Divide

Over at TPM (link on the right), Josh Marshall raised the question of what was it, exactly, that brought the Junta down? Was it Iraq? Katrina? Social Security? All of the above? Well, I do have an answer for him: it was all of it and it was none of it. I do have to explain that, right?

See, In the Bush/Rove political machine, they like to divide the electorate. The more they can make it 'us or them,' the better they like it. What happens when political parties are polarized (in a two-party system) is that the choice between them becomes a much bigger leap for voters. The Bush message is: "you're either with us or against us."

And that's not just for terrorists or foreign countries; that's for voters and members of Congress. Your choice, as presented by Bush/Rove, is to vote the straight ticket or be a terrorist symp. They sucked the air out of the middle of the political process and told voters: be one one side or the other - and those guys are wimpy lazy weenies who want to psychoanalyze terrorists while we want to kill them. Do you want to be on the winning team?

Congress was part of this. The Senate and House both fell into lockstep with the Leader because there wasn't an inch of middle ground. "Vote our straight ticket or we'll bury you." It was even worse for them in some way, because I think their choices were clearer: go along with absolutely everything or else lose your committee seat and funding and lobbyist money and eventually your job.

Look at Collins and Snowe and Spectre. They are the enabling moderates of the extreme right in the Senate. Of course they had the choice to buck the system - but what do you think Frist and Rove were whispering in their ears? 'Oppose us and we'll bury you.'

As with most of their hackery, this effort was geometrically more effective after 9/11. Then they could really play the fear card. I think their edge in 02 and 04 was a Rove-designed voting booth moment. Can I really pull the lever for a Democrat? Can I risk not being on the winning side of this? But the turning point has been a function of those same divisive tactics.

After Katrina and Social Security and as Iraq has deteriorated, people have jumped to the other side. If it's one or the other, it'll be the other. The Bush team has proven to be incompetent and greedy and bloodthirsty. Nobody wants to stand with that, not even a lot of the rightist followers from 04.

Now, the more they push the divide, the more they isolate themselves on the losing side.

Democrats have to keep pushing and let the divide be there as long as the authoritarian executive is around. There can be no 'bipartisanship' with the Bush rightists - they are in it for the win, no matter what.

Only now, the more they suck the air out of the middle, the more they trap themselves on the wrong side.

Just my two cents.

Fire!

It was heartening to see that Gerry Ford was against the Iraq war and thought his former lieutenants, Cheney and Rummy, were batshit crazy warmongering motherfuckers. Hey - his words.

And I don't blame him for stipulating that the interview be withheld until he passed. He was 91 years old at the time - who needs to have their old friends attack them in the media and get into a whole thing at 91? Actually, I was shocked at how coherent he was in his comments. And a four-hour interview? Wow. I couldn't sit through a four-hour meeting without a stack of comic books and some crystal meth.

Not to say Gerry didn't have those things at hand, but he's more than twice my age. It must have been good meth.

But Gerry knew what these guys were capable of. He knew that his words would bring a dirty-tricks dungpile on his head. Suddenly, all the CIA ops from his presidency would be magically declassified. Oh - Gerry! Did you really approve short-sheeting the Pope?

But Gerry was right - Iraq was a huge mistake. And I refuse to "if-only" the situation.

See, I really believe that if we had a real coalition of UN countries and 500,000+ troops and had secured the peace from day one, stopped any looting and imposed order, rebuilt the country in a real Marshall-plan kind of way, it would have worked.

But people who lied and conned and manipulated to start the war were not people capable of doing any of those things. If you are howling crazy enough to choose a war against a country that is no threat to you because of a bunch of ideological freaks talking to you in your waking dreams, then by definition you don't have what it takes to pull off a campaign like that.

And now the thing is beyond any means of control. The violence is no longer state violence as represented by an army like Saddam had. The violence has spread to the population. People who, if the had a job and security, would never have picked up a weapon are now combatants - what choice do they have? Who will secure their families if not themselves and their coreligionists?

I'm not saying it's right to be an insurgent in any way, I'm saying that, given the American failures, it's understandable. You don't live in the Wild West town of Tombstone without wearing a pistol.

And now Georgie is talking about a "surge." He's meeting with his top warmongers today to discuss it. Nice that they're talking now.

But - and here's the point of the whole thing - it's way too late for that.

Lets say there's a big apartment building that is set on fire. The fire is small at first and the fire engines show up in time. But the Fire Chief decides to sit. 'There are enough fire extinguishers inside," he says, "the landlord and the super and one or two firemen can put this out with hand-held extinguishers."

But they clearly can't, and the fire gets larger and larger until the whole building is fully engulfed. "I guess we better start using the fire hoses," the Chief reluctantly admits, before joining a few of his close friends in a discussion about what to do about this big, you know, FIRE that's blazing out of control.

