During the Vietnam war a bootleg tape called “What the Captain Meant to Say” circulated among the press corps. It purported to be the recording of a press interview in which an Air Force pilot repeated puts his foot in it and a Public Affairs Officer repeatedly breaks in to clear up the mess. A sample from memory:

Pilot: We were trying to hit the Dim Sum Bridge, but we must have missed the son of a bitch by a good half mile at least.

P.R.O: What the captain meant to say was that his squadron cratered the approaches to the Dim Sum Bridge.

Along the same lines, here’s what our Pigmy President said five years ago tomorrow on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln:

“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush said at the time … The “Mission Accomplished” banner was prominently displayed above him — a move the White House came to regret as the display was mocked and became a source of controversy …

“The banner should have been much more specific and said Mission Accomplished for These Sailors Who are on This Ship on Their Mission,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday.

The excerpts below come from a disturbing story in today’s Washington Post. What possible reason could Iran have to be “hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons?” Possibly because the warhogs in the White House, having demonstrated that our existing military is either too small or too mismanaged to pacify a hostile nation of 28 million, are now hell-bent on invading a hostile nation of 65 million?

As for Mullen, what is he, nuts? Navy and Air Force reservists are no doubt capable of killing large numbers of Iranian civilians from a safe distance, but not all 65 million of them. Who’s going to keep the survivors subdued once the shock and awe are over? Read the papers, Mullen. Suicides, epidemic stress disorders, revolving door troop rotations, recruiting felons. On and on. Get real, Mullen. Tell our pigmy president the truth for once, and then retire with honor.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a conflict with Iran would be “extremely stressing” but not impossible for U.S. forces, pointing to reserve capabilities in the Navy and Air Force.

“It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability,” he said at a Pentagon news conference. Speaking of Iran’s intentions, Mullen said: “They prefer to see a weak Iraq neighbor. . . . They have expressed long-term goals to be the regional power…”

In a speech Monday, [Defense Secrtary] Gates said Iran “is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.” He said war would be “disastrous” but added that “the military option must be kept on the table, given the destabilizing policies of the regime and the risks inherent in a future Iranian nuclear threat.”

In my opinion the single greatest issue arising from the immoral and inept and illegal Bush/Cheney misadministration is the blowback likely to be generated by the disasters we’ve wreaked around the world. We’ve made enemies of literally millions of people in Iraq alone; five million refugees, internal and external, plus a million dead, and who knows how many lives and bodies left shattered, most of them not initially predisposed to despising us. An economy and social structure in ruins; existing political instabilities exaggerated throughout the region; American and Israeli strength increasingly intertwined, and thus suspicion and guilt increasingly collective in nature.

How will Americans process that knowledge?

My guess is they’ll start with denial, but that river ain’t flowin’. We try to follow our beloved President down the cherry-blossom path, but like him we keep finding ourselves bewildered and deserted. Dana Milbank lists the countries whose governments have changed hands in one sense or another as polities around the world reject the Cheney approach. Spain, Italy, Poland, Japan, Britain, and Australia have all substituted Bush doubters for the Bush promoters who helped, or at least didn’t complain about, the war.

Bush’s pariah status has turned his Coalition of the Willing into a retirement community and given the president an unusual role in the domestic affairs of other countries. In Australia, one of Rudd’s predecessors as Labor leader, Mark Latham, got the top job after describing Bush as “the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory.” He further described members of Howard’s government as a “conga line of suckholes” to Bush.

Howard, in turn, expressed a view that al-Qaeda terrorists would be praying for a 2008 victory by Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular.

Bush enjoyed this mutual affection. “I can tell you, relations are great right now,” he said last year in Sydney, which was all but shut down by security measures needed to keep him safe.

Relations are perhaps not quite so great now, but Bush put on a brave face as he welcomed Rudd to the White House Friday. He called the 50-year-old premier a “fine lad” and even praised Rudd’s decision to pull out of Iraq. “I always like to be in the presence of somebody who does what he says he’s going to do,” Bush reasoned.

Rudd, touched by Bush’s manner, said he was designating the president as “an honorary Queenslander,” after the prime minister’s home state.

Will international hostility toward us decrease, as we flush the Bush presidency down the memory hole at top speed while people around the world continue to suffer from our latest war of aggression? Probably it will; there seem to be signs in international polls that the current political campaign has helped our image abroad, if only in showing a lot more engagement by Americans than the world has recently seen from us, and in reminding us all that the nightmare will soon end.

Now the question is, what do we do about it? By “it”, I mean the whole shebang. The Bush wars and the disasters they’ve created, not confined to Afghanistan and Iraq. The loss of honor involved in the revelations of systematic and institutionalized torture. The direct assaults on privacy and civil liberties. And perhaps most disgusting and frightening of all, the attempts to rob us of our most basic American right, to cast a vote that counts toward the decisions we as a nation must make.

If at this transitional moment we succumb to the ease of the remote and switch to another channel, we’ll miss a tremendous opportunity. We could recoup a large amount of the global goodwill that flooded our way after 9/11 if we were to repudiate the conduct and aims of the previous presidency. This to my knowledge the US has never done, but we need to make explicit public record that Bush, Cheney, et.al., violated both the letter and the spirit of our national institutions, and many cases our laws as well.

By default, those institutions will remain in their current configurations, ready for use by the next occupant of the Oval Office. Doubtless, the three most likely occupants will all employ the office with greater reverence for tradition and international coöperation than the current one. But will the next President agree to make warrantless wiretaps illegal? Or will we just agree to define “warrant” and “wiretap” so that whatever we’re currently doing is now okay?

The real question is whether the November election will bring the US to a realistic operating posture with respect to the rest of the world. We no longer dominate. We never should have tried. We can still lead by example, if we admit our mistakes and try to fix them. Or we can hunker down and wait for the incoming, hoping to be raptured.

From the Wikipedia:

The Banality of Evil is a phrase coined in 1963 by Hannah Arendt in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem. It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

From an article in the Washington Post about John Yoo’s long concealed memorandum:

“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network,” Yoo wrote. “In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a “national and international version of the right to self-defense,” Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations — that it must “shock the conscience” — that the Bush administration advocated for years.

“Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is without any justification,” Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be prosecuted.

Kurt Vonnegut:

So it goes.

Don Heiny sends this:

Well, I say that the Democratic Party changed. The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000. It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will — and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me. I’m a Democrat who came to the party in the era of President John F. Kennedy. It’s a strange turn of the road when I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain.

The speaker is the despicable Joe Lieberman, on ABC this morning. Here is some earlier moralizing from Holy Joe, Likud’s man in Connecticut and soon to be, if his wettest dreams come true, McCain’s man on the GOP ticket this fall:

WASHINGTON — Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman reluctantly acknowledged Thursday that he does not believe waterboarding is torture, but believes the interrogation technique should be available only under the most extreme circumstances…

The difference, he said, is that waterboarding is mostly psychological and there is no permanent physical damage. "It is not like putting burning coals on people's bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological," Lieberman said.

Connecticut resident Jerry Doolittle reluctantly acknowledges that he would rather have just about anybody as his senator but Torture Boy Lieberman. In fact I once put my vote where my mouth is.

It was in 2000, when a Republican no-hoper named Philip Giordano was running against Lieberman for the senate seat that Holy Joe was clinging to for dear life while simultaneously dragging down the national Democratic ticket as the vice presidential candidate.

I only knew two things about Giordano. One was that he was mayor of Waterbury, which is significant in Connecticut politics. It signifies that you haven’t been indicted yet, but hold your horses. You’ll get there soon enough.

The second thing I knew was that Giordano wasn’t Joe Lieberman, which left me with no option but to cast the first vote of my life for a Republican.

Meanwhile the FBI had already been quietly investigating Giordano for corruption, a process which is triggered more or less automatically when a new Waterbury mayor takes office.

During “Operation LandPhil,” as the Bureau called it, the wiretappers snapped to attention one day when they overheard Giordano making arrangements with a local prostitute to bring two girls, aged nine and ten, to his office for oral sex. Now the former Marine is doing 37 years in federal prison.

And still I don’t regret my vote. I’d rather be represented in the Senate by a pedophile than by a whiny, smarmy, sanctimonious warmonger with the blood of innumerable nine- and ten-year-old girls on his hands.

— thanks to Iran:

BAGHDAD — Iranian officials helped broker a cease-fire agreement Sunday between Iraq’s government and radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, according to Iraqi lawmakers.

The deal could help defuse a wave of violence that had threatened recent security progress in Iraq. It also may signal the growing regional influence of Iran, a country the Bush administration accuses of providing support to terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere.

