $500 million authorized in February. The reason? Chase had refused to sell the bonds below par. The Republican Congress ensured that this would not happen again in the great loan act of March, 1863. First, it authorized the treasury department to issue $900 million in a bewildering variety of short and long-term notes and bonds, at different rates of interest. Second, it required the secretary to sell the bonds at market value but to accept for their purchase the depreciated Greenbacks at par. That meant a creditor could purchase a 5/20 federal bond, that paid six percent annual interest in gold, with a currency worth only 65 cents on the dollar. As the currency continued to depreciate into 1864, this windfall would increase still more (by July, a creditor could purchase a bond with a currency worth only 39 cents in gold).
Not surprisingly, by December 1863, Chase had sold $400 million of the previous year's 5/20 bonds, and $75 million of the 1863 bonds. Chase came to see the wisdom of accepting depreciated paper at par. He wrote: "It required the printing and paying out of $400,000,000 of greenbacks before the five-twenty 6 percent bonds could be floated easily … , and it will probably require the circulating paper issues of the government, now amounting to about $625,000,000, to be increased to $650,000,000 or $700,000,000 before the people will be induced to take 5 percent bonds in order to get rid of the surplus circulation that may accumulate in their hands, that cannot be more profitably invested in other modes." An additional factor that increased the desirability and value of the bonds was the passage of the National Banking Act, in February 1863, for it required the national banks to buy bonds to back their notes. They could issue no more notes than the par value of the bond holdings.
An interesting measure of whether people lent their money to the government out of patriotism or greed is to contrast the percentage of all loans that were short-term versus long-term by year. In 1861–62, 85 percent of all loans were short-term (three years or less). In 1862–63, 71 percent of all loans were short-term. Only after Northern victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg in the summer of 1863 seemed to ensure the defeat of the Confederacy did long-term loans surpass short-term ones.
[b]The Postbellum Era: Contraction or Inflation?[/b]
According to Sumner, "The war being ended, the financial question took this form: Shall we withdraw the paper, recover specie, reduce prices, lessen imports, and live economically until we have made up the waste and loss of war, or shall we keep the paper as money, export all our specie which has hitherto been held in anticipation of resumption, buy foreign goods with it, and go on as if nothing had happened?" In other words, should the country return to hard money and correct at once the imbalances and malinvestments wrought by four years of inflation and war, or should it continue with soft money and attempt to perpetuate wartime boom. The majority Republicans again opted for inflation. Thus, the inflationary boom, inaugurated by the war and the Greenback, continued unabated until the panic of 1873 brought it to a close.
After the war, many Democrats wanted to pay off the debt in the depreciated greenback. It was known as the Ohio Idea. While this was just, it was not wise, as it perpetuated inflation and set a precedent of quasi-repudiation through inflation. The Democrats made it their major issue in the 1868 presidential campaign, and made its author, Senator Pendleton of Ohio, their vice presidential candidate. The Republicans now posed as the party of hard money and sound credit, and painted the Democrats as the party of inflation and repudiation. The Republican victory led to the passage of the Public Credit Act of 1869 mandating that government bonds be redeemed in gold.
[i]Historian Scott Trask is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute. hstrask@highstream.net. See his article archive[/i].
[b]Sources[/b]:
Davis Dewy, The Financial History of the United States (New York, 1902).
Murray Rothbard, History of Money and Banking (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2002).
William Graham Sumner, A History of American Currency (New York, 1874).
|
|
|
| |
| What Are We Doing in Russia's Neighborhood? |
| 02.04.04 (7:22 am) [edit] |
[b]What Are We Doing in Russia's Neighborhood?[/b], http://antiwar.com/pat/?artic...
Napoleon III, Emperor of France, saw his opportunity.
With the United States sundered and convulsed in civil war, he would seize Mexico, impose a Catholic monarchy and block further expansion of the American republic.
In 1863, a French army marched into Mexico City. In 1864, Maximilian, the brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, was crowned Emperor of Mexico. The French empire had returned to North America a century after its expulsion in 1763.
