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By Weldon Berger, on August 31st, 2007
The Bush administration have once again proved themselves the most effective minority executive branch in history. Bush, Cheney & Co. have persuaded Democratic leaders to avoid investigating even the possibility of impeaching the pair; they’ve persuaded the Democratic Congress to immunize the administration against prosecution for crimes it may have and may yet commit; they’ve convinced Democrats to vote en masse for a warrantless wiretapping bill that most of the hapless Dems hadn’t even read; they’re continuing to persuade Democrats that voting to end an occupation most Americans now despise is politically reckless.
It’s an astonishing record, but this week’s events have placed it once and forever beyond assault: the administration persuaded anti-occupation Democrats to support a new supplemental spending request for Iraq before the administration even submitted it and, most amazingly, before they even told the secretary of defense that that he would be requesting it.
Continue reading Gates is this season’s Powell; Dems are Washington Generals
By Weldon Berger, on August 31st, 2007
I wrote recently about Joe Biden’s more or less hallucinatory plan to salvage Iraq by federalizing it and bringing in a UN peacekeeping force that would necessarily be an order of magnitude larger than any previously assembled. Some people are latching on to Biden’s plan, which would simultaneously fail and extend the U.S. occupation of Iraq by at least two years beyond the end of the Bush administration. Although Biden has not received nearly as much attention as Brookings Institution hacks Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack earned with their Surge-related soft shoe, he’s getting more notice from occupation foes than former Reagan assistant secretary of defense Lawrence Korb and his Center for American Progress colleagues are getting for their plan, which has the virtue of being more or less sane if overly optimistic and frankly ruthless.
Korb has co-authored two thematically linked papers, one that outlines new approaches to U.S. Middle East diplomacy, focusing on actual diplomacy, and one that describes in detail a plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq except those directly involved in protecting diplomatic personnel (both links are to the report summaries, from which you can download the full Acrobat documents).
Unlike the report (Acrobat document) issued by O’Hanlon and Pollock following their Pentagon-guided tour of Iraq, the CAP papers are detailed and rely on verifiable information rather than super-secret Pentagon assessments that require the authors to say, “Trust us as we trust them.” (That’s presuming O’Hanlon and Pollack bothered to disclose their circumstances to consumers, which they didn’t). But for some reason, Korb is not being rewarded with hours of cable news face time, space on the Park Place op-ed pages of the Washington Post and New York Times, or breathless coverage in the news pages.
Continue reading Why isn’t Lawrence Korb on CNN non-stop?
By Montfort, on August 30th, 2007
The latest signal came from George Bush, warning of a “nuclear holocaust” if Iran gets The Bomb (despite an IAEA report that Iran isn’t as much of a threat as Bush claims). There can’t be any more provocative words than “nuclear holocaust” to justify the purported prevention of one. Nor can there be any doubt that, with such freighted language, combined with the accusation that Iran is arming insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and that a substantial portion of its army is a terrorist organization, the propaganda campaign to soften us up for The Announcement is accelerating or that an attack, whether it actually happens or not, is solidly in the works. Continue reading Attack on Iran: the PR campaign picks up speed
By Weldon Berger, on August 24th, 2007
The foreign policy community has been subjected to considerable rigorous scrutiny by various, generally liberal commentators of late. The proximate cause of the exercise was the New York Times op-ed column from born-and-raised community residents Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, Iraq invasion supporters who recast themselves as occupation critics in order to create an artificial and highly successful drama around their support for The Surge. The Pollack/O’Hanlon article didn’t at all mark the beginning of questions as to why the range of foreign policy opinion accepted by the institutional press as “serious” is so narrow, or why people who are continually, demonstrably and flagrantly wrong on foreign policy questions remain the primary source of opinion for the press, but it certainly kicked the conversation into high gear.
In the same way that the press recognizes the foreign policy community as its bellwether of acceptable and promotable views on the issues encompassed by the brand, the community recognizes certain politicians as being especially accomplished in the arena (which in turn has the press following suit). Indiana Republican Richard Lugar is the reigning king, although lately he’s threatened by Virginia Republican John Warner; on the Democratic side, the go-to guy is often Lugar’s opposite number on the Senate foreign relations committee, current chairman and presidential candidate Joe Biden, who has been praised by some in the community for his plan, developed in conjunction with Council on Foreign Relations president emeritus Leslie Gelb, to split the country into federal regions under a miraculously empowered strong central government. Biden describes it as an Iraqi version of the Dayton Accords, in which the U.S. imposed a “soft partition” plan upon the fractious children — “We even allowed Muslims, Croats and Serbs to retain separate armies…” of Bosnia.
The plan has a number of philosophic and practical flaws, beginning with the assumptions that the U.S. has both the right and the capacity to impose a particular form of government upon Iraqis.
Continue reading Biden: Ethnic cleansing a legitimate U.S. policy tool
By Montfort, on August 22nd, 2007
It’s yet another example of reporting that makes no effort at analysis of Bush’s claims. This time, Bush says that an American withdrawal from Iraq would have an effect like that of our withdrawal from Vietnam – a bloodbath resulting in the deaths of millions of people.
