Uncle Dick — in the cross-hairs

Here are fascinating Libby wrinkles and reads, and the elephant in the room [now mentioned with regularity] is Uncle Dick — the fear that this matter would bypass the ultimate point, rush to war, has been pretty much justified; but it HAS pointed again and again to Dick Cheney and insider CYA. Almost as good, in my estimation. The dots, of course, connect through Cheney’s office and lead to the Dub — still, it’s Cheney that’s being protected by this commutation [which is often being referenced as a pardon, lazy reporting], not George.

Cheney could be nailed, but I doubt that our vague and addled president could be — we simply need to change our “as usual” mindset about the “executive” to acknowledge that, as we’ve long suspected, we have a co-presidency anyhow … and we’re after the devious one, not the narcissistic one. Yet. Dick is now the public face of the radical coup — Dubby remains the befuddled daydreamer and fratboy.

The Newsweek piece is telling — Dubby didn’t want to “break” with Uncle Dick; so that should end any speculation about George’s canny political persona … he’s going to ’stand by his man’ when close to 2/3rds of the nation wants him impeached? As the NY Daily points out, the Dub doesn’t have enough political collateral for that stance.

Meanwhile, Kucinich continues to gather co-sponsers for his bill — up to 15, last I heard; if George wants to keep on truckin’ he’d better lose that wide load when Uncle Dick gets his heart tune-up later this summer. But don’t hold yer breath — sock puppets have a co-dependency problem, and they’ll need one another if they want to proceed with that Excellent Adventure in Iran.

Another nice fat collection. Two bits here are MSM, the rest are worthy reads about Dick, Dub, Iran-Contra, and — of course — impeachment possibilities. Frank Rich, as you know, writes for The New York Times, and you’ll find an excellent and [somewhat] amusing Will Durst, last.

Jude

Bush helps Libby, but hurts himself
THOMAS DeFRANK, New York Daily News
Sunday, July 8th 2007

WASHINGTON - Moments after President Gerald Ford’s stunning Sunday morning pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974, I encountered a top Ford aide just outside the Cabinet Room.

Asked for my opinion, I replied: “Howard, he just lost the 1976 election.”

At that moment, Nixon’s chief of staff, Gen. Alexander Haig, wandered past and begged to differ with my shortsighted analysis.

“He just made his first presidential decision,” Haig corrected.

As history shows, we were both right: The controversial pardon of his predecessor sealed Ford’s defeat by Jimmy Carter, but also helped heal a Watergate-weary nation.

President Bush’s intervention to keep Lewis (Scooter) Libby out of jail may not be treated as kindly by history. And for the short term, he will likely get to relive the Ford experience after the shock of the pardon and see his popularity and moral authority plunge even lower. Republicans fear the odds of the next President being a Democrat have just risen exponentially.

The outraged reaction of Democrats, many of whom stared at their shoes when Bill Clinton’s eleventh-hour pardons of cronies and contributors fouled the Oval Office, was predictable. But some Republicans - including former federal prosecutors aghast at the chilling effect on sentencing guidelines - were also appalled.

“The dirty little secret is that in his own way, Bush has shown as much contempt for the law as Clinton did,” said Curt Smith, a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush.

“We have now witnessed the evisceration of the Bush presidency by its own hand,” lamented a mandarin of the Washington Republican establishment who supported Bush enthusiastically in 2000.

As a practical matter, Bush’s moral standing has been further dissipated by the spectacle of a former law-and-order governor and a President benefiting a convicted felon who used to work for him - particularly after he’d vowed to deal harshly with whoever leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name to the media.

When Libby was nailed for lying about Plame, Bush’s partisans were reduced to arguing lamely that Clinton’s pardons of fugitive financier Marc Rich and others were more craven.

In one sense, the decision isn’t surprising. The Bush clan has always prized loyalty over competence, so voiding a stiff jail sentence for a man who used to be his senior aide as well as Vice President Cheney’s consigliere is wholly in character.

What’s more surprising is the contorted logic of a decision short-circuiting standard legal processes by the chief law enforcement officer of the land. Even Paris Hilton, after all, served some time.

“Thirty months in jail was absolutely excessive,” a senior Republican political operative noted, “but zero is offensive to the average American. Commuting to 60 days in jail would have made this a lot more palatable to the average person.”

There’s no question Bush was totally within his authority to spare Libby. It’s also entirely possible he has shored up his conservative base, openly rebellious over his middle-ground immigration posture.

As Bush’s Supreme Court appointments have proven, he retains significant executive power. The net result of the Libby decision, however, significantly weakens his governing power. Vetoing bills and issuing executive orders are weak substitutes for passing an agenda, and helping Scooter has further depleted Bush’s waning influence.

“He made one of those pure political decisions every President makes that costs you capital,” a Bush confidant who talks with him regularly told the Daily News. “The problem is, he didn’t have a lot of capital left to spend.” ++

Friends in High Places
Inside Bush’s decision to give Scooter Libby a pass.
Michael Isikoff, Newsweek
July 16, 2007 issue

As is often the case in the Bush White House, it was a decision made swiftly, and with stealth. For weeks, allies of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby had aggressively lobbied the president to pardon Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. Libby’s powerful supporters—including major GOP fund-raisers like Florida developer Melvin Sembler, the chairman of his legal-defense trust—argued that Libby’s conviction in March in the CIA leak case was a miscarriage of justice. Libby’s allies pressed their argument with White House aides but got nowhere. George W. Bush’s senior staff was under strict instructions: listen politely, but give away nothing about what the president might ultimately do.

Behind the scenes, Bush was intensely focused on the matter, say two White House advisers who were briefed on the deliberations, but who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. Bush asked Fred Fielding, his discreet White House counsel, to collect information on the case. Fielding, anticipating the Libby issue would be on his plate, had been gathering material for some time, including key trial transcripts. Uncharacteristically, Bush himself delved into the details. He was especially keen to know if there was compelling evidence that might contradict the jury’s verdict that Libby had lied to a federal grand jury about when—and from whom—he learned the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson, wife of Iraq War critic Joe Wilson. But Fielding, one of the advisers tells NEWSWEEK, reluctantly concluded that the jury had reached a reasonable verdict: the evidence was strong that Libby testified falsely about his role in the leak.

The president was conflicted. He hated the idea that a loyal aide would serve time. Hanging over his deliberations was Cheney, who had said he was “very disappointed” with the jury’s verdict. Cheney did not directly weigh in with Fielding, but nobody involved had any doubt where he stood. “I’m not sure Bush had a choice,” says one of the advisers. “If he didn’t act, it would have caused a fracture with the vice president.” (White House officials and Cheney declined to comment. “As you know, we don’t discuss internal deliberations,” a Cheney spokeswoman tells NEWSWEEK.)

Last week, just hours after a three-judge panel rejected an appeal for a delay in Libby’s sentence, the president intervened. He said Libby’s 30 months were “excessive,” and he was reducing it to zero. He left intact the conviction and $250,000 fine—which Libby promptly paid with a cashier’s check. But Bush didn’t clear Libby entirely. He said he respected the jury’s verdict and described special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald as a “professional prosecutor.” Bush’s choice of words rankled Libby’s supporters, since it seemed to make it harder for Bush to grant a full pardon. (The next day, Bush said he wouldn’t “rule out” a pardon.)

The grumbling from Libby’s supporters was nothing compared with the howls of indignation from Democrats, who condemned Bush for pushing harsh mandatory sentences for criminals—except the one who happened to work at the White House. But the Democrats’ outrage lost steam when Hillary Clinton came forward to scold Bush for not respecting “the rule of law.” White House aides were all too happy to remind the country about Bill Clinton’s own questionable pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

In part, Bush may have stopped short of a full pardon precisely to keep Libby and other White House aides away from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Investigators in Congress are eager to call Libby to testify about the Plame case and prewar Iraq intel—an invitation Libby can continue to resist by claiming he can’t talk as long as his appeal remains alive in the courts.

The White House has used the same line to shield itself from questions about the case. When the effort to discredit Wilson surfaced in 2003, Bush vowed to fire anyone on his staff who leaked classified information about Plame to the press. Last week a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Tony Snow why Bush hadn’t dismissed Karl Rove—who was found to be one of the White House leakers. “We are not going to make comments in detail until the legal process is over,” Snow responded. “And it is not—there is still an appeal.” Nobody at the White House would be disappointed if that appeal just happened to drag on until Jan. 20, 2009. ++

‘Cheney fatique’ descends on GOP
Some are tired of defending Vice President
TOM RAUM, Capital Hill Blue
July 8, 2007

Dick Cheney, who thrives on secrecy while pulling the levers of power, is getting caught in the glare of an unwelcome spotlight. Once viewed as a sage and mentor to President Bush, Cheney has approval ratings now that are as low as — or lower — than the president’s. Recent national polls have put them both in the high 20s.

Bush’s decision to spare former Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby from a 2 1/2-year prison sentence has focused new attention on the vice president and his possible role in the commutation.

Cheney’s relentless advocacy of the Iraq war, his push to expand presidential authority and his hard-line rhetoric toward North Korea and Iran are raising concerns even among former loyalists now worried about the GOP’s chances in 2008.

It seems Cheney fatigue is settling in some Republican circles.

Republican strategist Rich Galen, who worked for both Bush and Bush’s father, said he is finding less interest or enthusiasm for Cheney. “Republicans have, in essence, moved on and focused on who to get behind in 2008,” Galen said.

Cheney has drawn criticism and ridicule from Democrats for his close ties to Libby and for his contention — later modified — that his office is not “an entity within the executive branch.”

Bush last week commuted Libby’s sentence for his conviction of lying to investigators about his role in leaking the identity of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame. Plame’s husband, retired diplomat Joseph Wilson, was a prominent critic of the administration’s case for invading Iraq over weapons of mass destruction.

Bush said the sentence was excessive. The president kept the issue alive by saying he would not rule out an eventual full pardon for Libby.

Wilson said he would not be surprised if Cheney were “pulling the strings here, too” in sparing Libby prison time.

White House officials said they did not know exactly what role Cheney may have played in Bush’s decision.

GOP strategist Mary Matalin, once Cheney’s top political and public affairs assistant, suggested detractors are “score-settling or agenda-seeking.”

“As the effectiveness of Bush-bashing winds down as a `vision’ for their future, Cheney-bashing is their last breath as a substitute for principles upon which to forge an agenda to lead the country,” she said.

Things have not gone well of late for the vice president. Courts have ruled against efforts he championed to broaden presidential authority and accord special treatment to suspected terrorists.

Cheney’s position on Iran and North Korea has been tempered partly part by Bush, who recently authorized tentative diplomatic overtures to both countries. Bush also bowed to mounting bipartisan pressure and agreed to put the National Security Agency’s warrantless domestic surveillance program under the auspices of a special court.

In addition, the White House confirmed it is considering closing the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Cheney long has said the facility is needed.

On top of that, the Supreme Court has reversed its own April decision and agreed to hear challenges by Guantanamo detainees in their fall term.

Is anyone listening to Cheney any more?

The vice president shuffled alone and in silence out of a luncheon of Republican senators last week amid defections on Iraq by GOP senators and as the administration’s immigration overhaul went down to defeat.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, branded as “unfounded” Cheney’s claim to extra protections for his office because of his constitutional powers to preside over the Senate and break ties.

“I don’t think he handles too many documents in that capacity. He handles a gavel. That’s about all he handles,” Specter said in an interview.

Added Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah: “I don’t know what he meant by that. I think he understands what his role is.”

Still, Hatch said, Cheney continues to be valuable to the president. “Everybody knows he’s a straight shooter. I know that he and the president work very closely together. And I think there’s a good reason for it.”

Democrats have not passed many opportunities to bash Cheney. “Who died and left him boss?” asked Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.

Cheney has seen his influence wane with rank-and-file Republicans and even conservatives, once his most ardent supporters. They are uneasy about Cheney’s signing onto Bush’s attempt to liberalize immigration law; spread democracy in the Middle East, which they deride as “nation building”; the amassing of record budget deficits; and even Cheney’s support for certain gay rights (a daughter, Mary, is openly lesbian).

“We don’t feel we’re invested in Cheney, because he hasn’t — in any way we’re aware of — carried any of our water in these 6 1/2 years,” conservative activist Richard Viguerie said.

Most of Cheney’s hard-line colleagues are gone: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

More moderate players now command Bush’s attention and oversee the national agenda: Robert Gates at the Pentagon, Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, Stephen Hadley as national security adviser.

Bush clearly still values Cheney’s advice and the vice president is at Bush’s side in major policy meetings.

“He must be an awfully bruised guy at this point. I think his star has set,” said Thomas E. Cronin, a political science professor at Colorado College, where Cheney’s wife, Lynne, and their daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, went to college.

“People who knew Cheney, whether they speak on or off the record, feel something changed with him. And they don’t know when. Obviously, post-Watergate reforms of Congress and weakening the executive branch have affected him. He speaks a lot about that. Haliburton probably changed him. Maybe his (four) heart attacks changed him,” Cronin said.

Cheney, 66, was chief of staff to Ford, represented Wyoming in Congress in the 1980s, was defense secretary under the first President Bush and chief executive officer of Haliburton, the oil-services company, in the 1990s.

He has a history of heart problems, including four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery, two artery-clearing angioplasties and an operation to implant a pacemaker-defibrillator. ++

Cheney’s Fingerprints
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
August 2007 Issue

You don’t have to dust for long before finding Dick Cheney’s grimy fingerprints all over the Bush crime scene. It’s becoming clearer by the day that behind every one of Bush’s illegal actions lurks the shadow of the Vice President. Never in our history have we had a Vice President who grabbed so much power. And never have we had a President so lazy that he was willing to divest so much power to such a man.

Cheney has said that it is his mission to aggrandize the Executive Branch. And then he notoriously argued that he was not part of the Executive Branch, placing himself on a new twig all by his lonesome.

This is a man who has no respect for our system of checks and balances. It is high time he was impeached.

Bush, too, should be impeached, for they are partners in crime. But there is a certain logic in impeaching Cheney first. After all, who would want to impeach Bush and be left with Cheney? And secondly, the path of criminality, time after time, leads back to Cheney.

It was Cheney, in the days after 9/11, who insisted that the United States would have to work the “dark side” in the war on terror.

