The Price We Will Pay For Bush's Folly

On the same day that the totally bonkers Liz Cheney pens an op-ed in the WSJ where she says this:

The president has so effectively diminished American strength abroad that there is no longer a question of whether this was his intent. He is working to pre-emptively disarm the United States. He advocates slashing our nuclear arsenal even as the North Koreans threaten us and the Iranians close in on their own nuclear weapon. He has turned his back on America's allies around the world and ignored growing threats.

we find out that we will all be paying for Bush and Cheney's folly in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades to come. 

Abstract: The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history – totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs. The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid. Since 2001, the US has expanded the quality, quantity, availability and eligibility of benefits for military personnel and veterans. This has led to unprecedented growth in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense budgets. These benefits will increase further over the next 40 years. Additional funds are committed to replacing large quantities of basic equipment used in the wars and to support ongoing diplomatic presence and military assistance in the Iraq and Afghanistan region. The large sums borrowed to finance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will also impose substantial long-term debt servicing costs. As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives. The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.

Remember what we were told 10 years ago?  James Fallows does:

A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisors as Paul Wolfowitz, who said that the invasion would be largely "self-financing" via Iraq's oil, and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war's total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.

So what does the Harvard Kennedy School of Government report see as the greatest security threat?

One of the most significant challenges to future US national security policy will not originate from any external threat. Rather it is simply coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Get that Liz?  Our biggest security threat are the actions of your father and George W. Bush.
Go read the entire report (pdf) for a breakdown of the costs.

In which universe?

John McCain has a tough job ahead of him. The Bush kool-aide drinkers are down into the mid 20s. Bush has the highest disapproval rating ever recorded but McCain needs the kool-aide drinkers. St John must distance himself from George W. Bush to win but if he alienates the Bush cultists he can't win anyway even if Hillary attempts tom throw the election his way. OK, the cultists and the hard core rednecks won't vote for Obama but the might just sit it out. Tony Snow had his debut on CNN today and said McCain is trying to distance himself from Bush on the easy stuff like Katrina. But here was the shocker. Who does Snow think could help McCain? The only man in the US less popular than George W. Bush, Dick Cheney. Come on Tony, you are going to have to do better than that. In which universe would Dick Cheney be an asset to McCain's campaign? Certainly not this one.

Dick And John's Road Trip

Dick Cheney and John McCain both went to Iraq this weekend so they could demonstrate just how well the surge is working. Of course Iraq did not cooperate.
Cheney cites 'phenomenal' Iraqi security progress as bombing kills 40

BAGHDAD — Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday made a surprise visit to Baghdad, where he pledged that U.S. forces would "not quit before the job is done" and said that a massive troop buildup had achieved "phenomenal" improvements in security.

At sunset Monday, however, a female suicide bomber killed at least 40 people and injured more than 50 when she blew herself up in a crowded pedestrian area near a Shiite Muslim shrine in the southern holy city of Karbala, according to government and hospital officials. Among the victims were several Iranian pilgrims who'd come to worship at the Imam Hussein shrine, one of Islam's most sacred sites.

And the U.S. military announced the deaths of two soldiers who were killed Monday when their Humvee struck a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, bringing the number of American troop deaths to at least 3,990 since the war began.

Meanwhile St John made a taxpayer financed photo-op trip to Iraq but the surge is working so well he won't be visiting the market he put up as an example a year ago. Last year he visited the the open-air Shorja market, guarded by 100 US troops and three blackhawk helicopters. Not even that would be enough today as the market is controlled Sadr's Mahdi Army and is not considered safe for Americans.

And from the LA Times Garrett Therolf went to Iraq to find some feel good stories and couldn't find many and was once again forced to mostly report bad news.

The lunatics win another one

You should be very afraid. Dick Cheney and the rest of the criminally insane neocons and Zionists have forced yet another rational senior military commander out paving the way for attempt to create Armageddon before they lose power.
Admiral Fallon Resigns as Head of Centcom

WASHINGTON — Navy Adm. William Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command, which leads U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, is stepping down, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced Tuesday.

Fallon claimed ongoing misperceptions about differences between his ideas and U.S. policy are making it too difficult for him to operate, Gates said, agreeing. He added that the differences are not extreme, but the misperception had become too great.

"I believe it was the right thing to do, even though I do not believe there are, in fact, significant differences between his views and administration policy," Gates said, noting that he accepted the request to retire with "reluctance and regret."

"I don't know whether he was misinterpreted or whether people attributed views to him that were not his views, but clearly there was a concern," Gates said.

The misperceptions relate to an article published last week in Esquire magazine that portrayed Fallon as opposed to President Bush's Iran policy. It described Fallon as a lone voice against taking military action to stop the Iranian nuclear program.

In a statement distributed by Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Fla., Fallon said he requested permission to step down because the article showed disrespect toward the president and caused embarrassment and distractions that were the result of misrepresentations of his views of Centcom missions.

They may call it a resignation but you know he was forced out.

Larry Johnson says this can only mean one thing we are One Step Closer to War in Iran.

