If the idea behind today's DSM hearing was to give the media a fresh news hook to talk about the memo and put pressure on the White House to respond, then I guess I'd say mission accomplished."

For whatever reason (and contrary to my original pessimism) the story seems to be growing legs. I particularly liked this lead from -- of all places -- yesterday's Star & Stripes:

Several parents of soldiers killed in Iraq visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ask for congressional hearings on the Downing Street memo, which one mother called President Bush’s “Watergate.”

It will be interesting to see if the White House and the Republicans continue their "deaf, dumb and blind" PR response -- or rather, lack of response -- or whether they will shift to "slime and defend" mode. That would actually be a good sign -- filthy, but good -- that the gang is starting to feel the heat.

One word, though, on the backdrop to the hearings -- what the theatrical pros call the production values. I can understand the desire to hold the hearings in the Capitol -- to lend them greater legitimacy, attract more press coverage, etc. But really, it looked like a meeting of the Parker Valley PTA. The room was way too small, the folding tables made the participants appear small and unimportant (you could see one of them waving her toe around under the table) and the torsos standing behind both the members and the witnesses were frequently distracting.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that kind of "reality" TV style comes across as fresh and honest -- like Ross Perot and his charts. But when you're talking about impeaching a president for manipulating the country into an aggressive war, I think it's probably more effective to do it in the court-like setting of an official hearing room.

But of course, the Democrats don't have access to an official hearing room. I don't see any reason, though, why the party couldn't build its own, one that closely resembles, say, the House or Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing room -- same walnut paneling, high ceiling and crystal chandeliers, same sold oak table for the witness, massive dais for the members, plush blue carpet, etc. etc. They could put it in an office building somewhere close to the Capitol complex and let Democratic House and Senate members hold their unofficial hearings there.

Sure, the Republicans would howl about it and the Kool Kids would make catty remarks -- until their 30-second attention span was captured by something else bright and shiny. But so what? The viewers wouldn't know the difference. To them, the unofficial hearings would look just like the real thing, especially in the 10 or 20-second clips that might (with luck) start to show up on the networks or the NewsHour.

And if the pink tutu Democrats see that the hearings are not a bad way to get their preening mugs on the tube, they might be more inclined to show up, giving the hearings a little more heft, if only through weight of numbers. Which might draw more media coverage.

To me, this seems like potentially a pretty nice bang for a relatively modest number of bucks. But hey, what do I know? Maybe the Dems prefer looking like the Parker Valley PTA.

LAUER: But when you stood on the floor and you said, She does respond, are you at all worried that you led some senators . . .

FRIST: I never said, She responded. I said I reviewed the court videotapes – the same ones the other doctors reviewed – and I questioned, Is her diagnosis correct?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Today Show interview
June 16, 2005

"Once again in the video footage, which you can actually see on a web site today, but in the video footage, she certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli that the neurologist puts forth."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Senate Floor Remarks
March 17, 2005

"I have looked at the video footage. Based on the footage provided to me, which was part of the facts of the case, she does respond."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Senate Floor Remarks
March 17, 2005

An exhaustive autopsy found that Terri Schiavo's brain had withered to half the normal size since her collapse in 1990 and that no treatment could have remotely improved her condition, medical examiners said on Wednesday . . . The autopsy also found that the brain deterioration had left her blind.

The New York Times
Schiavo Autopsy Says Brain, Withered, Was Untreatable
June 15, 2005

"I never made the diagnosis, I wouldn't even attempt to make a diagnosis from a videotape."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Remarks to Reporters
June 16, 2005

"The diagnosis they made is exactly right. It's the pathology, I'll respect that. I think it's time to move on."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Interview on The Early Show
June 16, 2005

Dr. Bill Frist demonstrates the use of the Pinocchio 3000, an advanced prosthetic device for the chronically truth challenged. Industry analysts predict sales of the device will top $300 million this year in the Republican Congress alone.

With the Senate Finance Committee at an impasse on Social Security and House leaders anxious about moving forward, Republican congressional leaders have told the White House in recent days that it is time to look for an escape route.

Washington Post
Exit Strategy on Social Security Is Sought
June 16, 2005

"I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,'' Bush said, ''with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security." The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us ''two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be quacking like a duck.''

Ron Suskind
Without a Doubt
October 17, 2004

Update 6/16 4:55 pm ET: You know they're getting desperate when . . .

When you're in a campaign, people have to make a choice. It's either A or B. Easy enough," said Ken Khachigian, who served as a strategist for President Reagan. "It gets more complicated after the campaign." Khachigian said Bush could seize the initiative by delivering a speech to Congress on Iraq.

So what's he supposed to say? Mission not accomplished?

By an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: "No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye."

But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
1973

Sometimes the truth is so damning you have to speak it for its own sake -- not to convince or condemn or even because you think it might right the wrong, but to make it clear you will not consent to a lie by remaining silent.

However, this is not the kind of behavior you normally expect from a politician. Even the good ones -- or rather, the less bad ones -- tend to treat the truth like a scarce commodity, one that has to be strictly rationed in order to avoid running out all together. Evasion, on the other hand, is plentiful, and used as freely as a Hummer burns gasoline.

Which is why I did a double take when I saw what Sen. Durban of Illinois said on the Senate floor yesterday:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners. (link courtesy of Talk Left)

I don't know much about Dick Durbin -- he's a solid, dependable Democrat, but definitely not one of the Senate's show horses. I also don't recall him playing the role of human rights champion before. So God help me, when I read what he said I immediately began to wonder what kind of political advantage he hoped to gain from such extravagant use of the truth.

(You know you're a cynic when you automatically suspect a politician is telling the truth for dishonest reasons.)

But as far as I can tell, Durbin had absolutely nothing to gain from this, other than the predictable smears from the GOP propaganda machine and the cave dwellers of the Neanderthal right. (Actually, in Limbaugh's case, I think even homo erectus would be ashamed to have to claim such an ape as a distant cousin.)

I have no idea what motivated Durbin to let it all hang out, except perhaps personal moral outrage and a clear understanding of the practical risks raised by the Bush regime's debasement of the American military.

The quote former Vietnam POW Pete Peterson that Durban included in his floor speech said just about everything that needs to be said about the latter:

"From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival . . . This is one reason the United States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and care of enemy prisoners: because these standards also protect us . . . We need absolute clarity that America will continue to set the gold standard in the treatment of prisoners in wartime."

As for morality . . . Well, if you can't see the evil in locking prisoners of war -- some of them held by mistake, others only foot soldiers in the Taliban's army -- in 100 plus degree rooms for 24 hours without food or water, until they shit or piss all over themselves -- then you're truly beyond redemption. Once you've reached that point, you can probably justify anything, up to and including murder.

Unfortunately, according to the polls, that category may include a sizable fraction of the American people. I've speculated on the reasons for this before, I won't rehash them here. Maybe it's just human nature to ignore evil when it takes place outside of immediate eye or ear shot. Solzhenitsyn also wrote about this trait, and how the Cheka learned to use it to its advantage:

There's an advantage to night arrests in that neither the people in the neighboring apartment houses nor those on the city streets can see how many have been taken away. Arrests which frighten the closest neighbors are not an event at all to those farther away. It's as if they had not taken place. Along that same asphalt ribbon on which the Black Marias scurry at night, a tribe of youngsters strides by day with banners, flowers and gay, untroubled songs.

Easier still to look the other way when the arrests take place half a world away, the archipelago is entirely offshore and the prisoners aren't driven through the streets in trucks but whisked through the sky by the CIA's own private airline. Add in the facts that those arrested are foreign, non-Christian and non-white -- and that some of them almost certainly are guilty of terrorist atrocities -- and you have the perfect excuse for a nation of Sergeant Schultzes to stick to its "We know nothing" line.