Al-Sadr ordered his forces off the streets of Iraq on Sunday. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hailed al-Sadr’s action as “a step in the right direction.” It was unclear whether the deal would completely end six days of clashes between U.S.-backed Iraqi forces and Shiite militias, including al-Sadr’s…

Mark Danner is an exceptionally useful citizen who teaches journalism at Bard College and the University of California at Berkeley. What follows are excerpts from a long piece that I hope you’ll be tempted to read in full. Professor Danner has given an explanation as intelligent and convincing as any I’ve seen of why we were dragged into Bush’s Folly in the first place. As to a plan of escape, he has none. No “peace with honor” is by now possible, any more than it was in Kennedy’s, Johnson’s and Nixon’s Folly.

Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on “terrorism” — a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target — was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, “Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.…”

That broader story comes down to a matter of two strategies and two generals: General Osama bin Laden and General George W. Bush. General bin Laden, from the start, has been waging a campaign of indirection and provocation: that is, bin Laden’s ultimate targets are the so-called apostate regimes of the Muslim world — foremost among them, the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the House of Saud on the Arabian peninsula — which he hopes to overthrow and supplant with a New Caliphate.

For bin Laden, these are the “near enemies,” which rely for their existence on the vital support of the “far enemy,” the United States. By attacking this far enemy, beginning in the mid-1990s, bin Laden hoped both to lead vast numbers of new Muslim recruits to join Al Qaeda and to weaken U.S. support for the Mubarak and Saud regimes. He hoped to succeed, through indirection, in “cutting the strings of the puppets,” eventually leading to the collapse of those regimes…

The latter perception — that terrorism as it struck the United States arose from political factors and that it could only be confronted and defeated with a political response — strikes me as incontestable. The problem the administration faced, or rather didn’t want to face, was that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the very order that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded, and sustained by the United States.

We see an explicit acknowledgment of this in the “Bletchley II” report drafted after 9/11 at Defense Department urging by a number of intellectuals close to the administration: “The general analysis,” one of its authors told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important ... But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with. But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable ...”

The United States has made possible the rise to power in Iraq of a Shiite government which is allied with its major geopolitical antagonist in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran. And the United States has been fighting with great persistence and distinctly mixed results a Sunni insurgency which is allied with the Saudis, the Jordanians, and its other longtime friends among the traditional Sunni autocracies of the Gulf…

At this moment, the Iraq War is at a stalemate. Confronted with a growing threat from those “enemies allied with its friends in the region,” the Sunni insurgents, the Bush administration has adopted a practical and typically American strategy: it has bought them. The Americans have purchased the insurgency, hiring its foot soldiers at the rate of $300 per month. The Sunni fighters, once called insurgents, we now refer to as “tribesmen” or “concerned citizens.”

General David Petraeus blames Iran for yesterday’s mortaring of our occupation headquarters in the Green Zone. Maybe, but maybe also we should keep in mind the legal principle of cui bono.

Suppose you are the public face of a “surge” which you claim has greatly reduced violence by al-Qaeda in the country your troops occupy. And suppose your own headquarters has just come under heavy bombardment.

Then suppose you run right out and tell the press that al-Qaeda had nothing to do with the attack. No, indeed. Instead, by one of those happy coincidences to which we have become so accustomed since 9/11, it was outside agitators. What’s more they were from Iran which — what are the odds? — your own commander-in-chief happens to be desperate to invade. What a fortunate confluence of God’s own truth and your own self-interest that would be!

And there was more to come, of a surprising nature:

In response to the news that 4,000 US military personnel have now been killed in Iraq, [Petraeus] said it showed how much the mission had cost but added that Americans were realistic about it.

He also said a great deal of progress had been made because of the “flipping” of communities — the decision by Sunni tribes to turn against al-Qaeda militants. The extent of this had surprised even the US military, he said.

Before we let it surprise us, however, we might want to read the full article in Rolling Stone from which this excerpt comes. The author speaks Arabic, which turns out to be handy once you leave the Green Zone. Apparently everybody out there talks funny except the ones who report to General Petraeus.

Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government…

In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector — more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. “Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems,” as U.S. strategists like to say. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calls it “balancing competing armed interest groups…”

“Before the war, it was just one party,” Arkan tells me. “Now we have 100,000 parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but nobody lets them get back into service. First they take money, then they ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good.” He dreams of returning to the days when the Iraqi army served the entire country. “In Saddam’s time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite,” he says.

The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded. Most Iraqis viewed themselves as Iraqis first, with their religious sects having only personal importance. Intermarriage was widespread, and many Iraqi tribes included both Sunnis and Shiites. Under Saddam, both the ruling Baath Party and the Iraqi army were majority Shiite.

What follows is my transcription of New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman explaining his flat world on The Charlie Rose Show. I don’t think I’ve heard this much concentrated stupidity since listening to Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley III at country team meetings in wartime Laos.

The transcription below contains the money shot, as they call it in the frankly pornographic rather than the political side of show biz. But if you have time to watch the whole interview you’ll see that Friedman’s performance was well-rehearsed and at least partially memorized. Thus the last three appalling paragraphs were not misspoken, but intentional.

Particularly unattractive, like Bush’s fake Texas accent, are Friedman’s tone-deaf attempts to sound like an ex-Marine Corps pogue tough-talking at the Legion Hall late at night. (Suck on this, Friedman, okay?)

And what we learned on 9/11, in a gut way, was that [the terrorist] bubble was a fundamental threat to our open society because there is no wall high enough, no INS agent smart enough, no metal detector efficient enough, to protect an open society from people motivated by that bubble and what we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world, I’m afraid, and burst that bubble. We needed to go over here basically and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.

And there was only one way to do it because part of that bubble said, “We’ve got you. This bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between we and you because we don’t care about it. We’re ready to sacrifice and all you care about is your stock options and your Hummers.”

And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this, okay?”

That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of the bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Baghdad because we could.

It appears the struggle to create a war with Iran is in its last throes.

Meanwhile, the uneasy partnership between Karl Rove and Dick Cheney continues. While Rovian operations take out political opponents like Don Siegelman in Alabama and Eliot Spitzer in New York, the Cheneyists struggle against the so-called adult leadership of war criminals like Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice, and the increasingly lonely rational Republicans in Congress. Wikipedia reports that

The final report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, issued on August 4, 1993, said that Gates “was close to many figures who played significant roles in the Iran/contra affair and was in a position to have known of their activities. The evidence developed by Independent Counsel did not warrant indictment…”

When such a person is your adult leadership, the outlook is sub-optimal indeed.

And sure enough, the makeshift patriots on the Dark Side have managed to gain one of their objectives: Admiral William “Fox” Fallon is resigning as Commander in Chief of Central Command, which includes Iran and Iraq. (Check out this map; I knew CentCom covered a lot of ground but I didn’t realize it was this much, basically Kenya to Kazakhstan.) Fallon is said to have called General (soon, presumably, Saint) David Petraeus, who reports to him, an ass-kissing little chickenshit. Evidence available to the public since the revelation of this remark suggests the characterization was not entirely without merit; but it was certainly unwelcome in the White House, and even more unwelcome in the Undisclosed Location. No doubt similar reactions followed the reports of Adm. Fallon responding to a question about a US war against Iran with “…not on my watch.’

Apparently Fallon’s approach was insufficiently aggressive.

The Persian Gulf right now is booming economically, and Fallon wants to harness that power to connect the failed states that pockmark the landscape to the outside world. In this choice, he sees no alternative.

“What I learned in the Pacific is that after a while the tableau of failed, failing, or dysfunctional states becomes a real burden on the functional countries and a problem for their neighborhood, because they breed unrest and insecurities and attract troublemakers very well. They’re like sewers, and they begin to fester. It’s bad for business. And when it’s bad for business, people tend to start restricting their investments, and they restrict their thinking, and it allows more barriers, so we’re back to building walls again instead of breaking them down. If you have to build walls, it means you’re moving backward.”

Fallon has no illusion about solving the Middle East or Central Asia during his tenure, but he’s also acutely conscious that with globalization’s rapid advance into these regions he may well be the last Centcom commander of his kind. Already Fallon sees the inevitability and utility of having a Chinese military partnership at Centcom, and he’d like to manage that inevitably from the start rather than have to repair damage down the line.

“I’d like to continue to do things that will be useful to the world and its inhabitants,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of good things, and I’ve seen a lot of stupid things.”

He omitted to specify the deciders in the cases of the stupid things he’d seen, or even which side they were on.

Discussing one of the incidents in which Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats showboated around and taunted American warships in the Strait of Hormuz,

Fallon’s eyes narrow and his voice becomes that whisper: “This is not how a country that wants to be a big boy in the neighborhood behaves. How are we supposed to take these guys seriously as players in the region? You’d like to deal with them as big-league players, but when they do this, it’s very tough.”

As before, there is the text and the subtext. Admiral William Fallon shakes his head slowly, and his eyes say, These guys have no idea how much worse it could get for them. I am the reasonable one.