Admiral Fallon has led the resistance among military senior commanders who oppose a military strike against Iran. Fallon correctly recognizes that an attack on Iran will put the United States at great risk and ruin our ability to influence events for the good in the Middle East. He knows first hand that U.S. military forces are stretched past the breaking point and are unable to provide the military support required to carry out offensive operations against targets in Iran. This is madness and President Bush has not learned a goddamned thing from the mis-adventure in Iraq. It is time for Congress to stand firmly against this rush to war. But it is an election year and such a stand would require courage–a trait sorely lacking among most members of either party.

Related information here: Does Admiral Fallon have to go?

Update
I think Josh get's it right here which is why we should be really frightened.

It is widely believed in media and political circles that despite the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, American foreign policy is back under some kind of adult/mainstream management. In other words, that we've left the Cheney/Rumsfeld era behind for a period of Gates/Rice normalcy and that Iran regime change adventurism is safely off the table. But put together what the disagreements with Fallon were about, the fact that the president chose him as someone he thought he could work with not more than one year ago, and the almost unprecedented nature of the resignation and it becomes clear that that assumption must be gravely in error.

Indeed - I fear the lunatics are still in charge of the asylum.

The Trouble With Romney

I like to make fun of David Brooks - sometimes his columns are idiocy personified. Occasional he takes off his partisan dunce hat and his delusional rose colored glasses and gets it right. Today is one of those times as he talks about the snake oil salesman, Romney.

Road to Nowhere

Earnestly and methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. For social conservatives, he embraced a culture war against the faithless. For immigration skeptics, he swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo.

He has spent roughly $80 million, including an estimated $17 million of his own money, hiring consultants, blanketing the airwaves and building an organization that is unmatched on the Republican side.

And he has turned himself into the party’s fusion candidate. Some of his rivals are stronger among social conservatives. Others are stronger among security conservatives, but no candidate has a foot in all camps the way Romney does. No candidate offends so few, or is the acceptable choice of so many.

And that is why Romney is at the fulcrum of the Republican race. He’s looking strong in Iowa and is the only candidate who can afford to lose an important state and still win the nomination.

And yet as any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something. It always yields unintended consequences.

And what Romney failed to anticipate is this: In turning himself into an old-fashioned, orthodox Republican, he has made himself unelectable in the fall. When you look inside his numbers, you see tremendous weaknesses.

Brooks sees something that many of us have seen but that most Republicans have refused to acknowledge - the end of a coalition.

But his biggest problem is a failure of imagination. Market research is a snapshot of the past. With his data-set mentality, Romney has chosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory. As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition.

That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now. The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years. Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins. Republicans’ losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters. Surveys from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the G.O.P. on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government.

If any Republican candidate is going to win this year, he will have to offer a new brand of Republicanism. But Romney has tied himself to the old brand. He is unresponsive to the middle-class anxiety that Huckabee is tapping into. He has forsaken the trans-partisan candor that McCain represents. Romney, the cautious consultant, is pivoting to stress his corporate competence, and is rebranding himself as an Obama-esque change agent, but he will never make the sort of daring break that independent voters will demand if they are going to give the G.O.P. another look.

And the following observation is not the kind I have come to expect from Brooks.

The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven’t yet suffered the agony of defeat, and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don’t know which way to turn.

Brooks and other Republicans (and former Republicans) are beginning to realize the the politics of Karl Rove that were supposed to keep the "Reagan revolution" going forever in fact destroyed it. That will be the lasting legacy of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

Update
We all know that the vast majority of politicians are phonies. That said Matt Yglesias makes what may be a vaild point about Romney.

...to give Romney the benefit of the doubt, one thing I can say about him is that there's some indication he might make an okay president. He ran a successful business. He managed the Olympics well. He took over a state that enjoyed a high standard of living and during his years of governor it continued to enjoy a high standard of living and he never tried to do anything crazy. He's taken a lot of repugnant stands in the campaign, but that's clearly because he's telling people what he thinks they want to hear. When he thoughts his constituents wanted to hear about gay equality and a women's right to choose he said that stuff, too. He's a giant phony. But also a technocrat with some record of competence -- basically a risk-averse guy who knows what he's doing and understands how to color between the lines. It's impossible to imagine him being a great president, but it's relatively easy to imagine him being an okay president.

The others in the field, not so much. Who knows what wars Rudy Giuliani or John McCain would start? And Mike Huckabee can't even fake knowing what he's talking about for fifteen minutes.

I'm not sure I'm entirely ready to buy that but he probably is the pick of the litter.

How low can they go?

It would appear that the government ruled over by the Bush/Cheney cabal can only continue to reach new lows. Not even the Hitler analogy is enough but perhaps Stalin is. The news that the CIA had destroyed tapes of interrogations was certainly not a surprise - outrageous but just part of a pattern. I don't think I fully realized just how outrageous is was until I read Kevin Drum's WHAT THE TAPES WOULD HAVE SHOWN.

And here is Barton Gellman's gloss of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine:

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be....Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics.

.......

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"
Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each...target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel.

As Digby reminds us this should come as no surprise since the resident of the White House has a history of being one sick SOB.

But there are times, when a candidates says something so revealing that the hair on the back of your neck stands up. This was one of those times:

While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. 'Did you meet with any of them?' I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. 'No, I didn't meet with any of them,' he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. 'I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder.

