As much as in pains me.....

.....I have say Max Boot is almost right.
One of the things that angers me most about Cheney's war for oil in Iraq is that it has made it impossible for us to win a war that needed to be fought and needed to be won. Of course I'm talking about Afghanistan. Max Boot makes a good point here, just not the one he meant to.
Going it alone because we have to
He points out correctly that our NATO allies have so slashed their military budgets that it is almost impossible for the US to not act unilaterally. Of course Max wouldn't agree that this makes it more important for the US to not enter in wars of choice - wars for oil, read Iraq. Now I will assume that the Bush/Cheney administration thought that NATO would be a bigger player in Afghanistan. Of course they shouldn't have and that too is a sin.

The primary culprit is declining defense spending among U.S. allies. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, defense budgets among NATO members, excluding the U.S., have fallen from 2.49% of gross domestic product in 1993 to 1.8% of GDP in 2005.

Yes they should have know. Of course I could also assume the the Bush/Cheney cabal knew and just didn't care.

The point Max Boot makes is not the one he intended to make, no optional wars. But other than that his right.

Crazy Cheney's bad trip!

Dick Cheney went to Pakistan and chewed out Musharraf who told him to mind his own business after he left for Afghanistan where he was attacked by insurgents, probably from Pakistan. To make matters worse Condi Rice apparently got to George W. Bush while he was gone.
U.S. Set to Join Iran and Syria in Talks on Iraq

WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 — American officials said Tuesday that they had agreed to hold the highest-level contact with the Iranian authorities in more than two years as part of an international meeting on Iraq.

The discussions, scheduled for the next two months, are expected to include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts.

The announcement, first made in Baghdad and confirmed by Ms. Rice, that the United States would take part in two sets of meetings among Iraq and its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, is a shift in President Bush’s avoidance of high-level contacts with the governments in Damascus and, especially, Tehran.

So what changed? Could it have something to do with this?
Iraqis Agree Oil Deal to Spread the Wealth
The Gun Toting Liberal thinks so.

Well now it’s clear to me why this is happening. There is money to be made in Iraq! Gunny, you can stop slapping me upside the head now. Thanks. Mike and Alex you can stop too! “Surge” didn’t read the Governor’s piece or mine. He was simply being “Surge” again.

Now that the Iraqi government has reached an agreement to share the wealth of it’s very profitable oil fields it is more than okay for the evil doers in the region to sit at a table and talk with our nation. Is it just me or is this the administration you have to always follow the flow of oil and money in order to find out what they will do next? If that is true then hypothetically, if the oil fields in Iraq started to run dry, President Bush would have our troops home in a matter of days! Why would we need our troops there if it was just a damn desert with no economical value to the Republicans United States of America?

This meeting will be about the money and not the peace. Before the war, Iraq was supposedly up there in the ranking as one of the larger producers of oil at two to four million barrels a day. I may be wrong on that fact but the truth of the matter is that Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Oklahoma are probably pumping out more oil today than Iraq. That can only mean somewhere there is an oil bazzillionaire whose checkbook is not balancing out. Twenty something zeros are missing on the end amount on the old ledger balance sheet.

That's right, the invasion of Iraq always was all about oil and money. Now that Exxon/Mobile, Shell and Chevron can make big bucks peace is now important. There is more money to be made with oil than war. James Baker III new this and that's why he wanted to talk to Iran.

Update
Steve Soto agrees that the administraion is now ready to talk because with the new Iraqi Oil Law they have won the "real" war.

No, this isn't from The Onion

It's from The American Spectator
Jeb in 2008?

Don't be surprised if, come November of 2008, voters are choosing between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush for president.

But how can that be? Jeb's not running.

Well, he isn't running now, but the new, front-loaded primary system may, counterintuitively, allow him to enter the race late as a "white knight" rescuing Republicans from a morass of unhappiness and indecision.

Now Jeb may be the "smart one" of the family but one look at the Bush gene pool would indicate that doesn't mean too much. But the Republicans don't have a recent record of nominating mental giants so perhaps we should look at the the current President Bush's approval ratings. Yes that's right, Jeb would have to change his name and hope that no body remembers that he used to be a Bush. Not even the Republicans want a Bush and in the general election he might get less votes than a third party candidate. And let's not forget the Terri Schiavo fiasco; it did in Bill Frist and did the same for Jeb Bush. No. this isn't from The Onion but it could be.

Iran tries to kill Cheney in Afghanistan

OK, I'm just trying to get ahead of the spin, we all know it was Saddam's second cousin.
Cheney unhurt after deadly blast at Afghan base

BAGRAM, Afghanistan - A suicide bomber attacked the entrance to the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan Tuesday during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, killing up to 23 people and wounding 20. The Taliban claimed responsibility and said Cheney was the target.

Cheney’s spokeswoman said he was fine, and the vice president later met with President Hamid Karzai in the capital, Kabul, before leaving the country.

[....]

“At 10 a.m. I heard a loud boom,” Cheney said.

A red alert was sounded and Secret Service officials told Cheney there had been a suspected suicide attack. “They moved me for a relatively brief period of time to one of the bomb shelters nearby,” he said.

“As the situation settled down and they got a better sense in terms of what was going on, then I went back to my room until it was time to leave.”

It doesn't really matter if Cheney was the target or how far away he was from the blast. It just goes to show how the chaos in Afghanistan is increasing and that the US is helpless to stop it.

Update


Steve Soto has an excellent post and analysis on all of this and asks, how did the Taliban know the super secret Cheney was there? Pakistan perhaps?

This is really Romper Room. The Taliban are supported by Pakistan’s ISI, where Cheney visited the day before. Why is no one asking how the Taliban knew where Cheney was? Sure, the Taliban would not be here to attack him if Cheney and Rumsfeld had finished Bin Laden off five years ago at Tora Bora. Nor would the Taliban be in this position had Bush and Cheney not encouraged Musharraf to give Bin Laden and the Taliban a free pass out of North Waziristan back in September. But the fact that this trip has turned into a joke of sophomoric secrecy and an attack against the Veep is a perfect illustration of the administration’s failed foreign policy and war on terror.

Condi Speaks and .......

I've been lecturing, occasionally, at Stanford for two decades. I never met Condolezza Rice when she was at the far right "think" tank there, the Hoover Institute, nor when she was Provost at Stanford for 6 years in the '90s. I've asked a lot of faculty members who did meet her what she was like. The most positive thing anyone has ever told me about her is that she was an OK piano player. Academically she was always a joke, someone who had managed to get through a series of third-rate schools because of a good memory and some charm but little with little ability for analysis or real comprehension.
~DownWithTyranny

The Bush administration is marked by two types of people.

1. The insane masquerading as incompetent - Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
2. And the truly incompetent - Condolezza Rice.

In spite of her resume Dr Rice has always come off as an intellectual light weight. Perhaps just as important she represented an administration that was based on lies and deception and she is a really bad liar. You can tell when she's lying and she comes off as someone who is seconds away from a panic attack.

Kieth Olbermann dissects Condi's latest intellectually dishonest analogy in last nights special comment, Condi goes too far.

Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thought he could equate those who doubted him with Nazi appeasers, without reminding anybody that the actual, historical Nazi appeasers in this country in the 1930s were the Republicans.

Vice President Cheney thought he could talk as if he and he alone knew the “truth” about Iraq and 9/11, without anyone ever noticing that even the rest of the administration officially disagreed with him.

The president really acted as if you could scare all of the people all of the time and not lose your soul — and your majority — as a result.

But Secretary of State Rice may have now taken the cake. On the Sunday morning interview show “Of Broken Record” on Fox, Dr. Rice spoke a paragraph, which if it had been included in a remedial history paper at the weakest high school in the nation would've gotten the writer an "F" — maybe an expulsion.

If Congress were now to revise the Iraq authorization, she said, out loud, with an adult present: "… it would be like saying that after Adolf Hitler was overthrown, we needed to change, then, the resolution that allowed the United States to do that, so that we could deal with creating a stable environment in Europe after he was overthrown."