The point is - and whether you believe the first part about the fire being manageable or not, the point stands - it's way too late to hose it down. There may or may not have been a time when water could have extinguished it, but that time is long past.

The only thing to do now is try and protect the surrounding buildings and haul away the ashes later.

Only, these guys want to light the other buildings - Iran and Syria - as well.

We need Americans to re-take this government, and do it now.

Dead Presidents

One president has passed on and another is set to go in 30 days. Is that too cavalier? Should I be more circumspect or respectful of the passing of Gerald Rudolph Ford?

No. I think not.

While a lot of years have passed since his unelected and unelectable presidency, the damage of his administration is still being felt.

Damage? Ford? What, you may well ask, did he fall on?

Ford's greatest sin was his pardon of Richard Nixon. It was an event that people screamed about back in the day, but seem to have come around to accept today - even Ted Kennedy now says it was a good idea. I don't.

What I see in the pardon is the unpardonable acts of today's loathsome administration. The key players today are the same people who rejected Nixon's guilt in 1974. Yes, I'm looking at you, Dickie Cheney. Cheney never accepted that there was a limit on executive power - specifically that anything that Nixon did was illegal.

And that's the crux of everything that's gone so horribly wrong in the past six years. The country is being run by a cabal of authoritarians who reject the Constitution of the United States. They believe - counter to every word and intent in that document - that there is no legal constraint on the president. When the president says or does something - or orders others to do so - it becomes legal by the fact that it is his order.

If Nixon had been hauled in front of a judge and convicted of his massive and illegal conspiracy - along with his own Junta Fellow travelers - maybe we wouldn't be facing a Constitutional crisis today.

Ford saw his job as a calming of political emotion, that his day called for a leader who was simply decent and legal. But what the country really needed was a clear destruction of the authoritarian belief that resides in the hearts of Republicans.

Look: if Georgie and Cheney and Rummy had pulled their bad acts on an America that did not have a fascistic strain in the right wing, they never could have gotten any where. Imagine an America - the country I thought I had grown up in - where people didn't allow the Junta to get away with what they've done.

Because it's been the media and the Congress and the people - lied to, but still responsible - who have let this government have its head. Were you ever curious about where a political movement would go if it could go anywhere? Wonder no more about conservatism - we know the hell it leads to when left unchecked.

And maybe if Nixon - a kinder, gentler version of Junior Bush - had had his day in court, we wouldn't have let these guys do what they did.

The other president who is destined for his ultimate reward is Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi court has spoken: hanging for him in 30 days. Look, I have no wish to see this man live. My opinion is that hanging is too good for him. He should be tortured to death in exactly the same fashion as he had his many victims tortured to death.

But there remain questions about his trial. It went through so many judges and lawyers (several killed by insurgents), how can it really have been a fair trial? Once again: fair trial, more than his victims got, I know. But not more than a real justice system demands. It's the image of real justice that will make a difference.

And of course, there will be weeks in increased violence afterward. His loyalists - and anybody else who wants to make trouble - will be out in force. Why bring all that on?

But Georgie will have his pound of flesh. And he'll say goodbye to Gerry Ford - and hope that there's another Ford around who will do for him what Ford did for Nixon when the time comes.

Dam!

Georgie and his new buddy, Bobby Gates (a new face!) are talking up a "surge" in troops that are supposed to do something military. Except the Joint Chiefs are publicly against it. But they're a bunch of cowards who only fight wares, not send people away to fight them.

Anyways, two things about this "surge.' First, it's not really such a big deal militarily because they're only talking about 20,000-30,000 troops. Yes, that's a lot of troops, I agree. But if you look back over the past three years of warfare, our forces have regularly swung from 130,000 to 160,000. The usual estimate is around 138,000.

So another 20k is only news when King Georgie makes an imperial pronouncement, or when his various court functionaries talk to their media scribes about the plans. It's a SURGE! We're SURGING! Umm, okay.

The Joint Chiefs are agin' the surge because there's no military mission for it. You're going to drop a small division on their battlefield to do - what, exactly? See, if it were 200,000 troops, it would mean that maybe we could secure the country enough for people to start rebuilding their shattered lives. But after the immense errors of the past, it would more likely take 2,000,000 men for that.

And nothing is going to work in Iraq until there is security for the moms and pops and kids. We in the real world were telling the irrational zealots the same thing before the invasion.

The second point about the "Surge" is that in a practical sense it's not at all a surge - it's a dam. See, we don't really have 20k guys to drop in there. What we have are relief forces so the tired and shellshocked vets can cycle out of theater and get some down time.

A "surge" is really a "dam" because you're taking in the new guys without releasing the old guys. The 'tour of duty' for troops scheduled to come home would extend, while their replacements still come in-country.