It was Cheney who devised many of the flimsy legal justifications for the torture that U.S. personnel committed. “The Vice President’s office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody,” Barton Gellman and Jo Becker wrote in The Washington Post on June 25. They showed that the Vice President’s lawyer, David Addington (now his chief of staff), was instrumental in drafting the President’s February 7, 2002, directive, which said that U.S. personnel would abide by the Geneva Conventions “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.” Addington also worked on the Justice Department’s infamous “torture memo,” which said that almost any infliction of cruelty that didn’t cause organ failure or death was justifiable. Addington pressed the point that the President was exempt from treaties and laws governing torture, the Post said. Those “do not apply” to the commander in chief, according to the torture memo.

It was Cheney who said he approved of the torture tactic of waterboarding, calling it “a no-brainer.”

It was Cheney, the Post said, who prevailed upon the Administration to declare U.S. citizens Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi enemy combatants and to deny them access to U.S. courts.

It was Cheney who insisted that detainees had no due process rights, here or abroad, and who bypassed normal channels—including the State Department and the National Security Council—to get Bush to sign off on this executive order, the Post reported.

It was Cheney who vigorously opposed any moves by Congress to outlaw torture, and got Congress to exempt the CIA from the ban.

It was Cheney who insisted that the Military Commissions Act, which Congress passed, include a section that lets the President decide whether something is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

It was Cheney who initially advocated for detentions in secret CIA prisons around the globe, the Post reported, and who prevailed upon Bush to resume them.

Beyond championing the torture and detention policy, it was Cheney who first hyped the case for the Iraq War, beginning in the spring of 2002.

It was Cheney who leaned all over the CIA in the lead-up to the Iraq War in an unprecedented interference with the intelligence agency’s process of sifting through data. As Seymour Hersh has reported for The New Yorker, Cheney cherry-picked and stove-piped any information that served to buttress his case.

And it was Cheney who, just days before Bush launched the war, went on Meet the Press and uttered the most flagrant lie, saying that Saddam Hussein had actually reconstituted nuclear weapons.

It was Cheney who directed the outing of Valerie Plame and the campaign to smear Joe Wilson. “There is a cloud over the Vice President,” Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald told the jurors in the Scooter Libby trial. And that cloud hangs even lower after Bush’s shameful grant of clemency to Libby.

It was Cheney who pushed the illegal wiretapping that the NSA conducted on millions of Americans. He sparred with Justice Department officials who didn’t want to go along with the spying at a White House meeting in March 2004, according to the Senate testimony of former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey. That meeting took place just one day before then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and then-Chief of Staff Andrew Card went to the hospital room of the ailing John Ashcroft and, in Godfather fashion, tried to get him to sign off on aspects of the NSA spying program. Cheney later blocked the promotion of a Justice Department official who had expressed reservations about the NSA spying.

It was Cheney who exempted his office from the requirement to protect classified information, and who then tried to abolish the executive branch office that was complaining about his self-exemption.

It was also Cheney who was the prime mover behind Bush’s signing statement spree. “The office of Vice President Dick Cheney routinely reviews pieces of legislation before they reach the President’s desk, searching for provisions that Cheney believes would infringe on Presidential power, according to former White House and Justice Department officials,” wrote Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe last May in a story that won a Pulitzer Prize.

“The officials said Cheney’s legal adviser and chief of staff, David Addington, is the Bush Administration’s leading architect of the ’signing statements’ the President has appended to more than 750 laws.” Two examples: Bush issued a signing statement on the anti-torture law to say that he would enforce it only to the extent that it didn’t interfere with his authority as commander in chief. And he issued a signing statement on an obscure postal bill last fall to give the Executive Branch an expansive right to open first-class mail.

Dick Cheney is a man who has gone way over the line, time and time again.

He is fond of saying he has a constituency of one—Bush—when in fact we are all his constituents. And as his constituents, we must avail ourselves of the only constitutional remedy at our disposal: impeachment. Article 2, Section 4, specifically allows for the impeachment of the Vice President. He clearly has committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which our founders construed to mean usurpations of power that subvert our system of checks and balances.

Cheney is a recidivist usurper. We cannot keep letting him get away with his crimes. Nor should we let Bush. But OK, start with Cheney first.

Fortunately, Representative Dennis Kucinich has gotten the ball rolling. This spring, he introduced House Resolution 333, which calls for the impeachment of Cheney. Kucinich’s bill is co-sponsored by Representatives William Lacy Clay, Yvette Clarke, Keith Ellison, Barbara Lee, Jim McDermott, Jan Schakowsky, Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey, and Albert Wynn.

It is too narrow for my liking. It contains only three articles. The first two say that Cheney “purposely manipulated the intelligence process to deceive citizens and Congress” in the lead-up to the Iraq War, both about weapons of mass destruction and about the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The third one says Cheney “has openly threatened aggression against the Republic of Iran absent any real threat to the United States.” Kucinich notes that such a threat is a violation of the U.N. Charter.

Cheney should be brought up on more charges than these. But the concluding passage of the Kucinich bill is right on the mark:

“Vice President Richard B. Cheney has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as Vice President, and subversive of constitutional government, to the prejudice of the cause of law and justice and the manifest injury of the United States. Wherefore, Richard B. Cheney, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

Many people of goodwill raise objections to the idea of impeachment for either Cheney or Bush. Let me attend to those.

But first, can we dispatch with the paternalistic claptrap that the American people somehow wouldn’t be able to endure another impeachment process? We are not so weak that we cannot stand up and fight for our constitutional system. Some of the people who make this argument are the very ones who foisted upon the nation the ludicrous impeachment of Bill Clinton. His petty, personal indiscretion, and even his serious lying under oath, pale in comparison to the crimes against the Republic that Bush and Cheney have been committing.

Still, some progressive allies say that impeachment will never pass. It’s a waste of time, so why try?

Well, we don’t know that.

Now that the Democrats have investigative powers, every time they turn over a new rock, more reptilian facts emerge.

And we may be headed toward a constitutional confrontation, as Bush and Cheney resist subpoenas from the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

They are invoking “executive privilege.” That has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?

Patrick Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary, called it “Nixonian stonewalling” and said, “Increasingly, the President and the Vice President feel they are above the law.”

John Conyers, head of the House Judiciary Committee, added: “This is reckless. It’s a form of governmental lawlessness that is really astounding.”

Conyers should know.

He sat on the Judiciary Committee when it voted to impeach Richard Nixon in 1974.

And let’s remember, one of the three articles that this committee brought forward concerned just such stonewalling.

Article 3 says: Richard M. Nixon “failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives . . . and willfully disobeyed such subpoenas. . . . In refusing to produce these papers and things, Richard M. Nixon . . . acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government.”

Incidentally, Conyers introduced in the last Congress a bill to explore grounds for impeachment, and that was before many of the Bush crimes surfaced. He explained to Lewis Lapham of Harper’s early last year that he was doing so because he didn’t want people to wonder, years from now, where everybody was and why nobody did anything when “the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government.”

Ironically, Conyers’s party did not control the House at that time, so he knew his bill would go nowhere. Now, with the Democrats in power, Con yers can move impeachment forward in the Judiciary Committee that he heads. But he’s gone uncharacteristically silent. Why? Because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has muzzled him.

She and other Democratic leaders say that impeachment may distract them from more important legislative duties. But what could be more important than upholding the Constitution? And anyway, the argument doesn’t hold up, since impeaching Cheney or Bush might be the best way to bring the war to an end and to restore some of our civil liberties.

That’s what happened after Nixon resigned, as Kucinich adviser Steve Cobble has argued. We got out of Vietnam, we had the Congressional hearings that exposed illegal spying and infiltration, and Gerald Ford’s Attorney General, Edward Levi, issued guidelines prohibiting most domestic spying.

Partisan Democrats make one last argument against impeachment. They say it will hurt their chances in 2008 of solidifying gains in Congress and in winning back the White House. History, here, suggests otherwise. In the Presidential election following the Nixon impeachment hearings, Jimmy Carter won. And in the Presidential election following Clinton’s impeachment, the Republicans won.

The pragmatic argument also collapses under its own light weight. For impeachment is not about partisan payback or political gamesmanship. It’s about something much larger. It’s about whether we will have a democratic form of government or not. Democrats and responsible Republicans alike need to rise to this challenge.

And what message does doing nothing send? It tells Bush and Cheney that they can get off scot-free. And it leaves a loaded gun in the front drawer of the Oval Office desk for the next President to shoot more holes into the Constitution.

“Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no Vice President has before. . . . And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous Presidents did not assert.”

~ Barton Gellman and Jo Becker of The Washington Post

“In grasping and exercising Presidential powers, Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III.”

~ Bruce Fein, former Reagan Administration lawyer, writing in Slate

“With the support of the leaders of the Progressive Caucus and the leader of the Out of Iraq Caucus, we will see more and more Members of Congress signing on in this effort to save our Constitution and protect the very values that bind us as a nation.”

~Dennis Kucinich

++

The Darksider
Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker
July 9, 2007

It took thirty years for “Frost / Nixon” to reach Broadway. Assuming that civilization survives and the Great White Way remains above water, we can expect “Cheney / Bush” to mount the boards sometime in the late twenty-thirties or early twenty-forties. The playwright and the actors, whoever they are, will have plenty to work with. The story of the scowling, scheming, domineering, silently sinister Vice-President and the spoiled, petted prince who becomes his plaything is irresistible—set in a pristine White House, played against an ominous, unseen background of violence and catastrophe, like distant thunder, and packed with drama, palace intrigue, and black comedy.

A thick sheaf of new material has lately been added to the Cheney folder. For four days last week, the front page of the Washington Post was dominated by a remarkable series of articles slugged “ANGLER: THE CHENEY VICE PRESIDENCY.” (”Angler,” Cheney’s metaphorically apt Secret Service code name, refers to one of his two favorite outdoor pastimes, the one less hazardous to elderly lawyers.) The series, by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, occupied sixteen broadsheet pages and topped out at twenty thousand words. The headline over last Monday’s installment encapsulates the burden of the whole: “The Unseen Path to Cruelty.”

Some of the Post’s findings have been foreshadowed elsewhere, notably in Jane Mayer’s dispatches in this magazine. (See, especially, Letter from Washington, “The Hidden Power,” July 3, 2006.) But many of the details and incidents that Gellman and Becker document are as new as they are appalling. More important, the pattern that emerges from the accumulated weight of the reporting is, as the lawyers say, dispositive. Given the ontological authority that the Post shares only with the New York Times, it is now, so to speak, official: for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams called “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived,” has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable “war on terror.”

More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of “cruel,” “inhuman,” and “degrading” treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: “a no-brainer for me”), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.

The stakes are lower in domestic affairs—if only because fewer lives are directly threatened—but here, too, Cheney’s influence has been invariably baleful. With an avalanche of examples, Gellman and Becker show how Cheney successfully pushed tax cuts for the very rich that went beyond what even the President, wanly clinging to the shards of “compassionate conservatism,” and his economic advisers wanted. They show how Cheney’s stealthy domination of regulatory and environmental policy, driven by “unwavering ideological positions” and always exerted “for the benefit of business,” has resulted in the deterioration of air and water quality, the degradation and commercial exploitation of national parks and forests, the collapse of wild-salmon fisheries, and the curt abandonment of Bush’s 2000 campaign pledge to do something about greenhouse gases. They also reveal that it was Cheney who forced Christine Todd Whitman to resign as the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, by dictating a rule that excused refurbished power plants and oil refineries from installing modern pollution controls. “I just couldn’t sign it,” she told them. Turns out she wasn’t so anxious to spend more time with her family after all.

Cheney, Gellman and Becker report, drew up and vetted a list of five appellate judges from which Bush drew his Supreme Court appointments. After naming John Roberts to the Court and then to the Chief Justice’s chair, the President, for once, rebelled: without getting permission from down the hall, he nominated his old retainer Harriet Miers for the second opening. (”Didn’t have the nerve to tell me himself,” Cheney muttered to an associate, according to the Post.) But when Cheney’s right-wing allies upended Miers, Bush obediently went back to Cheney’s list and picked Samuel Alito. The result is a Court majority that, last Thursday, ruled that conscious racial integration is the moral equivalent of conscious racial segregation.

That unfortunate day in the duck blind wasn’t the only time the Vice-President has seemed more Elmer Fudd than Ernst Blofeld; last week, Cheney provoked widespread hilarity by pleading executive privilege (in order to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee) while simultaneously maintaining that his office is not part of the executive branch (in order to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives). On Cheney’s version of the government organization chart, it seems, the location of the Office of the Vice-President is undisclosed. So are the powers that, in a kind of rolling, slow-motion coup d’état, he has gathered unto himself. The laughter will fade quickly; the current Administration, regrettably, will not. However more politically moribund it may become, its writ still has a year and a half to go. A few weeks ago, on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the Vice-President issued threats of war with Iran. A “senior American diplomat” told the Times that Cheney’s speech had not been circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered, adding, “He kind of runs by his own rules.” But, too often, his rules rule. The awful climax of “Cheney/Bush” may be yet to come. ++

Mr. Cheney’s Minority Report
Sean Wilentz, The New York Times
Monday, July 9, 2007

TWENTY years ago this week, Lt. Col. Oliver North testified for six days before a special joint House and Senate investigating committee. Permitted by the Democratic majority to appear in his bemedaled Marine uniform, and disastrously granted immunity, Colonel North freely admitted that he had shredded documents, lied to Congress and falsified official records.

Colonel North justified these crimes as necessary to protect two of the Reagan administration’s covert policies: defying a Congressional ban on aiding the anti-Sandinista contra insurgents in Nicaragua; and selling arms to Iran — officially classified as a terrorist state — in order to free American hostages in the Middle East.

Mixing bathos with belligerence, Colonel North played the incorruptible action hero facing down Washington politicians and lawyers. He also suggested that, under the Constitution, the president and not Congress held ultimate authority to direct foreign policy.

Most of the Congressional committee members, Republicans and Democrats alike, expressed shock at Colonel North’s testimony. And despite the surge in Colonel North’s personal popularity, he failed to sway other Americans on the underlying issues. Clear majorities in opinion polls said that Colonel North had gone too far in his covert operations, especially in helping the contras. Roughly half of those polled believed that he had acted as if he was above the law. Sixty percent said that Congress was more trustworthy than the Reagan White House on foreign relations.

And Mr. North was eventually convicted of three federal felonies — receiving an illegal payment, obstruction of a Congressional inquiry and destroying official documents, although an appellate court held that his testimony delivered under Congressional immunity may have affected jurors and reversed one conviction. (Prosecutors gave up on the other two.)

But there were dissenters. A number of House Republicans on the committee cheered Colonel North on. One who led the way was Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who praised Colonel North as “the most effective and impressive witness certainly this committee has heard.”

