De-Authorize the War Now, No Residual Troops

Gov. Bill Richardson

05.04.2007

I first called for de-authorization of the war in Iraq in January, and I have repeated that call all around the country -- because I believe immediate de-authorization and removing all of our troops from Iraq this year is the only way to end Bush's war.

Congress should de-authorize the war today and demand that the President begin redeploying our troops.

There would be no need to negotiate the withdrawal with the President, and he could not veto the resolution.

The time has has come for Congress to stand up to this President who refuses to recognize that his war is bleeding our military and weakening our country. He believes mere stubbornness is a foreign policy and that he can just ignore the will of the American people. In the interest of our national security, he must be stopped.

Congress has the ability to end this war under the War Powers Act -- let's not wait or waver while more people die. And de-authorizing the war should mean removing all our troops. Every last one.

This is essential, because our presence in Iraq worsens the violence and enables our enemies to portray us as imperialist occupiers. If we announce that we are getting out completely, we undercut this propaganda. We need to get all our troops out of the crossfire of this civil war.

Anything less than immediate de-authorization, and beginning the process to remove all troops, is not a real plan to end this war. I know this region well, and understand how people there see the world.

I have served as US Ambassador to the UN, President Clinton's Special Envoy, and as Secretary of Energy. I have been there. I even met with Saddam Hussein and secured the release of hostages. I applaud Senators Clinton and Byrd's steps to begin the process of getting us out of this disastrous war. But I urge them and their colleagues in Washington to commit to the full task at hand:

Immediate de-authorization, and the removal of all U.S. troops.

If the United States leaves Iraq things will really get bad

May 3, 2007

by William Blum

This appears to be the last remaining, barely-breathing argument of that vanishing species who still support the god-awful war. The argument implies a deeply-felt concern about the welfare and safety of the Iraqi people. What else could it mean? That the US military can't leave because it's needed to protect the oil bonanza awaiting American oil companies as soon as the Iraqi parliament approves the new written-in-Washington oil law? No, the Bush administration loves the people of Iraq. How much more destruction, killing and torturing do you need to be convinced of that? We can't leave because of the violence. We can't leave until we have assured that peace returns to our dear comrades in Iraq.

To better understand this argument, it helps to keep in mind the following about the daily horror that is life in Iraq:
It did not exist before the US occupation.

The insurgency violence began as, and remains, a reaction to the occupation; like almost all insurgencies in occupied countries -- from the American Revolution to the Vietcong -- it's a fight directed toward getting foreign forces to leave.

The next phase was the violence of Iraqis against other Iraqis who worked for or sought employment with anything associated with the occupation regime.

Then came retaliatory attacks for these attacks.

Followed by retaliatory attacks for the retaliatory attacks.

Jihadists from many countries have flocked to Iraq because they see the war against the American Satan occupiers as a holy war.

Before the occupation, many Sunnis and Shiites married each other; since the occupation they have been caught up in a spiral of hating and killing each other.

And for these acts there of course has to be retaliation.

The occupation's abolishment of most jobs in the military and in Saddam Hussein's government, and the chaos that is Iraqi society under the occupation, have left many destitute; kidnapings for ransom and other acts of criminal violence have become popular ways to make a living, or at least survive.

US-trained, financed, and armed Iraqi forces have killed large numbers of people designated as "terrorists" by someone official, or perhaps someone unofficial, or by someone unknown, or by chance.

The US military itself has been a main perpetrator of violence, killing individually and en masse, killing any number, any day, for any reason, anyone, any place, often in mindless retaliation against anyone nearby for an insurgent attack.

The US military and its coalition allies have also been the main target of violent attacks. A Department of Defense report of November 2006 stated: "Coalition forces remained the target of the majority of attacks (68%)."[1]

And here is James Baker, establishment eminence, co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, on CNN with
Anderson Cooper:
Cooper: And is it possible that getting the U.S. troops out will actually lessen that violence, that it will at least take away the motivation of nationalist insurgents?
Baker: Many people have argued that to us. Many people in Iraq made that case.
Cooper: Do you buy it?
Baker: Yes, I think there is some validity to it, absolutely. Then we are no longer seen to be the occupiers.[2]

In spite of all of the above we are told that the presence of the United States military has been and will continue to be a buffer against violence. Iraqis themselves do not believe this. A poll published in September found that Iraqis believe, by a margin of 78 to 21 percent, that the US military presence is "provoking more conflict that it is preventing".[3]

Remember that we were warned a thousand times of a communist bloodbath in Vietnam if American forces left. The American forces left. There was never any kind of bloodbath.

If the United States leaves -- meaning all its troops and bases -- it will remove the very foundation, origin, and inspiration of most of the hate and violence. Iraqis will have a chance to reclaim their land and their life. They have a right to be given that opportunity. Let America's deadly "love" embrace of the Iraqi people come to an end. Let the healing begin.

Some people love guns. But why should the rest of us be targets?
The massacre at Virginia Tech is the kind of tragedy that invariably produces an abundance of sociological and psychological speculation, comparisons to the violence of American foreign policy, and many other clichés, platitudes, and truisms; a lot of ground I prefer not to walk over again. Except this one thing, as knee-reflex as it is: We should ban all guns. It should be illegal to possess any functioning firearm; those who already possess them should be obliged to turn them in for a payment. No halfway measures here. We went beyond halfway measures many massacres ago.

Last year in England and Wales (population 54 million), where there are tough restrictions on gun ownership, there were 50 shooting deaths. In Washington, DC (population half a million), there were 137 fatal shootings.[4]

Nearly twice as many people commit suicide in the 15 US states with the highest rates of gun ownership than in the six states with the lowest rates of gun ownership, although the population of the two groups is about the same. Guns are used in only five percent of suicide attempts, but more than 90 percent of those attempts are fatal, whereas drugs account for nearly 75 percent of suicide attempts, but the fatality rate in those attempts is less than 3 percent.[5]

Those who question the correlation between ease of gun ownership and death by gunfire should try to imagine what the Virginia Tech killer would have done if he hadn't been able to purchase guns as easily as he had. What would he have used? A club? A knife? He would have been jumped and disarmed after attacking his first victim in the classroom.

The only exception to the gun ban should be for law enforcement. That doesn't include the military. If the American military did not have any weapons this sad old world would be a much safer and nicer place, for American soldiers as well as their victims. So let's perform an act of euthanasia and pull the plug on the military's life-support machine. Let's convert the Pentagon into affordable housing. We won't have to worry about anti-American terrorists because our un-armed forces would not be going all over the world and creating them by the thousands with bombings, invasions, overthrows of governments, occupations, support of repressive regimes, and similar charming activities, all of which require vast amounts of firearms and bombs. Yes, the bombs would become history as well.

Oh, one more thing. Before the gun ban goes into effect, a posse should be formed to go and shoot up the National Rifle Association's headquarters. The NRA loves to cite the Second Amendment to the Constitution: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." What militias, in the 21st century, are the NRA gun-lovers thinking of? And what state? I'd guess that most NRA members are fervent libertarians who hold a lot of paranoia and no love for any state. It's time for another constitutional amendment to abolish the Second Amendment, like the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments changed the Constitution to abolish slavery.[6]

Because of Virginia Tech's location and the fact that several of the victims came from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, where I live, the Washington Post gave book-length coverage to the event. I found myself choking up, at times with tears, repeatedly, each day as I read the stories of the stolen young lives. Two days after the massacre, the Supreme Court issued a ruling making certain abortions illegal. This led to statements from celebrating anti-abortion activists about how the life of "unborn children" would be saved, and how the fetus is fully a human being deserving of as much care and respect and legal protection as any other human being. But does anyone know cases of parents grieving over an aborted fetus the way the media has shown parents and friends grieving over the slain Virginia Tech students? Of course not. If for no other reason than the parents choose to have an abortion. Does anyone know of a case of the parents of an aborted fetus tearfully remembering the fetus's first words, or high school graduation or wedding or the camping trip they all took together? Or the fetus's smile or the way it laughed? Of course not. Because -- to those who support abortion on demand -- the fetus is not a human being in a sufficiently meaningful physical, social, intellectual, and emotional sense. But the anti-abortion activists -- often for reasons of sexual prudery, anti-feminism, religion (the Supreme Court ruling derived from the five Catholic members of the court), or other personal or political hangups -- throw a halo around the fetus, treat the needs and desires of the parents as nothingness, and damn all those who differ with them as child murderers. Unfortunately, with many of these activists, their perfect love for human beings doesn't extend to the human beings of Iraq or Afghanistan.