Which once again begs the question: for what? We long ago lot the ability to control the places we need to control. We still can't protect the damn road from the damn airport to the damn Green Zone. 20,000 guys can't change those facts.

Like everything else, this whole conversation is for the consumption of votes who are disgusted by the King and his party. Little King doesn't want to do what Baker is telling him to do, so he'll make it look like he's doing something else when he's really just doing the same things he's always done.

Smart King!

I swear, this guy must be a Soviet Plant into the Bush family back in the 60's, because nobody has ever done as much damage to America as he has. Somewhere, Kruschev is laughing.

Surge!

Okay, now he's gone and done it. Georgie's going to speechify i the next half hour about how he's going to expand the size of the military. See, he wants a surge! of troops in Iraq, but there ain't any to surge with. So we have to get more.

It's an admission that he's broken the military, and they need more guys to fix it. It's an admission of final, fatal stupidity.

Somehow, America has gone from post-Cold War peace dividend-smaller military-budget surplus-unquestioned world leadership, to broke, humbled, and broken. That's your Republican leadership!

And he's put Democrats in an awkward position (yet again). How can you oppose expanding the military when all the top soldiers are saying it's a 'broken force?' It doesn't matter how or who broke it - the American military needs to be fixed and to operate as it should.

So Democrats should support a build-up. But that should be done on their terms. That means no permanent increases, and no stupid increases. No throwing more money at millile defense or Rummy's 'weapons of the future.'

Iraq is a massive failure. Even Georgie's starting to see that: "we're not winning and we're not losing". In American Georgie, if you're not winning you are losing.

I lament, for the billionth time, the loss of "smart America." Smart America used to be the country that did things with an intelligence and thoroughness and can-do attitude that was the envy of the world.

The Smart American military could plan a war, execute, win, clean up, and get out. Oh, we stumbled in Vietnam, but even then Smart American leaned the Lessons of Vietnam. That was: plan, execute, clean up, exit. Don't try to execute, exit. It doesn't work.

But the far rightists never learned that simple lesson. For them, if we just tried more execute and less exit, we would have won Vietnam. It's pure lunacy.

And it's that lunacy, spiced with grotesque stupidity, that's put us in Vietnam II, and that keeps us making the worst possible decisions.

In his (most welcome) exit speech, Rummy talked about the need for America to be strong. But what is strong? Is strong the bully who beats on the weak, steals, disregards the opinions of absolutely everyone else, and then gets stuck in a fight he can't win and calls for help? How intimidating is that guy?

What happened to the karate expert with a sniper rifle who 'walked softly and carried a big stick?' What happened to the guy who talked to everybody - friend and foe - until he formed a censuses by strength of will - and by the example of his demonstrated ethics and morality?

That guy's gone. I hope to see him back around some day. Until then, we're giving the big dumb guy a bigger stick to replace the one he broke.

I hope he doesn't start using it.

Denial!

At first I was really steamed at the Holocaust Denial Conference that our good friend President Ahmadinijadeieio of Iran just hosted in Tehran. It's one thing for scattered crackpots around the globe to make excuses for their anti-semitism by denying the untold slaughter of the greatest crime in history. Further, it allows them to de-legitimize Israel by claiming that without Holocaust guilt, there would not be an Israel, or at least an Israel that has international support and whups ass on all the scumbags that try to, you know, KILL ALL ITS CITIZENS.

I believe it's wrong to want to kill all Israelis. It's wrong to want to kill all the Jews (and that's admittedly self-serving). But I'll go further than that: it's wrong to want to kill all the Iranians. It's wrong to want to kill all the Luxumbougians (those bastards). It's wrong to want to kill all the Palestinians, Russians, Iraqis, Americans...

You get me, right? And if wanting to do it is so wrong (which it is), than how much worse is trying to do it? How much worse is actually making a stab at it? If you'll pardon the pun.

Bad, right? That's why Clinton's war in Bosnia was a good one - for all the ham-handedness - because it stopped a genocide. That's why the US, instead of creating death and mayhem in Iraq, should be using its force to stop genocide in Darfur. See how that works?

Anyway, back to Tehran (if we must). I was trying to build up some big outrage mojo, but I just couldn't do it. After reading about these poor dumb bastards, I had an embarrassing out-loud chuckle on the subway:

They sent congratulatory telegrams to Hamas, their rabbis advised Yasser
Arafat (and took a fee for their trouble), and they stood outside the White
House wagging signs -- "Judaism Has No Right to Rule over ANY PART of the Holy
Land" -- to protest a November visit by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert.

But even by the standards of Neturei Karta, these most ultra of
ultra-orthodox Jewish Hasids took a step into the world of the very strange, if
not the meshuga, or crazy, when they showed up as honored guests at a conference
of Holocaust skeptics and deniers in Tehran. With a hug and a smile for Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Rabbi Aharon Cohen walked into a conference room
with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, discredited academics, and more than
a few white supremacists and served up a rousing welcome speech.

