Bush's new "offensive": old lies wrapped up in newer desperation, hubris, arrogance and bigotry

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Charles Gibson of ABC pressed the issue: what had Iraq to do with 911? Bush leaned forward aggressively and shot back: I just told you!! Oh ..well!!! That clears up everything, doesn't it?

Bush's new offensive is summed up thus: repeat the same old lies but do it belligerently! The same old lies —no argument, no facts, no evidence! You are expected to take the word of a proven liar who, faced with an unprecedented national debacle, goes back to the well, summoning the old bogeyman: terrorism! Here's Bush's new package of old lies:

In the war on terror, we face a global enemy.
—Bush

But who is the enemy? Is it the people of Afghanistan? The people of Iraq? Evil doers? Why don't we start with the "evil doers" in Bushco? Or —perhaps Bush prefers to murder them in order to save the infidel souls that he has "liberated"!

And if we were not fighting this enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle; they would be plotting and trying to kill Americans across the world and within our own borders.
—Bush

That's the if we don't fight them there, we will have to fight them here argument. Bush is lying again. No one —certainly not the administration —has made the case that there were "terrorists" in Iraq before the US invaded. What are improperly called "terrorists" or "insurgents" by Bush are, in fact, guerillas resisting by whatever means an illegal, oppressive occupation. Such a resistance is recognized as legitimate by International law and is, therefore, not terrorism.

If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I never would lay down my arms,—never! never! never!
--William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. (1708–1778), Speech to Parliament, Nov. 18, 1777

Those not making up the guerrilla resistance to the US are of three remaining groups: Kurds fighting for control of the northwest; Shi'ites and Sunnis fighting one another for control of Baghdad. What is that if not civil war? Bush either does not understand this or is deliberately misstating the facts in order to mislead the American people.

Against this enemy there can be no compromise, so we will fight them in Iraq, we will fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won.
—Bush

Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warns of this "clash of civilizations" rhetoric; if Bush continues, warns Brzezinski, the US may find itself on the losing side of just such a confrontation. The term "Islamo-fascism" is a made up word —the work of paid GOP focus groups and the right wing blogosphere. There is no such thing. It is pure and misleading propaganda designed to conceal the true nature of the conflict just as the term "insurgent" conceals the nature of Iraqi resistance to the US occupation.

Even if there were such a thing as "Islamo-fascism", how are we to know who to murder and who to spare? "Islamo-fascism" has its roots in racism, jingoism, and bigotry, just as do the terms "raghead" and "sand nigger". Islam is insulted and ought to be. As the bigot that he is, Bush has denied humanity to millions if not billions of the world's population.

Victory, meanwhile, seems even more elusive now than ever. Some three years after a Blitzkrieg called "Shock and Awe" more than 2,300 Americans are dead and more than 17,000 wounded. Iraqi causalities vary but the best estimates are some 40,000 dead from "Shock and Awe" alone; total dead between 100,000 to 140,000.

Of course Bush will exploit the terrorism card again. The opinion surveys reveal growing disenchantment, impatience with a war that is increasingly associated with torture, atrocities, escalating death, horror, and the absolutely unacceptable deprivations that the US has forced upon a civilian population.

There is no justification for what the US has done to the people of Iraq.
Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with 911; Saddam doesn't even like Bin Laden, a right winger, a creation of the American CIA. Saddam had no WMD. Saddam's Iraq had not been a haven for "terrorists" before the US invaded, and even now, most of the so-called "terrorists" are guerillas who oppose an aggressive war by the United States. No ex post facto rationale put forward by Bush has ever, in any way, justified the heinous level of deprivation and horror exacted upon that civilian population by Bush.

Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is absolutely correct: Bush is bogged down in the Iraq quagmire because he doesn't understand the nature of the conflict, the nature of Middle East politics, the subtleties of Middle Eastern culture. Speaking on NPR this weekend, Brzezinski, characterized Bush's recent statements as hubris and ignorance. Brzezinski had earlier stated that the US would lose a war of attrition. We have already lost our legitimacy.

Another Bush lie implies that the US is involved in a struggle to bring democracy to Iraq. That's the lie; now here's the truth: if the Middle East never becomes democratic , it will be because Bush has made a dirty word of "democracy". Throughout the Middle East, you will find this admonition: "Be nice to America....or it will bring 'democracy' to you!"

By violating all democratic principles to wage war of naked aggression against Iraq, Bush lost! Villages are not saved by destroying them; democracy is not defended when it is subverted. When the US is eventually forced to withdraw ignominiously from Iraq, it will have lost all credibility, all influence, and, most tragically, its own democracy at home. If it were true that terrorists "just hate freedom", then Bush succeeded where every terrorist failed!

The US is now thought to be the most dangerous nation on earth. Even our closest ally —Britain —will soon rid itself of the once promising Tony Blair who owes his demise to his association with George W. Bush.

Now I would like to say very briefly that in my view, that war which was a war of choice is already a serious moral set back to the United States. A moral set back both in how we start, how it was justified, and because of some of the egregious incidents that have accompanied this proceeding.

The moral costs to the United States are high. It’s a political setback. The United States has never been involved in an intervention in its entire history like it is today. It is also a military set back. “Mission Accomplished” are words that many in this administration want to forget.

—Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Charting a U.S. Foreign Policy Road Map for 2005 and Beyond 

Desperate to link Iraq to his phantom menace, the "war on terrorism" and, more recently, the "war on Islamo-fascism", Bush has become a war criminal under international law and a capital-crime felon under US criminal codes. When he can no longer hide behind the Presidential seal, Bush may very well find himself in the dock, charged with capital crimes. [See  U.S. Codes, Title 18, 2441]

The issue is not only aggressive war but torture. Contrary to the official cover story, George W. Bush authorized torture with a memo of Feb. 7, 2002. His deliberate act violates both Geneva and the above cited US criminal codes that were approved by a Republican-led Congress in 1996. Now that Bush has at last admitted the existence of the torture camps that his administration had initially denied, he seems more prosecutable than ever.

So let's take a step back and analyze what just happened.

• First of all, Bush instantly pissed off what few European allies he had left, because he told them that the secret prisons didn't exist.
• Bush once again painted himself as a liar. He might as well be wearing a sign reading "I cannot be trusted".
• Not only did he lie about the existence of the secret prisons, but he must have also lied about the torturing of detainees. He has denied all along that "we don't torture", but the only reason for shipping them off to non-US territories is to have them out of the bounds of US laws & protections. Bottom line - of course they're being tortured.
• In the process of admitting to secret "black-site" prisons, and having 'renditioned' these detainees for 'special interrogation', Bush is also pushing for congressional action to allow for a change in the Geneva Conventions and military tribunals. The Supreme Court has already ruled against this, but now Bush is trying to change the laws... right now... in a hurry... in time for the November election. Gee, could it be that Bush is politicizing his tough-on-terrorism rhetoric for GOP advantage?

• Public Affair Magazine

 Now —appallingly —Bush insists upon "staying a course" when there is no course to stay. Old lies are no truer now than they were then. Bush insists upon miring the US in a Middle East quagmire in which there is not only no victory but no definition of one. Bush insists upon staying the course when, in fact, his incompetent administration has failed to define the "enemy" beyond an infantile description of "evil doers" and "terrorists".

Bush has committed the United States to a perpetual war that it has already lost, from which it cannot withdraw with honor, and cannot stay with even less. Whatever campaign of un-American aggression Bush has committed this nation to, I can tell you that it is not war. It is, rather, bloody murder —a campaign of aggression, oil theft, and imperial, vainglorious hubris. As Pogo said: "We have seen the enemy and he is us!" Bush has made of us Nazis!

We are the aggressors! We will not win! We will not have deserved to win! Bush has damned the US to a perpetual, un-winnable conflict which Bush does not and cannot understand, against a mythic enemy which Bush has not and cannot define, with tactics which do not and will never address reality!

