We Don't Know What To Do, So We Do Nothing, op ed. Jay Bookman,

Published on Thursday, March 30, 2006 by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Dismay of Our Elders Sums Up US
by Jay Bookman


An eerie sense of calm has settled over the nation's affairs — a dead calm.

It's not merely that the Bush administration has run aground on its own illusions. The real problem runs deeper, much deeper, and at its core, I think, lies the fact that out of fear and laziness we insist on trying to address new problems with old ideologies, rhetoric and mind-sets.

To put it bluntly, we don't know what to do, and so we do nothing.

Run through the list: We have no real idea how to address global warming, the draining of jobs overseas, the influx of illegal immigrants, our growing indebtedness to foreign lenders, our addiction to petroleum, the rise of Islamic terror . . .

Those are very big problems, and if you listen to the debate in Congress and on the airwaves, you can't help but be struck by the smallness of the ideas proposed to address them. We have become timid and overly protective of a status quo that cannot be preserved and in fact must be altered significantly.

The Republicans, for example, continue to mouth a cure-all ideology of tax cuts, deregulation and a worship of all things corporate, an approach too archaic and romanticized to have any relevance in the modern world, as their five years in power have proved.

The GOP's sole claim to bold action — the decision to invade Iraq in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 — instead epitomizes the problem. The issue of Islamic terrorism is complex and difficult, and by reverting immediately to the brute force of another era, we made the problem worse.

Unfortunately, the Democrats don't offer an alternative. They mouth no ideology whatsoever, their imagination, ingenuity and courage apparently having petered out 30 years ago. They can't bring themselves to acknowledge that the modern litany of problems will require us to invent new roles for government, and to rework the relationships between citizens, corporations and country.

But we can't even talk about such things. Our public discourse — which ought to be the source of renewal and energy in a democracy — has been stripped of meaning, with rudeness now mistaken for eloquence and anger substituting for insight.

All that has led to a sense of helplessness atypical of the American character. In an accurate reflection of our national mood, only 29 percent in a recent Gallup Poll said they were satisfied with the country's direction, a number that can't be explained away solely by our predicament in Iraq. The Gallup numbers haven't consistently been above 50 percent since the spring of 2002, long before most Americans were even aware an invasion loomed.

But more compelling to me than numbers are the e-mails, probably dozens of them in total, that have trickled into my in-box over the past year or so from older Americans all around the country.

"I am 79 . . . I am 84 . . . I was born in 1931," they start out. "I fought with the Eighth Army in Korea . . . We lost our oldest son in Vietnam . . . My husband served in the Pacific . . . I taught school for 35 years," they continue, each recounting their personal contributions to this country and establishing their own perspective on its history.

Then comes the statement that breaks your heart. The words vary from author to author, but the sentiment does not:

"This is not the country I wanted to leave my grandchildren . . . Is this what we sacrificed so much for all those years? . . . I really don't understand how it has come to this. . . . We took for granted that in America it would always be better for the next generation, but I can't see that's the case anymore. . . . Where did we go wrong?"

These people are concerned not for themselves, but for what they may soon leave behind. And that concern for the future is all the more remarkable because it is so rare among those of us who are their children and grandchildren.

Unlike our elders, we refuse to tax ourselves to pay for our wars, our roads, our government. We elevate leaders who promise us tax cuts and free services and cheap oil and the strongest military in the world, and we shun any who dare to suggest that sacrifice might be necessary for such things.

Of course, as a nation we have faced worse. The generation that endured the Great Depression only to be hit with World War II had to confront challenges that make our own pale in significance.

But when people of that generation express sincere dismay about where we're headed today, it's gotta make you wonder.

Jay Bookman is deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays and Mondays.

UNDER THE RADAR, ALMOST: why the US won't and can't leave Iraq: BASES

UNDER THE RADAR, ALMOST
Why the US won’t and can’t leave Iraq
by Paschal Baute
Old Salty Dog blog

What Mr. Bush is not telling us and what the mainstream media has not yet reported is that the planning for our future military presence in Iraq is so extensive that no final exit is planned or possible.

Fourteen bases are being planned there, enduring, long term encampments for troops. (See Chicago Tribune March 23, 2004), so a long term military presence is envisioned. Www.globalsecurity.org.

That the U.S. is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region was reported early on (2001) by the New York Times.

However, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a 21 April 2003 press conference said that any suggestion that the United States is planning a permanent military presence in Iraq is "inaccurate and unfortunate." Rumsfeld said "I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting. .”

Now if the planning is going forward and the Defense Department still denies it, then we are being lied to once more. The Washington Post reported in May, 2005, that the bases were being consolidated into four large air bases. U.S. forces currently occupy 106 bases, ranging in size from the sprawling Camp Victory complex near Baghdad's international airport where the U.S. military command is headquartered, to some outposts with as few as 500 soldiers. Additionally, the United States operates four detention facilities and several convoy support centers for servicing the long daily truck runs from Kuwait into Iraq.

The US has no intention of giving up its military presence in Iraq. This is the reason why no timetable will be discussed, as this fact of non-withdrawal would then be revealed. Put Iraqi facilities in your browser and discover many articles addressing this issue. The Friends Committee on National Legislation includes a map: http://www.fcnl.org/iraq/bases.htm

The long term military presence being implemented currently demonstrates clearly that the US government has no intention of withdrawing from Iraq. Therefore no timetable can be discussed, or this fact will be clearly evident. Hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent. PLanning for long term presence, despite Rumsfield denials, have been in the works for some years. It was part of the Neo-Con strategy for the New Project for American Imperialism, well before 9/11.

Bush is my shepherd, I dwell in want.

A friend forwarded this.
I do not have the source.

The 23 rd Qualm

Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want.
He maketh logs to be cut down in national forests.
He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness.
He restoreth my fears.
He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace for his ego's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution and war,
I will find no exit, for thou art in office.
Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy media control, they discomfort me.
Thou preparest an agenda of deception in the presence of thy religion.
Thou anointest my head with foreign oil.
My health insurance runneth out.
Surely megalomania and false patriotism shall follow me all the days of thy term,
And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.

-Anon.

Is the Pentagon the monster being fed?

Published on Monday, March 27, 2006 by the Boston Globe
Rumsfeld and the Big Picture
by James Carroll
My subtitle: Is the Pentagon the monster being fed by our hidden icons?

"Fortunately, history is not made up of daily headlines, blogs on websites, or the latest sensational attack," Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a Washington Post op-ed column last week. "History is a bigger picture, and it takes some time and perspective to measure accurately."

Rumsfeld was arguing that any evaluation of the present catastrophe in Iraq should take a longer view, and I agree with him. Indeed, I have spent the last six years exploring two generations' worth of events and decisions that brought us here. I have written a long history of the Pentagon called House of War, which will be published in May. But contrary to what Rumsfeld hopes, such a "bigger picture" in no way exonerates him or the Bush administration for its grave failures. The disaster in Iraq both recapitulates American mistakes of the past and worsens them immeasurably.

Let's begin with Rumsfeld himself. In 1975, he was Gerald Ford's secretary of defense when the USS Mayaguez was seized off Cambodia by the newly empowered Khmer Rouge, whose ascendance followed the destabilizing US ''incursion." The American crew of 38 was captured.

Rumsfeld shaped the response -- which was to ignore diplomacy, begin bombing a Cambodian port city, and dispatch a large force of Marines to rescue the crew. Bad moves based on bad intelligence. While untold Cambodian civilians were bombed, 40 American rescuers were killed in an attack on an island where the crew was thought to be held. In fact, the American sailors had already been released unharmed and set adrift on a Thai fishing vessel. The Mayaguez affair was a dress rehearsal for Rumsfeld's war in Iraq.