The secretary's résumé reads that she has a master’s degree and a Ph.D in political science. The interviewer should have demanded to see them, on the spot. Dr. Rice spoke 42 words. She may have made more mistakes in them than did the president in his State of the Union Address in 2003.

There is, obviously, no mistaking Saddam Hussein for a human being. But nor is there any mistaking him for Adolf Hitler.

Invoking the German dictator who subjugated Europe; who tried to exterminate the Jews; who sought to overtake the world is not just in the poorest of taste, but in its hyperbole, it insults not merely the victims of the Third Reich, but those in this country who fought it and defeated it.

Saddam Hussein was not Adolf Hitler. And George W. Bush is not Franklin D. Roosevelt — nor Dwight D. Eisenhower. He isn't even George H.W. Bush, who fought in that war.

However, even through the clouds of deliberately spread fear, and even under the weight of a thousand exaggerations of the five years past, one can just barely make out how a battle against international terrorism in 2007 could be compared — by some — to the Second World War.

The analogy is weak, and it instantly begs the question of why those of "The Greatest Generation" focused on Hitler and Hirohito, but our leaders seem to have ignored their vague parallels of today to instead concentrate on the Mussolinis of modern terrorism.

But in some, small, "You didn't fail, Junior, but you may need to go to summer school" kind of way, you can just make out that comparison.

But, Secretary Rice, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was akin to overthrowing Adolf Hitler? Are you kidding? Did you want to provoke the world's laughter?

And, please, Madame Secretary, if you are going to make that most implausible, subjective, dubious, ridiculous comparison; if you want to be as far off the mark about the Second World War as, say, the pathetic Holocaust-denier from Iran, Ahmadinejad — at least get the easily verifiable facts right: the facts whose home through history lies in your own department.

Olbermann then gives us the facts that Dr Rice either didn't know or chose to ignore.

The resolution that allowed the United States to" overthrow Hitler?

On the 11th of December, 1941, at 8 o'clock in the morning, two of Hitler's diplomats walked up to the State Department — your office, Secretary Rice -- and 90 minutes later they were handing a declaration of war to the chief of the department's European Division. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor four days earlier, and the Germans simply piled on.

Your predecessors, Dr. Rice, didn't spend a year making up phony evidence and mistaking German balloon-inflating trucks for mobile germ warfare labs. They didn't pretend the world was ending because a tin-pot tyrant couldn't hand over the chemical weapons it turned out he'd destroyed a decade earlier. The Germans walked up to the front door of our State Department and said, "We're at war." It was in all the papers. And when that war ended, more than three horrible years later, our troops and the Russians were in Berlin. And we stayed, as an occupying force, well into the 1950s. As an occupying force, Madam Secretary!

Sorry Condi, you may have a PhD but in your case that certainly stands for Pile it Higher and Deeper.

More on Iraq and Iran

The Bush administration via the Pentagon is claiming one again today that it has "solid evidence" that Iran is responsible for the EFP's in Iraq.
U.S. Says Raid in Iraq Supports Claim on Iran

David Hambling at The Danger Room says it's not necessarily so.
Iraq's Superbombs: Home Made?

Cernig at NewsHog has all the details as usual.

The real danger that has been created by the six years of lies and deception by the Bush administration is that a majority of the world and now a majority of Americans no longer believe them - ever. This represents a very real National Security threat itself. What if the come to us and say the sky is falling and it really is?

Cheney - incompetent or insane

The headline reads:
Bush to Warn Pakistan to Act on Terror



And apparently he's going to leave it to the totally mad Lord of Darkness, Dick Cheney, to do it.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 — Vice President Dick Cheney made an unannounced trip to Pakistan on Monday to deliver what officials in Washington described as an unusually tough message Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, warning him that the newly Democratic Congress could cut aid to his country unless his forces become far more aggressive in hunting down operatives with Al Qaeda.

Mr. Cheney’s trip was shrouded in secrecy, and he was on the ground for only a few hours, sharing a private lunch with the Pakistani leader at his palace. Notably, Mr. Cheney traveled with the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Steve Kappes, an indication that the conversation with the Pakistani president likely included discussion of American intelligence agency contentions that Al Qaeda camps have been reconstituted along the border of Afghanistan.

The decision to send Mr. Cheney secretly to Pakistan came after the White House concluded that General Musharraf is failing to live up to commitments he made to Mr. Bush during a visit here in September. General Musharraf insisted then, both in private and public, that a peace deal he struck with tribal leaders in one of the country’s most lawless border areas would not diminish the hunt for the leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

This from Josh Marshall

Okay, it seems we need more updates on why Dick Cheney is too dangerously incompetent to have in any position of authority, let alone the vice presidency. You'll see for instance that this morning Cheney showed up in Islamabad warning President Musharraf that al Qaeda is "regrouping" along the Pakistani border. Musharraf must be a little confused since, didn't we sign off on the armistice his government signed with the jihadists and their protectors just a few months ago?

More to the point, last week Cheney claimed that Nancy Pelosi's position on Iraq would validate al Qaeda since al Qaeda's goal in Iraq is to show that our will can be broken. Reed Hundt chimed in and pointed out that it's far more likely that al Qaeda's goal is to bait us into ridiculous and unwinnable wars that will sap our military strength and financial power.

Sorry Josh, you've got it wrong, it's even worse. Dick Cheney is not too incompetent to be VP, he's to insane - mad - bonkers. Musharraf and the rest of the world knows it. Now Condi Rice is incompetent but Dick Cheney is bat shit crazy, a real life Dr Strangelove.

Where's the beef?

I thought I was the only one who had noticed that the battle for the presidential nomination between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had little substance - little policy - little ideology - few solutions. But no, Paul Krugman has noticed.
Substance Over Image
The title of Krugman's column refers to what we need not what we have.

Six years ago a man unsuited both by intellect and by temperament for high office somehow ended up running the country.

How did that happen? First, he got the Republican nomination by locking up the big money early.

Then, he got within chad-and-butterfly range of the White House because the public, enthusiastically encouraged by many in the news media, treated the presidential election like a high school popularity contest. The successful candidate received kid-gloves treatment — and a free pass on the fuzzy math of his policy proposals — because he seemed like a fun guy to hang out with, while the unsuccessful candidate was subjected to sniggering mockery over his clothing and his mannerisms.

Today, with thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead thanks to presidential folly, with Al Qaeda resurgent and Afghanistan on the brink, you’d think we would have learned a lesson. But the early signs aren’t encouraging.

This brings us to 2007 and the battle for the Democratic nomination. For the front runners - Hillary and Barack - it's all about image once again.

“Presidential elections are high school writ large, of course,” declared Newsweek’s Howard Fineman last month. Oh, my goodness. But in fairness to Mr. Fineman, he was talking about the almost content-free rivalry between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — a rivalry that, at this point, is mainly a struggle over who’s the bigger celebrity and gets to lock up the big donors.

Krugman suggests we demand some substance and ask some questions.

First, what do they propose doing about the health care crisis? All the leading Democratic candidates say they’re for universal care, but only John Edwards has come out with a specific proposal. The others have offered only vague generalities — wonderfully uplifting generalities, in Mr. Obama’s case — with no real substance.

Second, what do they propose doing about the budget deficit? There’s a serious debate within the Democratic Party between deficit hawks, who point out how well the economy did in the Clinton years, and those who, having watched Republicans squander Bill Clinton’s hard-won surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy and a feckless war, would give other things — such as universal health care — higher priority than deficit reduction.

Mr. Edwards has come down on the anti-hawk side. But which side are Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama on? I have no idea.

Third, what will candidates do about taxes? Many of the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. Should they be extended, in whole or in part? And what do candidates propose doing about the alternative minimum tax, which will hit tens of millions of middle-class Americans unless something is done?