Mr. Cheney the congressman believed that Congress had usurped executive prerogatives. He saw the Iran-contra investigation not as an effort to get to the bottom of possible abuses of power but as a power play by Congressional Democrats to seize duties and responsibilities that constitutionally belonged to the president.

At the conclusion of the hearings, a dissenting minority report codified these views. The report’s chief author was a former resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael J. Malbin, who was chosen by Mr. Cheney as a member of the committee’s minority staff. Another member of the minority’s legal staff, David S. Addington, is now the vice president’s chief of staff.

The minority report stressed the charge that the inquiry was a sham, calling the majority report’s allegations of serious White House abuses of power “hysterical.” The minority admitted that mistakes were made in the Iran-contra affair but laid the blame for them chiefly on a Congress that failed to give consistent aid to the Nicaraguan contras and then overstepped its bounds by trying to restrain the White House.

The Reagan administration, according to the report, had erred by failing to offer a stronger, principled defense of what Mr. Cheney and others considered its full constitutional powers. Not only did the report defend lawbreaking by White House officials; it condemned Congress for having passed the laws in the first place.

The report made a point of invoking the framers. It cited snippets from the Federalist Papers — like Alexander Hamilton’s remarks endorsing “energy in the executive” — in order to argue that the president’s long-acknowledged prerogatives had only recently been usurped by a reckless Democratic Congress.

Above all, the report made the case for presidential primacy over foreign relations. It cited as precedent the Supreme Court’s 1936 ruling in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, which referred to the “exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.”

History, the report claimed, “leaves little, if any doubt that the president was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States.” It went on: “Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down.”

These conclusions went beyond what had long been considered the outermost limits of presidential power — and they put a special twist on history. Hamilton certainly desired a strong executive, but warned that it would be “utterly unsafe and improper” to give a president complete control over foreign policy.

The Curtiss-Wright decision actually concerned a presidential claim of constitutional power to act in the absence of an act passed by Congress, not in violation of such an act.

One of the foremost constitutional scholars of the 20th century, Edward S. Corwin, stated in 1957 that the Constitution was “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy,” and that in many cases “the lion’s share” of that privilege belonged to the president. But Corwin finally insisted that “the power to determine the substantive content of American foreign policy is a divided power.”

The Iran-contra joint committee majority in 1987, including some Senate Republican members, charged that the minority report, with tortuous illogic, reduced Congress’s foreign policy role to nearly nothing. Senator Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican and vice chairman of the Senate side of the investigating committee, paraphrased Adlai Stevenson and quipped that the minority report had separated the wheat from the chaff and left in the chaff.

His comments did not lead Mr. Cheney to alter course, as Mr. Cheney’s actions as vice president demonstrate. Asked by a reporter in 2005 to explain his expansive views about presidential power, Mr. Cheney replied, “If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-contra committee.”

“Nobody has ever read them,” he said, but they “are very good in laying out a robust view of the president’s prerogatives with respect to the conduct of especially foreign policy and national security matters.”

In truth, as Mr. Cheney has also remarked, the struggle for him began much earlier, during the Nixon administration. A business partner says that Mr. Cheney told him that Watergate was merely “a political ploy by the president’s enemies.” For Mr. Cheney, the scandal was not Richard Nixon’s design for an imperial presidency but the Democrats’ drive for an imperial Congress.

Still, Mr. Cheney’s quest to accumulate unaccountable executive power — a quest that has received much attention of late — took a major turn 20 years ago. And part of Iran-contra’s legacy has now become a legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration. ++

Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, is the author of a forthcoming book on the Reagan administration and its legacy.

A Profile in Cowardice
Frank Rich, New York Times
7/8/07

THERE was never any question that President Bush would grant amnesty to Scooter Libby, the man who knows too much about the lies told to sell the war in Iraq. The only questions were when, and how, Mr. Bush would buy Mr. Libby’s silence. Now we have the answers, and they’re at least as incriminating as the act itself. They reveal the continued ferocity of a White House cover-up and expose the true character of a commander in chief whose tough-guy shtick can no longer camouflage his fundamental cowardice.

The timing of the president’s Libby intervention was a surprise. Many assumed he would mimic the sleazy 11th-hour examples of most recent vintage: his father’s pardon of six Iran-contra defendants who might have dragged him into that scandal, and Bill Clinton’s pardon of the tax fugitive Marc Rich, the former husband of a major campaign contributor and the former client of none other than the ubiquitous Mr. Libby.

But the ever-impetuous current President Bush acted 18 months before his scheduled eviction from the White House. Even more surprising, he did so when the Titanic that is his presidency had just hit two fresh icebergs, the demise of the immigration bill and the growing revolt of Republican senators against his strategy in Iraq.

That Mr. Bush, already suffering historically low approval ratings, would invite another hit has been attributed in Washington to his desire to placate what remains of his base. By this logic, he had nothing left to lose. He didn’t care if he looked like an utter hypocrite, giving his crony a freer ride than Paris Hilton and violating the white-collar sentencing guidelines set by his own administration. He had to throw a bone to the last grumpy old white guys watching Bill O’Reilly in a bunker.

But if those die-hards haven’t deserted him by now, why would Mr. Libby’s incarceration be the final straw? They certainly weren’t whipped into a frenzy by coverage on Fox News, which tended to minimize the leak case as a non-event. Mr. Libby, faceless and voiceless to most Americans, is no Ollie North, and he provoked no right-wing firestorm akin to the uproars over Terri Schiavo, Harriet Miers or “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

The only people clamoring for Mr. Libby’s freedom were the pundits who still believe that Saddam secured uranium in Africa and who still hope that any exoneration of Mr. Libby might make them look less like dupes for aiding and abetting the hyped case for war. That select group is not the Republican base so much as a roster of the past, present and future holders of quasi-academic titles at neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.

What this crowd never understood is that Mr. Bush’s highest priority is always to protect himself. So he stiffed them too. Had the president wanted to placate the Weekly Standard crowd, he would have given Mr. Libby a full pardon. That he served up a commutation instead is revealing of just how worried the president is about the beans Mr. Libby could spill about his and Dick Cheney’s use of prewar intelligence.

Valerie Wilson still has a civil suit pending. The Democratic inquisitor in the House, Henry Waxman, still has the uranium hoax underlying this case at the top of his agenda as an active investigation. A commutation puts up more roadblocks by keeping Mr. Libby’s appeal of his conviction alive and his Fifth Amendment rights intact. He can’t testify without risking self-incrimination. Meanwhile, we are asked to believe that he has paid his remaining $250,000 debt to society independently of his private $5 million “legal defense fund.”

The president’s presentation of the commutation is more revealing still. Had Mr. Bush really believed he was doing the right and honorable thing, he would not have commuted Mr. Libby’s jail sentence by press release just before the July Fourth holiday without consulting Justice Department lawyers. That’s the behavior of an accountant cooking the books in the dead of night, not the proud act of a patriot standing on principle.

When the furor followed Mr. Bush from Kennebunkport to Washington despite his efforts to duck it, he further underlined his embarrassment by taking his only few questions on the subject during a photo op at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. You know this president is up to no good whenever he hides behind the troops. This instance was particularly shameful, since Mr. Bush also used the occasion to trivialize the scandalous maltreatment of Walter Reed patients on his watch as merely “some bureaucratic red-tape issues.”

Asked last week to explain the president’s poll numbers, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center told NBC News that “when we ask people to summon up one word that comes to mind” to describe Mr. Bush, it’s “incompetence.” But cowardice, the character trait so evident in his furtive handling of the Libby commutation, is as important to understanding Mr. Bush’s cratered presidency as incompetence, cronyism and hubris.

Even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, a consistent Bush and Libby defender, had to take notice. Furious that the president had not given Mr. Libby a full pardon (at least not yet), The Journal called the Bush commutation statement a “profile in non-courage.”

What it did not recognize, or chose not to recognize, is that this non-courage, to use The Journal’s euphemism, has been this president’s stock in trade, far exceeding the “wimp factor” that Newsweek once attributed to his father. The younger Mr. Bush’s cowardice is arguably more responsible for the calamities of his leadership than anything else.

People don’t change. Mr. Bush’s failure to have the courage of his own convictions was apparent early in his history, when he professed support for the Vietnam War yet kept himself out of harm’s way when he had the chance to serve in it. In the White House, he has often repeated the feckless pattern that he set back then and reaffirmed last week in his hide-and-seek bestowing of the Libby commutation.

The first fight he conspicuously ran away from as president was in August 2001. Aspiring to halt federal underwriting of embryonic stem-cell research, he didn’t stand up and say so but instead unveiled a bogus “compromise” that promised continued federal research on 60 existing stem-cell lines. Only later would we learn that all but 11 of them did not exist. When Mr. Bush wanted to endorse a constitutional amendment to “protect” marriage, he again cowered. A planned 2006 Rose Garden announcement to a crowd of religious-right supporters was abruptly moved from the sunlight into a shadowy auditorium away from the White House.

Nowhere is this president’s non-courage more evident than in the “signing statements” The Boston Globe exposed last year. As Charlie Savage reported, Mr. Bush “quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office.” Rather than veto them in public view, he signed them, waited until after the press and lawmakers left the White House, and then filed statements in the Federal Register asserting that he would ignore laws he (not the courts) judged unconstitutional. This was the extralegal trick Mr. Bush used to bypass the ban on torture. It allowed him to make a coward’s escape from the moral (and legal) responsibility of arguing for so radical a break with American practice.

In the end, it was also this president’s profile in non-courage that greased the skids for the Iraq fiasco. If Mr. Bush had had the guts to put America on a true wartime footing by appealing to his fellow citizens for sacrifice, possibly even a draft if required, then he might have had at least a chance of amassing the resources needed to secure Iraq after we invaded it.

But he never backed up the rhetoric of war with the stand-up action needed to prosecute the war. Instead he relied on fomenting fear, as typified by the false uranium claims whose genesis has been covered up by Mr. Libby’s obstructions of justice. Mr. Bush’s cowardly abdication of the tough responsibilities of wartime leadership ratified Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to go into Iraq with the army he had, ensuring our defeat.

Never underestimate the power of the unconscious. Not the least of the revelatory aspects of Mr. Bush’s commutation is that he picked the fourth anniversary of “Bring ‘em on” to hand it down. It was on July 2, 2003, that the president responded to the continued violence in Iraq, two months after “Mission Accomplished,” by taunting those who want “to harm American troops.” Mr. Bush assured the world that “we’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.” The “surge” notwithstanding, we still don’t have the force necessary four years later, because the president never did summon the courage, even as disaster loomed, to back up his own convictions by going to the mat to secure that force.

No one can stop Mr. Bush from freeing a pathetic little fall guy like Scooter Libby. But only those who paid the ultimate price for the avoidable bungling of Iraq have the moral authority to pardon Mr. Bush. ++

Outing Valerie Plame aided our enemies
Bob Ewegen, Denver Post
07/06/2007

After 44 years in journalism, I don’t get angry very often about the dirty tricks that so often besmirch the American political process.

But I am angry about the Valerie Plame affair, a sordid tale that flared anew this week when President George Bush commuted the prison sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

I am not angry at the commutation or the pettifogging partisan exchanges it spawned. I am angry at the underlying event - the fact that an American patriot whose only crime was to serve her country in a dangerous and honorable profession had her mission undercut for partisan political purposes.

I am even angrier that the vicious “outing” of Valerie Plame put her sources at risk - the men and women in foreign countries who had risked their own lives to help America in our war on terror.

In the intelligence trade, such foreign sources are called “assets.” I call them heroes. And they are the ones who were put most at risk after columnist Robert Novak revealed Plame’s CIA connection as part of a clumsy Bush administration effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had become a critic of the Iraq war.

To explain why this case angers me so deeply, let me give you a number: RA68031300. It identifies me as a Vietnam-era veteran of the United States Army. After enlisting, I took basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., where I received orders sending me to Fort Sill, Okla., for training in artillery, after which I expected to be sent to Vietnam.

Because someone in the Pentagon noticed I had worked for United Press International, I was called out on my last day of basic and redirected to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. I ultimately became editor of the post newspaper, the Pointer View.

So in the end, my personal risk in my military career was limited to some really awful haircuts. But the names of 58,000 of my comrades engraved on a wall in Washington, D.C., prove that my story could have ended differently. Those names also explain why I will never forgive anyone who willfully puts the lives of America’s military or intelligence personnel or our friends abroad in danger.

And that’s exactly what former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage did when he leaked Plame’s identity to Novak - and what Novak did when he published the name of a covert CIA agent.

Between Armitage’s dishonorable act and Novak’s dishonorable act were a string of other dishonorable acts, including an executive order by President Bush empowering Vice President Cheney to declassify classified information, which Cheney did, thus allowing Libby to shop Plame’s identity around in hopes of finding a journalist willing to smear Wilson through his wife. With Libby’s information confirming Armitage’s original tip, Novak willingly blew Plame’s cover.

In so doing, he didn’t put Plame at personal risk, because she was not overseas at the time. But he did irrevocably damage her mission - and put those human “assets” at risk.

You see, al-Qaeda and its ilk rarely try to kill CIA agents - or anyone else who can fight back. What these cowards do is kill people who have worked with U.S. agents.

You can imagine the conversation: “Hmm, that Valerie Plame who visited here turns out to be a CIA agent. Didn’t she hang out at Hamid’s coffee shop a lot?”

Next day, Hamid’s body turns up, along with the bodies of his wife and family, all of whom were tortured to death before his eyes.

That’s the way our enemies play the game. That’s why we train brave men and women like Valerie Plame so America can fight back.

The outing of Plame may have been technically legal, as the commutation of Libby’s sentence undoubtedly was. But our supreme law, the U.S. Constitution, still defines treason as giving aid and comfort to our enemies in time of war.

And in this aging veteran’s eyes, that’s exactly what Armitage, Cheney, Libby and Novak did. ++

Bob Ewegen is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.

Lonely and Lame, Bush Agonises Over Legacy
Ewen MacAskill, the Guardian/UK
Saturday, July 7, 2007 by

President George Bush turned 61 yesterday but he had little to celebrate at the end of a week in which his isolation has been exposed as never before.

Laura Bush held an early family party for him on Wednesday, to which a few professional golfers were also invited, and on Thursday the president made a rare outing to watch a baseball game. But these few birthday celebrations apart, it has been a relentless week for the US president.

A backlash against his decision on Monday to commute the jail sentence of the former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby was followed on Thursday by the withdrawal of support for his Iraq strategy by Pete Domenici, a Republican senator for 35 years. The loss of such a loyal senator is ominous for Mr Bush’s war plans.

More defections are expected, and Mr Bush cuts a lonely figure, holed up in the White House fretting over his legacy.