The Iraq war breaks with American tradition by being explicitly defined as "preventive," but in other ways it fulfills the core tradition -- the eschewing of diplomacy in favor of war preparation, and wars, whose real purpose is to feed the insatiable appetite of the economic, political, and cultural behemoth on the Potomac. The Pentagon is 63 years old: Key moments in its lifetime cry out to be freshly understood.

Why, after the disappearance of America's Cold War enemy in the early 1990s, did Washington maintain its huge Cold War military? In what sense, for that matter, did the United States "win" the Cold War, when its structures were overwhelmingly dismantled by the other side?

By what right did the United States come out of the energy crisis of the 1970s proclaiming, with the Carter Doctrine, its intention to use military force to protect access to Persian Gulf oil? Jimmy Carter, too, is a progenitor of the war in Iraq.

In reviewing an arms race that led, across 40 years, to the accumulation of more than 100,000 nuclear weapons, when will the United States reckon with the truth that Washington held the initiative at almost every stage of that escalation, with Moscow forever struggling to catch up? What does it say about America that the United States led the way up this mountain of horror, with Moscow, under Mikhail Gorbachev, leading the way down?

What is revealed by the "retirement syndrome," in Robert Jay Lifton's phrase -- the consistent phenomenon of men whose careers shaped the national security state, only to denounce its assumptions as they left power? This is true not only of legions of generals and admirals, but of statesmen like Henry L. Stimson and George Kennan, civilian hawks like Robert S. McNamara and Paul Nitze, and presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower, who famously decried the "military-industrial complex" he had just created.

What does it say that, as pressures periodically built to rein in Pentagon budgets and influence, new threats and enemies were conveniently discovered, "rescuing" the Pentagon, as Dean Acheson said of the North Korean invasion of South Korea? Ho Chi Minh, Manuel Noriega, and Saddam Hussein were such rescuers, and so was Osama bin Laden. Now comes Iran.

How did the impulse to demonize the enemy in Moscow paralyze American strategic and political thinking? This psychological imprisonment was so complete that the demonizing mindset carried over into the new century, when dreaded ''communism" was replaced by "terrorism." George W. Bush did not invent this myopia.

Iraq shows how self-destructive were the responses of Americans and their government to the crisis of Sept. 11, 2001. They were not new, but flowed along a channel through which powerful currents had been running for 60 years.

The point of history's bigger picture, however, is to see that, as human choices shaped this terrible outcome, human choices can change it.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© 2006 The Boston Globe

###

GENOCIDE AGAINST WOMEN, WORLD-WIDE?

Women Go 'Missing' by the Millions
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

As I was preparing for this article, I asked a friend who is Jewish if it was appropriate to use the term "holocaust" to portray the worldwide violence against women. He was startled. But when I read him the figures in a 2004 policy paper published by the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, he said yes, without hesitation.

One United Nations estimate says from 113 million to 200 million women around the world are demographically "missing." Every year, from 1.5 million to 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect.

How could this possibly be true? Here are some of the factors:

In countries where the birth of a boy is considered a gift and the birth of a girl a curse from the gods, selective abortion and infanticide eliminate female babies.

Young girls die disproportionately from neglect because food and medical attention is given first to brothers, fathers, husbands and sons.

In countries where women are considered the property of men, their fathers and brothers can murder them for choosing their own sexual partners. These are called "honor" killings, though honor has nothing to do with it.

Young brides are killed if their fathers do not pay sufficient money to the men who have married them. These are called "dowry deaths," although they are not just deaths, they are murders.

The brutal international sex trade in young girls kills uncounted numbers of them.

Domestic violence is a major cause of death of women in every country.

So little value is placed on women's health that every year roughly 600,000 women die giving birth.

Six thousand girls undergo genital mutilation every day, according to the World Health Organization. Many die; others live the rest of their lives in crippling pain.

According to the WHO, one woman out of every five worldwide is likely to be a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime.

What is happening to women and girls in many places across the globe is genocide. All the victims scream their suffering. It is not so much that the world doesn't hear them; it is that fellow human beings choose not to pay attention.

It is much more comfortable for us to ignore these issues. And by "us," I also mean women. Too often, we are the first to look away. We may even participate, by favoring our sons and neglecting the care of our daughters. All these figures are estimates; registering precise numbers for violence against women is not a priority in most countries.

Going forward, there are three challenges:

Women are not organized or united. Those of us in rich countries, who have attained equality under the law, need to mobilize to assist our fellows. Only our outrage and our political pressure can lead to change.

The Islamists are engaged in reviving and spreading a brutal and retrograde body of laws. Wherever the Islamists implement Shariah, or Islamic law, women are hounded from the public arena, denied education and forced into a life of domestic slavery.

Cultural and moral relativists sap our sense of moral outrage by claiming that human rights are a Western invention. Men who abuse women rarely fail to use the vocabulary the relativists have provided them. They claim the right to adhere to an alternative set of values - an "Asian," "African" or "Islamic" approach to human rights.

This mind-set needs to be broken. A culture that carves the genitals of young girls, hobbles their minds and justifies their physical oppression is not equal to a culture that believes women have the same rights as men.

Three initial steps could be taken by world leaders to begin eradicating the mass murder of women:

A tribunal such as the court of justice in The Hague should look for the 113 million to 200 million women and girls who are missing.

A serious international effort must urgently be made to precisely register violence against girls and women, country by country.

We need a worldwide campaign to reform cultures that permit this kind of crime. Let's start to name them and shame them.

In the past two centuries, those in the West have gradually changed the way they treat women. As a result, the West enjoys greater peace and progress. It is my hope that the third world will embark on this effort. Just as we put an end to slavery, we must end the gendercide.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch legislator, lives under 24-hour protection because of death threats against her by Islamic radicals since the murder of Theo van Gogh, with whom she made the film "Submission" about women and Islam. This Global Viewpoint article was distributed by Tribune Media Services.

Copyright © 2006 The International Herald Tribune

No One's Laughing at This Deja Vu All Over Again, by Joan Chittester, OSB

Published on Saturday, March 25, 2006 by the National Catholic Reporter
No One’s Laughing at This Deja Vu All over Again
by Joan Chittister, OSB

I think it was Yogi Bera, the New York Yankees own “Mrs. Malaprop,” who made famous the line, “Here we go, it’s deja vu all over again.” Everybody laughed then.

President George Bush looks as if he’s about to make the line common parlance again. Only this time people aren’t laughing.

What may be the buildup to an attack on Iran, the new breeding ground of terrorists according to the U.S. lexicon of evil nations, appears to be in high gear. It’s a ritual now of recognizable parts:

First we have a nuclear standoff -- which this time may be real for a change -- given the fear generated in the Middle East as well as in the States as a result of our last unsubstantiated “preemptive strike.”

Then, we have the declaration of the new, but now theologized and therefore holy, “doctrine of pre-emptive war.” Meaning that if we decide that another country has something that is dangerous to us, they have it and we will respond accordingly.

Then we have the parade of sabers and spears, of bombs and bombers. This, of course, is designed to intimidate the rest of the world and embolden the United States itself. I mean, if nobody can beat us, what difference does it make whether we’re right or wrong again. We’ll win anyway.

Then we have the swashbuckling speeches of a president already defeated in one war and attempting, perhaps, to distract from that debacle by creating another one.

The only question now is whether or not the public, the Congress, the world will risk another frightening U.S. fiasco in the name of freedom. Whose freedom, we’re never told. To what end, no one knows. With what success, given our present record, is anyone’s guess.

The problem is that this time we are being asked not only to be afraid but also to be nonsensical, absurd, fatuous, inane.

We are being asked to forget the blunders in Iraq:

Forget the embarrassment of the “intelligence” that wasn’t.

