The "New True" still smells like smoke

December 7th, 2006

Baker and Gates … and a pouty Dubby … and a same-old,same-old scenario. It’s not the new mandate that we wanted … but it’s the one we expected. This Pat Oliphant cartoon for 12/7 tells the tale …

Feingold tells the truth about the war, below, to Friend Keith — hope you can stream; Ray McGovern does too, on the listless Gates confirmation. We have challenges … we have moved from years of extreme emergency to a period of emergency, still … but at least there is now a Progressive voice, and the voice we use is no longer considered traitorous to any but the radical Right and the perpetually fearful.

The will of the people is still being ignored … revolution is still in the future … but the ground is being ploughed for it, day by day. [And the recently reported 100,000 contractors in Iraq are still pulling in the bucks.]

Jude

Feingold Cuts Through The ISG Hype on Countdown
Jamie Holly
Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
[open for video snip]

Keith Olbermann had Russ Feingold on to give his assessment of the now very famous Iraq Study Group report.

Feingold said what I have felt all day. This report does not give us a clear path in Iraq and leaves the future of the war up in the air. Even worse is the fact that we have lost 10 more soldiers today and the administration needs more time to figure out what to do. Iraq sure doesn’t need more time
to slip into anarchy - it gets worse by the day.

Hey, We Got Beat Fair and Square
Mike Whitney
Dec 7 2006

The hearings for Robert Gates were about as weird as it gets.

Gates wasn’t asked one tough question the whole time. It was all a meaningless formality. Besides, Gates had all the qualifications the senate was looking for.

In other words, he wasn’t Rumsfeld and that’s all that mattered.

For Gates it was more like Coronation Day than a serious inquiry into past indiscretions. Did anyone care about his involvement in Iran-Contra and his propensity to “fix the intelligence to fit the policy” or were they too busy showering him with praise?

And, what happened to our tough new Democratic majority? Did the midterm elections really change anything?

Oh, yeah; we traded a rubber-stamp Republican congress for a rubber-stamp Democratic congress. Now that’s progress.

No one bothered to ask Gates how he felt about military tribunals, although that will be one of his many responsibilities as Secretary of Defense.

And, no one asked him about Guantanamo Bay, or habeas corpus, or extraordinary rendition, or deploying the military inside the US, or covert assassination programs, or collecting information on American citizens, or placing propaganda in the foreign press.

Not one senator was even curious to know if he would continue to spy on Quakers, antiwar protestors or peace activists. And what about terror suspects; will he give them a fair hearing in front of a federal judge or run them through Rummy’s Star Chamber?

These are important questions, but they never showed up on the senatorial radar.

Why?

Because the rights of “We the People” don’t amount to a hill-o-beans and the politicians don’t give a hoot if we know it or not.

What really matters is Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq. That’s why Rep. Steny Hoyer muscled out John Murtha as House Majority Leader. And that’s why the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep Silvestre Reyes, wants to send another 30,000 troops to the Iraqi sinkhole.

The Democrats won’t get us out of Iraq. They’re already arming the war-donkey for another 4 years.

And it’s no different with the Baker group either.

Sure there’s plenty of gloom and doom in the report, but its all window-dressing. We’re not pulling-out. Heck no! Baker just wants to reduce troop levels to patch up the army and bolster public support for the next big bloodbath.

“Let’s talk to our enemies,” Baker opines. “Let’s talk to Iran”.

Okay. But, I’ll tell you what they’ll say. They’ll say:

“Your time is up, George W. Bush. You just did us the biggest favor anyone could ever dream of. You crushed our enemies in Afghanistan and destroyed our arch-rival, Saddam Hussein. You’re army is overextended, your people are fed up, and you’ve spent zillions of dollars that you’ll never see again. On top of that, you’ve thrown your support behind our main agent, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who runs the most feared death squad in all of Iraq; The Badr Brigade”

“Thank you, Great Satan. How can we ever repay you?”

Baker is a smooth-talking attorney and a good diplomat, but he won’t get us out of this mess. His hands are tied. Besides, there’s nothing he can do.

There’s nothing anyone can do. Its not a matter of whether we keep 70,000 or 140,000 troops in Iraq. The troop-size is irrelevant.

The place is unraveling!

Why don’t the American people understand that?

Iran can’t fix it. Syria can’t fix it. No one can fix it.

