Iraq=Vietnam? Analyze This

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How Our Leaders Decided

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This is How Our Leaders is Improving Iraq

Not; we are failing them. But that's Bush-style: make a worse mess after making a mess.

The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves.

Despite some evidence that the troop buildup has improved security in certain areas, sectarian violence continues and American-led operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of additional troops arrived, the studies show.

The data track what are known as internally displaced Iraqis: those who have been driven from their neighborhoods and seek refuge elsewhere in the country rather than fleeing across the border. The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed areas in the center of Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north.

Though most displaced Iraqis say they would like to return, there is little prospect of their doing so. One Sunni Arab who had been driven out of the Baghdad neighborhood of southern Dora by Shiite snipers said she doubted that her family would ever return, buildup or no buildup.

“There is no way we would go back,” said the woman, 26, who gave her name only as Aswaidi. “It is a city of ghosts. The only people left there are terrorists.”

Statistics collected by one of the two humanitarian groups, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, indicate that the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000, since the buildup started in February.

Those figures are broadly consistent with data compiled independently by an office in the United Nations that specializes in tracking wide-scale dislocations. That office, the International Organization for Migration, found that in recent months the rate of displacement in Baghdad, where the buildup is focused, had increased by as much as a factor of 20, although part of that rise could have stemmed from improved monitoring of displaced Iraqis by the government in Baghdad, the capital.

The new findings suggest that while sectarian attacks have declined in some neighborhoods, the influx of troops and the intense fighting they have brought are at least partly responsible for what a report by the United Nations migration office calls the worst human displacement in Iraq’s modern history.

The findings also indicate that the sectarian tension the troops were meant to defuse is still intense in many places in Iraq. Sixty-three percent of the Iraqis surveyed by the United Nations said they had fled their neighborhoods because of direct threats to their lives, and more than 25 percent because they had been forcibly removed from their homes.

The demographic shifts could favor those who would like to see Iraq partitioned into three semi-autonomous regions: a Shiite south and a Kurdish north sandwiching a Sunni territory.

Over all, the scale of this migration has put so much strain on Iraqi governmental and relief offices that some provinces have refused to register any more displaced people, or will accept only those whose families are originally from the area. But Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the migration office, said that in many cases, the ability of extended families to absorb displaced relatives was also stretched to the breaking point.

“It’s a bleak picture,” Mr. Tschannen said. “It is just steadily continuing in a bad direction, from bad to worse.”

He also cautioned that reports of people going back to their homes were overstated. As the buildup began, the Iraqi government said that it would take measures to evict squatters from houses that were not theirs and make special efforts to bring the rightful owners back.

“They were reporting that people went back, but they didn’t report that people left again,” Mr. Tschannen said. He added that Iraqis “hear things are better, go back to collect remuneration and pick up an additional suitcase and leave again. It is not a permanent return in most cases.”

American officials in Baghdad did not respond to a request for comment, but the national intelligence estimate released Thursday confirmed that Iraq continues to become more segregated through internal migration. “Population displacement resulting from sectarian violence continues,” it found, “imposing burdens on provincial governments and some neighboring states.”

Dr. Said Hakki, director of the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, said that he had been surprised when his figures revealed that roughly 100,000 people a month were fleeing their homes during the buildup. Dr. Hakki said that he did not know why the rates were so high but added that some factors were obvious.

“It’s fear,” he said. “Lack of services. You see, if you have a security problem, you don’t need a lot to frighten people.”

It is clear that military operations, both by American troops and the Iraqi forces working with them as part of the buildup, have something to do with the rise in displacement, said Dana Graber Ladek, Iraq displacement specialist for the migration organization’s Iraq office.

“If a surge means that soldiers are on the streets patrolling to make sure there is no violence, that is one thing,” Ms. Ladek said. “If a surge means military operations where there are attacks and bombings, then obviously that is going to create displacement.”

But Ms. Ladek added that, in contrast to the first years of the conflict, when major American offensives were a main cause of displacement, the primary driving force had changed.

“Sectarian violence is the biggest driving factor — militias coming into a neighborhood and kicking all the Sunnis out, or insurgents driving all the Shias away,” Ms. Ladek said.

Her conclusions mirrored the experiences of Iraqis who had fled their homes.

Aswaidi and her family were driven out of the Dora section of Baghdad five months ago when Shiite snipers opened fire on their Sunni neighborhood from nearby tower blocks, shooting through their windows “at all hours of day and night.”

Returning covertly to check on the property in mid-August, she found Sunni insurgents occupying the building and neighboring homes, walking unchallenged through the deserted streets. Nearby, she claims, the same insurgents captured one of the Shiite snipers who drove the residents away, and claimed that he was a 16-year-old Iranian.

She now fears that her entire neighborhood will be taken over by Shiite militias like the Mahdi Army, which is loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

“I don’t want them to take my town, but I think they will,” Aswaidi said. “It will change from Sunni to Shia. The Americans can’t stop it.”

Shiites face similarly overwhelming odds. In Shualah, on the northern outskirts of Baghdad, 400 Shiite families now live in a makeshift refugee camp on wasteland commandeered by Mr. Sadr’s followers.

In a sprawl of cinder block hovels and tin and bamboo-roofed shacks, families have stories of being expelled from their homes by Sunni insurgents.

Ali Edan fled Yusifiya, a Sunni insurgent haven south of Baghdad, when his uncle was killed. He has no intention of returning, even though American commanders claim Sunni sheiks there have begun cooperating with them. “It is still an unsafe area,” said Mr. Edan.

Both humanitarian groups based their conclusions on information collected from the displaced Iraqis inside the country. The Red Crescent counted only displaced Iraqis who receive relief supplies, and the United Nations relied on data from an Iraqi ministry that closely tracks Iraqis who leave their homes and register for government services elsewhere.

Before the troop buildup, by far the most significant event causing the displacement of Iraqis was the bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra in February 2006. The bombing set off a spasm of sectarian killing, but the rate at which Iraqis left their homes leveled off toward the end of that year before accelerating again as the buildup began, the Red Crescent figures show.

The United Nations figures also include a little over a million people it says were displaced in the decades before the Samarra bombing, including the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The Red Crescent data does not include them.

In Baghdad, the latest migration involves an enormously complex landscape in which some people flee one district even as others return to it.

In Ghazaliya, a mixed but Sunni-majority district of north Baghdad, one 30-year-old Shiite said his family was driven out by Sunni insurgents a year ago with just two hours notice to leave their home.

Five months ago, the troop buildup brought American soldiers and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army onto his street and his family returned. But even as it did, Sunni neighbors fled, knowing that the army had been infiltrated by Shiite militias.

“They are afraid, because the army has good relations with the Mahdi Army,” said the 30-year-old man, who said he was too afraid to give his name. “My area used to have a lot of Sunni. Now most are Shia, because Shias expelled from other places have moved into the empty Sunni homes.”

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Unlike Fox, this is Fake News that Seems Almost Real

Fake but too close to the truth, unlike Faux Nooz, which is all simple lies and propaganda.

Rudy's Brain

The most enduring lesson that Karl Rove taught the American people during his term as George W. Bush's top adviser was to always find out who the candidate's brain is before you elect him or her. For instance, if voters had fully understood that the swaggering, brush-cutting cowboy they elected was under the total sway of a dumpy balding guy with glasses who dropped out of college and believed William McKinley was America's greatest president, they might have thought twice.

***

* * The tutorial begins with a look at Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani's chief whisperer, a man named Anthony V. Carbonetti.

You ask: "Who?" And that is exactly the point. The essence of a good candidate whisperer is to stay in the background, at least until after an election. Carbonetti, 38, is the guy with the beefy build, dark hair, usually wearing a gray suit, standing slightly to the right of America's mayor.

Giuliani observers will argue that he needs no one else's brain because his own is so well-developed. But even Rudy's admirers will admit that Carbonetti, whose greatest passions are aroused at a casino blackjack table, is a major influence on the man who may someday soon be deciding whether to take out Tehran with a tactical strike. We thus ignore him at our peril.