Forget the old reservists who did double duty for the troops who could never be convinced of the valor of the war and so never enlisted.

Forget the number of U.S. soldiers who fell in the sand and never rose again.

Forget the pictures of Iraqi families streaming out of broken homes and pockmarked cities, saved by us, we say, only to be abandoned by us, they say.

Forget the blood spattered children in whom the seeds of another war have already been planted.

Forget the burst water systems, the streets running with sewage, the downed electric grids, the sabotaged oil fields.

Forget the wounded in body and the shattered of soul.

Forget the fact that we made things worse rather than better for a country that was bad enough off to begin with.

Forget the evolving anti-Americanism that now festers even among our most traditional allies. “Americans are very shocked,” the young Irish woman said to me, “when they come to Europe and find out we don’t like them. Why are they shocked?” she asked. And she meant it.

Somewhere in the gospels the line echoes over and over again ominously and unendingly, “And the last state shall be worse than the first.”

Why have we suddenly abandoned the decades of deterrence and containment that guided U.S. foreign policy and out-waited the cold war for over 50 years? The U.S. prospered under it; the world balanced on an unsteady peace for years because of it; talks went on unceasingly during it until understanding increased and alliances formed and bonds developed and old enemies outgrew their enmity as a result of it.

If there is such a thing as national neurosis, are we in it? Will public paranoia be the disease that defeats us in the end?

While we frisked little old ladies in wheelchairs in our airports on the grounds that they might be foreign agents, we would have allowed our commercial seaports to be serviced under the auspices of the very people we said we were trying to keep out of the country.

While we preached the fear of foreigners, we spied on our own.

While we assumed the right to invade the borders of every nation on earth, we tightened ours against the poor whose poverty came as a result of our wealth.

While we preached life, we practiced death in its name.

Has our hysteria reached the point where, like a blind giant, we are raging around the world swatting flies with a pile driver?

Is this the United States that won the respect and admiration of the world as recently as 50 years ago and lost it more recently because of torture chambers and kennels full of uncharged prisoners in leg irons?

Who are we now? Who do we want to be? Who will our leaders insist that we be? Or shall they be the very ones who lead us into more ignorant ignominy?

Have we, in all our power, forgotten all of our ideals? Are ideals only for the poor and the powerless? Is power the only foreign policy the powerful need to apply? And is it really working in Iraq -- a country on the verge of civil war, crippled physically, full of anger, and unsafe -- both for us and for them?

From where I stand, these are the questions real patriots ask. But are we?

According to The Irish Times, (Denis Staunton, March 17, p. 10) a poll by the Pew Research Center asked U.S. respondents to suggest one word that described the president. Up to this time, the word most commonly chosen has been “honest.” In this poll, “the single characteristic most closely associated with Mr. Bush in the current poll is ‘incompetent.’”

But I don’t know. When it takes six years of international bungling to change people’s perceptions of current policies, you have to wonder, don’t you, who’s really been incompetent and who’s really been clever?

Our one best hope may lie in soon being able to answer that question.

Benedictine Sister of Erie, Joan Chittister is a best-selling author and well-known international lecturer on topics of justice, peace, human rights, women's issues, and contemporary spirituality in the Church and in society. She presently serves as the co-chair of the Global Peace Initiative of Women, a partner organization of the United Nations, facilitating a worldwide network of women peace builders, especially in the Middle East. A speech communications theorist, Sister Joan's most recent books include The Way We Were (Orbis) and Called to Question (Sheed & Ward), a First Place CPA 2005 award winner. She is founder and executive director of Benetvision, a resource and research center for contemporary spirituality in Erie.

Copyright 2006 National Catholic Reporter

No Light in the Tunnel, by William Greider

ublished on Thursday, March 23, 2006 by The Nation
No Light in the Tunnel
by William Greider

Hope and fear are always the polar forces at work in American politics and this Texas-macho President has brilliantly orchestrated the nation's fear of terrorism into a winning position. Support him, he will protect us, take the fight to the treacherous enemies and crush them. He has reminded us relentlessly of what we most fear. For many, it felt reassuring to hear his resolve. But the brave-cowboy act is over. He failed himself yesterday in the White House press room.

George W. Bush called the press conference to sell hope--give people a reason to keep on believing--but trampled his own objective. Instead, he deepened the public's fear--not of Muslim terrorists--but of his own leadership at war. Does this guy know what he's doing? He got us into this mess; does he know how to get us out?

A fatal admission was revealed when Bush was asked whether he could envision a day when US troops were out of Iraq. The President shrugged, as though the question does not apply to him. "That'll be decided," Bush said, "by future presidents and future governments of Iraq." When I heard this, I thought, that's going to be tomorrow's headline. Sure enough, it was in the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper that always rallies to Bush's side. "Bush commits until 2009," the banner headline declared.

That remark shuts down hope and kicks it out the door. Want to bring the troops home? For the next three years, forget it. Bush's comment, it is true, was more ambiguous than the headline. But it's too late for White House amplifications. The headline is the shorthand that will linger in public consciousness, repeated endlessly in the political chatter.

Does this guy have a clue? His tone of casual dismissal sends a chill down the spine. His press conference blunder will stalk George Bush until he either makes a big change in policy or personnel or actually gets us out of Iraq. He can't just smirk and walk off the stage.

National affairs correspondent William Greider has been a political journalist for more than thirty-five years. A former Rolling Stone and Washington Post editor, he is the author of The Soul of Capitalism (Simon & Schuster).

© 2006 The Nation

Shame, guest editorial by "Georgia10" on Daily Koz

Shame
by georgia10
Tue Mar 21, 2006 at 03:51:32 PM PDT

I am ashamed. I am ashamed of this President. Aren't you? After watching his press conference today, a sense of shame overtook me. I'm ashamed that he took to the podium today as if he emptied out a container of laughing gas. I'm ashamed of a President who has the temerity to laugh when asked a question about war. I'm ashamed of the whores of the fourth estate who care more about having the honor of being the butt of one of the President's jokes than about exposing the truth to the American people. I'm ashamed that millions of my fellow Americans are so scared and so desperate for leadership that they believe the President's bullshit.

I am ashamed. I'm ashamed of this President, this megalomaniac hellbent on leaving his assprint on the map of the Middle East, no matter how much destruction is wrought and no matter how much blood flows in the streets of lands that never threatened us. I'm ashamed that when I see the American flag waiving, images of flag-draped coffins flash in my mind. I'm ashamed of Freedom's MarchTM. Ashamed when I see villages reduced to rubble. Ashamed when I see the tiny little corpses. God, they're so painfully tiny--lined up in a row, little angels wrapped in colorful blankets that starkly contrast against their gray-tinged faces. Ashamed when I see wailing Iraqis slam their hands against plain, unvarnished coffins, over and over, asking "Why? Is this democracy? Why?" When I see those image of funerals, of broken families, I want to crawl into my TV, I want to go to them and grab their slumped shoulders and scream "I'm sorry, good god, I'm so sorry. I want to leave, I want us to leave, believe me. But they won't listen...No one listens anymore."

I'm ashamed that the word "massacre" is even uttered in connection with our actions in Iraq. I'm ashamed it's not just one massacre that is alleged, but two. I'm ashamed it's gotten to the point that I can't even tell this little voice inside of me to shut up, that little voice that says maybe, just maybe it could be true. That the impossible may be plausible. Before this war, I would have rejected such claims outright. But that voice of plausibility is the consequence of those black hoods. It's the consequence of those leashes, those snarling dogs. It's the consequence of those detainees chained to bedframes. Of naked pyramids. Of forced sex acts. Of beatings and blood-streaked floors.