Bush can either follow Baker’s advice or go ahead and do it his own way; it won’t make a damn bit of difference. The outcome will be exactly the same.

Events on the ground are outpacing all of the political posturing and decision-making. In fact, the Baker report is probably already obsolete.

Bush started a brushfire that’s going to zip right across the entire Middle East taking down all the US puppets on the way.

Yee-hah! Isn’t liberation fun?

But what happens when all of our Arab gas station attendants join the resistance and turn off the oil spigot? Won’t that put a hurtin’ on our economy?

Maybe we should’ve thought about that first?

Baker thinks he can stop this madness; this worm of anarchy that is sweeping through Iraq, but he’s dreaming. “Democracy is on the march!” The entire region is sliding towards chaos. By the time the tsunami hits Saudi Arabia even the impervious Bush will be pacing the deck.

The Baker Commission is just a finger in the dike. They can keep braying about “enhanced diplomatic and political efforts”, but that’s just because they’ve run out of options?

The military option flopped. Now what; flatten every city from Baghdad to the Syrian border? It wouldn’t work anyway; just look at Falluja. The Marines want another 20,000 troops just to maintain order in al-Anbar Province and THEY’VE ALREAY REDUCED THE WHOLE AREA TO RUBBLE.

What’s next; bomb the rubble into finely-ground sand?

Hey, we got beat fair and square. Now, let’s pack it in.

Like the report says: “The ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing”. The relentless aerial bombardment and the massive counterinsurgency operations have achieved their objective; the country is in a state of collapse.

Isn’t that what Bush wanted?

Iraq will never recover from this war and neither will America.

Even the strongest country can only suffer the choices of idiots for so long.

‘Centrist’ Democrats Want It Both Ways
John R. MacArthur
Wednesday, December 6, 2006 by the Providence Journal (Rhode
Island)

Sometimes it’s great to be wrong. When the Democrats took the House and the Senate — contrary to my published expectations — I breathed a sigh of relief. So what if James Webb is a pulp-fiction-writing former Reaganite. The senator-elect from Virginia and his Democratic colleagues have pledged renewed scrutiny of the Iraq catastrophe, and that’s reason enough to celebrate.

Then again, was my pessimism so misguided? I wanted the Democrats to win so they might get us out of Iraq, but I thought that they would fall short because of their steadfast refusal to condemn the war with a unified voice. Too often during the campaign, I couldn’t tell the difference between the Democratic and the Republican positions on Iraq.

Take the race in Indiana’s 2nd District, where Joe Donnelly, the Democrat, unseated the incumbent Republican, Chris Chocola. During one of their debates, Donnelly explained his position on Iraq as follows: “What we need is leadership in Washington that is as good as our troops. We can’t walk out of Iraq. We have to stabilize that country, and we have to win.” Sounds like “stay the course” to me.

Now, a month into the new Democratic majority, it’s possible to conclude that Americans voted for oversight — and the more distant hope of withdrawal from Iraq — without fully understanding how pro-war (or if you prefer, anti-anti-war) the opposition party really is.

To analyze this paradox it’s necessary to consider the work of Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D.-Ill.), the hatchetman for Bill and Hillary Clinton and boss of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Emanuel labored hard to keep strongly anti-war candidates off the Democratic line and slate Iraq equivocators instead.

Emanuel’s most publicized recruit was Tammy Duckworth, the former Army helicopter pilot who lost both her legs in Iraq. With national-party backing, Duckworth defeated the more anti-war Christine Cegelis in the primary in Illinois’s 6th District (Senator Clinton’s native grounds). But despite her martyrdom, Duckworth’s cautiously critical position on Iraq (”we can’t just pull up stakes and create a security vacuum”) wasn’t enough to defeat the Republican Peter Roskam in the general election.

Of the 22 Democratic candidates initially backed by Emanuel and his sponsors in the Clinton machine, only one, Peter Welch in Vermont, favored speedy withdrawal from Iraq. Welch won easily. Of the other 21, only 8 were victorious last month. And one of Emanuel’s original picks, Steve Filson, didn’t make it past his anti-war primary opponent, Jerry McNerney, who prevailed decisively over the incumbent Republican in California’s 11th District.

Before the election, Emanuel and his Senate counterpart, Charles Schumer, pleaded “pragmatism” — that the Democrats couldn’t be seen as the party of “cut and run” if they wanted to attract “moderate” voters. After the election, Emanuel made a quick costume change, and brazenly retailed a story to The New York Times that portrayed him as the architect of a “brilliant” strategy that exploited the mounting anti-war sentiment in the country.