And time will tell whether being reasonable will cost Admiral William Fallon his command.

Well, it has. I’m not one to glorify any part of military life or militarism, so I don’t mean to put Fox on a pedestal. I agree with Gibbon:

…as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.

Nowadays, as Thorstein Veblen pointed out, we’re more likely to vanquish our enemies with lawyers than soldiers. If you’re a threat to win a governorship we want, we’ll find a way to put you in jail on trivial or even trumped-up charges. If you’re a rising star, we’ll investigate your private life, and tell lies about your name, history, family, and religion. If you get elected President on a platform you copied from us, we’ll impeach you for adultery.

And if you try to stop our war machine, we’ll run over you.

More disgusting news from Halliburton, Vice President Richard Cheney’s favorite war profiteer:

…The inspector general's report said some troops noticed problems with the water. Between October 2004 and May 2005, troops at Camp Ar Ramadi said bathwater was discolored and had an unusual odor. The report said KBR failed to treat the nonpotable water and monitor water quality during the same period.

At Camp Q-West, KBR inappropriately delivered chlorinated wastewater for showers and latrines without informing military preventive medicine officials, the report said. "KBR did not monitor or record the quality of water at point-of-use containers before April 2006, even though the ... contract required the company to do so," the report added.

Medical records for troops at Camp Q-West indicated 38 cases of illnesses commonly attributed to problem water. These include skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections and diarrhea. Doctors diagnosed 24 of the cases in January and February 2006, the same period when medical officials warned of a rise in bacterial infections at the base…

If you liked the Southeast Asia War Games (as we players sometimes called them), you’ll love Bush’s war of choice in the Middle East. Excerpted from the Times of London:

The cost of direct US military operations — not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans — already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.

And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion.

In retrospect, I’m absolutely convinced that we lost the war wrong. We should have fought that war in an advisory mode and remained in that mode. When the South Vietnamese failed to come up and meet the mark at the advisory level, then we never should have committed US forces. We should have failed at the advisory effort and withdrawn. — Gen. Volney F. Warner, 1983

I’ve reached the epilogue of H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty, and it’s been quite a journey. The book covers the period from the inauguration of John Kennedy in 1961 to the point in July 1965 when Lyndon Johnson’s non-decision decisions fatally committed the United States to a land war in Asia, which nearly all of his advisors believed the US could not win. To get an idea of the granularity level McMaster is working at, check the first four (of fifteen) entries in the Table of Contents:

1. The New Frontiersmen and the Old Guard
   1961–October 1962
2. Havana and Hanoi
   October 1962–November 1963
3. New War, New Leader
   November 1963–January 1964
4. Graduated Pressure
   January–March 1964

At several critical points the narrative goes day by day, occasionally even hour by hour. The endnotes require eighty-two pages. It appears McMaster has gained access to nearly every relevant document, many of them unpublished memoirs or government memos that describe in detail what the participants were thinking about.

Anyone familiar with the history of the period will not be surprised by the duplicity and heartlessness of the main manager of the war, Robert Strange McNamara. If you saw The Fog of War, you know what I mean. McNamara is the kind of liar who lies to himself first and foremost, with the result that he can be convincing because he believes the lies he tells.

Certainly the war in Vietnam is the fault of LBJ above all; he handed McNamara the reins so he could concentrate on passing his Great Society legislation. That wasn’t a surprise to me, but I was taken aback by McMaster’s conclusion that Johnson’s personal insecurity was a large part of the problem. Unlike the current occupant, the President was actually the decider; but, like Bush, he was uncomfortable with dissent, so he continually reduced the size of the group with whom he was candid. When an advisor began to express doubts about the war, he was ignored, even if he happened to be the Vice President.

As a result the Joint Chiefs of Staff were cut out of the process of generating a strategy for fighting the war. When Johnson took office on November 22, 1963, American military folks were fighting in Vietnam, but neither the Vietnamese nor the American governments admitted that. Both claimed that US personnel performed in advisory roles only, which was true in the sense that American forces were not acting alone. Ground forces were always composed of Vietnamese soldiers accompanied by a few Americans, though the opposite ratios generally held when it came to the air war.

The Secretary of Defense, so called, held the top military brass in low esteem, in part because of his lack of knowledge of the military, in part because of his experience with the Bay of Pigs invasion, and in part because he believed he was smarter than they were and his systems analysis methods would solve every problem. This led McNamara to believe that he could control the American side of the war very precisely from Washington; so when he ordered bombing raids and the combination of bad weather and restrictions on military methods produced disappointing results, he blamed the military, despite their opposition to his methods. They might have been opposed to his goals as well, had they been given a clear picture of those goals; but you can’t provide a clear picture if you don’t have one yourself. At one point the National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy,

…told [Under Secretary of State George] Ball that there was no need for the United States to “follow a particular course down the road to a particular result.”

Right, we were only there killing people, and losing American lives, to see what would come of it. And to keep the profits rolling in for companies like Bell Helicopter. LBJ’s war cabinet believed, and said, that the US would be better off to fight and lose in Vietnam than to withdraw from the fight altogether.

Of course there’s plenty of blame to go around. An insecure President and a megalomaniac Defense Secretary were the main culprits, but the Joint Chiefs get some grief from McMaster too, which is probably why he’s still a Lieutenant Colonel.

The body charged with providing the president with military advice and responsible for strategic planning permitted the president to commit the United States to war without consideration of the likely costs and consequences. Comprehensive estimates of the number of troops necessary to win existed, but to conceal interservice divisions and to increase the likelihood that the president would approve the actions that they recommended, the Joint Chiefs suppressed them.

One study estimated that seven hundred thousand troops would be needed to win in Vietnam. The Army Chief of Staff thought five hundred thousand troops and five years would be required. But no one said anything, because McNamara and his allies in the administration had chosen a strategy they called graduated pressure, which severely limited the military’s ability to fight the war. The CIA was consistently reporting the difficulties faced by American strategists, but the American ambassador, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, removed the offending paragraphs before forwarding his reports to Washington. This inability to present the President with unvarnished analyses eventually led the director of the CIA to resign in frustration. But the Joint Chiefs simply buckled.

There are some striking similarities to the current war in Iraq. The ideological certainty of both administrations, though of different types, produced similar situations of willful blindness. This caused both administrations to ignore intelligence estimates that didn’t fit with what they wanted to hear. In both cases, many of the Americans making war strategy were innocent of military experience themselves. They believed passionately in the inherent superiority of American firepower, and equally strongly but less overtly in the superiority of Americans and the American way of life. These beliefs allowed both groups to retain their intentional ignorance of the objectives of those on the other side. McNamara et.al. persisted in thinking that Hanoi was playing a prestige game, and that rational calculations of cost would drive Ho Chi Minh to give up his ambitions to unify Vietnam.

William Bundy’s, [Michael] Forrestal’s, and [John] McNaughton’s education and experience in the law reinforced the analysts’ assumptions. In English common law, lawyers and judges must view human behavior through the lens of the “average reasonable man.” That theory underlay predictions of how Hanoi would respond to limited air strikes.

The problem was that all the evidence showed that Hanoi was not directed by average reasonable men. Ho told a French visitor that if they killed ten of his men for every man the Vietnamese killed, Ho would win the war. In the end, the Vietnamese were not going anywhere; the only way to beat them was to wipe them out. Graduated pressure was a strategy that clearly would not dissuade such opposition.

One is left with the impression that a good deal of the bungling of the invasion of Iraq is a replay of the disaster the US created in Vietnam. The main difference is that in the case of Iraq the Cheney administration knew exactly what it was going for. The PR was equally dishonest, but the goal was clear to the strategists: steal all the oil, even if we have to be there a hundred years to do so. American lives no longer mean more to the White House than foreign lives; dollars, and power, count.

John Edwards, sadly, is out. With him went what seemed like the only chance to end our occupation of Iraq before 2012, when a presumably Democratic president will presumably be reelected.

If Edwards had been able to end the occupation next year — Bush’s warhogs are right about this — the results would have been the shameful abandonment of our allies there, a bloody civil war killing thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and a destabilized Middle East descending into God knows what new horrors.

If Clinton or Obama is elected, exactly the same things will happen, only four years later. By that time we will have lost another trillion dollars or so and thousands more American lives. In addition the Iraqis would have lost — Oh, well, who cares?

Obama or Clinton will happily pay such a price for reelection, just as Nixon did before them. The awful irony is that this time it might not even work. Bush has left his successor a far worse mess to clean up than Kennedy/Johnson did. We could wind up with a Republican president in 2012, or even a Scientologist. On the evidence so far this century, we’re dumb enough to elect anything.