Professor Robert Dallek, author of several books about the presidency, said that while it was not unusual for a president to limp to the end of his term as a lame duck, he saw Mr Bush as a particularly pronounced case. “If you are looking at defeat, no one wants to be associated with the person responsible. This is the case with Bush. You do not see his party rally round. He has united opinion against him and it makes for a lonely, isolated position,” Prof Dallek said. “Once a president loses trust, he cannot govern effectively.”

Although he has 18 months left in office, Mr Bush’s options are limited. Last week, he lost his last chance for snatching a lasting domestic legacy when his immigration reform bill was destroyed in Congress. On foreign policy, there is little optimism of a late breakthrough on Israel-Palestine, Iran or Iraq.

The Washington Post reported this week on academics invited to the White House to discuss with him his legacy, including Sir Alistair Horne, author of a history of the Algerian revolt, which has parallels with Iraq. They, as well as former staffers and friends, spoke of his loneliness, his agonising over how history will portray him. Michael Conaway, a still loyal senator and long-time friend, said the president appeared to be worn down by the pressure and spoke of “a marked difference in his physical appearance”.

Although never a social animal, he is reluctant to drop into Washington restaurants unannounced for dinner, as the Clintons did, in part because he is fearful of the public response. This week, in particular, because of the Libby decision, he has largely avoided public contact - his July 4 speech in West Virginia was invitation-only.

The White House presented the Libby decision as a non-political compromise.

A well-connected source in Washington challenged the consensus that Mr Bush’s poll ratings, at just under 30%, could not fall much further because that figure represented bedrock Republican support. The source said commuting Mr Libby’s sentence, a popular move among Republicans, was a panic measure after an alarming erosion in support, mainly because of hostility to the immigration plan.

Mr Domenici’s withdrawal of support followed the desertion of the Republican senator Richard Lugar last week, also over Iraq. About 50% of the sitting Republican senators face re-election in November next year and their constituents have made them well aware of how unpopular the Iraq war is.

The White House yesterday expressed disappointment, saying it had hoped the senators would not go public with their frustration before September, when the army and others report back on whether Mr Bush’s “surge” strategy is working.

Steve Clemons, head of the progressive thinktank the New America Foundation, has heard the reports of Mr Bush’s decline in power and is sceptical. He cautioned: “Even though he has lost some ability to dictate events, he is still capable of deploying major influence on the big issues. We went through the same thing with [Vice-president Dick] Cheney when people thought he was down and out. I think it is a big mistake to think Bush is now powerless.”

With little positive to show from six years in office, Mr Bush has been talking up his transformation of the supreme court as his legacy. He has given it a strong rightwing bias, demonstrated by rulings on abortion, employment discrimination and rejection of death penalty appeals. That will please Republicans, at least.

But Prof Dallek remains unimpressed. Rating the worst presidents, he said: “Hoover was a disaster. Warren Harding rates very low in the pantheon of presidents and it is likely that Bush will be seen as a bottom feeder.” ++

What happened to the George Bush who insisted on honest government?
Joseph L. Galloway, McClatchy Newspapers
Thu, July 5, 2007

Why is it that the Bush administration, in its dying throes, looks remarkably more like an organized crime ring than one of the arms of the American government? A poorly organized and run crime ring, truly, but a crime ring nonetheless.

Why do I keep remembering the George Bush that I actually once voted for when he first ran for president — the one who talked of bringing in an administration that would look more like the face of America and of giving us a government whose appointees would be honest, upright, fair and moral.

Yes, that’s the one. What happened to him? Where did that George Bush go? When did he go over to The Dark Side? What enticements did Vice President Darth Cheney offer him? Was it the vision of unlimited, unchecked power over the world?

How can it be that this man from Texas presides over a White House that shelters and provides cover for men like Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who clearly believe that the laws of our country are only meant to be imposed on lesser beings, the man in the street?

Remember the George Bush who declared that anyone who violated the law and participated in the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame would be fired on the spot?

What about Karl Rove who works beside President Bush and is his Mr. Fixit and Mr. Fix Them? Was it just my imagination or did I not hear sworn testimony and see documents indicating that he was up to his pudgy little neck in the whole deal?

Can we not suppose that Mr. Rove was, in fact, at the root of the 51 White House employees whose e-mails miraculously vanished from all those e-mail accounts that executive-branch employees maintained through a cut-out: the Republican National Committee? How many laws governing the preservation of White House records, passed by Congress after the sorry spectacle of Richard Nixon and the vanishing 18.5 minutes of taped chit-chat in the Oval Office, have Mr. Rove and his hench-people broken? What ARE they hiding?

What about the lies and lame excuses put forward to hide their actions in the case of the missing federal prosecutors by the chief law enforcement officer of our country, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and his sophomoric young assistant attorneys general with their degrees from universities where only one book is on the reading list?

Does anyone doubt that Karl Rove personally drew up the list of those prosecutors who were to be executed because they did not enthusiastically go after people who were likely to vote for the Democrats in any election?

The good attorney general should be fired if he didn’t know where that list came from and he should also be fired if he did know and denied it under oath before Congress. It was his department, the one that is supposedly dedicated to upholding the laws of our nation fairly and with an even hand, and he damned well should have known and damned well should have told the simple truth.

Where is it written in either the federal statutes or the Constitution of the United States that our laws against criminal acts apply to everyone but nice, meek, small-statured Republican political operatives who have a wonderful wife and children? Our prisons are full of nice, meek white-collar criminals who cheated a bit on their taxes or back-dated their bountiful option awards or raped and looted the coffers of corporations and beggared the poor fools who trusted them and bought stock in their criminal enterprises.

The estimable Scooter Libby repeatedly lied under oath to investigators of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a sitting federal grand jury. Last time I looked that is a felony offense punishable by fine and imprisonment.

There are two former agents of the U.S. Border Patrol sitting in a federal prison for shooting a fleeing dope smuggler and then lying in their reports in an attempt to cover their butts with their bosses. Where is their commutation of sentences? Where is their pardon?

Instead of firing federal prosecutors who didn’t go after illegal immigrants and voter registration fraud like pit bulls, why isn’t our president demanding the dismissal of prosecutors and appointed regulators who turn a blind eye while the National Treasury is looted of billions by big corporations whose bosses write very large checks to Republican candidates?

What we have here, at the very heart of our own government, is a morass of criminal behavior unlike anything seen in recent American history.

It is past time to throw the rascals out of office, and I mean ALL the rascals of whatever party or political persuasion. If they didn’t participate then they closed their eyes to the rot, and by this I cheerfully include the Democrats in Congress who now control Congress and haven’t done anything but talk about doing something.

On his way out the door, whether sooner or later, George W. Bush had better sign one last pardon — to himself — for all the damage and destruction he has wrought on a nation that expected far better. ++

Joseph L. Galloway is a military columnist for McClatchy Newspapers and a former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers; he is co-author of the national best-seller “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young.”

The US is in Serious Trouble - We Can’t Ignore It
Timothy Gatto, The Smirking Chimp
Jul 7 2007

Today is the day that I take off my gloves and say what I have wanted to say for a long time, but haven’t because of some silly notion that I didn’t want to sink to the depths that other people have. I don’t care anymore. If you have delicate sensibilities, don’t read past this point. You might see something that will bother you, and I just wanted to say I warned you.

First of all, I have no respect for any of these politicians that say they believe that God created Adam and Eve and he created this world in seven days. If you are a politician that believes in the creationist theory, than you are either stupid, too stupid to hold office, or you are a liar, and you are lying to get stupid Christians that believe that to vote for you. In both cases, you are not qualified to hold political office. You should resign.

Anyone that believe that we are fighting them there so we won’t fight them here should also either go back to school and pay attention this time, or stop and think of what you are saying. Fighting them there had absolutely nothing to do with fighting them here. That entire line of reasoning is flawed. If they want to attack us here they can whether or not we fight them there. In fact, many people that want to attack us aren’t even “there”, they are somewhere else. That is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard anyone say. If you believe that, then you are stupid too. Sorry, but someone has to give you the message.

Bush and Cheney don’t give a goddamn shit about this country or anyone in it except the people that pay them. I’m not talking about the lousy salary they get for being in office. I’m talking about all the money that is given to them under the table from Halliburton, Blackwater and the Oil Companies and all the others making a fortune off the death and destruction going on in Iraq. I guarantee that Bush and Cheney have never cared about bringing freedom to the Iraqi people. If you believe that, you should get a check-up from the neck-up.

I believe that anyone that is blocking the impeachment of the President and the Vice-President should be charged for obstruction of justice. When it gets to the point when political interests outweigh moral interests, then these people should no longer be holding public office. There shouldn’t even be an argument about holding impeachment proceedings against these people. I am going to put my money where my mouth is, stay tuned. Meanwhile I will now paste an excerpt from a commenter (Sabresong) from my blog liberalpro:

sabresong said…
“anonymous” said…

What I’d like someone to do is to verify, establish point blank, what crimes have been committed.”

“An excellent request. It’s taken me some time to separate the proven crimes from the conspiracy theories, and I’m still working on it. I’ll post it on my own blog at www.eledanthe.com/news once it’s finished.”

until then, the following list is taken directly from the proposed articles of impeachment, calling for the impeachment of G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney:

1) Seizing power to wage wars of aggression in defiance of the U.S. Constitution, the U.N. Charter and the rule of law; carrying out a massive assault on and occupation of Iraq, a country that was not threatening the United States, resulting in the death and maiming of over one hundred thousand Iraqis, and thousands of U.S. G.I.s.

2) Lying to the people of the U.S., to Congress, and to the U.N., providing false and deceptive rationales for war.

3) Authorizing, ordering and condoning direct attacks on civilians, civilian facilities and locations where civilian casualties were unavoidable.

4) Instituting a secret and illegal wiretapping and spying operation against the people of the United States through the National Security Agency.

5) Threatening the independence and sovereignty of Iraq by belligerently changing its government by force and assaulting Iraq in a war of aggression.

6) Authorizing, ordering and condoning assassinations, summary executions, kidnappings, secret and other illegal detentions of individuals, torture and physical and psychological coercion of prisoners to obtain false statements concerning acts and intentions of governments and individuals and violating within the United States, and by authorizing U.S. forces and agents elsewhere, the rights of individuals under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

7) Making, ordering and condoning false statements and propaganda about the conduct of foreign governments and individuals and acts by U.S. government personnel; manipulating the media and foreign governments with false information; concealing information vital to public discussion and informed judgment concerning acts, intentions and possession, or efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction in order to falsely create a climate of fear and destroy opposition to U.S. wars of aggression and first strike attacks.

Violations and subversions of the Charter of the United Nations and international law, both a part of the “Supreme Law of the land” under Article VI, paragraph 2, of the Constitution, in an attempt to commit with impunity crimes against peace and humanity and war crimes in wars and threats of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq and others and usurping powers of the United Nations and the peoples of its nations by bribery, coercion and other corrupt acts and by rejecting treaties, committing treaty violations, and frustrating compliance with treaties in order to destroy any means by which international law and institutions can prevent, affect, or adjudicate the exercise of U.S. military and economic power against the international community.

9) Acting to strip United States citizens of their constitutional and human rights, ordering indefinite detention of citizens, without access to counsel, without charge, and without opportunity to appear before a civil judicial officer to challenge the detention, based solely on the discretionary designation by the Executive of a citizen as an “enemy combatant.”

10) Ordering indefinite detention of non-citizens in the United States and elsewhere, and without charge, at the discretionary designation of the Attorney General or the Secretary of Defense.

11) Ordering and authorizing the Attorney General to override judicial orders of release of detainees under INS jurisdiction, even where the judicial officer after full hearing determines a detainee is wrongfully held by the government.

12) Authorizing secret military tribunals and summary execution of persons who are not citizens who are designated solely at the discretion of the Executive who acts as indicting official, prosecutor and as the only avenue of appellate relief.

13) Refusing to provide public disclosure of the identities and locations of persons who have been arrested, detained and imprisoned by the U.S. government in the United States, including in response to Congressional inquiry.

14) Use of secret arrests of persons within the United States and elsewhere and denial of the right to public trials.

15) Authorizing the monitoring of confidential attorney-client privileged communications by the government, even in the absence of a court order and even where an incarcerated person has not been charged with a crime.

16) Ordering and authorizing the seizure of assets of persons in the United States, prior to hearing or trial, for lawful or innocent association with any entity that at the discretionary designation of the Executive has been deemed “terrorist.”

17) Engaging in criminal neglect in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, depriving thousands of people in Louisiana, Mississippi and other Gulf States of urgently needed support, causing mass suffering and unnecessary loss of life.

18) Institutionalization of racial and religious profiling and authorization of domestic spying by federal law enforcement on persons based on their engagement in noncriminal religious and political activity.

19) Refusal to provide information and records necessary and appropriate for the constitutional right of legislative oversight of executive functions.

20) Rejecting treaties protective of peace and human rights and abrogation of the obligations of the United States under, and withdrawal from, international treaties and obligations without consent of the legislative branch, and including termination of the ABM treaty between the United States and Russia, and rescission of the authorizing signature from the Treaty of Rome which served as the basis for the International Criminal Court.”

If you cannot understand the above charges, have someone explain them to you.

I am tired of people from “progressive” sites that I write for, taking one sentence from my articles and making a federal case about it. Sometimes when I write, I say things that are necessary to keep the article flowing. A case in point is the article I wrote on Total War. Because I explained what the doctrine of Total War was, does not mean that I condone any type of war. Before you comment on something of mine in the future, try to take what I have said in the context of what I’m writing about. People on the left seem to fight more with each other than anyone else. If some people would take this “boundless energy” that they have and point it towards the enemies of our Republic, namely the right wingnuts, we would all be better off. Sometimes I find myself writing an article and I’m so busy thinking of how to phrase something so I won’t be attacked, that I water down what it was I am trying to say so I won’t offend anyone. Forget about it.

Next week I am going to tell you about something that will make history (if everything works out OK) watch for it. I’m tired of just writing about these criminals holding office, Republican AND Democrats. There is no reason on Earth why Congress doesn’t support Dennis Kucinich on his quest to impeach VP Cheney. Cheney is not fit to hold office. Leaving the scene of an accident after he shot his friend in the face was a criminal act, although minor compared to the things he has done since becoming VP. Unless we DEMAND that this administration step down, we could lose our Republic, and replace it with a dictatorship.

Just remember this, the German people got what they deserved by supporting Hitler. If you are not with us, than you are against us. This is no time for people to be sitting on the fence. I don’t make this stuff up. ++

The Voice of the White House
Walter Storch, TBR News
July 2, 2007

Washington, D.C. - The media is jabbering away about the Libby pardon, criticizing the Head Chimpanzee for flouting the law.