Under the headline, “Democrats Turned War into an Ally” the Times’s credulous political reporters parroted Emanuel, saying that “the Democratic strategy of running against the war, which would have seemed impossibly risky three months earlier, when the White House had urged its candidates to embrace the war, was encouraged by poll after poll, not to mention regular reports of American casualties.”

Impossibly risky? What nonsense. Polls showed majority support for withdrawal in early August, and anger over Iraq dates back much further.

That’s what encouraged long-shot candidates like Webb to challenge entrenched, pro-war incumbents.

Besides, if Emanuel and the Democratic caucus have recognized the merits of opposing the suicidal American occupation of Iraq, then why did they smash John Murtha’s bid to become majority leader? Last year, Murtha courageously broke ranks with his party’s establishment by calling for a rapid pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq (he cleverly calls it “redeployment”), but his initiative attracted little congressional support. Even so, as a Pentagon insider and Marine Corps veteran, Murtha cut a high profile in the war debate, so voters aiming to protest Iraq may well have mistaken the Pennsylvania Democrat’s position with his party’s position.

Following Murtha’s defeat, the next House speaker, the increasingly anti-war Nancy Pelosi, was pilloried in the press for backing Murtha against Steny Hoyer, an early supporter of Bush’s Iraq folly. Evidently taking its cue from Emanuel, The New York Times’s editorial page declared that because of his near-indictment in the Abscam scandal, “Mr. Murtha would have been a farcical presence in a leadership promising the cleanest Congress in history” and tut-tutted that Pelosi “has managed to severely scar her leadership.”

Received wisdom is a bipartisan taste, and right-wing columnist John Podhoretz was also happy to take the Emanuel feed, calling Murtha in The New York Post Pelosi’s “sleazy born-again-peacenik buddy” and arguing that the Democrats won Congress “in spite” of Pelosi and her anti-war allies.

“Rather, [the Democratic victory] was the handiwork of Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Democrat who recruited the right candidates, raised money for them and made sure they knew what themes were working, according to Democratic polls.”

I think that Murtha would have weathered the Abscam video tape (after all he did turn down the proffered bribe), especially if it was contrasted with the corrupt awarding of vast amounts of money to Halliburton and the other sleazy defense contractors currently looting Iraq. And Podhoretz is simply wrong on the politics: Emanuel’s batting average, 9 for 22, doesn’t justify his crowning as the mastermind of victory. You could just as easily say the Democrats won in spite of Emanuel.

Of course, House Democrats haven’t suddenly become Puritans. A bigger reason for the hostility to Murtha is that he meant what he said about leaving Iraq and would have quickly forced the issue come January when the 110th Congress convenes. For now, the “centrist” Clinton wing controls the party’s agenda and wants to have it both ways — responsible critics who support the president’s alleged mission of democracy building in Baghdad.

Things are worse in the Senate. The brightest hope for the anti-war Democrats was Ned Lamont’s insurgent candidacy, which nearly knocked out Bush’s loyal war ally, Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Here I was wrong again, and this time I am sorry. I thought Lamont would carry not only anti-war Democrats, but also fiscally conservative Republicans appalled by the sheer cost of Iraq.

Unfortunately, collusion between the national Republican Party and a significant minority of the Democratic Party in Connecticut rescued Lieberman and, for the time being, Bush’s war policy. In a 51-49 Senate, Lieberman holds the balance of power on Iraq, since he can always threaten to switch to the Republicans and throw control to Dick Cheney, who as vice president can vote to break ties.

The New York/Washington power elite, dominated by Bush and the Clintons, doesn’t have the guts or the honesty to admit that Iraq is hopeless and that U.S. soldiers are being killed and mutilated for nothing more than Bush’s vainglory. The power elite’s spokesman, the champion equivocator and ace sloganeer Thomas Friedman, provides the purest distillation of the current conventional thinking on Iraq. The other day, The New York Times’s star columnist was still clinging to the fantasy that America could have “properly occupied” Mesopotamia and even now could send more troops and “crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it.”

Friedman and many Democrats haven’t figured out that lots of Iraqis view America as a dark force of colonialism and don’t want our version of “progressive politics.”