Like Rove, Carbonetti has been with his man since the beginning, helping to guide the former federal prosecutor's first successful run for office. Before that, Carbonetti had not been especially busy. At 24, he had dropped out of Boston University and was working as a bartender at the Cityside tavern on Commonwealth Avenue, serving drinks to former school pals. This résumé immediately qualified him to serve as deputy field director of Giuliani's 1993 campaign. It helped that his father, Lou, was a boyhood friend of the candidate's. Even more helpful, Rudy's dad and Lou's dad were tight buddies from the old neighborhood.

When he won City Hall, Giuliani installed his young aide in a little office with the title of "Director of Appointments." Actually, Tony Carbonetti was mostly engaged in disappointments, since his chief task was to smoke out Democrats with city jobs and fire them. He spent his days on the phone, ending careers as fast as he could dial.

The Carbonetti clan's own municipal fortunes were on the rise. Giuliani named Carbonetti's father as the $90,000-a-year director of his community assistance unit. He promoted Carbonetti's mother, JoAnna Aniello, to ever-higher posts at the city's Housing Authority, ultimately giving her a $162,000-a-year commissionership on his way out the door as mayor.

All went swimmingly until it was revealed in the newspapers that Lou Carbonetti had failed to list $150,000 in debts from a failed business on his financial disclosure forms. Curiously, he also held two different drivers' licenses, one of them suspended. The senior Carbonetti had to quit city government, but the mayor found his old friend a new $80,000-a-year post running a Brooklyn development organization. Unfortunately, this job also went off the tracks when Lou Carbonetti pleaded guilty to felony charges for lying to city investigators about his profitable dealings with the group's vendors.

Tony Carbonetti was also forgetful in disclosing his finances, and he was found to have neglected to list $11,000 in defaulted loans from his abbreviated student days. Giuliani's top deputies, all ex-law-enforcement officials, said this didn't matter because they knew all about the old loans anyway.

What mattered was that Tony Carbonetti, as his boss would say, was very, very good at what he did. He moved steadily up the ranks, becoming the mayor's chief of staff in 1999. He proved himself by his delicate handling of such tasks as parades for the Yankees, the big Garth Brooks concert in Central Park, and the Princess Di memorial service. He also took care of it when Nancy Sinatra demanded a statue of her father in Times Square ("Dear Tony," her gushing handwritten notes read).

When he needed a break from these onerous chores, Carbonetti went gambling. He had learned his lesson and was careful to list his winnings on his financial forms. There was Bally's Hotel, $5,000; TropWorld, $20,000, Trump Plaza slots, $5,000; and much more, indicating enormous betting expertise. He also took a trip to Las Vegas with another City Hall aide who owed his job to his father's mayoral ties. Russell Harding later pleaded guilty to stealing $400,000 from the taxpayers for junkets including the Las Vegas jaunt. City and federal investigators were especially curious about Carbonetti's involvement, but no charges were brought.

It wasn't all fun and games, however. In the spring of 2001, the mayor called on his faithful aide to handle one more firing—that of his wife.

Giuliani was in the process of separating from Donna Hanover, his spouse of 16 years, who was still living in the mayoral residence at Gracie Mansion with their two children. For some reason, she had strenuously objected when Giuliani brought his new girlfriend to the mansion. Despite the estrangement, she said, she was still the city's First Lady and thus entitled to a certain level of respect.

Carbonetti was now dispatched to handle this most delicate of situations. His solution has been enshrined in the city's Municipal Archives, where is found this memorable memo he sent to the mayor's wife on May 22, 2001:

"In light of the quite public parting of the ways between Donna Hanover and the Mayor, it is obviously disingenuous and inappropriate for Donna Hanover to continue to act as First Lady or in any other way as a representative of the Mayor." Making sure there were no misunderstandings, he continued: "Donna Hanover will no longer serve as First Lady, and my office will designate spokespersons, as appropriate, to act on behalf of the Mayor."

It was this type of forceful action that Rudy Giuliani must have been thinking of when he wrote these words in his book Leadership: "Looking back, I believe that the skill I developed better than any other was surrounding myself with great people."

After all, even Karl Rove never fired a First Lady.

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The Sub-Prime Mess for Dummies

This time, it really was different; unbridled greed pushed any sense out the door. Wealth was created but for the wrong people.

Von Hoffman:

As the subprime mortgage mess continues to play itself out, certain words that ought to pop up in the discussion are not to be heard. These are words like “fraud,” “conspiracy,” “misrepresentation” and “felony.”

We are looking at more than greed gone awry. We are looking at an industry that tolerated and fostered what the trade calls “ninja loans.” The Wall Street Journal defines a ninja loan as one that “required no income, no job, and no assets.” Anyone issuing a ninja knows damn well that there is a good chance that the home buyer will default. Nevertheless, the ninjas were sold to mortgage bankers who mixed them in with other mortgages, turned the package into bonds and sold them. If the bankers did not know that they were trading in worthless paper, their ignorance has to be willful, and that’s a crime.

Other subprime mortgages are called “no docs.” Such loans, according to The Journal, “didn’t require the lender to verify the borrower’s income.” Until 10 or so years ago it was absolutely impossible to obtain a no doc mortgage in the United States of America. The people and institutions issuing the loan and selling and/or reselling it demanded verification of the borrower’s ability to make the monthly payments. The only reason to issue a no doc loan is to deliberately choose not to know that the home buyer will more than likely not be able to carry the mortgage. Fraud again.

***

Thanks to the puffed-up appraisals, mortgage brokers got large fees as they placed the fraudulent loans with bankers who got their cut as they passed the mortgages on to the next link in the chain. That the home purchasers did not have the income to keep their payments up to date was no problem since, with the assistance of the appraisers, the value of their property was going up all the time; they could make good on the payments by refinancing rotten mortgages with rotten-er mortgages. The yet-more-rotten instrument was the adjustable rate mortgage (ARM), which in and of itself, when ethically used, is a useful financial tool.

The whole thing was too rich for words. Not only did these people clean up with the original mortgage, but more fees and more thieving hanky-panky was there for the using when refinancing time came around. The refis were low-interest ARM’s that after two or more years would reset into high-interest ARM’s, unless of course the value of the property had risen again, thus making a second refi a profitable possibility.

Profitable is hardly the apt word. High on the hog does not describe it. Last year Angelo Mozilo, the founder and boss man of Countrywide Financial Corporation, took home $114 million in his pay envelope.

Apparently the crooked-business crowd thought that their squirrel-in-the-cage financing operation would go on forever. In the end, however, the rodent could no longer keep the cage revolving and collapsed exhausted. Finally, the government stepped in to stop the spinning cage but it was too late.

What was going on was no secret. Inside the housing and finance sectors, and outside of them, there were enough people who understood the essence of this racket. Talk, often intoxicated, greedy talk, about the real estate bubble abounded. We are not looking at another Enron, a case of the books having been cooked in such a manner that it was difficult to tell that this seemingly impressive corporation was in the death rattle phase.

This baby was out in the open for all to see if they wanted to. The politicians blindfolded themselves. The home ownership rate rose to more than 69 percent of households. For practical purposes anybody and everybody in the United States who wanted to own a home could. The people who hung back seem to have been limited to those too infirm to mow a lawn. So the construction industry hummed, furniture marched out of the stores alongside of the new appliances and the wheels of commerce turned so fast they blurred.

For some hundreds of thousands of lower-income minority home seekers the whole thing was a swindle and a bad enough swindle for the Federal Trade Commission to look into what happened. These people were told by real estate agents, appraisers, mortgage brokers and bankers that when they signed on ye olde dotted line they would be buying a house.

But they were not. Their no-down-payment mortgage with its trickery terms and the sneaky fees connected with consummating the deal left the would-be home buyers without any practical hope of building up equity in the property. In essence, under the guise of selling houses, the swindlers were renting to them. The people were renting but at the same time they were their own landlords, responsible for all expenses connected with the property. A more costly form of renting would be difficult to devise. Inasmuch as some of the fattest, most prestigious financial institutions have been partners in screwing those who can least afford it, let’s hope that, lured by the scent of large class action settlements, the lawyers will swoop in to exact a dollop or two of retribution and compensation.

Who's Bad?

Who's the worst, Cheney or Rove? I personally go with Dick (just like Rove's step-daddy!)....