Secretary of State Seward did nothing until the Union armies had defeated the Confederacy. Then, he called in Gen. John Schofield, who had wanted to lead an army of volunteers into Mexico to drive the French out, and instructed him instead to go to Paris. "I want you to get your legs under Napoleon's mahogany and tell him he must get out of Mexico," Seward told Schofield. To impress upon Napoleon that the Union was in earnest, President Johnson, at the urging of Grant and Sherman, sent Gen. Sheridan with 40,000 troops to the Rio Grande.
Napoleon got the message. The French army headed for the boats, and Maximilian went before a Mexican firing squad.
[i]Lesson[/i]: Nations are unwise to seize upon the temporary weakness of a great power to put military forces inside its sphere of influence.
Which brings us to this headline in last week's [i]Washington Post[/i]: "U.S. May Set Up Bases in Former Soviet Republics."
The lead graph reads like something out of the [i]London Times [/i]in the salad days of Kipling and Queen Victoria: "Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that the United States might establish military bases in parts of the former Soviet empire, but he sought to reassure Russians that increased U.S. influence in the region does not pose a threat to them." With bases already in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, we apparently intend to build a base in Georgia, birthplace of Stalin.
[i]Query[/i]: What are we doing there? What is the strategic interest in Georgia? Tiblisi is about as far away as one can get. Why are we rubbing Russia's nose in her Cold War defeat by putting U.S. imperial troops into nations that only yesterday were a part of that country? Powell anticipated the question: "Are we pointing a dagger in the soft underbelly of Russia? Of course not. What we're doing is working together against terrorism."
But after Iraq, where we invaded an oil-rich country on what the world believes were false pretenses and forged evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, why should Russians not suspect our motives?
After all, the neoconservatives who beat the drums loudest for war, and cherry-picked the intelligence sent to Bush that got us into war, have been braying for years that we intend to create an American empire and impose our "benevolent global hegemony" on all mankind.
Why should Russians, Chinese and Iranians not believe America's crusader castles in Central Asia and the Caucasus are not part of a grand scheme for a Pax Americana?
Have we forgotten our history? When Reagan put Marines into the middle of Lebanon's civil war, 241 perished in the terrorist bombing of their Beirut barracks. Reagan retaliated, but got out. He should never have gone in. Who runs Beirut or rules Lebanon is not our business.
When we intervened in Somalia's civil war, we got "Blackhawk Down" in Mogadishu and 18 dead Rangers. Again, we pulled out. We should never have gone in. When we planted a U.S. army on Saudi soil after the Gulf War, we got 9-11. Now we have pulled out of there.
How often must we be taught the lesson?
Have we considered the consequences of planting military bases in countries afflicted by Islamic fundamentalism and ruled by autocrats who, only 15 years ago, were apparatchiks of Moscow?
A U.S. imperial presence in Central Asia and the Caucasus resented by Russia, Iran and China and detested by Islamists is less likely to contain terrorism than to invite it.
Even a cursory reading of U.S. history shows us to be an almost paranoid people about any foreign military presence near our frontiers. The French, British, Spanish and Russians were all bought off or driven out. Moscow's presence in Cuba and meddling in Grenada and Nicaragua in the Cold War were constant causes of American outrage.
But if we are entitled to our own Monroe Doctrine – i.e., no foreign colonies or bases in our backyard – are not other great nations like China and Russia equally entitled? Why should they not feel as we do, and one day act as we did with Napoleon, and tell us to get out of Central Asia and to get out of the Caucasus?
But, again, why are we going in? Other than empire, what is the vital interest here?
- [i]Patrick J. Buchanan[/i]
|
|
|
| |
| Blame the Masters, Not the Servants ... |
| 02.04.04 (7:17 am) [edit] |
[b]Blame the Masters, Not the Servants[/b], http://politics.guardian.co.u...,12956,1137568,00.html
On September 2 2002, the Hutton report reminds us, I quoted in the Guardian a source who told me: "The dossier will no longer play a role. There's very little new to put in it." The next day, Tony Blair, just back from a visit to George Bush, said the government would publish a new dossier on Iraq's weapons programme. My source was completely wrong on his first point, completely right on his second. He knew what was in the existing dossier and the weak case it made for military action against Iraq.