A conservative's idea of a random act of kindness is cutting the capital gains tax
Michael Scheuer is a former CIA officer who headed the Agency's Osama bin Laden unit. He's also the author of "Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America", and "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror". In last month's edition of this report, in my section on Washington's war on terrorism, quoting from the Sydney Morning Herald I wrote that when Scheuer was told that the largest group in Guantánamo came from custody in Pakistan, he said: "We absolutely got the wrong people." This sentiment is in keeping with the point I was making, that a significant portion of "terrorists" held in US custody are no such thing.

But then the editor of DissidentVoice.org, which reprints my report each month, received a letter from Mr. Scheuer, saying in part: "Regarding the quote attributed to me in Mr. Blum's column. I do not recall ever making such a statement, and if I did make it, I spoke mistakenly. I have no reason to believe that any one in the Guantanamo Bay facility does not deserve to be there. I have objected to the facility only because it forces the United States to be subject to the pacifist whinings of human rights advocates and EC [presumably European Community] officials."

I replied to Scheuer, asking him if his remark -- "I have no reason to believe that any one in the Guantanamo Bay facility does not deserve to be there" -- referred only to "the present prisoners, those held as of the time of your alleged remark in February 2006, or any and all of the prisoners who've been held there the past 5 years? If the last, that would be quite a remarkable statement to make given all that we know about the very faulty criteria employed in deciding who to send to Guantanamo, a portion of which I discuss in my article. Even if you're referring to the first or second time period, your statement would still be most surprising. How could you possibly know that? Or even hazard a guess? As I mention, even the prison commanders didn't believe that."

Scheuer has not yet replied. I had also wondered about his use of the term "pacifist whinings". Then, in a review of former CIA Director George Tenet's new book, Scheuer takes his former boss to task as well as Bill Clinton for not attacking Afghanistan enough in the late 1990s to kill Osama bin Laden and his followers, accusing the former president of "cowardly pacifism". Scheuer writes: "I did not -- and do not -- care about collateral casualties in such situations, as most of the nearby civilians would be the families that bin Laden's men had brought to a war zone. But Tenet did care. 'You can't kill everyone,' he would say. That's an admirable humanitarian concern in the abstract, but it does nothing to protect the United States. Indeed, thousands of American families would not be mourning today had there been more ferocity and less sentimentality among the Clinton team."[7]

It should be noted that in 1993 Clinton ordered the firing of missiles into Iraq, killing and injuring many, as retaliation for Iraqi involvement in a plot to assassinate former president George H.W. Bush who was due to visit Kuwait. (Both the plot and the Iraqi involvement in it should be filed away under "alleged".) In 1998 the president ordered the firing of several missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan in an attempt to take out suspected terrorists and their facilities, instead hitting "collateral casualties". And the following year, Clinton, wearing a NATO mask, dropped bombs on the people of Yugoslavia for 78 consecutive days.
But by Michael Scheuer's standards, Bill Clinton was a pacifist.

If it's difficult for you pacifists -- of the whining, cowardly, or any other variety -- to appreciate or understand the mind or heart or soul of a Michael Scheuer, if you think he's out of touch with reality, amoral, and scary, take a look at a recent get-together between George W. and a group of neo-conservatives. Compared to these guys, Scheuer should quickly seek out the nearest Friends Meeting House. And the rest of us should seek out another country. Or planet.

Salon.org reported on the February 28 luncheon between Bush and the leading lights of American neo-conservatism. You have to read the whole thing, but here's a snippet: "The most critical priority [of the neo-cons] is to convince the President to continue to ignore the will of the American people and to maintain full-fledged loyalty to the neoconservative agenda, no matter how unpopular it becomes. To do this, they have convinced the President that he has tapped into a much higher authority than the American people -- namely, God-mandated, objective morality -- and as long as he adheres to that (which is achieved by continuing his militaristic policies in the Middle East, whereby he is fighting Evil and defending Good), God and history will vindicate him. ... Finally, the neoconservatives left Bush with the overarching instruction -- namely, the only thing that he should concern himself with, the only thing that really matters, is Iran."[8]

Has there ever been an empire that didn't tell itself and the world that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate? And that it had God on its side?

Will America's immune system be able to rid itself of its raw-meat conservatives?

The biggest lie of all is never mentioned
Bill Moyers' recent documentary "Buying the War" does an excellent job of showing how the preeminent members of American mainstream journalism failed woefully in their duty to the public and their profession by not properly questioning the great falsehoods of the Bush administration in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. The media did not expose the fallacies of White House claims that Saddam Hussein possessed all manner of weapons of mass destruction, that he had close working ties to Osama bin Laden and/or al Qaeda, that an Iraqi agent had met with Mohammad Atta, the reputed leader of the 9-11 hijackers, and other stories put forth by the Bush-Cheney gang to create the belief that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States.

But the biggest lie of all about the war in Iraq, one that I've discussed before in this report, one that the mainstream media never pursue, one that Moyers doesn't mention in his documentary, but one that has been clearly implied during five years of news and discussions, is this: If in fact Saddam Hussein had possessed all those terrible weapons he would have been a threat to use them against the United States, even without provocation. This is so preposterous that I doubt that even Bush or Cheney held such a belief. To attack the United States, Hussein would have had to be imbued with nothing less than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide. I do not know of any evidence that he was insane.

Nor the leaders of Iran. But that counts for nought when the empire knows that you are a non-believer in the empire.

Moreover, having exposed the administration's stated excuses for war as fraudulent, the documentary inexplicably presents no discussion whatsoever as to what might have been the real reasons for the war, though the program undoubtedly left many viewers wondering just that -- "So why did they lie so much? To cover up what?" Most TV journalists tend to tread rather lightly in a field full of mines labeled "oil" or "Israel" or "defense corporations".[9]

Democracy Now!
I'm a fan of Amy Goodman and her morning radio program "Democracy Now". It consistently covers a wide range of issues of interest to the progressive community and undoubtedly recruits many new members to the cause. But perhaps their range is too wide to expect the Democracy Now! staff to have done all of their homework on all of the issues. Cuba is one such issue where the program tends to stumble. The latest example was on April 26. In the opening news report, Amy informed us: "In Cuba, six dissidents have been released from prison nearly two years after they were jailed. The Cuban government had drawn international condemnation after the jailings in the summer of 2005."

That was it. CBS or NPR couldn't have followed the State Department script any better. There must be many thousands in American prisons who could be called "dissidents" for having at one time or another expressed serious disgust with what the US was doing in some part of the world and who had taken part in a protest; or done the same in regard to some vital economic, civil rights, or civil liberties issue at home. "Oh," you declare, "but they were not imprisoned because of their dissidence." Yes, that's true about almost all of them. But it's also true about almost all Cuban prisoners.

To grasp this, one must first understand the following: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government officials, particularly in Havana through the American Embassy (the United States Interests Section). Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization inside the United States? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents' ties to the United States, evidence gathered by Cuban double agents.

NOTES
[1] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2006/iraq-security-stability_nov2006.htm)

{2] CNN, December 6, 2006

[3] World Public Opinion Poll, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland,
"The Iraqi Public on the US Presence and the Future of Iraq", September 27, 2006, p.5

[4] Washington Post, April 24, 2007, p.18

[5] Study by Harvard School of Public Health, Associated Press, April 16, 2007

[6] The title of this section and some thoughts on the Constitution are taken from an excellent article on the subject of gun control by Jonathan Safran Foer in the Washington Post, April 22, 2007, p. B5

[7] Washington Post, April 29, 2007, p.B1

[8] Glenn Greenwald: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/03/14/roberts_luncheon/print.html),

[9] Transcript: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/transcript1.html

Hillary and the End of Occupation and of the New Imperialism

Friday, May 04, 2007

Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a surprise move, will introduce legislation with Sen. Robert Byrd to revoke the war powers granted to Bush in October of 2002. She says she had originally supported a Byrd amendment at that time to limit those powers to a single year. In the US Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, even though once it is declared the president is commander in chief. The Founding Fathers would have been appalled at the tendency of Congress to cede war-making to the executive during the past century.

As George Lakoff reminds us, actually what is needed is a bill to cut off Bush's authorization to occupy another country. The US was born in a revolt against colonialism and empire; it is shameful for it to seek to retain other countries as colonies now, in the mold of King George III. You may as well bring back slavery as to seek to go on occupying Iraq, as the Republican presidential hopefuls want to do.

And this is what I would add to Lakoff's suggestion. The war was over in 2003. What we've had since then is an occupation, at least in the Sunni Arab areas and some of the Shiite south, where US military presence is unwelcome. Although the Bushies trumpet the two elections, in fact the prime minister elected as a result of them, Ibrahim Jaafari, was unseated through heavy-handed US intervention in Iraqi domestic affairs. When Bush is telling Iraq who it can and cannot have as prime minister, then Iraq is not an independent country.