The only bright spot in today’s announcement is my suspicion that Edwards has cut a deal with Obama and will wind up as vice president. This would halfway realize the advice I generously offered on December 16: “As between Edwards and Obama my considered opinion is that they should swap wives and then flip for the nomination.”

Sound familiar?

[The Secretary of Defense] would dominate the policy-making process because of three mutually reinforcing factors: the [Joint] Chiefs’ ineffectiveness as an advisory group, [the president’s] profound insecurity, and the president’s related unwillingness to entertain divergent views on the subject… Above all [the president] needed reassurance. He wanted advisors who would tell him what he wanted to hear, who would find solutions even if there were none to be found. Bearers of bad news or those who expressed views that ran counter to his priorities would hold little sway. [The SecDef] could sense the president’s desires and determined to do all that he could to fulfill them.

Who, it’s apparently being asked among military thinkers, will be the H.R. McMaster of Iraq? Whoever it is, will he or she be capable of writing, and allowed to write, as honest a portrayal of governmental failings, both civilian and military, as that in Dereliction of Duty?

And will that person be passed over for promotion in the same fashion?

When there is a bull in a china shop, the intelligent first step is not to leave him there until he mends what he broke. The bull is too big and too clumsy and too dumb for that. The intelligent first thing is to get that bull the hell out of the china shop.

Noam Chomsky makes this point conclusively in an interview with CT Review (no link), the journal of the Connecticut State University System:

Interviewer: While we’re in the game, we can’t quit the game.

Chomsky: That’s another presupposition. The Russians were in the game in Afghanistan in 1986. Did we say, “Well they broke it, so they have to stay there to fix it?” No, we didn’t say that. When the Germans were in France in 1944, we didn’t say, they broke it, so they have to fix it and stay there until they do. We didn’t ever say that.

There’s a deeper presupposition. We own the world, so therefore anything we do is justified . Therefore, unlike the Russians in Afghanistan or the Germans in occupied France, we broke it so we’ve got to fix it. We’re totally different from everyone else because we own the world.

That presupposition is never mentioned. People would be horrified if you brought it out, but the discussions just don’t make any sense unless you assume this. Bush announces the surge in exact opposition to the will of the American population, and of course the Iraqis. Both populations want to reduce the troops or for us to get out. Bush’s response is to send more troops.

Predictably, as they announce the surge, they announce that Iran is interfering in Iraq. This shifts the discussion to, “Is Iran interfering in Iraq?” Suppose that Germany in 1943 had said the allies are interfering in occupied France. People wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The Germans invaded and occupied France. How can anybody be said to be interfering with that?

Well, while the Russians were in Afghanistan, America was proud to support terrorists, incidentally Islamic terrorists, to oppose them. But we didn’t think of ourselves as interfering in Russian-occupied Afghanistan. By the same logic, how can Iran possibly be interfering in American-occupied Iraq?

But the debate rages. Are the serial numbers on the improvised explosive devices traceable to Iran’s revolutionary guards? We have a profound debate about this, all instilling the assumption that we own the world, because if we didn’t own the world then you couldn’t even have such a debate. It wouldn’t make sense.

Another installment of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up. (h/t Cursor)

When American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, private security and military contractors will have guarded the convoys bringing the turkey and gravy.

If not for the private security contractor (PSC) business, there would have been no Thanksgiving at all. For it was a PSC whom the Pilgrims hired in 1620 to join them on the Mayflower and provide security for what would become their new colonial settlement in Plymouth, Mass.

Oh, well that excuses the murders of all those Iraqis then. They’re not Christians anyway, and they wouldn’t be interesting in giving thanks. According to Rat Pobertson:

Ladies and gentlemen, we have to recognize that Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law. In the Quran, it says it very clearly. There are two spheres. One is the Dar al-Harb, which is the realm of war. The other is Dar al-Islam, which is that part that’s under submission to Islam. There is no middle ground. You’re either at war or you’re under submission. Now, that’s the way they think.

Which is completely different from Robertson’s view, that God punished the United States with 9/11 because we allow pornography and gays, that we should submit to his view of God rather than Muhammed’s, and that we’d better start a new Crusade posthaste. Can we say shadow projection? (Can we say President Rudy? I didn’t think so.)

Whether due to good relations with the friendly local Indians or the deterrent effect of the well-organized militia and relatively well-armed fort, Plymouth never came under direct enemy attack. But other English colonial towns would. Standish and his men volunteered to come to their aid when threatened or attacked, and in at least one case they left the invaders bloodied and dismembered. Some accounts say Standish led revenge raids and, in one case, used a medieval form of intimidation — mounting an enemy Indian’s head on a pike — to protect the colonists from further attack.

Such operations earned Standish criticism for being too harsh. But the colonists held him in high regard. They repeatedly elected him military captain of Plymouth…

It’s good to remind ourselves that the founders of our country were just as bloodthirsty as we are.

Are you pro-“War on Terror” or anti-?

That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? All the Republicans except Paul are pro-, in fact they’re for all wars, as long as we’re attacking enemies we know are too weak to resist us on the battlefield (thus 4GW). Clinton and Obama have both made it clear that they think the GWOT is a real thing, and that we face a threat from an Islamic Mussolini. To me that makes them excellent examples of the old Chomsky saw that you can’t reach a position of power in our government unless you believe that the US is unique in history in acting purely from altruistic motives. If there’s any conflict that we’re involved in — and there is, always, because it’s the only thing we excel at — we’re the aggrieved party. We may have been the invaders, and we may have invaded for no reason, indeed for less than no reason; but our inherent goodness and altruism prove that if we torture it’s because torture was required, and those who were tortured understand that.

Personally I agree with John Edwards that the GWOT is nothing more than a bumper sticker, a slogan used to concentrate wealth and eliminate civil liberties. Only the foolish and the power-hungry take it seriously. And the oil companies.

Which doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as terrorism. What is a B-2 if not a terror weapon? Bombing Iraqi cities has only one purpose, to terrorize. A case can be made that bombing German cities during World War II was an attempt to destroy the industrial base, thus shortening the war. I don’t personally buy it, but there’s a real argument to be made there. But flattening Fallujah, a war crime by any definition, had nothing to do with removing the insurgency’s industrial base; it was simply an attempt to terrify the population. That’s terrorism, and if we wanted it to stop we could stop doing it.

So am I saying that the US is the leading terrorist country in the world? Yes. Followed by Israel, much of whose terrorism the US funds.

The Bush administration’s double standards are as glaring as meteor impacts. When, in the summer of 2006, Israel used the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah to unleash a pre-programmed devastating war on Lebanon, destroying great swathes of the country, the Bush administration immediately gave the Israelis the green light. When 12 Turkish soldiers are killed and eight captured by PKK guerrillas based in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Bush administration urges Ankara to take it easy.

The “war on terror” is definitely not an equal-opportunity business.

It is a business, though. The current problem for the terrorism industry is the incompetence, indeed the idiocy, of its MBA CEO and his board. Their inability to understand the complexities of the world drives them to shrink the problem to the point where their little minds can wrap around it, the issue being that such grotesque simplification removes their ability to predict the outcome of their actions.

A reasonable view of the world allows its holder to predict results with a non-zero chance of being right. Unfortunately, a view of the world that is one hundred percent wrong can sometimes produce the same results. For instance, if someone doesn’t hate you, but you believe he does, you’ll act hatefully toward him, thus generating in him a strong distaste for you, which you will then interpret as confirmation of what you always thought, thus increasing your confidance in your misapprehension, and eventually changing it to a truism.

An oversimplified view of the world, on the other hand, regularly produces unexpected results.

US plans for Iraqi Kurdistan, stretching back to that 1990 Israeli-devised Turkish plan, are in jeopardy. And once again all because of the enemy within.

Washington played the ethnic card in Afghanistan, pitting Tajiks against Pashtuns; the result, apart from a never-ending war in Afghanistan, was that Pashtuns on both sides of the border united and are now destabilizing even further the US ally, Pakistan.

Washington played the Kurd card to destabilize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and as a beachhead for its control of the country after the invasion. Not only Iraq turned into a quagmire, Washington helped to plunge Kurdistan into the line of (Turkish) fire.

Please support and pass this law:

The Sacrifice Recognition Act of 2007

Effective immediately, the president and vice-president, after seeking and securing the agreement of the bereaved family, each separately shall attend the funeral of at least one of the next 200 members of any branch of the armed services who are killed while serving, or as a direct result of serving, in a combat zone as defined in 26 U.S.C. § 112(c)(2), or in any other area defined in 37 U.S.C. § 310(a)(2)(B) & (C). Thereafter, the president and vice-president in like manner shall continue to attend at least one funeral for each subsequent increment of 200 such fatalities.

Is the Speaker of the House really serious about genocide, or is she simply involved in a standard Washington power play?