He could not believe that the government could use a dossier based on what little British intelligence really knew about the state of Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programme to justify war.
The answer, we now know, is that Blair and his closest advisers were determined to abuse intelligence to produce a document to try and convince parliamentary and public opinion to back an invasion of Iraq. A train of events was set in motion leading to the greatest scandal involving the intelligence agencies in modern times.
The scandal is all the greater since the published dossier was used to support a decision which, according to senior Whitehall officials, was made not as a result of anything it contained, but simply because of Bush's decision to go to war. It is inconceivable, they say, that Blair would have allowed Bush to go to war on his own. Whatever Bush does, Blair is not far behind. But that position, the prime minister learned yesterday, is not always comfortable. Bush's decision to set up an inquiry into the issue of intelligence and Iraqi WMD left Blair with no choice but to set up his own.
A UN security council resolution supporting an attack on Iraq would have got Blair out of a corner. But as the chances of that were thin, a convincing dossier painting a picture of an Iraq building up a dangerous arsenal of WMD that threatened British interests was essential. The intelligence agencies were told to come up with scarier information than the original dossier contained. Robin Cook and Clare Short, who both saw the intelligence reports, said last night it would be unfair to blame the agencies for exaggerating the threat.
There is ample evidence from what the Hutton inquiry heard - though the former law lord chose to ignore it - showing how Downing Street, notably Alastair Campbell, succeeded in persuading intelligence chiefs to "sex up" the dossier. The dossier, Campbell told the inquiry, had to be "revelatory, we needed to show it was new and informative, and part of a bigger case".
Hutton notes that a draft of the preface to be signed by Blair contained the phrase: "The case I make is not that Saddam could launch a nuclear attack on London or another part of the UK (he could not)." It was taken out of the published version. That was a sin of omission. There was plenty left in Blair's preface - and the dossier - that has a hollow ring to it now. Saddam's WMD programme, Blair said at the time, "is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working".
Just as the CIA was bullied by elements in the White House and the Pentagon, here senior intelligence officials succumbed to pressure from Downing Street. They say the hyping up was done by the politicians, not by them. There is, however, one glaring example for which intelligence chiefs, as much as ministers, have yet to answer. The claim that Iraqi forces could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes is made more than once in the dossier, most emphatically in Blair's preface. Scarlett told the inquiry the claim referred only to short-range, battlefield weapons, not long-range missiles as the dossier implied. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, reflected his frustration just once - telling Hutton that MPs' criticisms of the way the 45-minute claim was described in the dossier were "valid".
Whitehall officials now privately admit it was dishonest to describe the 45-minute claim as "recent intelligence", since it could have been gleaned from old Iraqi military manuals. "Why now and why Saddam?" asked Ann Taylor, chair of parliament's intelligence and security committee when she first saw the dossier. The same questions were being asked by intelligence chiefs. The fight against terrorism was far more important, and an attack on Iraq would make it more difficult, a view echoed yesterday by the Commons foreign affairs committee.
The intelligence agencies are servants to their elected political masters. Blaming them for bowing to Downing Street's demands would be a bit rich. These are the issues an inquiry must address. They are more crucial at a time when Blair has adopted Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, whose success or failure - and legality - will depend on accurate, not politicised, intelligence.
· [i]Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian's security affairs editor[/i].
|
|
|
| |
| WMD-gate: Bush/Cheney Wants to Scapegoat CIA |
| 02.03.04 (7:11 am) [edit] |
[b]WMD-gate: Bush Wants to Scapegoat CIA[/b], http://antiwar.com/lobe/?arti...
Badly wounded by the total collapse of its prewar contentions that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the administration of President George W. Bush has embarked on a strategy of diversion and delay.
It hopes to divert attention from the role played by senior administration officials in influencing and exaggerating the intelligence assessments of the Iraqi threat in the run-up to the war by focusing debate instead on flaws in the intelligence and how it can be improved in the future.