Such an occupation is just warmed over 19th century colonialism of the "white man's burden" variety. And, such colonialism is just as objectionable as slavery. When the revolutionary French National Assembly abolished slavery in 1794, its abolitionists voiced the hope that ending slavery would also end colonialism.

Why There Was No Exit Plan

April 30, 2007

by Dan Hamburg

There are people in Washington … who never intend to withdraw military forces from Iraq and they’re looking for 10, 20, 50 years in the future … the reason that we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region, and I have never heard any of our leaders say that they would commit themselves to the Iraqi people that 10 years from now there will be no military bases of the United States in Iraq.

– former President Jimmy Carter, Feb. 3, 2006


For all the talk about timetables and benchmarks, one might think that the United States will end the military occupation of Iraq within the lifetimes of the readers of this opinion editorial. Think again.

There is to be no withdrawal from Iraq, just as there has been no withdrawal from hundreds of places around the world that are outposts of the American empire. As UC San Diego professor emeritus Chalmers Johnson put it, “One of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn’t intend to leave.”

The United States maintains 737 military bases in 130 countries across the globe. They exist for the purpose of defending the economic interests of the United States, what is euphemistically called “national security.” In order to secure favorable access to Iraq’s vast reserves of light crude, the United States is spending billions on the construction of at least five large permanent military bases throughout that country.

A new Iraq oil law, largely written by the Coalition Provisional Authority, is planned for ratification by June. This law cedes control of Iraq’s oil to western powers for 30 years . There is major opposition to the proposed law within Iraq, especially among the country’s five trade union federations that represent hundreds of thousands of oil workers. The United States is working hard to surmount this opposition by appealing directly to the al-Maliki government in Iraq.

The attack upon, and subsequent occupation of, Iraq can be seen as a direct result of the 2001 National Energy Policy Development Group (better known as vice president Cheney’s energy task force) that was comprised largely of oil and energy company executives. This task force — the proceedings of which have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of “executive privilege” — recommended that the U.S. government support initiatives in Middle Eastern countries “to open up areas of their energy sector to foreign investment.” As Antonio Juhasz, an analyst with Oil Change International wrote last month in the New York Times, “One invasion and a great deal of political engineering by the Bush administration later, this is exactly what the proposed Iraq oil law would achieve.”

The people of the United States have indicated, in the national election last November and in countless polls, that they no longer support the Bush administration’s war. The Scooter Libby trial revealed that top administration officials, including the vice president, “cherry-picked” and distorted intelligence in order to sell a “pre-emptive” war to a spooked public. The squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars, some billions of which, according to Seymour Hersh writing in the New Yorker, is being siphoned into “black-ops” programs being run out of Cheney’s office (a stunning redux of Iran-Contra carried out by many of the same actors), has also strained the patience and credulity of the American people.

Another betrayal is the “contracting out” of “war-related activities” to corporations such as Halliburton, Bechtel, Chemonics and Blackwater. Halliburton, Vice President Cheney’s previous employer, calls itself an “energy services company” but has tentacles reaching into nearly every aspect of the war (originally dubbed Operation Iraqi Liberation until some bright bulb among the Bushies realized that “OIL” might not be the best handle for this venture). Halliburton has also profited handsomely from no-bid government contracts awarded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the construction at the national embarrassment known as “Gitmo,” and most recently, from the fiasco at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, all this corruption, mayhem and death are good for some (or it wouldn’t go on).

The U.S. military budget, larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world’s nations combined, continues skyward, even without all the “supplementals” passed regularly by Congress to fight the “war on terror.”

The question we must ask as citizens is this: Is the United States a democratic republic or an empire? History demonstrates that it’s not possible to be both.


Dan Hamburg, a former U.S. representative, is executive director of Voice of the Environment.

© 2007 The San Francisco Chronicle

Reid: Congress Will Endorse Iraq Pullout

By DAVID ESPO, AP Special Correspondent

Monday, April 23, 2007

(04-23) 09:54 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) --

Defying a fresh veto threat, the Democratic-controlled Congress will pass legislation within days requiring the start of a troop withdrawal from Iraq by Oct. 1, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Monday.

The legislation also sets a goal of a complete pullout by April 1, 2008, he said.

In remarks prepared for delivery, Reid said that under the legislation the troops that remain after next April 1 could only train Iraqi security units, protect U.S forces and conduct "targeted counter-terror operations."

Reid spoke a few hours after Bush said he will reject any legislation along the lines of what Democrats will pass. "I will strongly reject an artificial timetable (for) withdrawal and/or Washington politicians trying to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their job," the president said.

Bush made his comments to reporters in the Oval Office as he met with senior military leaders, including his top general in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus.

Taken together, Reid's speech and Bush's comments inaugurated a week of extraordinary confrontation between the president and the new Democratic-controlled Congress over a war that has taken the lives of more than 3,200 U.S. troops.

Reid drew criticism from Bush and others last week when he said the war in Iraq had been lost.

The Nevada Democrat did not repeat the assertion in his prepared speech, saying that "The military mission has long since been accomplished. The failure has been political. It has been policy. It has been presidential."

Reid said that in addition to the timetable, the legislation will establish standards for the Iraqi government to meet in terms of "making progress on security, political reconciliation and improving the lives of ordinary Iraqis who have suffered so much."

The measure also would launch diplomatic, economic and political policy changes, Reid said.

Negotiators for the House and Senate arranged a late-afternoon meeting to ratify the timetable that Reid laid out. The demand for a change in course will be attached to a funding bill that is needed to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reid said Bush was in "a state of denial" over the war, and likened him to another commander in chief four decades ago. "I remember when President Johnson, trying to save his political legacy, initiated the first of many surges into Vietnam in 1965," he said.

Reid said thousands more U.S. troops died in Vietnam as a result. Now, he said, Bush "is the only person who fails to face this war's reality - and that failure is devastating not just for Iraq's future, but for ours."

Reid also challenged Bush to present an alternative if, as expected, he vetoes the Democratic legislation.

The president said that Petraeus will go to Capitol Hill to tell lawmakers what's going right in Iraq — and what's not.

"It's a tough time, as the general will tell Congress," Bush said. Still, the president insisted, progress is being made in Iraq as more U.S. troops head into the country to provide security.

There is no doubt that Republicans in Congress have the votes to sustain Bush's threatened veto.

That would require Congress to approve a second funding bill quickly to avoid significant disruptions in military operations.

Reid's speech blended an attack on Bush, an appeal for patience to the anti-war voters who last fall gave Democrats control, and an attempt to shape the post-veto debate.

"I understand the restlessness that some feel. Many who voted for change in November anticipated dramatic and immediate results in January," he said.

"But like it or not, George W. Bush is still the commander in chief — and this is his war," Reid said.

Reid said Democrats have sought Republican support for their attempts to force Bush to change course. "Only the president is the odd man out, and he is making the task even harder by demanding absolute fidelity from his party."

Looking beyond Bush's expected veto, he said, "If the president disagrees, let him come to us with an alternative. Instead of sending us back to square one with a veto, some tough talk and nothing more, let him come to the table in the spirit of bipartisanship that Americans demand and deserve."

Reid noted disapprovingly that in a speech last week, Bush repeatedly said there were signs of progress in Iraq in the wake of a troop increase he ordered last winter.

"The White House transcript says the president made those remarks in the state of Michigan. I believe he made them in the state of denial," said Reid.

Democratic officials have also said they intend to add a minimum wage increase to the war funding bill. Key lawmakers announced agreement late last week on a package of business tax breaks to accompany the boost in the wage floor, which would total $2.10 cents an hour in three equal installments.

Apart from the clash over war policy, Bush has pledged to veto the funding bill if Democrats go ahead with plans to include billions of dollars in domestic spending.

GOP Sen. Snowe sponsoring Iraq withdrawal bill

From the Los Angeles Times

Maine moderate is third Senate Republican to take stance despite pressure from Bush.

By Noam N. Levey and James Gerstenzang

Times Staff Writers

April 20, 2007

WASHINGTON — In another sign of Republican unease with the president's Iraq policies, a third GOP senator expressed support Thursday for pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq under certain conditions.

Sen. Olympia J. Snowe announced she would sponsor a bill to require American commanders to plan a withdrawal within 120 days of the bill's enactment, unless the Iraqi government meets a series of benchmarks.

"The Iraq government needs to understand that our commitment is not infinite," said Snowe, a moderate from Maine who frequently departs from the party line.

President Bush has insisted that Congress not impose any limits on his conduct of the four-year-old war. But Snowe has taken issue with that view.

"It is our business as well," she said Thursday.

Snowe is not backing a Senate Democratic plan approved last month that would require the president to begin withdrawing troops within 120 days and would set a nonbinding goal of complete withdrawal by March.

But that plan did draw the support of two GOP senators, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Gordon H. Smith of Oregon.

