What was the big story about Iraq this week? I don’t mean Harry Reid keeping some senators up all night. More than that, it was the degree to which the U.S. military is bursting at the seams over this stupid war. I’m certain many of you saw the video of Bob Gates sobbing over the death of the Marine they called “the lion of Fallujah”, but how many have seen footage from the air war in Iraq? Show of hands… I thought not. 
That’s because it’s not being televised, just as the daily suffering of U.S. soldiers and ordinary Iraqis (now suffering at our hands non-stop since 1990) seldom makes it to our national news programs. As during the later years of the Vietnam War, the use of massive firepower is becoming a kind of consolational therapy for our political leaders and senior military commanders, as well as a sign of their increasing frustration over so persistent a policy failure as Operation Iraqi Freedom. Planners know that the clock is ticking on the Iraq project, and that they need to show “progress”, “results”, etc., and fast. So… bombs away.
Right now the focus is on September, when General Petraeus’ report is due, but they’re talking about this only because September isn’t here yet. When September arrives, they will have moved the goal posts yet again. Preliminary work for this next extension is already being laid in the public sphere – just this morning I read a news item quoting someone high in the chain of command on how they will need at least until summer of 2008 to consolidate what “gains” they have made since the beginning of the “surge” strategy (i.e. temporarily displacing insurgents to other areas of Iraq) and perhaps another 2 years. At the current rate of attrition, that could mean another 700-1500 American lives and god knows how many Iraqis. Personally, I don’t think Bob Gates has got that many crocodile tears in him. I can’t imagine what American soldiers deployed in Iraq for their third tour of duty must think when they read stories like that. One wonders if they’re reading Catch-22 at the same time. (One wonders if they would need to.)
Why, then, does Colonel Cathcart keep raising the number of missions? Well, obviously the administration did not invade Iraq just to quit it 5 short years later. (Fact is, they didn’t invade Iraq at all; only their unfortunate charges.) It is an enormous geopolitical prize, if it can be tamed, and a long-term U.S. presence (invited by a compliant Iraqi regime, of course) is what U.S. decision makers want here, even if it costs another 700, 1,500, or 3,000 American lives. Now, they will always present it as a matter of completing the job that the fallen have started, but if that “job” (created by politicians, not soldiers) is illegitimate, immoral, and extremely ill-advised, then the sooner we quit, the better. By their logic, we will never leave Iraq… which is, of course, their intention. So the dying will continue, until we decide it’s time for them to stop. Perhaps that time will only come when they start digging a little deeper to find live bodies to fill all those empty boots. Sooner or later, they will have to.
Looks like we’re in for some pretty hard-sell recruiting, friends. We’ve got ourselves a keeper.
luv u,
jp
stories were the intelligence reports about a resurgent Al Qaeda and the interim report on “progress” in Iraq. While those two stories are, by virtue of previous intelligence reports, intimately related, Sawyer and Stephanopoulos were careful to keep them in their separate silos. No chance that either of these seasoned journalists would, say, ask Michael Chertoff whether or not Al Qaeda’s new strength was further evidence that the Iraq war is spawning a new generation of terrorism, drawing more people to extremism, and alienating those people in the middle east who might otherwise harbor some affection for us. I mean, we know that this stupid war is making terrorism worse – why do we pretend otherwise? 
Even in the face of no significant progress on the “benchmarks”, Bush demands patience. That’s basically the only card he has left. He’s got nothing to lose by taking that position because… well… he’s got nothing to lose. He can’t run for president again and he knows it’s unlikely that he’ll be impeached, so he’s got the office for the next 18 months. And as long as he never admits failure, Bush can always tag the collapse of Iraq on someone else. It won’t be down to him. It will be Congress’s fault if they cut off funds and Iraq falls apart. It will be the Iraqis’ fault if the money keeps flowing but the place implodes anyway. It will be the skeptics’ fault in either case for draining the American people’s will to “stay the course.” And when he leaves office with the war still rolling lethally along, he leaves the mess to someone else who will take the blame for the ensuing disaster. For now, Bush and company are content to prolong the fiction that there can be a good outcome to this war for anyone besides Halliburton and Blackwater. If doing so kills another World Trade Center’s worth of Americans between now and the end of his term, it’s no skin off his nose.