I am ashamed. Ashamed that Justice is no longer blindfolded, but gagged. Ashamed that in America, in AMERICA, I can only protest in "free speech zones" the size of postage stamps. Ashamed that by the time I'll take my oath as an officer of the court to support the Constitution, I'll be swearing to uphold a tattered document that has managed to survive over 200 years only to be shredded by this President in less than eight.

I am ashamed. Ashamed that in America, I see bearded men panhandling in the street, holding cardboard signs that read "U.S. Vet, can't work, need food. God bless." Ashamed that somewhere, in our America, a grandmother is sitting alone at her kitchen table, crumpled bills clutched in her thin hands, agonizing over the choice before her: medicine for her pain, or food to keep on living. Ashamed that there is a child who will go to sleep tonight on a cot in an orphanage, with no one to read him a story, no one to stroke his hair and kiss him goodnight, because the American Taliban thinks gay Americans can't love, can't parent, can't provide.

I am ashamed of my fellow Americans. Ashamed that they haven't flooded the streets. Ashamed they care more about Brangelina than the Bill of Rights. Ashamed that they're seemingly ok with the subtle but steady transformation from democracy to dictatorship. Ashamed that they are so gullible.

I am ashamed of myself. For not having the courage or the strength to do anything else but sit here and blog. I write. I protest. I vote. And yet, I'm impotent. Stuck in a unrelenting cycle of hope and despair and hope and despair. What a curse it is to be 23 and want to change the world. What a curse to be so disillusioned so early in life. What a curse to want to change a world that will not change...that cannot change? That cannot change as long as we sit and wait for others to change it. That cannot change as long as our elected Democrats refuse to take a principled stand. That cannot change until they--until we--appreciate the gravity of the situation before us: we are losing America.

This is not America. I refuse to accept it. America doesn't torture. America doesn't jail people incommunicado for years. America doesn't sit idly by as an entire people are exterminated in Darfur. America doesn't stifle science. America doesn't conduct massive, secret spying on innocent citizens. America doesn't believe the individual is an annoyance, an impediment to supreme government power. This isn't the greatest democracy on earth. This isn't the nation that pioneered human rights. This isn't the America that leads the world, that leads humanity towards a greater good. No, I refuse to accept this America of shame. This is not my America. It is an America perverted by Republican stewardship. A nation that under GOP rule has abandoned its founding ideals of freedom, liberty, and justice for all. True Americans--coast to coast, young and old--now bow their heads silently in collective shame for a nation that has lost its way.

Day of Reckoning for the Current Occupant, by Garrison Keillor, Chi Trib, 3/15/06

Day of Reckoning for the Current Occupant
By Garrison Keillor
The Chicago Tribune

Wednesday 15 March 2006

Spring arrived in New York last week for previews, a sunny day with chill in the air, but you could smell mud, and with a little imagination you could sort of smell grass. I put on a gray jacket, instead of black, and went to the opera and saw Verdi's "Luisa Miller," a Republican opera in which love is crushed by the perfidiousness of government. A helpful lesson for these times. I am referring to the Current Occupant.

The Republican Revolution has gone the way of all flesh. It took over Congress and the White House, horns blew, church bells rang, sailors kissed each other, and what happened? The Republicans led us into a reckless foreign war and steered the economy toward receivership and wielded power as if there were no rules. Democrats are accused of having no new ideas, but Republicans are making some of the old ideas look awfully good, such as constitutional checks and balances, fiscal responsibility, and the notion of realism in foreign affairs and taking actions that serve the national interest. What one might call "conservatism."

The head of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan, Lt. Gen. William Odom, writes on the Web site NiemanWatchdog.org that he sees clear parallels between Vietnam and Iraq: "The difference lies in the consequences. Vietnam did not have the devastating effects on US power that Iraq is already having." He draws the parallels in three stages and says that staying the course will only make the damage to US power greater. It's a chilling analysis, and one that isn't going to come from the Democratic Party. It's starting to come from Republicans, and they are the ones who must rescue the country from themselves.

I ran into a gray eminence from the Bush I era the other day in an airport, and he said that what most offended him about Bush II is the naked incompetence. "You may disagree with Republicans, but you always had to recognize that they knew what they were doing," he said. "I keep going back to that intelligence memo of August 2001, that said that terrorists had plans to hijack planes and crash them into buildings. The president read it, and he didn't even call a staff meeting to discuss it. That is lack of attention of a high order."

Over the course of time, the Chief Occupant has been cruelly exposed over and over. He sat and was briefed on the danger of a hurricane wiping out a major American city, and without asking a single question, he got up from the table and walked away and resumed his vacation. He played guitar as New Orleans was flooded. It took him four days to realize his responsibility to do something. When the tsunami killed 100,000 people in Southeast Asia, he was on vacation and it took him 72 hours to issue a statement of sympathy.

The Republicans tied their wagon to him and, as a result, their revolution is bankrupt. He has played the terrorism card for all it is worth and campaigned successfully against Adam and Steve and co-opted whole vast flocks of Christians, but he is done now, kaput, out of gas, for one simple reason. He doesn't represent the best that is our country. Not even close.

He openly, brazenly, countenanced crimes of torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram. He engaged in illegal surveillance, authorized the arrest of people without charge and "disappeared" them to foreign jails. And he finagled this war, which, after three years of violence, does not look to be heading toward a happy ending. And now it's up to Republicans to put their country first and call the gentleman to account.

The Current Occupant is smart about handling a political mess. The best strategy is to cut and run and change the subject. You defend the Dubai ports deal in manly terms until you lose a vote in a House committee and then you retreat - actually, you get the Dubai people to do it for you - and that's it, End of Story.

Harriet Miers was fully qualified one day and gone the next. Social Security was going to be overhauled to give us the Ownership Society, and then the stock market went in the toilet and Republicans got nervous, and suddenly it was Never Mind and on to the next new thing.

Let's bring the boys home. Otherwise, let's send this man back to Texas and see what sort of work he is capable of and let him start making a contribution to the world.

Garrison Keillor is an author and the radio host of "A Prairie Home Companion."

Violence is destroying Islam, says Muslim professional in USA.

For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats
By JOHN M. BRODER
N Y Times, March 11, 2006.

LOS ANGELES, March 10 — Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

"I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings," she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: "Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs."

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."

She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."

She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.

She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in Damascus. Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel. One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.

DR. SULTAN is "working on a book that — if it is published — it's going to turn the Islamic world upside down."

"I have reached the point that doesn't allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book."

The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster."

Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's strictures into adulthood.

But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.

"They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."

She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge of Los Angeles County.

After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr. Sultan has completed her American medical licensing, with the exception of a hospital residency program, which she hopes to do within a year. David operates an automotive-smog-check station. They bought a home in the Los Angeles area and put their children through local public schools. All are now American citizens.

BUT even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr. Sultan's anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix.

An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim Brotherhood caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her to debate an Algerian cleric on the air last July.

In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young people to commit suicide in the name of God. "Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?" she asked. "In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched."

Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew exponentially when she appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21, an appearance that was translated and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as Memri.

Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed more than a million times.

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

She said she no longer practiced Islam. "I am a secular human being," she said.

The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, "Are you a heretic?" He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.

Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats on her answering machine and by e-mail.

One message said: "Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see." She received an e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, "If someone were to kill you, it would be me."

Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than she did for her own.

"I have no fear," she said. "I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles."

ARE YOU SAVED BY JESUS as a political test in Kentucky

From: Stein, Kathy (State Rep.) (LRC) [mailto:Kathy.Stein@lrc.ky.gov]
Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 7:48 PM
To: ashley.davidson@WBKO.com
Cc: alanm803@lexingtonlegends.com; chixnkidz@aol.com
Subject: Religious questionnaire
Sensitivity: Personal

Dear Ms. Davidson,

Thank you for allowing me to present my thoughts on the questionnaire
sent to candidates by Mr. Jeff Sharp.