It hopes to delay until well after the November presidential elections the reporting deadline for a proposed commission that will study the fiasco.
"This is damage control," said one Congressional aide, who added the president's reelection chances might well hinge on whether he is able to pull off the strategy. "Bush wants to get this out of the headlines and into a commission that won't say anything until he's reelected."
Bush, who is helped by the fact that Republicans control key committees in Congress, appears able to count as well on David Kay, whose statements after he resigned as the man in charge of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD), in Iraq last week set off the White House's latest maneuvers.
Kay's admission that "we were almost all wrong" about Iraq's WMD stockpiles and alleged reconstitution of a nuclear-weapons program, and his endorsement of the proposal to create a commission to examine the causes of the intelligence failures initially forced the administration on the defensive.
But, in absolving the administration of the charge of pressuring the intelligence community's analysts to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq's alleged WMD programs, Kay threw Bush a life preserver.
But to veteran intelligence analysts, Kay's life preserver could more accurately be called a lie preserver.
In their view, the professional intelligence community did indeed make serious mistakes. But they charge as well that the administration effectively encouraged it to make those mistakes and, to make matters worse, deliberately exaggerated the assessments to make the Iraqi threat sound more ominous than even the intelligence community's flawed reports said it was.
"Did the intelligence shape policy, or did the policy shape intelligence"? asked Melvin Goodman, a top Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Soviet expert during the Cold War who currently teaches at the National War College.
Like other intelligence veterans who have remained in touch with their former colleagues, Goodman says Kay's assertions the administration did not pressure analysts are simply "wrong."
"I've talked with analysts at CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and they all claim there was tremendous pressure put on them," Goodman told IPS.
The fact, according to Goodman, that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created an Office of Special Plans (OSP) outside the formal intelligence channels with the specific mandate to reassess raw intelligence in order to find alleged links between Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist group suggests the administration was applying that pressure in unconventional ways.
"When Rumsfeld couldn't get what he wanted, he created his OSP," Goodman said. "That really gives away the whole game right there."
Other retired analysts, such as the CIA's former top counter-terrorist specialist, Vincent Cannistraro, have cited Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated trips to CIA headquarters to personally question analysts as another example of how pressure was exerted on analysts.
Greg Thielmann, a WMD specialist at the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research who worked on Iraq until his retirement in late 2002, also disputes Kay's assertion the administration had nothing to do with the intelligence failure.
"Everyone knew that the White House was deaf to any information that would not substantiate its charges; that is a very unproductive environment for any intellectual inquiry," he said in a telephone interview.
"The White House was never searching for the truth; it was searching for arguments to make the case for war," he continued. "They were searching for evidence to support the conclusions they had already reached."
"The perfect example is what the White House did not do in February, 2003, after U.N. inspectors had been on the ground in Iraq for three months looking under roofs, examining facilities, interviewing weapons scientists, and giving us a lot better and fresher information base than we had had for the previous four years," according to Thielmann.
"As far as I know, the White House never asked the intelligence community to update their October (2002) assessment to see whether any of its key judgments about Iraq should be modified in light of what the inspectors were seeing on the ground.”
"And the reason is that the administration did not care what was going on on the ground. It was interested in going to war and convincing the American people and the international community that war was necessary," he said.
The analysts' views about the way in which the administration's drive to war affected the intelligence assessments are largely shared by Democrats on the two congressional intelligence committees that have been investigating the performance of the intelligence community for months behind closed doors.
The committees, however, have split along partisan lines over the same question. Republicans have insisted that what faults have been uncovered lie exclusively with the intelligence professionals, while Democrats say they have accumulated evidence of constant pressure and interference by senior administration figures, particularly senior Pentagon officials, Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
But Republican control of the two intelligence committees means the administration has been able to effectively limit the scope of their investigations, making it far more difficult for Democrats to obtain additional evidence by forcing key officials to testify or to publicize their findings.
Democrats are clearly worried that a Bush-appointed presidential commission will be similarly limited in what it can or cannot investigate.