And why not? If the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the smoke billowing from the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp up on the hill, why shouldn't we expect most Americans to ignore what's going on in Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib -- or any of the other islands in the archipelago?

Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such terms, which is why the propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on Durbin's reference to an extreme nationalist party that flourished in a certain central European country in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as they popped a vein over Amnesty International's use of a Russian word for forced labor camp.

Strictly on the facts of the case, they are correct: The American archipelago is just a series of flyspecks compared to its Soviet predecessor. At its peak, the Soviet gulags held an estimated 2.5 million prisoners. The number of deaths -- by torture, execution, disease or deliberate starvation -- has to be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The KGB, meanwhile, set a record for the assembly-line murder of political prisoners that I don't think has been matched since, not even by that wannabe Saddam.

As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he did.

I guess that's enough to satisify most conservatives. (Maybe they should print up some bumper stickers: "America: Still better than Stalin.") But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy. Quantitatively, the case against moral equivalence may be open and shut, but qualitatively . . . well, it's getting a little more dicey. Compare, for example, the FBI's account of interrogation methods at Guantanamo -- the one cited above by Durbin -- with this scene from the Solzhenitsyn:

In this "kennel" there was neither ventilation nor a window, and the prisoners' body heat and breathing raised the temperature to 40 or 45 degrees Centigrade (104 to 113 degrees Farhenheit) -- and everyone sat there in undershorts . . . They sat like that for weeks at a time, and were given neither fresh air nor water -- except for gruel and tea in the mornings.

Or this passage from Peter Maass's visit to an Iraqi-run, American-advised interrogation center in Samarra:

One of Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the detainee’s body, and we heard the detainee’s pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence.

With this anecdote from The Gulag Archipelago:

In the silence we could hear someone in the corridor protesting. They took him from the cell and into a box . . . They left the door of the box open, and they kept beating him a long time. In the suspended silence every blow on his soft and choking mouth could be heard clearly.

And these are just the things we know about. What happens on the remoter flyspecks in the American archipelago (much less the affiliated islands of our Saudi or Egyptian or Pakistani "allies") remains largely a closed book. We know prisoners have died in American custody, some appear to have been brutalized before they died. We don't know how many of them were murdered. We don't know how many were subjected to outright torture, not just conditions "tantamount" to torture. We're asked by the Pentagon and the CIA to accept it on faith -- blind faith -- that crimes will be investigated and the guilty punished. But we already know that faith has been terribly abused.

On the other hand, we do know that. We have at least partial knowledge of life and death in the archipelago. There are still journalists willing to do stories and news organizations willing to run them -- Guantanamo even made the cover of this week's Time. Politicians gutsy enough to defy the right-wing slime machine can still get up in the Senate and protest. The security services won't drag them (or us) away.

Exaggerating for political effect is a technique at least as old as Jonathan Swift. (And it's not always for effect: When G. Gordon Liddy compared the BATF to the Gestapo, you knew he really meant it.) Still, quantitatively and qualitatively, we're not even in the same universe as Stalin's paranoid empire.

But if Durban had wanted to be completely honest, he would have skipped the rhetorical flourish about the Soviets, the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, and instead pointed out that if we didn't know better, we might think today's horror stories out of Guantanamo and Abu Graib and Baghram were tales told about prisons in El Salvador, Honduras and Argentina thirty years ago -- or South Vietnam, forty years ago.

And if he really wanted to get reckless with the truth, he could have explained the reasons for that resemblance.

But that's probably more truth than even Dick Durban can afford.

Before I poked fun yesterday at Tom Friedman's latest attempt to fish his journalistic reputation out of the Iraq War toilet, I probably should have paused to consider the significance of his casual slur about liberals who "deep down" want to see Bush fail.

Why? Because it bore such an uncanny resemblance to this poisonous 2003 comment from National Review contributor Stanley Kurtz:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. A nation where the political opposition stands against our foreign policy, and even secretly (and not so secretly) hopes for its failure, cannot reform a region as recalcitrant as the Middle East. (emphasis added)

As I mentioned at the time, Kurtz's version of the stabbed-in-the-back theory eerily echoed the original, as expounded by the leader of an extreme nationalist party in a certain central European country in the grim years following World War I.

I'd mention their names, but I don't want to sound "shrill."

Such talk from the McCarthyist right is predictable, and probably inevitable. Hell, Kurtz was muttering about treason before we even lost the war. But now we're hearing similar, if more subtle, hints from Mr. Globalony himself – second only to the editorial "we" of The New Republic as the official voice of American neoliberalism.

I don’t know why Friedman is flirting with Ann Coulter’s world view. Maybe he’s just nipping back at his critics – who managed to be right about the war even though they aren’t on a first-name basis with every kleptocrat in the Middle East. Or maybe he understands that the sinking of the U.S.S. Mission Accomplished is going to take a hell of a lot of reputations to the bottom with it, and has decided he needs a bigger life raft.

He may be right: Trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his conduct of the war and sucking up to Colin Powell (“Almost every problem we face in Iraq today . . . flows from not having gone into Iraq with the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force . . .”) may not provide enough protection – not when you’re as sprawled across the public record of the last three years as Tom Friedman. You also never know who’s going to end up writing those postwar why-we-lost-in-Iraq books. Hedging his bets – by blaming both the most powerful presidential administration in recent memory and a tiny, marginalized antiwar movement – could be a smart career move.

But what Friedman’s comment really drove home for me is how perilous the postwar political environment is likely to be for the remnants of American liberalism – and for the anti-imperialist left in particular.

This may seem counterintuitive, since the “national greatness” conservatives and their Friedmanesque collaborators have just taken such a spectacular geostrategic belly flop. But if you look back at America’s post-Vietnam experience, you may see my point. After a brief period of ’70s soul searching – a rare example of American glasnost – the silent majority quickly repressed all doubt and buried the memory of defeat under the jingoism and cheap patriotism of “Rambo” Ron Reagan. The antiwar left had been right about Vietnam, practically as well as morally, (Ben Stein can bite me) and was punished for it.

It may have been inevitable. Great powers rarely accept military defeat gracefully, especially when the loss isn’t total enough to compel acceptance. The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan may have been one of the rare exceptions where a lost war actually resulted in positive political change for the loser – positive at least when compared to the decaying Stalinist system it destroyed. But even there it was a close run thing.

In most cases, though, national humiliation tends to begat national denial and rage – and a hunt for someone or something to blame. As Robert Paxton observes about a certain central European country in his book The Anatomy of Fascism:

Germans had been shaken to their roots by defeat in 1918. The emotional impact was all the more severe because German leaders had been trumpeting victory until a few weeks before. So unbelievable a calamity was easily blamed on traitors.

Having led America to a thoroughly humiliating defeat in Iraq, the neocons and their Texas protégés will soon have an urgent need for scapegoats of their own. So will the journalistic and foreign policy elites who rushed to join Shrub’s march of folly like the children of Hamlin following the pied piper. So will the Israel lobby. So will the pro-war Democrats.

The best scapegoat, of course, is one that is both blameless and weak. Blameless, because it relieves the truly guilty parties of the need to decide who among them must take the fall. Weak, because the guilty themselves have been weakened by defeat, and even a modest defense might enable a truly blameless set of scapegoats to convince the country of their innocence.