Karl Rove, interchangeably known as "Boy Genius" or "Turd Blossom," has left the White House. The press conference announcing his decision to resign has been given front-page treatment by most major media outlets, but the fact of the matter is the buzz surrounding Rove's departure is much ado about nothing, especially in terms of coming to grips with the remaining 16 months of the worst presidency in the history of the United States.

Rove is a domestic political marauder, the personification of a conservative movement which lacks a moral compass and has a complete disregard for facts. The master of exploiting mainstream America's predilection for news-as-entertainment, under which the likes of Rupert Murdoch can manufacture headlines out of thin air, Rove helped turn "fair and balanced" into a national joke which everyone laughs at but few actually comprehend.

Rove served as the maestro of a political-smear orchestra composed of such intellectually challenged muckrakers as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, manipulating the NASCAR/professional wrestling crowd's addiction to seedy gossip in an effort to maintain the all-important 51 percent majority needed to win elections.

Perhaps if the Democratic Party had possessed a semblance of organization and cohesion (not to mention a post-Clinton message that could be sold to a majority of America), then Rove would be but a footnote in history, known simply as the man who helped the worst governor in the history of Texas get elected. Even the self-destructive campaign run by Al Gore in 2000, in which he distanced himself from a sitting president who, despite all of his faults, would have defeated Bush in a landslide if the Constitution permitted a third term, was enough to deny Rove his beloved 51 percent -- it was Gore, not Bush, who won the majority of votes in that contest. It took a Republican governor of Florida, backed by a compliant Supreme Court, to put George W. Bush into the White House, not any genius on the part of Rove.

"Bush's Brain" may claim that it was his careful manipulation of fiction over fact that carried the 2004 election, in which the term "Swift-boating" became synonymous with political character assassination, but it was the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq which sank the Democratic Party and its candidate for president, John Kerry.

It is very difficult to unseat a president in a time of war, especially when so many Democrats voted in favor of the concept, first by buying into every post-9/11 policy put forward by the Bush administration (find me one Democrat who actually read the Patriot Act in its entirety before it was voted into law) and second by rubber-stamping the lies that led to Bush's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Remember, it was Kerry's inarticulate defense of his decision to vote in favor of granting war powers to the president that sank his election hopes, not his Vietnam War record.

Certainly, Karl Rove played a significant behind-the-scenes role in supporting Bush's war policies. The perjury trial of "Scooter" Libby forced the collective of deaf, dumb and blind pseudo-journalists who populate what is known as the mainstream media in America to recognize how pathetically duplicitous and petty the Bush administration could get when it came to defending the policies propping up the so-called Global War on Terror and the awful tragedy of Iraq. Rove's fingerprints were all over the decision by Vice President Dick Cheney to leak CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to the media in an effort to thwart the truth-telling of her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.

But that is about as deep as Rove's involvement in the two issues that will define the presidency of George W. Bush gets. While Rove might be the "genius" behind the kind of winner-takes-all dirty politics that won the Republicans a majority in Texas (and brought down the likes of Tom "The Hammer" DeLay), he was way out of his depth when it came to the reality of national security policy. Unlike unsubstantiated rumors of wrongdoing which can stain a political opponent's record for the brief moment needed to gain political advantage, regardless of what the actual truth is, the never-ending flow of dead American service members from a war based on a foundation of lies cannot be overlooked indefinitely, even by the most subservient of media outlets.

Try as Rove and his political operatives might, one cannot forever suppress the images of flag-draped caskets, row upon row of white grave markers sprouting up in cemeteries across America, or the thousands of wounded veterans left to rot in hospitals, forgotten by an administration that, with few exceptions, never knew war and used the military as an electioneering prop. Eventually, those patriotic Americans who were fooled into believing there was actually some coherent planning behind the global conflict Bush had dispatched their youths to fight and die in were bound to get wise. Rove never had the depth needed to navigate such serious waters.

Being the Brain of the most vapid, intellectually shallow president ever creates an apt epitaph for Rove's tenure at the White House. The Bush administration has never won accolades for its substance. Its best frontman, Colin Powell, self-destructed in front of the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. Powell's nemesis, Donald Rumsfeld, followed suit shortly thereafter, unable to coherently explain where Saddam Hussein had hidden all those WMD we went to war for, and ultimately telling the average foot soldier to pound sand when it came to the lack of adequate equipment needed to fight and survive in occupied Iraq.

Bush's singular appeal has been the impression of steadfastness in the eye of the storm, even if the storm is for the most part self-created. For this we must look not to "Bush's Brain," but instead peer deep into the dark recesses of the White House, where we can glimpse the awful "soul" of the president -- Dick Cheney.

The vice president is the single greatest threat to American and international security in the world today. Not Osama Bin Laden. Not the ghost of Saddam Hussein. Not Ahmadinejad or Kim Jung Il. Not al-Qaida, the Taliban, or Jose Padilla himself. Not even George W. Bush can lay claim to this title. It is Dick Cheney's alone. Operating in a never-never land of constitutional ambiguity which exists between the office of the president and the Congress of the United States, Cheney's office has made its impact felt on the policies of the United States of America as had no vice president's office before him. Granted unprecedented oversight over national security and foreign policy by executive order in early 2001, many months prior to the terror attacks of 9/11, Cheney has single-handedly steered America away from being a nation among nations (albeit superior), operating (roughly) in accordance with the rule of law, and toward its present manifestation as the new Rome, a decadent imperial power bent on global domination whatever the cost.

The absolute worst of the rot that has infected America because of the policies and actions of the Bush administration has originated from the office of the vice president. The nonsensical response to the terror attacks of 9/11, seeking a "global war" versus defending the rule of law at home and abroad, taking the lead in spreading the lies that got us involved in Iraq, legitimizing torture as a tool of American jurisprudence, advocating for warrantless wiretappings of U.S.-based communications (regardless of what the Fourth Amendment says against illegal search and seizure), and pushing for an expansion of America's global conflict into Iran--all can be traced back to the person of Cheney as the point of origin.

America today is very much engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the forces of evil. The enemy resides not abroad, however, but at home, vested in the highest offices of the land. Neither Osama Bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein threatened the life blood of the United States--the Constitution--to the extent that Cheney has. Not Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Ho Chi Minh. Not since the American Civil War has there been a constitutional crisis of the magnitude that exists today, threatening to rip the very fabric of American society apart at the seams, courtesy of Dick Cheney.

That Congress today remains relatively mute on this crisis is one of the great mysteries of our time. Perhaps the vagaries of national politics can be blamed. The Democratic majority in Congress appears to have ceded its leadership role to unelected presidential candidates who seem solely empowered to comment on current events, domestic or foreign, and who, out of fear of any misstep which could hurt their chances to seize the White House as their own, refuse to actually take a substantive stand against the policies of the Bush administration. In an effort that is curiously Rovian in the quest for electoral victory, the Democratic candidates (with a few notable exceptions) have been less than bold in their opposition to the heinous policies that are currently in place concerning Iraq, Iran, the war on terror, torture and constitutional violations--unless you count empty rhetoric.

In many ways, the leading Democrats, both those running for office and those currently holding office, are a far greater insult to American values than the conservative standard-bearers for the policies of Cheney. No one of substance takes seriously the manic ranting of the Hannity/Limbaugh/Coulter triad. These Democrats, on the other hand, have mastered the art of compromise to the point that they stand for nothing at all--this at a time in American history when the policies of the administration, derived from the dark abyss of Bush's soul, Cheney, provide the most concrete example of what we as Americans should be standing against.

The Democrats need to stand for something. Cheney has provided the sort of political ammunition that would enable them to fight, and win, a constitutional battle over the heart of America, the kind of defining struggle which I believe the vast majority of Americans would rally around. Unless the Democrats start separating themselves from the policies of the Bush administration, and take an active role in outing and suppressing the true evil that is Dick Cheney, all they will achieve in the coming years is a change in the titular political orientation of America, without the kind of deep-seated break from the failures and crimes of the past six-plus years that have taken our nation, and the world, right up to the edge of chaos.

"Bush's Brain" may be gone, but his "Soul" lives on. It is high time all of America put Dick Cheney fully in the spotlight of collective accountability, purging our nation of this scourge which has harmed us in so many ways. If there is any case for impeachment to be made against any member of the Bush administration today, it can be made against a vice president who has shamed our nation, destroyed our moral standing and broken our laws.