Friedman apparently doesn’t even remember that Iraq was once a British colony, since he blames the present chaos on “1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Ba’athist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions.” Nothing about the Sykes-Picot (1916) carving up of Syria and Iraq by the British and French; nothing about the destabilizing British practice of divide and rule that pitted Sunnis against Shi’ites, Arabs against Kurds; and nothing about Washington’s support for Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and ’80s.

As a senior Democratic senator told me last week in Washington, with the Democrats divided the only politician who can end the American role in the war is the executive, George Bush. That means we’re a long way from leaving Iraq, no matter what the voters want, no matter how loudly the Democrats celebrate their victory.

Question One About Iraq
Aaron B. Pryor
Dec 6 2006

I don’t know about you, but I find the release today of the Iraq Study Group report to be utterly annoying. After all, it says what Democrats have been saying for a few years now only to be pointed at and called “faggots.”

More annoying than that, though, is that its purpose is to address question three, while not even attempting for a moment to talk about question one.

Sorry, skipped ahead: There are three essential questions about Iraq.

The third question, addressed by the ISG report, is: “Well, now what?” It is obviously an important question, though I think questions one and two are just as important.

Question two is nicely discussed in Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. It is: “Well, if you’re going to do that, shouldn’t you at least do it right?”

The first question, the one that’s been resolved the least effectively but the one that’s still vital, one many Amercans have just given up on or even one that they’re ashamed for some reason to want addressed, is: “What the hell did you do that for?”

Question one should be tattooed backward onto George W. Bush’s forehead. He should have an iPod stapled to his head looping nothing but Cindy Sheehan saying “What the hell did you do that for? What the hell did you do that for? What the hell did you do that for?” (which is, essentially, what she anted to ask him in the first place). He should be forced to write a 500-word essay titled “What The Hell I Did That For,” and points will be taken off for spelling and grammar.

Because as of today, the number of Americans killed in this Dirty Big War has passed 2,900.

That’s the population of Hampshire, Ill. It’s the number of people killed in coal mining accidents in China. It’s 151 more people than were killed in the World Trade Center.

We watched George W. Bush and his closest staffers mouth like synchronized swimmers that, if we hesitated, the smoking gun could become a turnip truck. I mean, mushroom cloud. And they had to Zamboni away from that rationale and on down the road, until now, when, as noted in my first graf, all they’ve got left is to point at their opponents and call ‘em homos.

We are nowhere near coming close to answering question one. We’re not even asking it anymore; we got shamed out of asking it anymore. But we can’t just shrug our shoulders anymore and figure that we broke it and bought it and had it bagged and that we’re on our way back to the car now so we might as well not ask what happened. It’s still relevant. It’s still important. It is still indeed Question Number One. So jot it down and stick it in your wallet for in case you run into your congressman or your mayor or your president tomorrow, so you can look him right in his eyes and go, Sir, I have an important question for you: What the hell did you do that for?

James Baker’s New Test In Diplomacy
CBS
Dec. 6, 2006

WASHINGTON — For more than 30 years, James Baker has been both a behind-the-scenes political operator and a very public statesman - much of it in the service of his close friend, the first President Bush.

Baker now co-chairs the panel that will suggest a change of strategy in Iraq, CBS News White House correspondent Bill Plante reports. So here’s the question: Is Baker acting as a friend of the family, trying to help his friend’s son out of a tight spot -or is there more to it than that?

“Jim Baker is always an honest broker,” says former White House Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein. “If he can help the family and help other families, I think he really strikes a twofer.”

It isn’t the first time Baker has extended his hand to this president. Six years ago in Florida, he managed the legal strategy that delivered the White House for George W. Bush.

Baker has been White House Chief of Staff for two presidents, as well as Treasury Secretary and Secretary of State. He helped put together the coalition that joined the U.S. in the Gulf War - and knew enough then to anticipate the dangers of marching to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

“Jim Baker is one of these rare people that comes along once in a while who’s smart - smart not only intellectually and from experience, but street smart,” says former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Michael Deaver.

Back in 1990, Baker convinced Syria to join the Gulf War coalition against Saddam Hussein. Now, he wants this George Bush to talk to Syria … and Iran, too.

“It has to be hard-nosed, it has to be determined,” Baker said in a television interview in October. “You don’t give away anything, but in my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”

But this president may not be in much of a hurry to accept Baker’s ideas about that - or much else. Asked if Baker would help implement the report, a spokesman for Mr. Bush said, “Jim Baker can go back to his day job.”