The antiwar left would seem to fit the bill quite nicely. It has little money, no power, few friends among the pundit class, and has largely been shunned by the leaders of the supposed opposition party – with the exception of Dr. Dean, and even he knows enough to keep his distance. Unlike the antiwar libertarians, the antiwar left is not useful to the administration on other issues, like Social Security privatization. And, since the antiwar movement has been effectively blacked out in the media and is rarely visible in the streets, it certainly can’t be rationally blamed for failure in Iraq – which means it almost certainly will be blamed, and not just by Tom Friedman.

There may be liberals or progressives out there who are genuinely, if quietly, happy to see Bush and America get their faces rubbed in their own shit in Iraq. I know there are many outside the United States who feel that way. Personally, I see the war as an immense tragedy – one in a long line of tragedies since the contested election of 2000, but made even more terrible by the fact that it could be, and was, predicted.

Whenever I’m tempted to gloat over the increasingly frantic lies and delusions of the true culprits – and I have to admit, they are entertaining, in a Kaftkaesque sort of way – I try to remember the carnage (the butcher’s bill, as Ulysses S. Grant used to call it) and the price that will have to be paid in human lives before American elites finally admit defeat. Then I think about the grim postwar climate waiting on the other side of withdrawal from Iraq.

That usually does the trick, although sometimes I find myself laughing in a way that isn’t funny at all. In fact it hurts.

I wonder: Does Tom Friedman ever have that problem?

We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we 'celebrate' a [gay] lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average life span according to the 2005 issue of the revered scientific journal Psychological Reports. Something is wrong with this picture.

Rev. Bill Banuchi
Executive Director, New York Christian Coalition
As quoted by MidHudsonNews.com
June 12, 2005

(Via Rox Populi)

Nazi concentration camp badges, made primarily of inverted triangles, were used in the concentration camps in the Nazi-occupied countries to identify the reason the prisoners had been placed there. The shape was chosen by analogy with the common triangular road hazard signs in Germany that denote warnings to motorists.

Wikipedia
Nazi concentration camp badges

The Cameron group has published its empirical research in academic journals with low prestige and, at least in the case of Psychological Reports, with a low rejection rate and a publication fee required from authors. Given the serious methodological flaws in their survey studies and obituary study, it is reasonable to conclude that the Cameron group's papers would have been rejected by more prestigious scientific journals.

Dr. Gregory M. Herek
Publication Outlets Used By The Cameron Group
Date Unknown

In Nazi Germany, national or public health — Volksgesundheit — took complete precedence over individual health care. Physicians and medically trained academics, many of whom were proponents of "racial hygiene," or eugenics, legitimized and helped to implement Nazi policies aiming to "cleanse" German society of people viewed as biologic threats to the nation's health.

New England Journal of Medicine
In the Name of Public Health — Nazi Racial Hygiene
July 2004

"I said before the invasion that the Bush Administration might fuck up in Iraq, and I said during the invasion that the Bush Administration might fuck up in Iraq, and I said after the invasion that the Bush Administration might fuck up in Iraq, and now the Bush Administration has fucked up in Iraq. And it's the liberals' fault because deep down inside they wanted Bush to fail."

("Or maybe it's France's fault. I don't know. Just as long as everybody understands that it's not my fault.")

If you saw the movie, then you remember that Harrison Ford's love interest, Rachel, was actually a replicant who had had a bunch of false memories implanted in her mind so she would think she was a human being.

Someone seems to have done the same to Howie Kurtz:

I sympathize with Pelosi about the Democratic position being reduced to two sentences in many stories. With Republicans running everything in D.C., the minority party often gets short shrift. The Republicans had the same problem in '93 and '94. Lacking that White House megaphone makes a huge difference.

Of course: that must have been why Clinton's health care plan was such a PR triumph -- nobody was listening to the Republicans!

What? You don't remember that? Neither do I. Guess we missed out on the implants.

I don't know, maybe the RNC has filled Howie's brain with the memories of Newt Gingrich's niece. But I was there, and while many of my memories may be somewhat dimmed by time and alcohol, on this point I can assure you: Kurtz once again is spewing complete horse shit -- as even a cursory examination of the coverage will demonstrate.

The reality is that the Republicans had no problem whatsoever getting their POV across in the corporate media during that brief period of Democratic hegemony -- even when they, too, were peddling complete horse shit.

I wish I had a dollar for every Republican quoted in the papers or on the boob tube predicting the economic collapse of the United States as a result of Clinton's tax hikes. Or the destruction of Western civilization because of gays in the military. Or the death of morality because of the Whitewater "scandal." Or he postalization of the American health care system because of Hillary.

I'd have enough money now to buy the Washington Post Co. and fire Howie's sorry ass.

I was covering economic policy at the time, and I can tell you at times it was virtually impossible to make the truth heard over the roar of the GOP propaganda (and they didn't even have Fox News back then!) Just as an example: My paper also owned a bunch of TV stations, and I can remember doing a stand-up with some local anchor team in which I tried to explain that -- whatever you thought about the wisdom of the Clinton tax plan -- the hikes undeniably would be heaviest for the country's wealthiest taxpayers. This was just too much for one of the local twinkies, so she proceeded to give me (and her audience; this was live) an impromptu supply-side lecture on the evils of taxing society's "productive members."

I remember wanting to tell the airhead she'd given us all a pretty good clue as to what income bracket she was in, but I also remember thinking: I can't afford to lose this job.

But that kind of thing was not all unusual in those days -- only marginally less usual than it is today, in fact. And when the GOP (or its media poodles) couldn't pound a point home, there was always a friendly lobby or two (or two hundred) ready to step in with a massive ad buy.

Don't the names "Harry and Louise" ring a bell, Howie? They should. You wrote this about them back in 1998:

The industry used this approach to great effect in 1994, when its $15 million barrage of "Harry and Louise" ads helped sink President Clinton's health care reform package.

Or maybe the Howie Kurtz who wrote that paragraph was the real Howie Kurtz, instead of a replicant with the duplicated memories of Newt Gingrich's niece implanted in its head. Didja ever think of that Howie? Creepy, huh?

The good news, of course, is that replicants don't live very long, and Howie's already past his pull date. The Post is about due for a replacement. And if we have to get lousy media coverage from Newt Gingrich's neice, I'd rather she at least looked like Newt Gingrich's niece -- instead of an uglier version of that dumb actor from "Thirtysomething."

But then again, maybe I just think I remember watching a television show called Thirtysomething . . .

How do you collect $23 million, $2,500 at a time?

That is what Republican lawmakers have spent months doing in preparation for tonight's President's Dinner, a fundraiser for the party's House and Senate campaign committees that lures well-off donors from across the country . . .

To pep up the rank and file, Rep. Jack Kingston (Ga.), the dinner chairman for the House . . . invoked his childhood preacher to tell them about getting the spirit, and compared the dinner to a church building fund. (emphasis added)

Washington Post
Hard Cash Is Main Course for GOP Fundraiser
June 14, 2005

Mammon: (măm'en) 1. Riches, avarice, and worldly gain personified as a false god in the New Testament. 2. Material wealth regarded as having an evil influence.

American Heritage Dictionary
Mammon

Party leaders pit the House against the Senate in going after donors, and lawmakers use their tallies as a way to promote themselves for future leadership jobs.

Washington Post
Hard Cash Is Main Course for GOP Fundraiser
June 14, 2005

By Mammon is meant the devil who is the Lord of Money.

Thomas Aquinas
Catena Aurea

"This is the hardest part of being a member, and we all get weary of it. So much money is spent and sometimes you think, 'Gosh, you know, we need to bring some sanity to this.' But when you've got both sides doing it, it ups the ante."

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.)
As quoted in the Washington Post
June 14, 2005

After the rebellion in heaven, Mammon is relegated to hell, where he is the one who finds the underground precious metals that his demonic companions use to build their capital city, Pandemonium.