Fourth, how do the candidates propose getting America’s position in the world out of the hole the Bush administration has dug? All the Democrats seem to be more or less in favor of withdrawing from Iraq. But what do they think we should do about Al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Pakistan? And what will they do if the lame-duck administration starts bombing Iran?

The point of these questions isn’t to pose an ideological litmus test. The point is, instead, to gauge candidates’ judgment, seriousness and courage. How they answer is as important as what they answer.

He concludes with this:

Over the last six years we’ve witnessed the damage done by a president nominated because he had the big bucks behind him, and elected (sort of) because he came across well on camera. We need to pick the next president on the basis of substance, not image.

As I read this I can't help but think that Paul Krugman is as delusional as Dick Cheney. Substance will continue to take the back seat to image. The candidates don't employ policy makers they employ image makers. One of the major reasons for this is the nature of the media. Joe Gandelman had a good post yesterday, Should News Entertain Or Inform — Or Both?.

–The tabloidization of the American news media. The biggest 20th century shift came with the advent of the evening newscast, a bullet in the head to many afternoon newspapers which either shut down or merged with morning papers. But the BIGGEST shift in content came in the 1980s, after the Gart Hart/Donna Rice scandal that transformed Hart from a symbol of the future to a laugh-assured punchline. It was the National Enquirer, under aggressive, new leadership, that got the pix of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap on the boat Monkey Business. It looked like a photo that had been photoshopped — but it wasn’t. This was the Golden Age of the American Supermarket Tabloid. And the news media scrambled to compete with the supermarket tabs on that one and never looked back. Now you didn’t only have to beat the Times and Post, but you had to beat the Enquirer, the Star and the Globe.

And Joe has more, I'll just give you the bullets.

• –The rise of talk radio


• –The 24 Hour News Cycle and Fox News’ impact


• –The decline of truly high profile journalistic role models


• –The dominance of personality over issues in politics and news

  If you look at all of the above, the common denominator is the injection of personality into politics and news coverage. In the end, the personalities involved drive the narrative more than the ISSUES. Whether it’s news, talk radio, blog posts or blog comments, it now comes down to taking an issue and turning in into something linked to a person. (Note how in many comments on blogs if someone disagrees with a post they immediately turn it into a personal attack or a personal characterization — one that upon examination often proves to be wrong, oversimplified or simply just lashing out).



• –News editors and corporations can’t just ignore the competition and do 100 percent their own thing

The bottom line is that if the media is more interested in image than substance it's image we will get. And don't forget image is cheaper than substance, you don't have to pay people to fact check or analyze. So image it will be not substance. That's what will bring in the bucks and get a candidate face time on the tube.

A Dick Cheney Weekend

The Lord of Darkness was the subject of much speculation this weekend. And no, I'm not referring to is airplane problems. Cheney's latest delusional inflammatory rantings have been covered already so I'll pass on that as well. Seymour Hersh thinks that the super secret activities of Dick Cheney's super secret shadow government may be too much for Iran-Contra felon John Negroponte. Jeralyn at TalkLeft discusses the possibility that Fitzgerald with go after Cheney if he gets a Libby conviction.

This brings us to some speculation from paradox at The Left Coaster. Now everyone who checks in from time to time know that I consider Cheney to be the source of most if not all evil and on top of that he is insane - bat shit crazy. Now if Cheney wasn't actually running the show he would have been gone years ago. We also know there are people within the administration who are fighting Cheney's influence and speculation they may be more powerful than in the past. With all that in mind paradox wonders if Cheney is going to be forced to resign in the next few months.

If justice, reason and truth ever meant anything in this world of course Cheney should have resigned years ago, and of course our whoring media class has completely shielded yet another Bush administration felon, and of course Darth Cheney is seen as the untouchable evil glue that holds the heinous forces of Bush reactionaries together.

Yes, but stranger things have happened. Another extremely interesting notch to add to the detrimental cascade above is Cheney’s unique and extremely debilitating status as a non-successor vice president; it ensures a very nasty primary fight for his party before they even have to think of taking on the Democratic nominee. Bush could toss him to legitimately solve the successor issue.

Humans also, regrettably, love to find scapegoats. If Libby is guilty, Cheney is about to be indicted and bring down the whole party, why, one could easily see Cheney being forced to take the fall and resign in disgrace.

Be prepared for the unexpected on the Republican side in the next ten months. The forces being applied to the party are terrific, and already John McCain is babbling incoherently. Right now the only thing the GOP can do for 2008 is serve good food on the campaign plane, that’s it, and for a party with so much resources and expectations facing so much failure something is going to give.

It can't happen too soon.

Been there - done that - got beat

Toby Dodge writing in the Washington Post explains that the British should have known better.
Failing in Baghdad -- The British Did It First

Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Stanley Maude was head of the British army in Mesopotamia when he marched into Baghdad on a hot, dusty day in March 1917. Soon thereafter, he issued the British government's "Proclamation to the People of Baghdad," which eerily foreshadowed sentiments that Bush and his administration would express 86 years later: British forces, Maude declared, had entered the city not as conquerors, but as liberators.

Maude had arrived in Baghdad after a long and arduous military campaign. British forces had been fighting the Ottoman army for 2 1/2 years and had suffered one of the worst defeats of World War I in the six-month siege of the eastern city of Kut, which had ended in an ignominious surrender to the Turks in April 1916.

Having rallied from that loss and finally reached Baghdad, Maude tried to create common cause between the British army and the city's residents, whom he saw as having been oppressed by 400 years of Ottoman rule. "Your lands have been subject to tyranny," he declared in his proclamation, and "your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered." He promised that it was not "the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions." Instead, he called on residents to manage their own civil affairs "in collaboration with the political representatives of Great Britain."

Maude did not live to see the failure of his efforts to rally the people of Iraq to the British occupation. He died eight months later, having contracted cholera from a glass of milk.

But a failure it was.

In an echo of what is happening under the U.S. occupation, hopes for a joint Anglo-Iraqi pact to rebuild the country were dashed by a violent uprising. On July 2, 1920, a revolt, or thawra, broke out along the lower Euphrates, fueled by popular resentment of Britain's heavy-handed behavior in Iraq. The British army had set about taxing the population to pay for the building of the Iraqi state, while British civil servants running the administration refused to consult Iraqi politicians, judging them too inexperienced to play a role in the new government.

The rebellion quickly spread across the south and center of the country. Faced with as many as 131,000 insurgents armed with 17,000 modern rifles left over from the war, the British army needed eight months to regain full control of Iraq; 2,000 British troops were killed, wounded or taken prisoner and 8,450 Iraqis were killed. To make matters worse, the British government was forced to pour troops back into Iraq, long after the end of the war, to stabilize the situation.

And the lesson?

U.S. presidential candidates now campaigning to seize the White House in 2008 should be forewarned, however: It took Britain 10 more years to jettison its financial and military commitments to Iraq. During that period, a number of governments struggled to reduce the size of the forces deployed in Iraq and the amount of money being spent there. They strove for a decade to stabilize the country and meet Britain's pledges to the international community while trying to placate domestic opinion. The tensions involved in this exercise -- building a state from scratch with a hostile population, under severe budgetary constraints and in the face of rising domestic anger -- ultimately led to the failure of the whole exercise.

Now what I didn't notice in Dodge's report was the Shiite-Sunni conflict we are seeing today.

41 die in bombing near Baghdad college

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide bomber struck Sunday outside a college campus in Baghdad, killing at least 41 people and injuring dozens as a string of other blasts and rocket attacks left bloodshed around the city.

Most of the victims were students at the college, a business studies annex of Mustansiriyah University that was hit by a series of deadly explosions last month. At least 46 people were injured in Sunday's blast.

The wave of attacks around Baghdad came a day after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki lauded the progress of an ongoing U.S.-Iraqi security operation seeking to cripple militant factions and sectarian killings in the capital.