"Let me express my gratitude to the illustrious organizers of this valuable event,"
Cohen told the 67 delegates from 30 countries this week according to a text
printed on the organization's Web site. "To sum up, the Orthodox Jewish view is
that, yes, there was a Holocaust to a terribly significant degree whatever that
was. But in no way can it be used to justify the illegitimate and criminal cause
and actions of Zionism."

This drew, by all accounts, loud applause from the Holocaust-denying set,
who insist against all reason that the Nazis never committed genocide by
systematically killing millions of Jews.

I'm sorry - that's funny.

Tell me - is that not a Mel Brooks scene? In fact, I'm sure I saw that in one of his movies. Was it "Blazing Saddles?" "High Anxiety?" I know - "The History of the World - Part I" (I've been waiting in vain for the rest of the history - "It's good to be the King!").

Can you picture the KKK assholes in robes hanging out with the Illinois Nazis (still looking for those Blues Brothers)? The effete French "intellectuals" smoking in berets and speaking English with a rididulous accent? "Zees Ooloocoost - she never 'appen, oui?" The self-loathing Jews buttering them all up, and the various Arabs and Persians digging the whole scene?

I guess the central point for this collection is that if there were to be a real Holocaust, if it were to actually happen (presupposing that it did not in the 30's and 40's), THEY would be the bastards to do it, right? I mean, Ahmadinijadedodioud himself has put forward the viewpoint more than once that Israel should not exist and should be made to not exist, by force of arms if necessary. In each of the Arab-Israeli wars of the past, the explicit multi-national Arab aim war to kill, you know, all of them.

So no bunch of historical Nazis is going to steal that thunder from this group. I guess the next conference will be more of a planning session. How will we kill all the Jews and who will draw the short straw and go and try to actually, you know, do it.

There was one truly sorry-ass Canadian there, just to ensure that the Maple Leaf was not spared the drag through the mud along with so many other nation's flags. St. Francis Xavier Prof, Shiraz Dossa (no doubt as dry and fruity as his namesake wine), actually spoke at the Con. Sweet.

Speaking for all Canadians was the university's president:

"My main feeling is it's just an embarrassment for the university. I think it's
an embarrassment for Canada to have lent any credibility, no matter how thin, to
that particular conference with that very hurtful agenda," university president
Sean Riley said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Do you think Dossa dressed up like a Mountie? Come on - just picture it.

It's how Mel Brooks would have framed it.

More War

As everyone knows, this site is all about making astounding predictions about the future which inevitably come true, like it or not (the administration will screw this up" is the standard).

So here's your free, no charge, guaranteed prediction for the day. After the ISG has reported, and the ex-generals and current generals have spoken, and Rummy has flimmity-flamed his way out of the DOD, Bush's grand new Iraq December pre-Christmas strategy (ready for January, maybe) is this: nothing.

The Decider is in a real pickle. In order to be the Decider, and not just another of Poppy's boys or a guy who listens to Congress or anybody besides Rove (who's not looking so hot these days, either), he has to decide on his own path and nobody else's. And his path is this: eternal failure.

This is not a guy who takes failure lightly. Failure and Georgie are old friends. And every time he has embraced failure, it's been his ticket forward.

His Iraq policy is perfect; it's already failed. How can you screw up something that's already broken? The economy was riding a high and the government budget was in surplus when he took over - now it's in a shambles of historic magnitude. Mission accomplished.

Saddam Hussein was a tin-pot dictator relegated to the fringes of world concern, an evil dictator with a wrecked army, no WMD, and no future. Now look - Iraq is a world hot-spot, churning out terrorists like Apple makes Ipods. Even the Iraqis who were miserable under Saddam are somehow, almost miraculously, more miserable today. Mission accomplished.

And Rummy's been tossing barbs at him on his way out the door. How can he make changes when Rummy's telling him to now? He won't reduce troops, because that's what Poppy's guys are telling him to do - forget it. He can't increase troops, because that's what John McCain wants to do - no way. Why help McCain? All those damn War Heroes just need to shut the hell up.

So he'll find the least possible thing to do to make nobody but himself and his brigade of worshippers happy. Maybe send more body armour to those crybaby troops. Maybe send more guns to the Iraqis (though those seem to end up with the Insurgency more often than not).

Whatever. It will be a big announcement timed to step on the Democrat's take-over of Congress.

Try to beat that press, Commie Pelosi.

Jobs

Okay, read this, and try to understand why it's taken longer than all of World War II for our "leaders" to come up with this.