Additional resources:

• Bush War Crimes: The Nuremburg Precedent
• Zbigniew Brzezinski: George W. Bush's suicidal statecraft
• The Current Status of the Transatlantic Relationship – 4 Points of Consideration
• Tailoring the Case Against Iran
• More Lies - Bush Finally Comes Clean On Secret CIA Prisons
• Bush Protested During Visit in Atlanta
• The Five Morons revisited

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Hezbollah will rebuild Southern Lebanon faster than Bushco will rebuild New Orleans

In another year, New Orleans will still be a shadow of its former self —if it survives at all. More effort has been spent making excuses than restoring one of America's great cities. There will be more empty words and over the course of another year nothing will have changed. In the meantime, there is Southern Lebanon —already rebounding with help from an organization that Bush deems "terrorist".

In Lebanon, Hezbollah, the force fighting and defending the villages, at the same time started helping the population as soon as the Israeli bombing began. The Lebanese resistance provided the ambulances and scores of searchers who pulled people from the rubble. They helped organize getting tens of thousands of refugees to schools, public parks and private homes. (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 16)

In Beirut alone, Hezbollah organized 10 mobile medical teams that cared for 14 schools each, in two-day rotations, helping 48,000 people. Another 70,000 were treated in houses by other professionals.

In a Hezbollah kitchen near downtown Beirut, volunteers prepared 8,000 hot meals a day—part of a daily total of 50,000 they distributed across Beirut, reported the Monitor.

In New Orleans, families evacuated from the Superdome and the Convention Center were scattered all over the country. Parents were sometimes separated from children. Some didn’t know if loved ones lived or died. Three months after Katrina hit, 6,500 people were still unaccounted for, and more than 400 bodies still unidentified, according to the National Center for Missing Adults.

—Joyce Chediac, Lebanon rebuilds, New Orleans waits

So —who are the terrorists? Bushco or Hezbollah?

If I had been a New Orleans resident victimized by the shoddy job done by the US Army Corps of Engineers and, later, by the Bush gang of crooks and incompetents, I might be inclined to call the US government a terrorist organization.

If I were an Iraqi citizen with family members among some 140,000 civilians murdered in Bush's initial wave of bombings —Shock and Awe —I might be inclined to call Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld terrorists.

If I had family members murdered in cold blood by US troops at Haditha, I might be inclined to label the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld a terrorist organization.

If I should find myself thrown into Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, or an Eastern European gulag where I am tortured, sodomized, electrocuted, humiliated or, possibly, murdered, I might be inclined to use the term "terrorists" to describe and denote Bush, the Pentagon, the Military/Industrial Complex, a private army of un-accountable private contractors, and the enablers of the GOP!

Significant progress by Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon will finish Bush politically at a time when the US has no leverage anywhere in the world. Surely, no one believed Bush when he declared Hezbollah defeated; by contrast, probably everyone believed Hezbollah when it declared "victory". Bush is testy and anxious and it shows. Billions of people know him to be a liar, a fraud, a war criminal, and an incompetent!

How did Hezbollah —called "terrorist" by Bush —win? For one thing, Hezbollah was in much better touch with its "base" than Bush with anyone but a tiny, wealthy elite. Hezbollah began a defense of villages as soon as Israel began a widespread bombing campaign. When Bush is forced by reality and an increasingly livid American populace to pull out of Iraq, who will undo the harm done there by Bush and his criminal gang?

Who will rebuild Baghdad?

Will we withdraw the troops and send in FEMA?

Can Brownie do a heckuva job in Baghdad where everyone else has failed?

Will anyone go to Baghdad in order to take the fall for Bush?

I suppose Bush hasn't thought that far down the road. It might have been David Hume who said that there is a moral imperative to be intelligent. Iraq was a "war of choice". Likewise, Bush's stupidity is the result of a deliberate choice. No one but Bush is to blame for Bush's stupidity. Less privileged people must learn quickly and choose wisely in order to survive. Bush did neither and winds up ruling the world. What's up with that?

As to be expected, Howard Zinn, gets right to the heart of the matter: Bush's war machine is impotent:

I remember John Hersey's novel, ``The War Lover," in which a macho American pilot, who loves to drop bombs on people and also to boast about his sexual conquests, turns out to be impotent. President Bush, strutting in his flight jacket on an aircraft carrier and announcing victory in Iraq, has turned out to be much like the Hersey character, his words equally boastful, his military machine impotent.

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations -- the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan -- and were forced to withdraw.

...

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a ``war on terrorism" is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

—Howard Zinn, War is not a solution for terrorism

The following story is hardly an update. It was published immediately after the dedication of the Clinton library. It is especially unsettling in retrospect. Since Bush mused about a single submarine "taking out" the Clinton library, Forbes reported that the said "Israeli soldiers" were captured inside Lebanon —not kidnapped inside Israel; the Jerusalem Post reported that Bush had urged Olmert to attack Syria, presumably to draw Iran into the fray. The Israeli source bluntly called Bush nuts for "egging" Olmert on! In short, there is abundant evidence to support the conclusion that George W. Bush is a violently inclined psychopath. Here he is fantasizing about an attack on the Clinton library:

At Bill library, Bush sounds sub-versive

President Bush and top strategist Karl Rove (l.) took a trip to the Clinton Library to seek inspiration for W's own legacy-building. President Bush once daydreamed about blasting Bill Clinton's presidential library to smithereens, according to a new book.

In "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime," former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal recounts a November 2004 visit by Bush and his political guru Karl Rove to the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock, Ark., on the banks of the Arkansas River.

"Bush appeared distracted and glanced repeatedly at his watch," Blumenthal writes about a presidential tour during the library's dedication. "When he stopped to gaze at the river, where Secret Service agents were stationed in boats, the guide said: 'Usually, you might see some bass fishermen out there.' Bush replied: 'A submarine could take this place out.'"

The author muses: "Was the President warning of an Al Qaeda submarine, sneaking undetected up the Mississippi, through the locks and dams of the Arkansas River, surfacing under the bridge to the 21st century to dispatch the Clinton Library? Is that where Osama Bin Laden is hiding? Or was this a wishful paranoid fantasy of ubiquitous terrorism destroying Clinton's legacy with one blow?"

Blumenthal, who attributes his account to two anonymous eyewitnesses, adds that "Rove showed keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs, obviously thinking about a future George W. Bush library and legacy.

"'You're not such a scary guy,' joked his guide. 'Yes, I am,' Rove replied. Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly: 'I change constitutions, I put churches in schools.'"

Amen to that.

Did Bush and his gang fantasize, at one point, about airliners attacking the WTC?

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George Bush loses five middle east wars —three of them in Iraq!

Irag continues its slide into chaos though the MSM says Civil War is merely possible. In fact, Shi'ites and Sunnis are involved in a violent conflict for control of Central Iraq; Kurds are trying to secure the NW. What is that if not two, separate civil wars? Moreover, so-called "insurgents" —more properly described as "resistance" —oppose the failed US occupation. What is that if not a guerilla war? Clearly —US forces are in the crossfire of a Civil War, bogged down in a guerrilla resistance that it cannot win.

You know, I hear people say, well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box.

—George W. Bush, August 7, 2006

A majority of Americans reject Bush's latest strategy: linking Iraq with the "war on terrorism". [Source: PBS Washington Week] Both wars are failed; both are premised upon Bush misconceptions, his inability to "...do nuance", his deliberate lies.

Even the Pentagon's latest report is one of gloom and doom, a picture of a failed occupation. It was supposed to be a cake walk. Some cake. Some walk. We've been at war longer than World War II. Cheered then, we are jeered now! We have achieved nothing but pointless death and destruction. Even our allies hate us. Enemies grow stronger as American citizens are bled by the very government that promised to "liberate" —not annihilate —Iraq! Seeing how precariously perched is the dollar, I wonder: just who is the enemy? Pogo knew. He said: "We have seen the enemy and he is us!" Likewise, I have seen the enemy who wages war daily on both the Iraqi people and the American people. The enemy is Bush.