The Senate proposal and a House version approved last month — which both include benchmarks for the Iraqi government — are being merged into one proposal.

Democratic leaders said they expected to have the compromise measure ready for a vote next week.

Bush, who has promised to veto the measure and has spoken out forcefully against it, took his campaign on the road Thursday at a town hall event in House Minority Leader John A. Boehner's western Ohio district.

Bush met with about 500 people from the Dayton area selected by the chamber of commerce and Boehner's office.

For the first time in more than a year, he engaged in a lengthy question session with an audience.

Bush repeated warnings that a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would risk a wider war in the Middle East and allow extremists to "follow us here." He also cautioned that chaos in the region "could cause the Middle East to enter into a nuclear arms race."

Snowe's legislation marks another challenge to a White House that has worked to keep GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill from backing any congressionally mandated limits on the president's war powers.

The effort has been very successful. Only two GOP lawmakers in the House and two in the Senate crossed the aisle last month to vote for the Democratic withdrawal plans.

And congressional Republicans have repeatedly reiterated their support for the president in recent weeks, traveling to the White House to stand with the chief executive.

At the Capitol, Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.) dismissed the effect of Snowe's challenge to the president's leadership.

"It doesn't matter…. We've got plenty of votes," said Lott, whose 49-member caucus could sustain more than a dozen defections and still prevent Democrats from overriding a veto.

Republican leaders Thursday focused their attacks on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who said at a news conference that he believed "the war is lost."

"I can't begin to imagine how our troops in the field, who are risking their lives every day, are going to react when they get back to base and hear that the Democrat leader of the United States Senate has declared the war is lost," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

But Republicans face greater challenges to keeping their members in line as public impatience with the violence in Iraq mounts.

McConnell refused last week to say when he thought Americans would know whether Bush's surge had succeeded.

But some Republicans who voted with the White House last month are saying privately that the president has only a few more months to demonstrate success.

In her proposed legislation, which has no cosponsors, Snowe put her own limit at four months.

Under her bill, if the Iraqi government has not met the benchmarks — which include disarming militias, amending the constitution and passing legislation to equitably share energy resources — the U.S. commander in Iraq must submit a plan for withdrawing U.S. forces.

"Americans are losing patience with the failure of the leadership in Baghdad to end the sectarian violence and move toward national reconciliation," she said.

61% say NOT accurate to compare withdrawal with surrender

One Senator[McCain] recently claimed that setting a date for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is more accurately described as a date for surrender — do you think it is accurate to compare withdrawal with surrender?

Yes: 33 percent
No: 61 percent

FOX POLL, APRIL 19, 2007 - PDF

The Real Surge Story: Sen. Joe Biden

Some good info here. Biden and the CFR are wrong however. The US must leave now.
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The Real Surge Story

By Joe Biden
Thursday, April 12, 2007; A27

Sen. John McCain[" The War You're Not Reading About," op-ed, April 8] is right to warn about the consequences of failure in Iraq. But he is fundamentally wrong when he argues that those potential consequences require us to stick with a failing strategy.

It is precisely because the stakes are so great that we must change course in Iraq, now.

McCain wrote that the president's strategy is beginning to show results but that most Americans don't know it because the media cover the bad news, not the good news. Of course, reporting any news in Iraq is an extraordinary act of bravery, given the dangers journalists must navigate every day. But the fact is, virtually every "welcome development" McCain cited has been reported, including the purported anti-al-Qaeda alliance with Sunni sheikhs in Anbar, the establishment of joint U.S.-Iraqi security stations in Baghdad and the decision by Moqtada al-Sadr to go to ground -- for now.

The problem is that for every welcome development, there is an equally or even more unwelcome development that gives lie to the claim that we are making progress. For example:

· While violence against Iraqis is down in some Baghdad neighborhoods where we have "surged" forces, it is up dramatically in the belt ringing Baghdad. The civilian death toll increased 15 percent from February to March. Essentially, when we squeeze the water balloon in one place, it bulges somewhere else.

· It is true that Sadr has not been seen, but he has been heard, rallying his followers with anti-American messages and encouraging his thugs to take on American troops in the south. Intelligence experts believe his militia is simply waiting out the surge.

· Closing markets to vehicles has precluded some car bombs, but it also has prompted terrorists to change tactics and walk in with suicide vests. The road from the airport to Baghdad may be safer, but the skies above it are more lethal -- witness the ironic imposition of "no-fly zones" for our own helicopters.

The most damning evidence that the "results" McCain cites are illusory is the city of Tall Afar. Architects of the president's plan called it a model because in 2005, a surge of about 10,000 Americans and Iraqis pacified the city. Then we left Tall Afar, just as our troops soon will leave the Baghdad neighborhoods that they have calmed.

This month, Tall Afar was the scene of some of the most horrific sectarian violence to date: a massive truck bomb aimed at the Shiite community led to a retaliatory rampage by Shiite death squads, aided by the Iraqi police. Hundreds were killed. The population of Tall Afar, 200,000 a few years ago, is down to 80,000.

There is an even more basic problem with McCain's progress report, and it goes to the heart of the choice we face in Iraq. Whatever tactical progress we may be making will amount to nothing if it is not serving a larger strategy for success. Alas, the administration's strategy has virtually no prospects for success.

The administration hopes that the surge will buy time for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to broker the sustainable political settlement our military views as essential to lasting stability in Iraq.

But there is no trust within the government, no trust of the government by the people it purports to serve and no capacity on the part of the government to deliver security or services. There is little prospect that the government will build that trust and capacity anytime soon.

In short, the most basic premise of the president's approach -- that Iraqis will rally behind a strong central government that looks out for their interests equitably -- is fundamentally and fatally flawed.

If the president's plan won't work, what will? History suggests only four other ways to keep together a country riven by sectarian strife:

We allow or help one side to win, which would require years of horrific bloodletting.

We perpetuate the occupation, which is impossible politically and practically.

We promote the return of a dictator, who is not on the horizon but whose emergence would be the cruelest of ironies.

Or we help Iraq make the transition to a decentralized, federal system, as called for in its constitution, where each major group has local control over the fabric of its daily life, including security, education, religion and marriage.

Making federalism work for all Iraqis is a strategy that can still succeed and allow our troops to leave responsibly. It's a strategy I have been promoting for a year.

I cannot guarantee that my plan for Iraq (detailed at http://www.planforiraq.com) will work. But I can guarantee that the course we're on -- the course that a man I admire, John McCain, urges us to continue -- is a road to nowhere.

Democrats back away from Iraq troops withdrawal demand

April 8

Also on the Sunday shows: Gingrich says it's best for Gonzales to Go; Huckabee says he's the man to take on Clinton; Thompson lists Iraq principles

For the second straight weekend, top Senate Democrats shrunk further away from core principles they had set out in the Iraq war debate, signaling Sunday that they were prepared to drop a timetable mandating the withdrawal of U.S. troops, should President Bush fulfill his vow to veto current war funding legislation.

Last Sunday, senior Democrats said that they would not hold back funding for the war if the president vetoed a bill including an Iraq withdrawal timetable. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, reiterated that point on ABC's "This Week." He said, "We're not going to vote to cut funding, period."

Sen. Carl Levin (AP Photo/ABC News, Lauren Victoria Burke)

After a veto, he said, "there's a number of options. Either we can keep the benchmarks part of the bill without saying that the troops must begin to come back." And if that doesn't work, "what we will leave will be benchmarks, for instance, which would require the president to certify to the American people if the Iraqis are meeting the benchmarks for political settlement, which they, the Iraqi leaders, have set for themselves."

Democrats also suggested their strategy would be to portray Bush as the one who is denying funds to the troops.

"Should he veto this bill, which means he will be vetoing the money for the troops, we will try to come up with a way, ... trying to compromise with the White House, that both supports the troops and yet changes the strategy in Iraq, which we feel is misguided," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on "Fox News Sunday."

"And by the way, 70 percent of the American people feel it's misguided. If a change in strategy means not supporting the troops, then 70 percent of the American people don't support the troops."

The House and Senate have both passed $100 billion spending bills to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afgahnistan. The House bill would require U.S. combat troops to leave by Sept. 1, 2008, while the Senate bill asks that troops begin to leave in 120 days, a process to be completed by March 31, 2008. House and Senate negotiators are to work on a compromise bill to send to the president when the House comes back from recess in a week.

Some Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), have vowed to pursue legislation that would cut off funds for combat operations on March 31, if Bush continues to keep a large troop presence there. That would go much further than the bills currently being considered, which Democrats have emphasized would not cut funding.

Levin suggested that the more far-reaching bill, co-sponsored by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Russell Feingold (D-Wisc.) would not go anywhere if it contains measures to cut funding. "Harry Reid acknowledged that that's not going to happen. He has a personal position, which he said was not the caucus position. He was very clear when he joined a bill which would cut off funding under certain circumstances."