Did you read it? Okay, here's what it says: it might help if Iraq had less than a 70% unemployment rate, so let's get some Iraqis back to work. Do you think? Just maybe, if there weren't millions of unemployed men sitting around funeral parlors burying relatives and hating Americans, maybe if they were working they wouldn't take the first nickel offered and go shoot at our troops?

Maybe?

I've written before that my answer to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a Marshall Plan for Palestine. Without good jobs and a future, there is no hope for the Palestinians. They will simply sit and take endless handouts and hate and kill. That 50+ year cycle has to be broken.

In Afghanistan, they were willing to give us a chance. They shouldn't have bothered. The same single-digit-IQ bunch that flinched at Tora Bora and let Osama get away are the same bunch that cheaped out at reconstruction, and now we (NATO) are locked in an endless struggle against a foe who can easily wait us out, like they waited out the British and the Russians.

Iraq is a far worse story, though. Iraq was the plaything of the neocons, their test case. That mean Self Reliance and lots of Bootstraps and, most importantly, Cartel Capitalist Carpetbaggers. Their idea was to sell Iraq off cheap to anybody who would buy.

Reconstruction contracts? Those are for Bechtel and Halliburton, not for Iraqis. The money was for the bagmen like Chalabi and the few other connected Iraqi's who had access to their masters in the Green Zone.

So what was the expectation? The know-nothing fantasy-world neocons thought that Iraqis would line up for jobs at the doorsteps of international carpetbagging war profiteers and work for pennies. In the real world, they refused to take it.

So now we're back to well before square one. Square One should have been the stable security of 500,000 troops preventing looting and imposing law and order. Square One would have been Iraqi businesses getting preferred treatment in contract bidding. Imagine if all the money wasted on thieving war profiteers had gone instead to average Iraqis.

But that's how these guys work - just look at the US. They're paying themselves first, last, and exclusively. They've even broken the bank for their own kids and grandkids. They exist for greed, and that's where it's taken us. We all now live in greed world. If you want something, you have to take it for yourself.

And if you were stupid enough to be born Iraqi or just poor (anywhere), you are on your own, Bub.

So then, years later after Rummy has resigned, we get this bolt: "hey, why not put them to work?"

Maybe it's Socialism, but gee - maybe it'll get them to stop killing us. Gee, maybe there might be some value to looking out for the poor and creating a middle class. Maybe - and try to stay with me here - the world doesn't exist for the sole pleasure and enjoyment of those born to wealth.

Do you think?

Pats

Let me touch of two really bad things this afternoon. First, the Patriots handed in one of the most dreadful performances of the Belichick era. Just really bad football. The kind of football that leads teams to not win things like championships.

Our receivers were bad. They couldn't get open. Anybody could cover them. I could cover them. I'm covering them right now.

Our DB's were dreadful. They can't cover anybody. They can't cover me. I'm open right now.

The Fins knew just where to hit us to inflict pain and points. Nick Saban knows Belichick's plans as well as anyone, and he was ready for them. What this game showed was that this Pats team is not ready for quality opponents. They were not ready to play at a high level.

The other really bad thing is a bit more fun. That is, the 109th Congress is officially done, after working the fewest days in Congressional history. Not only is the current executive the worst president in history, but this congress is clearly the lowest of the low. These guys worked fewer days than the "Do-Nothing Congress" that got their enemy, Harry Truman, re-elected.

This is the congress that allowed our treasury to be sacked by cronies and insiders. They've allowed the executive to set up a dictatorship. They've allowed - well, everything. They've done no oversight.

Even when they stumbled on something (when it was in the paper, say) and asked about it, they just shugged it on. The odious Arlen Spectre said that the bill to eliminate habeus corpus for suspected bad-intenders 'set up back 900 years' to befor the Magna Carta - and then voted in favour of the bill.

These guys are a moral rot on the world, and history will remember them as the collection of lazy miscreants who allowed a dictator to set up shop in the White House.

Goodbye, Miami. Good riddance 109th.

First Failure

As Iraq continues its descent into utter unfathomable chaos, and as Washington piruets around hopeless and ineffective Iraq Report by the morally vampiric James Baker, I am reminded of how this all started. No, a step forward from that. Not the lies and treason that got us into the war, which the new Congress will investigate. Not the invasion itself, with the fast light force that knocked out the formal Iraqi military (while that army was busy dissolving into a powerful insurgency). I'm talking about the un-planned-for aftermath.

There was not a single person outside the Junta who did not expect there to be a major rebuilding of Iraq. There is not a liberal hawk or a conservative war monger (outside of card-carrying Junta members and their media and corporate sponsors) who did not believe that it was the duty of the United States to secure a civil peace in the country we'd taken over. We believed the Powell "Pottery Barn Rule" that if you break something you've bought it and own it (even though Pottery Barn itself doesn't have a rule like that). Heck, we still believed in the "Powell Doctrine" from Poppy's Iraq war, where you use overwhelming force to achieve concrete goals. You know, back when we won wars.