Billions of people the world over have wisely concluded that Bush is the enemy of peace and humankind, if Americans have not. Billions, whose news is not filtered by a US corporate MSM, have Bush's sorry record to cite in their support. Even in America, the tide has turned. By December 13, 2005, fifty-eight percent of Americans told CNN that Bush had no clear plan for victory in Iraq. Fifty-nine percent of Americans disapproved of Bush's handling of Iraq. It's only gotten worse since then.

So Bush declared a great "war on terrorism" but failed to think past some several months of hysterical war fever. How is such a war won? More recently, influenced by the right wing blogs, Bush's definition of success consists of Republi-babble about Islamo-Fascism. In earlier statements, his promises to "smoke out" Bin Laden and bring him to justice were no more connected to reality. Equally vague, Bush said he would treat nations harboring terrorists as if they were terrorists themselves. Bush would, seemingly, wage war on any nation funding terrorists; Bush would wage war on the world. But applying that principle would necessitate attacks on the United States itself, then Saudi Arabia, possibly Great Britain, and most certainly Israel. Bush has never been able to think clearly about terrorism or the US role.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

—January 20, 2002, President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address

Just this week, Bush compared suicide bombers in Baghdad to terrorists who attacked the United States. Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was busy comparing Democrats to Nazi appeasers. The better analogy is Rumsfeld to Goebbels; both Bush and Rummie have used every dirty trick in the Hitler/Goebbel's playbook, impugning dissent and opposition.

With regard to the "insurgency" in Iraq, it's time to stop calling it insurgency —a rebellion against legitimate, lawful authority. It's time to start calling it what it is: a guerilla war against an illegal force of occupation, Bush's occupation, Bush's war of aggression, Bush's war crime, Bush's capital crime. The vocabulary of this war is unlike that of any other war including Viet Nam where even the Viet Cong were recognized guerilla fighters. Bush-speak deliberately conceals the true nature of this conflict. Even the word "war" is suspect. Our illegal occupation of what had been a sovereign nation cannot be legitimately called war. Better words are heist, mass murder, plunder, occupation. Not war!

What Bush called the Axis of Evil —like Poland and Czechoslovakia who were similarly demonized by the Nazi Hitler —never had WMD. What they do have in common with one another is poverty and "third world" status —not unlike that of six other nations similarly threatened and/or attacked by the big bully on the block. Those nations are Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Sudan and now Afghanistan and Iraq! It is Bush, rather, who threatens world peace; it is Bush who has failed on five fronts.

Bush might not have intended to define victory in Afghanistan but in his previously cited State of the Union Address he said:

In Afghanistan, we helped liberate an oppressed people. And we will continue helping them secure their country, rebuild their society, and educate all their children -- boys and girls.

—January 20, 2002, President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address

We have not liberated anyone. The people Bush claims to have liberated never asked Bush to liberate them. They do not feel liberated now —not that Bush has bothered to ask.

"Liberation", it turns out, is another ex post facto rationale for war! Afghanistan was supposed to be a quick and easy victory. Bush fell for the Rumsfeld doctrine and attacked Afghanistan on the cheap. Bush had really wanted to attack Iraq but because Colin Powell insisted, Bush was momentarily diverted. Cheney and Rumsfeld persisted. The better targets, they said, were in Iraq. Eventually, Bush —advised by the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis of arrogance —would attack where the terrorists weren't.

An August New York Times article entitled “Losing Afghanistan” summed up rising concerns about the alarming state of the US occupation of Afghanistan quite aside from Bushco's first obvious failure there: smoking out Bin Laden. NYT concluded: "...there is no victory in the war for Afghanistan, due in significant measure to the Bush administration’s reckless haste to move on to Iraq and shortsighted stinting on economic reconstruction”.

Some of the strong indicators of Bush's ignominious defeat in Afghanistan include the following developments:

• There are now some 40,000 guerillas fighting against the American occupation of Afghanistan.
• NATO forces in the southern provinces have met strong opposition resulting in fighting described as "...persistent, low-level dirty fighting" not seen by the British since the Korean War or World War II.
• In Kandahar, some 2,300 Canadian troops have reported heavy casualties this month alone.
• "Insurgents" —more properly called "resistance" to an aggressor — and the Taliban itself have benefited from outrage over "...routine searches, detention and killing[s]" of civilians.

Bush never bothered to define "victory" in Afghanistan apart from "smoking out" Bin Laden and "bringing him to justice". It is only fair, then, to judge the war by Bush's standard. After some five years, it is an utter failure. If judged by yet another standard, never articulated by Bush himself, that winning means establishing a stable occupation over all of Afghanistan, then, clearly, the occupation and the war has failed and failed utterly.

It gets harder daily to give Bush the benefit of any doubt. It's impossible not to conclude that Bush has taken the bait, that Bin Laden outsmarted Bush with a wily and nuanced strategy:

Bin Laden's only way to reduce American influence in the Middle East is to make the cost of dominating the region outweigh the benefit. ... If he can gain access to enough US assets on [Al Qaeda] controlled turf he's confident he can prick us to death. Bin Laden knows he will have one shot at an attack on American soil sufficient to lure the US into a decisive military move in the Middle East.

—Bill Cusack: Osama Bin Laden is Kicking George Bush Ass

Bush's fifth lost war is, of course, his most recent: his war by proxy with Iran. Bush supported if not egged Olmert to attack Lebanon. According to the Jerusalem Post, Bush urged an Israeli attack on Syria with the intention, presumably, of drawing Syria and Iran into the conflict. It must have been a bitter pill for the bellicose Bush to have lost that war, to see the demonized Iran emerge strengthened and emboldened. It is no surprise to see Bush begin yet another offensive —a PR offensive designed, as always, to mislead the American people and the world. It is an act of desperation that can be heard in his voice. It is the last gasp of a failed President —the worst President in American history.

A video update. Watch how defensive and thin skinned Bush is about everything:

The Existentialist Cowboy
Terror
Civil War
Iraq
Endless War

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The Existentialist Cowboy

Bush plays politics with terrorism, resorts to McCarthyism and old lies

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Bush's new PR offensive is a recycled old lie and thinly disguised McCarthyism. Bush will try to convince the American people that Iraq is a part of the war on terror and, opposing the war is un-American. Never mind that Bush's war on terror is not only phony, it makes real terrorism worse and endangers American lives. What will happen when we get a real terrorist threat? Merely asking makes you a "Nazi appeaser". Bush and Rumsfeld breathe new life in odious McCarthyism. This cynical exploitation of fear does not makes us safer. It endangers us all.

Secondly, even Bush admitted —after having lied it about it for years —that Saddam had nothing to do with 911. So which is it? It's unclear how Bush intends to convince people that Iraq now has anything to do with terrorism when only a few days ago he told the truth at last by denying it. So —when Bush now says that Iraq is a part of the war on terrorism, Americans should ask themselves: was Bush lying then or is he lying now?
Clearly —the oft called "insurgents" had nothing to insurge against before the US invasion. Is this what Bush hopes you will believe are terrorists? If so, then Bush's failed US policy has caused it. It will simply dissipate when Bush admits that he has committed capital crimes and removes US troops from the war of aggression that he ordered in violation of Geneva, the UN resolution, Nuremberg Principles and US Codes, Title 18 § 2441. War crimes. Read Title 18. It's a capital crime.
And Bush has already lied about his new "PR offensive". He claims that it is not politically motivated.

But surely it is a response to the fact that the latest British terror alert did nothing to restore American confidence in Bush's utterly failed administration. Americans seem immune now to color codes, MSM hyperbole about improbable "binary bombs", and empty rhetoric about terrorism.
Bush now finds it impossible to tell the truth without confessing to a multitude of previous falsehoods. None of his various pretexts for war were true; all of them have been proven false during a long and miserably failed American occupation of a country that had nothing to do with 911, a sovereign nation that never attacked, never posed a threat to the people of the United States in any way.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, meanwhile, is among a growing chorus that sees the "war on terrorism" for what it is: a boogeyman exploited by a cynical, extremist administration that now dares to slap the label "Nazi appeaser" on legitimate dissent and criticism.