in months – free BBC reporter Alan Johnston. They’re cracking down on organized crime, drug trafficking, even celebratory gunfire. Aside from that last item, it’s unclear to me why Bush doesn’t fucking love them, inasmuch as they’re religious conservatives as well. And now reporters and the “experts” who love them (including many who thought the Iraq war was a great idea and are still on television) are finding themselves backed into saying something not entirely disparaging about Hamas, which by their expressions appears to be roughly equivalent to drinking their own urine. Oh my god! Hamas is governing! They’re not acting like crazed chimps with machine guns, like we always said they would!
This is the first presidential campaign in my memory that hasn’t featured a contender from the current administration. Not a huge surprise, since the Bush team appears to have the midas touch in reverse (everything they touch turns to shit). In fact, it’s too consistent a pattern to be mere incompetence. Politically, Bush represents some of the most extreme right elements of the G.O.P. Usually the focus is on social “conservatives”, but his true base is corporate America and people with enormous pots of money and no desire to part with any of it. Since 2001, Bush has steadily and methodically trashed the federal government, outsourcing its functions, privatizing its resources, and running what’s left into the ground with his “hekuva job” cronyism. Even his astoundingly well-funded Pentagon is now largely a clearing house for private contracting. When he finally leaves, he will have gone a long way towards fulfilling the desires of his well-heeled supporters, turning the government into a cash cow and undermining public faith in its effectiveness and accountability for probably decades to come.
senators and congresspeople are watching the polls and worrying about their prospects for fending off anti-war challengers if this Iraq business doesn’t roll to a stop before fall of 2008. Others are probably just sick of hearing about dead and grievously wounded constituents. Dubya, for his part, obviously couldn’t care less. In some ways, he’s strikingly similar to his predecessor in the White House, at least with respect to his disregard for the health of his party. Oh sure, Bush, Rove, and Tom Delay tried to rig Washington into a G.O.P.-only club, but look where they have brought the party after six years. Pretty much the only thing they have a firm grip on now is the Supreme Court, which can be relied upon to hand down draconian decisions and maybe decide an election in a pinch. That’s enough to win… but not to govern.
It is remarkable, though, the extent to which they’ve discredited not only military adventurism (resuscitated temporarily by the Gulf War) but, more generally, the U.S.’s capacity for getting its way in the world. We still have plenty of weight to throw around, make no mistake – both economic and military – but that easy way we had of getting ordinarily compliant governments to line up behind us (or in front of us) is not what it once was. Just this week it was reported that African nations are bridling at the prospect of hosting permanent U.S. bases on the continent to support the Pentagon’s new “Africa Command”. Even notoriously corrupt western-oriented (i.e. able to be bribed) leaders are afraid that any movement in that direction will provoke an awful backlash from the populace, which trusts neither American power nor the motives behind its application. (Recall that Africa is now a substantial source of petroleum for the U.S.) Russia is off the reservation and Latin America is in open revolt (both are committing the mortal affront of putting their national and regional interests ahead of our own).
while in fact speaking a portion of the grisly truth. “Freedom” may sound like human rights, but what they’re really talking about is the freedom to apply power at will. Pirates’ freedom, or perhaps more accurately, the freedom of the mafia don. Our standard is clear: a regime loves freedom if it is compliant with our directives. If not, it is radical, dictatorial, extreme. Uri Avnery, the great Israeli peace activist, 
If it weren’t so grim, it would be almost laughable to hear Dubya clumsily working his rhetoric around this situation when he and Olmert have so obviously undermined the very principles the claim to champion. Pundits in the U.S. media – those critical of Bush – fault him for being “disengaged” from the Israel / Palestine issue, but the problem is just the opposite. That lack of progress in reaching a comprehensive peace agreement? That’s what they’ve accomplished, with the full cooperation of the Israeli government. Bush has involved himself deeply, pouring money and arms into one Palestinian side, strangling the other (and 1.5 million civilians along with it), and fomenting this conflict under the watchful eye of their Middle East point person, Elliot Abrams, who by rights should be spooning gruel in a Nicaraguan prison right now. The result is quite typical for this administration – a total disaster, people at one another’s throats, that sort of thing. More birth pangs, and with a midwife like Abrams, you can see what this sucker is going to look like when it grows up.