They are also concerned that the commission's work schedule might be designed to bury the issue of whether the administration deliberately misled the country into going to war until after the elections.
"You don't take national security and say, 'oh, let's just put it on hold for a year, until an election is over'," the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller, told Fox News on Sunday.
The administration is already pressuring the commission established to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon to either publish its final report by its May 29 deadline – six months before the elections – or to wait until early next year if it needs more time, presumably so as not to influence the elections.
Members of that body, which is headed by former Republican New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean but evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, have complained administration delays have pushed back its work schedule, but that they could finish its report by July or August.
-[i] Jim Lobe[/i]
|
|
|
| |
| U.S. Officials Blame Cheney For Intelligence Failures |
| 02.03.04 (7:08 am) [edit] |
[b]Iraq intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified errors, officials say[/b], http://www.sanluisobispo.com/...
[b]WASHINGTON - (KRT)[/b] - What went wrong with intelligence on Iraq will never be known unless the inquiry proposed by President Bush examines secret intelligence efforts led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon hawks, current and former U.S officials said Monday.
The officials said they feared that Bush, gearing up his fight for re-election, would try to limit the inquiry's scope to the CIA and other agencies, and ignore the key role the administration's own internal intelligence efforts played in making the case for war.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, didn't dispute that the CIA failed to accurately assess the state of Iraq's weapons programs. But they said that the intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions.
Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaida and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies, the officials said.
"There were more agencies than CIA providing intelligence ... that are worth scrutiny, including the (Pentagon's now-disbanded) Office of Special Plans and the office of the vice president," said a former senior military official who was involved in planning the Iraq invasion.
Some of the disputed findings were presented as facts to Americans as Bush drummed up his case for war.
Those findings included charges of cooperation between Saddam and al-Qaida, Cheney's assertion that Iraq had rebuilt its nuclear weapons program and would "soon" have a nuclear bomb, and Bush's contention in his 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam was seeking nuclear bomb-making material from Africa.
Senior officials on Monday revealed new details of how Cheney's office pressed Secretary of State Colin Powell to use large amounts of disputed intelligence in a February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council laying out the U.S. case for an invasion.
A senior administration official said that during a three-day pre-speech review, Powell rejected more than half of a 45-page assessment on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction compiled by Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, and based on materials assembled by pro-invasion hard-liners in the Pentagon and the White House.
Powell also jettisoned 75 percent of a separate report on al-Qaida, said the official.
Still, he said, Libby continued pressing Powell unsuccessfully right up until a few minutes before the speech to include dubious information purportedly linking Saddam to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Bush said Monday he would name an independent bipartisan commission to review intelligence failures in Iraq. It would also look at what is known about efforts by Iran, North Korea and terrorist groups to obtain nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Two congressional committees, an internal CIA board and a White House advisory panel are already reviewing the Iraq intelligence.
Bush's decision to name an independent commission followed assertions by David Kay, who quit last month as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, that Saddam had not hidden the banned chemical and biological warfare stockpiles. The president had cited such weapons as his prime justification for the March invasion.
Bush and GOP leaders in Congress had resisted a demand by Democrats for an independent review of the Iraq intelligence, but calls by Kay and key Republicans last week for such an inquiry forced the president to reconsider.
"I want to know all the facts," Bush told reporters after a Cabinet meeting.
He insisted, however, that the war and occupation - in which more than 500 U.S. troops have died - were justified because Saddam had failed to halt all illicit weapons activities in violation of numerous U.N. resolutions.
"Saddam Hussein had the intent and capabilities to cause great harm," Bush asserted.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the membership and duration of the independent commission weren't settled. He skirted the question of whether the panel would examine whether Bush and his top aides exaggerated or misrepresented intelligence on Iraq.
"I'm not going to get into the scope issues at this point," he said.
Top Democratic lawmakers said Bush should allow Congress to appoint the commission and determine the scope and duration of its inquiry.