Olbermann has said what millions have already known: Bush is "playing politics" with terrorism", exploiting terrorism for political purposes and endangering American lives by doing so. Olbermann, at last, openly questions and documents the curious and statistically questionable timing of a series of phony terror alerts:

SLC Mayor: BuPresidensh Is The Worst t In History

(KUTV) Video: Mayor Anderson blasts President Bush

 Sky2 Video: Protesters march thru the streets of SLC

 Slideshow: Pres. Bush's Visit To SLC

During a large-scale protest in downtown Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Mayor Rocky Anderson unleashed perhaps his harshest criticisms yet of President George W. Bush -- just hours before the president was scheduled to arrive in Utah.

"Iraq had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on the United States... and there was no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Anderson said from the steps of the Salt Lake City & County building.

Mayor Anderson also said that President Bush will go down in history as the worst president in U.S. history and called Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "incompetent." ...

Study calls Iran 'biggest beneficiary' of US war on terror

Another analysis blames weak US approach to Iran on poor intelligence.
Two new reports criticize the US's handling of Iran, just as the West gauges Iran's response to a proposal meant to rein in Tehran's nuclear ambitions. One report says the US war on terror has strengthened Tehran, the other slams America's poor intelligence on Iran.

The first report, released Wednesday by the non-government Royal Institute of International Affairs (also known as Chatham House) in Britain, says that Iran, despite being a part of US President Bush's "axis of evil," has been the "chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East."

The United States, with Coalition support, has eliminated two of Iran's regional rival governments — the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in April 2003 — but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures. The outbreak of conflict on two fronts in June –July 2006 between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza, and Israel and Hizbullah in Lebanon has added to the regional dimensions of this instability.

Consequently, Iran has moved to fill the regional void with an apparent ease that has disturbed both regional players and the United States and its European allies. Iran is one of the most significant and powerful states in the region and its influence spreads well beyond its critical location at the nexus of the Middle East, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia and South Asia.

Catastrophic and Reckless: How Bush brought America to the brink of economic ruin!

Just a year ago Bush played guitar while New Orleans drowned. Nothing has been learned. Nothing has changed. New Orleans is morbidly fascinating because Americans, intuitively, have seen in that disaster our nation's future. But Bush, like a fiddling Nero, stays a failed course amid warnings that our nation is falling apart at the seams heading for third world status and catastrophe.

The warnings come amid the valid assessment that Bush's tax cut for the rich failed to make good on two empty promises: it did not trickle down or prime the economic pump and it did not pay for itself as Bush himself had promised it would. In fact, the poor have gotten poorer, the rich exceedingly rich. The nation is bankrupt to boot. The dollar is allowed to slide and we are dependent upon China, Japan, and the EU to keep the anemic dollar propped up. Were it not for that we would have no purchasing power at all.

Ronald Reagan made the same promises in 1982 —but, according to the US Census Bureau, only the upper quintile prospered. Every other income group lost ground even as Reagan's deficit grew exponentially. Unfortunately, Bush is still being assessed. But just one year after Congress bowed to Bush and passed the tax cut of 2001, the Brookings Institution would write:

The official federal budget outlook has deteriorated dramatically since early 2001, due to last year's tax cut, the economic slowdown, and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In addition to the pressures from the long-anticipated increase in entitlement spending as the nation ages, the government now also faces growing spending needs for defense and homeland security. These trends imply that future taxes must rise, future spending outside of defense and the elderly must decline, or obligations to the elderly and to defense be reduced.

—Alan Auerbach, William G. Gale, and Peter R. Orszag
June 2002, The Budget Outlook: Options for Restoring Fiscal Discipline, Brooking Institution

But GOP supply side, trickle down economics also promises more opportunity, a growing economy, more jobs.

Some in Washington say we had to choose between cutting taxes and cutting the deficit….Today’s numbers show it to be a false choice. The economic growth fueled by tax relief has helped send our tax revenues soaring. That’s what has happened.

—George W. Bush

But that's not what happened. Wealth has never trickled down and there is no "higher pie". A Treasury Department analysis refuted Bush directly, confirming in its analysis what many experts and Bush critics had been saying all along: tax cuts do not come remotely close to paying for themselves. [PDF] . In other words, the two promises of "trickle down" theory are dead wrong: wealth does not trickle down and tax revenues do not increase to make up the short fall.

As Dizzy Dean said: it's deja vu all over again! Why does the GOP insist upon repeating failed strategies. Reaganites promised that the stimulated economy would outgrow the deficit and the budget would be balanced "...within three years, maybe even two." It didn't! Reagan tripled the deficit and, on the way, he doubled the size of the federal bureaucracy. Reagan's tax cuts were followed promptly by the longest and worst recession since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression. As Robert Freeman correctly points out: "...Jimmy Carter's last budget deficit was $77 billion. Reagan's first deficit was $128 billion. His second deficit exploded to $208 billion. By the time the "Reagan Revolution" was over, George H.W. Bush was running an annual deficit of $290 billion per year."

How will Bush compare to Reagan? By the year 2002, Citizens for Tax Justice were already writing:

Over the ten-year period, the richest Americans—the best-off one percent—are slated to receive tax cuts totaling almost half a trillion dollars. The $477 billion in tax breaks the Bush administration has targeted to this elite group will average $342,000 each over the decade.

By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest one percent—whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million. Their tax-cut windfall in that year alone will average $85,000 each. Put another way, of the estimated $234 billion in tax cuts scheduled for the year 2010, $121 billion will go just 1.4 million taxpayers.

Although the rich have already received a hefty down payment on their Bush tax cuts—averaging just under $12,000 each this year—80 percent of their windfall is scheduled to come from tax changes that won’t take effect until after this year, mostly from items that phase in after 2005.

1968 was the year in which measured postwar income was at its most equal for families. The Gini index for households indicates that there has been growing income inequality over the past quarter-century. Inequality grew slowly in the 1970's and rapidly during the early 1980's. ...

Generally, the long-term trend has been toward increasing income inequality. Since 1969, the share of aggregate household income controlled by the lowest income quintile has decreased from 4.1 percent to 3.6 percent in 1997, while the share to the highest quintile increased from 43.0 percent to 49.4 percent. Most noticeably, the share of income controlled by the top 5 percent of households has increased from 16.6 percent to 21.7 percent. Over the same time period, the Gini index rose 17.4 percent to its 1997 level of .459.

—Income Inequality, Census Bureau

The trend began then has continued: October 2003 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau make stark reading:

Median household incomes are falling The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 5.7 percent to 43.6 million individuals.

The number of people living below the poverty line ($18,392 for a family of four) climbed to 12.1 percent — 34.6 million people.

Wages make up the majority of income for most American families. As "Downward Mobility," NOW's report on workers and wages illustrates, many American workers are facing corporate efforts to cut pay and benefits, which could lead to more American families struggling to stay out of poverty.

The results in black and white:

• Twenty percent of the population owns 84% of our private assets, leaving the other 80 percent of the population with 15.6 percent of the assets.
• In 1960, the wealth gap between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of Americans was thirty fold. Four decades later it’s more than seventy-five-fold.
• Either way -- wealth or income – America is more unequal, economists generally agree, than at any time since the start of the Great Depression…
  
• And more unequal than any other developed nation today.

—Inequality.org

Why are failed strategies repeated? The GOP prescription seems to be: just take another dose of whatever it is that's making you sick.

Unfortunately, there is an entire caste of people who leech off the labors of others. They dare to call it "free enterprise". GOP policies have built our economy around our chief export: death and destruction. It is served up by our biggest industry, the biggest single slice in our budget pie chart —the military! Tax cuts, meanwhile, favored a tiny elite even as purchasing power of the ever poorer American working class depends upon the good graces of China. One is tempted to believe that what normal people perceive as Bush incompetence is, in fact, a deliberate and cynical GOP policy. Bush may have given the game away when he addressed a meeting of the "upper one percent" of the population —the primary beneficiaries of his tax cut. Predictably, he smirked and called them his "base".