'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'

I must look shocked -- ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush -- because he immediately stops smirking.

'It's tough stuff,' Bush says, suddenly somber, 'but my job is to enforce the law.'

Why should anyone be surprised that that man would demand that a mentally ill prisoner with a broken leg be denied pain medication and tortured?

The idea that he didn't know about these torture session is ludicrous. It was one of the perks.

I worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the late 60s and early 70s and attended the DIA interrogation school. The first thing they taught us is that torture doesn't work. When you torture people they don't tell you the truth they tell you what they think you want to hear. Does that explain this administration's fascination with torture? I think so. They have demonstrated over and over that they have no interest in the truth and only want to hear what they want to hear. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Foreign policy of the US is being formulated by rage filled psychopaths who are so good at using the weapon of fear that they got the country to go along with their madness.

Counter Coup?

I suggested here from the get go that Secretary Of Defense Robert Gates was responsible for the release of the Iran NIE. Well Andrew Sullivan seems to agree

And although it was a Democratic victory, it may help salvage something for the Bush administration's legacy in the Middle East. And that is the deeper point. No single party in our polity can claim credit for all of this. The course adjustment was a function of different entities fighting one another, reacting to events and facts, and thereby forging a more sensible war policy. What no single entity wanted came eventually to pass. It's shaping up to be a text-book lesson in the virtues of separating powers. Dictatorships cannot do this in wartime, which is why they often lose; neither can unchecked executives in democracies. But it's a good thing.

The key players will only emerge definitively with the judgment of history. But my roster of those who helped get us back toward a rational war-policy would put Bob Gates and David Petraeus at the top of the list.

While I may not have a lot of use for Petraeus I don't deny he is an intelligent guy who realized that an attack on Iran would jeopardize his legacy in Iraq; so perhaps Sully is right to give him a piece of the credit. So is this a counter coup? I guess is a sense it could be described as such. Does it mean the system works as Sully claims? I don't think so - we were just lucky. People have been trying to take the bat shit crazy Cheney out of the loop for six years. Gates may have finally been able to do it although he was certainly aided by six years of foreign policy failure.

Tell me again - who's mad?

It's well into his column, The Myth of the Mad Mullahs, before David Ignatius gets to the subject matter in the title but he's right it is a bombshell considering the source.

The most important finding of the NIE isn't the details about the scope of nuclear research; there remains some disagreement about that. Rather, it's the insight into the greatest mystery of all about the Islamic republic, which is the degree of rationality and predictability of its decisions.

For the past several years, U.S. intelligence analysts have doubted hawkish U.S. and Israeli rhetoric that Iran is dominated by "mad mullahs" -- clerics whose fanatical religious views might lead to irrational decisions. In the new NIE, the analysts forcefully posit an alternative view of an Iran that is rational, susceptible to diplomatic pressure and, in that sense, can be "deterred."

"Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs," states the NIE. Asked if this meant the Iranian regime would be "deterrable" if it did obtain a weapon, a senior official responded, "That is the implication." He added: "Diplomacy works. That's the message."

While the intelligence community regards Iran as a rational actor, the workings of the regime remain opaque -- a "black box," in the words of one senior official. "You see the outcome [in the fall 2003 decision to halt the covert program] but not the decision-making process." This official said it was "logical, but we don't have the evidence" that Iran felt less need for nuclear weapons after the United States toppled its mortal enemy, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, in April 2003.

The debate about what the NIE should mean for U.S. policy toward Iran is just beginning. But for the intelligence community, this rebuttal of conventional wisdom will restore some integrity after the Iraq WMD debacle. In challenging the previous certitudes about Iran and the Bomb, the NIE recalls the admonition many decades ago by the godfather of CIA analysts, Sherman Kent: "When the evidence seems to force a single and immediate conclusion, then that is the time to worry about one's bigotry, and to do a little conscientious introspection."

Unfortunately there are still madmen involved - the neocons and Dick Cheney. And yes there are not only the madmen at the Weekly Standard but we are also dealing with madmen in the MSM like the Washington Post's Fred Hiatt who still thinks that bombing is better than diplomacy even while normally mad Robert Kagan has apparently taken a sanity pill and thinks it might be time to talk. Now nothing constructive is going to happen while Cheney is in power but we may be able to avoid anything destructive.

As long as the maddest of the mad reside in Washington nothing good will be accomplished. We can only hope to survive the next year.

Have the lunatics lost?

A couple of days ago Steve Soto said he thought an "Attack Against Iran Unlikely". CENTCOM commander, Admiral William Fallon, said it would be a really bad idea and the intelligence community is resisting demands from the Lunatic in Chief to cook the intelligence. In Harpers Scott Horton says he also feels the Roll-Out to an attack on Iran is Sputtering.

Also we learn that Bush is distressed with Prime Minister Brown’s independence on the Iran issue. He wants the U.K. to be a faithful puppy and heel, adopting the servile stance already taken up by French President Sarkozy. But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, as the Sunday Telegraph reported.

Still, my sense this week is that the roll-out for attacks on Iran has, to the great distraction of its sponsors, not gained the sort of traction that they envisaged for it.