Suppose we assume that a million and a half Armenians died between 1915 and 1923 in a systematic and deliberate campaign; personally I know of no reason to doubt that, but I’m not a historian of the Ottoman Empire.

Now suppose the House of Representatives, 92 years later, decides to label that systematic and deliberate campaign “genocide”.

What, exactly, is the difference between a systematic and deliberate campaign by Ottomans that killed a million and a half Armenians, and a systematic and deliberate campaign by Americans that killed a million-plus Iraqis?

Is it that last half-million deaths? Or the religion of the killers? Can the wingnuts come up with some defense based on intent, or will they, as usual, escape the dilemma by denying the facts?

And what’s the difference between wingnuts denying facts, and House Speakers choosing to spend time on century-old genocides to distract attention from an equal number of deaths the Speaker’s party funded? I mean, they’re different, but do they differ in levels of culpability?

[ Update: I don’t really understand what evidence TeddySanFran considers in thinking that Pelosi is trying to stop the war in Iraq with a semantic resolution about Armenians. The argument seems a bit far-fetched. I wish it were true, but I see no reason to think so. ]

[ Update 2: It has been pointed to me that a semantic non-wingnut argument holds up against my original statement. If we define genocide as the attacker trying to exterminate a group of people, then intent, and ratio of killed to spared, are critical. By those measures, American involvement in Iraq has not been genocidal.

My original point, poorly stated, was this: what is the moral difference between killing a million and a half people in an attempt to eliminate Armenians, and killing a million-plus people in an attempt to run off with the resources they live on top of? Is it less moral if one intends to kill a million people than if one does so unintentionally? In other words, what is the moral difference between the Ottoman actions the House condemns and the war in Iraq it funds? ]

You know Brian Eno? Musician, or as he says non-musician, inventor of ambient music, and producer of groups like Talking Heads, David Bowie, Depeche Mode, and U2, he’s sufficiently iconic to be a character in Salman Rushdie’s wonderful homage to pop music (and love, and life, and the universe), The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

It’s not just his production skills, either.

Our leaders would undoubtedly be happy if we “moved on” from Iraq. They don’t want to talk about it any more: it was a dreadful blunder, and reflects little credit on any of them. Presumably this is why the question has hardly been debated in parliament. Although the majority of the public were always against the war, this was not reflected by their elected representatives. The government behaved in a way that was transparently undemocratic but the Conservatives won’t call them on it, for without their almost unanimous support the whole project couldn’t have happened.

But to conveniently forget Iraq now is to forfeit the only possible benefit the war might have: the chance to rethink the dysfunctional political system that got us into this hole. If we don’t, we risk digging a series of ever deeper holes.

The Iraq adventure was justified as the planting of a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Not only did it utterly fail at that, it also undermined our democracy. Appealing to our paranoia more than our vision, George Bush and Tony Blair obtained restrictions on freedoms that had taken centuries to evolve. They said these were necessary to ensure our security — a device used by authoritarian leaders since time immemorial.

[…]

If we don’t stand up about Iraq then we tacitly sanction the next steps in this deadly experiment of democratic evangelism. Those will likely include an attack on Iran, a permanent force of occupation in Iraq (probably always the intention), the complete militarisation of the Middle East, and a revived nuclear future.

Apparently the Brown government, which only a couple weeks ago appeared ready to cruise through an early election, is being tested in a variety of ways. One of its chosen responses was to ban a demonstration, scheduled for the day Parliament opens, under an apparently rarely used 1839 law.

Eno is part of the Stop the War coalition that was planning the demonstration, so you can imagine he’s less than pleased.

It would take courage for Gordon Brown to say: “This war was a catastrophe.” It would take even greater courage to admit that the seeds of the catastrophe were in its conception: it wasn’t a good idea badly done (the neocons’ last refuge — “Blame it all on Rumsfeld”), but a bad idea badly done. And it would take perhaps superhuman courage to say: “And now we should withdraw and pay reparations to this poor country.”

I don’t see it happening. But the demonstration will, legal or not: on Monday Tony Benn will lead us as we exercise our right to remind our representatives that, even if Iraq has slipped off their agenda, it’s still on ours. Please join us.

Well, at least the unit has been reduced to half a Friedman:

“I think the next three to four months are critical,” Odierno told reporters. “I think that if we can continue to do what we are doing, we’ll get to such a level where we think we can do it with less troops.”

Continue doing what we were doing: lying, murdering, and stealing?

Yes, as long as we don’t make make any peace treaties.

…the Iraqi High Tribunal upheld death sentences of former defense minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai and Hussein Rashid Mohammed, a former deputy director of operations for the Iraqi armed forces.

Al-Tai negotiated the cease-fire than ended the 1991 Gulf War, when a U.S.-led coalition drove Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Is Senator Warner’s proposal to “redeploy” 5,000 troops by the end of 2007 meaningful? Or is it an early salvo in a cleverly designed rear-guard action by a desperate retreating army? The latter.

The Republicans are desperate for a strategy, any strategy, that might offer them a ray of hope for 2008. At this point it seems that only a miracle would give them the House, but they might hope to take the Senate, or at least keep it in its current state of impotence. But you know the litany of troubles they’ve seen. Not just the fact that two-thirds of the Senators up for re-election in 2008 are Republicans. And not just the incompetence, the lies, or even the corruption. Sure, it hurts that so many Republicans are going to jail, but they’ll have replacements soon enough.

The big problem right now is, they look like losers. They lied to get their war, then they lost it.

Now they’re scrambling for rheotorical cover for the firefight of the next election. If they bring the troops home, obviously the best solution in political as well as national-security terms, they’ll have started and lost the war single-handedly, and even some of their core supporters will join in the pounding they get at the polls.

On the other hand, three-quarters of the population has already realized that withdrawal, now or soon, is the only choice, and that Staying the Course is simply killing people for political (and for Cheney-friendly corporations, financial) gain.

They need a Third Way.

Thus the Slow Withdrawal, changing course in a measurable but insignificant way. Party leaders are said to have let the White House know quite clearly that Republican support in Congress for staying the course would be gone by September absent a miracle in Iraq. They supposedly recommended a drawdown executed very slowly, giving the impression of doing something while ensuring there’s a war to hand to the next President.

Perhaps they figure they can recruit 5,000 mercenaries by the time Christmas rolls around, effectively doubling the cost while eliminating any shred of accountability. Halliburton et. al. would love that, eh?

Everyone’s talking about the soldiers’ piece at the New York Times, “The War as We Saw It”. And rightfully so.

The result of a 15-month deployment, signed by six Army sergeants and a specialist, it’s one of those reminders that the military is generally not the problem. It often happens that a President bent on war finds a general to lead his military. Lincoln went through a lot of them, but most people thought he was looking for a competent aggressor. Bush and Cheney need someone to execute an impossible plan based on a bunch of hooey. Thankfully, many high-ranking officers have made it clear by word or deed that they feel there are some missions that should be not be undertaken. Now some sergeants are joining in.

One of the most impressive things about the article is the clarity of their vision of the situation.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

Straightforward and on the mark, as far as I can tell. Presumably these guys are not expecting to be career Army; or perhaps they haven’t heard about Gen. Taguba. But thank God for ’em.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

This article is undoubtedly part of what seems to be wide-spread displeasure in the military about the policy of arming all sides. Which we’re clearly doing, whether by disbanding the Iraqi army, losing 190,000 weapons, training Iraqis of dubious loyalty for police and military work, or directly handing guns to Sunnis hoping they’ll use them on “Al Qaeda in Iraq”. They might very well do so; but then what happens? Suppose we work with Sunnis to clear out the AQI folks, will the Shia-dominated government then be allowed to take control and the Sunnis required to give back the guns? Would they do that?

In any case, it’s good to know we have sergeants and specialists of such character and insight in the Army. It’s regrettable that their leadership, particularly their civilian leadership, has once again given them an impossible mission. Therein lies the truest similarity of the occupation of Iraq to the war in Vietnam. That, and the Presidential lies that led to each.

It’s regrettable, but understandable. Not acceptable or forgivable, from my point of view, but understandable as part of a pattern of behavior of the United States over time.

We don’t consciously seek to create violent crises; but our actions tend to create inequalities of financial and military power around the globe, which foster discontent. In particular, we’re by far the biggest seller of weapons, and we spend more on “defense” than the rest of the world combined. In theory, if the defense budget does anything other than transfer wealth from the general fund to the richest members of society, we should be able to take on the rest of the world at once; but in the real world we’ve lost to an insurgency.

For the Halliburtons and the Bechtels, the economy is in great shape. For the dead and wounded, and for those of us lucky enough to be on the sidelines, the inequalities look a lot like the Roaring ’20s, without the inventive and playful spirit. Of course, our war isn’t over yet. But I doubt we’ll have a decade between the end of our war and our economic reckoning.