Some updates with the very latest Census Bureau info:

Data show one in eight Americans in poverty

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the world's biggest economy, one in eight Americans and almost one in four blacks lived in poverty last year, the U.S.
Census Bureau said on Tuesday, both ratios virtually unchanged from 2004.

The survey also showed 15.9 percent of the population, or 46.6 million, had no health insurance, up from 15.6 percent in 2004 and an increase for a fifth consecutive year, even as the economy grew at a 3.2 percent clip. ...

The last time poverty declined was in 2000, the final year of Bill Clinton's presidency, when it fell to 11.3 percent.

The stagnant poverty picture drew attention from Democrats and others who said not enough is being done to help the nation's poor.

"Far too many American families who work hard and play by the rules still wind up living in poverty," said Rep. George Miller (news, bio, voting record) of California, the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Around a quarter of blacks and 21.8 percent of Hispanics were living in poverty. Among whites, the rate edged down to
8.3 percent from 8.7 percent in 2004.

"Among African Americans the problem correlates primarily to the inner-city and single mothers," said Michael Tanner of CATO Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington. He noted that blacks also suffer disproportionately from poor
education and lower quality jobs.

Black median income, at $30,858, was only 61 percent of the median for whites. ...

The Bush Record: More Poverty, More Uninsured

Bush says “the foundation of our economy is solid, and it’s strong.” That’s true, for some: corporate profits have now climbed to their highest share of GDP since the 1960’s.

But new Census Bureau data show the real state of the current economy. The Bush record on combating poverty and insuring more Americans is an undisputed failure.

Poverty, All Races (Millions)

Number of Uninsured (Millions)

More on the new census data HERE.

A great update courtesy Mark:

Devaluing Labor

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, August 30, 2006; Page A19

That America is as dead as the dodo. Ours is the age of the Great Upward Redistribution. The median hourly wage for Americans has declined by 2 percent since 2003, though productivity has been rising handsomely. Last year, according to figures released just yesterday by the Census Bureau, wages for men declined by 1.8 percent and for women by 1.3 percent.

As a remarkable story by Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt in Monday's New York Times makes abundantly clear, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of gross domestic product since 1947, when the government began measuring such things. Corporate profits, by contrast, have risen to their highest share of the GDP since the mid-'60s -- a gain that has come chiefly at the expense of American workers.

Don't take my word for it. According to a report by Goldman Sachs economists, "the most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor's share of national income."

As the Times story notes, the share of GDP going to profits is also at near-record highs in Western Europe and Japan.

Clearly, globalization has weakened the power of workers and begun to erode the egalitarian policies of the New Deal and social democracy that characterized the advanced industrial world in the second half of the 20th century.

For those who profit from this redistribution, there's something comforting in being able to attribute this shift to the vast, impersonal forces of globalization. The stagnant incomes of most Americans can be depicted as the inevitable outcome of events over which we have no control, like the shifting of tectonic plates.

Problem is, the declining power of the American workforce antedates the integration of China and India into the global labor pool by several decades. Since 1973 productivity gains have outpaced median family income by 3 to 1. Clearly, the war of American employers on unions, which began around that time, is also substantially responsible for the decoupling of increased corporate revenue from employees' paychecks.

—Washington Post

Here's a breaking story somewhat off topic, but timely, indeed:

Bashir: CIA used 'micro nuclear' bomb in Bali

Indonesian Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir claims America's top spy agency was involved in the devastating 2002 Bali bombings.

Bashir, who was convicted and imprisoned for having prior knowledge of the attacks which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, is also appealing for the lives of three convicted bombers to be spared.

Bashir, the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), was released from prison in June after serving nearly two years.

Amrozi, Ali Ghufron - also known as Mukhlas - and Imam Samudra are awaiting execution for their part in the plot.

In an interview tonight on ABC television's Foreign Correspondent, Bashir claims the device that killed most people in the Bali attack was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) "micro-nuclear" bomb. ...

The Existentialist Cowboy
Bush
Economy
Trickle Down Theory
Census Bureau
Income Inequality
Working Class

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The Existentialist Cowboy

Americans are paying for Bush's war of aggression at the bank, the store, the pump, and the graveside!

Bush would give you the impression that the Iraq war is free or cheap. But that's a hoax! The war is paid for with hidden taxes, higher prices, and American lives; the cost of the Iraq war has more than tripled since Bush declared "...major combat operations in Iraq have ended!"

War is a racket fought by the masses for privileged elites. Bush's war on Iraq is not merely fought for the benefit of no-bid contractors like Halliburton, it is financed by America's working poor and middle classes who pay for the war —with their lives abroad and with their jobs, their retirement prospects, and their access to health care at home. Bush's base —the nation's elite, his corporate sponsors, and the so-called defense industry —have paid nothing, risked nothing! Rather —they feed at the trough. The upper one percent of the population has gotten several tax cuts while the big oil companies report record profits rising concurrently with higher prices at the pump.

Just two days after 9/11, I learned from Congressional staffers that Republicans on Capitol Hill were already exploiting the atrocity, trying to use it to push through tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. ... We now know that from the very beginning, the Bush administration and its allies in Congress saw the terrorist threat not as a problem to be solved, but as a political opportunity to be exploited. The story of the latest terror plot makes the administration’s fecklessness and cynicism on terrorism clearer than ever.

—
Hoping for Fear, by Paul Krugman, Using Fear Commentary, NY Times

One of the more insidious falsehoods about Iraq has turned out to have been Bushco estimates of its cost. In 2002, George W. Bush himself predicted the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion —tops! To be expected —Bush was dead wrong. A report by the Democratic staff of the House Budget Committee now estimates that Bush's war of aggression in Iraq could cost the US $646 billion by 2015 —depending on the scope and duration of operations. Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University, estimates the cost of the war from one trillion to two trillion dollars!

Ongoing operations in Iraq were estimated at $5.6 billion per month in 2005. And costs have surely risen since then as the intensity of fighing increases accompanied by significant losses of materiel and maintenance.

The Bill So Far: Congress has already approved four spending bills for Iraq with funds totaling $204.4 billion and is in the process of approving a “bridge fund” for $45.3 billion to cover operations until another supplemental spending package can be passed, most likely slated for Spring 2006. Broken down per person in the United States, the cost so far is $727, making the Iraq War the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years.

Long-term Impact on U.S. Economy: In August 2005, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the cost of continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at current levels would nearly double the projected federal budget deficit over the next ten years. According to current estimates, during that time the cost of the Iraq War could exceed $700 billion.

Economic Impact on Military Families: Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 210,000 of the National Guard’s 330,000 soldiers have been called up, with an average mobilization of 460 days. Government studies show that about half of all reservists and Guard members report a loss of income when they go on active duty—typically more than $4,000 a year. About 30,000 small business owners alone have been called to service and are especially likely to fall victim to the adverse economic effects of military deployment.

—The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of War and the Case for Bringing Home the Troops, Institute for Policy Studies

The Bush administration has been able to keep the precise cost of the war a matter of guess work and estimates. But however much is wasted killing civilians in Iraq that is money that is not being spent educating Americans, providing for health care, fixing Social Security, rebuilding a deteriorating infrastructure, or addressing real threats to our environment. However much has blown up in Iraq, it is lost forever to the victims of Bush's incompetence in the face of Katrina just one short year ago. It is lost forever to those millions losing retirements to corporate mismanagement and greed. It is lost forever to those unable to pay the high costs of education, transportation, housing, and getting enough to eat each day.

U.S. Budget and Social Programs: The Administration’s FY 2006 budget, which does not include any funding for the Iraq War, takes a hard line with domestic spending— slashing or eliminating more than 150 federal programs. The $204.4 billion appropriated thus far for the war in Iraq could have purchased any of the following desperately needed services in our country: 46,458,805 uninsured people receiving health care or 3,545,016 elementary school teachers or 27,093,473 Head Start places for children or 1,841,833 affordable housing units or 24,072 new elementary schools or 39,665,748 scholarships for university students or 3,204,265 port container inspectors.