The suicide attacker detonated a bomb-rigged belt near the main entrance to the college, where students were resuming midterm exams after the two-day weekend in Iraq. Police said that guards confronted the bomber as he tried to enter the college grounds.

A 22-year-old student, Muhanad Nasir, said he saw a commotion at the gate. "Then there was an explosion. I did not feel anything for 15 minutes and when I returned to consciousness, I found myself in the hospital," said Nasir, who was wounded in his head and chest.

The blast left cement walls pockmarked by shrapnel and twisted parts of the metal gate and turnstile. Parents rushed to the site and some collapsed in tears after learning their children were killed or injured. Students used rags and towels to try to mop up the blood.

The school is in a mostly Shiite district of northeast Baghdad, but does not limit its enrollment to that group. The main campus of Mustansiriyah University, located about 1 1/2 miles away, was the target of twin car bombs and a suicide blast last month that killed 70 people.

Earlier, two Katyusha rockets hit a Shiite enclave in southern Baghdad, killing at least 10, and a bomb near the fortified Green Zone claimed two lives, police said.

Of course all of this continued carnage won't stop the wingnuts from declaring
Shhhh... The Surge is Working
I'm sure the British had their own Patrick Ruffinis 90 years ago.

This is pure BS

Now I would never vote for Mitt Romney and in fact most of his views repulse me. I think his religion is one that adds another layer of nonsense to the magic that calls itself Christianity. That said this is the kind of bull shit I would bitch about if Romney was a progressive and so it's still wrong.
Romney family tree has polygamy branch

SALT LAKE CITY - While Mitt Romney condemns polygamy and its prior practice by his Mormon church, the Republican presidential candidate's great-grandfather had five wives and at least one of his great-great grandfathers had 12.

And I have a chimp or two in my family tree if I go back 4 million years. If I go back less than 200 years I have some slave owners. I don't even want to think about what my viking ancestors on my mothers side may have done in the last 2,000 years but as a student of history I have a pretty good idea and it's not pretty.

I'm sorry but JENNIFER DOBNER and GLEN JOHNSON, Associated Press Writers, should be working for the National Enquirer not a news organization.

The AP owes Mitt Romney and America an apology.

Wanted - A leader for the 15th Century

The Dominionists aren't pleased with the the presidential candidates who have emerged from the party they thought they had taken over.
Christian Right Labors to Find ’08 Candidate

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 — A group of influential Christian conservatives and their allies emerged from a private meeting at a Florida resort this month dissatisfied with the Republican presidential field and uncertain where to turn.

The event was a meeting of the Council for National Policy, a secretive club whose few hundred members include Dr. James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Liberty University and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Although little known outside the conservative movement, the council has become a pivotal stop for Republican presidential primary hopefuls, including George W. Bush on the eve of his 1999 primary campaign.

But in a stark shift from the group’s influence under President Bush, the group risks relegation to the margins. Many of the conservatives who attended the event, held at the beginning of the month at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Fla., said they were dismayed at the absence of a champion to carry their banner in the next election.

Many conservatives have already declared their hostility to Senator John McCain of Arizona, who once denounced Christian conservative leaders as “agents of intolerance,” and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, a liberal on abortion and gay rights issues who has been married three times.

But many were also deeply suspicious of former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts; the council has been distributing to its members a dossier prepared by a Massachusetts conservative group about liberal elements of his record on abortion, stem cell research, gay rights and gun control. Mr. Romney says he has become more conservative.

While it is obvious the Bush/Cheney administration has discredited the neocon ideology for years to come the same can be said for the religious right. The pandering by former enemies like McCain and Romney has not born fruit. Giuliani never had any chance at support from the lunatic fringe. Now I don't know who will get the Republican nomination but I do know it won't be someone the Dobsons will like. What this means is that one of the Republican's most reliable voting blocks may just stay home in 2008 or vote for a third party candidate.

Get that padded bunker ready

The last few days I have suggested that Dick Cheney is "bat shit crazy" and a megalomaniac. On his recent tour of Australia Dick Cheney confirmed those observations and more. From The Carpetbagger Report:

He “stands by” what he said in 1991? Maybe Cheney is confused about what the phrase “stands by” means, but it suggests he still agrees with the remarks he made when he insisted that invading and occupying Iraq would be a “classic definition of a quagmire.” In the next breath, however, there’s 9/11.

It seems, in all sincerity, that Cheney was arguing that the 9/11 attacks justify the quagmire he predicted 16 years ago. Why? Just because.

If Cheney had said he was wrong in 1991, there would at least be something resembling coherence here. He thought Iraq would be a mess if we invaded, but we invaded, and lo and behold, everything is going great.

But that’s not what he said. Cheney argued that he was right before and right now, despite the fact that the two Cheney's appear to contradict each other.

I’m starting to think the Vice President isn’t well.

And Cernig points out that he contradicted everyone else in the administration.

Unheedful of his own administrations insistence that the US wants a peaceful resolution to its dispute with Iran over that nation's nuclear power program, Cheney insists that "all options are on the table" and, incidentally, comes out at odds with Bush's wish for the White House to appear neutral in the Republican presidential nominee race by endorsing John McCain and his view of foreign policy as war forevaaaah! (Maybe Cheney is why senior UK defense officials worry the rhetoric of a peaceful solution is just a cover for the coming attack.)

Unmindful of Bush's push of the recent North Korean nuke deal as a glorious victory for his administration, Cheney insists that he doesn't trust the North Koreans to keep their end of the deal. If the administration really thought that, then the whole deal would be a sham, a fake, a subterfuge to look like they were doing somehting, right? Way to undermine your (at least theoretical) boss, Dick!

Oh, and at the same time, Cheney picks on a recent Chinese anti-satellite test as a sure sign of Chinese belligerence.

Uncaring that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently described that very test thusly: "I would not directly tie that to a threat - it's a capability."

Even within the administration there must be people who realize Dick Cheney is dangerously demented and a threat. It's time to pad the walls of the secret bunker and lock the door. And as I suggested below we shouldn't be wasting our time going after George W. Bush. We shouldn't be concentrating on the puppet but on the puppeteer - the modern day Rasputin - the administration's own bull goose loony - Dick Cheney himself.

Quote of the day

The Quote of the Day comes from Digby.(Note: I can't get the link to work so scroll down to Counting Coup.

It's not about politics and it's not about religion. It's about tribalism. The Republicanism is an "identity" movement in which member's affiliation with the party is more akin to affiliation with clan or family.

That explains why so many people are willing to vote against their own best interests. Sounds a bit like Democracy in Iraq. Digby is writing about a post on Rick Perlstein's article on Mitt Romney. Go read the entire thing.

Yes Cheney is Bat Shit Crazy!

I keep wondering if I'm the only one that realizes the Dick Cheney is bat shit crazy. Well maybe not. We have this, (via Josh Marshall):
Fears grow over Iran

Tony Blair has declared himself at odds with hawks in the US Administration by saying publicly for the first time that it would be wrong to take military action against Iran.

[.....]

But there are deep fissures within the US Administration. Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, who has previously called for direct talks with Tehran, is said to be totally opposed to military action.

Although he has dispatched a second US aircraft carrier to the Gulf, he is understood to believe that airstrikes would inflame Iranian public opinion and hamper American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. One senior adviser to Mr Gates has even stated privately that military action could lead to Congress impeaching Mr Bush.

Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary of State, is also opposed to using force, while Steve Hadley, the President’s National Security Adviser, is said to be deeply sceptical.

Of course you will never guess who is in favor of it.

The hawks are led by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, who is urging Mr Bush to keep the military option “on the table”. He is also pressing the Pentagon to examine specific war plans — including, it is rumoured, covert action.

That's right it just Cheney and his fellow inmates in the neocon lunatic asylum.

I have felt for some time that there must be people within the administration and close to it who have been trying to short circuit Cheney's influence. In that group you would probably find the likes of George HW Bush and James Baker III. Up to this point they have not been too successful. With the insanity of an attack on Iran I'm willing to bet they are working over time. If they ever needed to succeed it is now.