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Who's Bad?

But It's Not Just Here....

Chinese airline paints out logo on crashed airline to save face or for some other unacceptably stupid "reason".

Our Leaders Making Us Safer

TSA stops food, lets blade through.

Our Quislings

Malaki really loves us, us who are bringing his country peace (you know, our people dying so his don't have to or something), not mention putting him in power:

Iraq's prime minister lashed out Wednesday at U.S. criticism, saying no one has the right to impose timetables on his elected government and that his country "can find friends elsewhere."

Such gratitude! It makes the fandango all that more worthwhile....

Our Wonderful Mortgage Meltdown

Contrary to previous normal, accepted practice, Countrywide, one of the major sub-prime lenders can't renegotiate with borrowers were it so inclined to do (which really is the best thing for it financially).

Countrywide's approach to this troublesome situation might be a little skewed by its CEO who had the great, great fortune to make approximately 241 million dollars dumping his company's stock the past few years.

Meanwhile, the Big Media meme is that this is a crisis that is already passing.

Well, notwithstanding the large national homebuilders not quite believing that, there is this, which looks a lot more like a tip of the iceberg that a crisis ending:

U.S. Home Foreclosures Jump Sharply in July, Up 9 Percent From June

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The number of foreclosure filings reported in the U.S. last month jumped 93 percent from July of 2006 and rose 9 percent from June, the latest sign that homeowners are having trouble making payments and finding buyers during the national housing downturn.
There were 179,599 foreclosure filings reported during July, up from 92,845 during the same period a year ago, Irvine-based RealtyTrac Inc. said Tuesday. There were 164,644 foreclosure filings reported in June.

The national foreclosure rate in July was one filing for every 693 households, the company said.

"While 43 states experienced year-over-year increases in foreclosure activity, just five states -- California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Georgia -- accounted for more than half of the nation's total foreclosure filings," RealtyTrac Chief Executive James J. Saccacio said.

The filings include default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions.

Some properties included in the survey might have received more than one notice, if the owners have multiple mortgages.

The company did break out individual properties as part of its report for the first six months of this year, when a total of 573,397 properties reported some sort of foreclosure activity.

That represents a 58 percent jump from the 363,672 properties in the first six months of 2006 and a 32 percent increase from the 433,504 in the last six months of 2006, the firm said.

In the July report, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan accounted for the highest foreclosure rates nationwide.

Nevada posted the highest foreclosure rate: one filing for every 199 households, or more than three times the national average. It reported 5,116 filings during the month, an increase of 8 percent from June.

Georgia's foreclosure rate was more than twice the national average, with one filing for every 299 households. The state reported 12,602 foreclosure filings, up 75 percent from June.

Michigan reported 13,979 filings in July, a 39 percent spike from June.

California, Florida and Ohio were among the states with the highest number of foreclosure filings in July, RealtyTrac said.

California cities continued to dominate top metropolitan foreclosure rates.

The state reported 39,013 foreclosure filings last month, the most by any single state. However, the number of filings rose less than 1 percent from June.

The state's foreclosure rate was one filing for every 333 households, RealtyTrac said.

Florida's foreclosure filings dropped 9 percent between June and July to 19,179. The July figure, however, represents a 78 percent jump from the year-ago period.

In recent months, the mortgage industry has been battered by rising defaults and foreclosures, primarily driven by borrowers with subprime loans and adjustable rate mortgages.

Lagging home sales and flat or decreasing home prices have made it more difficult for homeowners who fall behind on payments to sell their homes and clear the debt, spurring the rise in foreclosure activity.

Loan types seeing higher delinquencies and defaults in general are home equity loans or second mortgages used to cover a downpayment, subprime loans to people with shaky credit histories, and Alt-A loans, which can include interest-only and adjustable rate mortgages sold with little or no documentation.

Meet Our Leaders' Agent

The love machine:

Roger J Stone, Jr.

Born: 1952

Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Government
Party Affiliation: Republican

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Campaign consultant, GOP dirty trickster

Longtime political operative and no stranger to dirty tricks. Worked for Chuck Colson in 1972 at the Committee to Re-Elect the President (i.e. Nixon). Helped strategize for the Reagan presidential campaign and Arlen Specter's Senate campaign. Worked on Bob Dole and Donald Trump's unsuccessful presidential campaigns. Also appears to have been helping Al Sharpton's 2004 presidential campaign, for some reason.

In 1996, Roger and his wife Nydia purportedly placed an ad in Swing Fever magazine looking for single men and couples to join them in group sex. According to reporting in the National Enquirer and the Star, the copy proclaimed:

C-161,787-DC* INSATIABLE COUPLE
We are hot, athletic and very fit. We are seeking similar couples or exceptional muscular, well hung, single men. She's 40DD-24-36 and bi. She loves to fuck hard and deep. He's 195 lbs., trim, muscular and 8" +. She prefers jocks, miliary men, and body builders. No fat people or smokers need respond. Send photo and phone. No photo, no response! We are interested in DC, VA, MD, NYC, Miami, and LA.

VOICE MAIL 12209

In August 2007, Stone vehemently denied having left the following message on the telephone answering machine of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's father:

"This is a message for Bernard Spitzer: You will be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate committee on investigations on your shady campaign loans. You will be compelled by the Senate sergeant at arms. If you resist this subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany. And there's not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son's a pathological liar will be known to all."

This despite the fact that according to caller ID logs, the call was placed from a phone number registered to Stone's apartment. Stone added: "Putting together a voice tape that sounds like me wouldn't be hard to do." (And how would he know that?)

Faux Nooz Indeed

FNC hits the campaign trail for the Republicans. Fair. Balanced. Completely fake; FNC lies from it's slogan on.

McCain Takes the Straight Talk Express to Bermuda

Josh thinks it's, well, a weird place to campaign.

But Josh must have forgotten that Bermuda remaining a tax shelter is important to, if not supporters, organizations from whom McCain undoubtedly (but with, you know, straight talk) would love to receive desperately needed contributions.

History; An Actual Iraq-Vietnam Parallel

Couldn't find a quisling that would our orders in 'Nam who could also lead the country competently.

And Our Leaders seem to have the same problem in Eye-raq.

American Justice; Why the Rest of the World is Jealous of Us

Iraq fraud whistleblowers vilified
Cases show fraud exposers have been vilified, fired, or detained for weeks

The Associated Press

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers — all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

“It was a Wal-Mart for guns,” he says. “It was all illegal and everyone knew it.”

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics “reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.”

No noble outcomes

Corruption has long plagued Iraq reconstruction. Hundreds of projects may never be finished, including repairs to the country’s oil pipelines and electricity system. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared, according to a government reconstruction audit.

Despite this staggering mess, there are no noble outcomes for those who have blown the whistle, according to a review of such cases by The Associated Press.

“If you do it, you will be destroyed,” said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

“Reconstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me, ‘Should I do this?’ And my answer is no. If they’re married, they’ll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will lose everything,” Weaver said.

They have been fired or demoted, shunned by colleagues, and denied government support in whistleblower lawsuits filed against contracting firms.

“The only way we can find out what is going on is for someone to come forward and let us know,” said Beth Daley of the Project on Government Oversight, an independent, nonprofit group that investigates corruption. “But when they do, the weight of the government comes down on them. The message is, ’Don’t blow the whistle or we’ll make your life hell.’

“It’s heartbreaking,” Daley said. “There is an even greater need for whistleblowers now. But they are made into public martyrs. It’s a disgrace. Their lives get ruined.”

One whistleblower demoted

Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse knows this only too well. As the highest-ranking civilian contracting officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she testified before a congressional committee in 2005 that she found widespread fraud in multibillion-dollar rebuilding contracts awarded to former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

Soon after, Greenhouse was demoted. She now sits in a tiny cubicle in a different department with very little to do and no decision-making authority, at the end of an otherwise exemplary 20-year career.

People she has known for years no longer speak to her.

“It’s just amazing how we say we want to remove fraud from our government, then we gag people who are just trying to stand up and do the right thing,” she says.