The Other Iraq Study Not Getting Much Attention
Michelle Pilecki
12.07.2006

Not to imply that the report from the Iraq Study Group isn’t worth covering, but how about what’s “quickly becoming the largest” refugee crisis in the world, according to the London Guardian.

Last month, the UN estimated that 100,000 people were fleeing the country each month, with the number of Iraqis now living in other Arab countries standing at 1.8 million.

The newspaper was flagging “Iraq: The World’s Fastest Growing Refugee Crisis,” a new report from the Washington-based Refugees International.. The report’s major findings:

* The violence in Iraq has reached a deadly tipping point: Most Iraqis feel threatened.

* Neighboring countries are being overwhelmed by the massive influx of Iraqi refugees.

* The UN High Commissioner for Refugees does not have enough resources to assist Iraqi refugees in the Middle East.

* Conditions for Palestinians from Iraq and other third country nationals are especially desperate and bleak.

The group’s recommendations call for a greater role by Western nations — which, incidentally, are becoming the destination of choice among many fleeing Iraqis, legal or not. “The United States and its allies sparked the current chaos in Iraq,” the group’s president, Kenneth Bacon, told the Guardian, “but they are doing little to ease the humanitarian crisis caused by the current exodus.”

Senate Armed Services Plays Taps for the Constitution
Ray McGovern, TruthOut
Thursday 07 December 2006

It felt yesterday like paying last respects to the Constitution of the United States at the wake orchestrated by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the very reverend John Warner, gentleman for Virginia, presiding. On the surface, the ceremony was about confirming Robert Gates to be secretary of defense. But at a deeper level, it was quite a sorry spectacle, as pretentious heads and patrician manners once trumped courage, and vitiated the prerogative carefully honed by the framers of our Constitution for the Senate to advise and consent.

In other news, “a series of particularly brutal attacks across Baghdad Tuesday resulted in at least 54 Iraqis killed and scores wounded,” according to the New York Times. The US military announced that three more American soldiers were killed Monday, adding to the 13 killed over the weekend. And five Marines are expected to be charged today with the killing of 24 Iraqis, many of them women and children, in the village of Haditha in November 2005.

No such bothersome details about this misbegotten war were allowed into evidence yesterday by the stuffed shirts sitting in stuffed seats in a hearing room stuffed with 80 stenographers from our domesticated press. Rather, the ornate hearing room seemed to serve as a kind of funeral parlor for the Constitution.

That Gates would be given a free pass without serious probing was already clear in ranking member Carl Levins’s (D-Mich.) deference to lame-duck chairman John Warner’s (R-Va.) plan for a carefully scripted hearing, at which senators could disregard new, documentary evidence of Gates’s deception of Congress and the independent counsel for Iran-Contra. Holding the hearing so quickly after Gates’s nomination also made it possible for him to say, in effect, “Gosh, I just got here; didn’t know about that; haven’t read that, but I’ll put that on the top of my reading pile.”

Fully expecting that Levin’s Democratic colleagues would join him in acquiescing in the charade, anti-war activists told me before the hearing began that they had come prepared with a chant:

You won the elections. Now ask real questions!

I later learned that the activists left after only an hour, to avoid becoming physically ill at the unseemly spectacle of the courtly fawning, as troops and Iraqi civilians get blown up in Baghdad.

They said they started feeling queasy after a brief ray of hope was abruptly dashed during Warner’s introductory remarks, when he alluded to what he called the “moral obligation that our government, the executive and legislative, has to the brave men and women of our armed forces.” Moral obligation; sounded good! Oops. Its not what you might think. By “moral obligation,” Warner meant merely that the president “privately consult with the bipartisan leadership of the new Congress” before making his “final decisions” on Iraq. It gets worse: Witness the hypocrisy shining through the distinguished senator’s admonition to Gates:

In short, you simply have to be fearless, I repeat, fearless in discharging your statutory obligations.

Fearless fawning is what followed. It doesn’t matter how many times Warner and Levin have dropped into the hermetically sealed Green Zone in Baghdad. There is always the “In other news….” And despite the ample affectation yesterday, none of the senators there is affected in any immediate way by the carnage at the Green Zone gate. It is our soldiers and Iraqi civilians who are Lazarus at the gate. And, as Benjamin Franklin once said, “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

From Gates: Candor or Disingenuousness?