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Republican Conference, said the Congress should send the president a war spending bill without conditions. "The point here is that when you send the president a bill that has a big poison pill in it like that ... he's going to veto it. This is a very risky strategy," Kyl said on ABC's "This Week." "Every day of delay is a day when we're not sending troops the body armor they need, the humvees that they need and all of the other things that they need.

Also on the foreign policy front this morning:

-- On Fox, Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.),who is mulling a presidential bid, had harsh words about the response to Iran's seizure - and return - of 15 British Navy personnel: "The West was humiliated. The British were humiliated. The Europeans were humiliated. The United Nations was humiliated. ... We should be actively seeking to replace that government by bringing every kind of non-military pressure to bear we can, to destabilize that government and help the people of Iran, replace it with a moderate government."

-- On CNN, Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), who caucuses with the Democrats, switched partisan roles discussing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent visit to Syria, in spite of administration wishes.
"She has a very prominent constitutional role in determine what's going to happen in the Iraqi war. Syria is very much involved with respect to the funding," Specter said.

Lieberman disagreed: "Her visit to Syria was a mistake, that it was bad for the United States of America and good for the Syrians. And I say this because Syria -- we're in a war. We're in a war against the Islamist terrorists who attacked us on 9/11/01. Syria is a state sponsor of terrorism."

U.S. Attorney Firings: No lenience for Gonzales

This morning, it became pretty clear that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is lucky Gingrich is no longer the speaker of the House of Representative.

Gingrich suggested that it would be best if Gonzales resigned in the mounting congressional probe into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys,

Newt Gingrich (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

"I cannot imagine how he is going to be effective for the rest of this administration," the former speaker said. "Thanks to our good friends in the Senate side, they're going to be involved in endless hearings, which is going to take up an immense amount of time and effort. I think the country, in fact, would be much better served to have a new team at the Justice Department, across the board."

Campaign 2008: Mike Huckabee

On this relatively quiet Easter Sunday, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee , a Baptist pastor running for the GOP presidential nomination, had his time under the sun as the sole guest on CBS's "This Week." And he spoke with sky-blue clarity about his political positions on abortion, the role of Christian conservatives in American politics and Iraq.

Mike Huckabee(AP)

When the topic came to the reality of running a presidential campaign, however, the discussion got a little more muddied. Host Bob Schieffer asked about the "obscene" amounts of campaign cash the three leading GOP hopefuls raised in the first three months of the year -- nearly $50 million combined, or 100 times the half-million Huckabee took in.

"This is a time when people are talking about $100 million before the end of the year. If that's the case, do you really want someone in charge of the federal treasury who burns $100 million before the first vote is cast?" Huckabee said.

Huckabee said the real question is how much he can raise in the future, perhaps using a bit of hyperbole to suggest what's possible. "This is the kind of environment in which a candidate can catch fire, and people go to the Web site that he has and make contributions over the Internet. And I could raise $20 million overnight if everyone watching this show just simply went and said, I'll make a $100 contribution. The point is that things can change so rapidly."

Schieffer interrupted, "That's kind of a big if. I mean, you know, they always say, you know, the dog could have caught the rabbit if he hadn't stopped to make that phone all. ... You're going to have to have a tremendous s of money to even have a chance. I'm not saying that's fair. ... It's simply the golf course that politics is played on these days. It's not clear to me how you can get from there to here."

Huckabee said, "Well, again, if I thought that I had raised all the money I was going to realistically raise, I'd be out of it today. But what I'm telling it is that we're on the front end of our fund- raising, not on the back side."

Schieffer also asked about laudatory comments Huckabee made of one of the Democratic candidates, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) - that she's focused, disciplined and brilliant.

Was he angling for a cabinet post in a Clinton administration? Schieffer wondered.

Huckabee said he's not - "I don't think I'd accept" - but he did say he knows her the best of the GOP candidates and "that's why I'm the best candidate on the Republican side."

"I know ... how dangerous she can be as a candidate," Huckabee said. "That's one of the reasons that I believe my candidacy offers the clearest contrast, and an opportunity for America to have maybe a real, solid choice."

Other notes from Huckabee:

-- He thinks Christian conservatives should engage Republicans and Republican politics with the same critical eye on social and family issues they did President Clinton in the 1990s.

-- He thinks displays or religion on public property - the nativity scene on Capitol grounds, for example - are just fine.

-- He thinks the United States must win in Iraq and doesn't think a timetable for removing troops is a good idea.

Campaign 2008: Tommy Thompson

Another GOP presidential hopeful, four-term former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson , spent a few minutes on CNN.

He said his strategy for Iraq has four parts: 1. Protect the troops. 2. The Iraqi government must have a vote on whether the U.S. should stay in the country and the U.S. should follow whatever they say 3. The 18 territories in Iraq should elect their own leaders and operate like U.S. states. He didn't get to the fourth part. 4. An equitable distribution of oil revenues.

The health and human services secretary during Bush's first term, Thompson also said he's pro-life and would like to see the federal government regulate nicotine as it does so many other drugs.

By Zachary Goldfarb | April 8, 2007; 3:06 PM ET

How to Get Out of Iraq

by JUAN COLE

[from the April 23, 2007 issue]

Both houses of Congress have now backed a timeline for withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq in 2008, which George W. Bush has vowed to veto. He gives two major rationales for rejecting withdrawal. At times he has warned that Iraq could become an Al Qaeda stronghold, at others that "a contagion of violence could spill out across the country--and in time, the entire region could be drawn into the conflict." These are bogeymen with which Bush has attempted to frighten the public. Regarding the first, Turkey, Jordan and Iran are not going to put up with an Al Qaeda stronghold on their borders; nor would Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis. Most Sunni Iraqis are relatively secular, and there are only an estimated 1,000 foreign jihadis in Iraq, who would be forced to return home if the Americans left.

Bush's ineptitude has made a regional proxy war a real possibility, so the question is how to avoid it. One Saudi official admitted that if the United States withdrew and Iraq's Sunnis seemed in danger, Riyadh would likely intervene. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has threatened to invade if Iraq's Kurds declare independence. And Iran would surely try to rescue Iraqi Shiites if they seemed on the verge of being massacred.

But Bush is profoundly in error to think that continued US military occupation can forestall further warfare. Sunni Arabs perceive the Americans to have tortured them, destroyed several of their cities and to be keeping them under siege at the behest of the joint Shiite-Kurdish government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. American missteps have steadily driven more and more Sunnis to violence and the support of violence. The Pentagon's own polling shows that between 2003 and 2006 the percentage of Sunni Arabs who thought attacking US troops was legitimate grew from 14 to more than 70.

The US repression of Sunnis has allowed Shiites and Kurds to avoid compromise. The Sunnis in Parliament have demanded that the excesses of de-Baathification be reversed (thousands of Sunnis have been fired from jobs just because they belonged to the Baath Party). They have been rebuffed. Sunnis rejected the formation of a Shiite super-province in the south. Shiites nevertheless pushed it through Parliament. The Kurdish leadership has also dismissed Sunni objections to their plans to annex the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, which has a significant Arab population.

The key to preventing an intensified civil war is US withdrawal from the equation so as to force the parties to an accommodation. Therefore, the United States should announce its intention to withdraw its military forces from Iraq, which will bring Sunnis to the negotiating table and put pressure on Kurds and Shiites to seek a compromise with them. But a simple US departure would not be enough; the civil war must be negotiated to a settlement, on the model of the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Lebanon.

Talks require a negotiating partner. The first step in Iraq must therefore be holding provincial elections. In the first and only such elections, held in January 2005, the Sunni Arab parties declined to participate. Provincial governments in Sunni-majority provinces are thus uniformly unrepresentative, and sometimes in the hands of fundamentalist Shiites, as in Diyala. A newly elected provincial Sunni Arab political class could stand in for the guerrilla groups in talks, just as Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, did in Northern Ireland.

The United States took a step in the right direction by attending the March Baghdad summit of Iraq's neighbors and speaking directly to Iran and Syria about Iraqi security. Now the United States and Britain should work with the United Nations or the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to call a six-plus-two meeting on the model of the generally successful December 2001 Bonn conference on Afghanistan. The Iraqi government, including the president and both vice presidents, would meet directly with the foreign ministers of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to discuss the ways regional actors could help end the war as the United States and Britain prepare to depart. Unlike the Baghdad summit, this conference would have to issue a formal set of plans and commitments. Recent Saudi consultations with Iranian leaders should be extended.