Forward to the past - continued

While the rich get richer.....
U.S. economy leaving record numbers in severe poverty

WASHINGTON - The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen.


A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.


The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy's review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

As the Religious Right has been taking us back to the 14th century when it comes to science and rational thought the economic policy of the Bush has been taking us back to the feudal economy of the same period. And let us not forget the Bankruptcy Bill which turned the middle class into indentured servants.

The British in Iraq - Beyond the Spin

While Cheney and the rest of the Bush administration have tried to spin the British withdrawal from Basra and Southern Iraq as a sign of victory and success evidence on the ground would indicate otherwise.
Did the Brits Lose Southern Iraq?

Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East military expert and former national security aide to John McCain , says London's drawdown only cements Shi'ite power in southern Iraq. Shi'ite police in the region have been conducting sometimes deadly sect-based operations against Sunni residents for months, he says, and local politics have devolved into "a fractured mess" delinked from national political parties. "The coming British cuts in many ways reflect the political reality that the British `lost' the south more than a year ago," Cordesman, who has traveled to the region frequently, writes in a Wednesday analysis from his office at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The Shi'ites will take over, Iranian influence will probably expand, and more Sunnis, Christians, and other minorities will leave."

And this "success" will spread to the remainder of Iraq.

In fact, Cordesman fears that the brutal Shi'ite control of Basra and southern Iraq will spread to greater Baghdad and make the already bad situation there that much worse. Shi'ite militias in the capital appear to be standing down and not challenging U.S. and Iraqi forces as they attempt to quell the bombings and bloodshed that have gripped the city for the past year. That leaves insurgent Sunnis as the main target of the effort. "In effect," Cordesman says, "both the U.K. and the U.S. may end up acting to expand Shi'ite influence in very different ways." That, of course, would expand the influence of Shi'ite Iran in Iraq, and unsettle majority-Sunni states like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

The calm before the storm.

Cordesman's bleak outlook comes on the heels of a recently released study by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that warns that democracy is a long way from coming to the southern part of the country. In their report, "The Calm Before the Storm: The British Experience in Southern Iraq," Michael Knights and Ed Williams observe that greater Basra "has suffered one of the worst reversals of fortune of any area in Iraq since the fall of Saddam's regime." Once a cosmopolitan city and the center of Iraq's oil industry, the city — under British control — has become a violent maelstrom of warring Islamic elements. While the British initially could patrol the city without helmets, now they travel in heavily armored vehicles. "Basra is increasingly a kleptocracy used by Islamist militias to fill their war chests," the report says.

The British experience in Basra is just one example of how the Iraq war has been quarterbacked by delusional people who had no knowledge of the region. How can we forget this bit of delusional neocon wisdom?

"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."

~Willaim Kristol,
April 4th, 2003

Update
Patrick Cockburn from the Independent agrees that it is a defeat as does Chris at AmericaBlog.

Update 2
Patrick Cockburn from the Independent has even more on the British Defeat.
Revealed: The true extent of Britain's failure in Basra

The partial British military withdrawal from southern Iraq announced by Tony Blair this week follows political and military failure, and is not because of any improvement in local security, say specialists on Iraq.

In a comment entitled "The British Defeat in Iraq" the pre-eminent American analyst on Iraq, Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, asserts that British forces lost control of the situation in and around Basra by the second half of 2005.

Mr Cordesman says that while the British won some tactical clashes in Basra and Maysan province in 2004, that "did not stop Islamists from taking more local political power and controlling security at the neighbourhood level when British troops were not present". As a result, southern Iraq has, in effect, long been under the control of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri) and the so-called "Sadrist" factions.

[.....]

Why is the British Army still in south Iraq and what good does it do there? The suspicion grows that Mr Blair did not withdraw them because to do so would be too gross an admission of failure and of soldiers' lives uselessly lost. It would also have left the US embarrassingly bereft of allies.

Good Bye Joe

Lieberman Says War Vote Could Prompt Party Switch
The majority in the Senate is not worth having to put up with Joe Lieberman's bull shit. Jump Joe jump, we don't want you and never did. The only reason you caucused with the Dems was you thought you could black mail them. We don't like slimy political hacks and we like black mailers even less. The Democratic tent is big but not big enough for neocons and PNAC lunatics. So do it Joe, the sooner the better. And while you are at it make it official, announce you are a member of the Likud Party. Joe Lieberman, Likud, Connecticut; sounds like it rings true to me.
Update
In the comments section shirt makes this excellent point.

And what do we lose? The republicans will again regain the Senate and complete ownership of the war in the eyes of the public! Currently, the public thinks the dems can do something about the war and that just isn't the case. I'm not to woried about senate commitees: they'll be more than balanced by the house.

I would add that since the Senate Republicans will own it they will be much more likely to go against Bush/Cheney and do something about it. Joe's switching sides will be a plus for everyone but Joe.

Update 2
David Sirota has more on the positives if Lieberman should jump.

Wasting Time On George W. Bush

Are we wasting our time going after George W. Bush? I think the answer is yes. George W. Bush is not the problem. He is little more than a not too bright dry drunk. He is involved little, if any, in the policy decisions of the administration. As I have said here many times the source of evil is the megalomaniacal would be tyrant Dick Cheney. George W. Bush is little more than Dick Cheney's puppet and his impeachment would not only be politically damaging but a waste of time. It's time those who care about the United States and the world to ignore George W. Bush and go after the evil at it's source, Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney represents a greater threat to the United States and it's system of government than al Qaeda ever could.

The Lunatic's "War on Terror"

The Cheney administration is not incompetent; on the world stage things are going just as they planned. With this in mind let's look at a couple of pieces appearing in the MSM this week. The first is this commentary by David Ignatius,
Going Nowhere Fast

We are in the ditch in the Middle East. As bad as you think it is watching TV, it's worse. It's not just Iraq but the whole pattern of America's dealings with the Arab world. People aren't just angry at America -- they've been that way to varying degrees since I first came here 27 years ago. What's worse is that they're giving up on us -- on our ability to make good decisions, to solve problems, to play the role of honest broker.

Let's start with some poll numbers presented at the Doha conference by Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor and a fellow of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, which co-sponsored the conference with the Qatari foreign ministry. The polling was done last year by Zogby International in six countries that are usually regarded as pro-American: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In these six "friendly" countries, only 12 percent of those surveyed expressed favorable attitudes toward the United States. America's leaders have surpassed Israel's as objects of anger. Asked which foreign leader they disliked most, 38 percent named George Bush; Ariel Sharon was a distant second at 11 percent; and Ehud Olmert was third with 7 percent.

The poll data show a deep suspicion of American motives: 65 percent of those surveyed said they didn't think democracy was a real U.S. objective in the Middle East. Asked to name two countries that had the most freedom and democracy, only 14 percent said America, putting it far behind France and Germany. And remember, folks, this is coming from our friends.

So the US is universally hated in the mid east. That's OK with Cheney exactly what he wants. Cheney doesn't want to be liked - only feared. The second piece is by Christiane Amanpour,
Iranian official offers glimpse from within: A desire for U.S. ally

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- As I sat down recently with a senior Iranian government official, he urgently waved a column by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times in my face, one about how the United States and Iran need to engage each other.

''Natural allies,'' this official said.

It was a surprising choice of words considering the barbs Washington and Tehran have been trading of late.

"We are not after conflict. We are not after crisis. We are not after war," said this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But we don't know whether the same is true in the U.S. or not. If the same is true on the U.S. side, the first step must be to end this vicious cycle that can lead to dangerous action -- war."

