Elementary school shooting: What gun control laws might US voters support? (+video) (via The Christian Science Monitor)
20 kids, 6 adults massacred in US school (via AFP)
Survivor: Shootings 'should not be normal' in US (via AFP)
BAGHDAD — Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.While the administration talks about about Iran's support for al-Sadr the Iranians are laughing. They like al-Maliki's government just fine since it is supported and controlled by the pro-Iranian ISCI and Da'wa party. The Iraqi security forces are primarily members of the Badr Brigade - a creation of the Iranians.
By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.
BAGHDAD — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers.Now the American and British air strikes may have driven the Mehdi army underground but only to fight another day. The always stupid and incompetent Rice has just poured gasoline on embers which will flare up even sooner resulting in the deaths of both Iraqis and Americans. This administration is criminally stupid and incompetent.
Bush screwed the pooch in Iraq. There is a good argument to be made that we should not have invaded in the first place.* There is no good argument that we should leave.Well he's half right and that's an improvement but it goes downhill from there.
This conclusion is inevitable when one comes to the same realization as me. There was a war in Iraq and there is a war in Iraq. In fact, we've had two wars in Iraq: Iraq War I & Iraq War II.Give me a break, "the second war is against Islamists of various stripes, but mainly al Qaeda". Not even the Pentagon or the Bush administration make such claims anymore. You're not paying attention to the latest talking points Rusty, it's all about Iran now - you know, the country who's President is greeted with flowers by "our" puppet government.
The war now is not the same as that war. The first war in Iraq was against Saddam Hussein, the second war is against Islamists of various stripes, but mainly al Qaeda.
We must begin to speak of two Iraq wars. The two wars conception is more precise. It describes what has happened and what is happening in Iraq more fully than speaking of the war. It clarifies many of the debates surrounding the present war as well as allows us to conceptually think more clearly.Of course the Fafblog crew isn't serious - Rusty is! Straight jacket please.
Further, the only way to convince war skeptics that winning the present war in Iraq is in our national interests is to give them the linguistic tools for being able to conceive of it as separate from the first war, even if it flows from it.
The First Iraq War may have been "optional", as many of the critics say; but the Second Iraq war is not. We must win it. The price of victory may be high, but the price of defeat is higher.
*There are also good arguments, in my estimation, that the decision to invade Iraq was correct.
**There may be an argument that Iraq I was an extension of the Gulf War in the same way that some view WWII was an extension of WWI.
As Michael reminds us, we can argue over 2002-3 all we want, but it doesn’t have anything to do with 2008. We are in Iraq, and al-Qaeda is arrayed against our troops. In fact, this is the best possible situation if we want to fight terrorists — to have them on a battlefield in straight-up fights against our military. It’s exactly what terrorists don’t want. If they wanted to fight our military, they wouldn’t use bomb commuter trains and fly civilian airplanes into their targets.OK, Ed is even more delusional than the administration - not even they think al-Qaeda is a significant force is Iraq. He then goes on to say that al-Qaeda wants us to leave Iraq - nothing could be further from the truth. Both al-Qaeda and Iran love the fact that our military is tied down and rapidly being worn down in Bush's ill advised Mesopotamian quagmire. And speaking of Iran - they are all ready the winners in Iraq. Their longtime nemesis, Saddam, is gone and their very good friends of the ISCI and Da'wa party a firmly in control. If we really think the government of al-Maliki is "our" ally we are really fools.
Last week's violence in Basra and Baghdad has convinced the Bush administration that actions by Iran, and not al-Qaeda, are the primary threat inside Iraq, and has sparked a broad reassessment of policy in the region, according to senior U.S. officials.Yes, they are still looking for an excuse to attack Iran. And if they do? It would appear they are oblivious to the fact that the ISCI and Da'wa party are even closer to Iran than al-Sadr. The ISCI's Badr brigade has infiltrated the Iraqi security forces and they will not stand by if the US should attack Iran. With the ISCI and the Da'wa party in charge of the government Iran is already calling most of the shots. Iran, unlike the US, realizes al-Sadr is popular and powerful so they give him token support. But they would much prefer to have the ISCI and the Da'wa party running the show in Iraq.
Evidence of an increase in Iranian weapons, training and direction for the Shiite militias that battled U.S. and Iraqi security forces in those two cities has fixed new U.S. attention on what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday called Tehran's "malign" influence, the officials said.