In her demotion, her supervisors said she was performing poorly. “They just wanted to get rid of me,” she says softly. The Army Corps of Engineers denies her claims.

“You just don’t have happy endings,” said Weaver. “She was a wonderful example of a federal employee. They just completely creamed her. In the end, no one followed up, no one cared.”

No regrets

But Greenhouse regrets nothing. “I have the courage to say what needs to be said. I paid the price,” she says.

Then there is Robert Isakson, who filed a whistleblower suit against contractor Custer Battles in 2004, alleging the company — with which he was briefly associated — bilked the U.S. government out of tens of millions of dollars by filing fake invoices and padding other bills for reconstruction work.

He and his co-plaintiff, William Baldwin, a former employee fired by the firm, doggedly pursued the suit for two years, gathering evidence on their own and flying overseas to obtain more information from witnesses. Eventually, a federal jury agreed with them and awarded a $10 million judgment against the now-defunct firm, which had denied all wrongdoing.

It was the first civil verdict for Iraq reconstruction fraud.

But in 2006, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III overturned the jury award. He said Isakson and Baldwin failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months, was part of the U.S. government.

Not a single Iraq whistleblower suit has gone to trial since.

“It’s a sad, heartbreaking comment on the system,” said Isakson, a former FBI agent who owns an international contracting company based in Alabama. “I tried to help the government, and the government didn’t seem to care.”

U.S. shows little support?

One way to blow the whistle is to file a “qui tam” lawsuit (taken from the Latin phrase “he who sues for the king, as well as for himself”) under the federal False Claims Act.

Signed by Abraham Lincoln in response to military contractors selling defective products to the Union Army, the act allows private citizens to sue on the government’s behalf.

The government has the option to sign on, with all plaintiffs receiving a percentage of monetary damages, which are tripled in these suits.

It can be a straightforward and effective way to recoup federal funds lost to fraud. In the past, the Justice Department has joined several such cases and won. They included instances of Medicare and Medicaid overbilling, and padded invoices from domestic contractors.

But the government has not joined a single quit tam suit alleging Iraq reconstruction abuse, estimated in the tens of millions. At least a dozen have been filed since 2004.

“It taints these cases,” said attorney Alan Grayson, who filed the Custer Battles suit and several others like it. “If the government won’t sign on, then it can’t be a very good case — that’s the effect it has on judges.”

The Justice Department declined comment.

Placed under guard, kept in seclusion

Most of the lawsuits are brought by former employees of giant firms. Some plaintiffs have testified before members of Congress, providing examples of fraud they say they witnessed and the retaliation they experienced after speaking up.

Julie McBride testified last year that as a “morale, welfare and recreation coordinator” at Camp Fallujah, she saw KBR exaggerate costs by double- and triple-counting the number of soldiers who used recreational facilities.

She also said the company took supplies destined for a Super Bowl party for U.S. troops and instead used them to stage a celebration for themselves.

“After I voiced my concerns about what I believed to be accounting fraud, Halliburton placed me under guard and kept me in seclusion,” she told the committee. “My property was searched, and I was specifically told that I was not allowed to speak to any member of the U.S. military. I remained under guard until I was flown out of the country.”

Halliburton and KBR denied her testimony.

She also has filed a whistleblower suit. The Justice Department has said it would not join the action. But last month, a federal judge refused a motion by KBR to dismiss the lawsuit.

'I thought I was among friends'

Donald Vance, the contractor and Navy veteran detained in Iraq after he blew the whistle on his company’s weapons sales, says he has stopped talking to the federal government.

Navy Capt. John Fleming, a spokesman for U.S. detention operations in Iraq, confirmed the detentions but said he could provide no further details because of the lawsuit.

According to their suit, Vance and Ertel gathered photographs and documents, which Vance fed to Chicago FBI agent Travis Carlisle for six months beginning in October 2005. Carlisle, reached by phone at Chicago’s FBI field office, declined comment. An agency spokesman also would not comment.

The Iraqi company has since disbanded, according the suit.

Vance said things went terribly wrong in April 2006, when he and Ertel were stripped of their security passes and confined to the company compound.

Panicking, Vance said, he called the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where hostage experts got on the phone and told him “you’re about to be kidnapped. Lock yourself in a room with all the weapons you can get your hands on.”’

The military sent a Special Forces team to rescue them, Vance said, and the two men showed the soldiers where the weapons caches were stored. At the embassy, the men were debriefed and allowed to sleep for a few hours. “I thought I was among friends,” Vance said.

An unspoken Baghdad rule

The men said they were cuffed and hooded and driven to Camp Cropper, where Vance was held for nearly three months and his colleague for a little more than a month. Eventually, their jailers said they were being held as security internees because their employer was suspected of selling weapons to terrorists and insurgents, the lawsuit said.

The prisoners said they repeatedly told interrogators to contact Carlisle in Chicago. “One set of interrogators told us that Travis Carlisle doesn’t exist. Then some others would say, ’He says he doesn’t know who you are,”’ Vance said.

Released first was Ertel, who has returned to work in Iraq for a different company. Vance said he has never learned why he was held longer. His own interrogations, he said, seemed focused on why he reported his information to someone outside Iraq.

And then one day, without explanation, he was released.

“They drove me to Baghdad International Airport and dumped me,” he said.

When he got home, he decided to never call the FBI again. He called a lawyer, instead.

“There’s an unspoken rule in Baghdad,” he said. “Don’t snitch on people and don’t burn bridges.”

For doing both, Vance said, he paid with 97 days of his life.

Link.

All Hail Our Victorious Imperial Leader!

Link.

Our Deluded Big Media

Alterman agrees with me, but with facts:

Thomas Patterson of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government did a study of US news media from 1980 to 1999 and found that news stories that had no clear connection to policy issues increased from less than 35 percent of all stories in 1980 to roughly 50 percent in 2000, and taking all news outlets into account, approximately 25 percent of news stories contained a moderate-to-high level of sensationalism in 1980 compared with nearly 40 percent in 2000. And yet the period Patterson studied was a Golden Age compared with the present.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Index for the first week in June of this year, for instance, the fifth biggest story of the week was the on-again, off-again incarceration of Paris Hilton. On cable, Paris ranked number three and on radio, four. Still, her story was a piker compared with the death of the no-less-famous-for-no-good-reason Anna Nicole Smith. According to PEJ, during February 8 and 9, coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death made up roughly 60 percent of the morning news shows. To say nothing of the wall-to-wall cable coverage it received. And yet, according to Pew, viewer interest in Smith's death ranked in the bottom third of stories covered that quarter, not only way below the number of people who claim to follow closely the news about Iraq but also below those who continue to maintain a deep interest in global warming. (Cable's attention to the Iraq War ranged from a mere 8 percent of coverage on Fox News to 18 percent on CNN during the second quarter of 2007.)

No less misguided is the news business's pursuit of a public it believes has shifted rightward. While it may be a staple of punditry to assume Americans have grown more conservative in recent decades, the data disagree. As political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson observe, "It is striking that across all of the major left-right issues, one is hard pressed to find any evidence that Americans are markedly more conservative today than they were in the recent (and even relatively distant) past." No doubt the political system has moved rightward. Careful calculations by political economists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal demonstrate that the average Republican member of Congress was 73 percent more conservative in 2003 than his 1973 counterpart, and his Senate colleague was approximately twice as right-wing. While the Poole/Rosenthal calculations find the average 2003 Democratic member of Congress to be 28 percent more liberal than his early 1970s counterpart, this is almost entirely due to the sudden political extinction of the party's conservative Southern wing. Non-Southern Democrats have actually traveled a bit to the right. Meanwhile, on most issues, the majority of Americans have actually moved slightly leftward--leaving the center of gravity of the political system well to the right of the public on issue after issue.

What appears to be going on here is not a rise in the size of the audience that prizes Fox News-style nonsense. Rather, it's that the proportion of people who get their news from traditional sources has sunk significantly. Given their relative paucity of production values, talk-radio and cable news programs can be profitably sustained with audiences that are a fraction of those required by broadcast and entertainment programs. The fact that most Americans find themselves increasingly alienated from the system that Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh have pioneered has not led their competitors to rethink the content of their broadcasts, only to focus more intensely on what remains of their diminishing audiences. Given the tendency of so many reporters to follow the herd news of the day--Edwards's haircut, Hillary's cleavage--the net result is a perversion of our political process in pursuit of an understandably alienated American public.