Social Costs to the Military/Troop Morale: As of May 2005, stop-loss orders are affecting 14,082 soldiers—almost 10 percent of the entire forces serving in Iraq with no end date set for the use of these orders. Long deployments and high levels of soldier’s stress extend to family life. In 2004, 3,325 Army officer’s marriages ended in divorce—up 78 percent from 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion and more than 3.5 times the number in 2000.

Costs to Veteran Health Care: The Veterans Affairs department projected that 23,553 veterans would return from Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005 and seek medical care. But in June 2005, the VA Secretary, Jim Nicholson, revised this number to 103,000. The miscalculation has led to a shortfall of $273 million in the VA budget for 2005 and may result in a loss of $2.6 billion in 2006.

Mental Health Costs: In July 2005 the Army’s surgeon general reported that 30 percent of U.S. troops have developed stress-related mental health problems three to four months after coming home from the Iraq War. Because about 1 million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.

—The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of War and the Case for Bringing Home the Troops, Institute for Policy Studies

Many delusions were promoted in order to commit this nation to aggressive war. In the short months after 9/11, Bush erected a strawman upon which to direct American frustration, anger, and vengeance: an “axis of evil” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. His intentions were made clear at the time: this "Axis of Evil" was responsible for world terrorism in general and our nation would wage war against it. Bush's speech was most notable, however, for what he did not say. Bush did not tell the American people that he had no intention of paying for the war. He would leave the deficit to future administrations and generations. Rather than expect his privileged base to pony up, he would reward their loyalty with several tax cuts. Nor are sons of daughters of that base required to serve their nation militarily. Bush's base gets a free ride as the rest of the nation bears the cost of war —in both lives and dollars.

If wars are not paid for upfront, they are paid for in the form of higher interest rates, prices, and lives. Wealth does not trickle down; but the effects of a falling dollar is felt by everyone. The exponential rise of wage and income inequality began with a vengeance in the Reagan 80's, most closely associated with the Reagan tax cut of 1982. Only the top 20 percent of the population benefited. Wage/income disparities have increased since then with only a short respite in the Clinton years. The current trend began before a great wave of technical change and a computer revolution —none of which has benefited working Americans. Indeed, if you work for a living you have paid and continue to pay for Bush's war of aggression while Bush's base gets preferential treatment!

It is no coincidence that as prices increase, so, too, the national deficit. American credit abroad is dodgy. As the dollar continues to slide on world exchanges, not only gasoline prices increase but also prices of imported goods. Bush had said that he favors a strong dollar but, in fact, his administration has let the dollar slide, a cynical ploy designed to finance the Iraq folly upon the backs of working Americans. That it provides a moderate relief to US exporters is a bad trade off. What, after all, do we export these days? How many new jobs are created when, in fact, Ford is only one of many American corporations in big trouble.

Like Bush's mythical "Axis of Evil" the idea that a nation can wage a free war is an evil GOP fairy tale. Wars are always paid for, if not now, later, and in ways you won't like.

By way of Mark, this update from the Washington Post:

Securing Future Fiscal Health

By Bob Kerrey and Warren Rudman

The economic and moral case for long-term reform of fiscal policy is clear. Yet politicians refuse to act. If this stalemate persists, it could end in catastrophe.

Over the next 30 years, spending on federal programs is on track to go up by 50 percent as a share of the economy. If revenue remain at their historical level, the resulting deficits will approach 20 percent of gross domestic product by 2036 -- almost 10 times the current size. The debt will surge to 200 percent of GDP -- twice what it was at the end of World War II.

Political realities explain why nothing has been done about this. Changing course would require substantial spending cuts from projected levels or equivalent tax increases. Neither party wants to be the first to propose these tough choices out of fear that the other side would attack it. Similarly, neither side wants to discuss possible compromises of its own priorities, out of fear that the other side will take the concessions and run. Unfortunately, these fears are justified.

Since the regular legislative process seems incapable of dealing with the impending crisis, some alternative has to be found. President Bush has suggested a commission. Having served on many commissions, we understand their potential value. We also understand how they can go wrong. In our view, a new commission could be very useful, but only if it recognizes fiscal and political realities. It needs five elements to succeed. ...

Securing Future Fiscal Health, Washington Post

From Fred Kaplan writing in Slate, this update:

What a Moronic Presidential Press Conference!

It's clear Bush doesn't understand Iraq, or Lebanon, or Gaza, or …...

An excerpt:

...

Asked if it might be time for a new strategy in Iraq, given the unceasing rise in casualties and chaos, Bush replied, "The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve their objectives and dreams, which is a democratic society. That's the strategy. … Either you say, 'It's important we stay there and get it done,' or we leave. We're not leaving, so long as I'm the president."

The reporter followed up, "Sir, that's not really the question. The strategy—"

Bush interrupted, "Sounded like the question to me."

First, it's not clear that the Iraqi people want a "democratic society" in the Western sense. Second, and more to the point, "helping Iraqis achieve a democratic society" may be a strategic objective, but it's not a strategy—any more than "ending poverty" or "going to the moon" is a strategy.

Strategy involves how to achieve one's objectives—or, as the great British strategist B.H. Liddell Hart put it, "the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy." These are the issues that Bush refuses to address publicly—what means and resources are to be applied, in what way, at what risk, and to what end, in pursuing his policy. Instead, he reduces everything to two options: "Cut and run" or, "Stay the course." It's as if there's nothing in between, no alternative way of applying military means. Could it be that he doesn't grasp the distinction between an "objective" and a "strategy," and so doesn't see that there might be alternatives? Might our situation be that grim?

It's all just words to Bush and that's just as well. He doesn't know the meaning of any of them anyway. The war on Iraq is a war of aggression, i.e. a war crime. Whenever a crime is committed, one must ask: Qui bono?

Cheney's remaining US investment

Firestarter5 asked a question in a previous post about who of the neo-cons has stock in Halliburton. Well, we certainly know that Cheney does. In 2005, his 433,333 stock options soared by 3,281%. Now, Cheney says he has "pledged" the proceeds to charity. Yeah, and did you also know that the insurgency in Iraq is "in the last throes"? I hope this so-called "charity" isn't counting on Cheney's word on this. Unless, of course, it is a charity run in the mold of Tom DeLay's "charitable organisations."Halliburton's government contracting has increased by 600% under the Bush/Cheney administration and was the fastest growing contractor between 2000 and 2005. The stock did drop, although lately it has recovered and leveled out, as this five year plot shows (vertical scale is compressed compared to the Cheney stock options value graph.

No doubt this is due to the fact that Halliburton has raked in about [all] it is going to from US government contracts in Iraq, unless Bush keeps all those troops over there for as long as he can -- and he certainly intends on doing that. KBR will then keep pulling in some change.

As far as other of Cheney's neo-con cohorts, well, not much is readily apparent. I'm certain that any investment in Halliburton by these others is probably well-veiled. ...

An update:

Experts warn U.S. is coming apart at the seams; becoming third world

By Chuck McCutcheon
Newhouse News Service

A pipeline shuts down in Alaska. Equipment failures disrupt air travel in Los Angeles. Electricity runs short at a spy agency in Maryland.

None of these recent events resulted from a natural disaster or terrorist attack, but they may as well have, some homeland security experts say. They worry that too little attention is paid to how fast the country's basic operating systems are deteriorating.

"When I see events like these, I become concerned that we've lost focus on the core operational functionality of the nation's infrastructure and are becoming a fragile nation, which is just as bad — if not worse — as being an insecure nation," said Christian Beckner, a Washington analyst who runs the respected Web site Homeland Security Watch (www.christianbeckner.com).

The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation "D" for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.

"I thought [Hurricane] Katrina was a hell of a wake-up call, but people are missing the alarm," said Casey Dinges, the society's managing director of external affairs.