The intensified focus on Iran coincides with diminished emphasis on al-Qaeda in Iraq as the leading justification for an ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq.
A student and his family have filed a federal lawsuit demanding that a popular European history teacher at California's Capistrano Valley High School be fired for what they say were anti-Christian remarks he made in the classroom.And what were those "anti-Christian" remarks you ask?
Farnan recorded his teacher telling students in class: “What country has the highest murder rate? The South! What part of the country has the highest rape rate? The South! What part of the country has the highest rate of church attendance? The South!”The facts hurt. Of course the teacher left out a few like the highest rate of teen pregnancy and the highest rate of driving while drunk.
Now we have a battle with militias who are operating outside the government. … We must win this fight. The militias that we are fighting are backed by Iran. So this is an effort by Iran to destabilize Iraq.Of course there is one small problem with this as Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI):
The Iranians have close associations with all the Shia communities, not only with Sadr but also Hakim. … The notion that this is fight by American allies against Iranian-inspired elements is not accurate.But it's even worse that that:
Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations noted the ISCI “was essentially created by Iran, and its militia, the Badr Brigade, was trained and equipped by the Revolutionary Guards” — which the Bush administration calls a “terrorist” organization.In fact Sadr is the least supportive of Iran of all the Shia groups but he is also the most anti-occupation which makes him the enemy.
Journalist Gareth Porter added the Badr militia is the “most pro-Iranian political-military forces in Iraq.” In fact, ISCI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim “met with [Iranian Revolutionary Guard] officers to be his guests in December 2006, apparently to discuss military assistance to the Badr Organisation.”
Graham, underscoring his cluelessness about the situation on the ground right now, added that “the Badr brigade is not the problem.” Graham seems to be supporting an effort to fight Iran by supporting Iran.
WASHINGTON — Navy Adm. William Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command, which leads U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, is stepping down, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced Tuesday.They may call it a resignation but you know he was forced out.
Fallon claimed ongoing misperceptions about differences between his ideas and U.S. policy are making it too difficult for him to operate, Gates said, agreeing. He added that the differences are not extreme, but the misperception had become too great.
"I believe it was the right thing to do, even though I do not believe there are, in fact, significant differences between his views and administration policy," Gates said, noting that he accepted the request to retire with "reluctance and regret."
"I don't know whether he was misinterpreted or whether people attributed views to him that were not his views, but clearly there was a concern," Gates said.
The misperceptions relate to an article published last week in Esquire magazine that portrayed Fallon as opposed to President Bush's Iran policy. It described Fallon as a lone voice against taking military action to stop the Iranian nuclear program.
In a statement distributed by Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Fla., Fallon said he requested permission to step down because the article showed disrespect toward the president and caused embarrassment and distractions that were the result of misrepresentations of his views of Centcom missions.
Admiral Fallon has led the resistance among military senior commanders who oppose a military strike against Iran. Fallon correctly recognizes that an attack on Iran will put the United States at great risk and ruin our ability to influence events for the good in the Middle East. He knows first hand that U.S. military forces are stretched past the breaking point and are unable to provide the military support required to carry out offensive operations against targets in Iran. This is madness and President Bush has not learned a goddamned thing from the mis-adventure in Iraq. It is time for Congress to stand firmly against this rush to war. But it is an election year and such a stand would require courage–a trait sorely lacking among most members of either party.
It is widely believed in media and political circles that despite the difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, American foreign policy is back under some kind of adult/mainstream management. In other words, that we've left the Cheney/Rumsfeld era behind for a period of Gates/Rice normalcy and that Iran regime change adventurism is safely off the table. But put together what the disagreements with Fallon were about, the fact that the president chose him as someone he thought he could work with not more than one year ago, and the almost unprecedented nature of the resignation and it becomes clear that that assumption must be gravely in error.Indeed - I fear the lunatics are still in charge of the asylum.
Yesterday, Senator John McCain said he was “very honored by Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement.” The Republican presidential hopeful also called Hagee “the staunchest leader of our Christian evangelical movement,” citing the minister’s pro-Israel stance.I'm not a Catholic or a Christian but I have to side with the Catholic League on this one. But Hagee is a lunatic and a bigot which makes him a member in good standing of today's Republican party.