"One of the major questions that needs to be addressed is whether senior administration officials ... misled the Congress and the public about the nature of the threat from Iraq. Even some of your own statements and those of Vice President Cheney need independent scrutiny. A commission appointed and controlled by the White House will not have the independence or credibility necessary to investigate these issues," Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D., S.D.) and four other senior Democrats wrote in a letter to Bush.
The former and current officials said that an objective inquiry would require the panel to look at the roles that Cheney, his office and his neoconservative allies at the Pentagon played in collecting and analyzing intelligence on Iraq.
Reviewing what the CIA did "is half the picture," said Melvin Goodman, a former senior CIA analyst who teaches at the National Defense University. "What you want is an open-ended, blue-ribbon inquiry of the whole picture, which is what (intelligence) the White House got and how the White House used what it got."
Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld have long expressed serious doubts about the CIA's abilities.
Cheney, according to a senior U.S. official, began visiting the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency during his first days in office for briefings on Iraq and other pressing national security issues.
His staff collected intelligence on Iraq from sources such as newspapers, as well as from regular intelligence channels and from internal Pentagon initiatives directed by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
Those efforts, according to the current and former U.S. officials, combined raw intelligence from the CIA and DIA with information from defectors and Iraqi exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi, now a member of the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council.
The CIA and State Department saw Chalabi, who is close to neoconservatives inside and outside the administration, as an unreliable source of information with a self-interest in pressing the case for Saddam's ouster.
The senior administration official said the assessments on illicit weapons, al-Qaida and human rights in Iraq that Libby pressed on Powell were products of Cheney's office and Feith's efforts.
The bulk of the work on illicit weapons and al-Qaida links was rejected after representatives from Cheney's office failed in a 10-hour meeting to show that the materials were from reliable sources, he said.
He said that materials rejected as dubious or false included:
_Sept. 11 terrorist Mohamed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, the Czech Republic, five months before the attacks;
_Iraqi efforts to purchase software from an Australian company to use for mapping the East Coast of the United States;
_Satellite pictures that Libby insisted showed Iraq possessed robot aircraft capable of spraying lethal chemicals;
_A chronology of contacts "going back years" between Iraqi officials and al-Qaida. "These pages put the two in contact, but they didn't prove a damn thing," said the senior official, who added that follow-up reports showed that "in meeting after meeting Iraq rebuffed al-Qaida, that Saddam had serious differences reconciling fundamentalist Islam with secular Iraq."
Still, Powell included in his U.N. speech charges that Iraq had provided chemical and biological warfare training to several al-Qaida members and that he had helped an al-Qaida-linked group produce crude poisons.
[i]BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY, WARREN P. STROBEL AND JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY, Knight Ridder Newspapers[/i]
|
|
|
| |
| The Cheney Liability |
| 02.03.04 (7:05 am) [edit] |
[b]The Cheney Liability[/b], http://www.tompaine.com/featu...
[b]While Democratic rivals battle it out for the presidential nomination, Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be fighting to secure his spot on the Republican ticket behind President George W. Bush[/b].
The vice president, whose moderation and 35-year Washington experience reassured voters worried about Bush's callowness and inexperience during the 2000 campaign, is seen more and more by Republican politicos as a drag on the president's re-election chances in what is universally expected to be an extremely close race.
The reasons are simple: instead of the moderate voice of wisdom and caution that voters thought they were getting in the vice president, ongoing disclosures about his role in the drive to war in Iraq and other controversial administration initiatives depict him as an extremist who constantly pushed for the most radical measures.
[b]Closet Skeletons [/b]
Not just an extremist, but also a kind of eminence grise who exercises undue influence over Bush to promote a radical agenda, a notion that was furthered by the publication of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's recent book,describing Cheney as creating a "kind of praetorian guard around the president" that blocked out contrary views.
In addition, Cheney's association with Halliburton, the giant construction and oil company which he headed for much of the 1990s and which gobbled up billions of dollars in contracts for Iraq's post-war reconstruction, is growing steadily as a major political liability.