Let’s study why he did such a politically stupid thing. At one time, Libby was Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff. He was the chief pro-Israel Jewish advisor to Cheney, which helps explains why Cheney was so determined to invade Iraq. Libby has been a longtime associate of Wolfowitz and was also a lawyer for convicted felon and Israeli spy Mark Rich, whom Clinton pardoned in his last days as president.

Why did Bush pardon Libby? Simply because Libby was a man who knew too much. He was designated to take the fall for Cheney on the Plame business but drew the line at jail time. Libby saw to it that the brass in the White House knew that if he had to go to prison, he would sing like an opera star at La Scala and like a good singer, he would certainly bring down the house.

What would Libby talk about? Well, the plans to institute official torture cooked up by Cheney and eagerly approved by Bush. Cheney’s obscene rake-offs from the Halliburton scams, serious scandals about Gannon’s nocturnal visits to the White House and who he was fudge-packing, Karl Rove’s chronic blackmail of anyone who got in Bush’s way, Bush and Cheney’s outspoken contempt for blacks and their obedience to Israeli demands, Cheney’s determination to establish Iraq as a permanent forward military base to secure Iraqi oil for the US and his friends and serve as a launching pad for attacks on Israeli’s enemies, plans to oust Putin and regain control over Russian oil and gas fields, deliberately falsified “terror alerts” and, worse of all, knowingly launching an attack on Iraq using officially falsified CIA reports.

How many have died because of these two evil men? Libby knows and that’s why dear old Scooter, convicted of several serious felonies, goes free. It sure ain’t compassion because George has a heart the size of a mustard seed and has strong sadistic tendencies. Maybe Libby would tell them about the movies George and his evil friends used to watch upstairs in the private quarters showing terrible tortures at Gitmo and in Iraq.

Believe me, these are very sick people who should be in a nice jail of their own and not dictating to the American people and killing their sons.” ++

Kucinich: ‘Imperial’ vice president needs to be impeached
David Edwards and Nick Juliano, Raw Story
Monday July 9, 2007

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, continued to stress his case for impeaching Vice President Dick Cheney, saying his role in pushing the false case for war is akin to a high crime against the constitution.

“To me it’s about the constitution, it’s not about the personality,” Kucinich said Monday morning on Joe Scarborough’s MSNBC show. “And the constitution requires the highest office holders to have the highest standards and obedience to the law, and I think serious questions have been raised, which is why I introduced the resolution.”

Kucinich predicted more members of Congress would join his impeachment push after a poll showed last week that a majority of Americans support the vice president’s impeachment, as RAW STORY previously reported.

The long-shot presidential candidate reminded Scarborough that he was among 31 Democrats who supported inquiries that led to former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in pointing out that partisan motives were not behind his current push.

Because Cheney had “enormous influence” in pushing the US into war with Iraq and made “unequivocal statements” about Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of weapons mass destruction, he has abused the trust of the American people and no longer deserves to be in office, Kucinich said.

“There’s kind of an imperial vice presidency that’s moved in,” he said. “And I think that congress has to move forward to use the remedies that our founders set forth in the early debates about making those that hold the highest offices accountable.”

Open the link for video from MSNBC’s Morning Joe, broadcast on July 9. ++

It’s His Government
I got your checks and balances right here. Well, right there, under Dick Cheney’s foot, holding hands with individual liberties, writhing in their death throes.
Will Durst, AlterNet
July 6, 2007

Alright, I got a message for the American public, and the message is this: leave Dick Cheney alone. He’s not answerable to you. Get off his big white furry butt. You are not the boss of him. Nobody is the boss of him. Dick Cheney is the boss. Of you, me, Bush. Nouri Al- Maliki. Gitmo. All of us. He’s Boss Dick. And the only reason you’re out to get him is because when he smiles he looks like he swallowed a small black child. And that is just prejudiced people. Doesn’t matter that he’s keeping this country safe. And the only two ways to do it are his way and the highway. Well, actually, under the highway. Sometimes as part of the highway. Mixed in with the rebar.

Face it: he’s better than you. And if you had half a brain in your head, you’d get down on your bony knees, kiss his feet and thank God he’s doing us the huge ginormous favor of running this country instead of letting Dyslexic Boy screw things up worse than a dumpster full of coat hangers made out of copper barbed wire. As for breaking the law, you could not empanel a jury that would find Dick Cheney guilty. Of anything. Because he has no peers. I’m not saying Dick Cheney is above the law. I’m saying Dick Cheney is the law and the least we can do is leave him and his buddies at Halliburton alone to do what they’re good at. Making money and burying bodies.

So he’s not part of the Executive Branch of the Government. So what? Hey, he doesn’t want to belong to the Executive Branch of the Government, he shouldn’t have to belong to the Executive Branch of the Government. You’ve seen the Executive Branch of our Government, would you want to belong to it? It’s less effective than spitting tobacco juice at the moon from a skateboard on ice. I got your checks and balances right here. Well, right there, under Dick Cheney’s foot, holding hands with individual liberties, writhing in their death throes.

If Dick Cheney wants to be his own branch of government, he’s his own branch of government. What’s wrong with that? Its his government. So we got an extra branch now. Four is better than three, right? And the Vice President should be able to call it whatever he wants to. The Cheneystative branch. Who’s going to tell him he can’t? You? Yeah, you and what Army? The Supreme Court? Ha. Don’t make me laugh.

And get those Congressmen to stop bothering Dick Cheney with those silly subpoenas for crum’s sake. He doesn’t have to tell you who he’s meeting with. You seriously do not want to know who he’s meeting with. Or what they’re planning. Or where they’re planning on doing it. You’ll find out soon enough. Can’t you get it through your tiny little heads: if he wanted us to know, he’d tell us. He doesn’t want to talk to you or Henry Waxman or Angelina Jolie. He doesn’t want to talk to anybody. Why do you think he’s always at an undisclosed location?

You want to know the truth. YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH. We need his lies. We cherish his lies. Because his lies are comforting; they allow us to believe what we want to believe. Not to mention being essential to a covert operation. And this whole administration is one big covert operation. And there’s no real need for anyone to know what’s going on. And that includes me and you and especially George W. Who doesn’t want to be part of the Executive branch of our Government either. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Add comment July 9th, 2007

The Tipping Point

Ahhh — the power of the press! The majority of the articles below are MSM, and they fall on the side of the Angels … end the war now! After all these long bloody years, the New York Times editorial board has decided that it’s time to come home; it isn’t exactly a Cronkite moment, but, combined with the growing GOP defection, it’s powerful. With September looming as the deadline for meeting benchmarks, it appears that none will be met and we no longer have the belly for another round of smoke and mirrors; I trust they’re putting together a plan for withdrawal, but given their competence … I fear for the next leg of this hellish journey.

With some 220+ dead this weekend, the Maliki “government” in shambles, and Democrats, incensed over the Libby affair, smelling blood in the water, Reid and Pelosi are planning more legislation to get us out — and the GOP can no longer afford to follow the Dubby’s muse — an anonymous Big Dog senator is reported to have said that the Bushies do not “recognize the depth of difficulty they’re in.” I’ll second that.

Here are MSM reads that give you all the details — one regarding Colin Powell’s attempt to talk the Dubby out of it [too little, too late, Colin -- the blog response on this article was hostile; I fear Colin will be remembered for his misplaced loyalty in this matter, and not his sterling record prior] and two articles from alternative sources, last … a piece by General Odom and one explaining the chilling new “war” word, ‘Incorporeity’. Sick. You’ll also find an insider report by Bob “Prince of Darkness” Novak, here; meanwhile, the White House is denying most of what the papers printed this weekend [duh.]

We’ve turned the corner — but let’s remember that the power of Commander-in-Chief is just about all Dub’s got going for him; if Iraq is no longer in play, there will have to be another war theatre to support his authority.

So here’s news of the flagging “will” of the American people and the Administration that can no longer ignore them — mostly MSM, and all bad news for Bush. This post is loaded — you don’t have to go anywhere else for your war news, today.

Jude

ps — attempting to solve the problem of inactive links and the wrinkles of working in Google, I just don’t have time to activate them all; here’s my compromise … if they are embedded links, or tinyurl’s, I will active them manually; the rest will be cut ‘n paste, unless you want to wait until I input to the blog [same day you receive the post] where all links will be active.

The Road Home
The New York Times | Editorial
Sunday 08 July 2007

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.
•

Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs - after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.

Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.

A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.

That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes - and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise.

The Mechanics of Withdrawal

The United States has about 160,000 troops and millions of tons of military gear inside Iraq. Getting that force out safely will be a formidable challenge. The main road south to Kuwait is notoriously vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks. Soldiers, weapons and vehicles will need to be deployed to secure bases while airlift and sealift operations are organized. Withdrawal routes will have to be guarded. The exit must be everything the invasion was not: based on reality and backed by adequate resources.

The United States should explore using Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq as a secure staging area. Being able to use bases and ports in Turkey would also make withdrawal faster and safer. Turkey has been an inconsistent ally in this war, but like other nations, it should realize that shouldering part of the burden of the aftermath is in its own interest.

Accomplishing all of this in less than six months is probably unrealistic. The political decision should be made, and the target date set, now.

The Fight Against Terrorists

Despite President Bush’s repeated claims, Al Qaeda had no significant foothold in Iraq before the invasion, which gave it new base camps, new recruits and new prestige.

This war diverted Pentagon resources from Afghanistan, where the military had a real chance to hunt down Al Qaeda’s leaders. It alienated essential allies in the war against terrorism. It drained the strength and readiness of American troops.

And it created a new front where the United States will have to continue to battle terrorist forces and enlist local allies who reject the idea of an Iraq hijacked by international terrorists. The military will need resources and bases to stanch this self- inflicted wound for the foreseeable future.

The Question of Bases

The United States could strike an agreement with the Kurds to create those bases in northeastern Iraq. Or, the Pentagon could use its bases in countries like Kuwait and Qatar, and its large naval presence in the Persian Gulf, as staging points.

There are arguments for, and against, both options. Leaving troops in Iraq might make it too easy - and too tempting - to get drawn back into the civil war and confirm suspicions that Washington’s real goal was to secure permanent bases in Iraq. Mounting attacks from other countries could endanger those nations’ governments.

The White House should make this choice after consultation with Congress and the other countries in the region, whose opinions the Bush administration has essentially ignored. The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

The Civil War

One of Mr. Bush’s arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. That war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out. Iraq may fragment into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics, and American troops are not going to stop that from happening.

It is possible, we suppose, that announcing a firm withdrawal date might finally focus Iraq’s political leaders and neighboring governments on reality. Ideally, it could spur Iraqi politicians to take the steps toward national reconciliation that they have endlessly discussed but refused to act on.

But it is foolish to count on that, as some Democratic proponents of withdrawal have done. The administration should use whatever leverage it gains from withdrawing to press its allies and Iraq’s neighbors to help achieve a negotiated solution.

Iraq’s leaders - knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival - might be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes.

The United States military cannot solve the problem. Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war.

The Human Crisis

There are already nearly two million Iraqi refugees, mostly in Syria and Jordan, and nearly two million more Iraqis who have been displaced within their country. Without the active cooperation of all six countries bordering Iraq - Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria - and the help of other nations, this disaster could get worse. Beyond the suffering, massive flows of refugees - some with ethnic and political resentments - could spread Iraq’s conflict far beyond Iraq’s borders.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia must share the burden of hosting refugees. Jordan and Syria, now nearly overwhelmed with refugees, need more international help. That, of course, means money. The nations of Europe and Asia have a stake and should contribute. The United States will have to pay a large share of the costs, but should also lead international efforts, perhaps a donors’ conference, to raise money for the refugee crisis.

Washington also has to mend fences with allies. There are new governments in Britain, France and Germany that did not participate in the fight over starting this war and are eager to get beyond it. But that will still require a measure of humility and a commitment to multilateral action that this administration has never shown. And, however angry they were with President Bush for creating this mess, those nations should see that they cannot walk away from the consequences. To put it baldly, terrorism and oil make it impossible to ignore.

The United States has the greatest responsibilities, including the admission of many more refugees for permanent resettlement. The most compelling obligation is to the tens of thousands of Iraqis of courage and good will - translators, embassy employees, reconstruction workers - whose lives will be in danger because they believed the promises and cooperated with the Americans.

The Neighbors

One of the trickiest tasks will be avoiding excessive meddling in Iraq by its neighbors - America’s friends as well as its adversaries.

Just as Iran should come under international pressure to allow Shiites in southern Iraq to develop their own independent future, Washington must help persuade Sunni powers like Syria not to intervene on behalf of Sunni Iraqis. Turkey must be kept from sending troops into Kurdish territories.

For this effort to have any remote chance, Mr. Bush must drop his resistance to talking with both Iran and Syria. Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraq’s borders.
•

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened - the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage - with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading. ++

Two more GOP senators break from Bush on Iraq
Ron Brynaert, Raw Story, based on LA Times article
Saturday July 7, 2007

Two more Republican senators have gone public with their dissatisfaction with President Bush’s Iraq war strategy, but the White House still doesn’t view the internecine feuding during wartime as a “hemorrhaging of support,” since hardly any GOP lawmakers have aligned with Democrats to call for an immediate troop withdrawal.

“Wearied by the lack of progress in Iraq and by the steady stream of military funerals back home, a growing number of Republican lawmakers who had stood loyally with President Bush are insisting his strategy has failed and are calling on him to bring the war to an end,” Noam N. Levey writes for Saturday’s LA Times. “In the last two weeks, three GOP senators — including one of the party’s leading voices on foreign affairs and one of Bush’s strongest allies — have urged the president to change course now so U.S. troops can start to withdraw.”

On Friday, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee told the paper, “It should be clear to the president that there needs to be a new strategy. Our policy in Iraq is drifting;” and “Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who helped lead the charge earlier this year against Democratic efforts to oppose Bush’s troop buildup, said: ‘We don’t seem to be making a lot of progress.’”

Gregg added that it was important that there be “a clear blueprint for how we were going to draw down.”

“None of these GOP lawmakers has embraced Democratic legislation to compel a troop withdrawal,” the paper notes. “But nearly five years after congressional Republicans overwhelmingly answered Bush’s call for military action against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, some are doing what was once unthinkable: challenging a wartime president from their own party.”

The article continues, “The tide of Republican dissent began to grow two weeks ago when Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, former chairman of the foreign relations committee, delivered an earnest plea for change from the floor of the Senate. Sen. George V. Voinovich of Ohio expressed similar doubts in a letter he sent to the president the next day, and Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, the former chairman of the armed services committee, openly praised Lugar for speaking out.”