a dream come true – at long last, Palestinians are killing one another. Forty years into the illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (not to mention the Syrian Golan, still illegally occupied), the imperial tactic of divide and conquer is finally paying dividends. Back in the 1980s, when the first intifada was brewing, Israeli intelligence made an investment in the then-nascent Hamas movement, hoping that it would undercut Fatah in the occupied territories. Of course, the intifada made Arafat’s organization, then in exile in Tunis, far less relevant, as resistance was driven by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, not in the diaspora. That was when Hamas began to take hold as a political force, providing social services while the territories were under siege.
Palestinian Authority is funded, trained, and dog-whipped by Israel and the United States. We Americans may be ignorant of this, but it’s only too clear to the people living in the territories. And since the election, Palestinian society has been strangled by an act of collective punishment (shamelessly supported by the Europeans) that would be condemned bitterly in any other context, touching off this fratricidal struggle. This fulfills the fervent wish of an Israeli leader decades ago who envisioned Palestinians in the territories being contained like “drugged roaches in a bottle.” Quite so, and the world looks on. Our own indifference is fueled by a mainstream media that almost never goes out on a political limb, even when ex-presidents give them cover. I just heard NPR’s 
the biggest caveman on camera. I think this week’s prize might have to go to G.O.P. longshot congressman Duncan Hunter, who advocated using “tactical nuclear missiles” to destroy Iranian centrifuges. (There’s a man of conviction!) That’ll teach those Iranians to threaten … people with… nuclear … weapons…. (irony). Christ, they’ll probably kick up their uranium enrichment just on the basis of his little demagogic tirade. Then there’s the god-stakes, which was a bit more of a laugh than usual since the very same day I heard a political commentator on NPR opining that the Republican candidates were shying away from openly religious rhetoric to distance themselves from Dubya. Right on the money once again, NPR! What’s the weather going to be like tomorrow? (How about today?) For chrissake, that Huckabee jerk started one of his answers quoting from Genesis (and I don’t mean 
It’s the same phenomenon that keeps international and national news off the front page of my hometown newspaper. The publishers – like the politicians – assume that we don’t really care that much about what’s happening in, say, Iraq, because 1) we don’t have to go and fight there, 2) we don’t pay for the war via added taxation, and 3) we re-elected George W. Bush, who can’t tell the ceiling from the floor, as our commander-in-chief. We’re insulated from the effects from our own wars, so why should anyone assume we want to know about them? That insulation is the product of our own gullibility. While a good many of us wanted the Iraq war, no one wants higher taxes… so our “leaders” came up with this “invade now, pay later” imperial strategy. Similarly, no one wants the draft, so our politicians lean more and more heavily on the volunteer force, making them go back again and again, perpetually raising the bar like Colonel Cathcart in Catch-22. Bush and our congressional leaders told us we could have a world war without having to fight or pay, and we, for the most part, bought it. 
directed extremist organizations. It’s the last rhetorical refuge for a president who has lost the support of the vast majority of his countrymen and is now hunkering down to ride out the last 18 months of a particularly septic tenure. If we leave Iraq, Bush cautions us, we will be hit again. What he doesn’t tell us is, if we stay, we are just as likely to be hit again, if not more so, thanks to his war in Iraq, which has spawned a new generation of terrorists and significantly destabilized a region already boiling with hatred and injustice. Alas, there is no “undo” button on this war, which is why so many of us opposed it most strenuously before its start. We have set into motion a catastrophe the repercussions of which will be with us for decades to come. If Bush is in search of a legacy, there it is.