Indeed, Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trial are already using Halliburton's rhythmic, four-syllable name (Hal'-li-bur-ton, Hal'-li-bur-ton) as a mantra that neatly taps into the public's growing concerns on Iraq and disgust with crony capitalism and corporate greed all at the same time.
Reports surfaced already two months ago that a discreet "dump-Cheney" movement had been launched by intimate associates of Bush's father—his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and secretary of state, James Baker, who now has a White House appointment as Bush's personal envoy to persuade official creditors to substantially reduce Iraq's $110 billion foreign debt.
In addition to their perception that Cheney's presence would harm Bush's re-election chances, the two men, who battled frequently with the vice president when he was defense secretary under the first Bush administration, have privately expressed great concern over the Cheney's unparalleled influence over the younger Bush and the damage that it has done to U.S. relations with long-time allies, particularly in Europe and the Arab world.
[b]Damage Control [/b]
Cheney's unprecedented rounds of press interviews earlier this month, as well as his trip this week to Switzerland and Italy—only the second time the vice president has traveled abroad in three years—should be seen in this context.
"I think he knows that he's in trouble," noted one prominent Republican activist, who thinks Cheney should be dropped. "I don't think there's any other way to explain why he would sit for a puerile interview for the (Washington Post's) "Style" section. You know he despises that sort of thing."
Cheney's travel and sudden and abundant press availability was noted in Tuesday's New York Times which described his behavior as "a calculated election-year makeover to temper his hard-line image at home and abroad."
What was remarkable, however, is that he may only have confirmed the growing impression that he remains a zealot, an impression that was especially pronounced in an interview he gave National Public Radio (NPR) last week.
Cheney not only insisted that the major stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) may still be found in Iraq, he also asserted that two semi-trailer trucks found in Iraq during the war constituted "conclusive evidence" of WMD programmes.
Both assertions were almost instantly refuted by none other than the administration's outgoing chief weapons inspector, David Kay. In a series of statements published after Cheney's NPR broadcast, Kay said he had concluded that the WMD stockpiles were destroyed in the early 1990s and that the two trailers were intended to introduce hydrogen for weather balloons or possibly rocket fuel, but had nothing to do with WMD.
In the same NPR interview, Cheney also insisted there was "overwhelming evidence" of an "established relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, citing as one clue Hussein's alleged harboring of a suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.
But the notion of such an "established relationship" in any operational sense has now been virtually totally discarded by the intelligence community, and Bush and other senior officials have largely dropped the issue.
Moreover, the FBI and other intelligence agencies that investigated the 1993 bombing and the subsequent residence Iraq of Abdul Rahman Yasin, a low-level suspect, never found any evidence that Iraq was actively protecting him or that he was linked to Iraqi intelligence in any way.
[b]Image Problems[/b]
Indeed, the fact that Cheney would cite Yasin at this late date suggested that he still clings to a theory developed in the 1990s by Iraq specialist Laurie Mylroie at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that Al Qaeda was actually a front for Iraqi intelligence, a notion that is completely dismissed by the intelligence community.
In a recent Washington Monthly article based on interviews with numerous intelligence officials involved in the bombing investigation, Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc., a highly regarded book on Al Qaeda, concluded that Mylroie was, "in short, a crackpot."
In a second interview, Cheney told USA Today that he was not worried about his image as the administration's Machiavelli skilled in the quiet arts of persuading his "Prince" to pursue questionable policies, adding, surprisingly un-self-consciously, "Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It's a nice way to operate, actually."
But whether Cheney likes it or not, he is increasingly seen that way, by Democrats, by Republican internationalists like Baker and Scowcroft, and, perhaps, most significantly for purposes of Bush's re-election prospects, by a growing number of traditionally Republican right-wingers and libertarians who are worried about the exploding costs of the "war on terror" on the country's fiscal health, individual liberties, and armed forces. They also blame Cheney for being administration's key backer and enabler of the neo-conservative vision of a never-ending war against radical Islam which they believe will only accelerate current trends.