Occultopedia
Mammon

Lawmakers will spread out among the tables at the Washington Convention Center to rub elbows with donors, and the band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy will entertain.

Washington Post
Hard Cash Is Main Course for GOP Fundraiser
June 14, 2005

Meanwhile the winged Heralds, by command of Sovereign Power, with awful ceremony and trumpet's sound, throughout the Host proclaim a solemn council forthwith to be held at Pandemonium, the high Capitol of Satan and his peers.

John Milton
Paradise Lost

"There's something for everybody," said Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (N.Y.) . . . "Raising hard money is hard. Our members have learned it takes persistence."

Washington Post
Hard Cash Is Main Course for GOP Fundraiser
June 14, 2005

No man can serve two masters: For either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.

Jesus Christ
Matthew 6:24

I finally got around to reading Michael Kinsley's feeble attempt to dismiss the Downing Street Memo as a conspiracy theory pushed by the loony left -- i.e. by liberals who aren't domesticated enough to be proper corporate lap dogs. Not a charge anyone is likely to make against Kinsley.

At this late date I won't bother repeating or deflating Kinsley's points, except to note the complete contradiction between this passage:

Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence.

And this one:

You don't need a secret memo to know [the intelligence was being fixed.] Just look at what was in the newspapers on July 23, 2002, and the day before.

As I mentioned earlier, the latter argument is one the rest of the media poodles have been barking for weeks: "It was old news." "Everybody knew about it at the time." "We were having trouble with our flea collars."

Or, if you're the Associated Press: "We just never got around to it."

However, according to Kinsley, what everybody knew three years ago is a paranoid theory now, albeit one promoted to "the very edge of national respectability."

You have to admit: He's got us coming and going. By insisting that the media cover the story of Bush's illegal rush to aggressive war, we've demonstrated we're just a bunch of unreasonable extremists peddling a paranoid conspiracy theory -- one that "everybody" already knows is true.

How can you argue with logic like that?

Bill Gates has seen the future, and it works -- for him, at least:

Users of Microsoft's new Internet portal in China are being blocked from using the words "democracy," "freedom" and "human rights," in an apparent move by the U.S. software giant to appease Beijing . . . Bloggers who enter such words or other politically charged or pornographic content are prompted with a message that reads: "This item should not contain forbidden speech such as profanity. Please enter a different word for this item."

Agence France-Presse
Microsoft China portal bars talk of 'freedom'
June 15, 2005

US software giant Bill Gates has high praise for China, which he says has created a brand-new form of capitalism that benefits consumers more than anything has in the past.

"It is a brand-new form of capitalism, and as a consumer it's the best thing that ever happened," Gates told an informal meeting late Friday at the World Economic Forum in this ski resort.

He characterized the Chinese model in terms of "willingness to work hard and not having quite the same medical overhead or legal overhead." (emphasis added)

Agence France-Presse
Gates: China's New Form Of Capitalism Is Best Ever
January 29, 2005

You know, I used to think this was just a little over the top:

Now I don't.

In an institution where can-do optimism is about as mandatory as patriotism, it's remarkable to hear Army generals talking like this:

Military action won't end insurgency,
growing number of U.S. officers believe

"I think the more accurate way to approach this right now is to concede that ... this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations," Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said last week, in a comment that echoes what other senior officers say. "It's going to be settled in the political process."

Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, expressed similar sentiments, calling the military's efforts "the Pillsbury Doughboy idea" -- pressing the insurgency in one area only causes it to rise elsewhere.

Hearing such honest, if openly defeatist, sentiments expressed by the brass in Baghdad shows just how far we have come since "mission accomplished." I mean, compare Alston's and Casey's bleak appraisals with the swaggering boasts of days gone by:

"I think we're at the hump" now, a senior Central Command official said. "I think we could be over the hump fairly quickly" -- possibly within a couple of months.

U.S. Adopts Aggressive Tactics on Iraqi Fighters
Washington Post
July 27, 2003

"It's a handful, a rearguard that's attempting to maintain a degree of political relevance here. We're going to finish these guys off."

Col. James Hickey
AP Interview
September 19, 2003

"There is no question in my mind that the coalition and the Iraqi people are winning."

Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez
Press Briefing in Baghdad
December 13, 2003

We're on a glide-path toward success ... We have turned the corner, and now we can accelerate down the straightaway."

Gen. Charles H. Swannack, Jr.
Press Briefing
January 6, 2004

"We feel right now that we have ... broken the back of the insurgency, and we have taken away this safe haven."

Lt. Gen. John Sattler
Press Briefing
November 18, 2004

And so on. But now the commanders in the field seem to be explicitly conceding, in public no less, that the insurgency is too entrenched and too resilient to destroy by military force -- and certainly not with the limited force available. (Just check out this story for a look at how many troops the Marines have available to hold Anbar province, an area about the size of North Carolina.)

Truth is, even if Centcom had twice the troop strength, it's hard to see how the insurgency could be defeated -- that is, reduced to military, political and economic irrelevance -- on a battlefield as chaotic and complex as Iraq. There are simply too many cross-cutting social and cultural and ethnic and tribal realities that stand in the way of a successful counterinsurgency effort, unless the idea is simply to pound every city, town and village in the Sunni Triangle as flat as Fallujah.

Even then the insurgents probably would still be hiding in the rubble, waiting for the Americans to go pound somewhere else. The Army may have uncontested ownership of whatever ground it happens to be standing on, but as soon as local control is handed back over to the Iraqis, the infiltration and the intimidation begin all over again. Bomb labs are seized and cells broken up, but the level and sophistication of the attacks still appears to be gradually rising. The insurgency is rebuilding itself faster than it can be dismantled -- and unlike the corporate media, the generals no longer seem willing to humor Dick Cheney's bizarre fantasy that it is in its "last throes."

But pinning hopes for a minimally acceptable outcome on the political process may not be that much more realistic, considering the track record to date. (The Army didn't exactly make things easier last month by busting into the home of the leader of Iraq's most important Sunni party and hauling him off to jail in the middle of the night.) Without security, how well can the political process be expected to work? And if the insurgents can't be defeated militarily -- as even our own generals now admit -- how much of an incentive will they have to negotiate?

There may be and probably are factions within the insurgency that would be open to a negotiated peace, especially if it meant the total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. There may be others who would regard such a deal as an acceptable tactical cease fire, one that would allow them to resume their campaign later, after it has become politically impossible for the Americans to return.

General Giap: Trust me, it works.

At this point, any plausible American strategy for avoiding outright defeat in Iraq has to be based on shaving these factions away from the hard core, and encouraging as much dissent and mistrust as possible among the core that remains.

But it also has to be recognized that for the Sunni elites, and a large fraction of the Sunni population, the New Iraq is a political disaster of epochal proportions -- the end of centuries of dominance and privilege. As a relatively small minority (15% maybe 20%) in a Shi'a majority, with Shi'a Iran right next door, and hostile Kurds to the north, the Sunni are in a very difficult spot. The new order completely deprives them of geographical access to or control of Iraq's only real resource -- oil. Without it, the short-term (and probably long-term) economic prospects of the Sunni provinces are very bleak. And the wealth and power prospects of the Sunni elites are even bleaker.

Under the circumstances, the "bitter enders" could very well carry the day in any internal political debate within the community. War, even a protracted struggle that leaves Iraq in ruins (that is, in even more ruins) could be seen as preferable to a compromise peace that ultimately leaves the Sunnis (from their point of view) at the mercy of their enemies. And this might be true not just of the jihadis and the hardline neo-Baathists, but of many non-ideological fighters and their popular supporters -- exactly the people that have to be peeled away if a political solution is to work.