Can you imagine a worse way to run a democracy?

The Golden Era Our Leaders Have Brought Us; Or Duh News

Home prices about to tank. (I exaggerate but a little.)

Our allies in Afghanistan increase poppy production (for greater heroin yields -- and thus lower prices for junkies!).

A new lie from Rudy: He falsely insinuates he became mayor with a deficit and left office with a surplus.

Thank God George W. Bush is president! (And here too.)

About This Re-Design....

The last design, with the blocky letters and Screaming Yellow Zonkers coloring was done, in great part as an accommodation to Dr. Jerry Bails (more here), founder of comic book fandom and, more importantly, a true comrade and a mensch (and a goy explains how to be one here). (And a terrific biographical esssay is here.)

Dr. Bails passed away last year, the Friday after Thanksgiving. We had met, to the extent we had met, through (unsurprisingly) a comic book history email list or two. When health permitted, he was an active participant. Although he knew, like, everything relating to the subject matter of the list, he occasionally slipped in the odd political observation. (They were too factually based to be opinions.) It was obvious that his politics were what you could call sympathetic to this list. I sent him the URL for the then-iteration of this blog and he advised that reading was difficult for him so I redesigned it to be as easy to read as possible. Which, unfortunately, wasn't easy enough. And, somewhat unsurprisingly, Dr. Bails did not go into the scope of illnesses, leaving it just as, you know, a simple vision thing, like the other old people get, part of aging; it was a lot more than that....

Anyway, the prior design failed to serve its purpose and was too, well, playful looking. So now for something a little more mature....

Here's to you, J.B.!

America: Freedom to be Deprived of Freedom, Freedom to be Forced to Live in Fear

Schneier; the nation's chief spook confesses -- because he knows the story won't get much play and no one will do anything about it anyway:

Mike McConnell, U.S. National Intelligence Director, gave an interesting interview to the El Paso Times.

I don't think he's ever been so candid before. For example, he admitted that the nation's telcos assisted the NSA in their massive eavesdropping efforts. We already knew this, of course, but the government has steadfastly maintained that either confirming or denying this would compromise national security.

There are, of course, moments of surreality. He said that it takes 200 hours to prepare a FISA warrant. Ryan Single calculated that since there were 2,167 such warrants in 2006, there must be "218 government employees with top secret clearances sitting in rooms, writing only FISA warrants." Seems unlikely.

But most notable is this bit:

Q. So you're saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That's what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it's a democratic process and sunshine's a good thing. We need to have the debate.

Link with link.

Our Leaders' Puppet in Iraq is Attacked by Our Leaders' Agents

Of course, it's okay for Republicans to do it....

Greenwald discusses it all....

Our Beloved Leader Continues the Radical Right Wing Tradition of Lying about Vietnam, of which He has No Experience or Knowledge

The Chickenhawk-in-Chief (I just made that up!) is debunked here.

And then there's this, for those not into clicking on links to history:

Bush's Bogus Vietnam History Kills

By Robert Parry
August 23, 2007

It is often said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But a much worse fate may await countries whose leaders distort and falsify history. Such countries are doomed to experience even bloodier miscalculations.

That was the case with Germany after World War I when Adolf Hitler’s Nazis built a political movement based in part on the myth that weak politicians in Berlin had stabbed brave German troops in the back when they were on the verge of victory.

And it appears to be the case again today as President George W. Bush presents the history of the Vietnam War as a Rambo movie with the heroic narrative that if only the U.S. military had stuck it out, the war would have been won.

Or, more likely, the black wall of the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial would stretch most of the way to the U.S. Capitol.

After hearing his selective historical rendition of the Vietnam experience in his Aug. 22 address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, one is tempted to ask Bush what he would have done as President in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Presumably, Bush would have prolonged or escalated the Vietnam War, although it’s doubtful he would have called up the Texas Air National Guard where he was safely ensconced, while skipping his flight physical and seeking an early discharge.

In his speech, Bush justified an open-ended Vietnam War by citing the carnage that followed the U.S. military withdrawal.

“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields,’” Bush said.

In Bush’s version of history, condemnation should fall on Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford for making the painful decisions that eventually extricated the United States from the Vietnam quagmire – rather than on Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon for inserting or keeping U.S. troops in the middle of the Indochinese civil war.

Bush also ignores the carnage that was inflicted by U.S. aerial bombings and massive firepower. Historians estimate that some two million Indochinese were killed during the war, along with about 57,000 American soldiers.

Also, by invading Cambodia and authorizing secret carpet-bombing of the countryside, President Nixon spread the chaos into that politically fragile country, opening the door first to a military dictatorship and then to the rise of the fanatical Khmer Rouge.

Friends, Not Enemies

In his historical account, Bush leaves out, too, the longer-term reality and the fact that the great communist enemies of Asia – China and Vietnam – did not turn out to be the strategic threats to the United States that Cold Warriors insisted they would be. Dominoes did not fall all across Asia.

Indeed, today’s biggest threats from China appear to be the quality of the cheap goods it manufactures for American companies and its ownership of large quantities of U.S. government bonds. Bush also has exchanged friendly visits with the leaders of Vietnam.

But that history and reality disappear in Bush’s selective account. Just as he cherry-picked intelligence on Iraq to justify his 2003 invasion, he is selecting what facts from history serve his political ends now.

In his VFW speech, Bush also continued his practice of baiting critics of his Iraq War policy as essentially imbecilic and anti-American. He accused them of believing “that if the United States would just leave a place like Iraq those who kill our troops or target civilians would no longer threaten us.”

In truth, Iraq War critics have argued not that al-Qaeda would stop being a threat but that Bush’s policies are playing into al-Qaeda’s hands. Not only did the U.S. invasion of Iraq divert U.S. forces from their pursuit of Osama bin Laden, but the Iraq War has proved to be a boon to al-Qaeda in recruiting, fundraising and regrouping for new terrorist attacks.

The evidence is that al-Qaeda actually wants the United States to remain bogged down in Iraq indefinitely so the organization can continue to exploit the American occupation.

In letters to Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda leaders, holed up along the Pakistani-Afghan border, warned that al-Qaeda’s position in Iraq might collapse if the United States left, removing both the magnet attracting young recruits and the glue holding together the fragile coalition between foreign jihadists and Iraqi nationalists.

A July 2005 letter attributed to al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri urged Zarqawi to talk up the idea of an Islamic “caliphate,” so the young jihadists, drawn to Iraq to fight the Americans, wouldn’t just “lay down their weapons and silence the fighting zeal” once the Americans left.

The “Zawahiri letter,” which was intercepted by U.S. intelligence, also predicted that an American departure would force the depleted force of al-Qaeda fighters into a desperate battle simply to carve out an enclave inside Iraq.

In a December 2005 letter, another top aide to Osama bin Laden, known as “Atiyah,” lectured Zarqawi on the need to act more respectfully toward Iraqi Sunni leaders so al-Qaeda could put down deeper roots in Iraq.

Atiyah emphasized the importance of keeping U.S. forces trapped in Iraq. “Prolonging the war is in our interest,” Atiyah wrote in a letter that was discovered by U.S. forces after Zarqawi’s death in June 2006. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]

Bush-bin Laden Symbiosis

By prolonging the Iraq War now, Bush is doing exactly what al-Qaeda wants. “As long as I’m Commander in Chief, we will fight to win,” Bush told the cheering VFW crowd.

In other words, Bush and the terrorists share a symbiotic relationship with Bush using the “war on terror” to expand his presidential powers at home and bin Laden exploiting the U.S. occupation of Iraq to enhance his standing in the Islamic world.

Now Bush has mixed in the emotional issue of the Vietnam War, as his father did during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Near the end of that standoff with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, President George H.W. Bush spurned a Russian plan for getting Iraqi forces to withdraw peacefully from Kuwait. Instead, Bush wanted a successful ground war to exorcise the demons of Vietnam from the American psyche.