The Saudi government should then be invited to reprise the role it played in brokering an end to the Lebanese civil war at Taif in 1989, at which communal leaders hammered out a new national compact, which involved political power-sharing and demobilization of most militias. At Taif II, the elected provincial governors of Iraq and leaders of the major parliamentary blocs should be brought together. Along with the US and British ambassadors to Baghdad and representatives of the UN and the OIC, observers from Iraq's six neighbors should also be there.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has credibility with Iraq's Sunnis, especially now that he has denounced the US occupation as illegitimate. They could trust his representations, which would include Saudi development aid in places like Anbar province. Since the Sunnis are the main drivers of violence in Iraq, it is they who must be mollified, bribed, cajoled and threatened into a settlement. The Shiites will have to demobilize the Mahdi Army and Badr Organization as well, and Iran will have to commit to working with the Maliki government to make that happen. A UN peacekeeping force, perhaps with the OIC (where Malaysia recently proffered troops), would be part of the solution.

On the basis of a settlement at Taif II, the US military should then negotiate with provincial authorities a phased withdrawal from the Sunni Arab provinces. The Sunnis will have to understand that this departure is a double-edged sword, since if they continued their guerrilla war, the United States could not protect them from Kurdish or Shiite reprisals. Any UN or OIC presence would be for peacekeeping and could not be depended on for active peace-enforcing. The rewards from neighbors promised at Taif II should be granted in a phased fashion and made dependent on good-faith follow-through by Iraqi leaders.

From all this the Sunni Arabs would get an end to the US occupation--among their main demands--as well as an end to de-Baathification and political marginalization. They would have an important place in the new order and be guaranteed their fair share of the national wealth. Shiites and Kurds would get an end to a debilitating civil war, even if they have to give up some of their maximal demands. The neighbors would avoid a reprise of the destructive Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, which killed perhaps a million people and deeply damaged regional economies. And by ending its occupation, the United States would go a long way toward repairing its relations with the Arab and Muslim world and thus eliminate one of Al Qaeda's chief recruiting tools. A withdrawal is risky, but on the evidence so far, for the US military to remain in Iraq is a sure recipe for disaster.

The 'withdrawal' that isn't

KEVIN RYAN

By Kevin Ryan | March 29, 2007

IN JANUARY, President Bush announced the start of a "surge" that wasn't really a surge. Now the House and Senate have responded with a "withdrawal" that isn't really a withdrawal.

Last week, the House passed a bill that many believe would set hard deadlines for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. This week, the Senate followed suit. The House bill would require that troop withdrawals start immediately if the president cannot certify that Iraq or the United States are meeting benchmarks in the war. The withdrawal would have to be completed within 180 days. Even if the United States and Iraq are successful in reducing violence, the bill requires the United States to start a withdrawal by March 2008 and complete it by that August. The Senate bill requires a withdrawal to be complete by March 2008. Supporters of both bills claim they are forcing a withdrawal from Iraq, but a look at the fine print reveals otherwise.

First, to reverse the current surge the House bill requires the president to certify that every Army unit deploying to Iraq for a year-long tour of duty have a minimum of 365 days back home before deployment. (Marine units that deploy for seven months would have 210 days back home.) In addition, units in Iraq could not be extended beyond their one year (or seven months) assignment. This might be an effective way to halt the surge, except for the fact that the bill also allows the president to waive these restrictions in the interest of "national security." It's likely that the president already believes that he is acting in the interest of national security, making these restrictions superfluous.

Although the House and Senate bills set clear timelines for withdrawal of US troops, they also permit some troops to remain in Iraq as long as they are performing one of three specific missions: protecting US facilities, citizens, or forces; combating Al Qaeda or international terrorists; and training Iraqi security forces. How many troops are we talking about? Potentially as many as have been there for the past three years.

--MORE--

NBC's Matt Lauer: 'Would Iraq withdrawal really make things worse?'

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Bush's lies are emboldening journalists - FINALLY

"What would happen in Iraq if U.S. troops just got up and left?" asked Matt Lauer in an NBC Today Show report on President Bush's stated intent to veto a bill sent to him by Congress that would impose a timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.

yes... what WOULD happen...? well, a lot has ALREADY happened because of us, and, if we stay, more of the same is on the way...

"The region has become more dangerous because we've been there, the longer we stay the more dangerous it will become," said former National Security Agency direction Lt. Gen. William Odom on the prospect of a heightened civil war.

"I think when you really scrub it, the prospects for outside intervention and a regional war are actually pretty slim," said William Reidel, who worked in both the Clinton and Bush National Security Council.

As for the prospect of an "emboldened" Al Qaeda, Odom suggested that terrorists now in Iraq are less concerned with transnational terrorist activities than with their domestic conflict. "They're homegrown Iraqi terrorists who are much more concerned with winning the civil war in Iraq," said Odom. Added Reidel, "Once you take away the American occupation, Al Qaeda's gonna find that it has an awful lot of enemies in Iraq, people whom it has walked over in the last few years and who are gonna want revenge."

where were these friggin' reports when we needed 'em...?

Iraq Will Be in Chaos Whether We Stay or Go

March 22, 2007

The ardent supporters of the war in Iraq constantly tell us that there will be widespread chaos and boodshed if U.S. troops leave the country.

Sen. John McCain is especially vocal on this point in his presidentialial campaign for the GOP nomination next year. Rep. Sam Johnson, Republican of Texas, calls it a "surrender" if our forces come home.

Let's examine these claims.

Iraq was a country of roughly 24 million people before the hostilities began four long years ago. Two million have left the country for Jordan, Syria, Iran, or other safe havens. Many of the most educated and affluent are among this group because they can afford it.

About 1 million have been killed, wounded, or maimed, with most of the casualties coming after Saddam Hussein was toppled. Remember Dick Cheney's words that we would be treated as liberators once Saddam was ousted.

An additional 500,000 have died in infancy. In other words, the population is dwindling and fast.

The chaos and bloodbath are already present, Senator McCain. And after four years of trying to salvage the country, Johnson has the gall to call it a surrender to start bringing our men and women back home.

President Bush continues to call for patience. A recent poll by ABC News showed that 51 percent of Iraqis say it is all right to injure Americans. The patience, Mr. President, ran out long ago for most of us.

So the next time politicians talk about the havoc that would come with a U.S. pullout, remind them of what has and is going on already in that wartorn and unforgiving land.

Posted at 12:00 AM by John W. Mashek

Leave over Iraq to al-Qaida: Bogus argument

Playing the Course

Jeff Huber | March 19, 2007

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. --Voltaire

The peculiarly insane brand of neoconservative pro-war rhetoric continues to resonate. Last week, Representative C.W. Bill Young (R-FL) said, "Nobody wants our troops out of Iraq more than I do, but we can't afford to turn over Iraq to al-Qaida."

The Sunni organization al-Qaeda is not going to take over Shiite dominated Iraq. If Young honestly thinks it can, he's an utter dullard. It's more likely that Young was the Bush liegeman chosen to introduce the latest Rovewellian talking point.

Straying the Course

From the beginning, The administration and its echo chamberlains have sold their woebegone war in Iraq with a fabric of glittering generalities, appeals to emotion, bandwagons, sand bagging, blame shifting, straw man attacks, faulty main assumptions, false analogies, and the rest of the propaganda arsenal. They coaxed us into this war by making visions of mushroom clouds dance in our heads, and they've been playing Rovewellian mind games with us ever since.

Their most enduring trick has been the "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" mantra. In recent months "fighting them over there" has morphed into "If we withdraw, they will follow us here." Pish. How are they going to get here--hide in our troops' luggage? Swim? Wind surf? Jump?

Despite what Bush the younger tells us, the oceans do, in fact, still protect us. Nobody has an army large enough to invade and occupy the United States, and they certainly don't have a navy or air force capable of transporting a force that size across the Atlantic or Pacific. Even if they did, we could sink them and/or shoot them down before they got halfway here.

Yes, terrorists might still sneak through our borders and ports in drips and drabs like the 9/11 perpetrators did, but nothing we're doing militarily in the Middle East is preventing that from happening. That's Homeland Security's job, and if Homeland Security can't keep terrorists from infiltrating our country, why does it even exist?

Young Mr. Bush exhorts us to show "resolve" in the Middle East. But the kind of resolve we're showing in the Middle East is the kind of resolve it takes to throw yourself in front of a moving bus, and then lie there while the bus continues to roll back and forth over you.

In January, Senator Joe Lieberman (?-CT) said on Meet the Press that "We all want to find the right exit strategy. But my own sense of history tells me that in war, ultimately, there are two exit strategies. One is called victory; the other is called defeat."

My three dogs have a better sense of history than Lieberman does. Wars, especially modern American wars, have seldom been decisive. World War I ended in an armistice, the conditions of which laid the groundwork for World War II. World War II concluded with the formal surrenders of Germany and Japan, but that only led to the Cold War and a series of dirty little third-world proxy wars that lasted for half a century.