Mr. Sharp is perfectly free to send out any sort of survey he wishes.
But just because he can do something doesn't mean that he should.

Mr. Sharp's questionnaire, asking the single question of people running
for office if they have accepted Jesus as their savior, poses a religious
test for office, and is highly discriminatory of non-Christians.
Unwittingly or not, persons who answer "yes" to the survey are participating
in religious discrimination. Mr. Sharp's reported shock over reaction to
what he calls "a simple little survey" is disingenuous. He and every other
politician know the potential negative consequences of revealing
non-mainstream religious beliefs. And his suggestion that he may share the
survey response with churches in the area of the candidate is nothing less
than school yard bullying-- i.e. "I will tell the churches in your area that
you are not Christian." His implication is clear-- answer this question
the "right way" or he will tell the churches on you.

I am certain that not all Christians share Mr. Sharp's values nor
appreciate his intimidating tactics. I hope that the children he is
teaching in the Sunday School class have also learned a civics lesson-- that
the Constitution prohibits religious tests to hold office.

I am also hopeful that Mr. Sharp will share with his students Section 5 of
the Kentucky Constitution which is even more clear about why what he did is
wrong.

Kathy W. Stein

Richard Mitchell
Clergy & Laity Network of Kentucky

Richard.Mitchell@insightbb.com
(859) 327-6277 (cell)

The Collapse of the Bush Presidency has begun

Note: Based on my assessment of the character and personality of George W. Bush, I predicted to friends and others that he would end his second term as a failed president. It is happening somewhat faster than I expected. See below.

Weakened Bush reels from new blows
Financial Times, Online edition
By Edward Alden, Guy Dinmore and Holly Yeager in Washington
Published: March 10 2006 19:42 | Last updated: March 10 2006 19:42

With nearly three years remaining in the administration of George W. Bush, it may be too soon to start writing the epitaph for his presidency. But after a week that saw a stinging rebuke at the hands of the Republican-controlled Congress over the Dubai ports deal, and growing warnings of civil war in Iraq, there is widespread concern in Washington that Mr Bush is now so crippled politically that he may not be able to rebound.

For the first four years of his presidency, Mr Bush's personal style seemed a great strength. When faced with political opposition, he was doggedly on message, faithful to his staff and Republican allies in Congress, and aggressive in carrying his message outside Washington to the US public. That focus helped him push through the largest tax cuts in US history, win congressional support for the invasion of Iraq, and deflect charges that his administration had missed the multiple warning signs prior to the September 11 2001 attacks.

He was rewarded with re-election in 2004 largely because Americans saw him as a stronger leader than Democratic rival John Kerry.

But since then, he has fallen farther and faster than any second-term president since Richard Nixon in the throes of the Watergate scandal. Unlike the first term, where every move seemed carefully calculated for political advantage, Mr Bush now seems deaf to the waves crashing around him.

"The power of an election keeps them sharp, it keeps them thinking about the political ramifications of every decision," says Julian Zelizer, history professor at Boston University. “Once they lose that edge, they make mistakes. Not having that election dulls your senses a bit.”

Indeed, Mr Bush’s first-term virtues now appear to be vices. His loyalty to his close circle of advisers has kept him from shuffling the White House staff, as most second-term presidents do. His stubbornness kept him from modifying his plans to reform Social Security until the initiative had foundered. And his repeated warnings of the threat the US faces from terrorist attack have been turned against him by Democrats.

Mr Bush signalled on Friday he had little intention of changing course. "You have to believe in certain principles and beliefs," he told a meeting of newspaper owners in Washington. "And you can’t let the public opinion polls and focus groups cause you to abandon what you believe and become the reason for making decisions."

He reiterated his strong personal beliefs in the universality of freedom, the peacefulness of democracies, free enterprise and the power of an almighty God. "I know some people would like me to change, but you can’t be a good decisionmaker if you’re trying to please people," he said.

Congress’s success at killing the Dubai ports deal was only the worst of the recent setbacks for Mr Bush. Little-noticed this week amid the furore, the administration was also rebuked by the courts and ordered to release the names and histories of all detainees at Guantánamo Bay, while the Pentagon announced it would close the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

With the third anniversary of the launch of the Iraq war approaching, the Bush administration's public statements are also increasingly sombre, a far cry from just nine months ago when Vice-President Dick Cheney declared the insurgency to be in its last throes.

Even Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary who has often accused the media of exaggerating the depth of the crisis, acknowledged on Thursday the possibility of civil war, and insisted that US troops would not be caught in the middle.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the skilled US ambassador to Baghdad who is struggling to get the Iraqis to form a government of national unity, this week conceded that the US had opened Pandora's box in Iraq, an assessment reinforced by the State Department's annual human rights report, which painted a grim picture of sectarian warfare between insurgents and interior ministry death squads.

The White House said on Friday that it would once again launch a public campaign to shore up support among the nearly 80 per cent of Americans who believe a civil war is looming there, much as it did in December when Mr Bush’s poll ratings had also dipped below 40 per cent.

But there seems little chance this will stem falling public and congressional support for the war.

More likely is that Mr Bush’s weakness will threaten other initiatives. The president this month linked a historic pact to welcome India into the club of nuclear nations, but must still sell the agreement to a sceptical Congress. Thomas Donnelly, defence analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said the backlash over the Dubai ports deal could have a spillover effect on India's nuclear deal.

"If you could make a xenophobic case to shut down the ports deal, you could also make a different sort of, possibly pretty strong, xenophobic argument in regard to the transfer of nuclear materials to India, even if it is quasi-racist," said Mr Donnelly.

It may also threaten the president's ability to sustain the effort in Iraq, with larger consequences for US power globally. William Kristol, editor of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard and one of the war’s strongest supporters, warned this week: "The Bush administration leads the west. If the west seems to be on its heels, it is because the administration seems to be on its heels."

The Collapse of the Bush Presidency has begun

Note: Based on my assessment of the character and personality of George W. Bush, I predicted to friends and others that he would end his second term as a failed president. It is happening somewhat faster than I expected. See below.

Weakened Bush reels from new blows
Financial Times, Online edition
By Edward Alden, Guy Dinmore and Holly Yeager in Washington
Published: March 10 2006 19:42 | Last updated: March 10 2006 19:42

With nearly three years remaining in the administration of George W. Bush, it may be too soon to start writing the epitaph for his presidency. But after a week that saw a stinging rebuke at the hands of the Republican-controlled Congress over the Dubai ports deal, and growing warnings of civil war in Iraq, there is widespread concern in Washington that Mr Bush is now so crippled politically that he may not be able to rebound.

For the first four years of his presidency, Mr Bush's personal style seemed a great strength. When faced with political opposition, he was doggedly on message, faithful to his staff and Republican allies in Congress, and aggressive in carrying his message outside Washington to the US public. That focus helped him push through the largest tax cuts in US history, win congressional support for the invasion of Iraq, and deflect charges that his administration had missed the multiple warning signs prior to the September 11 2001 attacks.

He was rewarded with re-election in 2004 largely because Americans saw him as a stronger leader than Democratic rival John Kerry.

But since then, he has fallen farther and faster than any second-term president since Richard Nixon in the throes of the Watergate scandal. Unlike the first term, where every move seemed carefully calculated for political advantage, Mr Bush now seems deaf to the waves crashing around him.

"The power of an election keeps them sharp, it keeps them thinking about the political ramifications of every decision," says Julian Zelizer, history professor at Boston University. “Once they lose that edge, they make mistakes. Not having that election dulls your senses a bit.”