Yes natural allies in the real war on terror. The terror threat doesn't come from the Shiites in Iran, or Iraq. The roots of al Qaeda and the Taliban is the extremist Sunni Wahhabi sect out of Saudi Arabia, enemies of the Shiite Iranians for 1400 years. Now the PNAC neocons, including Dick Cheney, have had Iran as a target since their own tyrant, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown in 1979. They controlled the Shah and so they controlled the resources of the country. Indirect imperialism. Now an attack on Iran will further destabilize the region leading to more war and less security. Cheney and his fellow lunatics are fully aware of this and it's just what they want. Dick Cheney is a classic megalomaniac - a man who wants above all else to be a tyrant. Like all tyrants Cheney and the rest of the PNAC crowd realize that one of the best ways to consolidate power is war - a constant state of war against real or concocted external enemies. No Dick Cheney is not incompetent. Instability in the middle east and the wars it will bring are exactly what he wants. That's why they will attack Iran. It's not about oil but power except for the power that comes from controlling the oil.

Related Post Here

It's about to get a lot worse? - Continued

In It's about to get a lot worse? I discussed Brij Khindaria's scenario for the Middle East and the world. It paints a picture of a destabilized Middle East and West Asia. Rick Moran, someone that I don't often agree with but read and respect, left this comment:

Ron:

I've read quite a few scenarios that game out an attack on Iran and I can assure you that this one is off the wall.

This isn't even worse case - it's no case. I don't even know where to begin to dissect this nonsense but here's a good start:

"Terrorists and rogue missiles would strike it from all sides because of its close alliance with the US. Palestinians would use the fog of war to make gains against Israel. If Israel and the US riposte heavily against the Palestinians, pressure from the Egyptian street would force Cairo to get involved."

Palestinians would use "the fog of war?" Wah? What - would the IDF fall asleep? And the only thing that "pressure from the Egyptian street" would lead to is a lot of innocent dead Egyptians.

Look - I have written continuously over the past year that an attack on Iran would be nuts - the downside far outweighing any possible gain. But this is wildly off target. It's shallow, unrealistic, and naive.

I know you didn't write it. And I know you wrote a nice, healthy caveat at the end. But this is pure fantasy - just someone rumninating in the dark after watching a horror movie.

Not going to happen.

Since I have become convinced that the Bush/Cheney administration is going to attack Iran I truly hope that Rick is right. I hope that Kindaria is as wrong as all the rosie scenarios painted by Bill Kristol and the rest of The Weekly Standard crew, as wrong as all the visions of a Democratic wonderland painted by the Bush/Cheney administration. The Iraq war has already further destabilized a region that was inherently unstable to begin with. I'll be the first to admit I don't know enough about Iran to know if it could survive the destabilization that would result from an American attack. I do suspect that Pakistan is very fragile and could fall into the hands of the Taliban and al-Qaeda at any time, nukes and all. Any regime change in Jordan or Syria would not be better than what we have now. Look at Iraq; yes Saddam was a terrible tyrant, but the world is full of those, but would the US be safer today is Saddam was still in power? Most of the time I think the answer is yes.

Is all of Khindaria's take on things correct? No. But there are parts of it that can't be dismissed as fantasy.

Quote of the day

We might also call this post by Steve Soto the most bang for the bandwidth since it's the entire post.

Sunni insurgents are now using chlorine gas bombs against Iraqis. These of course would be the same Sunni insurgents who are financed and armed by Saudi Arabia, and not Iran.

So which country are we kowtowing to, and which country are we preparing to attack?

Irrelevant - Giuliani VS Clinton that is

Any polls for the 2008 presidential election that include Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton are irrelevant. Neither one of them will be their parties nominee in 2008. Lets look at Rudy first. He has too many skeletons in his closet, including marriages, adultery, pro-choice and pro-gay marriage.
Since John McCain has hired the very man who slimmed him in 2000 for his campaign you can bet all those skeletons will see the light of day.

And then there is Hillary. If you read these virtual pages you know I am no fan of Hillary. Her hawkish stance and close association with the DLC has resulted in a distrust by a large portion of the base. She did not help herself with this:
Clinton Gives War Critics New Answer on ’02 Vote

If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Today's news has to make one wonder if Hillary's campaign is already in a melt down mode.
Clinton, Obama trade barbs over donor

WASHINGTON - Two Democratic presidential campaigns angrily accused the other of nasty politics on Wednesday over a Hollywood donor who once backed Hillary Rodham Clinton's husband but now backs her top rival.

The Clinton campaign sent out a testy news release after DreamWorks movie studio founder David Geffen, a fan of Sen. Barack Obama, told The New York Times that Sen. Clinton was ambitious and polarizing.

"CLINTON CAMP TO OBAMA: CUT TIES & RETURN CASH AFTER TOP BOOSTERS VICIOUS ATTACKS," screamed the headline of the news release.

Geffen hosted a $1.3 million fundraiser for Obama on Tuesday and is backing the Illinois senator.

Hillary has a DLC inspired hubris and the look and feel of a DC insider. The refusal to admit mistakes makes her look more like Geroge W. Bush than a person the Democrats would want to nominate. As John Avarosis said, after six years of George W Bush's refusal to admit mistakes and refusal to take responsibility:

"It worked for six years, but now people are seriously over the "I'm wrong, but resolute" personality type."

Hillary Clinton started out in a hole in her quest for the nomination and up to this point has continued to dig. Who does that sound like.

The "surge" and Sadr

"If there's more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way."
~Murphy's Law

Yesterday Cernig reported that the Kuwaiti News Agency said that Iraqi and US forces had attacked Sadr's office. This report has not been confirmed but today we have this.
Joint force weighs move on Sadr City

BAGHDAD — U.S. and Iraqi forces have moved aggressively in the last week to combat Sunni Arab insurgents in neighborhoods across the capital and to establish a stronger presence in religiously mixed districts long plagued by sectarian violence.

But as the new security crackdown enters a second week, they face their most sensitive challenge: whether, when and how to move into the Shiite-dominated slum of Sadr City, stronghold of the Al Mahdi militia.

Political pressure has mounted to crack down on the Baghdad neighborhood that harbors the militia loyal to radical anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr. Sunni Arabs, who make up the backbone of the insurgency, have long accused Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki of allowing Sadr City to remain a haven for the militia to keep the support of Sadr's followers.

Breaking something that's not broken?

U.S. and Iraqi military commanders setting out the next steps of the Baghdad security plan are concerned about stirring up a hornet's nest in a neighborhood of more than 2 million Shiites.

They worry that by moving too aggressively they could sabotage one of the few success stories in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

The teeming streets of Sadr City are thriving while the rest of the violence-racked capital wilts. The district pulses with commerce and youth, even as huge stretches of Baghdad fade into ghost towns.

Sadr City may shelter troublemakers, but they're lying low for the most part now. Moreover, Sadr's deputies have endorsed the security crackdown.

Even amid the bloodshed across Baghdad, customers fill Sadr City's shops. Workers repair its streets and sewage lines. Children play soccer on its dusty fields and walk to school along newly prettified squares, verdant emblems of progress in a quarter long one of Iraq's most deprived.

"Sadr City has always been safe, with the exception of the suicide and roadside bomb attacks," said Talib Saad, a barber along the district's main thoroughfare.

Now Sadr's people were convinced, at least in part, by the al Malaki government to go underground during the surge and let the US forces help the largely Shiite Iraq military eliminate the Sunnis. So what will happen if they march into Sadr city? The original authors of the "surge policy" thought that including Sadr city would be a bad idea.

Any new move into Sadr City remains controversial among military experts. Army Gen. Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff, and military analyst Frederick Kagan, who were among the most influential advocates of the current Bush administration plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq by 21,500, have warned that a push into Sadr City would unnecessarily unite the country's now-splintered Shiite leadership.

"Attempting to clear Sadr City would almost certainly force the [Al Mahdi militia] into [a direct] confrontation with American troops," they wrote in a January report for the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.

"It would also do enormous damage to [Maliki's] political base and would probably lead to the collapse of the Iraqi government."

But apparently Kagan has had a change of heart and now supports such a move. Juan Cole says this is not encouraging.