One pro-war neoconservative pundit recently compared Representative Jack Murtha (D-PA) to Lee Harvey Oswald. He said that Murtha and Oswald formed a small club of individuals who deserved to be classified as "ex-Marines." This pundit is not a Coulter-class luminary in the neoconservative galaxy. He is a distinguished dean and professor at one of our most distinguished graduate level war colleges who consistently indulges in this kind of vituperative through the Big Brother Broadcast megaphone. With people like him in key positions of upper level of military academia, it's little wonder our national security brain trust is so bankrupt.

We hear from voices on the right that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will create conditions that could lead to a regional war, but the fact is that U.S. presence in Iraq has created a regional war. Conflict, at one level or another, rages from the Horn of Africa to Pakistan, and our presence in Iraq is fueling it, not containing it.

The Bush war hawks keep serving up grape flavored hallucinogen shooters, and their non-cognitive supporters keep slamming them down. Meanwhile, a pack of dune farmers armed with tinker toys continue to make the "best-trained, best-equipped" armed force in history look like it couldn't find its oasis with a map and a flashlight.

It's so difficult for me to watch our chicken hawk leaders pour more of our magnificent troops into a war they're not designed to fight in pursuit of a "victory" that cannot be defined, and justify their policies and strategies with arguments they have to know are medicine show hokum, and blame their failures on the CIA, the news media, Catholics who voted for John Kerry, and whatever other scapegoat is handy.

It breaks my heart.

Sound Off...What do you think? Join the discussion.

About Jeff Huber

Freelance writer Jeff Huber was operations officer of a naval air wing and an aircraft carrier, and he commanded an E-2C Hawkeye aircraft squadron. His analyses of military and foreign policy affairs have appeared in Proceedings, The Navy, Jane's Fighting Ships, and other print periodicals. Some of his essays have been required student reading at the U.S. Naval War College, where he received a master's degree in national security studies in 1995. Jeff is a contributing editor with ePluribus Media. His home website is Pen and Sword.

Democrats: End This War NOW

Mon Mar 19, 2007 at 10:43:38 AM PST

by Maryscott O'Connor
myleftwing@gmail.com

It seems to me that the old cliché, "Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it" applies much more to ordinary citizens than to politicians.

In fact, politicians COUNT on that truism. How many people actually know how Vietnam started? How many people further know how our involvement in Vietnam accelerated? How about when the draft was implemented?

And how many know the details of the Weimar Republic, the Reichstag, the supposed "election" of Adolf Hitler, the purported attack by Poland on a German radio station that was, in fact, a falsehood from beginning to end?

The fact that we are, collectively, so very uneducated about humanity's own recent history, is what the right wing counts on when they send out the attack dogs to decry any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam -- and possibly what the Democrats now dragging their feet on the Iraq Quagmire count on as they tell us every day, "Wait, wait, give us more time..."

Beware the urge to draw comparisons of current events to those historical when attempting to make your case against those current events; woe unto you who foolishly believe that your audience has enough intellectual honesty to respond to the substance of your argument. Oh, pitiable simpleton, don't you know anything? Kristallnacht? How can you possibly say that the United States of America has anything in common with Germany on the eve of its reign of unspeakable evil? Have we made laws forbidding any one race or religion to work, to teach, to walk the streets after dark? Have we seen an organized assault against their businesses? Do you see the trains lining up, construction under way of concentration camps of any kind wherein to house political prisoners, enemies of the state? We could go on, naive fool - your comparison is baseless. A few civil liberties suspended here and there do not a fascist takeover make!

So when you open your peacenik mouths to even try to mention in the same breath the words "Iraq" and "Vietnam," prepare yourselves for an onslaught of denial and bizarre - nay, freakish -- pickings and choosings of factual differences that in the mind of the true believer of the ChristoFascist Neocon Zombie Brigade distinguish today's quagmire from the one in which George W. Bush so deftly managed to avoid stepping lo these 40 years ago.

"That was a jungle! This is a desert!"

Dear god, I cannot even begin to dignify the natterings of these febrile imbeciles with a list of their rationalizations. One thing comforts me, and a cold comfort it is, indeed: the sheer number of these buffoons dwindles by the minute. Bush's 23% approval ratings for his job performance in Iraq -- in fact, his 30% overall job performance approval ratings indicate one positive thing about this country: only the rock bottom of the barrel, stupidest, most stultified, possibly illiterate, certainly skirting the line between mere insipidity and outright, certifiably impaired and people whose intellectual capacity most resembles that of plastic houseplants remain avid, unquestioning and, obviously, unthinking supporters of this disastrous catastrophe of an excuse for a President and his policies.

To tell the truth, I've lost a lot of faith in polls these past several years - gee, golly, dunno why! - and so I choose to believe even better of my country's population, despite all evidence that I ought believe the very worst. I tend to believe that 23% who believe that Bush has performed superbly in Iraq also believe it of him in all other areas of performance - and that the other 7% is a statistical anomaly, an error created by overzealous pollsters attempting to be overly fair to a common criminal turned war criminal who deserves nothing BUT fairness and, unfortunately, will never get it.

And we wonder why the right wing devalues public education. It is in the interest of the powerful, who wish to retain their power, to churn out generations of badly educated citizens. It is in their interests to churn out giant segments of the citizenry fit for little more than manual, menial labour. Else where will we get our waitresses, our janitors, our grocery store clerks? Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue in a country this size if the majority of the population were actually college educated? Why, we'd have to open the borders and... Oh. Never mind.

No doubt the advances in public education of the past 40 years, inadequate though they may be, drive the neo-fascists mad; there are so many of us who do remember history. Not just Vietnam, but the protests against it, the gradual awakening of an entire generation to the lamentable fact that our beloved paternalistic government was a lying, manipulative, amoral gathering of rich, old, white men who decidedly did not have our interests at heart or in mind.

The question is, are we strong enough, in great enough number, to derail this disaster? Will we be able to convince the older version of that heroic Vietnam Veteran that his true heroism lay not in his laudable actions in battle, but in his even more courageous actions at home? Or will we find ourselves pleading with a presumably decent, younger but already calcified member of the newest older generation, using some version of his own words, hoping to pierce through years of political stultification: "Who's going to be the last one to die for this mistake, President Obama, or Edwards, or Clark -- or godforbidClinton?"

I would gladly trade the impeachment of the monstrous man sitting in the Oval Office for an end to the war in Iraq, were that exchange offered as an option. I would gladly suffer 22 more months of his insufferable sneer and grotesque drawl, if it meant that every single American could come home from Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow.

We have no business there, you see. Perhaps once we had business in Afghanistan - that, at least, is arguable, though my argument would be that we did not. But Iraq, as any intellectually honest human being MUST admit by now, has been from beginning to present an exercise in imperialist hubris and capitalist folly. And every day we remain in these countries, we lose more and more young American men and women and those countries lose more and more men, women and children - all for naught but the profit of the cronies of the war criminals holding hostage our country and our government.

Over the past two decades I've watched my party, the Democratic Party -- MY representatives in MY government -- sink deeper and deeper into the ignominy of cowardice, appeasement and, worst of all, a cringing, craven desire to retain, at all costs, their tenuous hold on their individual seats of power, all the while losing their collective power in direct proportion to their willingness to sell out their constituency for a buck.

I've watched in dismay, fury and despair as the dignity, integrity, courage and commitment of elected Democrats eroded until, finally, my party was no longer recognizable to me.

I've been a political pragmatist my entire adult life, it seems. I liked to think myself rational, logical, reasonable and sensible. To that end, I supported the candidates who combined the elements of what I considered "electability" and as close a hewing to my own political views and stands as I could hope for from an "electable" candidate. It only made sense, after all; better to hitch your wagon to a flickering star than to a tree stump.

Pragmatism has its place. In the Byzantine, baffling and praetorian world of politics, a lack of prudence and pragmatism is a veritable guarantee of a short life span. Certainly while navigating the twisted channels of American governance, the ability to make judicious compromises and to guard jealously one's political capital in anticipation of putting it to its best use -- these essential talents deserve and demand respect from those of us whose interests are served by those who possess them.

But suppose the talented stewards of the country's welfare were to lose their way? Suppose our elected emissary takes one faulty turn into a dimly lit corridor where truth and propriety seem mere shadows in contrast to the promise of a greater end?

And further suppose that, having grown accustomed, then inured and possibly even approving of our advocates' shortcuts in the name of pragmatism, we found ourselves seduced by the siren song of the practical, the prudent, the pragmatic? Suppose we traveled so far down that darkened hallway that the concept of "the lesser of two evils" took on the aura of an immutable, empirical truth?

Here we stand, facing a seemingly endless journey, our destination no longer an ideal, but a torpid prison of our own making. Having made our pact of pragmatism, we find we now have neither what we want, nor what we should. Bereft of even the meager leavings for which we groveled following every defeat, we can "get busy living, or get busy dying."