But for the general's promotion from head of the Joint Chiefs to actual Secretary of State, he was actually listened to less. Rummey and Cheney knew better. Oh, neither had ever worn a uniform or faced an enemy for their country, as Powell had. They are the Dark Princes of Chickenhawkia, a place where keyboards are the greatest weapons and serve with powerful might - to make others fight and die.

The Dark Princes cooked up a war where the Army and Marines had just enough troops to beat the guys shooting back at them. But that's the conception of war that amateurs cling to. Real professional officers know better - war is about logistics. War is about holding the territory you've taken from the enemy. War is about imposing security on hostile populations. War is about handling a defeated army properly. It's about honouring the Geneva Conventions and all the other rules of combat.

Rummy and Cheney didn't know any of that. Why should they? Rummy was only Secretary of Defense, for crying out loud. Cheney, the Veep, was Defense Secretary for Poppie when Powell won the first Iraq war. How were they in a position to glean any insight from professional soldiers who had studied and practiced warfare for decades? What would a bunch like that know, anyway?

Best thing to do, then, was what they did with the boys at Itel. Fire and demote the ones who act like they know something you don't. Find the ones who agree with everything you say, and promote the hell out of them. They're the guys who will be there to tell you you're right when the chips are down.

So, armed with bad intelligence, bad planning, a skeleton force, and absolutely no reason to do it, we invaded Iraq.

We needed an international force of at least 500,000 men. We went with a 85% American force of 130,000. They were both brave and skilful, and they did us proud.

But when they won a city, they moved on without leaving a garrison. When they won an ammo dump, they pressed on - they didn't have the forces required to secure what they'd won. When they took the final prize - Baghdad - it got worse. They were not under orders to enforce civil peace, so they allowed looting and other bad acts. Unsurprisingly (now), the only building they were ordered to guard was the oil ministry.

And that was the day we lost the war.

It's because there was never security for the populace that the civil war started. When revenge killers go unpunished and there is no safety from death squads of any stripe, what do you do? Exactly what the Iraqis have done: you organize your own security. You fall back to the only groups that can protect you - in this case, your Sunni or Shia brethren. We created the civil war by failing to create security. If the proper troop levels had been there to start with, and if any member of the Junta (including Congress and the Executive) had been ever barely competent, we might have had a chance.

What was needed was total street security - marshal law for long enough to create safety. Then, at the same time, a massive Marshall Plan to rebuild right away. Yes, Nation Building. Rummy and Cheney hate the concept of "Nation Building." They prefer to just knock 'em down and leave 'em there.

As I said at the time, Toronto is a relatively peaceful city - and if there were no cops, I wouldn't leave the house. What were they to do in Baghdad? What do they do?

There are lots of people saying that it's not the lack of men and planning that lost the war, that it was a failed adventure from the get-go. I don't agree. But asking the same people who lied about the reasons they were attacking and bungled their way in to start doing smart things immediately afterward is a bit much. It's like asking the driver who gets lost and spends a week driving in circles to be the one to pitch a tent when you get there. If he didn't have the ability to read a map or pack a lunch, what makes you think he'll be able to assemble shelter?

That being said, it is, empirically, possible to defeat a nation in a war and rebuild it. We did that in WWII. How? We occupied Germany and Japan (among other countries) with a large multinational military force, and put giant dollars into rebuilding. It's a lot more complicated than that, but those are the essential realities.

So why did this deranged Junta think they could just pass on those things?

This has been a war that has benefitted only one group: the defense industry. Without a Cold War to fight, and a budget surplus fuelled by the "peace dividend" (remember that?), big defense industries needed a war. So they got their Three-plus Stooges elected and bought the war.

But the catch was that the only guys stupid enough to have rigged up a war for them were too stupid to win it.

ISG

The hiply-acronymed 'Iraq Survey Group' has published their long-awaited 'bipartisan' recommendations. I will admit to reading 1. Coverage and 2. The executive summary. Other things are far more important to my, like working my way through a Madden 07 tournament on my Xbox.

Still, like many of the dishonest and ill-considered opinions out there on the Rightist side of the Internets, I've read more than enough to know what I think. And I think it's bunkum.

No surprise there, right?

As has been observed by sharper eyes than my own (like the irreplaceable glenn Greenwald), the group was composed entirely of people who got Iraq wrong to begin with. The original dissenting voices are still considered pinko peaceniks who don't deserve to have their (correct and far seeing) opinions heard. Pity.

Baker himself has a Cloak of Bipartisanship, much like an AD&D artifact. He puts it on as a way to show that he's just looking out for y'awl, and just wants to do what's best for everyone. Right.