In addition to the pushback from the intelligence community and the DOD Horton sees a couple of other factors.

• Oil Prices
  I noted earlier that a major G.O.P. linked think tank had done economic modeling to ascertain the impact on the U.S. economy of a short-term aerial war against Iran. A source at the Heritage Foundation, which was involved in this process, advises me that two separate studies were completed both taking the impact on the price of oil as a focal point. Some of the scenarios considered included Iran’s effective closing of oil traffic through the straights of Hormuz. With oil now right at $100/bbl, this closure and additional market anxiety associated with war has the potential of driving the price up dramatically, perhaps even as much as doubling it. Within three months, this could send the price of gasoline at the pump in the U.S. into the range of $7/gallon.
  
  Rising oil prices have already had a serious, though not much remarked upon, effect on the U.S. economy. Many economists consider that the current U.S. downturn has much to do with them. A price rise as dramatic as this (though still not to the at-the-pump price faced in the U.K., for instance) could have catastrophic economic impact, likely triggering a recession. Moreover, as my source noted, it would hit the U.S. disproportionately hard in the “red heartland,” where voters rely on automobiles for their livelihood, commute great distances, and have no available viable public transportation alternatives. “When our folks look at the economic consequences of this step for the heartland,” said the source, “they get cool to the idea pretty quickly.”

• Shift in Israeli Analysis
  To the great consternation of the Neocon war coven, Israeli opinion is taking a decisive shift against them. I don’t mean public opinion, but rather the perspectives of key analysts upon whom the Israeli leadership relies. A piece recently posted by Barry Rubin, the head of the GLORIA Center at Herzliya, sends this message clearly:

  The Iranian nuclear issue is too important and dangerous to be miscomprehended. So here are some life-and-death factors to keep in mind about it:
  
  First, Iran is not about to obtain nuclear weapons, certainly not ones that it could use. That dreadful outcome is still several years away. Despite all the bragging going on by Iranian leaders in Persian-language statements about how they are getting closer to atomic bombs—coupled with denials of any such intention in English-language ones—it just isn’t that easy to do.
  
  Second, neither Israel nor the United States is about to attack Iran. There are lots of reasons why this is so but they can be boiled down to the following: it is hard militarily to carry out such an attack, it is politically dangerous, and can lead to very serious consequences. An attack is something better to avoid, if possible. And it is certainly too early for such a high-risk, potentially high-cost venture.

  Writing in Ha’aretz, Zvi Bar’el put the new focus this way:

  The international community, which is looking to its leaders to neutralize Iran’s nuclear bomb with their own hands, will have a hard time coming up with the goods. After all, this is the same community that imposed sanctions on Iraq and did not manage to prevent war being waged on it; that has dealt so incompetently with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; that cannot stop the atrocities taking place in Darfur or implement its resolutions in Lebanon, and has long since pushed Africa out of its field of vision.
  
  In light of these fumblings on the part of “the international community,” another working assumption can be adopted. Within two to three years that same community will be needing a new kind of diplomacy vis-a-vis Iran—the kind that the U.S. is using with North Korea, a diplomacy whose goal is to dismantle existing weapons and eliminate the motivation to use them. This would be a policy that is the opposite of sanctions. A policy that would give Iran the international status it desires, and for which purpose it is, among other things, developing nuclear capabilities. A policy that would include Arab states and Israel, in place of the kind that is perceived as a Western diktat to the Arab and Muslim world. In essence, that is the same policy that should be employed now, especially at a time when important voices in Iran are showing a willingness to conduct serious negotiations.

Perhaps enough of the right people have regained their sanity to stop the insanity of the Dick Cheneys, Norman Podhoretzs and Bill Kristols to save us from another disaster.

Mussolini in drag

The other day I wrote the following:

Giuliani is the scariest individual running for president. You can find some reasons here and here. While I don't like Hillary and I don't trust Hillary I will vote for Hillary to keep Rudy out of the White House. Rudy Giuliani is Dick Cheney on meth.

Ezra Klein agrees and wonders why the press is afraid to point out that Giuliani is bat shit crazy - just as bat shit crazy as Cheney.

You know, a few years ago, Sally Quinn wrote an article explaining why elite Washington had united against Bill Clinton. In it, David Broder famously said that, "He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place." He got a lot of flack for that comment. But it gets at an important truth: That the media does, indeed, come together to repel perceived threats. In Clinton's case, it was a gauche striver. He was a threat to DC's prestige, or vision of itself. Not the greatest danger in the world, but the media was quite effective in kneecapping him.

So what of Rudy? Rudy, after all, is a danger to the world. Every reporter in this town knows that he's become a pandering lunatic. Why doesn't Time have cover stories asking "Is hGiulianie out of his #($*^ mind!?" Why aren't the Sunday shows filled with horrified reporters agreeing to disagree about much of the race, but uniting against the apocalyptic stupidity on evidence in the Giuliani campaign? Why aren't the various horserace reporters fitting every successive foreign policy pronouncement into an overarching narrative of Giuliani's crazed belligerence, "which is causing serious doubts about his campaign among some in the GOP?"