New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, a senator for more than three decades, up for reelection in 2008, was the third Republican elder statesman to publicly turn against the president’s troop ’surge’ policy within 10 days.

“I am unwilling to continue our current strategy,” Domenici said at a news conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, blaming the Iraqi government for not making sufficient progress to merit the sacrifices of US troops.

The Times notes that “another House Republican, conservative Rep. John T. Doolittle from Roseville, Calif., labeled the Iraq war ‘a quagmire’ and called for a reduced U.S. military presence, according to the Sacramento Bee.”

During a White House press gaggle on Friday, spokesman Tony Fratto took exception when a reporter asked “what is the President going to do to stop the hemorrhaging of support from his own — his fellow Republicans before the progress report even comes forth.”

“I don’t buy that characterization of what we’re hearing from these leaders in Congress,” Fratto responded. “I think what we are hearing is some thoughtful discussion of how we go forward. And what we’re going to do, and what the President is going to do is going to continue to talk to them and continue to work together on ways forward as we work through this. So I don’t buy that characterization of it.”

Another reporter asked, “Is there no concern that these leading, influential Republicans — Domenici, Voinovich, Lugar — are basically parting with the President on many aspects of his policy? And I think that’s undeniable. They’re calling for timetables; the President doesn’t want that. They’re calling for withdrawal plans; the President doesn’t want to provide that.”

“If a withdrawal plan is tied to — is tied to a specific date, I think that’s not a wise way to go and that’s not something that we would support and that’s a conversation that we would have with them,” Fratto responded. “We think that is — that’s fraught with danger. But that’s part of the conversation that we would have with them.”

Fratto added, “But I hope they do recognize — and I think they do — that we do want to get to the same place, and we share that goal. So that is a huge amount of common ground that we share, and again, distinctly different from where Democrat leaders are talking about — where they are talking about pulling out troops in 120 days, which isn’t even really possible, forgetting that it’s not advisable. So what we’re going to continue to do is work with them on where we go in a post-surge environment.” ++

White House Debate Rises on Iraq Pullback
DAVID E. SANGER, NYT
July 9, 2007

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.

Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15, when the top field commander and the new American ambassador to Baghdad are scheduled to report on the effectiveness of the troop increase that the president announced in January. But suddenly, some of Mr. Bush’s aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the war’s future and financing.

Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

“When you count up the votes that we’ve lost and the votes we’re likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty grim,” said one senior official, who, like others involved in the discussions, would not speak on the record about internal White House deliberations.

That conclusion was echoed in interviews over the past few days by administration officials in the Pentagon, State Department and White House, as well as by outsiders who have been consulted about what the administration should do next. “Sept. 15 now looks like an end point for the debate, not a starting point,” the official said. “Lots of people are concluding that the president has got to get out ahead of this train.”

In a sign of the concern, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates canceled plans for a four-nation tour of Latin America this week and will stay home to attend meetings on Iraq, the Pentagon announced yesterday.

Last week, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, called in from a brief vacation to join intense discussions in sessions that included Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s longtime strategist, and Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff.

Officials describe the meetings as more of a running discussion than an argument. They say that no one is clinging to a stay-the-course position but that instead aides are trying to game out what might happen if the president becomes more specific about the start and the shape of what the White House is calling a “post-surge redeployment.”

The views of many of the participants in that discussion were unclear, and the officials interviewed could not provide any insight into what Vice President Dick Cheney had been telling President Bush.

They described Mr. Hadley as deeply concerned that the loss of Republicans could accelerate this week, a fear shared by Mr. Rove. But they also said that Mr. Rove had warned that if Mr. Bush went too far in announcing a redeployment, the result could include a further cascade of defections — and the passage of legislation that would force a withdrawal by a specific date, a step Mr. Bush has always said he would oppose.

“Everyone’s particularly worried about what happens when McCain gets back from Iraq,” one official said, a reference to the latest trip to Baghdad by Senator John McCain, who has been a stalwart supporter of the “surge” strategy. Mr. McCain’s travels, and his political troubles in the race for the Republican nomination for president, have fueled speculation that he may declare the Iraqi government incapable of the kind of political accommodations that the crackdown on violence was supposed to permit.

Officials say that Mr. Gates has been quietly pressing for a pullback that could roughly halve the number of combat brigades now patrolling the most violent sections of Baghdad and surrounding provinces by early next year. The remaining combat units would then take up a far more limited mission of training, protecting Iraq’s borders and preventing the use of Iraq as a sanctuary by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni Arab extremist group that claims to have an affiliation with Osama bin Laden’s network, though the precise relationship is unknown.

President Bush has repeatedly said that he wants as much time as possible for his 30,000-troop increase to show results. And publicly, administration officials insist that the president has no plans for a precipitous withdrawal — but the key word seems to be “precipitous,” and they appear to be recalibrating their message.

“I think it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we here in the administration, and in our conversations with Congress, and in our conversations with generals on the ground and policy makers in Iraq, are thinking about what happens after a surge,” Tony Fratto, the deputy White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday, at a briefing where he was peppered with questions about the defection of Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico.

That defection followed a similar move by Senator Richard G. Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

In the meetings last week, officials say, there was frustration that Mr. Bush’s statements were being drowned out by a presidential race that has created a forum for daily critiques of his policies, past and present.

Moreover, the dynamics inside the administration have changed. The hawks who once surrounded Mr. Bush have been replaced by pragmatists like Mr. Gates, who has made it clear that he wants to lower the political temperature of the Iraq debate at home, and has joined with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to gradually shift White House strategy.

When it came time to pick a new “Iraq czar,” the choice was a general who had been openly skeptical about the prospects of the troop increase strategy. Mr. Bush will get a chance to make his case later this week, when he presents an interim report, required by law by Sunday, on the status of 18 “benchmarks” of progress.

The calendar may be working in Mr. Bush’s favor. If he can get through the next three weeks without more defections, Congress will recess until September, returning just as the report from Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker arrives in Washington.

Also, the Republican defectors have not agreed on what different strategy they would prescribe, giving the president some negotiating room. But Senator Lugar said yesterday on CNN that he would support a significant withdrawal that left “residual forces” in Iraq to ensure that “the whole area does not blow up.”

That approach would mean abandoning the current mission of using those forces to patrol Baghdad and try to reimpose order, which was Mr. Bush’s stated goal in January.

Asked whether he could support an amendment proposed by Senator Ken Salazar, Democrat of Colorado, that would put in legislative language the Iraq Study Group’s call for a withdrawal of combat units by March 31, 2008, Mr. Lugar said it was “worthy of a lot of discussion.”

John Hamre, the president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was headed to Baghdad over the weekend to begin preparing another Congressionally mandated report, an independent assessment of the Iraqi military, said, “The political power of Salazar’s amendment is its ambiguity.”

“What does it mean?” Mr. Hamre asked. “That we will immediately implement all 76 provisions? I doubt it. It’s a way to give political cover.”

Senior officials involved in preparing the report Mr. Bush must deliver to Congress this week say he will be able to praise the Iraqi government for delivering the troops it promised — if a little late — and for removing the restrictions on arresting or killing violent members of Shiite militias. But on the critical issue of political compromise, Mr. Bush will be able to report little progress. ++

Administration Shaving Yardstick for Iraq Gains
Goals Unmet; Smaller Strides to Be Promoted
Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post
Sunday, July 8, 2007; Front Page

The Iraqi government is unlikely to meet any of the political and security goals or timelines President Bush set for it in January when he announced a major shift in U.S. policy, according to senior administration officials closely involved in the matter. As they prepare an interim report due next week, officials are marshaling alternative evidence of progress to persuade Congress to continue supporting the war.

In a preview of the assessment it must deliver to Congress in September, the administration will report that Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province are turning against the group al-Qaeda in Iraq in growing numbers; that sectarian killings were down in June; and that Iraqi political leaders managed last month to agree on a unified response to the bombing of a major religious shrine, officials said.

Those achievements are markedly different from the benchmarks Bush set when he announced his decision to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq. More troops, Bush said, would enable the Iraqis to proceed with provincial elections this year and pass a raft of power-sharing legislation. In addition, he said, the government of President Nouri al-Maliki planned to “take responsibility for security in all of Iraq’s provinces by November.”

Congress expanded on Bush’s benchmarks, writing 18 goals into law as part of the war-funding measure it passed in the spring.

In addition to the elections, legislation and security measures Bush outlined in January, Congress added demands that the Iraqi government complete a revision of its constitution and pass a law on de-Baathification and additional laws on militia disarmament, regional boundaries and other issues.

Lawmakers asked for an interim report in July and set a Sept. 15 deadline for a comprehensive assessment by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador. Now, as U.S. combat deaths have escalated, violence has spread far beyond Baghdad, and sectarian political divides have deepened, the administration must persuade lawmakers to use more flexible, less ambitious standards.

But anything short of progress on the original benchmarks is unlikely to appease the growing ranks of disaffected Republican lawmakers who are urging Bush to develop a new strategy. Although Republicans held the line this year against Democratic efforts to set a timeline for withdrawing troops, several influential GOP senators have broken with Bush in recent days, charging that his plan is failing and calling for troop redeployments starting as early as the spring.

According to several senior officials who agreed to discuss the situation in Iraq only on the condition of anonymity, the political goals that seemed achievable earlier this year remain hostage to the security situation. If the extreme violence were to decline, Iraq’s political paralysis might eventually subside. “If they are arguing, accusing, gridlocking,” one official said, “none of that would mean the country is falling apart if it was against the backdrop of a stabilizing security situation.”

From a military perspective, however, the political stalemate is hampering security. “The security progress we’re making is real,” said a senior military intelligence official in Baghdad. “But it’s only in part of the country, and there’s not enough political progress to get us over the line in September.”

In their September report, sources said, Petraeus and Crocker intend to emphasize how security and politics are intertwined, and how progress in either will be incremental. In that context, the administration will offer new measures of progress to justify continuing the war effort.

“There are things going on that we never could have foreseen,” said one official, who noted that the original benchmarks set by Bush six months ago — and endorsed by the Maliki government — are not only unachievable in the short term but also irrelevant to changing the conditions in Iraq.

As they work to put together the reports due to Congress next week and in September, these officials and others close to Iraq policy recognize that the administration is boxed in by measurements that were enshrined in U.S. law in May.

“That is a problem,” the official said. “These are congressionally mandated benchmarks now.” They require Bush to certify movement in areas ranging from the passage of specific legislation by the Iraqi parliament to the numbers of Iraqi military units able to operate independently. If he cannot make a convincing case, the legislation requires the president to explain how he will change his strategy.

Top administration officials are aware that the strategy’s stated goal — using U.S. forces to create breathing space for Iraqi political reconciliation — will not be met by September, said one person fresh from a White House meeting. But though some, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have indicated flexibility toward other options, including early troop redeployments, Bush has made no decisions on a possible new course.

“The heart of darkness is the president,” the person said. “Nobody knows what he thinks, even the people who work for him.”

Mixed Security Results

Military commanders say that their offensive is improving security in Baghdad. “Everything takes time, and everything takes longer than you think it’s going to take,” Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, which is fighting south of Baghdad, said Friday. He added: “There is indeed room for optimism. I see progress, but there needs to be more.”

Yet the month of May, which came before the Phantom Thunder offensive began, was the most violent in Iraq since November 2004, when U.S. and Iraqi forces fought a fierce battle to retake Fallujah. That intensity promises to continue through the summer. “I see these aggressive offensive operations . . . taking us through July, August and into September,” Lynch said.

Not even the most optimistic commanders contend that the offensive is allowing for political reconciliation. At best, Petraeus is likely to report in September, security will have improved in the capital, perhaps returning to the level of 2005, when the city was violent but not racked by low-level civil war.

More significant is whether that slight improvement in security can be built upon.

Regardless of what decisions are made in Washington and Baghdad, the U.S. military cannot sustain the current force levels beyond March 2008 because of force rotations. Long-term holding of cleared areas will fall to Iraqi soldiers and police officers.

Because of corruption and mixed loyalties, a Pentagon official said about the Iraqi police, “half of them are part of the problem, not the solution.” The portrait officials paint of the Iraqi military is somewhat brighter. “These guys have now been through some pretty hard combat,” said a senior administration official. “They’re in the fight, not running from it.

“But can they do it without us there? Almost certainly not,” the official said.

Even if U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies are able to hold Baghdad and the surrounding provinces, noted the intelligence official, there is a good chance that security will deteriorate elsewhere because there are not enough U.S. troops to spread around. As U.S. troop numbers decrease, he said, it is possible that by sometime next year “we control the middle, the Kurds control the north, and the Iranians control the south.”

A Hurdle to Progress

Last month, Iraq’s largest Sunni political grouping announced that its four cabinet ministers were boycotting the government and that it was withdrawing its 44 members from parliament. The immediate cause was the arrest of a Sunni minister on murder charges and a vote by the Shiite-dominated legislature to fire the Sunni Arab speaker.

The withdrawal poses a serious problem for short-term U.S. goals. A new law to distribute oil revenue among Iraq’s sectarian groups — seen by U.S. officials as the best hope for a legislative achievement before September — reached parliament last week after months of delay. Although the Shiite and Kurdish blocs could pass it, the absence of the Sunnis would make any victory meaningless.

U.S. officials despair of any timely progress on the oil law. “I suppose they’ll pass it when they damn well want to,” one official said.

Plans to hold provincial elections, envisioned to provide more power to Sunnis who boycotted a 2005 vote, have grown more complicated. As Anbar tribal chieftains have emerged to help fight al-Qaeda, they have also demanded more political power from traditional Sunni leaders. In southern Shiite areas, Maliki’s Dawa organization continues to vie with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the largest bloc in the Shiite alliance that dominates Iraq’s parliament, while both fear the rising power of forces controlled by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

“In mixed areas such as Baghdad,” a U.S. official said, “the Sunnis are worried that the Shiites will just clean up again even if [Sunnis] participate this time, because so many Sunnis” have fled sectarian violence in the capital.

Late last year, amid strong doubts about Maliki’s leadership capabilities, senior White House officials considered trying to engineer the Iraqi president’s replacement. But most have now concluded that there are no viable alternatives and that any attempt to force a change would only worsen matters.

Instead, U.S. officials in Baghdad are engaged in a complicated hand-holding exercise with Iraqi leaders, and are striving for small gains rather than major advancement. The main example of success they cite is agreement reached by the top Shiite, Sunni and Kurd officials in the government to appeal for calm after last month’s bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra.