The essential point here is that for the insurgency, as for all guerrilla movements, to survive is to win. And if the insurgents are winning, then the United States is losing. It may be able to stay in Iraq for a thousand years if it is willing to pay the price, but unless it can reduce the level of violence to a point where indigenous security forces can maintain a pro-U.S. (or at least anti-insurgent) government in power and keep the country from coming apart at the seams, it will have lost the war. And losers rarely have much bargaining power.

Right now, though, what I hear the generals saying is that they have neither the tools nor the strategy to win a counterinsurgency war in Iraq without some kind of political breakthrough -- which, under the circumstances, sounds suspiciously like hoping for a Deus Ex Machina. But as the saying goes: God helps those who help themselves.

Defense officials from Russia and the United States last week helped block a new demand for an international probe into the Uzbekistan government's shooting of hundreds of protesters last month, according to U.S. and diplomatic officials.

British and other European officials had pushed to include language calling for an independent investigation in a communique issued by defense ministers of NATO countries and Russia after a daylong meeting in Brussels on Thursday. But the joint communique merely stated that "issues of security and stability in Central Asia, including Uzbekistan," had been discussed.

The Washington Post
U.S. Opposed Calls at NATO for Probe of Uzbek Killings
June 14, 2005

It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

George W. Bush
Second Inaugural Address
January 20, 2005

One of the more outrageous things -- among many -- about the war in Iraq is the way it has become deeply entwined with the Republican Party's war for political hegemony at home, thanks to the Bush administration's unabashed belief in the slogan of every successful political machine: "To the victors go the spoils."

Considering how the war in Iraq is going we could perrhaps amend that to read: To the losers go the spoils. But the principle, or rather utter lack of principles, remains the same.

We saw this in the staffing of the occupation authority in Baghdad with GOP hacks and the sons and daughters of the conservative apparat, and even more spectacularly (not to mention obscenely) in the Pentagon's various contracts with Halliburton.

If the symbol of the Roman state was a statue of a she wolf suckling the city's founders, Romulus and Remus, then I think America should have one of a sow, suckling every defense contractor, hack politician and PR operative in Washington.

But this kind of corruption is relatively benign compared to the potential for abuse in the Pentagon's growing budget for strategic information -- or "psywar" operations.

Even before the Iraq invasion, you may recall, Rummy and the gang were scheming to create their own in-house propaganda and disinformation operation, to be called the Office of Strategic Influence. The program was nominally killed after the critics pointed out how easily the phony news it created could drift back into the domestic media. (This was back when the Democrats still had a foot in the door of power, and Rumsfeld had to back down every once in awhile.)

But the Donald soon made it clear he intended to push through the budgetary back door what he couldn't get through the front door. And after the Dems lost the Senate, he didn't even try too hard to conceal what he was doing. The occupation of Iraq -- and the money and lack of accountability it spawned -- put the Pentagon in the "strategic influence" business in a big way, with its own TV news operation (the Pentagon Channel), a Coalition-controlled Iraqi TV and radio network (now nominally in the hands of the Iraqi government, I presume, but still powered by Pentagon dollars and run by a U.S. vendor) and millions of dollars to hire PR firms and consultants to spin the coalition's propaganda to the Iraqi people.

The net benefit of all this in terms of strategically influencing the Iraqis -- or the rest of the Islamic world -- has been roughly zero, or maybe even a negative number. But the benefit to the Bush administration and the Republican Party is a different sum, harder to measure. For some time now, one of my pet suspicions has been that the Pentagon's psywar budget is both a hidden piggy bank and an R&D; laboratory for the GOP's own political propaganda operations.

I have no proof of this. I didn't even have anything that could reasonably be called evidence, until today, when I came across this story:

Pentagon Funds Diplomacy Effort

The Pentagon awarded three contracts this week, potentially worth up to $300 million over five years, to companies it hopes will inject more creativity into its psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military.

"We would like to be able to use cutting-edge types of media," said Col. James A. Treadwell, director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element, a part of Tampa-based U.S. Special Operations Command. "If you want to influence someone, you have to touch their emotions."

He said SYColeman Inc. of Arlington, Lincoln Group of the District, and Science Applications International Corp. will help develop ideas and prototypes for radio and television spots, documentaries, or even text messages, pop-up ads on the Internet, podcasting, billboards or novelty items.

Now $300 million is a hell of a lot of clams to be spending on text messages and podcasts, even in this day and age. So I paid particular attention to the recipients of all that dough. I know SAIC and SYColman -- both large (especially SAIC) established Pentagon contractors. But I'd never heard of the Lincoln Group. Curious, I spent a few hours checking Google and Nexis to see what I could find out. Which, as it turned out, wasn't much, but it was enough to put a few scraps of meat on the bones of my suspicions.

According to O’Dwyer’s Newsletter, a PR industry tip sheet, the Lincoln Group was formerly known as Iraqex, but changed its name in March to match that of its corporate parent, the Lincoln Alliance Corporation, a DC-based "business intelligence" firm.

In this audio clip of an interview with the web site earlystage.com, Lincoln Group executive vice president Christian Bailey, a British venture capitalist -- who appears in this picture (scroll down) to be about 18 years old -- claims to have started Iraqex with some unidentified partners in October 2003 to explore private equity and property related transactions in the New Iraq.

Not surprisingly, given the realities of doing business in a war zone, government contracting transactions proved more attractive to Iraqex, and in October 2004, the firm was awarded a one-year $6 million contract from the Pentagon to do PR work for the military in Iraq, with three six-months options for another $12.2 million. O'Dwyer editor Kevin McCauley was quotedas calling it "a blockbuster -- in terms of dollars -- for PR . . . Those are big numbers, even if one is operating in a war zone."

From the beginning, Iraqex/Lincoln Group has been strangely tight-lipped about its work in Iraq, refusing to talk to the press except through its own hired mouthpiece, who had this to say to the industry trade mag PR Week (11/14/04):

"For various different security reasons, we can't disclose information except to say we are very qualified to work on the ground in Iraq," [the spokesman] said. "We have more experience working in Iraq than any other firm or organization anywhere in the world."

Puffery aside, though, some details of Iraqex's operations have made it into the press, such in as this story from the Chicago Tribune ("Word Warriors, 2/4/05), which inadvertently highlighted the fact that the most experienced firm in Iraq has a penchant for hiring GOP political hacks with absolutely no experience in Iraq:

When [Jonathan Blessing] and another political consultant who had been working for the Bush campaign in Illinois heard about an opportunity to work for a company doing public relations in Iraq, the two jumped at the chance . . .

Blessing and Swift are working for a private company called Iraqex, a subcontractor for the U.S. Department of Defense . . . Swift worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign in Illinois, and Blessing worked for the state GOP.

Perhaps we shouldn't read too much into Iraqex's hiring policies -- other than that the company clearly knows the buttered side of the bread from the dry. But things get more interesting when we look at the Lincoln Group's corporate parent, Lincoln Alliance.

Lincoln is, if anything, even more shadowy than Iraqex, as is the relationship between the two. The Lincoln Group's website -- while offering virtually no info about the firm's history, owners or officers, does mention that it was formed in 1999 -- long before Iraqex was even a gleam in Christian Bailey's youthful eye. And it clearly has interests that extend far beyond trying to spin the latest collateral damage in Iraq.