There is precedent for all this. And in Giuliani's case, the threat has the added benefit of being true. You don't need to make anything up, invent any scandals, concoct any problems. You just have to honestly evaluate the words coming out of Giuliani's mouth, the rhetoric coming out of his campaign, and the advisers circling the candidate. It's all there. There's no blowjob, I know, but there's a real threat, and the media should, in its role as guardian of some minimal level of competency within the political process, be pointing out that this man is dangerous, his statements scary, his campaign unsettling, and his advisers insane. His is not a normal candidacy, and so long as the reporters continue treating it as the equivalent of Hillary Clinton's campaign rather than Pat Buchanan's, we're in trouble.

Even the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, agrees that Cheney is bat shit crazy. Will the press actually let Giuliani's insanity go unreported? Will they risk letting another Mussolini wannabe run the country for another eight years which would certainly be the end of the US Republic as we've known it.

Adm. Mullen agrees - Cheney is bat shit crazy

Sitting next to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen said that Dick Cheney and his psychopathic neocon cohorts are dangerously insane. OK, that's not exactly what he said but it's not far off the mark.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Looks Beyond Current Wars

The new chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, expressed deep concerns that the long counterinsurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have so consumed the military that the Army and Marine Corps may be unprepared for a high-intensity war against a major adversary.

He rejected the counsel of those who might urge immediate attacks inside Iran to destroy nuclear installations or to stop the flow of explosives that end up as powerful roadside bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan, killing American troops.

With America at war in two Muslim countries, he said, attacking a third Islamic nation in the region “has extraordinary challenges and risks associated with it.” The military option, he said, should be a last resort.

[.....]

“We’re in a conflict in two countries out there right now,” he added. “We have to be incredibly thoughtful about the potential of in fact getting into a conflict with a third country in that part of the world.

How Insane?

How insane are Dick Cheney and Norman Podhoretz? They are so insane that certified lunatic Frank Gaffney thinks they are insane.
Before We Bomb Iran …
Shouldn't we give peace a chance?

But shouldn't we give peace a chance? Frank Gaffney thinks so. For two decades, it was impossible to out-hawk this guy on anything. Gaffney is still a bellicose Reaganite, but the "bomb now" crowd is apparently giving even some neocons serious pause. "We know there's broad and deep popular support for our side in Iran," Gaffney says. Bombing dispersed and deeply buried nuclear sites not only isn't practical, it "would almost certainly drive the population into the arms of the [radical] mullahs." To try something else first—something that Gaffney concedes might not work— his Center for Security Policy began agitating after 9/11 to "divest terror."

At least he's sane

I was somewhat hopeful that when Robert Gates replaced Rumsfeld that while a right winger unlike the rest of the administration he was at least sane. Over at Newshoggers our friend Cernig has a post that would indicate that this is true:
Gates Vs Cheney Over Iran War
Is Gates the only thing between us and the disaster that would be a military assault on Iran? Check it out.

All that oil

Perhaps Dick Cheney's oil friends will start to lose interest in Dick's war.
UPDATE: Gunmen Blow Up Iraq's North Export Pipeline -Official

AMMAN -(Dow Jones)- Unknown attackers have blown up part of an Iraqi pipeline that pumps crude oil from Kirkuk oil fields to the Turkish export terminal, Ceyhan, a senior Iraqi oil official and a shipping agent said Wednesday.

"The pipeline was attacked and damaged Tuesday," the official told Dow Jones Newswires by telephone from Baghdad.

The attack took place in the section of the pipeline connecting the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the Baiji, home to Iraq's largest oil refinery. Iraq usually pumps Kirkuk crude oil to the refinery, 250 kilometers north of Baghdad, which takes what it needs before it pumps the rest to Ceyhan.

The official said the pipeline blast was "catastrophic" as it caused huge quantities of crude oil to spill into the Tigris River.

It isn't known yet how long it will take the Iraqi authorities to repair the damaged pipeline.

A Middle East shipping agent based in Ceyhan, through which Iraq exports its Kirkuk crude to Europe, confirmed the flow of oil via the export pipeline was on hold Wednesday.

The agent expected damage to the pipeline to delay or cancel a tender announced last week by the country's crude oil marketing arm, SOMO, to sell 5 million barrels.

Cheney's invasion and occupation of Iraq for oil isn't working out any better than the rest of the war. There are plenty of insurgents to insure that the US doesn't get their hands on Iraqi oil.

Boy that surge sure is working isn't it?

I hope he is right!

Steve Clemons thinks that the relatively sane Rice and Gates will prevail over the criminally insane Cheney and the neocons when it comes to Iran.
Why Bush won't attack Iran

To date, however, nothing suggests Bush is really going to do it. If he were, he wouldn't be playing good cop/bad cop with Iran and proposing engagement. If the bombs were at the ready, Bush would be doing a lot more to prepare the nation and the military for a war far more consequential than the invasion of Iraq. There is also circumstantial evidence that he has decided bombing may be too costly a choice.

First, journalist Joe Klein documents a December 2006 meeting in which Bush met in "the Tank" with his senior national security counselors and the military's command staff and walked out with the impression that either the costs of military action against Iran were simply too high, or that the prospects for success for the mission too low.