We need wars and upheavals and rebellions to keep our economy going. And to assure our place as the most important country. If the question is, Who’s got the biggest stick, we’ll win. If it’s, Who’s got the best schools or medical care or industrial capability, we’ll be embarrassed.

A little known bit of history. Art endures.

Where’s the outrage? Pointed in the wrong direction, to allow us to acquit ourselves of participatory guilt.

Everywhere you look there’s outrage at the accusations against Michael Vick for running a dog-fighting ring. With good reason; the fighting alone is a disgusting thing, not to mention the gruesome executions. But I don’t really understand why people are surprised, or why it’s such a big deal.

Compared, say, to Chris Benoit’s murder of his wife and child, quite clearly a product of the same chemically-induced rage that Vick and his fellow scumbags sought a release for.

Or to the accusations that Pat Tillman was killed intentionally by comrades, shot three times in the forehead with an M-16 from ten yards away.

Or to the deaths of about a million Iraqis, and the torture of who knows how many others.

In my book, people are more important than dogs. I expect I’ll be accused of speciesism, but there it is. Hell, I may as well go all the way and declare that I believe war is more important than wrestling (especially fake wrestling), and, God help my future book sales, even football.

But it’s easier to direct one’s inner rage against a target like Vick. Especially given the sensitive nature of the steroid issue right now, and the approach by Bondsy Barr to hallows everyone knows he didn’t earn and doesn’t deserve, the official records of which should in my opinion be erased, not asterisked (at least his chemically-induced rage hasn’t killed anyone, as far as I know). Benoit, after all, has the benefit of being dead.

Just as with the war in Vietnam, and for the same reasons, Americans have a lot of inner rage right now. A lot of it comes from inner conflict, very especially among those who found some reason to support the war. It’s not just the right-wing warmongers who feel this; liberal interventionists like George Packer are still struggling to resolve the contradictions in their positions without having to admit they were wrong morally, wrong legally, and wrong realpolitik-wise.

Given all those inner conflicts, plus the constant drumbeat of distraction from the media, it’s not surprising that people look for scapegoats, and focus on things that don’t really matter to the exclusion of things that do.

Holy Crowley, has it really come to this?

Today Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker were grilled by Senators via video hookup. McClatchy’s article leads with the question posed by Sen. Lugar: are you planning for a change of mission or a redeployment? A clever question in a sense, because it emphasizes the issue of competence. Any military commander in Petraeus’s position had better have a plan for withdrawing, even if he’s been ordered not to admit it.

The Cheney administration has tricked, blamed, and otherwise exploited the military command structure beyond anything I’ve seen or read about in American history. As a result, the military, still harboring bitter memories of Vietnam, has lost significant prestige in the eyes of Americans. The command structure has again been presented with the choice between following orders and doing what’s right, and some officers have chosen poorly.

But the well-known preference of Americans for winning over for losing pales in comparison to the anger provoked by cheating and incompetence. Or at least we hope it will. We’ll know soon enough, if this is the best spin the administration point men can mount:

Asked for examples of progress, [Amb. Crocker] said that Iraq’s Shiite Muslim prime minister, Kurdish president and two vice presidents — one a Shiite and one a Sunni Muslim Arab — now met every Sunday morning. “I’m encouraged they can at least come together and thrash out their differences face to face,” Crocker said.

Which is something, I guess, but at this rate of progress there’ll be few Iraqis left by the time an entire legislature can even be convened, let alone decide on who gets how much of the oil wealth and, more importantly, how quickly rights to the oil can be signed over to American companies.

In response to Sen. Lugar’s question, the ambassador said No, we’re not planning.

The Indiana senator, who’s called for planning ahead for a withdrawal so that it won’t be done poorly, said there’d been reports that the Bush administration had pressed officials to abandon any such planning.

Crocker said he knew of no efforts to create a Plan B.

“I’m fully engaged, as is General (David) Petraeus, in trying to implement the president’s strategy that he announced in January,” he said, referring to an increase of nearly 30,000 U.S. troops, mainly to try to quell sectarian fighting in Baghdad. “The whole focus is implementation of Plan A.”

Which reminded me of a very old line so typical of loyal Bushies.

Some neocons began agitating inside the Bush administration to support some kind of insurrection, led by Chalabi, that would overthrow Saddam. In the summer of 2001, the neocons circulated a plan to support an INC-backed invasion. A senior Pentagon analyst questioned whether Iraqis would rise up to back it. “You’re thinking like the Clinton people,” a Feith aide shot back. “They planned for failure. We plan for success.”

Faith-based planning works just as well as faith-based birth control and faith-based farming.

So it begins.

It’ll be harder to extract our military from Iraq than we’ve admitted to ourselves (and that’s saying something), because with all the mercenaries and their support systems we’ve really got over a quarter-million people on the ground. Of course about a quarter of them are Iraqis, but a lot of those will want to leave.

They’ll have to catch something other than Expat Airlines, though. So will the Indians and Pakistanis who’ve been employed in large numbers by the various contractors, as described for example in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

Pro Group, with offices in Amman and the United Kingdom, is launching Expat Airways in conjunction with the Jordanian Air Force. The Baghdad flights will use Jordan’s Marka Airport.

Ashraf Mraish, managing director for Pro Group, based in Amman, said Jordan’s tight visa restrictions drove the decision to exclude non-Westerners. Refugees have overwhelmed Jordan, which has imposed strict entry requirements for Iraqis.

“It would cost us much more to accommodate non-Westerners,” Mraish said this week. “We hope this flight is a solution to make (contractors’) lives easier.”

You can see why the Jordanian Air Force would consider it a national security issue to get Americans and other Westerners out of Baghdad, can’t you? Well, I can’t. It looks to me like a US operation under Jordanian cover. Probably Blackwater and Halliburton types starting to draw down.

According to the article, US taxpayers are funding payroll for 180,000 contract workers in Iraq. And of course we also have about 150,000 uniformed military folks there. It’s gonna take a while to get that many people out. But with those in the White House seeing clear signs of desertion in Republican ranks, the panic they deny is obviously setting in.

So it looks like they’re starting to decamp. But they don’t want anyone to know that, a perfect symbol of which is that Expat Airlines planes will have no logo.

There’s a lot of buzz about the editorial in the New York Times today calling for what loyal Bushies would term precipitate withdrawal.

Indeed, there are some striking statements from this organ of pre-war lies.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The editorial lists some of the harms the US has suffered as a result of what it calls “this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war”, and accuses the President and Vice President of using demagoguery and fear as weapons against American public opinion. It ends with a call to action.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

Executive summary: we thought it would be a cakewalk securing Iraq’s oil, but it wasn’t. So our advice is to cut bait; just don’t let it hurt Israel.

But the Times is ready to give up on the occupation, not the oil.

The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

This seems to me patently silly, totally PR, and the colors aren’t even particularly happenin’.

How can one tell whether a given number of ground troops and a fleet of bombers, fighters, and support craft constitute a force whose size is sufficient for effective raiding but not for large-scale combat? Is there a UN agency that does such surveys, or is it an NGO? Sounds like rhetorical cover is being sought.

Plus, there’s an argument to be made that the force we now have in Iraq is not a large-scale combat force; we didn’t expect to see large-scale combat except for a brief period during the invasion. If that argument held up, the Times would presumably be happy simply to remove US troops to bases in Kuwait and the budding Kurdistan. Bringing them home, and getting the hell out of Iraq, does not seem to be the primary goal.

Most importantly, why does our military need to “stage … raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq” if we’re no longer bogged down there militarily? Are we claiming that we have vital interests in Iraq?

Which is really the point. Whether true believer (Bush, Wolfowitz) or shameless profiteer (Cheney, Perle) or lying propagandist (most of the MSM, including the Times), it’s clear that for establishment types in the US, the war in Iraq is subtitled “Oil! And Israel”. The question is not whether the interests are vital, but how best to secure them.

To me, on the other hand, it seems that there are two points to securing the oil in Iraq. One is imperial: to have, as Chomsky says, our hand on the spigot that dispenses an ever more precious resource. The other is corporate: the profits being made in the oil business are nothing short of criminal, and should be treated as such.

We could use the billions we’d collect in fines to fund research into alternative energy and transportation.

Our relationship with Israel has a strong imperial tint as well; as Kissinger said, Israel is our lieutenant in the Middle East. And, given our actions in that area over the past few decades, damn near our only friend. Sure, our military might reinforces some monarchies that wouldn’t last a year without our support; but that’s a different sort of friendship.

Clearly we need a new plan for our forces in Iraq. But we can only make an intelligent one if we state our premises and assumptions. The problem is that my premises and those of the New York Times editorial board don’t match.

Seems to me there are three kinds of problems in Iraq.