If I had to speculate, I would guess that having scored the big Pentagon contract -- despite just a one-year track record and no apparent PR experience -- front man Bailey and his unknown partners sold out to a bigger firm (Lincoln Alliance) with the resources and bench strength to actually perform the work. This is as customary among Beltway Bandits as it is among Silicon Valley venture capitalists. At some point thereafter, Lincoln Alliance was relabeled the Lincoln Group.

It's a theory, anyway. Of course it's also possible that Bailey's hidden partner in Iraqex was Lincoln Alliance all along. This brief item from the Center for Media and Democracy suggests as much.

But that still leaves the key question: Who is (or was) Lincoln Alliance?

Export.gov -- the Commerce Department's export promotion web site, provides an address, phone number and web address for Lincoln Alliance on its Iraq page:

Lincoln Alliance Corporation
1130 17th St NW Suite 400
Washington DC 20036
Tel: (202) 595 - 1350

www.lincolncorp.com

It also has a blurb about Lincoln's Iraq operations, although this doesn't included any info about Iraqex's big PR contract. Other than that, Lincoln Alliance has left remarkably light footprints on Google and Nexis. And the web address listed on the export.gov site has been redirected to the new Lincoln Group site -- which, as I mentioned, seems rather deliberately uninformative about the firm.

Google's cache, however, still contains traces of the older Lincoln Alliance web site (lincolncorp.com), allowing me to add a few possibly pertinent details of the firm's "business intelligence" focus.

This page, for example, tells us that Lincoln provides what it calls "tailored information services" (tm), including the "collection of information from diverse internal and external sources, both historical and real-time." and the "dissemination [of] actionable results . . . rapidly and securely."

In practice, this jargon seems to mean "oppo" research -- looking for information (including derogatory information) on competitors, vendors, potential merger partners, acquisition targets, etc. Or, as this page puts it:

Lincoln delivers timely, relevant information on your competitors, including competitive pricing, products, management bios, key customers, alliances, strengths and weaknesses, and other targeted information. Based on your unique information requirements, Lincoln will develop methods to collect and fuse data and information from a wide variety of sources.

Now ordinarily this wouldn't strike me as all that sinister -- or at least, no more sinister than other high-powered corporate detective agencies like Kroll and Associates. But Lincoln Alliance apparently doesn't just serve the business community; it also has provided it's "oppo" capabilities to political candidates and campaigns -- or to certain ones, anyway:

Lincoln has developed a unique service which provides campaign managers and their staff with concise actionable information in order to understand their candidate's time and events, media planning, voter interest, issue positions and several other factors . . . This service is restricted and available only to select clients. (emphasis added).

It would be interesting to know more about those "other factors" that Lincoln provides "actionable information" on, and even more interesting to know which political campaigns in the past have qualified as "select clients." Considering what I've learned about the company -- although it's admittedly not much -- I'm going to bet the inhabitants of that charmed circle have a rather Republican coloration.

Lincoln also appears to have its fingers in several projects that have a strong intelligence community coloration to them. These include techniques for allowing analysts to process distributed bits of classified data without ever seeing the whole picture, as well as (shades of Admiral Poindexter) something called: Role Based Online Gaming for Unconventional Environments (ROGUE)

In essence, ROGUE is a massive multiplayer game that allows private individuals to compete against government and military forces in unconventional scenarios. ROGUE incorporates a motivation and e-commerce system that rewards successful gamers with money and fame.

(If Lincoln really is part of some Pentagon-funded political black op, at least someone has a sense of humor about it.)

So to sum up: We have a tiny start-up venture, controlled by persons unknown, that suddenly materializes in late 2003 doing "private equity" deals in the middle of a war zone, and then obtains a huge PR contract from the Pentagon, and then hires a bunch of unemployed GOP campaign operatives to execute that contract, and then is absorbed by a shadowy DC company that specializes in corporate and political detective work and that may have close ties to both the Republican Party and the intelligence community, which then is awarded an even bigger contract to produce even more Pentagon propaganda.

Now maybe that's just the way business is done in George Bush's government, but it doesn't make me any less creeped out by what I was able to dig up with a few online searches. You don't have to have too much of a taste for paranoid conspiracy theories to imagine scenarios in which such contracting relationships could prove very useful for the Bush administration and the GOP machine.

If I were still a real reporter -- that is, if someone were paying me to do this kind of work -- there are many other things I would try to find out about Lincoln Alliance, the Lincoln Group and Iraqex. Things like incorporation records or doing-business-as registrations, UCC filings, lists of corporate officers, disbursements from political campaigns, court records (if any) and a complete list of all federal government contracts awarded to all three entities.

But I'm not getting paid for this kind of work and I've already chewed up enough of my free time chasing whips of smoke. If anyone out there has the means, motive and opportunity to keep sleuthing, and is inclined to do so, drop me a line at billmon@billmon.org and let me know what you find.

For now, though, I'll just leave it where I began -- with the strong suspicion that political opposition in this country no longer just means fighting the Republican Party and its corporate and religious allies, but also the Pentagon and its multi-million dollar propaganda budget.

Your tax dollars at work, in other words.

Update 6/13 11:30 am ET: It appears that Iraqex -- and its various activities in Iraq -- were a Lincoln Alliance venture all along. The wayback machine has archived a reasonably complete copy of the original Lincoln Alliance web site, which includes this blurb under "Careers":

Do you have what it takes to work in Iraq?

Starting in October 2003, Lincoln has started to recruit individuals with the willingness and experience to work and travel to Iraq.

Lincoln is establishing four offices in Iraq: Baghdad, Kirkuk, Basra, and An Nasiriyah. We are currently recruiting individuals with the business sense, willingness, contacts and skills necessary to safely work in a dynamic and challenging environment.

October 2003 is when Iraqex was born, at least according to Christian Bailey, who is starting to look more and more like the front man for some very well connected, if so far anonymous, people.

(Thanks to b for the tip.)

Update 6/13 12:25 pm ET:Xan at Corrente also is on the story, and has dug up a few nuggets on our man Christian Bailey, who appears to be quite the party animal in both senses of the term:

Since its inception in Fall 2001, Lead21 has been doing its part to cultivate the next generation of business leaders committed to building a dynamic future for the Republican Party . . . Among us, we have Lead21 members who served as Delegates, Alternates and volunteers to the 2004 Republican National Convention, demonstrating a passionate commitment toward re-electing President Bush. Lead21 NYC Co-Chairs – Christian Bailey and Maxine Friedman, in conjunction w/ Convention Co-Chairs - Scott Johnson, Natalie Lui, and Sarayu Srinivasan – organized Lead21’s trip to the GOP Convention in New York City. (emphasis added.)

The quintessential Young Republican venture capitalist on the go, in other words -- although the "venture" part is hard to identify in his relationship with Lincoln Alliance. What, exactly, did Bailey bring to the table, other than his British accent and Oxford degree?

And who was on the other side of that table???

(Thanks to Mahablog for the tip)

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 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.

The Sunday Times
Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’
June 12, 2005

"Let the jury consider their verdict," the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

"No, no!" said the Queen. "Sentence first -- verdict afterwards."

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Alice loudly. "The idea of having the sentence first!"

"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen, turning purple.

"I won't!" said Alice.

"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

"Who cares for you?' said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
1865

Dick Polman, the national political writer for my local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, drops this disheartening line into an otherwise encouraging column on the Downing Street memo:

This [the memo] is one of the few pieces of hard evidence that supports critics who contend that Bush hyped a nonexistent threat -- Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction -- as his justification for waging war.

Thus demonstrating, in a concrete way, the self-reinforcing nature of journalistic self-suppression. As anyone who's been following the story knows, there is plenty of "hard evidence" of the administration's determination to use an illusory WMD threat as a pretext for war -- ranging from the case of the aluminum tubes that were not atomic centrifuge parts, to the uranium-from-Niger fraud, to the fanciful tales peddled by the Iraqi defector appropriately code named "Curveball" -- stories that were recklessly recycled by the administration despite clear warnings from Curveball's German handlers.