Officials are encouraged by the growing numbers of local Sunni officials and tribal leaders in Anbar striving to wrest political and security control from al Qaeda in Iraq. Bush has also highlighted the importance of such local efforts. “This is where political reconciliation matters most,” he said in a speech last month, “because it is where ordinary Iraqis are deciding whether to support new Iraq.”

But officials caution that this transformation is no substitute for a national Iraqi identity, with unified leadership in Baghdad. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government must continue to reach out to Anbar “and give these emerging tribal forces status, adopting them,” a U.S. official said.

“Trying to do the local initiative stuff and having that be the whole story does not advance the process,” he said.

Warnings on Withdrawal

Facing increased public disapproval and eroding Republican support, Bush has stepped up his warnings that a sudden U.S. withdrawal would allow al-Qaeda or Iran — or both — to take over Iraq. What is more likely, several officials said, is a deeper split between competing Shiite groups supported in varying degrees by Iran, and greater involvement by neighboring Arab states in Sunni areas battling al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Kurdish region, officials said, would become further estranged from the rest of Iraq, and its tensions with Turkey would increase.

“I can’t say that al-Qaeda is going to take over, or that Iran is going to take over,” an official said. “I don’t think either are true. But I do think that a lot of very, very bad things would happen.” If the administration decided to have troops retreat to bases inside Iraq and not intervene in sectarian warfare, he said, the U.S. military could find itself in a position that “would make the Dutch at Srebrenica look like heroes.”

For its part, the military has calculated that a veto-proof congressional majority is unlikely to demand a full, immediate withdrawal. But however long the troops remain, and in whatever number, the military intelligence official said, they see a clear mission ahead.

“We’re going to get it as stable as we can, with the troops we have, and in the time available. And then, we’ll back out as carefully as we can,” the official said. ++

Staff writer Robin Wright contributed to this report.

‘Scouting’ the Hill on Iraq
Robert D. Novak, WaPo
Monday, July 9, 2007

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley visited Capitol Hill just before Congress adjourned for the Fourth of July. Meetings with a half-dozen senior Republican senators were clearly intended to extinguish fires set by Sen. Richard Lugar’s unexpected break from President Bush’s Iraq policy. They failed.

Hadley called his expedition a “scouting trip,” leading one senator to ask what he was seeking. It was not advice on how to escape from Iraq. Instead, Hadley appeared interested in how previous supporters of Bush’s course had drifted away. In the process, though, he planted seeds of concern. Some senators were left with the impression that the White House still does not recognize the scope of the Iraq dilemma. Worse yet, they see the president running out the clock until April, when a depleted U.S. military can be blamed for the fiasco.

The tone set by Hadley signaled that the White House did not understand that Lugar, in his fateful speech on the Senate floor the night of June 25, was sending a distress signal to Bush that a change in policy can be instituted only by the president and that it is imperative he act now. Hadley was told that it is not too late to go back to the Iraq Study Group’s 79 recommendations, neglected since their release in December. But the White House still seems unaware of the building tide, typified by the defection Thursday of six-term Republican Sen. Pete Domenici (who was not among the graybeards “scouted” by Hadley).

The White House no more expected Domenici to jump overboard than it did Lugar. The shock of Lugar’s speech was the reason Hadley quickly scheduled sessions with senior Republican senators such as Lugar and Chuck Hagel, the top two GOP members on the Foreign Relations Committee, and John Warner, former chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “The president has sent me up here on a scouting mission,” Hadley said to begin the meetings.

Always deferential, Hadley took copious notes. But he did more than listen. Based on what Hadley said, one senator concluded that “they just do not recognize the depth of the difficulty they are in.” That difficulty entails running out of troops in nine months. Hadley increased latent fears of the U.S. military being made the fall guy — a concern shared by many retired and some active senior officers, including a current infantry division commander.

During his expedition, Hadley was asked why Bush named a serving Army officer — Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute — as a deputy national security adviser and “czar” of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Isn’t that Hadley’s job? Freshman Democratic Sen. Jim Webb, a lawmaker who has worn the nation’s uniform in combat, was one of four senators who voted against Lute’s confirmation. He told the Senate that Lute’s return to the Army after serving in the administration would threaten the military’s status as a “non-political organization.”

Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Armed Services Committee, managed Lute’s confirmation with little enthusiasm. He noted that several retired four-star generals had refused the “czar” job. They included Marine Gen. Jack Sheehan, reported by Levin as having turned down the president because “hawks within the administration, including Vice President Cheney, remain more powerful than the pragmatists looking for an exit strategy in Iraq.”

Though Lugar’s defection brought the national security adviser to the Hill, Bush did not call the respected senator into the White House for a face-to-face talk. That is not this president’s style, as shown by his reaction to an essay by Hagel in the Financial Times last week calling for an international mediator in Iraq under U.N. Security Council auspices.

Hagel had advocated that proposal in a private letter to Bush several weeks earlier. Instead of the president responding to an overture from a longtime critic, Hagel was answered in routine fashion by a third-level bureaucrat (Jeffrey Bergner, assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs).

As the first in a succession of Republican senators to be critical of Bush’s Iraq policy, Hagel feared the worst when he returned home to conservative Nebraska for Fourth of July parades. Instead, he was pleasantly surprised by cheers and calls for the troops to be brought home. Perhaps a White House scouting trip into the American heartland might be worthwhile. ++

Powell tried to talk Bush out of war
Sarah Baxter, The Sunday Times UK
July 8, 2007

THE former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

“I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.”

Powell has become increasingly outspoken about the level of violence in Iraq, which he believes is in a state of civil war. “The civil war will ultimately be resolved by a test of arms,” he said. “It’s not going to be pretty to watch, but I don’t know any way to avoid it. It is happening now.”

He added: “It is not a civil war that can be put down or solved by the armed forces of the United States.” All the military could do, Powell suggested, was put “a heavier lid on this pot of boiling sectarian stew”.

The signs are that the views of Powell and other critics of the war are finally being heard in the Pentagon, if not yet in the White House. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, is drawing up plans to reduce troop levels in Iraq in anticipation that General David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, will not be able to deliver an upbeat progress report in September on the American troop surge.

“It should come as no secret to anyone that there are discussions about what is a postsurge strategy,” said Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, last week.

The surge’s lack of demonstrable success is creating fissures in the Republican party as well as putting enormous pressure on the Democratic presidential candidates to favour a rapid pull-out, which Gates fears could leave Iraq in chaos.

New Mexico senator Pete Domenici became the third Republican senator in recent weeks to break ranks openly with Bush on the war. “We cannot continue asking our troops to sacrifice indefinitely while the Iraqi government is not making measurable progress,” he said. “I am calling for a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path home.”

Speculation is growing that Gates will demonstrate his commitment to withdrawing US forces by moving a combat brigade of up to 3,000 troops out of Iraq as early as October and continuing to reduce their numbers month by month from their current strength of 160,000 to presurge levels of around 130,000 by the summer of 2008.

Gates believes American troop withdrawals are essential to building a cross-party consensus for retaining a presence in Iraq after Bush’s term in office expires. As a former director of the CIA who saw out the cold war in the early 1990s, he hopes to win the same bipartisan support for Iraq that President Harry Truman secured against the Soviet Union after the second world war.

The policy is likely to appeal to Gordon Brown, the prime minister, who hopes to begin withdrawing more British troops from southern Iraq by the end of August.

A senior defence source said it would be possible to reduce the number of American forces to roughly 50,000-70,000 by election day in November 2008. “You are going to have to have some people left behind to provide stability and security for the country and take on the terrorists,” the source said.

The figures are similar to those floated by aides to Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, although she has been upping the rhetoric against remaining in Iraq in an effort to capture the support of party activists.

According to Powell, the US cannot “blow a whistle one morning” and have all American forces just leave. The former secretary of state has twice met Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, to advise him on foreign policy. Despite his antiwar stance, Obama supports a phased withdrawal that could leave a “significantly reduced force” in Iraq for “an extended period”.

Defence experts believe it will be impossible to maintain the surge’s high troop levels beyond February at the latest, given the need to rotate and refresh troops. Powell, who served as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the early 1990s, said in Aspen that America’s volunteer army was already overstretched. He predicted that Bush would be forced to “face the situation on the ground” and alter course by the end of this year.

Supporters of the surge believe this could send a disastrous signal to the Iraqis. “If we pull out, if we stop this operation now, we will hand Al-Qaeda a terrific victory,” said Frederick Kagan, a military historian at the American Enterprise Institute and an early advocate of the policy.

“The Iraqi government, right now, is a terrific ally in the war on terror. There have been more Iraqis killed fighting Al-Qaeda than in any other nation of the world. The question is, are we going to stand by them?”

The same political fault line runs through the White House between Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office and the State Department � now run by Condoleezza Rice, Powell’s successor � as it did at the start of the Iraq war. Bush has not yet thrown his weight definitively behind one side or the other, but the key difference this time is that the defence secretary is one of the “realists”.

According to Powell: “We have to face the reality of the situation that is on the ground and not what we would want it to be.” He believes that, even if the military surge has been a partial success in areas such as Anbar province, where Sunni tribes have turned on Al-Qaeda, it has not been accompanied by the vital political and economic “surge” and reconciliation process promised by the Iraqi government.

Al-Qaeda, Powell asserted, was only 10% of the problem in Iraq and Nouri al-Maliki, its prime minister, lacked the political will to establish an effective government. After a promising start to the surge at the beginning of the year, 453 unidentified corpses were found on the streets of Baghdad last month, 41% more than the 321 bodies found in January, according to unofficial Iraqi health ministry statistics.

The military gains could prove as fleeting in Anbar as Baghdad. American officers in Iraq believe Al-Qaeda strengthened its hold on the Sunni-dominated region in 2005, when responsibility for security was shifted prematurely to Iraqi forces that were led by Shi’ites and proved incapable of providing protection.

Powell believes that a reduction in US forces will have to be accompanied by talks with Syria and Iran. “You have to talk to the people you dislike most in this dangerous world.”

The general and former joint chiefs of staff added:

“Shi’ites will ultimately prevail because they are 60% of the population and their militias can be pretty violent. They will prevail also because they are determined not to be ruled again by the Sunnis.

“The Sunnis are struggling for power and survival and it’s going to be resolved by a test of arms. It’s going to be very ugly.”

++

Violent weekend in Iraq kills over 220
ROBERT H. REID, AP
Sun Jul 8

BAGHDAD - Prominent Shiite and Sunni politicians called on Iraqi civilians to take up arms to defend themselves after a weekend of violence that claimed more than 220 lives, including 60 who died Sunday in a surge of bombings and shootings around Baghdad.

The calls reflect growing frustration with the inability of Iraqi security forces to prevent extremist attacks.

The weekend deaths included two American soldiers — one killed Sunday in a suicide bombing on the western outskirts of Baghdad and another who died in combat Saturday in Salahuddin province north of the capital, the U.S. command said. Three soldiers were wounded in the Sunday blast.

Sunday’s deadliest attack occurred when a bomb struck a truckload of newly recruited Iraqi soldiers on the outskirts of Baghdad, killing 15 and wounding 20, a police official at the nearest police station said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Also Sunday, two car bombs exploded near simultaneously in Baghdad’s mostly Shiite Karradah district, killing eight people. The first detonated at 10:30 a.m. near a closed restaurant, destroying stalls and soft drink stands. Two passers-by were killed and eight wounded, a police official said.

About five minutes later, the second car exploded about a mile away near shops selling leather jackets and shoes. Six people were killed and seven wounded, said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

The Karradah area includes the offices of the Supreme Islamic Council in Iraq, the biggest Shiite party in parliament, and is considered among the safest parts of the capital.

Elsewhere, a bomb hidden under a car detonated Sunday at the entrance of Shorja market — a mostly Shiite area of central Baghdad that has been hit repeatedly by insurgents — killing three civilians and wounding five, police said.

Police also reported they found the bodies of 29 men Sunday scattered across Baghdad — presumed victims of sectarian death squads. Four other people were killed Sunday in separate shootings in Baghdad, police said on condition of anonymity because they were not supposed to release the information.

The string of attacks in the Iraqi capital showed that extremists can still unleash strikes in the city despite a relative lull in violence here in recent weeks amid the U.S. offensives in and around Baghdad.

But the bloodshed in the Baghdad area paled in comparison to the carnage Saturday when a truck bomb devastated the public market in Armili, a town north of the capital whose inhabitants are mostly Shiites from the Turkoman ethnic minority.

There was still confusion over the death toll.

Two police officers — Col. Sherzad Abdullah and Col. Abbas Mohammed Amin — said 150 people were killed. Other officials put the death toll at 115. Abbas al-Bayati, a Shiite Turkoman lawmaker, told reporters in Baghdad that 130 had died.

Regardless of the precise figure, the attack was clearly among the deadliest in Iraq in months. It reinforced suspicions that al-Qaida extremists were moving north to less protected regions beyond the U.S. security crackdown in Baghdad and on the capital’s northern doorstep.

In a joint statement, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and U.S. military commander Gen. David Petraeus said the attack against the Turkoman Shiites was “another sad example of the nature of the enemy and their use of indiscriminate violence to kill innocent citizens.”

Turkish military air ambulances evacuated 21 people wounded in the attack for treatment in Turkish hospitals, the country’s Foreign Ministry said. Turkey feels special responsibility for its ethnic brethren, the Turkoman, who speak a Turkic language.

During a news conference Sunday in Baghdad, al-Bayati criticized the security situation in Armili, saying its police force had only 30 members and that the Interior Ministry had finally responded to requests for reinforcements only two days before the attack.

In the absence of enough security forces, al-Bayati said authorities should help residents “arm themselves” for their own protection.

The call for civilians to take up arms in their own defense was echoed Sunday by the country’s Sunni Arab vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, who said all Iraqis must “pay the price” for terrorism.

“People have a right to expect from the government and security agencies protection for their lives, land, honor and property,” al-Hashemi said in a statement. “But in the case of (their) inability, the people have no choice but to take up their own defense.”

He said the government should provide communities with money, weapons and training and “regulate their use by rules of behavior.”

Another prominent Sunni lawmaker, Adnan al-Dulaimi, said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had failed to provide services and security but he stopped short of saying his followers would seek to topple the Shiite-led government in a no-confidence vote.

The CBS Evening News reported Saturday that a large block of Sunni Iraqi politicians will ask for a parliamentary vote of no-confidence against al-Maliki’s government on July 15.

“The situation has become terribly bad,” al-Dulaimi told The Associated Press. “All options are open for us. We are going to study the situation thoroughly, and we are going to look into the possible measures which go with the interests of the Iraqi people. We will also consider whether to keep on with the government or not.”