Indeed, Mr Bush’s first-term virtues now appear to be vices. His loyalty to his close circle of advisers has kept him from shuffling the White House staff, as most second-term presidents do. His stubbornness kept him from modifying his plans to reform Social Security until the initiative had foundered. And his repeated warnings of the threat the US faces from terrorist attack have been turned against him by Democrats.

Mr Bush signalled on Friday he had little intention of changing course. "You have to believe in certain principles and beliefs," he told a meeting of newspaper owners in Washington. "And you can’t let the public opinion polls and focus groups cause you to abandon what you believe and become the reason for making decisions."

He reiterated his strong personal beliefs in the universality of freedom, the peacefulness of democracies, free enterprise and the power of an almighty God. "I know some people would like me to change, but you can’t be a good decisionmaker if you’re trying to please people," he said.

Congress’s success at killing the Dubai ports deal was only the worst of the recent setbacks for Mr Bush. Little-noticed this week amid the furore, the administration was also rebuked by the courts and ordered to release the names and histories of all detainees at Guantánamo Bay, while the Pentagon announced it would close the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

With the third anniversary of the launch of the Iraq war approaching, the Bush administration's public statements are also increasingly sombre, a far cry from just nine months ago when Vice-President Dick Cheney declared the insurgency to be in its last throes.

Even Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary who has often accused the media of exaggerating the depth of the crisis, acknowledged on Thursday the possibility of civil war, and insisted that US troops would not be caught in the middle.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the skilled US ambassador to Baghdad who is struggling to get the Iraqis to form a government of national unity, this week conceded that the US had opened Pandora's box in Iraq, an assessment reinforced by the State Department's annual human rights report, which painted a grim picture of sectarian warfare between insurgents and interior ministry death squads.

The White House said on Friday that it would once again launch a public campaign to shore up support among the nearly 80 per cent of Americans who believe a civil war is looming there, much as it did in December when Mr Bush’s poll ratings had also dipped below 40 per cent.

But there seems little chance this will stem falling public and congressional support for the war.

More likely is that Mr Bush’s weakness will threaten other initiatives. The president this month linked a historic pact to welcome India into the club of nuclear nations, but must still sell the agreement to a sceptical Congress. Thomas Donnelly, defence analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said the backlash over the Dubai ports deal could have a spillover effect on India's nuclear deal.

"If you could make a xenophobic case to shut down the ports deal, you could also make a different sort of, possibly pretty strong, xenophobic argument in regard to the transfer of nuclear materials to India, even if it is quasi-racist," said Mr Donnelly.

It may also threaten the president's ability to sustain the effort in Iraq, with larger consequences for US power globally. William Kristol, editor of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard and one of the war’s strongest supporters, warned this week: "The Bush administration leads the west. If the west seems to be on its heels, it is because the administration seems to be on its heels."

Bush finally revealed, exposed finally to be simply out of touch w. reality

A Deaf Man Spouting
A videotape of Bush's briefing before Hurricane Katrina exposes him as out of touch with reality
by Sidney Blumenthal


On the eve of George Bush's presidential campaign in 2000, the neoconservative Kenneth Adelman cast him as Prince Hal, who "puts the indiscretions of his youth behind him" and "redeems his father's reign." After September 11, Bush was wreathed with regal laurels as Henry V by a clerisy of pundits. From Ground Zero to the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln ("Mission Accomplished") the president struck bold poses, but his choreographed gestures have especially illuminated his hollow crown in the darkened breach of New Orleans.

For the first time, last week, the public has seen the spontaneous Bush behind closed doors, in a leaked videotape that recorded his briefing the day before Hurricane Katrina struck. Teleconferenced in from his Crawford ranch, Texas, Bush listens to disaster officials inform him that the storm will be unprecedented in its severity and consequences. "This is, to put it mildly, the big one," says Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, warns: "This hurricane is much larger than Hurricane Andrew ever was." Bush asks not a single question, says, "We are fully prepared," and departs.

The Katrina videotape is defining for Bush's presidency. It exposes a deaf man spouting talking points. After the hurricane hit, he stayed on vacation, went to a birthday party, strummed a guitar with a country and western singer, and on September 1 said: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." On his flight back to Washington, four days after landfall, his aides gave him a DVD of television news reports of the hurricane's impact about which he had done nothing to learn on his own.

As the catastrophe of the foreshadowed aftermath unfolded, he clapped Brown on the back: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." But soon the administration settled on Brownie as the scapegoat, prevented him from defending himself and forced him to resign. He was expected to fall on his sword.

Suddenly, last week, the sacrificial Brown stormed back, the betrayed turning on his betrayers. He proclaimed on every media outlet that he would no longer play the fall guy, detailed the warnings he had given, and named malefactors running up the chain of command.

In New Orleans, a sad Mardi Gras has come and gone, while crews from the morgue continue searching for bodies - still finding them. The city has lost more than half its population, most of the refugees are African-Americans, and their neighborhoods remain scenes of devastation. Having rejected a plan for rebuilding, Bush travelled to New Orleans for another photo-opportunity this week to announce a program that would supposedly give money to the homeless but absurdly will not permit destroyed housing to be replaced by new. Not one penny so far has been spent on new homes. Six months after the tempest, New Orleans, one of the glories of American life and culture, lies in ruins, and Bush visits to pose as visionary.

In a recently published hagiography on the theme of Bush-as-Prince-Hal, Rebel-in-Chief, written by the rightwing pundit Fred Barnes, Bush explained to him that his job is to "stay out of minutiae, keep the big picture in mind." To illustrate his self-conception, he "called my attention to the rug" in the Oval Office. Bush said that he wanted the rug to express that an "optimistic person comes here." He delegated the task to his wife, Laura, who designed a rug featuring bright yellow rays of the sun. In his Oval Office, Prince Hal imagines himself grown into a Sun King.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of "The Clinton Wars." Email to: sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com.

250 Doctors from seven counries attack US over Guantanamo

Doctors attack US over Guantanamo
More than 250 medical experts have signed a letter condemning the US for force-feeding prisoners on hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The doctors said physicians at the military prison had to respect inmates' right to refuse treatment.

The letter, in the medical journal, the Lancet, said doctors who used restraints and force-feeding should be punished by their professional bodies.

Some 500 terror suspects are being held without trial at Guantanamo Bay.

The US has argued that the Geneva Convention does not apply to prisoners at the camp, who, it says, are enemy combatants who continue to pose a threat to national security.

Human rights groups and the UN have urged the US to close down the facility.

Amnesty International said the "troubling" accusations in the doctors' letter underlined the need for the "independent medical examination of the prisoners.

BBC, March 9, 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4790742.stm

Warmongers Face the Facts & Admit They Were Wrong!

At Last, the Warmongers Are Prepared to Face
the Facts and Admit They Were Wrong
By Rupert Cornwell
The Independent UK

Thursday 09 March 2006

It has taken more than three years, tens of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, and $200bn (£115bn) of treasure - all to achieve a chaos verging on open civil war. But, finally, the neo-conservatives who sold the United States on this disastrous war are starting to utter three small words. We were wrong.

The second thoughts have spread across the conservative spectrum, from William Buckley, venerable editor of The National Review to Andrew Sullivan, once editor of the New Republic, now an influential commentator and blogmeister. The patrician conservative columnist George Will was gently sceptical from the outset. He now glumly concludes that all three members of the original "axis of evil" - not only Iran and North Korea but also Iraq - "are more dangerous than when that term was coined in 2002".

Neither Mr Buckley nor Mr Sullivan concedes that the decision to topple Saddam was intrinsically wrong. But "the challenge required more than [President Bush's] deployable resources," the former sadly recognises. "The American objective in Iraq has failed."