After U.S. ground forces administered a 100-hour drubbing to the overmatched Iraqi troops, the elder George Bush declared in his first post-war remarks, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” [For details, see our new book, Neck Deep.]

Still, the elder George Bush stopped U.S. forces before they could march up the Euphrates River and capture Baghdad. He recognized that a military occupation of Iraq would alienate the Arab world and would sink the United States into another Vietnam-style quagmire, which could again embitter the American people about military adventures.

Sixteen years later, however, the specter of Vietnam has returned to hover over the deserts of Iraq, this time conjured up by the younger George Bush to justify an open-ended war, a war he is determined to pursue regardless of the number of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis who die and the number of new Islamic terrorists it creates.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there.

Juan Cole on Our Beloved Leader as a Leader

Pitching the Imperial Republic
Bonaparte and Bush on Deck

By Juan Cole

French Egypt and American Iraq can be considered bookends on the history of modern imperialism in the Middle East. The Bush administration's already failed version of the conquest of Iraq is, of course, on everyone's mind; while the French conquest of Egypt, now more than two centuries past, is all too little remembered, despite having been led by Napoleon Bonaparte, whose career has otherwise hardly languished in obscurity. There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures, not least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery, invoking the spirit of liberty, security, and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts.

The French general and the American president do not much resemble one another -- except perhaps in the way the prospect of conquest in the Middle East appears to have put fire in their veins and in their unappealing tendency to believe their own propaganda (or at least to keep repeating it long after it became completely implausible). Both leaders invaded and occupied a major Arabic-speaking Muslim country; both harbored dreams of a "Greater Middle East"; both were surprised to find themselves enmeshed in long, bitter, debilitating guerrilla wars. Neither genuinely cared about grassroots democracy, but both found its symbols easy to invoke for gullible domestic publics. Substantial numbers of their new subjects quickly saw, however, that they faced occupations, not liberations.

My own work on Bonaparte's lost year in Egypt began in the mid-1990s, and I had completed about half of Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East before September 11, 2001. I had no way of knowing then that a book on such a distant, scholarly subject would prove an allegory for Bush's Iraq War. Nor did I guess that the United States would give old-style colonialism in the Middle East one last try, despite clear signs that the formerly colonized would no longer put up with such acts and had, in the years since World War II, gained the means to resist them.

The Republic Militant Goes to War

In June of 1798, as his enormous flotilla -- 36,000 soldiers, thousands of sailors, and hundreds of scientists on 12 ships of the line -- swept inexorably toward the Egyptian coast, the young General Napoleon Bonaparte issued a grandiose communiqué to the bewildered and seasick troops he was about to march into the desert without canteens or reasonable supplies of water. He declared, "Soldiers! You are about to undertake a conquest, the effects of which on civilization and commerce are incalculable."

The prediction was as tragically inaccurate in its own way as the pronouncement George W. Bush issued some two centuries later, on May 1, 2003, also from the deck of a great ship of the line, the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. "Today," he said, "we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians."

Both men were convinced that their invasions were announcing new epochs in human history. Of the military vassals of the Ottoman Empire who then ruled Egypt, Bonaparte predicted: "The Mameluke Beys who favor exclusively English commerce, whose extortions oppress our merchants, and who tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile, a few days after our arrival will no longer exist."

Bonaparte's laundry list of grievances about them consisted of three charges. First, the beys were, in essence, enablers of France's primary enemy at that time, the British monarchy which sought to strangle the young French republic in its cradle. Second, the rulers of Egypt were damaging France's own commerce by extorting taxes and bribes from its merchants in Cairo and Alexandria. Third, the Mamluks ruled tyrannically, having never been elected, and oppressed their subjects whom Bonaparte intended to liberate.

This holy trinity of justifications for imperialism -- that the targeted state is collaborating with an enemy of the republic, is endangering the positive interests of the nation, and lacks legitimacy because its rule is despotic -- would all be trotted out over the subsequent two centuries by a succession of European and American leaders whenever they wanted to go on the attack. One implication of these familiar rhetorical turns of phrase has all along been that democracies have a license to invade any country they please, assuming it has the misfortune to have an authoritarian regime.

George W. Bush, of course, hit the same highlights in his "mission accomplished" speech, while announcing on the Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" in Iraq "had ended." "The liberation of Iraq," he proclaimed, "is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding." He put Saddam Hussein's secular, Arab nationalist Baath regime and the radical Muslim terrorists of al-Qaeda under the sign of September 11th, insinuating that Iraq was allied with the primary enemy of the United States and so posed an urgent menace to its security. (In fact, captured Baath Party documents show that Saddam's fretting security forces, on hearing that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had entered Iraq, put out an all points bulletin on him, imagining -- not entirely correctly -- that he had al-Qaeda links.) Likewise, Bush promised that Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction" (which existed only in his own fevered imagination) would be tracked down, again implying that Iraq posed a threat to the interests and security of the U.S., just as Bonaparte had claimed that the Mamluks menaced France.

According to the president, Saddam's overthrown government had lacked legitimacy, while the new Iraqi government, to be established by a foreign power, would truly represent the conquered population. "We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq," Bush pledged, "as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people." Bonaparte, too, established governing councils at the provincial and national level, staffing them primarily with Sunni clergymen, declaring them more representative of the Egyptian people than the beys and emirs of the slave soldiery who had formerly ruled that province of the Ottoman Empire.

Liberty as Tyranny

For a democracy to conduct a brutal military occupation against another country in the name of liberty seems, on the face of it, too contradictory to elicit more than hoots of derision at the hypocrisy of it all. Yet, the militant republic, ready to launch aggressive war in the name of "democracy," is everywhere in modern history, despite the myth that democracies do not typically wage wars of aggression. Ironically, some absolutist regimes, like those of modern Iran, were remarkably peaceable, if left alone by their neighbors. In contrast, republican France invaded Belgium, Holland, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Egypt in its first decade (though it went on the offensive in part in response to Austrian and Prussian moves to invade France). The United States attacked Mexico, the Seminoles and other Native polities, Hawaii, the Spanish Empire, the Philippines, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in just the seven-plus decades from 1845 to the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I.

Freedom and authoritarianism are nowadays taken to be stark antonyms, the provinces of heroes and monsters. Those closer to the birth of modern republics were comforted by no such moral clarity. In Danton's Death, the young Romantic playwright Georg Büchner depicted the radical French revolutionary and proponent of executing enemies of the Republic, Maximilien Robespierre, whipping up a Parisian crowd with the phrase, "The revolutionary regime is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." And nowhere has liberty proved more oppressive than when deployed against a dictatorship abroad; for, as Büchner also had that famed "incorruptible" devotee of state terror observe, "In a Republic only republicans are citizens; Royalists and foreigners are enemies."

That sunlit May afternoon on the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush seconded Büchner's Robespierre. "Because of you," he exhorted the listening sailors of an aircraft carrier whose planes had just dropped 1.6 million pounds of ordnance on Iraq, "our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free."

Security for the republic had already proved ample justification to launch a war the previous March, even though Iraq was a poor, weak, ramshackle Third World country, debilitated by a decade of sanctions imposed by the United Nations and the United States, without so much as potable drinking water or an air force. Similarly, the Mamluks of Egypt -- despite the sky-high taxes and bribes they demanded of some French merchants -- hardly constituted a threat to French security.

The overthrow of a tyrannical regime and the liberation of an oppressed people were constant refrains in the shipboard addresses of both the general and the president, who felt that the liberated owed them a debt of gratitude. Bonaparte lamented that the beys "tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile"; or, as one of his officers, Captain Horace Say, opined, "The people of Egypt were most wretched. How will they not cherish the liberty we are bringing them?" Similarly, Bush insisted, "Men and women in every culture need liberty like they need food and water and air. Everywhere that freedom arrives, humanity rejoices; and everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear."

Not surprisingly, expectations that the newly conquered would exhibit gratitude to their foreign occupiers cropped up repeatedly in the dispatches and letters of men on the spot who advocated a colonial forward policy. President Bush put this dramatically in 2007, long after matters had not proceeded as expected: "We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That's the problem here in America: They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq."