• Resistance to foreign occupation
• Sectarian conflict
• Jockeying for government power and oil money

The last two overlap, of course, but it doesn’t matter, because we can’t solve either of them. All we’ve tried to do is buy the Iraqi government some time to get its act together and begin running the country.

Problem is, we know this isn’t going to happen. The Iraqi government did not win an election like those we (used to?) have in the US. Let’s not forget that candidates were often afraid to place their names on the ballot lest they be abducted, tortured, and killed. Campaigning was so dangerous that there was little of it, leaving people to vote for parties rather than individuals or clear positions on issues. As a result, the final tallies closely followed confessional lines.

Not to mention that the Saddam years provided a suboptimal training ground for up-and-coming Iraqi leaders.

In any case the Iraqi government has little real power to wield. It doesn’t control, in the classic sense, any territory at all in its own country. The US has the Green Zone, but even that receives mortar fire (which I don’t think is supposed to happen in an area you control).

The government cannot dispense those oil billions we were told to expect because of sabotage, part of the resistance to the occupation as well as the Sunni-Shia conflict.

It can’t even provide water and electricity — we’ve made sure of that by bombing the crap out of the infrastructure. And by creating a situation that killed or displaced many of the professionals needed to start anew.

Thus it seems that Cheney has succeeded in his plan: the establishment believes that to leave now would be to abandon our friends and give up on all that oil.

In the end, don’t you admire a man who persists in his plan in the teeth of resistance?

“He takes a range of medications that he and his doctors decline to detail. The extent of his atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries, which, if it extends beyond the heart to the brain, can cause hard-to-recognize changes in cognition) is unknown. Bypass surgery itself has long been associated with subtle changes in neurological function.

”At age 65, Cheney is easily 30 or more pounds overweight, seems to have slacked off on what was once a more rigorous diet, and appears to suffer from recurrent bouts of gout. At a roundtable lunch with reporters a couple of years ago, two who were present say, he cut his buffalo steak in bite-size pieces the moment it arrived, then proceeded to salt each side of each piece.“

If four heart attacks (that we know of) aren’t gonna teach him to avoid salt, it’s unlikely that he’s capable of learning anything.

Is it Cheney’s hope to tie us down in Iraq for many years to come, giving no-bid contracts to Halliburton, consuming lives in a perpetual war, and allowing enterprising young men to have other priorities than serving in it?

News reports have for some time shown the Iraqi resistance growing in size and in public acceptance. It’s increasingly clear that the US presence is aggravating the resistance problem to the point that it’s dominating the stage.

Without the US military, Iraq may well descend into a nightmare of bloodshed. Power struggles often go that way, especially among populations whose previous regimes have left them ill-prepared for self-government. But we can’t stop that.

Some of those who supported the war are now cloaking their imperial aims in humanitarian rhetoric. Others use similar rhetoric to cloak their interest in what they think is best for Israel.

We won’t make effective plans until we state our goals honestly. And we can’t do that because we don’t agree on whether the US should be an empire with a lieutenant in the Middle East.

Colin Powell is a war criminal just like the others.

The former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

“I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.”

Powell has become increasingly outspoken about the level of violence in Iraq, which he believes is in a state of civil war. “The civil war will ultimately be resolved by a test of arms,” he said. “It’s not going to be pretty to watch, but I don’t know any way to avoid it. It is happening now.”

As Colbert says, it’s never too late to speak out after it’s too late.

The way I understand it, participation in the execution of war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity is the issue in a court of law. What you tried to explain, even what you believed to be true, is of little consequence legally.

But at least he’s saying the right thing now. As far as I know, he never got around to doing that with the whole My Lai thing.

When the Senate voted unanimously to confirm the sainted Lt. Gen. David Petraeus as commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq in January, I wonder how many of them were aware of this Op-Ed piece he had written earlier in The Washington Post:

I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up. The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously … There are reasons for optimism … Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired … Progress has also been made in police training … Iraqi security forces are developing steadily and they are in the fight.

This evaluation, worthy of Joe Lieberman, was not only totally wrong, it was written in October 2004, just days before President Bush’s reelection, by a prominent general who apparently saw nothing improper in putting his name on a campaign document just before the presidential election.

I can recall no mention of the piece in the days leading up to Petraeus’ 81-0 confirmation vote. It was unearthed the other day by political columnist Dick Polman of the Philadelphia Inquirer and reprinted in a media column in today’s Washington Post.

“Pretty encouraging, right? Any swing voter who read that piece might well have concluded that it would be nuts to dump Bush and elect John Kerry, what with the Iraqis so poised to take responsibility for their own security,” writes Polman.

The cheerleading article, published in the newspaper where these 81 senators work and where they employ large staffs to help them cast informed votes, never came up when the 81 were considering, but certainly not debating, Petraeus’ appointment.

The 81 included Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, all of whom are now presumably awaiting Petraeus’ September report before deciding what to do next about Iraq.

“Given Petraeus’ rhetorical track record,” writes Polman, “and his apparent willingness, back in 2004, to inject himself into the middle of a domestic partisan campaign, why should we have confidence that in September he’ll say anything that would deviate from the White House line?”

And why, Senators, should we have confidence that you will be any smarter in September than you were in January?

Democrats are hoping to put off the moment of reckoning just as much as the White House is. In fact, the two sides are eyeing neighboring dates. The President dreams of January 20, 2009, while Democrats anticipate November 4, 2008.

Until then, Bush and Cheney will be channeling Bart Simpson: we didn’t do it. We didn’t fail. We kept the flame alive. We’ll hand it over to the next administration, and if they have the courage and the honor to do the right thing, the war will be carried to a successful conclusion at some glorious future time. Inshallah. I mean, God willing. (Heh heh, we’re out of here!) This ploy will fool the same clear-thinking folks that make up the 28-30% support Bush currently enjoys. These people are either those so artfully described by Thomas Frank, who still believe we would have won in Vietnam if not for the hippies:

Like everything else, however, the political valence of Vietnam-related martyrdom has been switched. What you hear more commonly today is that the soldiers were victimized by betrayal, first by liberals in government and then by the antiwar movement, as symbolized by the clueless Fonda. The mistake wasn’t taking the wrong side in the wrong war; it was letting those intellectuals — now transformed from cold corporate titans into a treasonable liberal elite — keep us from prevailing, from unleashing sufficient lethality on the Vietnamese countryside.

Or they’re the new generation of the same breed, electronic Rambos often derided in Left Blogostan as the 101st Fighting Keyboarders. Jeez, at least some of the previous generation had the integrity, or perhaps more importantly the cojones, to act on their beliefs.

These days, we get tragedy following tragedy, good people sacrificing life and limb in a stupid cause. Whatever you think of Pat Tillman’s decision to join up, he must have thought he was doing the right thing. (Personally, I wonder how he could have combined an understanding of Chomsky with enlisting, as has been reported, but perhaps I’ve got events out of order.) Andrew Bacevich’s son is another such tragic story. There are thousands of very similar ones in the US, and tens of thousands of stories of people whose lives will never be the same due to their injuries and experiences.

But these are overwhelmed by the millions of such stories in Iraq, stories of death, bodily harm, fiscal ruin, evacuation, homelessness, despair. At this point nearly every Iraqi must consider the US to be a sworn enemy. How would we feel in Riverbend’s place?

What a horrible thing this country has done. The only idea I’ve encountered so far that might help is to follow, as we should have done many years ago, George McGovern’s plan. McGovern and William Roe Polk sketch out a plan to compensate Iraqis for all the damage we’ve done. It’s kinda the least we could do, under the circumstances.

Though it would outrage the 101st FKs, it would be both the morally correct and the world-politically savvy thing to do. We should pay for the reconstruction of the Iraqi water, power, medical, and educational systems. And you know what? Altogether it would cost about as much as one year’s occupation, at the current rate. Thing is, we’d have to pay for it, not contract it out to Halliburton. McGovern’s strategy involves Iraqis doing the work, deciding what they want and building it. Our role is limited to paying for it, plus a reasonable amount of financial oversight. (Obviously there will be graft, but we’re not really in a position to complain about that right now. At least the money would end up in Iraq.)

Can we at least hope to realize how clearly Cheney proves that we create our own realities, even at the global level? Give the reins to a maniacal dark lord from a comic book, and you’ll soon have a situation as bad as a bunch of superheroes would make it. At that point, even if a superhero comes along and saves everyone, what kind of basis is that for society? That way lies tyranny, the strong-man theory of government. Damn, where’d we put Saddam?

One measure of what Americans have learned will be how we react to Bush and his cronies after they leave office. If the welcome Andy Card received at UMass was indicative, they’ll have to travel quietly and appear only in controlled settings.

Come to think of it, given Bush’s age, he might well survive until a post-imperial period, when the US military can no longer shelter a war criminal under its worldwide umbrella. Will Pinochet bequeath us some precedents? Or, wonder of wonders, will we join the ICC? (I maintain that we should ask every candidate, at every opportunity, “As President, will you lead the US into joining the International Criminal Court?”) But, like Cheney, Bush is unlikely to care. He never left the US before he was President, why should he leave afterward?

At this point, my money’s against the Republicans trying to deify this particular two-term President. Looks like Bush will manage to set a new standard, lower than Nixon, who — lying, cheating, murdering scumbag that he was — at least inherited his war, and from someone he didn’t much like, though the two were equally distant from the destruction they caused. If I believed in evil, I would consider such people instantiations of it. But I don’t, so I don’t.

I think what would really help our image on the world stage is if we’d try these bastards for their crimes. There seems to be good reason to investigate BushCo for war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. If we just brought Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzales, and Powell (and I’d argue for including Hadley) into court to defend themselves, we’d recoup some standing in the world. Of course Addington, Libby, Yoo, Rove, and some others should be in the dock as well, once we get rolling. I don’t even care whether we start prosecuting from the top or from the bottom, as long as we get ‘er done.

In any case, the world has changed since the last warmonger was President. I was never a Clinton fan, didn’t vote for him either time; but I have to admit his warmongering was piss-ant compared to either of the Bushes. (And we’re not even talking about the level of Truman or Johnson.) True, Clinton’s war was harder core than Reagan’s glorious salvation of the hard-pressed population of Grenada. Stephen Zunes recalls those heady days:

An island nation no bigger than Martha’s Vineyard, with a population that could barely fill the Rose Bowl, was defeated with relatively few American casualties. President Ronald Reagan’s decision to occupy the country and replace the government with one more to his liking proved to be quite popular in the United States, with polls indicating that 63% of the public supported the invasion.

There we go again. And how many days after the barracks bombing in Beirut was that…? (Correct answer: two.)

Lies and incompetence are not, unfortunately, unique to this particular war-criminal President. Nor is the employment of public relations in the service of military prowess.

After the invasion of Grenada, there was what the New York Times called recently a grand Reaganesque gesture; namely, Reagan stood up and said, we are “standing tall.” six thousand U.S. Special Forces won, I think, eight thousand medals for overcoming the resistance of a couple of dozen Cuban construction workers, meanwhile killing dozens of other American soldiers in the process. The press had to play a role, too. They had to suppress, and did suppress, the fact that Cuba had made offers instantly to negotiate the whole issue. The claim was the U.S. was protecting American students in a medical school. Cuba, said, fine, take over the medical school. All of that had to be suppressed by the press. It was kind of leaked quietly after it was all over and it was too late. But, yes, that was the grand event.

Proud to be an American, where at least, uh… How’s that go?

One thing you gotta say about Clinton, though, is that he wasn’t doing it so his friends in the oil and construction businesses could make out like bandits. No, sirree. No, his friends were lawyers and Wall Street types, and they weren’t heavy in defense industries. What they wanted was cover for their latest multinational scam.

They called this scam “free trade”, a term only slightly more accurate than “Moral Majority”. Clinton didn’t just buy into it; this was the only issue in his eight years for which he pulled out all the stops. Every bit of leverage he could apply to Congress was in play. With most of the Republicans, and fewer than 40% of the Democrats, voting with him, he got what Wall Street wanted. And the giant sucking sound became audible. Health care reform? Gays in the military? Civil liberties? Those could wait. We need 100,000 new cops on our dangerous streets.

Current-day Democrats, with a few honorable exceptions, are playing the same political game Bush is. He has a losing hand, and is trying not to acknowledge that, so he can find a sucker to take over the hand and go back to his beloved branch-cutting. The Democrats, on the other hand, figure they have a winning hand; all they have to do is not screw up and they’ll win in 2008. So why solve the big problems now? They didn’t create them. Yes, people might live who’ll otherwise die. But whose fault is that?

Surely, beloveds, it’s ours. Folks are dying in their roles as pawns in our politicians’ games. We must stop this madness.

Now that Bush has vetoed Congress’s first attempt to end the war, what’s the next move?

Some Democrats will complain about the President’s actions, talk about his distance from reality, and ridicule his idiotic stubbornness. Then they’ll vote for a bill that gives him more or less exactly what he wants: all the money and none of the strings. They’ll justify this cowardly action, aimed solely at improving their own career paths, with two contradictory excuses.

The exoteric statement will imply that the Democrats support the troops as much as the White House, and will pledge to work through other channels to change the President’s mind. In other words, it will be largely an admission of surrender in the battle to stop the war, plus a pledge not to surrender next time. Or at least to find some future time at which surrender will not happen. Cheese, anyone?

The esoteric view, understood in (most of) the restaurants frequented by Senators, Members of Congress, and Presidential hopefuls, will in essence be a calculation that the danger of confronting the President on the war is too great; so the best thing to do is to wait him out. Withdrawing funding, which is clearly the only tactic that will make the administration pay attention, might cause some occupancy changes on the Hill, whereas a President committed to a vastly unpopular war will be an albatross for any Republican running in 2008 who can’t point to a lot of anti-Bush votes between now and then. In particular, the Republicans will need to nominate a serious gymnast for President, someone who can connect with party faithful, about half of whom still believe in the war, and yet will have some chance of attracting votes from the two-thirds of the population that thinks the war was a bad idea to begin with.

My guess is the Enabler Caucus will boast at least Clinton, Biden, and Obama from the current crop of Presidential hopefuls. Of course, events could certainly intervene to change facts and opinions. I’d love to move Barack out of this group; but his own statements clearly place him in this group for now.

The Dissenter Caucus certainly includes Kucinich, Gravel, and Edwards, and probably Dodd, at least in most circumstances.

As for me, despite the moral and legal transgression of invading a country that didn’t threaten us, I’d be willing to consider leaving troops there for a short period if it would help Iraqis get things together, but that ain’t gonna happen. War supporters posit a bloodbath if we leave, but that’s obviously already taking place; the fault for which lies with the United States, and in particular with the planners and executors of the war, who are guilty of war crimes and crimes against peace, and possibly crimes against humanity as well, according to the definitions we established for the trials at Nuremberg after the Second World War. But that was, I admit, pre-9/11.

So it seems to me that it’s our duty as citizens to tell Congress that we want the war ended, as this Edwards commercial, now running in a few states, advocates.

We should also let Democratic Presidential hopefuls know that vague generalities followed by capitulation on the actual vote will be punished in the primaries.

Of course this is easy for people like Edwards, not currently in office, to say. If you’re in Congress, you might be inclined to believe that your continuance in office is ipso facto good for the country, because what you want is good stuff, and you’ve learned something about how to work the system. Thus, political calculations to keep yourself in office also work to the benefit of the country. What’s good for you is what’s good for America.

But at some point morality must trump ambition. A commmitted citizen would, in my opinion, finally reach a point where calculations of personal gain would be swept aside by the national need. And what this nation needs is to be out of Iraq.

It wouldn’t be fair to pick on just the New York Times today, it’s time to give a worse actor it’s due. Most of us here actually do like most of the editorial writing done at the Times. The same cannot be said for the Washington Post. Fortunately I don’t have to make the argument against the Post, as Representative David Obey of Wisconsin has already done it for me today on the floor of the House of Representatives. I might have spiced the language up with a few choice four letter words, but he’s telling the truth. Give ’em Hell, Obey.

Everything that descends must converge. The rhetoric of rationalization, for instance. George, meet Khalid:

I don’t like to kill children and the kids. Never Islam are, give me green light to kill peoples. Killing, as in the Christianity, Jews, and Islam, are prohibited. But there are exception of rule when you are killing people in Iraq. You said we have to do it. We don’t like Saddam. But this the way to deal with Saddam. Same thing you are saying. Same language you use, I use.

Today’s Sweet Spot award goes to Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and thus, hopefully, a person of some relevance to the debate over the US presence in Iraq.

Supporters of the surge argue that the resolution opposing it “emboldens the enemy,” Levin said, “but that is an extraordinarily naïve view of the enemy.”

“What emboldens the sectarian fighters is the inability of Iraqi leaders to make the political compromises so essential to finally reining in the Sunni insurgents and the Shia militias,” he said. “The enemy cares little what Congress says. It is emboldened by what the Iraqi leaders don’t do. The enemy isn’t emboldened by congressional debate. It is emboldened by open-ended occupation of a Muslim country by Western troops.

“The enemy is emboldened by years of blunders and bravado, false assumptions and wishful thinking, and ignorance of the history of the land being occupied. The enemy is emboldened by an administration which says it is changing course, which acknowledges that a political settlement by Iraqi leaders is essential to ending the violence, but then plunges us more deeply militarily into a sectarian witch’s brew.”

Sending in more U.S. troops, Levin said, “sends the false message that we can save the Iraqis from themselves.”