Nevermind his 60 years of intense partisanship. Nevermind that Poppy sent him to Florida in 2000 expressly to thwart the will of the people and get his idiot son elected president (see where that got you, Poppy? You're out raising canned good donations with Bubba - Jimmy Carter's running circles around you).

Baker is supposedly the king of the 'realists.' That means that he sees everything as a reality TV show. And he knows that unless he intervenes, everyone is going to vote his tribe the hell off the island. And he doesn't shower, but that's a Cloak thing. Nevermind.

So the fake bipartisan has reported that nothing is working in Iraq. Which everyone outside the federal government (and most within it) already knows. What else? We should step away by 08 no matter what, unless something else happens.

But the odds of something else happening are - whoops! Something else just happened while I was typing. Darn. There goes the report.

Honestly, I'm not sure what to make of the whole thing. It's such a PR exercise. It's like all these Junta delegates had to get together in a group-think to have the acorns to tell Leader Georgie that his big ideas are complete garbage. Hell, they even told him to start telling the American People the truth. I'm pretty sure he's not capable of that. But Baker spent enough time around a real live Congress to know what can happen when the subpoenas start flying.

What will be the change? Georgie will change nothing under any circumstances. The ISG report will allow Rightists and other Junta members the right to discuss Iraq as an abject failure. Without the report, they were under a lot of strain, because they knew how big a disaster it was, but were unable to talk about it because it was forbidden.

And that's where we are now in public and private political speech. The media will only talk about Junta-sanctioned topics in a Junta-sanctioned way. Rightists themselves will only talk about reality from behind this walls in a bug-swept dive bar at two in the morning under low-hanging tobacco smoke and across a dirty wooden floor from the cheapest floozies this side of St. Louis.

I don't know where that came from.

Anyway, the ISG report will serve the purpose that that other, obsolete document was intended to - it grants free speech to the people who are Loyal Americans.

If only we still had the Constitution thing in place. Do you think Dick Cheney kept the ashes?

More Rules

Do not torture or else your people will get tortured. Do not discriminate or else you will be discriminated against. And if you torture and discriminate, if you work the polls to suppress voters and lead a racist-baiting government, you can't tell anyone else in the world that they can't do those things, too.

Take Russia (please). Vlad Putin is setting up a doozy of a fascist state there. He's the best there is at eliminating dissent and a free press. Don't mess with this guy. But who has the moral high ground to criticize him? Not the US.

Oh, maybe we did six years ago. But no more.

I'm all for breaking rules. I break them all over the place, all day every day. When I am presented with a rule, I always ask: why?

But that's the difference between me and the Junta members. I ask 'why' and respond to a reasonable (or self-interested) explanation. They simply do what they want, and expect that their life of privilege and status will cover for them as it always has. They act in ways they want to regardless of consequences because they've lived consequence-free for their whole lives.

For example, the rule is that you show up for work every day of the week. If you are going to be late or absent, you call ahead.

Why?

Because otherwise you lose your job, and your credibility suffers. When you go for your next job, you have to figure out how to excuse the fact that you were let go before for absenteeism. It goes to trust - a new employer can't trust that you will do for them what you refused to do for the last guy. So - by being late and missing days of work without notice or reason, you not only lose your current job, but you hurt your ability to get jobs in the future. Pretty simple - pretty real.

But that's not how Bush's are raised. Georgie was raised in an atmosphere of extreme indulgence and wealth. There was never a reason to go to work. There was never a consequence to bad behaviour. If you wanted to get out of Vietnam, you want to fly Daddy's jets. If you'd rather drink and do drugs than fly planes, well, you just go do that now.

Want an oil company? We'll buy you one. Run it into the ground? We'll buy it out. Nevermind all the working stiffs Georgie left jobless in the wake of his failed business career.

That's why we are where we are today. Georgie has a religious certainty in himself stemming from the fact that he has been spared all repercussions of failure for his entire life. In a sense, he has never failed. There was always someone there to play Sugar Daddy and bail him out.

Until he pushed his luck with the lives and treasury of (what used to be) the greatest nation on earth. Like a problem gambler, he raised the stakes continuously until he was bankrupt. There's nobody left who can pick up this cheque. There's nobody to pay the bill.

But for Georgie, that's okay. He's just treading water at this point. You get the sense that he doesn't even want to be president at this point. He just wants to get through the next two years without anything worse happening.

The way to do that, he figures, is to stay status quo in Iraq (losing too slowly for people in his base to notice), pushing dictatorial policies that the new Congress will laugh at and then investigate, and (finally) using a veto on any legislation that will give the poor and working class a fraction of the government support he's thrown at the rich all these years.

The rule about breaking rules is this: know the rule that you are breaking and know your reason for breaking it. And when you start a sentence with the word "and," know that it's not correct but will give you the effect that you want.