He says he over-estimated the Mahdi Army and under-estimated Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki earlier. Kagan doesn't have the slightest idea what he is talking about when it comes to Iraq, and he is advising Bush what to do, who knows even less. Sadr City is quiet because the Mahdi Army made a policy decision to cooperate with the security plan, and al-Maliki is in on this deal. The Mahdi Army is the street gangs of the Sadr Movement, to which millions of Iraqis have given their allegiance. You can't uproot a social movement with a few patrols and firefights. Sadrism will be there long after the US is forced to withdraw from Iraq.

Since the foundation of the Bush administration's Iraq policy seems to be Murphy's Law we can expect it to go badly.

It's about to get a lot worse?

Steve Soto points out that we seem to be Powerless To Stop Fighting The Wrong Enemy. He points out that while most of the current violence is Saudi supported the target of the Bush/Cheney cabal and the neocons is what it always has been, Iran. Steve is correct when he says the Democrats now in power won't stop them and that Iran will be attacked. We have been discussing what that will mean including the cut off of much of the world's oil and the economic woes that will result and that the Shiite majority in Iraq will turn that country into a virtual killing field for the Americans there.

Over at The Moderate Voice Brij Khindaria paints an even bleaker picture for the region and the world after a US attack on Iran.

The perils of attacking Iran

Taking on Iran would be a first step to a new kind of world war. American analysts are looking upon Iran as a Shia vs. Sunni affair and appear to be much too sanguine about its ability to withstand US air strikes or outright invasion. They seem to think that it has sufficient internal cohesion to withstand such stress because of its 6,000-year civilization. That is far from the truth.

The cons and the Bush administration want regime change in Iran. An attack might give them that but they would probably not like the end result.

The instability in Iran caused by an invasion or even air strikes deep inside its territory would trigger internal conflicts and civil wars within Iran and a spreading ring of countries like flames gobbling up a vast forest. It would be impossible for America or any Western politico-military alliance to restore stability and constructive peace to a single one of those countries because each has latent antagonisms internal to its population.

[......]

Iran would be the first country to be destabilized and collapse into civil war among Persians, Turkmen, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Pashtuns and smaller ethnic groups. It is worth remembering that Iran is located in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus. It is as big as Britain, France, Spain and Germany combined. Collapse of governance in Iran would also destabilize Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which are among the world richest states.

And it won't end there.

Instability in Iran and Iraq would draw in Turkey especially if the Kurds, allied to the US, try to use the chaos to carve out a greater Kurdistan from Syria, Turkey and Iran. Syria would deliberately destabilize Lebanon, which is already on the brink of civil war, to secure power for its Hizbullah allies. In turn, the Damascus government may collapse because of instability in all its neighbors.


Israel would be severely tested. Terrorists and rogue missiles would strike it from all sides because of its close alliance with the US. Palestinians would use the fog of war to make gains against Israel. If Israel and the US riposte heavily against the Palestinians, pressure from the Egyptian street would force Cairo to get involved.


In the East, Afghanistan would collapse into civil war provoked by Al Qaeda and the Taliban. NATO, which is already having a hard time in Afghanistan, will be helpless because US actions against Iran will consume the resources of many of its members.


Pakistan will almost certainly collapse as Islamists of the radical Sunni majority burn Shia mosques and Ismaili Muslim places of worship to create chaos and grab control of Islamabad with help from Al Qaeda and the Taliban. That would inevitably draw India, which is the second most populous Muslim country after Indonesia.

Yes, it will make the destabilization of Iraq look insignificant. Is Khindaria's scenario a worse case? Yes, but even a small portion of it will change the world for decades - and not for the better.

Gordon Smith - the wingnut resurfaces

Last night on KGW's Townhall Gordon Smith couldn't even play a moderate on TV and his wingnuttery was front and center. You can watch it here. Over at Blue Oregon possible Smith challenger Steve Novick gives us a rundown, Smith on KGW: Absurdly Misleading.

So on the KGW Town Hall tonight, I thought Senator Smith said six things especially worthy of note: one flatly false, and one absurdly misleading, statement about the Bush tax cuts and the economy; one statement about his change of heart on Iraq that re-raises a credibility issue; a statement about Medicare negotiating drug prices in which he failed to acknowledge a flip-flop; a statement on global warming suggesting he still doesn't really believe it exists; and an interesting reaction to Ron Wyden's proposal to disallow tax deductibility of prescription drug advertising.

Head over to Blue Oregon for the specifics.

Morning Quick Hits

Cernig tells us how the The Surge's Lull May Be Over. Boy that didn't take long!

And Riverbend gives a look at the hell that is Baghdad in The Rape of Sabrine.... Who needs insurgents and militias when you have the US and Iraqi military.

Steve Soto explains how the Democrats Need To Use Failed War On Terror As Club Against GOP. He is referring to the resurgence of al Qaeda in North Waziristan.

Professor Jonathan Cutler provides the Quote of the Day.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asks so many of the right questions. Too bad he provides so few meaningful answers.

And I have some new images over at Just Pictures if you haven't been over there for awhile.

Gordon and Hillary

Oregon's Senator Gordon Smith and New York's Senator Hillary Clinton may belong to different parties and live on different oceans but they do have something in common - they are both politicians above all else. Four years out of every six Gordon Smith is the ultimate wingnut. He has been a good Bush sycophant rarely failing his fearless leader. But Gordon has a problem. He is a wingnut Senator from a blue state so a couple of years before his next election he gives the appearance that he is drifting to the middle. We saw this most recently after the Rethuglicans lost control of both the House and the Senate and many of his fellow wingers were sent packing. Just a few short weeks after that election Gordon became a born again war critic. Of course Gordon is still a wingnut and if he wins reelection in 2008 he will quickly return to his wingnutty ways for another four years.

This brings us to Hillary Clinton. This from Krugman's column this morning.

And there’s another reason the admission by Mr. Edwards that he was wrong is important. If we want to avoid future quagmires, we need a president who is willing to fight the inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom on foreign policy, which still — in spite of all that has happened — equates hawkishness with seriousness about national security, and treats those who got Iraq right as somehow unsound. By admitting his own error, Mr. Edwards makes it more credible that he would listen to a wider range of views.

In truth, it’s the second issue, not the first, that worries me about Mrs. Clinton. Although she’s smart and sensible, she’s very much the candidate of the Beltway establishment — an establishment that has yet to come to terms with its own failure of nerve and judgment over Iraq. Still, she’s at worst a triangulator, not a megalomaniac; she’s not another Dick Cheney.

Hillary is in fact a DLC corporatist and neocon who wants the Democratic presidential nomination. This is not unlike being a wingnut senator from a blue state. Yes she is turning against the war but she is probably just a few weeks or months ahead of most of the Republican party. The fact remains she is a DLCer, Marshall Wittmann was recently singing her praises. About a year ago in The American Conservative Justin Raimondo reminded us that Hillary is Hawk

Eager to overcome her reputation as the leader of the party’s left wing, Hillary is “repositioning” herself, in modern parlance, as a “centrist,” i.e. a complete opportunist. She could have no better teacher than Wittmann, who from the pulpit of his “Moose-blog,” advises her to “seize the issue of Iranian nukes to draw a line in the sand.” While paying lip service to multilateralism, she should “make it clear that while force is the last resort, she would never take it off the table in dealing with the madmen mullahs and the psychotic leader of Iran.”

This advice was proffered on the morning of Jan. 18. By that evening, when Hillary gave her scheduled speech at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, it had clearly been taken to heart: “I believe that we lost critical time in dealing with Iran,” she averred. Accusing the White House of choosing to “downplay the threats and to outsource the negotiations,” she disdained Team Bush for “standing on the sidelines.”