For Mr Sullivan, today's mess is above all a testament to American overconfidence and false assumptions, born of arrogance and naïveté. But he too asserts, in a column in Time magazine this week, that all may not be lost.

Of all the critiques however, the most profound is that of Francis Fukuyama, in his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads. Its subtitle is "Democracy, Power and the Neo-Conservative Legacy" - and that legacy, Mr Fukuyama argues, is fatally poisoned.

This is no ordinary thesis, but apostasy on a grand scale. Mr Fukuyama, after all, was the most prominent intellectual who signed the 1997 "Project for the New American Century", the founding manifesto of neo-conservatism drawn up by William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, the house journal of the neo-conservative movement.

The PNAC aimed to cement for all time America's triumph in the Cold War, by increasing defence spending, challenging regimes that were hostile to US interests, and promoting freedom and democracy around the world. Its goal was "an international order friendly to our security, prosperity and values".

The war on Iraq, spuriously justified by the supposed threat posed by Saddam's WMD, was the test run of this theory. It was touted as a panacea for every ill of the Middle East. The road to Jerusalem, the neo-cons argued, led through Baghdad. And after Iraq, why not Syria, Iran and anyone else that stood in Washington's way? All that, Mr Fukuyama now acknowledges, has been a tragic conceit.

Like the Leninists of old, he writes, the neo-conservatives reckoned they could drive history forward with the right mixture of power and will. However, "Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States."

But was it not Mr Fukuyama who claimed in his most celebrated work, The End of History and the Last Man, that the whole world was locked on a glide-path to liberal, free-market democracy? Yes indeed. But that book, he points out, argued that the process was gradual, and must unfold at its own pace.

But not only were the neo-cons too impatient. A second error was to believe that an all-powerful America would be trusted to exercise a "benevolent hegemony". A third was the gross overstatement of the post 9/11 threat posed by radical Islam, in order to justify the dubious doctrine of preventive war.

Finally, there was the blatant contradiction between the neo-cons' aversion to government meddling at home and their childlike faith in their ability to impose massive social engineering in foreign and utterly unfamiliar countries like Iraq. Thence sprang the mistakes of the occupation period.

Some, however, are resolutely unswayed. In the latest Weekly Standard, Mr Kristol accuses Mr Fukuyama of losing his nerve - of wanting to "retrench, hunker down and let large parts of the world go to hell in a handbasket, hoping the hand-basket won't blow up in our faces."

Christopher Hitchens, the one-time Trotskyist turned neo-con fellow traveller and eternal polemicist, derides Mr Fukuyama for "conceding to the fanatics and beheaders the claim that they are a response to American blunders and excesses," and for yearning for a return of Kissingerian realism in foreign affairs.

The fact, however, remains that future Bush policymakers who signed the PNAC nine years ago are now mostly gone. Paul Wolfowitz, the war's most relentless and starry-eyed promoter, has moved on to the World Bank, silent about the mess he did so much to create. Richard Perle, leader of the resident hawks department at the American Enterprise Institute think-tank here, has vanished from the scene. Lewis Libby meanwhile has stepped down as Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, to focus his energy on staying out of jail.

Yet another signatory was Zalmay Khalilzad, now the US ambassador to Iraq. This week even he - Afghan born and the one original neo-con who had the region in his blood - admitted that the invasion had opened "a Pandora's box" that could see the Iraq conflict spread across the entire Middle East.

Those left in the administration - primarily Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, are not so much neo-conservatives as "Hobbesian unilateralists", concerned to protect and advance US national interests in a lawless and violent world, whatever it takes.

As for Condoleezza Rice, never a signed-up member of the movement but mostly sympathetic to it when she was the President's security adviser - she has metamorphosed from hawk into pragmatist with her move from the White House to the State Department.

It is on George Bush's lips that neo-conservatism most obviously survives - in the commitment to spreading freedom and democracy that he proclaims almost daily, and most hubristically in his second inaugural in 2005 that promised to banish tyranny from the earth.

But even the extravagant oratory of that icy January day cannot obscure the irony of America's Iraq adventure. The application of a doctrine built upon the supposed boundlessness of US power has succeeded only in exposing its limits.

Thus chastened, Mr Fukuyama now wants to temper the idealism of the neo-conservative doctrine with an acceptance that some things are not so easy to change, and that the US must cut its cloth accordingly. He calls it "realistic Wilsonianism". A better description might be neo-realism. And if that brings a smile to the face of a certain former US high priest of realism with a pronounced German accent, who can blame him?

Conservatives Talk about Bush, Washington Post.

At Conservative Forum on Bush, Everybody's a Critic

By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, March 8, 2006; A02

If the ancient political wisdom is correct that a charge unanswered is a charge agreed to, the Bush White House pleaded guilty yesterday at the Cato Institute to some extraordinary allegations.

"We did ask a few members of the Bush economic team to come," explained David Boaz, the think tank's executive vice president, as he moderated a discussion between two prominent conservatives about President Bush. "We didn't get that."

Now why would the administration pass up such an invitation?

Well, it could have been because of the first speaker, former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett. Author of the new book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," Bartlett called the administration "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."

It might also have had something to do with speaker No. 2, conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. Author of the forthcoming "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back," Sullivan called Bush "reckless" and "a socialist," and accused him of betraying "almost every principle conservatism has ever stood for."

Nor was moderator Boaz a voice of moderation. He blamed Bush for "a 48 percent increase in spending in just six years," a "federalization of public schools" and "the biggest entitlement since LBJ."

True, the small-government libertarians represented by Cato have always been the odd men out of the Bush coalition. But the standing-room-only forum yesterday, where just a single questioner offered even a tepid defense of the president, underscored some deep disillusionment among conservatives over Bush's big-spending answer to Medicare and Hurricane Katrina, his vast claims of executive power, and his handling of postwar Iraq.

Bartlett, who lost his job at the free-market National Center for Policy Analysis because of his book, said that if conservatives were honest, more would join his complaint. "They're reticent to address the issues that I've raised for fear that they might have to agree with them," he told the group. "And a lot of Washington think tanks and groups of that sort, they know that this White House is very vindictive."

Waiting for the talk to start, some in the audience expressed their ambivalence.

"It's gonna hit the [bestseller] lists, I'm sure," said Cato's legal expert, Roger Pilon.

"Typical Bruce," replied John Taylor of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.

Admitted Pilon: "He's got a lot of material to work with."

Bartlett certainly thought so. He began by predicting a big tax increase "to finance the inevitable growth of government that is in the pipeline that President Bush is largely responsible for." He also said many fellow conservatives don't know about the "quite dreadful" traits of the administration, such as the absence of "anybody who does any serious analysis" on policy issues.

Boaz assured the audience that he told the White House that "if there's a rebuttal to what Bruce has said, please come and provide it."

Instead, Sullivan was on hand to second the critique. "This is a big-government agenda," he said. "It is fueled by a new ideology, the ideology of Christian fundamentalism." The bearded pundit offered his own indictment of Bush: "complete contempt" for democratic processes, torture of detainees, ignoring habeas corpus and a "vast expansion of the federal government." The notion, he said, that the "Thatcher-Reagan legacy that many of us grew up to love and support would end this way is an astonishing paradox and a great tragedy."

The question period gave the two a chance to come up with new insults.

"If Bush were running today against Bill Clinton, I'd vote for Clinton," Bartlett served.

"You have to understand the people in this administration have no principles," Sullivan volleyed. "Any principles that get in the way of the electoral map have to be dispensed with."

Boaz renewed his plea. "Any Bush economists hiding in the audience?"

There was, in fact, one Bush Treasury official on the attendance roster, but he did not surface. The only man who came close to defending Bush, environmental conservative Fred Singer, said he was "willing to overlook" the faults because of the president's Supreme Court nominations. Even Richard Walker, representing the think tank that fired Bartlett, declined to argue. "I agree with most of it," he said later.