Now, the Iraq war has generated at least 2 million external refugees, with probably 700,000 in Jordan and more than 1 million in Syria, plus another 2 million internally displaced within Iraq. These are enormous populations of desperate people who will probably not be returning home anytime soon, and I have to think that the vast majority of them blame us for their plight (assuming some level of rationality). Meanwhile, the U.S. is all but ignoring this growing catastrophe, even though it threatens to metastasize the horror of an imploding Iraq throughout the entire region, putting added pressure on societies already under stress. (The U.S. quota for accepting Iraqi refugees this year is about 7,000 – so far, we’ve taken less than 100.) If I were to guess, I’d say the next major attack on the U.S. will include some of these folks in Jordan and Syria – people who have lost everything – family, home, future, hope. What’s your guess? 
disastrous war he started more than four years ago. This in the wake of yet another 9 U.S. service members killed and god knows how many Iraqis – scores over the past few days. I know I’m not the only one saying W.T.F., though it’s not so much out of surprise as it is just pure exasperation. I mean, a watery timeline for withdrawal with a plethora of caveats – that hardly constituted a radical departure from Rumsfeldian warmaking (precisely what we need). And yet that has morphed into a no-strings-attached allocation of billions for the continued occupation of Iraq. Is that what people voted for last November? Was that the theme called out from the podium as party leaders implored us to turn the G.O.P. out? Not hardly.
This is criminal behavior, pure and simple. Bush wants to keep this sucker going so that it won’t be “lost” on his watch (or “watch”, as many might put it). The Democratic leadership, for its part, refuses to draw a firm line in front of the president even when his popularity is at a historic low, largely due to the war in Iraq (even in my moderate-to-conservative district, Bush polled about 28% in a recent Web survey by the local daily paper – that’s almost unprecedented for a Republican). It’s obvious that neither of the major political power centers in this country is going to put a stop to this slaughter. And judging by the news coming out of Iraq – Parliament supporting a timetable for withdrawal, Muqtada al-Sadr re-emerging, Iraqi youth in Basra (!) cheering over a burning security contractor vehicle – it may in fact take the Iraqis to send our military home. Until we can get ourselves politically beyond the idea that “supporting the troops” means extending their service in a hell hole, I see no other way out.
Yes, it was a proud moment indeed when applause could be heard at the mere mention of torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques”, as some put it). McCain, of course, gave his standard speech about torture – inspiring, until you recall that the “anti-torture” legislation he ultimately signed onto last year has holes big enough to pass a dozen waterboards through. To be certain, he was the only one there who’d ever experienced torture, and I imagine he and his fellow P.O.W.’s may have believed during their captivity, as McCain suggested, that America would never abuse prisoners in such a way. Just a ways south of the “Hanoi Hilton”, however, the C.I.A. and local allies were applying grisly and often lethal techniques on their captives with sickening regularity, particularly in connection with the Phoenix program, which left probably 20,000 dead (many of whom, like so many current detainees, may as well have been picked at random). Of course, how that is any worse than just dropping cluster bombs or jellied gasoline on people kind of escapes me.
We were also treated this week to some of the actual real-world reasoning behind keeping terror suspects out of the courtroom. As with the Phoenix program, I’m certain many of these detainees were captured on the basis of an informant accusation – perhaps a disgruntled neighbor or the like – or some other questionable evidence that might not stand up in open court. At Jose Padilla’s trial, for instance, the prosecution presented a kind of Al Qaeda recruitment document that purportedly had Padilla’s fingerprints on it. Of course, the guy was held in an extra judicial hole for years and had his wits tortured out of him to the point where he cannot even aid in his own defense, so it’s just possible that during that long process he may have been presented with this document during “enhanced” interrogation. Fact is, it seems the real reason they don’t want to try terror suspects in open court is that they often don’t have much of a case against them.