On weapons of mass destruction: Little attention is being given to the disingenuous response Gates gave to this question from Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Ohio):

Given what we know today about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, given the predicament that we’re in today, with the benefit of hindsight, would you say that invading Iraq was the right decision or the wrong decision?

Gates left it to “historians” to decide. Defending his early support for the invasion, he resorted to the tried and tested FOX News red herring: “I thought he [Saddam] had weapons of mass destruction … just like every other intelligence service in the world, apparently, including the French.”

Now, please, Dr. Gates: You know better than most where other intelligence services get strategic weapons-related information on denied areas like Iraq. From us. Independent-minded intelligence analysts in the Australian and Danish intelligence services were able to see through the deception and took courageous steps to notify leaders of their governments.

On links between Iraq and al-Qaeda: Senator Levin reminded Gates that he recently told the senator that he saw no “evidence of a link between Iraq under Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.” Why then, asked Levin, did Gates say publicly in February 2002 that:

We know that at least one of the leaders of the September 11 hijackers met twice in Prague with Iraqi intelligence officers in the months before the attack.

Levin wanted to know the source of that nformation. “Strictly a newspaper story, sir,” said Gates. Now that seems odd. For Robert Gates is not used to relying on newspaper stories to make sweeping assertions on such neuralgic issues. It seems likely he would have gotten “confirmation” from his successor as CIA director, arch-neoconservative James Woolsey, who cooked up and - together with Vice President Dick Cheney - promoted that cockamamie story to a fare-thee-well.

McNamara: The No New Ideas

In one moment of genuine - perhaps unintended - candor, Gates indicated he thought there were no new ideas to be had in addressing the conflict in Iraq. The suggestions made public today by the Iraq Study Group tend to substantiate that sad conclusion.

How about old ideas? Like dispatching more training teams to work with Iraqi security forces. Gates said, “That certainly is an option.” And he vowed to show “great deference to the judgment of generals.” New emphasis on the training mission is what General John Abizaid told the committee less than three weeks ago is a “major change.” Is that the “new” strategy? It is a feckless exercise, as we know from Vietnam. Been there; done that; should have known that.

Three months after John Kennedy’s death, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent President Lyndon Johnson a draft of a major speech McNamara planned to give on defense policy. What follows is a segment of an audiotape of a conversation between the two on February 25, 1964:

Johnson: Your speech is good, but I wonder if you shouldn’t find two minutes to devote to Vietnam.

McNamara: The problem is what to say about it.

Johnson: I’ll tell you what to say about it. I would say we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom. We could pull out there; the dominoes would fall and that part of the world would go to the Communists … Nobody really understands what is out there … Our purpose is to train [the South Vietnamese] people, and our training’s going good.

McNamara: All right, sir.

It wasn’t “going good” then and - as countless middle-grade American officers have now conceded - it’s not going good now, despite our having thrown our best generals at the problem. Hewing to this misguided approach betrays the “woodenheadedness” of which historian Barbara Tuchman speaks in From Troy to Vietnam: The March of Folly. Almost always, it is a forlorn hope that unwelcome occupation troops can train indigenous soldiers and police to fight against their own brothers and sisters. That the British seem to have forgotten that, as well, is really no excuse.

Speaking Truth to Power?

Yesterday’s charade at the Senate Armed Forces Committee included repeated allusion to the biblical injunction to “speak truth to power.” This has never been Robert Gates’s forte. Rather, his modus operandi has always been to ingratiate himself with the one with the power, and then recite - or write memos about - what he believes that person would like to hear. Thus, while CIA Director Bill Casey’s “analysis” suggested that the Soviets would use Nicaragua as a beachhead to invade Texas, Gates pandered by writing a memo on December 14, 1984, suggesting US air strikes “to destroy a considerable portion of Nicaragua’s military buildup.”

This makes me wonder what may be in store for Iran, if Cheney solicits help from Gates in making the case for bombing.

Gates may have “fresh eyes,” but if past is precedent he will add but marginally to the flavor of the self-licking ice cream cone that passes for Bush’s coterie of advisers. What Bush has done is substitute Sugary Gates for Rumsfeldian Tart. Otherwise, the Cheney/Bush recipe is likely to remain the same as the US draws nearer and nearer to the abyss in Iraq.

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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