You don't invade countries for personal reasons. You don't invade countries if you can't demonstrate clear cause. Why? Because what are you going to say to China about Tibet? If Iran decides to take over Yemen - why not? What do you say? It's only right when we do it?

When Saudi Arabia imprisons and tortures Americans - what do you say? We've got a bunch of Saudi's hog-tied on a water board. Had 'em there a few years now. Want to trade political prisoners?

Rules

The most fundamental question being asked by the Junta and its blind
followers is this: 'why follow the rules?' To most Americans, following
certain rules just makes sense; very few people need to have the rule:
"don't run with scissors" explained to them.

Many rules exist to help us not get killed. Others are expressions of our
prejudice and need to be abolished. Others are the rules we, as a society,
are supposed to cherish and live by.

The Constitution is just such a set of rules. The Bible is not. And that's
where they get in trouble.

For all their professed fundamentalism, the religious right in America is a
cafeteria form of Christianity. They believe the parts of their Bible that
they choose to - and then expect everyone else in the world to abide by
their choices.

The Junta has a similar take on the constitution. They choose to believe
the parts that support supreme executive authority and interpret the rest
to follow.

But the Constitution is not such a document. Certainly by the 'strict
constructionist' standards of the ideological Right it's not. The
Constitution stands for a definitive set of laws.

These are laws that we are raised to agree with and cherish. For most of
us, it's more than simple word-worship. We teach ourselves to understand
concepts like 'freedom of the press' are very much of the 'running with
scissors' variety.

We understand why a free press is crucial to keep the country democratic
(with a small 'd'). It's not a spiritual concept. It's a concept that makes
us who we're are. And, not to be crass, but love it or leave it.

And that's perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the !ush-Cheney-Rummy
cabal. The rules they break are not the 'no cookies at bedtime' variety.
They're the 'no doing headstands on the ledge' type. And they don't get why
we object when they drag us out there with them.

There's a report in the NYT this morning about Israel releasing a bunch of
video showing Hezbollah terrorists using schools, homes, and mosques as
cover. They fired at the Israeli army from civilian-populated areas, which
made it legal under the rules of war for the Israelis to fire back.

Rules of war. Sounds almost silly. War is about the human extremes of
violent behavior. Why would there be rules? Why would anyone follow them?
The simplest answer is self-interest. If you shoot from civilian areas, the
other guy will shoot back and kill your civilians. Maybe the other guy will
shoot at you from where his civilians are. Hell, maybe he'll shoot from
where your civilians are.

Hezbollah was also running guns and missiles under cover of white flag. But
if you break that rule, you lose all that a white flag truce can do for you
(like evacuate your wounded). Is it worth it?

We seem to have entered a rules-free period in history. People like
Georgie, obviously raised with no moral compass, break the good rules
because they believe that they are entitled to pick the rules for all of
us, the construction be damned.

And so we torture prisoners, begging our enemies from now on to torture our
captured combatants. We hold thousands of prisoners in a Kafka world of
justice-free cells and trials with invisible evidence.

And they - we - do it all in the name of a country and a Constitution that
holds less meaning every time they act to 'save' it.

The rules they've broken are the rules that tie us together at the most
fundamental level. If you break them, you are either grotesquely
ill-informed or you are a believer in dictatorial fascism.

Either way, America is not a country you should live in. We believe other
things.

Graceful?

Georgie was talkinating about a 'graceful exit' in front of the press and his ole pal Maliki. As in: "no graceful exit."

"I know there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean
there's going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq," the president said.
"This business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it
whatsoever."

No realism - get it reality freaks? Don't come around to this surreality-based imperial mission and start talking about doing things gracefully.

When we leave Iraq, it will be with our our tail between our legs or not at all. It will be with wailing and crying and gnashing of teeth. It will be in the front of a river of blood wider and deeper than the Ole Mississip.

So, if you think there's ever been a way to make things "right" by doing fairy pansy unmanful "reconstruction" or "leaving things better than we found them," just forget it. When we go, Gracie, they'll have to re-name the place "Widowandorphanistan."

So don't think that just because the "Dad's Army" Baker Commission comes out with a suggestion to stop, you know, needlessly killing people and having our own people killed, that's some sort of excuse to rethink anything. Rethinking is for Euro-Leftists. Remember Commies? They re-thought stuff. And look where it got them.

So don't ask the Decider to start Rethinking. Hell, thinking alone was hard enough. 'Specially with Cheney blowing whiskey breath in the Leader's shell-like ear.

It's not happening. You want to do something graceful? Something the Leader makes it a point to never do? Go hit a Church or Mosque or Synagogue or Sacred Cave or whatever turns your spiritual crank and send up a prayer.

We sure need it.