Polman himself even contradicts his own premise further down in his column when he notes that:

It has long been clear that Bush's depiction of Hussein as a grave menace was overstated. Among many examples: Bush said, on Oct. 7, 2002, that Hussein intended to use unmanned aerial vehicles "for missions targeting the United States," a distance of 6,000 miles. It later turned out that the UAVs had a range of 300 miles.

More "hard evidence." The problem, of course, is that the various pieces of the Iraqgate puzzle have made only sporadic appearances in the corporate media, and rarely -- if ever -- have been presented or analyzed as possible elements of a larger, more coherent story: the conspiracy to manuever America into an unnecessary and illegal war.

Treated separately and in isolation, however, it's that much easier for each fragment of "hard evidence" to fall down the memory hole -- to the point where even a reporter trying to cover the story squarely can be deceived into thinking they don't exist.

This is not so much a criticism of Polman -- who after all covers politics, not national security affairs -- but of the corporate media as a whole and its stubborn (and/or cowardly) refusal to draw broader conclusions from the hard evidence that has gradually come to light over the past two years.

To use yet another Watergate analogy, it's as if the press were still occasionally publishing brief stories about a break-in at DNC headquarters, involving security guys tied to the White House, who were being paid with money diverted from a Republican campaign fund, controlled by the attorney general of the United States -- all of which was being studiously ignored by the FBI -- without ever getting around to examining the question of whether the whole thing might be part of a conspiracy directed by the president of the United States.

Maybe the Downing Street Memo (coupled with Bush's sinking poll numbers) will be the cocktail that puts a little fire in the bellies of the Washington press corps. A few stiff belts of the truth seem to have encouraged Polman to stop pulling his punches anyway. More likely, the corporate drones at the top of the editorial pyramid will heed the voice of their master (Mammon) and simply close the bar -- long before the timid nobodies at CNN or the henpecked husbands of CBS/NBC/ABC ever get their hands on a drop of the good stuff.

On the other hand, the sheer insanity of the Iraq occupation (and the administration's own progressively more flagrant detachment from reality) finally seem to be having an effect on the American public -- despite the media's attempts to severely ration the truth. It may not take much of the stuff to get a good bar fight going, one in which the administration -- and the conservative propaganda machine -- will come out the loser for a change.

People want us to fight, and we are here to fight," Dean said during a quarterly meeting of the party's 64-member executive committee. "We are not going to lie down in front of the Republican machine anymore."

Dean's aides said he now realizes he needs to choose his words more carefully but plans to keep the pressure on Republicans.

Washington Post
Dean Urges Appeal to Moral Values
June 12, 2005

Works for me.

And like most sequels (The Godfather II being the big exception) it's not nearly as fresh or powerful as the original:

Memo: U.S. Lacked Full Iraq Plan

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

The July 23 meeting was the same one that produced the Downing Street Memo -- which has never quite made it onto the front page of the Washington Post, despite its explosive revelation that Britain's intelligence agency, MI6, knew in the summer of 2002 that the Bush administration was "fixing" the intelligence on WMD in Iraq.

On the other hand, the Post's editors have apparently decided the pre-meeting memo is page-one material right from the start. This is in part a credit to the activists who've been lobbying for more coverage of the leaks coming out of British, but it's also a classic example of the high value that newspapers, particularly the Post, put on having their own exclusives (even if in this case the "exclusive" was apparently obtained second hand from the Times of London. Foreign papers don't count, I guess.)

Any coverage is good, and front-page coverage is even better, but the smoke trickling from the gun in this memo is fairly thin -- we're talking about the customary Bush administration incompetence, short-sightedness and bureaucratic backbiting, not High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

But the Post's Walter Pincus is an exceptionally diligent and productive reporter, and the fact that he's managed to break out of his ghetto in the back of the A section with a Downing Street related story is a good sign. The editors on the national desk, it seems, are tacitly conceding (without actually admitting) that they blew the call the first time around.

Now if the New York Times would put one-tenth the time and resources into reporting the exposure of the Iraq lies as it did into reporting those same lies before, during and for a ridiculously long time after the Iraq invasion, we might actually get somewhere.

Thanks to links from assorted right-wing dipsticks like Hugh Hewitt, I'm suddenly getting traffic from conservative sites.

Apparently, now that I've made a few critical remarks about Howard Dean, I've been upgraded from angry radical to thoughtful liberal (Alan Comes division).

Well, as long as the pod people are here, I hope they'll take a look at some of my other "thoughtful" posts -- such as this one, this one, this one, and most particularly this one, which I'm rather proud of.

Feel free to link. Enjoy!

A growing number of Islamic militants from northern and sub-Saharan Africa are fighting U.S. and Iraqi forces in Iraq, fueling the insurgency with foot soldiers and some financing, U.S. military officials say . . .

A small vanguard of veterans are also returning home to countries like Morocco and Algeria, poised to use skills they learned on the battlefield in Iraq, from bomb making to battle planning, against their native governments, the officials said. (emphasis added)

The New York Times
As Africans Join Iraqi Insurgency, U.S.
Counters With Military Training in Their Lands
June 10, 2005

Some time before the Iraq war, I found myself musing out loud to someone close to the inner circles of the Bush administration . . . I voiced some worries about what might happen if an occupied Iraq became a target for international terrorism. Wouldn't U.S. soldiers become sitting ducks? . . .

And what he said surprised me. If the terrorists leave us alone in Iraq, fine, he said. But if they come and get us, even better. Far more advantageous to fight terror using trained soldiers in Iraq than trying to defend civilians in New York or London. "Think of it as a flytrap," he ventured.

Andrew Sullivan
Flypaper: A Strategy Unfolds
September 6, 2003

It appears some of the flies are escaping. So now I guess the strategy is that it's better to fight the terrorists in Iraq, Morocco, Algeria and sub-Saharan Africa than it is to fight them in the streets of New York or London.

Better put out some more fly strips, Andrew.

Update 11:50 pm ET: Field Marshal von Rumsfeld demands I point out that the flypaper theory was a product of HIS great military mind -- not some scatter brained British magazine writer:

In Iraq moreover we're dealing not just with regime remnants but also . . . terrorists and foreign fighters who have entered the country over the borders to try to oppose the Coalition. They pose a challenge to be sure but they also pose an opportunity because Coalition forces can deal with the terrorists now in Iraq instead of having to deal with those terrorists elsewhere, including the United States..

Donald Rumsfeld
Speech to the VFW
August 25, 2003

Clausewitz, Sun Tzu and Napoleon better watch out -- they may have to make some room in the pantheon for der Field Marshal . . .

Probably because of the title of my last post on Howard Dean -- Howard's End (a really stupid choice, in hindsight) -- a lot of people now think I'm calling on Dean to resign as DNC chairman.

I'm not. I just think he either needs to tone down the rhetoric and concentrate on party building, or improve his aim as a partisan hit man. But if he can't or won't do either, then yeah, he should leave. But personally I hope it doesn't come to that.

Howard's End was supposed to mean the end of my blathering about Dean's role in the Democratic Party -- not the end of his chairmanship. So now I really will stop blathering about it. Honest.

The lyrics aren't so hot, but it's got an interesting beat, even if you can't dance to it:

An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army's Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. "We have lived in humiliation since you left," one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. "We had hoped to spend our life with you."

So did he, baby. So did he.