The Democratic Party is not dead. No, death would be preferable to the fate to which we have consigned ourselves. The Democratic Party is a rotting, gangrenous, comatose vegetable; we have been reduced to the role of the brain-dead invalid over whom the relatives, lawyers, doctors and judges may scheme and negotiate.

Given the state of our Party, we now have the dubious luxury of having nothing left to lose. Our options cannot be more crystalline: we can continue our impersonation of the living dead, continue making compromises that result in, at best, a slower but no less inevitable mortification...

Or we can arise from our deathbeds, having tasted our own political mortality -- and resolve that never again will we be complicit in our defeats. Never again will we seek to avoid the risk of offending those who will bleed us dry regardless of our anguished compromises made in hopes of lessening the pain in the short term. On awakening, bloodied and exhausted, we see before us the starkest reality of human existence: that some never live to fight another day. That it is better to have fought for something in which we believe than not, for in either case, death comes to us all.

So, what in the hell have I been getting at?

"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," I said, quoting Voltaire, but sounding like nothing so much as yet another dithering Democrat.

My senior Senator, Feinstein, voted for the IWR. So did my candidate for President in 2004 -- John F. Kerry. I gave them the benefit of a lot of doubt in that their "No" votes, by themselves, wouldn't have changed the outcome. That's what I told myself. That's what I told everybody.

Except, GODDAMNIT, that's just as much bullshit as saying, "I didn't have time to vote, but my one little vote won't make a difference."

Because there are OTHER people thinking it. And if all these voters who figured "It's just MY vote" dragged their sorry asses to the polls, we'd have a very different government, a very different country and a very different world. Now, in my doggedly idealistic fashion, I choose to believe that it would be different for the BETTER.

What does that have to do with the IWR vote? Or the "foregone conclusion" Cabinet appointments? Let me COUNT THE FUCKING WAYS:

Imagine if EVERY Senator and Congressperson voted the way she or he REALLY WANTED TO, irrespective of political "capital" or "liability."

IMAGINE. Imagine, for instance, EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT in the Senate and the House voting AGAINST the IWR. Imagine what a potent force they could have been. Imagine -- they might even have lent courage to enough Republicans to have STOPPED IT ALL.

Imagine what might have been, had a Democratic Senator stepped forward to join the Congressional Black Caucus in their noble effort to defend the voters of Florida and, indeed, America. Imagine if they'd ALL stood up. Imagine, further, those remaining Republicans of honour and integrity, standing with their loyal opposition.

Imagine, now, if you can, something that still lies within our reach, something that doesn't require time travel -- merely courage, integrity, honour, honesty, dignity and simple human decency.

Imagine our Democratic representatives in the Senate and the House, resigned as they are to the confirmation of Bush's nominees by the malignant majority Republican Party... casting their votes according to conscience and common sense, instead of prosaic, pointless polity.

Imagine a party comprised of valiant advocates for the people, determined to fight till their last for what they know is right, for what they can be proud of when they shuffle off this mortal coil.

Imagine a Democratic Party whose elected members care more about what's right than what's pragmatic.

In the civilized societies of our understanding, the elected representatives of the people are designated "leaders," almost always a misnomer.

They are still my party; tenuous as their claim on me is, I am still a registered Democrat, and will remain so until the day a viable third party arises to speak for the left (and that is a topic for another day, but suffice to say I believe the Republicans to be the party of the right, the Democrats the party of the centre, the moderates, the "mainstream," if you will -- and the party of the left a mere glint in the eyes of those of us who yearn for representation but have none). And as A Democrat, who has never voted for anyone but a Democrat and likely never will, I have every right to make these criticisms of my party. Here is another: the Democratic Party seems to lack imagination, even now. Must we draw them pictures? Are not the pictures they've already seen enough to prod them from their desiccated torpor? Very well, let us draw them a picture:

Imagine, after all your failures, that you finally come to life and realize that you now hold the power you thought you lacked. Imagine bringing your respective houses to a stand-still and demanding an end to the war. An end to the killing, an end to the suffering, an end to the malfeasance, the murder, the graft, the lies.

You have the power. We gave it to you last November. You have made your promises, paid lip service, patted our liberal heads, scolded us when we demanded action and faster action still - some of you have dared reprimand us for our lack of pragmatism, our failure to heed the realities of the situation you face on the floors of your houses in Congress. Shame on you. We want no more excuses. We want action, we want you to fulfill your promises, we want an end to the war in Iraq. And should you fail to heed our demands, you will have no one to blame but yourselves when you lose your tenuous grasp on a majority in Congress, and mark our words, you will lose that brass ring of the Presidency and we will ALL pay for that.

And as for us, the much vaunted "We, the People?" We, who simultaneously bray to the rooftops our pride in our so-called "democracy" and bemoan our collective impotence in the face of the tensile strands of that democracy, as one by one they snap at the behest of the bureaucratic servants of a nascent fascism only a fool couldn't recognize by now as a distinct possibility, if not foregone conclusion? Shame on us all, as well. Some of us, to be sure, bear more responsibility than others for the dissolution of this great experiment; but when the world crumbles, will it matter who pulled less weight?

If any of us can say we did all we could, perhaps we will go to our graves with conscience clear; but I, for one, know full well I have not done all I could. I have done all I could bear to do, without risk to home, property, family and physical safety or freedom. Nothing like "all I could have done," can I claim - to claim it would be a bigger lie than to say I feel much in the way of shame over it. No martyr, I - in this age of extraordinary rendition and suspended habeas corpus and god only knows how many of us really have been "disappeared," what good would it have done to place myself in harm's way, I ask myself, to deprive my son of his mother - when so many in this country don't even know the desperate straits in which this nation finds itself?

It will not do, for lone protestors to offer themselves up to the machinery of this ruthless administration. There is only one path to forcing change, and that path requires millions of feet. They need not be all in the same place at the same time, though certainly half a million strong in the larger cities simultaneously make for a lovely photo opportunity - if, that is, you can get it covered by the right wing corporate media - no guarantee of that, as we know all too well. At least, it will not be covered if, as has happened each time in the past several years, the "protests" are managed and monitored and licensed and planned for a weekend, the better to not disturb the peace, the better to not interfere with the average working day's events. God forbid we stop any morning traffic. What would the neighbours think?

Who said it? "There go my people; I must lead them!" Was it Gandhi? Now, there was the antithesis of a pragmatist. Martin Luther King, Jr., I believe, said something like, "Too often, 'Wait' means 'Never.'"

Malcolm X is my favourite. The Declaration of Independence is a close second, and really, what does that say? "By any means necessary," indeed.

Somewhere between civil disobedience and outright violent revolution lies the true compromise we face, the only compromise worth contemplation. For people with nothing to lose, the only unacceptable path is the one of least resistance.

If our elected representatives refuse our demands, taking refuge in perfidious platitudes and the cowardice of the circumspect, it is incumbent upon us to lead them. We are people whose eyes and ears have been rudely opened to the terrible truth: The fault -- and thus our fate -- lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Tags: Z: Maryscott's Diaries, right wing, Democrats, Current Events, idealism, Pragmatism, civil disobedience, History, Vietnam, Iraq, (All Tags)

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Democrats: End This War NOW | 5 comments | Post A Comment

My opening comment here: The tragedy of this essay, for me, is that I so desperately wish I could have written it about Sudan. Or about extreme world poverty. The list is longer than my arm, of crises on which we ought to be demanding immediate action from those who sit in power, those who hold in their grasp the power to change these wretched realities. To be forced to choose, it's such a horror. While we sit in the comfort of our living rooms, in the relative luxury of our American homes, with hot and cold clean running water, potable water - and even then many of us retain the luxury of eschewing the drinking of it for the cleaner water that comes delivered on our doorsteps for pennies a day - and we watch our mass entertainment-as-palliative-or-opiate, many of us still do wonder, having consciences, how it can possibly be that we have so much power and do so little to alleviate the suffering it would be so EASY to alleviate the world over. Why we choose, as a nation, to spend our capital on causing pain, rather than ameliorating it. Oftentimes, I wonder it myself; but on days like today, the answer seems so clear: it is so because we allow it. WE allow it - collectively. And the only way to change it IS collectively. What form that collective action might be, that, I do not know. I can hardly ask of us a constant, unending parade of marches on Washington and sit-ins and work strikes - can I? What good can it do the suffering of the world to put our own families in danger of poverty, as well? I know only this: those who putatively wield the political power in this world only wield it at our suffrage. They also wield who only stand and speak. -9.63, -7.03 If I can't rant, I don't want to be part of your revolution. by: Maryscott O'Connor @ Mon Mar 19, 2007 at 10:48:35 AM PST