Catholic League president Bill Donohue addressed this today:
“There are plenty of staunch evangelical leaders who are pro-Israel, but are not anti-Catholic. John Hagee is not one of them. Indeed, for the past few decades, he has waged an unrelenting war against the Catholic Church. For example, he likes calling it ‘The Great Whore,’ an ‘apostate church,’ the ‘anti-Christ,’ and a ‘false cult system.’ To hear the bigot in his own words, click here. Note: he isn’t talking about the Buddhists.
“In Hagee’s latest book, Jerusalem Countdown, he calls Hitler a Catholic who murdered Jews while the Catholic Church did nothing. ‘The sell-out of Catholicism to Hitler began not with the people but with the Vatican itself,’ he writes.
“For the record, Hitler persecuted the Catholic Church and was automatically excommunicated in 1931—two years before he assumed power—when he acted as best man at Joseph Goebbel’s Protestant wedding. Hitler even bragged about his separation from the Church. As for doing nothing about the Holocaust, Sir Martin Gilbert reminds us that Goebbels denounced Pope Pius XII for his 1942 Christmas message criticizing the Nazis (the New York Times lauded the pope for doing so in an editorial for two years in a row). Much to Hagee’s chagrin, Gilbert also says that Pius XII saved three quarters of the Jews in Rome, and that more Jews were saved proportionately in Catholic countries than Protestant countries. Indeed, Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide credited the Catholic Church with saving 860,000 Jews. No religion can match that.
“Senator Obama has repudiated the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, another bigot. McCain should follow suit and retract his embrace of Hagee.”
"I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud ap-proach to Israel, then you're anti-Israel, and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel," leading Democratic presidential contender Illinois Senator Barack Obama said Sunday.Now it fills me with hope that a politician running for president would actually give AIPAC the finger. Of course Obama will soon be able to add antisemitic Nazi to his closet Islamic Terrorist tag.
"If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we're not going to make progress," he said.
He also criticized the notion that anyone who asks tough questions about advancing the peace process or tries to secure Israel by anyway other than "just crushing the opposition" is being "soft or anti-Israel."
Members of Washington's military and defense establishment are expressing trepidation about Sen. Barack Obama, as the Illinois senator comes closer to winning the Democratic presidential nomination and leads in national polls to become commander in chief.Of course there are more than a few in the Pentagon who would like a little less crazy in the White House.
But his backers, including a former Air Force chief of staff, say the rookie senator believes in a strong military, and with it, a larger Army and Marine Corps.It took the criminally insane neocons a long time to get their hands on the controls and they are not going to give up without a nasty fight.
Continuing his attack on Republican frontrunner Sen. John McCain, conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh devoted a significant portion of his radio show Monday to urging conservatives not to vote for the senator in tomorrow's Super Tuesday contests.The irony is that "conservative" is now associated with George W. Bush and his administration making conservative the new toxic tag. The more the wind bags on the right scream that McCain is not a "conservative" the more they improve his chances in November.
For weeks, Limbaugh has been on the attack against McCain, branding the Arizona senator a "liberal" and suggesting he would destroy the Republican Party.
On his radio show Monday Limbaugh said that if McCain is elected president, he would destroy the Republican party by working with Democrats to pass liberal legislation.
"He's going to reach out to Democrats in Congress," Limbaugh said, citing "McCain -Kennedy" and "McCain -Feingold" as examples of McCain-sponsored bipartisan legislation.
"This is how he's going to get even with Republicans for defeating him in South Carolina in 2000," Limbaugh said.
"The Republican Congress will effectively be neutered."
I love when this happens. It's a reminder that the political prattle that spews forth from group-think media stars without end and which consumes our political dialogue for a full year is based on absolutely nothing. Also, most predictive "analysis" from the media stars' cousins, the cogs in the right-wing noise machine, is merely self-absorbed wishful thinking masquerading as objective knowledge:He then gives us some examples. The always brilliant Digby writes:
The Republican establishment obviously has no idea what to do about him. He's a creature of the monster they created when they empowered the "low information" rural evangelical base. I suspect they will try to get to the preachers and turn them against him, but they can't afford to go after him too hard or too obviously or they will suffer hugely in the down ticket races in the fall if the evangelicals stay home. And the alternative who seems to be emerging is John McCain, someone who is loathed by the same evangelicals. It's a problem.As I have said here before Huckabee is the Republican's worst nightmare and one they created. Digby observes:
What we are seeing is the three wings of the conservative movement fighting for supremacy: Romney from the money wing, McCain (or Rudy) from the hawk wing and Huck from the God wing. The first two are part of the political establishment and rely on it for guidance. Up until now, the God wing did too. But now they have one of their own and they really don't need the permission of the money boyz or the hawks to vote for him. And they sure don't care what the pointy headed TV gasbags think about it.The Republicans created a monster that may end up consuming them. I keep coming back to this quote:
Huckabee won big last night with no money and no organization. Maybe he can't replicate it anywhere else. But I think he might. The religious right is the biggest single voting bloc in the GOP --- the people they cultivated and trained to vote en masse for the Republicans. They have a very specific agenda of social issues that they care about and understand very well. They are true believers. And they are the only constituency in the party who actually likes their candidate and feels inspired by him. He's one of them. I think he can win it and win it in spite of the many unforced errors he's bound to make. His followers just don't care about stuff like that. Unless he suddenly goes soft on abortion or gay rights or one of their other signature issues, he's got them.