The above paragraph is the lead on Washington Post reporters Tony Shadid and Steve Fainaru's latest piece on Iraqization -- you know, the creation of a brand new Iraqi Army capable of doing what the world's mightest military machine cannot: pacify Iraq. The guy carrying the torch for Saddam is a soldier in that army. Not Saddam's old army.

Clearly, the process for manufacturing the New Iraq has some serious quality control problems, and it doesn't look like there's a Six Sigma solution for them, either. Actually, Saddam's Song is the most encouraging point in the Post article. It's pretty much all downhill from there:

"I know the party line. You know, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, five-star generals, four-star generals, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld: The Iraqis will be ready in whatever time period," said 1st Lt. Kenrick Cato, 34, of Long Island, N.Y., the executive officer of McGovern's company, who sold his share in a database firm to join the military full time after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "But from the ground, I can say with certainty they won't be ready before I leave. And I know I'll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don't think they'll be ready then."

If Lt. Cato has any kids, he might want to start training them to do his job, judging from the level of progress that Shadid and Fainaru report. To call Charlie Company a sad sack outfit would be a cruel libel on unhappy bags:

Last month, three trucks filled with two dozen soldiers from Charlie Company were ambushed near a Tigris River bridge. Instead of meeting the attack, the Iraqis fled and radioed for help. The Americans said the Iraqis told them they had lost 20 men, had run out of ammunition and were completely surrounded.

When a U.S. quick reaction force arrived, the area was quiet and the Iraqi soldiers were huddled around their trucks. Four were missing; it was later learned that they had hailed taxis, gone home and changed into civilian clothes. One soldier, the company's senior noncommissioned officer, refused to come out for several hours, saying he continued to be surrounded by insurgents.

However, according to Lt. Cato, this performance under fire reflected a considerable improvement in the unit's readiness since he first took it under his wing earlier this year:

"When we first got here, soldiers were going to sleep on the objective. Soldiers were selling their weapons when they went out on patrol. I was on missions when soldiers would get tired, and they would just start dragging their weapons or using them as walking sticks."

The punchline to this gag is that the Army (the U.S. one, I mean) selected Charlie Company as the Iraqi unit it most wanted the Washington Post and its readers to get acquainted with. Which either means this is the very best they've got, or, someone in the chain of command deliberately picked one of the worst units in hopes of cutting through the oceans of Bush administration bullshit and showing the American people exactly how desperate the situation is in Iraq -- and not for the insurgents.

Awhile ago Steve Gilliard chided me for referring to the American-made Iraqi army as "the New ARVN." I'm beginning to see his point: ARVN would have mopped the floor with this lot.

Clearly, recruiting Sunnis to fight Sunnis on their own home turf is an inherently failure-prone policy, as the Post article's final little vignette indicates:

Along dirt roads bisected by sewage canals, the men of Charlie Company crouched, their weapons ready. Before them was their home town, dilapidated and neglected. Cpl. Amir Omar, 19, gazed ahead.

"Look at the homes of the Iraqis," he said, a handkerchief concealing his face. "The people have been destroyed."

By whom? he was asked.

"Them," Omar said, pointing at the U.S. Humvees leading the patrol.(emphasis added.)

Juan Cole calls that last sentence "chilling," and only a moron or a National Review editor (ah, but I repeat myself) could disagree. By now it should be clear to all that Iraqization is America's last, forlorn hope for avoiding a humiliating defeat -- or an endless bloody occupation -- in Iraq. But if Sunnis cannot be relied upon to fight Sunnis, then the only alternative is to find Iraqis who can and will.

A few months back I argued that the Bush administration ultimately would have no policy option in Iraq but to back the Shi'a sectarian coalition that won last January's election -- even if that alienated both collaboration-minded Sunnis and the Kurdish parties and allowed Iran to expand its sphere of influence in the country. Trying to play the different factions off against each other -- the traditional divide-and-conquer strategy of old-fashioned colonialism -- is merely accelerating the drift to fragmentation and communal conflict, without giving any single faction the strength to hold the country together.

Since the Shi'a coalition is the only entity in Iraq (aside from the U.S. Army) even remotely capable of doing that, I argued that sooner or later the administration will have to pay the price of its own folly and accept Shi'a hegemony -- and probably fundamentalist Shi'a hegemony -- as the face of the New Iraq.

The failure of Iraqization (that is, the failure to create a truly national, non-sectarian army) would make that policy shift even more imperative. It would leave the Shi'a paramilitary units -- SCIRI's Badr Brigade, in particular -- as the only possible nucleus for a security force strong enough to allow even a partial American withdrawal. (How the Kurdish peshmerga would react to such a "Shi'aization" policy is a nightmare problem in and of itself. But then just about every problem in Iraq is a nightmare problem.)

Bush: Yeah, but the world is better off with Saddam out of power . . . out of power . . . out of power . . . out of power.

Will somebody please knock that broken record back in its groove?

It gets even worse, though, because whether the new new security force is predominantly Shi'a or Kurdish (or both) somebody is still going to have to pacify, or at least occupy, the Sunni Triangle. And sending Shi'a and/or Kurdish paramilitary units to fight Sunni insurgents on Sunni home turf is an open invitation to a bloodbath.

Game it out, and you see that standing up a national Iraqi Army -- one that includes Sunni units willing to fight Sunnis in their own home towns on behalf of a largely sectarian, Shi'a-dominated government -- is the only possible outcome that doesn't end in civil war for Iraq and a foreign policy debacle for the United States. Now reread the last sentence and tell me how likely that solution sounds.

There is one other alternative, however: Keeping 150,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq, for, oh . . . roughly forever. In which case Lt. Cato may end up training his grandkids to pull occupation duty. Or, as Juan Cole put it recently: Sometimes you're just screwed.

Which is why in the years ahead I'm sure we'll be hearing lots of talk from the president and his ministers about the splendid progress being made by crack Iraqi units like Charlie Company.

The same old song, in other words.

Update 5:35 pm ET: This Chicago Tribune story notes that, Charlie Company notwithstanding, the new Iraqi army is largely being recruited in Shi'ite and Kurdish areas:

That need for flexibility isn't likely to end with the expected arrival of Iraqi army units in Anbar this fall. The Iraqi soldiers would ease the pressure on the Americans, but they could also heighten sectarian tensions. Anbar is largely Sunni Arab; the new Iraqi army is drawn largely from Shiite areas in Iraq's south and Kurdish regions in the north.

The Trib reporter doesn't explicitly say that the troops that will go to Anbar (the Wild Wild West of Iraq) will be predominantly Shi'a and Kurds, but that's the implication. So maybe Centcom has already figured out that sending Sunni to fight Sunni is a losing move.

On the other hand, if the new Iraqi army really is being filled with predominantly Shi'a/Kurd units, it would helpful to know where their real loyalities lie -- to the national government, or to their respective communal factions. I think I can guess.

(Thanks to Outraged at Moon of Alabama for the pointer.)

I see Ralph Nader wants Congress to impeach George Bush -- his nominal opponent and sometime political benefactor:

It is time for Congress to investigate the illegal Iraq war as we move toward the third year of the endless quagmire that many security experts believe jeopardizes US safety by recruiting and training more terrorists. A Resolution of Impeachment would be a first step. Based on the mountains of fabrications, deceptions, and lies, it is time to debate the ''I" word.

I guess while they're at it they should also bring charges against Al Gore -- because hey, he was just as bad as Bush, right Ralph?

But then Ralph's always so full of practical, progressive ideas:

"We're going to . . . establish a viable third party to keep those two parties (Democrats and Republicans) honest in the future. It is that watchdog function that is so critical."

Ralph Nader
CNN Interview
November 6, 2000