But Iraq’s national security adviser, a Shiite, insisted that the government still enjoyed broad support and he warned against any effort to replace al-Maliki.

“I can tell you one thing that after Maliki, there is going to be the hurricane in Iraq,” Mouwaffak al-Rubaie told CNN’s “Late Edition.” “This is an extremely important point to make across and to the Western audience and to the Arab audience as well as the larger Muslim audience.”

The idea of organizing local communities for their own defense has caught on here in recent months following the success of Sunni Arab tribes in Anbar province that took up arms to help drive al-Qaida from their towns and villages.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have said they hope to replicate the “Anbar model” elsewhere in the country, albeit under government supervision and control.

On Sunday, Lt. Gen. Ali Gheidan said the Iraqi army planned to raise volunteer forces in Diyala province, where U.S. and Iraqi forces have driven al-Qaida fighters from part of the capital of Baqouba. He said more than 3,800 volunteers had already been recruited.

“Their mission will be like the police, working under the Iraqi police,” Gheidan told reporters. “They work as a protection for each area, and they will only be from the residents of that area. Their role is to hold onto territory after it has been cleansed by the military.”

U.S. commanders have long believed the key to restoring security was the ability of Iraqi forces to hold on to areas cleared by American troops. Several senior U.S. officers have questioned whether the Iraqi police and army were capable of preventing insurgents from returning once the Americans had left.

Local defense forces would offer a way to compensate for weaknesses in the Iraqi police and army, but without careful controls, the system could backfire by promoting more militias in a country already awash in weapons.

Also Sunday, the British Defense Ministry announced the death of a British soldier who was wounded Saturday in the biggest British offensive against Shiite militias this year. ++

Lessons Unlearned In Iraq
Kiki Munshi, WaPo
Saturday, July 7, 2007

JULIAN, Calif. — Last year at this time, I traveled from Forward Operating Base Warhorse into the Iraqi town of Baqubah several times a week to meet with the governor, the provincial council chairman and other officials. Yes, it was dangerous. But it wasn’t suicidal.

Today, though, such trips would be almost impossible. Baqubah is a battlefield, the site of a major push against al-Qaeda and other insurgents. The houses that haven’t been destroyed are riddled with bullet holes. Many of the Iraqis I worked with are dead, and many others have fled.

The reason for some of this destruction lies, as our newspapers tell us, in the outpouring of al-Qaeda operatives from Baghdad, a result of the latest U.S. troop “surge” into the capital.

Much of the responsibility, however, is ours.

The actions of American troops have prompted much of the resistance in Diyala province. More important, these actions are symptomatic of other factors, including the short attention span of the American people, the regular rotation of our troops, the understandable desire of each commander to distinguish himself, and our very American belief that we can solve problems quickly when others can’t. We have allowed all of these factors to run away with the war in Iraq.

Last year the colonel in charge of a battalion of the 4th Infantry Division, several of his commanders and other officers and I spent a great deal of time trying to convince potential “insurgents” that politics could be a substitute for guns in the ongoing battle to control resources. We were modestly successful. The brigade commander met regularly with Shiites and Sunnis in the security forces and government. Battalion commanders were on excellent terms with Sunni and Shiite tribal chiefs in their areas and received substantial support from them.

Through the offices of Baqubah Mayor Khalid al-Sanjary, I spoke several times with high-ranking former Baathist military officers who wanted desperately to help their country and to defend it against Iranian incursion. Here our two sides had a common interest: The United States had been tracking the infiltration of war materiel into Diyala from Iran, and much of it was used against us; these Baathists (most of the officers were Sunni) had led Iraqi units during the war against Iran and had no desire to see Iranians control their country.

The “peace” of summer 2006 was tenuous and began to erode in August. There was a U.S. troop “surge” into Baghdad — the current “surge” isn’t the first or, some say, even the second — and we felt the results of insurgents fleeing into Diyala long before it became popular to talk about it.

Then came an unfortunate development in the Iraqi forces. The Shiite commanding general was replaced by Maj. Gen. Shaker Hulayel, another Shiite who was said to have been appointed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office.

Hulayel was sectarian to the core. He talked the talk of peace and reconciliation, but his walk was down corridors lined with Sunni detainees, illegally held and tortured. His walk was in front of death squads, sent to take out important Sunnis. His walk was laced with hatred and contempt for the precepts of democracy and order.

His presence was not helpful to the reconciliation process.

There was also an unfortunate development in the U.S. military. In the fall, the battalion from the 4th Infantry Division was replaced by a cavalry battalion. Our new colonel was eager to finish the job his predecessor had not. He chose to fight with weapons, not words, as a first option. He dropped the “speak softly” and resorted to the big stick. Out of necessity, as our directions were to work with and train Iraqi forces with a goal of handing responsibility to them, the sectarian Hulayel became an “ally.”

The results? Hard to prove, but Mayor Sanjary — an able and intelligent politician who worked harder to foster peace than anyone else I knew in the government — was “kidnapped” and his office blown up under strange circumstances. We Americans, after I left Baqubah, issued arrest warrants for him. Word is that he has been detained as an insurgent.

The whole episode is bizarre and, given Sanjary’s influence, damaging to U.S. goals. Of the former Baathist officers I knew, some have fled. Others have perhaps put their experience, intelligence and outstanding craftsmanship at the service of our enemies. Who really knows? If all the authorities are against you, do you have a choice?

Hulayel was, at U.S. insistence, finally dismissed a few weeks ago. The charges against him were corruption and aiding insurgents.

And we Americans? We are trumpeting our “new” initiative of enlisting Sunni tribal chiefs to our side. We are busy “building confidence” among the Iraqi security forces who, we now admit, have had sectarian tendencies. We’re also mounting a massive campaign against . . . our “enemies.”

We have forgotten or not bothered to remember what we have done over the past months.
But the Iraqis have not forgotten. They have lived this chapter before. Only it was better then, last year. ++

The writer is a retired Foreign Service officer who returned to duty to lead the provincial reconstruction team in Baqubah, Iraq, from April 2006 until January 2007.

‘Supporting the troops’ means withdrawing them
William E. Odom, Nieman Watch Dog
July 05, 2007

Gen. William Odom writes that opponents of the war should focus public attention on the fact that Bush’s obstinate refusal to admit defeat is causing the troops enormous psychological as well as physical harm.
____

Every step the Democrats in Congress have taken to force the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq has failed. Time and again, President Bush beats them into submission with charges of failing to “support the troops.”

Why do the Democrats allow this to happen? Because they let the president define what “supporting the troops” means. His definition is brutally misleading. Consider what his policies are doing to the troops.

No U.S. forces have ever been compelled to stay in sustained combat conditions for as long as the Army units have in Iraq. In World War II, soldiers were considered combat-exhausted after about 180 days in the line. They were withdrawn for rest periods.

Moreover, for weeks at a time, large sectors of the front were quiet, giving them time for both physical and psychological rehabilitation. During some periods of the Korean War, units had to fight steadily for fairly long periods but not for a year at a time. In Vietnam, tours were one year in length, and combat was intermittent with significant break periods.

In Iraq, combat units take over an area of operations and patrol it daily, making soldiers face the prospect of death from an IED or small arms fire or mortar fire several hours each day. Day in and day out for a full year, with only a single two-week break, they confront the prospect of death, losing limbs or eyes, or suffering other serious wounds.

Although total losses in Iraq have been relatively small compared to most previous conflicts, the individual soldier is risking death or serious injury day after day for a year. The impact on the psyche accumulates, eventually producing what is now called “post-traumatic stress disorders.” In other words, they are combat-exhausted to the point of losing effectiveness. The occasional willful killing of civilians in a few cases is probably indicative of such loss of effectiveness. These incidents don’t seem to occur during the first half of a unit’s deployment in Iraq.

After the first year, following a few months back home, these same soldiers are sent back for a second year, then a third year, and now, many are facing a fourth deployment! Little wonder more and more soldiers and veterans are psychologically disabled.

And the damage is not just to enlisted soldiers. Many officers are suffering serious post-traumatic stress disorders but are hesitant to report it – with good reason. An officer who needs psychiatric care and lets it appear on his medical records has most probably ended his career. He will be considered not sufficiently stable to lead troops. Thus officers are strongly inclined to avoid treatment and to hide their problems.

There are only two ways to fix this problem, both of which the president stubbornly rejects. Instead, his recent “surge” tactic has compelled the secretary of defense to extend Army tours to 15 months! (The Marines have been allowed to retain their six-month deployment policy and, not surprisingly, have fewer cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome.)

The first solution would be to expand the size of the Army to two or three times its present level, allowing shorter combat tours and much longer breaks between deployments. That cannot be done rapidly enough today, even if military conscription were restored and new recruits made abundant. It would take more than a year to organize and train a dozen new brigade combat teams. The Clinton administration cut the Army end strength by about 40 percent – from about 770,000 to 470,000 during the 1990s. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld looked for ways to make the cuts even deeper. Thus this administration and its predecessor aggressively gave up ground forces and tactical air forces while maintaining large maritime forces that cannot be used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sadly, the lack of wisdom in that change in force structure is being paid for not by President Bush or President Clinton but by the ordinary soldier and his family. They have no lobby group to seek relief for them.

The second way to alleviate the problem is to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq as soon as possible and as securely as possible. The electorate understands this. That is why a majority of voters favor withdrawing from Iraq.

If the Democrats truly want to succeed in forcing President Bush to begin withdrawing from Iraq, the first step is to redefine “supporting the troops” as withdrawing them, citing the mass of accumulating evidence of the psychological as well as the physical damage that the president is forcing them to endure because he did not raise adequate forces. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress could confirm this evidence and lay the blame for “not supporting the troops” where it really belongs – on the president. And they could rightly claim to the public that they are supporting the troops by cutting off the funds that he uses to keep U.S. forces in Iraq.

The public is ahead of the both branches of government in grasping this reality, but political leaders and opinion makers in the media must give them greater voice.

Congress clearly and indisputably has two powers over the executive: the power of the purse and the power to impeach. Instead of using either, members of congress are wasting their time discussing feckless measures like a bill that “de-authorizes the war in Iraq.” That is toothless unless it is matched by a cut-off of funds.

The president is strongly motivated to string out the war until he leaves office, in order to avoid taking responsibility for the defeat he has caused and persisted in making greater each year for more than three years.

To force him to begin a withdrawal before then, the first step should be to rally the public by providing an honest and candid definition of what “supporting the troops” really means and pointing out who is and who is not supporting our troops at war. The next step should be a flat refusal to appropriate money for to be used in Iraq for anything but withdrawal operations with a clear deadline for completion.

The final step should be to put that president on notice that if ignores this legislative action and tries to extort Congress into providing funds by keeping U.S. forces in peril, impeachment proceeding will proceed in the House of Representatives. Such presidential behavior surely would constitute the “high crime” of squandering the lives of soldiers and Marines for his own personal interest. ++

Reservist fighting his fifth war call-up
AMY DRISCOLL, Miami Herald
7/8/07

‘Incorporeity’: Increase Your Wartime Vocabulary
Harkavy, The Village Voice
July 6, 2007

[open link to view document]

This morning’s L.A. Times report that the U.S. and its allies are killing more Afghan civilians than the Taliban are could be just the tip of the coffin.

In Iraq, documents that the ACLU pried from the War Department indicate that the U.S. often rejects claims — even defying judges’ rulings — that its troops have killed innocent civilians. And one of those rejected claims shows that a seldom-used word — “incorporeity” — is creeping into the wartime language.

Judges are granting “incorporeity damages” for civilian deaths, as the document below shows, but U.S. officials often rejected such claims. In the case below, an Iraqi claims that his son was killed by troops as he approached a checkpoint on his way to market. A judge valued the son at $7,500 — $5,000 for “killed my son” and $2,500 for “incorporeity damages” — but U.S. officials said his behavior was “threatening” and refused to pay.

Heretofore not used to describe the death of Iraq civilians, “incorporeity” comes from “incorporeal,” according to my OED, which I guess you could say backs up the U.S. position: The first OED definition of “incorporeal”:

Having no bodily or material structure; not composed of matter; immaterial.

The second definition gets right to it:

Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of immaterial beings.

That’s accurate. As I pointed out in October 2004, General Tommy Franks remarked early on, “We don’t do body counts,” but others were, including Iraq Body Count, which has documented 65,000 violent deaths so far. It used to be that we did most of the killing, but now of course it’s the rebels’ bombs and suicide runs that account for most of it.

Nevertheless, IBC noted in a March 2007 rundown:

Coalition-caused deaths.

Coalition forces, principally US as well as some UK, were identified to have killed at least 536 Iraqi civilians in year four (excluding a major incident in Najaf in January which is still under investigation by IBC). This compares with 370 in year three. If 536 seems insignificant in light of the overall total, consider for a moment what it would mean if in your country there were, on average, three incidents a week in which a foreign army killed civilians, including the killing of a 5-yr-old girl and entire families with their children. Would this army be a stabilising influence?

Check out the batch of Iraq death claims yourself at this ACLU page; there’s even a search engine on civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The same kind of destabilizing is happening in Afghanistan, where Hamid Karzai’s government is shakier all the time. This morning’s L.A. Times story notes:

After more than five years of increasingly intense warfare, the conflict in Afghanistan reached a grim milestone in the first half of this year: U.S. troops and their NATO allies killed more civilians than insurgents did, according to several independent tallies. . . .

But the growing toll is causing widespread disillusionment among the Afghan people, eroding support for the government of President Hamid Karzai and exacerbating political rifts among NATO allies about the nature and goals of the mission in Afghanistan.

More than 500 Afghan civilians have been reported killed this year, and the rate has dramatically increased in the last month.

The Times story tries to be fair:

Still, Western military leaders argue that any comparison of casualties caused by Western forces and by the Taliban is fundamentally unfair because there is a clear moral distinction to be made between accidental deaths resulting from combat operations and deliberate killings of innocents by militants.

“No [Western] soldier ever wakes up in the morning with the intention of harming any Afghan citizen,” said Maj. John Thomas, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. “If that does inadvertently happen, it is deeply, deeply regretted.”

Well, it’s not true that no Western soldier wakes up in the morning with the intention of harming a civilian. How about the Abu Ghraib tortures, which my colleague Graham Rayman recently revisited?

A better example is soldier Steven Green, leader of a rape crew that prosecutors say got drunk, put on masks, invaded an apartment, raped a 14-year-old girl and killed her and her whole family.

Green’s now facing the death penalty, so maybe at some point he’ll become incorporeal himself. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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