Then Bush asked about the possibility of a successful attack on Iran's nuclear capability. He was told that the U.S. could launch a devastating air attack on Iran's government and military, wiping out the Iranian air force, the command and control structure and some of the more obvious nuclear facilities. But the Chiefs were -- once again -- unanimously opposed to taking that course of action.

Why? Because our intelligence inside Iran is very sketchy. There was no way to be sure that we could take out all of Iran's nuclear facilities. Furthermore, the Chiefs warned, the Iranian response in Iraq and, quite possibly, in terrorist attacks on the U.S. could be devastating. Bush apparently took this advice to heart and went to Plan B -- a covert destabilization campaign reported earlier this week by ABC News.

After this meeting, Bush immediately tilted away from the Cheney-dominant view that military action was the most preferable course and empowered and released other parts of his administration to animate a third option.

Secondly, we know via material first reported on my blog, the Washington Note, and subsequently confirmed by the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, that Cheney and his team have been deeply frustrated by the "engage Iran team" that the president empowered and felt that they were losing ground to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and the president's new chief of staff, Joshua Bolten.

One member of Cheney's national security staff, David Wurmser, worried out loud that Cheney felt that his wing was "losing the policy argument on Iran" inside the administration -- and that they might need to "end run" the president with scenarios that may narrow his choices. The option that Wurmser allegedly discussed was nudging Israel to launch a low-yield cruise missile strike against the Natanz nuclear reactor in Iran, thus "hopefully" prompting a military reaction by Tehran against U.S. forces in Iraq and the Gulf. When queried about Wurmser's alleged comments, a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times, "The vice president is not necessarily responsible for every single thing that comes out of the mouth of every single member of his staff."

We know Bush rebuffed Cheney's view and is seeking other alternatives. That is the most clear evidence that Bush is not committed to bombing Iran. Even if Bush wanted to make the Iranians believe that he could go either way -- diplomacy or military strike -- Bush would not so clearly knock back one side in favor of the other to the point where the "bad cops" in a good cop/bad cop strategy would tell anyone on the outside that they did not enjoy the favor and support of the president.

Bush is aware that America's intelligence on Iran is weak. Even without admitting America's blind spots on Iraq, the intelligence failures on Iraq's WMD program create a formidable credibility hurdle.

Bush knows that the American military is stretched and that bombing Iran would not be a casual exercise. Reprisals in the Gulf toward U.S. forces and Iran's ability to cut off supply lines to the 160,000 U.S. troops currently deployed in Iraq could seriously endanger the entire American military.

Bush can also see China and Russia waiting in the wings, not to promote conflict but to take advantage of self-destructive missteps that the United States takes that would give them more leverage over and control of global energy flows. Iran has the third-largest undeveloped oil reserves in the world and the second-largest undeveloped natural gas reserves.

Bush also knows that Iran controls "the temperature" of the terror networks it runs. Bombing Iran would blow the control gauge off, and Iran's terror networks could mobilize throughout the Middle East, Afghanistan and even the United States.

In sum, Bush does not plan to escalate toward a direct military conflict with Iran, at least not now -- and probably not later. The costs are too high, and there are still many options to be tried before the worst of all options is put back on the table. As it stands today, he wants that "third option," even if Cheney doesn't. Bush's war-prone team failed him on Iraq, and this time he'll be more reserved, more cautious. That is why a classic buildup to war with Iran, one in which the decision to bomb has already been made, is not something we should be worried about today.

What we should worry about, however, is the continued effort by the neocons to shore up their sagging influence. They now fear that events and arguments could intervene to keep what once seemed like a "nearly inevitable" attack from happening. They know that they must keep up the pressure on Bush and maintain a drumbeat calling for war.

What we have learned is that the neocons can be beaten down but they won't give up. Has Bush suddenly realized that the insanity of Dick Cheney has already resulted in what will be a dismal legacy? Another factor that Clemons doesn't really mention is the powerful business interests. Big business went along with Cheney's Iraq war because they thought there was money to be made. I doubt that they see such opportunities in a strike at Iran and in fact the inevitable economic turmoil would be very bad for business.

So How Goes That Global War On Terror

We saw yesterday that General Pretaeus would not or could not answer John Warner's question "Do you feel that [Iraq war] is making America safer"? . Of course it hasn't, in fact it has made us less safe by creating new recruits for the group that was actually responsible for 911 ans inflaming much of the Muslim world. One indication of that can be found here:
Poll: Bin Laden tops Musharraf in Pakistan

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf -- a key U.S. ally -- is less popular in his own country than al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to a poll of Pakistanis conducted last month by an anti-terrorism organization.

Additionally, nearly three-fourths of poll respondents said they oppose U.S. military action against al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan, according to results from the poll conducted by the independent polling organization Terror Free Tomorrow.

"We have conducted 23 polls all over the Muslim world, and this is the most disturbing one we have conducted," said Ken Ballen, the group's head. "Pakistan is the one Muslim nation that has nuclear weapons, and the people who want to use them against us -- like the Taliban and al Qaeda -- are more popular there than our allies like Musharraf."

The poll was conducted for Terror Free Tomorrow by D3 Systems of Vienna, Virginia., and the Pakistan Institute for Public Opinion. Interviews were conducted August 18-29, face-to-face with 1,044 Pakistanis across 105 urban and rural sampling points in all four provinces across the nation. Households were randomly selected.

According to poll results, bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating. Musharraf's support is 38 percent. U.S. President George W. Bush's approval: 9 percent.

Al-Qaeda may have decentralized but it is stronger and more dangerous than ever. Worldwide terrorist attacks have increased significantly since the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And what about those good Bush friends, the Saudis.
U.S.: Saudis Still Filling Al Qaeda's Coffers

Despite six years of promises, U.S. officials say Saudi Arabia continues to look the other way at wealthy individuals identified as sending millions of dollars to al Qaeda.

"If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia," Stuart Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury in charge of tracking terror financing, told ABC News.

Despite some efforts as a U.S. ally in the war on terror, Levey says Saudi Arabia has dropped the ball. Not one person identified by the United States and the United Nations as a terror financier has been prosecuted by the Saudis, Levey says.

The invasion of Iraq was never about making the US or the world safe. It was always about Dick Cheney's lust for hegemony over the oil rich middle east.

The incompetence of the Bush Administration

Dan Balz has an interesting article on how the descent of the Bush administration began with the catastrophic incompetence following Katrina.

Bush's presidency took a fateful turn during Katrina and reminders of the damage inflicted from that storm were resurrected again this week with the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. What linked the two events -- and what has left the president permanently weakened -- were perceptions of incompetence within the Bush administration.

Certainly Bush suffered from other problems as Katrina began to make its way through the Gulf of Mexico. By then, public support for the war in Iraq had begun to significantly erode. By then the president's audacious plan to restructure Social Security was on life support on Capitol Hill. His approval rating had fallen into negative territory.

But the storyline of a bungling administration was far from fully realized before Katrina hit the coast. Democrats had lost too many elections to Bush to conclude that his political team was a gang that couldn't shoot straight. The White House team enjoyed grudging respect from Democratic opponents for its discipline, strategic impulses and, yes, competence. Public approval of the president, while drifting down, was not yet in the danger zone.

Katrina suddenly changed all that. Bill McInturff, the Republican pollster, did an analysis Katrina's effect on Bush's approval ratings in the summer of 2006 and concluded that almost a year after the storm, the president was still suffering a post-Katrina hangover.

It is indeed interesting that the most incompetent AG ever was finally forced to resign near the anniversary of Katrina. What Katrina did was get people to look at everything else the administration had done. The incompetence of Karl Rove had surfaced in the attempt to do away with Social Security. Oh, and there was also the Terri Schiavo debacle. If you looked real close you could already see signs that the two wars that Bush and Cheney had started were not going too well.

And now the Bush sycophants in the Republican party are having second thoughts - a little late.

Much more than Katrina explains the continuing drop in Bush's support in the past 12 months, but there is little doubt that the hurricane crystallized negative perceptions about Bush's performance that he never has been able to shake. And in the fallout from the Gonzales resignation on Monday, there were renewed complaints that echoed the criticism after Katrina, that the administration lacks basic competence in dealing with problems.

By now this is a fully developed critique. Republicans look at the Gonzales tenure and see incompetence at almost every level. They see an attorney general who, for all his personal attributes, lacked the competence to run the Justice Department. They see a White House that, faced with a revolt that began with Democrats but eventually included many prominent Republicans, waited months before taking action to bring an end to his tenure.

But they see this now not as an isolated example but as a pattern. Even among Republican loyalists, almost no one defends the administration's management of the war in Iraq. They resent that Bush took so long to get rid of Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. They recall his decision to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. They look at the midterm elections of 2006 and see a White House that, publicly at least, kept asserting that Democratic gains could be kept to a minimum.

What worries Republicans most is that the damage inflicted by the administration now costs them as much as it does the president, which has caused Republican elected officials, presidential candidates and GOP strategists to wish for a speedy end to the administration.

One GOP strategist complained yesterday that, while the White House may be worried about Bush's legacy, congressional Republicans fear the consequences of administration incompetence will affect them and their party in the coming election. "The incompetence comes at their price as much as the president's," the strategist said.

Well Republicans, you think it's bad now. These same guys who have started two war and fucked them both up want to go out with a bang and are doing everything they can to provoke a confrontation.

Lieberman Rumors

I had heard this on Thom Hartmann this morning and I did pay much attention to it.
Lieberman as next Attorney General?

That's what Marjorie Cohn is saying on The Thom Hartmann Show. The talk started a few hours ago, from what they're saying. (not that it didn't occur to any of us earlier, but it's going around now) Per Cohn:

• It would stop the Senate investigations dead in their tracks.
• It would guarantee a Senate confirmation.
• It would change the balance of power in the Senate, in favor of the Republicans.
• And it smells of Karl Rove.

I didn't really pay that much attention to it because while it would be a plus for the Bush administration I really can't see Lieberman giving up another five and half years in the Senate for 16 months as AG.

GOTTALAFF has another rumor I have heard before that while it's crazier might make more sense.

This came up much later in the show. The next scary thought, after Lieberman's new AG status, was that Cheney would resign from the VPresidency (health issues, of course) at some point, and Lieberman would be brought in. That would set him up for a run for President.
Yes it's far-fetched, as Hartmann acknowledged. But we've all been floored by every other seemingly impossible scenario that this insane bunch has brought to fruition.

Yes this has pluses for Lieberman and the Bush administration. Joe is a poor Cheney Clone and would fit right in. The Rethuglicans are not too happy with any of their choices for president at the moment and Joe's ego might be just inflated enough to make him feel he could win.

When Cheney Was An Adult

I keep finding myself at conservative/libertarian sites and finding sanity. Just one of the many dreadful things the Bush/Cheney cabal has done. Well over at Cato@liberty there is this interesting piece by Brink Lindsey, Invasion of the Cheney Snatchers. Check it out - back in the 90's it appears that Cheney may have been almost sane but as Lindsey explains:

9/11 may not have changed everything, but it sure changed Dick Cheney.

For all the wrong reasons

In today's Oregonian a Wyoming native who has been transplanted to Oregon, John W. Haines, takes a look at Wyoming's infamous native son, Dick Cheney, and no longer likes what he sees. I'm going to give you the entire commentary without comment - it speaks for itself.
CHENEY'S POWER

I have voted for Dick Cheney four times. The first was in 1978 in Laramie, Wyo., where I was born. It was my first opportunity to vote, and, coincidentally, it was Cheney's first election.

He had risen from the Western plains as a young man to become President Ford's chief of staff. I was reminded of that fact by my father before walking to the grade school I had attended as a boy to cast that first vote.

I remember feeling the substance of the man, and I took pride in it, as people do for those few in the sparsely populated West who rise to political prominence -- the likes of Arizona's Morris Udall, Idaho's Frank Church, Montana's Mike Mansfield or Wyoming's Alan K. Simpson, the senator I also voted for in his first national race in 1978.

Their names never leave the land they represented, and their support rarely flags, as my father's support for Cheney remains strong to this day. "You stick to your guns," my father says about our man in Washington.

Today, with Cheney's former prominence now widely seen as villainous, my Wyoming votes have become a curiosity I pass on to friends as a joke. But to my father, a contemporary of Cheney's and a fourth-generation Wyomingite, those votes are no joke. "It should have been seven times," he tells me. "Five here and the last two as vice president." And in some ways my little joke cuts me close to the bone, too, but for different reasons.

My dad is a lot like Dick Cheney. Maybe I'm a lot like Dick Cheney. Maybe a lot of us are a lot like Dick Cheney, both in and out of Wyoming. But we haven't yet acknowledged how or understood the implications. I wonder what principles I might bend or manipulate for an end I care about. Stem cell research? Wilderness protection? Civil rights?

Before I graduated from the University of Wyoming, my political views shifted toward a concern for the natural environment, shaped largely by the damage that had been done to public lands near Laramie. Then, after several years of traveling and working around the world, I gained a new empathy for the world's poor and moved from Wyoming in search of a life's work outside the oil, gas or coal industries.

As I look now from Oregon with a sense of personal shame at Wyoming's native son, I cannot help but recognize a thread of his personal style in me. That common thread is sewn from time spent in the landscape of Wyoming, where practicality and persistence prevail over debate and delay. The legend of the rugged individualist is strong in Wyoming, a mythology of self-reliance, even though the state is economically dependent on the exportation of its natural resources.

People don't lightly shake such an attitude. It remains in me, but with a different set of concerns and values. The beautiful austerity of Wyoming produces a personal resolve and creativity in people that looks like entrepreneurship, which is, for Cheney, a popular word for the manifestation of his destructive government actions. You get it done in Wyoming because you have to. And Vice President Dick Cheney gets it done. An old friend from a ranch near Gillette used to say, "You don't call a plumber in Wyoming; you are the plumber."

Had Cheney's central thesis for the necessity of invading Iraq proved true, would that vindicate his obfuscation and manipulation of the democratic process -- of which we are only now learning and may never fully know? Or should an energy policy choreographed with still-undisclosed people to support extractive industries be acceptable if it proves economically viable in the short term? Of course not.

Had another vice president wielded backroom arm-twisting and rationalized deceit for causes I care for, would I judge him differently? I hope not.

I hope not because Dick Cheney has taught me that we all need a renewed vigilance for the democratic process. He has awakened something complacent in me that had assumed that a democracy, our democracy, will right itself, that it will work on its own. That's not the legacy Cheney may have anticipated for himself, but it's an important legacy nevertheless.

And for that, I have come to concede that Dick Cheney is possibly the most influential politician of our time. For all the wrong reasons.

His political rise and fall seem inevitable -- from his Western roots to Vietnam draft deferments to his diligence as a bright young public policy soldier to his election as a Wyoming congressman to his precision as defense secretary to an unusually experienced and calculating maverick of a vice president who knows how to maneuver outside of the margins to pursue his vision. A fall was bound to have happened somehow.

Perhaps we can learn from the actions and mistakes of our man in Washington how to build a more secure democracy and a better path for national and global engagement. Maybe we can learn humility and personal restraint when we rise from places that produce proud and stubborn people.

I believe we will because we must. But I am resigned that our learning will take the rest of my lifetime.