Liberty in this two-century old rhetorical tradition, moreover, was more than just a matter of rights and the rule of law. Proponents of various forms of liberal imperialism saw tyranny as a source of poverty, since arbitrary rulers could just usurp property at will and so make economic activity risky, as well as opening the public to crushing and arbitrary taxes that held back commerce. The French quartermaster Francois Bernoyer wrote of the Egyptian peasantry: "Their dwellings are adobe huts, which prosperity, the daughter of liberty, will now allow them to abandon." Bush took up the same theme on the Abraham Lincoln: "Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life."

"Heads Must Roll"

In both eighteenth century Egypt and twenty-first century Iraq, the dreary reality on the ground stood as a reproach to, if not a wicked satire upon, these high-minded pronouncements. The French landed at the port of Alexandria on July 1, 1798. Two and a half weeks later, as the French army advanced along the Nile toward Cairo, a unit of Gen. Jean Reynier's division met opposition from 1,800 villagers, many armed with muskets. Sgt. Charles Francois recalled a typical scene. After scaling the village walls and "firing into those crowds," killing "about 900 men," the French confiscated the villagers' livestock -- "camels, donkeys, horses, eggs, cows, sheep" -- then "finished burning the rest of the houses, or rather the huts, so as to provide a terrible object lesson to these half-savage and barbarous people."

On July 24, Bonaparte's Army of the Orient entered Cairo and he began reorganizing his new subjects. He grandiosely established an Egyptian Institute for the advancement of science and gave thought to reforming police, courts, and law. But terror lurked behind everything he did. He wrote Gen. Jacques Menou, who commanded the garrison at the Mediterranean port of Rosetta, saying, "The Turks [Egyptians] can only be led by the greatest severity. Every day I cut off five or six heads in the streets of Cairo.... [T]o obey, for them, is to fear." (Mounting severed heads on poles for viewing by terrified passers-by was another method the French used in Egypt...)

That August, the Delta city of Mansura rose up against a small French garrison of about 120 men, chasing them into the countryside, tracking the blue coats down, and methodically killing all but two of them. In early September, the Delta village of Sonbat, inhabited in part by Bedouin of the western Dirn tribe, also rose up against the Europeans. Bonaparte instructed one of his generals, "Burn that village! Make a terrifying example of it." After the French army had indeed crushed the rebellious peasants and chased away the Bedouin, Gen. Jean-Antoine Verdier reported back to Bonaparte with regard to Sonbat, "You ordered me to destroy this lair. Very well, it no longer exists."

The most dangerous uprisings confronting the French were, however, in Cairo. In October, much of the city mobilized to attack the more than 20,000 French troops occupying the capital. The revolt was especially fierce in the al-Husayn district, where the ancient al-Azhar madrassa (or seminary) trained 14,000 students, where the city's most sacred mosque stood, and where wealth was concentrated in the merchants and guilds of the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. At the same time, the peasants and Bedouin of the countryside around Cairo rose in rebellion, attacking the small garrisons that had been deployed to pacify them.

Bonaparte put down this Egyptian "revolution" with the utmost brutality, subjecting urban crowds to artillery barrages. He may have had as many rebels executed in the aftermath as were killed in the fighting. In the countryside, his officers' launched concerted campaigns to decimate insurgent villages. At one point, the French are said to have brought 900 heads of slain insurgents to Cairo in bags and ostentatiously dumped them out before a crowd in one of that city's major squares to instill Cairenes with terror. (Two centuries later, the American public would come to associate decapitations by Muslim terrorists in Iraq with the ultimate in barbarism, but even then hundreds such beheadings were not carried out at once.)

The American deployment of terror against the Iraqi population has, of course, dwarfed anything the French accomplished in Egypt by orders of magnitude. After four mercenaries, one a South African, were killed in Falluja in March of 2004 and their bodies desecrated, President Bush is alleged to have said "heads must roll" in retribution.

An initial attack on the city faltered when much of the Iraqi government threatened to resign and it was clear major civilian casualties would result. The crushing of the city was, however, simply put off until after the American presidential election in November. When the assault, involving air power and artillery, came, it was devastating, damaging two-thirds of the city's buildings and turning much of its population into refugees. (As a result, thousands of Fallujans still live in the desert in tent villages with no access to clean water.)

Bush must have been satisfied. Heads had rolled. More often, faced with opposition, the U.S. Air Force simply bombed already-occupied cities, a technology Bonaparte (mercifully) lacked. The strategy of ruling by terror and swift, draconian punishment for acts of resistance was, however, the same in both cases.

The British sank much of the French fleet on August 1, 1798, marooning Bonaparte and his troops in their newly conquered land. In the spring of 1799, the French army tried -- and failed -- to break out through Syria; after which Bonaparte himself chose the better part of valor. He slipped out of Egypt late that summer, returning to France. There, he would swiftly stage a coup and come to power as First Consul, giving him the opportunity to hone his practice of bringing freedom to other countries -- this time in Europe. By 1801, joint British-Ottoman forces had defeated the French in Egypt, who were transported back to their country on British vessels. This first Western invasion of the Middle East in modern times had ended in serial disasters that Bonaparte would misrepresent to the French public as a series of glorious triumphs.

Ending the Era of Liberal Imperialism

Between 1801 and 2003 stretched endless decades in which colonialism proved a plausible strategy for European powers in the Middle East, including the French enterprise in Algeria (1830-1962) and the British veiled protectorate over Egypt (1882-1922). In these years, European militaries and their weaponry were so advanced, and the means of resistance to which Arab peasants had access so limited, that colonial governments could be imposed.

That imperial moment passed with celerity after World War II, in part because the masses of the Third World joined political parties, learned to read, and -- with how-to-do-it examples all around them -- began to mount political resistance to foreign occupations of every sort. While the twenty-first century American arsenal has many fancy, exceedingly destructive toys in it, nothing has changed with regard to the ability of colonized peoples to network socially and, sooner or later, push any foreign occupying force out.

Bonaparte and Bush failed because both launched their operations at moments when Western military and technological superiority was not assured. While Bonaparte's army had better artillery and muskets, the Egyptians had a superb cavalry and their old muskets were serviceable enough for purposes of sniping at the enemy. They also had an ally with advanced weaponry and the desire to use it -- the British Navy.

In 2007, the high-tech U.S. military -- as had been true in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as was true for the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- is still vulnerable to guerrilla tactics and effective low-tech weapons of resistance such as roadside bombs. Even more effective has been the guerrillas' social warfare, their success in making Iraq ungovernable through the promotion of clan and sectarian feuds, through targeted bombings and other attacks, and through sabotage of the Iraqi infrastructure.

From the time of Bonaparte to that of Bush, the use of the rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny, of uplift versus decadence, appears to have been a constant among imperialists from republics -- and has remained domestically effective in rallying support for colonial wars. The despotism (but also the weakness) of the Mamluks and of Saddam Hussein proved sirens practically calling out for Western interventions. According to the rhetoric of liberal imperialism, tyrannical regimes are always at least potentially threats to the Republic, and so can always be fruitfully overthrown in favor of rule by a Western military. After all, that military is invariably imagined as closer to liberty since it serves an elected government. (Intervention is even easier to justify if the despots can be portrayed, however implausibly, as allied with an enemy of the republic.)

For both Bush and Bonaparte, the genteel diction of liberation, rights, and prosperity served to obscure or justify a major invasion and occupation of a Middle Eastern land, involving the unleashing of slaughter and terror against its people. Military action would leave towns destroyed, families displaced, and countless dead. Given the ongoing carnage in Iraq, President Bush's boast that, with "new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians," now seems not just hollow but macabre. The equation of a foreign military occupation with liberty and prosperity is, in the cold light of day, no less bizarre than the promise of war with virtually no civilian casualties.

It is no accident that many of the rhetorical strategies employed by George W. Bush originated with Napoleon Bonaparte, a notorious spinmeister and confidence man. At least Bonaparte looked to the future, seeing clearly the coming breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the likelihood that European Powers would be able to colonize its provinces. Bonaparte's failure in Egypt did not forestall decades of French colonial success in Algeria and Indochina, even if that era of imperial triumph could not, in the end, be sustained in the face of the political and social awakening of the colonized. Bush's neocolonialism, on the other hand, swam against the tide of history, and its failure is all the more criminal for having been so predictable.

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