''So Dick Cheney turns out to be a true radical—not a moderate Republican," noted Georgie Anne Geyer, a nationally syndicated columnist, who compared the vice president to Cardinal Richelieu of 17th century France in a cover article for this week's edition of American Conservative.
''While there is little mystery about what he has actually done, there remains the mystery of how a man from Wyoming should be the epicenter of a scheme so strange, so Machiavellian, so profoundly disaggregated from the American context'', she wrote. ''But no one should expect Dick Cheney and his group (of neoconservatives) to change. They will not."
In a case of particularly bad timing, Cheney's image as a manipulative schemer was furthered again this week just as he was trying to reassure Europeans about his moderation and commitment to multilateralism.
A new book on Tony Blair, by author and Financial Times correspondent Philip Stephens, depicts Cheney as the surprise guest at key meetings between Bush and the British prime minister. It quotes one Blair aide as complaining that Cheney ''waged a guerrilla war'' against London's efforts to seek UN approval before the war.
The book concludes that Cheney constantly ''sought to undermine the prime minister privately'' and quotes him as telling another senior official more than six months before the war, ''Once we have victory in Baghdad, all the critics will look like fools."
Despite Hussein's capture, however, that "victory" still looks rather tenuous, and, what with recent polls showing Cheney's favourability rating at less than half of Bush's at a mere 20 percent and falling, so may Cheney's claim to the number two spot on the Republican ticket.
[i]Jim Lobe writes for Inter Press Service, an international newswire, and for Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the New Mexico-based Interhemispheric Resource Center[/i].
|
|
|
| |
| Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road? ... Dubya Had To Escape The Protestors! |
| 02.02.04 (1:27 pm) [edit] |
[b]Dubya [i]Ain't[/i] Stupid? ... He he he![/b]
In the light of all the criticism that George Bush is an idiot, the Republicans decide to hold a "George Bush Is Not Stupid" convention. Eighty thousand Republicans meet in the Kansas City Chiefs Stadium.
Trent Lott says, "We are all here today to prove to the world that George Bush is not stupid. So ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce President George Bush."
After the cheers die down. Lott says "Mr. President, we're going to prove to the world once and for all that you are not stupid. So tell us, what is 15 plus 15?"
Bush, after scrunching up his face and concentrating real hard for a moment, declares, "Eighteen!"
Obviously everyone is a little disappointed. Then the 80,000 Republicans start cheering, "Give Bush another chance! Give Bush another chance!"
Trent Lott says, "Well since we've gone to the trouble of getting 80,000 of you in one place, I guess we can do that." So he asks, "What is 5 plus 5?"
After nearly 30 seconds of chin-rubbing and grimacing, Bush meekly asks "Ninety?"
Trent Lott is quite perplexed, looks down and just lets out a dejected sigh -- everyone is disheartened.
But then Bush starts pouting, and suddenly the 80,000 Republicans begin to yell and wave their hands, shouting again "Give Bush another chance! Give Bush another chance!"
Lott, unsure whether he's doing more harm than good, eventually says, "Ok! Ok! Just one more chance -- What is 2 plus 2?"
Bush looks down, counts on his fingers, and after a whole minute, proudly announces "Four."
A moment of total silence, then an electric charge surges through the stadium as pandemonium breaks out.
All 80,000 Republicans jump to their feet.
These GOP partisans start to wave their arms, stomp their feet and create a deafening roar:
"GIVE BUSH ANOTHER CHANCE! GIVE BUSH ANOTHER CHANCE!"
|
|
|
| |
| No Iraqi Sovereignty IF US Forces Stay |
| 02.02.04 (6:53 am) [edit] |
[b]No Iraqi Sovereignty IF US Forces Stay[/b], http://www.dailystar.com.lb/o...
As the date for the formal transfer of sovereignty approaches in Iraq, attention is focused upon crafting a political process that will advance this objective. Yet if returning Iraq to the Iraqis is so important, it would be better to determine how to withdraw the well over 100,000 American soldiers who are settling in for an extended military occupation.
US officials, particularly those in the Department of Defense, have always insisted that the political and security tracks in Iraq proceed independently of one another. As the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen | |
