Saturday, March 17, 2007

Losing the War on Terrorism

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Six months ago, 100 of America's top foreign-policy professionals told Foreign Policy magazine that the United States was losing the war on terrorism. Six months later, the prognosis is even worse:
...surveyed again today, this bipartisan group sees a world that continues to grow more dangerous and a U.S. national security strategy that is failing on several fronts.

-
Foreign Policy

Some highlights from the report: 80 percent disagree with Bush that the US is winning the "war on terrorism". Some 47 percent see nuclear prolileration to be the greater threat. Eighty-six percent believe the world has become a more dangerous place. Seventy-one percent of those calling themselves "conservative", likewise, believe that the US is losing the war on terrorism.

Just one month after 9/11, FP reports, 4 percent of Americans told an ABC News/Washington Post poll that "...they approved of how the fight against terrorism was being handled." How things have changed! That was before the US invaded Afghanistan, long before the US attacked and invaded Iraq. It's all gone to hell since. Clearly -war was not and is not the solution. War has solved nothing and made things worse.

Foreign Policy published a laundry list of disasters, all of which sour the public mood.

...a bloody war between Israel and Hezbollah, a plot in Britain to explode liquid bombs aboard airliners bound for the United States, North Korea’s nuclear test, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, and Iraq’s downward slide into deadly sectarian strife.
Why are Democrats afraid to take on Bush on the "support the troops" issue? Democrats are still trying to walk a thin, narrow line, triangulating a center that has clearly moved to the left.

Nothing is gained by staying in Iraq. It imperils the troops. It does not support them. Troops are best supported by taking them out of the killing fields and, in the process, ending those policies that have created terrorism and opposition where none had been before.

Bush may be but another ideological terrorist but he's a more dangerous one. The militant Ayatollahs, Bin Laden, and numerous anonymous bombers are not so different from Bush, nor he, them. On all sides, "combatants" eschew doubt, when it fact, it should be cultivated. Certitude is the first refuge of idiots.

Monsters from the id are very real. Bush cannot escape the consequences of his ill-conceived policies. Nor can we. Terrorism gets worse by the minute and, by the minute, the American occupation bogs down. Terrorism is said to have increased some seven fold since the conflict on the ground began. [See: The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide.]

Enough is enough.

Democrats must seize the moral high ground. Democrats must cut off funding for additional troops and additional campaigns. Tacking "social spending" onto the latest funding bill is all fine and good but more must be done. Democrats must tax our way out of the war with a "Victory Over Terror" tax levied on incomes of $5 million a year or more. Levied on all income, it would include stock options, jet plane rides, company-paid-for health and life insurance, retirement programs, golden parachutes, the use of apartments in Paris, cars and drivers.

In the meantime, we all continue to pay a high price for the Bush/Blair follies. Terrorists, we are still told, just hate freedom and, should they win, will rob us of those freedoms. But we are losing those freedoms anyway. To Bush, Blair and similar ilk. Consider the following from George Galloway's web site.
The BBC have banned the hit single 'War', which features a Tony Blair lookalike in the accompanying video, over fears that its pro-peace message will offend the government .

It is bad enough to lose freedom of speech during a real war! But a phony one? I remember when Britain was free. If you doubt the extent to which Blair has subverted Britain's proud heritage, consider yet another item from the Galloway site:
Cable TV Screens go blank as Murdoch and Branson battle for pay-TV market
An excerpt:
While insisting there is "mutual respect" between him and Rupert Murdoch, Sir Richard has made clear his views about the media mogul's role in British public life. Pointing out Mr Murdoch's ownership of four national newspapers and controlling stake in Sky, Sir Richard Branson said: "If you tag on ITV to that as well, basically you've got rid of democracy in this country and we might as well just let Murdoch decide who is going to be our prime minister."
How surreal the recent global market crash seemed --especially its choreographed appearance. We are reminded of the true nature of both globalization and global fascism. Here's a timely excerpt from Mike Whitney`s The Great Dollar Crash of '07: "
The so-called ‘global economic system’ has nothing to do with competition, free markets or private enterprise; that’s just public relations gobbledygook. In practice, it is the world’s biggest extortion racket, wherein, the “Godfather”-- Uncle Sam-- holds a gun to the heads of his subjects and forces them to use our fiat-paper to purchase the oil that lubricates their economies."
I refuse to believe, meanwhile, that Western Civilization will succumb to the new barbarian within, namely Bush and his fascist, global corporate sponsors. That Bush pays only lip service to the Constitution belies his true allegiance: the idea of the global corporation. It is the corporation which has allied itself with older cultures distinctly anti-Western in tone and spirit. Some have called it corporate feudalism. But, for my part, the word fascism does quite nicely. It was Mussolini who defined fascism as corporatism and he did so in both word and deed.

Bertrand Russell stated that Western Civilization was essentially Greek civilization, writing:
"There is no civilization but the Greek in which a philosophic movement goes hand in hand with a scientific tradition. It is this that gives the Greek enterprise its peculiar scope; it is this dual tradition that has shaped the civilization of the West."
Fast fowarding through my own rather lengthy take on this, I have come to the conclusion that there is a certain introspective reflection shot-through the Western tradition. Clearly there is no such self-consciousness in either Christianity or Islam. Significantly, the origin of both religions are both geographically and philosophically outside the "Western" tradition and the civilization of which Russell speaks. The fly in the ointment is the global corporation playing both sides against an amoral middle. It must be pointed out that while Christianity is practiced in the west, its origins are middle eastern. Fundies who demonize the Middle East have apparently forgotten that.

The Greece of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Phidias, Solon, Aristophanes, Sophocles was secular. From time to time in Western society, the fault lines will appear. When Salman Rushdie published his "Satanic Verses", he became the object of a fatwa. Later, when a cartoonist lampooned the "Prophet", the millions who supported the Greek ideal found themselves ill-equipped to defend it against an entire civilization which is outside their own tradition, a tradition so well described by Thomas Jefferson who wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." I leave it to a detail oriented scholar to trace Jefferson back to Locke, indeed, to Greece. Nor can we conclude that because Socrates lost his battle with the *religious right" that Greece was just another state. The point, rather, is that it was the Greek ideal of free inquiry that survived to shape the west -not the authoritarian, "Eastern" tradition that persecuted Socrates as surely as the Church in Rome would burn Giordano Bruno.

Meanwhile, a new motion picture, 300, has drawn fire from Iran for depicting a hand full of brave Greeks holding off a vast Persian army. I see another analogy. I see a handful of guerrillas holding off what had been the most powerful nation on earth. I see George Washington holding out long enough for the French to win the American "Revolution". I see Gen. Sam Houston attack with but a handful of scrappy "settlers" to defeat a vast Mexican army lead by Gen. Santa Anna of Mexico. (See:' Alamo' touches raw nerve in Mexico; The Battle Of San Jacinto ) In five years, ten years, a generation -what will be said of the US defeat in Iraq?

Some additional resources:
Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline
Bush Has Lost the War on Terrorism
Bush lost the war on terrorism because he dare not win it
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Friday, March 16, 2007

It's Official: The Hottest Winter on Record

A recent television news report may have summed up the sense of malaise and disgust in America today. A video clip depicted a rural family watching George W. Bush on the family television set. When Bush got to the topic of Iraq, the man seized the remote, clicked it off, and declared loudly: "I am sick of this guy!" This is interesting because there is a very real possibility that the man may have voted for Bush.

Enough is written of his numerous war crimes and torture -all pulled off under the cover of war on Iraq. But what of the war he wages daily on Americans?

At home, Bush has waged war on the environment -a fact brought home by the news today that this past winter has been the hottest since record keeping began some 125 years ago. Is it a fluke- as the GOP would have you believe -or is it global warming as a result of greenhouse gas emissions?

Until Al Gore took climate change on the road, Bush's abrogation of the Kyoto treaty had been all but forgotten. (see: An Inconvenient Truth) But a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change changed all that. Signed by some 2,500 scientists from 130 nations, it paints a stark picture. It's hard to sum up this vision of apocalypse, so here are just a few highlights.

Greenhouse gases - from industry, transportation and agriculture -are most certainly to blame for global warming. This so called Greenhouse effect is the label given the increase in such gases over time. Primary sources of greenhouse gases are clearly due to human activity and include:
  • deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels leading to higher carbon dioxide concentrations;
  • landfill emissions leading to higher methane atmospheric concentrations. Newer fully vented septic systems have become a major source of methane;
  • the use of fertilizers in various agriculture lead to higher concentrations of nitrous oxide.
The best source for information on emission can be found in the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios The following excerpt is related to the graphic that accompanies this article.
Figure 1-2: Energy-related and industrial global CO2 emissions for scenarios reviewed in the IPCC Report Climate Change 1994 (Alcamo et al., 1995). The shaded area indicates coverage of IS92 scenarios while the "spaghetti-like" curves indicate other energy-related emissions scenarios found by the IPCC review to be representative of the scenarios available in the open literature at that time. (Individual scenarios are listed in the Appendix of Alcamo et al., 1995.)

-Figure 1-2: Energy-related and industrial global CO2 emissions for scenarios
It is easy to get lost in the many numbers, many of which are meaningless to non-scientists. But here's an easy one: an average coal fired plant pumps about ten mllion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.

One of the most pernicious effects will be rising sea levels. That's easily visualized -having witnessed a tsunami and, later, Katrina. If nothing is done to correct the trend, if gas emission do not peak before 2030, it may be too late to do anything about it. But Bush's position on this issue has given cover to the world`s other great polluters --China and India. China is at least as dependent on coal as the US is addicted to oil and gas. What leverage will the US have on two nation's eager to out "US" the "US"? Aggravating the situation are the traditional tensions between China and India.

In the meantime, the numbers are in on what has turned out to have been the warmest winter since record keeping began in the US some 125 years ago. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says temperatures continue to rise by a fifth of a degree every decade. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1995. And while NOAA does not blame "global warming", weather experts predict that 2007 might very well be the hottest year on record. The IPCC report must be taken into consideration before these numbers can be blamed on El Nino.

Would things have been different if Bush had not thumbed his nose at Kyoto? Consider the fact that United States is among the world's leading producers of greenhouse gases.

-The Existentialist Cowboy

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Thursday, March 15, 2007

Bush Kills Off American Optimism

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Bush has robbed Americans of that most American trait -optimism. In the worst of times, Americans shrugged off deprivations and hardships with both a complaint and a wisecrack.

Not quite the British "stiff upper lip", it nevertheless struck back at bad times with a smart ass remark amid faith that things would get better. World War I would make the world safe for Democracy. The Axis powers would be defeated. We would get rich.

At the height of the depression, the movies had a hit with a little ditty called "We're in the Money". It made Ginger Rogers a star.
"We're in the Money," lyrics by Al Dubin, music by Harry Warren (from the film Gold Diggers of 1933, 1933)

We're in the money, we're in the money;
We've got a lot of what it takes to get along!
We're in the money, that sky is sunny,
Old Man Depression you are through, you done us wrong.
We never see a headline about breadlines today.
And when we see the landlord we can look that guy right in the eye

We're in the money, come on, my honey,
Let's lend it, spend it, send it rolling along!

Oh, yes we're in the money, you bet we're in the money,
We've got a lot of what it takes to get along!
Let's go we're in the money, Look up the skies are sunny,
Old Man Depression you are through, you done us wrong.
We never see a headline about breadlines today.
And when we see the landlord we can look that guy right in the eye
We're in the money, come on, my honey,
Let's lend it, spend it, send it rolling along!
But if you might not get rich, an American might provide for his children a better education than he got. An American might indulge fantasies of equality, an education, a career. An American rarely feared that he would be locked up unfairly, beaten, deprived of his rights as an American.

Unless he was black.

But in those days, as E.L. Doctorow would say satirically in "Ragtime", "...there were no negroes."

An American might sleep soundly at night knowing that his government would not be reading his mail or conspiring to break into his home. He might never be accused of treason for supporting a Democratic candidate. He might even dare to join his local union shop.

Of course, even then, such optimism was often misplaced. Black people were lynched. Education was difficult to get. Many died in the dust bowl. Others starved. During the Great Depression, my own relatives lived on wild game in the "Big Thicket" of southeastern Texas. One of my own ancestors might have killed a game warden. I will never know the truth of it. Out of that national experience, another great song became emblematic:
"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney (1931)

They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job. They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time. Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?
The ghosts of the often tragic struggles for equality, civil liberties, the right to join a labor movement, still haunt America. The struggles were engaged because we believed the ideals might be achieved. Labor might achieve a living wage. Minorities might achieve equality. And, during the long Viet Nam debacle, we took to the streets in Chicago because we believed peace might break out. That was the real meaning of flowers placed in gun barrels.

During the administration of Bush Jr, it was difficult to be so optimistic. Bush did not merely eschew American ideals, he openly derides them. Most perniciously, he said "This would be a whole lot easier if this was a dictatorship...just as long as I'm the dictator." Thus Bush declared the anti-American nature of his regime at the outset and, true to form, he waged war on the U.S. Constitution.

Bush is not content to crush American optimism. He seeks to replace it with fear and despair, powerful negative emotions that he and his party eagerly embrace and exploit. Dick Cheney's infamous "snarl" is but a symptom.

By contrast, Franklin Delano Roosevelt -at the height of the depression -said: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Bush, by contrast, seems to be the physical manifestation of the American anxieties that he exploits. He is nothing without the phantom menaces that he summons. His very image is enough to trigger a shot of adrenalin, a "fight or flight" reaction that goes right to the gut.

It is no wonder than his recent trip throughout Latin America was notable for the violent demonstrations that it inspired. And, in Europe, you will find graffiti stating "Bush is Satan".

It does not matter that Bush is or is not Satan. What matters is that millions of otherwise intelligent people believe that he is. In fact, he is more loathed than Satan.
The really bad news for Bush? When the same pollsters asked Americans to name a "famous person" as their "biggest villain of the year," 25 percent of them volunteered the president's name. That put Bush way out in front on the biggest-villain list. Rounding out the most villainous five: Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il, who combined couldn't match Bush's 25 percent level..
--Tim Grieve, War Room, More popular than Jesus, more hated than Satan,
Bush is thought by billions to be a most powerful force for evil. Clearly, he inspires fear at home and terrorism abroad,. He has made of America, an un-American state. Bush himself summed up his agenda:
We will export death and destruction to the four corners of the earth.
-George W. Bush
It just keeps getting harder to remain optimistic.-The Existentialist Cowboy
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Wednesday, March 14, 2007

How the GOP Made the World a More Dangerous Place

Bush has repeatedly compared what he calls his war against "Islamic extremists" to previous struggles against Nazism and Communism.

Nonsense!

The GOP has never forgiven FDR for having prevailed in World War II. Recently, the GOP would conspire with conversative media conglomerates to perpetuate a counter-myth: it was Ronald Reagan who prevailed in a cold war against "communism".

More nonsense.

This simplistic, jingoistic view ignores a remarkable leader by the name of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev who waged quiet revolutions at home and abroad. At Rekjavik, it was Gorbachev -not Reagan -who proposed "...a total elimination of Soviet and American intermediate-range missiles in Europe, and strict compliance with (and non-withdrawal from) the ABM Treaty for not less than ten years." (See: The Eighties Club) It was a nuclear showdown but not the type that we had prepared for since the 50's.

We had been threatened with peace --and were frightened by the prospect.

At the end of the Rekjavik sessions, it was a "...a tight-lipped Reagan" who escorted Gorbachev to the limousine. Gorbachev is reported to have said "I don't know what more I could have done."

"You could have said yes," Reagan replied, having already rejected the Soviet leaders proposals. It was Reagan -fearing the loss of his arch conservative base -who blinked. It was Reagan who left Rekjavik bearing the responsibility for having left a long and dangerous cold war intact.

It is true that the Soviet Union possessed considerable nuclear capabilities. In the event of a missile exchange, it might have destroyed the U.S. in the course of an hour. But, as we have said, it was Gorbachev who put that very capability on the table. It was Gorbachev who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. It was a Republican, Ronald Reagan, who blinked.

Consider the many Bush lies and exaggerations. Bush, like his GOP forebears, would like to compare his quagmire in Iraq to the war Roosevelt waged against the Axis powers. The truth of the matter is the Nazis had launched a world war with an awesome military machine -the most powerful military force that the world had yet seen. Nazis slaughtered millions of civilians in support of Hitler's quest for world domination and Russian oil. To liken Bush's many follies to WWII, to the world wide effort to crush the the very real threat of Nazism, is just absurd. Rather, Bush, by exploiting the extremist acts of of tiny minority, has empowered and legitimized their struggle. Bush has not only made terrorism worse, he has given it a megaphone.

Now we find ourselves bogged down in what may prove to be this nation's worst catastrophe. In the Middle East, Bush wages a brutal war crime against a civilian population and he does so upon a pack of malicious lies and transparent pretexts. Opposition to US aims in the Middle East cannot be compared to either WWII or the Cold War. If there are analogies to be made, they are Bush to Hitler, Halliburton to stormtroopers.

There is hope that the many throughout the Middle East who sincerely seek a positive change will find a voice. Only a united regional effort can expel the "crusader". If Bush is concerned about his legacy, he should keep this in mind: he will be remembered as the western crusader who re-united the disparate peoples who make up the region. He will have united "enemies" against us. He will have given them common cause to wage Jihad. Like Reagan who blinked at Rekjavik, Bush will have made the world a very, very, dangerous place, indeed'










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Tuesday, January 23, 2007

BBC: The World Rejects Bush's Policies

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

For a brief time following the events of 911 the United States enjoyed widespread support throughout the world. It took a George W. Bush to squander all that goodwill. It is not surprising that along with a Congressional majority and over 90 percent approval rating, the policies of George W. Bush are now almost universally reviled. A new world wide poll by the BBC suggests that US policies are almost universally rejected, denounced by majorities as high as two-thirds or more on most issues and much higher on still others.

Bush may have enjoyed a longer honeymoon with the rest of the world had he not insisted upon waging a war of aggression against Iraq, a nation having nothing whatsoever to do with 911, a nation about which Bush lied repeatedly in order to wage his war. Bush's numbers have gone down as the war rages on and on without end and, increasingly without hope. The numbers prove that the world now views the US, under Bush, as a rogue nation.

Getting reviews as bad as those for the Iraq war is the the issue of global warming. On this issue, often denied and derided be the GOP, Bush is proven as wrong, armed, and dangerous as he was on Iraq. Bush is now escalating his failed war on Iraq but failure on global warming carries with it even more catastrophic results.

Everyone can be wrong once in a while. And almost everyone is wrong from time to time with regard to issues less critical to the very survival of the planet. It takes a particularly evil genius to be so consistently wrong about almost everything and with such dire consequences.

Ironically and tragically, it is the magnitude of Bush's crimes that afford him a measure of invincibility. Those who are merely and routinely wrong about mundane issues are promptly sacked. Those, like Bush, who are monumentally wrong, are often promoted by a small and still powerful cabal who fear drowning in the wake of a sinking Titanic. Clinging tenaciously to power, this class of conscienceless courtiers will prop Bush up until all are swept away in the inevitable political Tsunami.

Such a political apocalypse was described by the great British screenwriter Sir Robert Bolt, whose script for A Man for All Seasons portrayed a frightened nobility in danger of being swamped in Wolsey's wake. As the execution of Sir Thomas More proved: there is rarely a convenient escape for fence-sitters. As in a play by Ibsen, Shakespeare, or, indeed, Bolt himself, Bush set into motion a tragic dialectic with the words: "You are either with us or you are for the terrorists".

On every issue, however, the world has rejected Bush and his divisive policies. Is Bush so stupid that he would suggest that some two thirds of the world's population are terrorists?

It is most certainly a mistake to divide up the world into black and white, good and evil. Yet that is what Bush has done. Though he would not compromise when pressed against the wall, Bolt's portrayal of Thomas More is that of a man who would have avoided the "either/or", a man who would have preferred the life of the common man to that of the existential hero.

More: God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. If He suffers us to come to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and, yes, Meg, then we can clamor like champions, if we have the spittle for it. But it's God's part, not our own, to bring ourselves to such a pass. Our natural business lies in escaping.

-A Man for All Seasons, Screenplay by Robert Bolt


Wednesday, January 17, 2007

"This would be a whole lot easier if this was a dictatorship…just as long as I’m the dictator!" —George W. Bush

As the world is distracted with wars and rumors of wars yet to come, Bush, who peddles those wars while exploiting the very fear of war, works quietly behind the scenes to consolidate his dictatorship.

The following video of Sen. Diane Feinstein on the floor of the U.S. Senate blows the whistle on yet another Bushco power grab -the latest chapter in Bush's Hitler-like attack on the independence of the American judiciary.

Watch this video and tremble -fear for the future of Democracy, Due Process of Law, freedom itself:

When the end nears, depend on Bush to defy the Supreme Court of the United States in a critical case, a divisive case in which the stakes are very high. As Bush said of his jihad against a mythic "Axis of Evil", this case is of the form either/or. It will make or break his would-be dictatorship in a scenario best left to the game Risk. Bush is willing to wager the farm that his weak-kneed opposition will make the wrong choice.

The American people, the Congress and the courts must prove him wrong -just as he has been wrong about everything else. The American republic is in play in a cynical Bush/GOP game.

The stakes are very high. If Bush wins, the people lose. America will no longer have the legal recourse of removal; impeachment will be a dead issue. If impeached, Bush will not leave the office. Having subverted every protection afforded the people by our founders, Bush and company seem determined to leave us no choice but slavery under a dictatorship or a popular uprising. Bush will leave us no choice but revolution. It's his modus operandi.

…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

—Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

Nixon was called an “imperial President”. Interestingly, the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon were concerned with his abuse of the IRS, obstruction of justice in connection with the Watergate Scandal, and his various abuses of agencies to include the CIA.

When the final us v them showdown occurs, I wonder: will the Congress stand up for the restoration of the U.S. Constitution, American Democracy, Due Process of Law?


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Saturday, January 13, 2007

How Bush Aided Al Qaeda and How the Democrats Can End the War

Bush antes up the lives of US soldiers to play out the two deuces he holds. Cynically sacrificing American lives, a treasonous and illegitimate "President" hopes to salvage his legacy -a legacy not worth salvaging at any price on any bet with any hand. Legally, the illegitimate "President" who lied the nation into the commission of an ongoing war crime compounds his venal crimes and ventures once again into high treason.

Why did Bush lose the war in its very planning, inception, and execution? Greed? Arrogance? Idiocy? Vainglorious visions of conquest and dictatorship? At this point -who cares? We must all work together to bring this miscreant and liar to justice in the Senate and, later, in the international court.

The record is clear when seen outside the prism of mass media -especially Fox and all the lying minions who toil there. The facts are these:
  • The Iraq war is lost. Iraq itself may be a lost cause. Bush broke it irreparably.
  • Iraq has become a virtual automated recruiting machine for Al Qaeda in those places where it actually exists. Moreover, Al Qaeda is now joined by numerous other groups who are similarly inspired by Bush's ongoing crimes. Bin Laden's number one ally is Bush's hamfisted conduct of middle east policy. The failed war in Iraq is only the most publicized aspect of it. Bin Laden -literally a creation of the CIA -has been made a gift of Iraq by Bush. Bin Laden and his wannabes alone have benefited from this most tragic war, this most tragic failure in American history.
  • There may nothing left Bush now but to bow and deign to talk to the villified Al Qaeda.
When the surge fails (and it will) Iran wil fill the vacuum having grown stronger as a result of Bush's counter-productive campaign of villification. As expected Iran has already formed an alliance with the Shias of Iraq -an outcome sure to alienate Bush's Sunni allies in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

If Bush's goal was the usurpation of Iraqi oil, it is hard to see how he might deliver those resources to his cabal of oil barons when both Sunnis and Shias oppose him and his evil campaign to make the Middle East safe for the theft of oil -not Democracy.

Some 70 percent of all Americans oppose the surge. Democrats, therefore, must seize the moral high ground by cutting off funding for additional troops and additional campaigns. Democrats -it has been suggested -can tax our way out of the war with a "Victory Over Terror" tax levied on incomes of $5 million a year or more. Levied on all income, it would include stock options, jet plane rides, company-paid-for health and life insurance, retirement programs, golden parachutes, the use of apartments in Paris, cars and drivers.

The GOP will hate it and, therefore, it must be good. Those targeted have enjoyed the big GOP tax cuts since the days of Ronald Reagan who made them feel good about being greedy. This group has never been expected to sacrifice in times of war; rather, they have been enriched by it repeatedly. It's time to put a stop to it. Power to the people'

To close, the following is the video referred to by Sadbuttrue in the comments to this article:


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Thursday, January 11, 2007

Bush's Last Gasp Amid a Lost War

A strong voice has emerged that lays bare the fraud and incompetence behind Bush's Iraq strategy from the bombing campaign to the surge -a last desparate grasp for illusory "victory". The voice is that of Rory Stewart of Britain's Foreign Office. He brings to the table his experiences in Afghanistan and in Iraq as a Deputy Governor.

Stewart declares flatly that the Bush/Blair war on Iraq is already lost, there are no good options left Bush. A civil war has been underway for some time now. That opinion, of course, is also that of this blog and has been since its inception. Stewart made his case on BBC's Hardtalk where he was cross-examined by Steven Sackur. Stewart says of the surge that it will "...only kill a lot of people" (See: All the King's Men Sign a Death Warrant on American GIs) It is a failed strategy. Citing experiences in Fallujah and elsewhere, he says that Bush's proposal is doomed to fail.

"I see no reason to believe that this will not be the case again," Stewart says. He is correct to point out that so-called insurgents have always been unaffected by surges. Insurgents always return to an area when coalition forces pull out.

It is not only the sectarian nature of the conflict but Bush's inability to define victory that makes winning impossible. Certainly it has been noticed that when Bush administration officials used to talk of victory now they talk only of security. Even when expectations are thus scaled down, the Bush administration is mute on how security is achieved when warring sects comprise the government itself. As this blog asked long ago: when civil war breaks out in Iraq, which side will Bush be on?

Ideological slogans marked the run up to war. Tragically, no slogan defined success but all them may have been designed to make GOP ideologues feel good about supporting a war of aggression and the ongoing war crime in the wake of attack and invasion.

Stewart comes to the point. Stated US goals, he says, are not achievable. Indeed, it may be too late for the US to shape Iraq's future in any way whatsoever. The surge which we now know will involve some 21,000 additional troops is called a "grave mistake." Underscoring the point, Stewart states: "What we can do, we have done." I wonder if Stewart might also have been thinking about how the irreparable harm that has been done might be undone. That, of course, is impossible. The enemy is hard to identify. Conventional forces cannot just go in, Stewart says, and have any effect.

Sunnis and Shias have at least this much in common. Both want the Americans out! Both sects have other things in common but we may never know about them. According to Stewart, Britain actually stopped talks between the warring factions. Why would the coalition fear the possibility of peace breaking out in the war zone? When something might have developed, nothing was. Stewart concludes: "Getting rid of Saddam is pretty much all that we have accomplished." It is my opinion that even that is tarnished by the ludicrous nature of the kangaroo court that tried Saddam and, of course, the farcical and cruel nature of the lynching that followed. It is hard to imagine that Bush would have wanted to make of Saddam a martyr.

Bush claims that pulling out now would result in disaster. Stewart, however, sees a phased withdrawal as Iraq's only hope at this point. BBC's Stephen Sackur pressed the issue, asking if such a pullout would result in a terrible civil war. Stewart's answer: "There is a terrible civil war now."

Indeed, some 3,000 Iraqis die every month. Stewart asks: "What is achieved by staying another year, three years, or six years?" That question may have been answered by Edwin Starr at the height of American involvement in Viet Nam. War! What is it good for? Absolutely Nuthin'.

At last, the opinion of the world has turned against the Bush/Blair conspiracy to occupy Iraq.
Agree with many of your points written above, but no-one 'dragged' this country into the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Yes, Blair acquiesced to US foreign policy, but the invasion was also supported and voted for by a huge majority of our MP's.

The choice to invade and occupy Iraq was made by the elected representatives of Britain. No-one else is to blame for this idiocy - it's Blair and our MP's.

Still, every cloud has a silver lining . . . I hope to see Blair eventually prosecuted by an energised International Criminal Court. Subsequently, I look forward to the day when I, and other British taxpayers are forced to pay reparations to Iraqis for the horrendous consequences of this immoral and illegal act.

-Comments, Defiance and Delusion, The Guardian



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Thursday, January 04, 2007

The Greeks had a word for Bush: IDIOT!

The great British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in his Wisdom of the West that Western civilization was and is essentially Greek -so great was that blossoming in the fifth century BC. Of the several factors supporting that thesis, none is more important than a discernable secular, populist trend absent from the older civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Russell supports that thesis by pointing out "...an astonishing stream of masterpieces which have set the standard for Western civilization."

Admittedly this is a bit of a tautology. Any civilization could merely define a standard conforming to those of its own creation. Nevermind, Russell remains one of the profound intellects of the 20th century, having partnered with Whitehead in the Principia Mathmatica, and, later, opposing nuclear proliferation, war, and the Viet Nam war in particular.
Russell believed the Greeks were the first civilization to evince philosophical or scientific curiosity. Eastern civilizations of the period, by contrast, were ruled by "divine" Kings, military aristocracies, and powerful priesthoods -guardians of elaborate polytheistic systems. The Pharaoh Akhenaten was a notable exception -remembered for having replaced many gods with one "Sun" god. The effort did not succeed.

Though each Greek city-state developed and nurtured its own culture, all were unmistakably Greek. As such, they were surprisingly secular even if Socrates himself would fall victim to the "religious right". Russell observes that religion "...was not conducive to the exercise of intellectual activity." He leaves it to the reader to conclude that it was because of this that neither Egypt nor Babylonia developed science or philosophy.

It is at this point that Russell makes the study of philosophy an ingredient essential to an understanding of politics:

A man who took no interest in politics was frowned upon, and was called an idiot, which is Greek for "...given over to private interests."

-Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West

The term private interests could be construed to mean hobbies. It is more likely, however, that it is descriptive of burgeoning business enterprises. After all, the city-states must surely have been great importers and traders. As such, it is easy to see certain tensions between the affairs of state and the affairs of enterprise. By the time of Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth" would presage both fascism and Stalinesque communism. In both, the "State" and business would bury the hatchet and work in concert against the interests of everyone else -as Bush and his cabal do today.

It is the Greek use of the word idiot that resonates so truly today, a time when multi-national corporations dominate the media, when Jack Abramoff and similar ilk broker the corporate takeover of the state, when the people themselves are shunned, when George W. Bush exports death and destruction for the benefit of corporate sponsors.

Idiots, indeed!



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Monday, January 01, 2007

Awakening as a Cockroach

It seems never to end. Nothing is learned. Old GOP scandals are covered up or spun while new ones are spawned. There is a body of evidence to indicate that Bush and Blair deliberately schemed to make legal -after the fact -the aggressive war against Iraq. The following link -Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’ -is just the latest smoking gun, confirming the much earlier Downing Street Memos. An excerpt:

MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal."

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier."

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal.

In other words, Bush and Blair are war criminals. These violations of the Nuremberg Principles are prohibited by US Codes, Section 2441 which prescribes the death penalty for war crimes resulting in death.

Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter is vindicated. In 2005, in a 5,000-word speech, Pinter excoriated "...the US government over Guantánamo Bay and its attempts to destabilise Nicaragua in the 1980s."

He also savaged the Blair government for its "pathetic and supine" support of George W. Bush. He likened Blair`s government to a "bleating little lamb" for its support of Bush's criminal war against Iraq. Indeed, the ICC at Belgium has already received numerous cases against Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld and a host of other senior U.S. officials. The charges include crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan.

...among the other named defendants we also have General Ricardo Sanchez, who was in charge of the Iraq war at the outset and authorized these torture techniques. There's also George Tenet, who was head of the CIA, and that of course involves the CIA's secret detention sites around the world, where waterboarding and other kinds of torture went on. Those are three of the people at the top who we've named as defendants. Then we have the lawyers, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo in particular, who basically set up the legal framework. There was a case during the Nuremburg trials in Germany after World War 2 in which German lawyers were gone after because they implemented the Nazi program of murder.

-US Codes, Section 2441Lawyers File War Crimes Charges Against Rumsfeld and Others in German Court

Bush meanwhile will compound his idiocy having learned nothing. Chaos will worsen for two reasons among others: the vengence execution of Saddam and Bush's planned "surge". Bush failure is evident on all but forgotten fronts. Afghanistan, under-reported for years, has been lost. Hamid Karzai is literally confined to Kabul.

​​One is reminded of Winston Churchill who wrote that the statesman "...who yields to war fever...is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events." At last, what does "staying the course" and "getting the job done" mean? There is, in fact, no course to stay but mere "war fever" itself.

Bush, moreover, has never defined what is meant by winning. Some 600,000 Iraqis are now dead as a result of the US invasion and the wave of civil war that spewed up in its wake. That figure is comparable to the 618,000 Americans who died in the Civil War. Is there yet another standard by which the magnitude of this catatastrophe might be made clear?

Now Bush wants to send more troops to Iraq to achieve a "goal" that he cannot articulate. A "surge" it is called when, in fact, it is idiocy compounded, the criminal repetition of a failed policy. Bush will raise the stakes on a losing bet —and he dares call himself a "Texan"! Bush has made of us mere slaves to uncontrollable events, victims of evil unleashed. We might as well have awakened as cockroaches.



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