…one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’
It took two New York Times reporters to write this nearly stenographic story. They condescended to include two short rebuttal sentences from Ted Kennedy, and two from a World War II veteran who heard Bush – who jumped through hoops to avoid Vietnam – speak at the VFW convention. Aside from some brief notes about the upcoming debate in September and the performance of the Iraqi government, much of the rest of the article consisted of direct quotes or paraphrases from Bush’s speech. Continue reading Bush rewrites history, aided by the New York Times
By zinya, on August 22nd, 2007
aka “You take our breath away.”
Reprehensibly: That’s beyond revoltingly rich, and with a twist: it’s richesse at the expense of everybody and everything else, self-indulgent, spoonfed government dole-out wealth on an IRS silver platter. These are the same folks already getting exponentially greater boon to their ledgers from everything the government provides and not wanting to pay their share for it…
This jawdropping set of figures released yesterday might have left me speechless were it not for the White House’s salt in the wound that sputters me here. As per usual with this era’s “news,” there’s nothing surprising in it really at all, and yet it’s rejoltingly stunning all the same.
Continue reading Reprehensibly Rich: Bush tax cuts redux
By Eric Brewer, on August 21st, 2007
The Washington Post’s lead editorial today asserts that Tehran is supplying “sophisticated bombs” that are killing American soldiers in Iraq.
After President Bush made the same accusation last year, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace said, on March 14, 2006, that he had no proof that the Iranian government was responsible for such attacks.
. . . → Read More: Prove it, Mr. Hiatt
By Montfort, on August 20th, 2007
The American Psychological Association now says that its members can’t take part in water-boarding, sleep deprivation or sexual humiliation, among other techniques that have become part and parcel of Bush tactics against alleged terrorists at Guantanamo. If they see such activities, they are now required to intervene to stop them, report them to superiors, and to report the names of participating psychologists to the APA.
What? You say you thought the premier professional society of psychologists would have long ago adopted such ethical strictures? After all, psychologists, those most politically liberal and emotionally empathic of healers, are supposed to be in the business of healing emotional pain, not causing it.
The Post described the move as a “rebuke” of Bush interrogation tactics. Yet the APA rejected an all-out ban on psychologists working at places like Guantanamo; the group says it’s fine for psychologists to serve in places where the American government practices torture because they can protect the prisoners and show the torturers how torture doesn’t work.
Right. That’s a self-serving proposition, and there’s a reason for such unethical, craven behavior not named in the Post article: the APA’s sordid history in confronting this issue. Continue reading Professional psychology: ethical whores for George Bush
By Montfort, on August 20th, 2007
The war – George Bush’s War, the Neo-con’s War, Joe Lieberman’s War, the Republican-Democrat’s War – is as catastrophic as its opponents predicted, but the reality of it is far more catastrophic than they could have imagined, because it’s impossible to imagine such endless, grinding horror. It must be lived to be known. Words can paint a picture, but – to take a vital lesson from the title of Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, “This Is Not a Pipe.”
Reporters, editorialists, generals, politicians, presidents, bloggers – they all can wax eloquent about the war’s unmitigated disasters or its illusionary triumphs, but words fail them, in part because they’re not fighting the war. It is so very rare to read words written by soldiers who are pulling the triggers and taking the hits and watching each other die, watching Iraqi families being shattered beyond repair. That’s why the New York Times op-ed by a group of non-coms and infantrymen makes such extraordinary impact.
Continue reading Who’s On First? Unlike Bush and the generals, soldiers in Iraq have a clue
By Weldon Berger, on August 18th, 2007
Can “Democrats,” “resolve” and “Iraq” be used in the same sentence without violating the Associated Press style manual guidelines? I traded my copy to a literate streetcorner pharmacist for a few days of anti-depression medication, so I don’t know. I do know that congressional Democrats will not be taking any action to hasten our exit from Iraq before George Bush leaves office.
A substantial number of Democrats are already reluctant to press the issue. The Petraeus/Crocker/Rice/Gates dog and pony show coming up in a few weeks will peel off more. Washington congressman Brian Baird, who voted against authorizing the invasion and still thinks it was a hideous blunder, told an Olympia newspaper after his recent trip to Iraq that “I think we’re making real progress” and “the consequences of pulling back precipitously would be potentially catastrophic for the Iraqi people themselves, to whom we have a tremendous responsibility … and in the long run chaotic for the region as a whole and for our own security.”
Baird’s take will resonate among Democrats who desperately want to avoid making a decision on Iraq. If you add together the ones who essentially support the administration’s position with the ones who think tweaks are necessary but that leaving is too scary — this includes proponents of the legislation that would withdraw all troops but the ones Bush thinks are essential — you probably have something close to a majority of Democrats in both chambers of Congress who have no intention of even considering withdrawal.
Continue reading Democrats set to abandon resolve on Iraq exit
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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