British oil company BP announced this month that severe corrosion would close its Alaska pipelines for extensive repairs. Analysts say this may sideline some 200,000 barrels a day of production for several months.

Then an instrument landing system that guides arriving planes onto a runway at Los Angeles International Airport failed for the second time in a week, delaying flights.

Those incidents followed reports that the National Security Agency (NSA), the intelligence world's electronic eavesdropping arm, is consuming so much electricity at its headquarters outside Washington that it is in danger of exceeding its power supply.

"If a terrorist group were able to knock the NSA offline, or disrupt one of the nation's busiest airports, or shut down the most important oil pipeline in the nation, the impact would be perceived as devastating," Beckner said. "And yet we've essentially let these things happen — or almost happen — to ourselves."

The Commission on Public Infrastructure at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said in a recent report that facilities are deteriorating "at an alarming rate." ...

Some additional resources:

• The Declining Dollar, Global Policy Forum
• Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz Calculates Iraq's Stunning Price Tag, Columbia Review
• Whoops! It's 1985 All Over Again, ibid
• The Hidden Cost of Iraq War, LA Times
• How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime

The Existentialist Cowboy
Quagmire
Iraq
War Crimes
Krugman
Bush

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The Existentialist Cowboy

Another Loser of Lebanon II: America

Will a weaker US hand in the Middle East force Bush to reconsider the building of permanent bases in Iraq? Has the sun set on US influence in the Middle East, and, indeed, worldwide?

In the wake of Lebanon II and perhaps a casualty of it, US influence throughout the Middle East is on the wane. Nevertheless, there are indications that the Bush administration is going ahead with plans to build permanent US bases in Iraq. How much sense does this make at a time when the US has lost its ability to set or shape a Middle East agenda?

American leverage, prestige and power has never been lower as the Bush administration is all but left out of a shaky cease-fire in southern Lebanon. Even before the Israel/Hezbollah war —called Lebanon II by some observers — America was perceived as having eschewed its role as "honest broker" —thus losing to Iran and radical Islam a position of great leverage in the Middle East. Compounding the difficulty of our predicament is the very real possibility that it was all deliberate. The Bush administration may have willingly relinquished a legitimate role in order to pursue its special oil interests in Iraq.

It was a bad and incompetent trade-off. By pursuing illegitimate and dangerous policies, Bush undermined our ability to positively influence legitimate issues. No Democratic goals are realized in Iraq where a puppet regime and an increasingly unpopular American occupation is caught up between three concurrent civil wars: the war between a guerilla resistance vs the US occupation; another involving Kurds vs other northern Iraqi communities; and a third between Sunni Arabs and Shi'ites.

Juan Cole recently quoted US Ambassador to Iraq —Zalmay Khalilzad —as having claimed that he had given assurances to sectarian opposition to the US: "We don't want to stay in Iraq." But there's never been any such assurance from either Bush or Rumsfeld. Quite the contrary. Kevin Drum, writing in Washington Monthly, stated that the Bush administration is, in fact, "allocating resources" to build permanent military bases in Iraq. I ask what is the purpose of such permanent bases if not to subjugate the people and control the production of oil?

Well, if you're going to war, obviously troops are going to a theater and to a country and in the immediate aftermath of such a conflict, there would have to be a need for some presence until such time as you can put in place a better system. I mean, the United States has done this many times in the course of the last 50 or 60 years and we always try to get out as quickly as we can once we have reestablished peace, put in place a stable system, it is never our intention to go and stay in a place and to impose our will by the presence of our military forces.

—Secretary of State Colin Powell, interviewed on NPR's "All Things Considered," October 11, 2002.

But, oddly, Powell would later discount a New York Times report of April 20, 2003 that cited sources that had said that the U.S. would build "...four permanent bases in Iraq". Powell called the report inaccurate! Not a denial. Secondly, the story was called "unfortunate". But Bushies can call "unfortunate" anything true that is said about them —especially if what is said about them is true. "Fortunate" is a relative term. What is truly unfortunate is a plethora of various and asundry indications that Bushco has no intention of leaving Iraq whatever its tragic costs, however long:

It's going to depend on events over the next couple of years. It's to be determined. —

General Richard Myers, December 16, 2003

The United States is committed to stay as long as is necessary in Iraq, but not one day more.

—Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs, February 11, 2003.

Here is one of the more disturbing comments:

A four- or five-year occupation of Iraq by 65,000 regular and 35,000 reserve troops - a realistic possibility - will require a rotation base of 260,000 active troops . . . and 315,000 reserve troops . . . This illustration does not properly capture the full effect of our broader "war on terror" on our reservists. . . If another war begins, President Bush will still be able to mobilize plenty of military power. It is occupations that are the problem. If occupation of Iraq stretches into years and the "war on terrorism" widens even further, Army Reserve and National Guard units will be called to active service again and again - an activation rate far higher than the norm expected by our citizen soldiers, their families and their communities.

These "quotes" are at odds with hints of "hints" of "major drawdowns" of American troops to a figure of less than 100,000 troops in Iraq by the end of 2006. It is simply not realistic to expect that Bush can withdraw some one-quarter of about about 136,000 American troops in the final quarter of this year! The "administration appears confused and contradictory, a symptom of a lost war and its utterly failed support of Israel in Lebanon II.

Nor is there any hope that America will soon regain a position in which it might play a more positive role. Not as long as Bush occupies the Oval Office. If I may paraphrase Antonin Scalia —the man who made possible Bush's maladministration —the melange of meaningless piffle about Iraq is not a recipe that will instill confidence in the ability of this administration to undo the many harms that it has already done and to right the wrong course upon which this nation is undoubtedly headed.

An update:

EU to provide 'backbone' of Lebanon force

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Friday (25 August) saw member states commit up to 9,000 troops to a UN force to oversee the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon.

>The agreement means that thousands of UN troops will be deployed to the region within as little as a week.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who also attended the meeting in Brussels, welcomed the EU pledges saying they amounted to over half of the total 15,000 troops envisaged under the UN resolution governing the ceasefire.

"More than half the force has been pledged today. Not only troops on the ground but we also got naval assets as well as air assets and when you put it altogether Europe is providing the backbone to the force," he said. ...

The Existentialist Cowboy
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Pentagon
Iraq
Endless War

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The Existentialist Cowboy

Bush's Phantom Menace

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

I am sick of sending blood money to the US government. I am sick of financing meaningless death and destruction. I am sick of sending money to a federal "theocracy" who gives a portion of it to "faith based initiatives" to propagate a metaphysics that neither I nor the founding fathers believed in!

I am sick of underwriting the robber barons of wall street. I am sick of financing the purchase of lethal toys for Donald Rumsfeld and the torture perverts of the Pentagon. I am sick of George W. Bush's thin skin and stupid face.

A documentary of 2004 asked the question:

Should we be worried about the threat from organized terrorism or is it simply a phantom menace being used to stop society from falling apart?

—BBC:The Power of Nightmares: Baby It's Cold Outside; See the documentary at Le Thé Chez Vierotchka

Thanks to GOP exploitation of every negative emotion known to man, society is falling apart anyway. I am inclined to opine that not only are GOP policies a MAJOR cause of terrorism, the relationship is, indeed, a symbiotic one as one writer recently observed. GOP policies cause terrorism.

Bush has made us less safe. His war on Iraq has failed. Iraq is in chaos, civil war, and all but abandoned to its fate in any case. Bush insists on staying when, in fact, it's lost and there is nothing left to do but face an ugly fact and leave —or stay and die ignormiously. And, in the end, we will leave anyway.

Terrorism has replaced the fifties bugaboo: communism. Did that keep us in line —or what? Here's an excerpt from the BBC story:

A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.
...
The rise of the politics of fear begins in 1949 with two men whose radical ideas would inspire the attack of 9/11 and influence the neo-conservative movement that dominates Washington.

Both these men believed that modern liberal freedoms were eroding the bonds that held society together.