Unfortunately, some wars are won by the side that is the most fanatical in the religious sense. The victorious leaders harness the holy energy of collective insanity.
~COGITOR KWYNA
[From the Machine Crusade by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson]
"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."There has been a lot of outrage about William Kristol's new position at the NYT from both the left and the paleocon right. I see it as a good thing - he will have a wider audience. Yes even more people will be able to see what a bunch of dangerous lunatics the neocon "intellectuals" of the Republican party are. Kristol constantly beating the war drums in the NYT for a war weary nation to read may hurt the Republican Party in 2008. Is this in fact an almost Rovian plot on the part of the "liberal" NYT? Let him write!
~Willaim Kristol, April 4th, 2003
I guess there are two ways of looking at this- one is that people are afraid of opposing viewpoints, the other that people see Kristol for what he is, a complete imbecile who has (take your pick) either been completely wrong about everything or lying about everything, and thus unworthy of the column. On the upside, letting Kristol’s views out in public might be a good thing, as people unaccustomed with the the two-bit rag the Weekly Standard will now get a good look at what the current Republican party looks like. From a blogging standpoint, this is the equivalent of hitting the Powerball.
And here is Barton Gellman's gloss of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine:As Digby reminds us this should come as no surprise since the resident of the White House has a history of being one sick SOB.Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be....Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda's go-to guy for minor logistics.So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel.
.......
Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You're not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"
Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each...target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
But there are times, when a candidates says something so revealing that the hair on the back of your neck stands up. This was one of those times:I worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the late 60s and early 70s and attended the DIA interrogation school. The first thing they taught us is that torture doesn't work. When you torture people they don't tell you the truth they tell you what they think you want to hear. Does that explain this administration's fascination with torture? I think so. They have demonstrated over and over that they have no interest in the truth and only want to hear what they want to hear. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Foreign policy of the US is being formulated by rage filled psychopaths who are so good at using the weapon of fear that they got the country to go along with their madness.While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. 'Did you meet with any of them?' I ask.Why should anyone be surprised that that man would demand that a mentally ill prisoner with a broken leg be denied pain medication and tortured?
Bush whips around and stares at me. 'No, I didn't meet with any of them,' he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. 'I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' 'What was her answer?' I wonder.
'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'
I must look shocked -- ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush -- because he immediately stops smirking.
'It's tough stuff,' Bush says, suddenly somber, 'but my job is to enforce the law.'
The idea that he didn't know about these torture session is ludicrous. It was one of the perks.
And although it was a Democratic victory, it may help salvage something for the Bush administration's legacy in the Middle East. And that is the deeper point. No single party in our polity can claim credit for all of this. The course adjustment was a function of different entities fighting one another, reacting to events and facts, and thereby forging a more sensible war policy. What no single entity wanted came eventually to pass. It's shaping up to be a text-book lesson in the virtues of separating powers. Dictatorships cannot do this in wartime, which is why they often lose; neither can unchecked executives in democracies. But it's a good thing.While I may not have a lot of use for Petraeus I don't deny he is an intelligent guy who realized that an attack on Iran would jeopardize his legacy in Iraq; so perhaps Sully is right to give him a piece of the credit. So is this a counter coup? I guess is a sense it could be described as such. Does it mean the system works as Sully claims? I don't think so - we were just lucky. People have been trying to take the bat shit crazy Cheney out of the loop for six years. Gates may have finally been able to do it although he was certainly aided by six years of foreign policy failure.
The key players will only emerge definitively with the judgment of history. But my roster of those who helped get us back toward a rational war-policy would put Bob Gates and David Petraeus at the top of the list.