“Let’s be clear about the threat we face now,” she thundered. “A nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel, to its neighbors and beyond. The regime’s pro-terrorist, anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric only underscores the urgency of the threat it poses. U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal. We cannot and should not—must not—permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons.” To be sure, we need to cajole China and Russia into going along with diplomatic and economic sanctions, but “we cannot take any option off the table in sending a clear message to the current leadership of Iran—that they will not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons.”

[....]

Hillary’s newfound centrism isn’t completely insincere. Her bellicose interventionism has a history: it was Hillary, you’ll recall, who berated her husband for not bombing Belgrade soon enough and hard enough. As Gail Sheehy relates in Hillary’s Choice:

Hillary expressed her views by phone to the President: ‘I urged him to bomb.’ The Clintons argued the issue over the next few days. [The president expressed] what-ifs: What if bombing promoted more executions? What if it took apart the NATO alliance? Hillary responded, ‘You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?’ The next day the President declared that force was necessary.

Together with Madeleine Albright—who famously complained to Colin Powell, “What good is it having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”—Hillary constituted the Amazonian wing of the Democratic Party during the years of her husband’s presidency. Her effort to outflank the Republicans on the right when it comes to the Iran issue is a logical extension of her natural bellicosity.

So is this the kind of person we want to get us out of the hell that Bush, Cheney and the neocons have created the last six years? And make no mistake just like Gordon Smith will revert back to his wingnuttery if reelected Hillary will once again become the Goddess of War once she gets the nomination.

A slide toward tyranny?

On the left we have had David Neiwert talking about a slide into fascism under the Bush/Cheney administration. But the left isn't the only side that's noticed, so has the Libertarian right. In the American Conservative we had Hunger for Dictatorship by Scott McConnell.

And yet the very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all-that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies.

And there is the always shrill Dr Paul Craig Roberts who talks about the Brownshirting of America. Joe Conason is the latest to explain It could happen here .

For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment.

Such foreboding, which would have been dismissed as paranoia not so long ago, has been intensified by the unfolding crisis of political legitimacy in the capital. George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold. He has announced that he intends to continue exercising power according to his claim of a mandate that erases the separation and balancing of power among the branches of government, frees him from any real obligation to obey laws passed by Congress, and permits him to ignore any provisions of the Bill of Rights that may prove inconvenient.

Whether his fellow Americans understand exactly what Bush is doing or not, his six years in office have created intense public anxiety. Much of that anxiety can be attributed to fear of terrorism, which Bush has exacerbated to suit his own purposes -- as well as to increasing concern that the world is threatened by global warming, pandemic diseases, economic insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and other perils with which this presidency cannot begin to cope.

Of course it's no coincidence that the ghost of Richard Nixon should appear now. The Nixon and Bush administration have a common personality, Dick (the Lord of Darkness) Cheney. From his earliest days a firm believer in the President as all powerful tyrant. In this case however of course the president is only a puppet now and Dick Cheney is the one pulling the strings.

Resolute Hillary

Almost a year ago I had a post on Hillary Clinton's neocon leanings and then on Sunday I discussed Hillary's refusal to concede she was wrong when she voted for the Iraq war resolution and sounding a lot like George W Bush, refusing to take responsibility. That is the Subject of Paul Krugman's column today, Wrong Is Right.

Many people are perplexed by the uproar over Senator Hillary Clinton’s refusal to say, as former Senator John Edwards has, that she was wrong to vote for the Iraq war resolution. Why is it so important to admit past error? And yes, it was an error — she may not have intended to cast a vote for war, but the fact is the resolution did lead to war; she may not have believed that President Bush would abuse the power he was granted, but the fact is he did.

The answer can be summed up in two words: heckuva job. Or, if you want a longer version: Medals of Freedom to George Tenet, who said Saddam had W.M.D., Tommy Franks, who failed to secure Iraq, and Paul Bremer, who botched the occupation.

For the last six years we have been ruled by men who are pathologically incapable of owning up to mistakes. And this pathology has had real, disastrous consequences. The situation in Iraq might not be quite so dire — and we might even have succeeded in stabilizing Afghanistan — if Mr. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney had been willing to admit early on that things weren’t going well or that their handpicked appointees weren’t the right people for the job.

The experience of Bush-style governance, together with revulsion at the way Karl Rove turned refusal to admit error into a political principle, is the main reason those now-famous three words from Mr. Edwards — “I was wrong” — matter so much to the Democratic base.

The base is remarkably forgiving toward Democrats who supported the war. But the base and, I believe, the country want someone in the White House who doesn’t sound like another George Bush. That is, they want someone who doesn’t suffer from an infallibility complex, who can admit mistakes and learn from them.

As John Avarosis said, after six years of George W Bush's refusal to admit mistakes and refusal to take responsibility

"It worked for six years, but now people are seriously over the "I'm wrong, but resolute" personality type."

But as Krugman points out there is even more.

And there’s another reason the admission by Mr. Edwards that he was wrong is important. If we want to avoid future quagmires, we need a president who is willing to fight the inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom on foreign policy, which still — in spite of all that has happened — equates hawkishness with seriousness about national security, and treats those who got Iraq right as somehow unsound. By admitting his own error, Mr. Edwards makes it more credible that he would listen to a wider range of views.

In truth, it’s the second issue, not the first, that worries me about Mrs. Clinton. Although she’s smart and sensible, she’s very much the candidate of the Beltway establishment — an establishment that has yet to come to terms with its own failure of nerve and judgment over Iraq. Still, she’s at worst a triangulator, not a megalomaniac; she’s not another Dick Cheney.

While she may not be another Dick Cheney her ties to the corporatist neocon soft DLC. The DLC often seems to be as arrogant as the Bush/Cheney cabal and Hillary often seems to share that.

But back to Mrs. Clinton’s problem. For some reason she and her advisers failed to grasp just how fed up the country is with arrogant politicians who can do no wrong. I don’t think she falls in that category; but her campaign somehow thought it was still a good idea to follow Karl Rove’s playbook, which says that you should never, ever admit to a mistake. And that playbook has led them into a political trap.

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And how is that war on terra goin!

While Bush continues his failed policy in Iraq and pounds his bully chest while threatening Iran our "good friends" in Pakistan have let al Qaeda regain much of it's former strength.
Al Qaeda Chiefs Are Seen to Regain Power

Senior leaders of Al Qaeda operating from Pakistan have re-established significant control over their once battered worldwide terror network and over the past year have set up a band of training camps in the tribal regions near the Afghan border, according to American intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan. Until recently, the Bush administration had described Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri as detached from their followers and cut off from operational control of Al Qaeda.

The United States has also identified several new Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan, including one that officials said might be training operatives for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan.

Do you feel safer with commander codpiece in charge of keeping you safe?

Quote of the Day

Digby on the neocons or as I like to call them the IAB's (insecure adolescent bullies)

No thanks to the rabid right which has been lobbying for a nuclear meltdown (and global domination, let's face it) since the end of WWII. It is a worldview that has almost nothing to do with actual events or facts on the ground. It reached its zenith with Bush, but they will never go away. They are fearful, insecure people whose temperament and ideology create a need for them to believe that they are warrior heroes in spite of all evidence to the contrary. They are the last people on earth who should be leading a powerful nation in a time of great challenge. Talk about putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.

Go read the entire post.

Writing off the majority

"It worked for six years, but now people are seriously over the "I'm wrong, but resolute" personality type."
~John Aravosis

Will this;
Clinton urges start of Iraq pullout in 90 days

Feb 17, 2007 — WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the early front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has called for a 90-day deadline to start pulling American troops from Iraq.

make up for this?
Clinton Gives War Critics New Answer on ’02 Vote

Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

So let me get this straight, Hillary wants to be the Democratic nominee for president but has just told the vast majority of the Democratic base and a majority of Americans to vote for someone else. John is right, we really have had enough of "I'm wrong, but resolute" personality type.". We have also had more than enough of presidents that won't admit or take responsibility for their mistakes. Yes Hillary, there are other choices and I will be choosing one of them.

Update
Paul Krugman has some thoughts.