The two movements they inspired set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this decay. But in an age of growing disillusion with politics, the neo-conservatives turned to fear in order to pursue their vision.
They would create a hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union that only they could see.

The Islamists were faced by the refusal of the masses to follow their dream and began to turn to terror to force the people to "see the truth"'.

—BBC: The Power of Nightmares: Baby It's Cold Outside

At last, terrorism is a distraction from several unpleasant economic facts, most prominently —our entire economy is utterly dependent upon the billions, the trillions that are spent on "defense" which is to say, fighting terrorism.

Terrorism —or, more properly, the phony defense against it —has become an industry, most certainly America's biggest. What do you suppose would happen to the US economy if we immediately stopped fighting Bush's war on terrorism and immediately made the appropriate adjustments to the defense budget? What would happen if we eliminated the Military/Industrial complex which now finds its raison d'etre in terrorism?

Recession? Far worse —the complete and utter collapse of the American economy which is now completely and utterly dependent upon a drug: terrorism! In my youth, I was prepared to get on the bus, report for basic training, and go to Viet Nam. To die? Possibly! After all, I was but a mere slave to the state. What chance was given the sons of poor carpenters and steel workers when America claimed to be defending us against the sons of even poorer farmers in Viet Nam? My country would have expected me to kill them. For God and country!

I wish I could say that I made a big public noise and put my life on the line for my convictions. There was no great moral victory in the mere fact that I did not go to Viet Nam. It was but the luck of the draw, and, in deed, a "draw" for those who opposed not only the war but the draft.
But I have never regretted not going to Nam. I have regretted not having won a point against the forces of fascism. I have regretted not shooting my big mouth off even more so. I have regretted not having been able to make a difference against the machine of state hellbent on grinding us all up in name of national security.

In the meantime, I support the troops by demanding as vociferously as I can that we bring them home! Wars are no longer winnable. The firepower necessary to win the next big one will wipe out mankind. Most governments and all intelligent people know this if Bush does not. Instead, they will grind us up piecemeal, killing the weakest and most vulnerable among us here and there, for symbolic, hollow "victories", braggadocio and propaganda. I wonder how many more poor kids will be asked and expected to kill farmers and peasants in a foreign land just so some GOP asshole can live in a penthouse apartment!

An update From the Liberal Doomsayer:

Bushco’s Façade Continues To Crack

So the terror-related charge against overall creep and bad actor Jose Padilla has been thrown out.

Wasn’t it only yesterday when he was considered to be such a threat to Truth, Justice and the American Way that it was decided by Bushco that he should be held as an enemy combatant (no...it was last year, actually).

So it turns out that Dubya can’t deny due process to an American citizen after all (this comes on the heels of the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision against Bush’s military commissions, which even Antonin Scalia thought was founded on a shaky ruling by The Supremes).

Hmmm...maybe this guy isn’t such a legal genius after all.

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The Enemy Within

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Carl Jung predicted our present sense of malaise as early as 1957 in his "The Undiscovered Self", decrying "...apocalyptic images of universal destruction" brought on by WWII and an atomic age ushered in when the United States dropped weapons of mass destruction on two cities in Japan. In its wake, Jung was fearful that 40 percent of the population —called a "mentally stable stratum" —might not be able to keep the lid on mass psychosis; it might be unable to restrain the spread of "dangerous tendencies", presumably: fascism, fanaticism, militarism, and intolerance. Jung seems to have been less concerned with external threats. The dangerous tendencies he feared were home grown.

The list above is mine —not Jung's, though I believe Jung would have approved. To that list I would add that most dangerous symbiotic cocktail: fear and hate.

Clearly —terrorism is a real threat but no more so than the dangerous and deliberate exploitation of it. Clearly —the subversion of Democratic ideals is a clear and present danger but no more so than home grown subversion by demagogues. What difference does it make to me if my "inalienable rights" are denied me by Alberto Gonzales or by the Taliban? Clearly —terrorist attacks upon the soil of any Democratic nation is worrisome but no more so than a home grown policy that nurtures, feeds, and inspires opposition at home and terrorism abroad. Clearly —Jung's list of "dangerous tendencies" must include our own tilt toward fascism, an unintended result that will have accomplished Bin Laden's goal without his ever having to leave his mythic cave in Afghanistan.

Clearly —the spectre of terrorism has been of greater benefit to Bush than it has been to those who espouse terrorism —those who, we are told, sow the seeds of fear and hate. Hitler, for example, could only seize dictatorial powers after a "terrorist" attack on the Reichstag building in 1933. Hermann Göring would later boast of having ordered the torching himself. Marinus van der Lubbe was executed but when a score of usual suspects were acquitted, an enraged Hitler dismissed the court itself. In both Himmler's Secret War by Martin Allen and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, the Reichstag fire was the work of SS agents who accessed the Reichstag through a tunnel that connected Göring's official residence with the Reichstag.

Meanwhile, Hitler would raise the spector of communist terrorism and assume new powers. Later, Hitler would start World War II with a lie: that Polish troops had invaded German territory to blow up a radio tower. The culprits —not surprisingly —were Nazi SS in Polish Army uniforms.

We are now familiar with this tactic. Bush attacked and invaded Iraq though his administration knew there were no WMD to be found. Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations was known at the time to have been a fraud —consisting of plagiarized student papers and out-of-date satellite photos. Since that time, Bush has told some five or six rationales for the attack —all of them ex post facto. None of them were cited as reasons for the attack before the attack or at the time of the attack. They were seemingly pulled out of grab bag one by one as the official cover stories were exposed.

When all the various rationales proved hollow, Bush resorted to the Saddam was a bad man tact. But, of course, he was a bad man; but this nation could not possibly wage aggressive war on all bad men. And what difference does that make to the Iraqi in the street for whom Bush is a worse man? Bush's body count must surely exceed Saddam's by now and there is no law, no order —only chaos. With every milestone cited by Bush as progress, the situation has only gotten worse.

Very recently, there were two versions of the capture of Israeli soldiers. In my opinion, the more credible report is that the soldiers were captured inside Lebanon —not kidnapped inside Israel as had been claimed. Even conservatives concede that Bush most certainly encouraged Israel to invade Lebanon. In retrospect the over-reach is obvious: crush Hezbollah while weakening Syria and Iran. Like Bush's own invasion of Iraq, the power of the air attack was over-estimated. When no one else proclaimed an Israeli victory, Bush did. But that was public. Behind the scenes, Bush had changed the rules. He encouraged Israel to accept a cease fire that destroyed forever the myth of Israeli invincibility. As this blog predicted —even as the war raged —Hezbollah emerged stronger and, by proxy, Syria and Iran. On the other side, Israel is weakened, and, by proxy, Bush and his increasingly inept regime.

Is it only a matter of governments deceiving their peoples? Governments lie all the time —especially governments who now more than ever believe that lying to the public is not only permissible but desirable. They have it the wrong way 'round. Assured of their invincibility, they have convinced themselves that they must deceive the public in order to achieve some all important agenda. The arguments they have made to themselves are delusions of psychotic proportions.

This is the very segment of any population that so concerned Jung. This is a sub-stratum that Jung estimated as high as 60 percent of the population. It is these people that Jung feared might not be checked. As Jung feared, we have failed to restrain that sub-stratum of incipient psychotics inside our own country.

After Jung had written of his fears in "The Undiscovered Self", Ronald Reagan would come along and make it okay to be marginal or outright psychotic! Ronald Reagan showed Bush Jr how best to exploit the symbiotic relationship between fear and hate for GOP advantage. It's really a psychological "binary" bomb —a bit of fear plus a dash of hate, stir in a tape from Bin Laden and you've got yourself a fascist dictatorship. Reagan would make it okay to blame victims of Reagan's misrule. Reagan left Bush a legacy of absolving the selfish and self absorbed from all guilt. Reagan gave legitimacy to bigotry, making up —full cloth —a story about a Cadillac driving welfare grandmother. Reagan would make right wing nut cases "...feel good about themselves" and Bush would learn all those wrong lessons. Hitler taught them all.

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