Unchallenged, the Bartlett-Sullivan tag team continued. "The entire intellectual game has been given away by the Republican president," said Sullivan. "He's a socialist in so many respects, a Christian socialist."

Bartlett argued that Richard Nixon "is the model for everything Bush is doing."

Sullivan said Karl Rove's political strategy is "pathetic."

Bartlett said that "the administration lies about budget numbers."

"He is not a responsible human being; he is a phenomenally reckless human being," Sullivan proclaimed. "There is a level of recklessness involved that is beyond any ideology."

"Gosh," Boaz interjected. "I wish we had a senior White House aide up here."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Spying and the CYA Readiness of Congress

Kabuki Congress
Op Ed. New York Times, March 6
Ready to "Cover the Ass" of the White House, to make legal what was illegal.

Imagine being stopped for speeding and having the local legislature raise the limit so you won't have to pay the fine. It sounds absurd, but it's just what is happening to the 28-year-old law that prohibits the president from spying on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge.

It's a familiar pattern. President Bush ignores the Constitution and the laws of the land, and the cowardly, rigidly partisan majority in Congress helps him out by rewriting the laws he's broken.

In 2004, to take one particularly disturbing example, Congress learned that American troops were abusing, torturing and killing prisoners, and that the administration was illegally detaining hundreds of people at camps around the world. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, huffed and puffed about the abuse, but did nothing. And when the courts said the detention camps do fall under the laws of the land, compliant lawmakers simply changed them.

Now the response of Congress to Mr. Bush's domestic wiretapping scheme is following the same pattern, only worse.

At first, lawmakers expressed outrage at the warrantless domestic spying, and some Democrats and a few Republicans still want a full investigation. But the Republican leadership has already reverted to form. Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has held one investigative hearing, notable primarily for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's refusal to answer questions.

Mr. Specter then loyally produced a bill that actually grants legal cover, retroactively, to the one spying program Mr. Bush has acknowledged. It also covers any other illegal wiretapping we don't know about — including, it appears, entire "programs" that could cover hundreds, thousands or millions of unknowing people.

Mr. Specter's bill at least offers the veneer of judicial oversight from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A far more noxious proposal being floated by Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, would entirely remove intelligence gathering related to terrorism from the law on spying, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Let's call this what it is: a shell game. The question is whether the Bush administration broke the law by allowing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans and others in the United States without obtaining the required warrant. The White House wants Americans to believe that the spying is restricted only to conversations between agents of Al Qaeda and people in the United States. But even if that were true, which it evidently is not, the administration has not offered the slightest evidence that it could not have efficiently monitored those Qaeda-related phone calls and e-mail messages while following the existing rules.

In other words, there is not a shred of proof that the illegal program produced information that could not have been obtained legally, had the administration wanted to bother to stay within the law.

The administration has assured the nation it had plenty of good reason, but there's no way for Congress to know, since it has been denied information on the details of the wiretap program. And Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, seems bent on making sure it stays that way. He has refused to permit a vote on whether to investigate the spying scandal.

There were glimmers of hope on the House side. Representative Heather Wilson, the New Mexico Republican who heads one of the subcommittees supervising intelligence, called for a "painstaking" review of the necessity and legality of the spying operation. But the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, is turning that into a pro forma review that would end with Congress rewriting the foreign-intelligence law the way Mr. Bush wants.

Ms. Wilson still says that the House needs to get the facts before it rewrites the law, and we hope she sticks to it. But she's facing a tough race this fall, and her staff has already started saying that, well, she never called for "an investigation," just "an oversight review."

Putting on face paint and pretending that illusion is reality is fine for Kabuki theater. Congress should have higher standards.

Bill Moyers on The Public Trust Derided and Betrayed in D.C.

Bill Moyers on DeLay, Abramoff and the Public Trust
Huffington Post.

Back in the first Gilded Age, Boies Penrose was a United States senator from Pennsylvania who had been put and kept in office by the railroad tycoons and oil barons. He assured the moguls: "I believe in the division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under which you make money... and out of your profits you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money."

Gilded Ages - then and now - have one thing in common: Audacious and shameless people for whom the very idea of the public trust is a cynical joke.

A recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that 70% of Americans believe lobbyists bribing members of Congress is the way things work. Findings like these underscore the fact that ordinary people believe their bonds with democracy are not only stretched but sundered.

You see the breach clearly with Tom DeLay. As he became the king of campaign fundraising, the Associated Press writes, "He began to live a lifestyle his constituents back in Sugar Land would have a hard time ever imagining." Big corporations provided private jets to take him to places of luxury most Americans have never seen - places with "dazzling views, warm golden sunsets, golf, goose-down comforters, marble bathrooms and balconies overlooking the ocean." The AP reports that various organizations - campaign committees, political action committees, even a children's charity established by DeLay - paid over $1 million on hotels, restaurants, golf resorts and corporate jets in DeLay's behalf.

DeLay was a man on the move and on the take. But he needed help to sustain the cash flow. He found it in a fellow right wing ideologue named Jack Abramoff. Abramoff personifies the Republican money machine of which DeLay with the blessing of the House leadership was the major domo.
Just last month Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials, a spectacular fall for a man whose rise to power began 25 years ago with his election as Chairman of the College Republicans. Despite its innocuous name, the organization became a political attack machine for the Far Right and a launching pad for younger conservatives on the make. "Our job," Abramoff, then 22 years old, wrote after his first visit to the Reagan White House, "is to remove liberals from power permanently [from] student newspaper and radio stations, student governments, and academia." Karl Rove had once held the same job as chairman. So did Grover Norquist, who ran Abramoff's campaign. A youthful $200-a-month intern named Ralph Reed was at their side. These were the rising young stars of the conservative movement who came to town to lead a revolution and stayed to run a racket.

Abramoff made his name, so to speak, representing Indian tribes with gambling interests. As his partner he hired a DeLay crony named Michael Scanlon. Together they would bilk half a dozen Indian tribes who hired them to protect their tribal gambling interests from competition. Abramoff and Scanlon came up with one scheme they called "Gimme Five": Abramoff would refer tribes to Scanlon for grassroots public relations work, and Scanlon would then kick back about 50% to Abramoff, all without the tribes' knowledge. Before it was over the tribes had paid them $82 million dollars, much of it going directly into Abramoff's and Scanlon's pockets.

Some of the money went to so-called charities set up by Abramoff and DeLay that filtered money for lavish trips for members of Congress and their staff, as well as salaries for Congressional family members and DeLay's pet projects. And some of the money found its way to the righteous folks of the Christian Right.

It gets worse. (More. . . ) see blog at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/delay-abramoff-and-the-_b_16534.html

"If you believe in God, your judgment (to go to war against Iraq) is "made also by God," Incredible, but . . .

Tony Blair is quoted (BBC news) as saying his judgment to go to way was also made by God. Yes! See below. Incredible. But this is typical reasoning of the religious enthusiast when faced with the human failure of his decisions. Which raises an interesting question: When will Mr Bush fall back on similarly justifying his decision? See BBC news below, dated March 4.
____

PM attacked on Iraq 'God' remarks

Anti-war campaigners have criticised Tony Blair after he suggested his decision to go to war in Iraq would ultimately be judged by God.

The prime minister told ITV1's Parkinson chat show: "If you believe in God (the judgement) is made by God."

Reg Keys, whose son was killed in Iraq, said Mr Blair was "using God as a get-out for total strategic failure" and his comments were "abhorrent".

But Labour MP Stephen Pound praised Mr Blair for being "painfully honest".

'Right thing'

Mr Blair told Michael Parkinson, in an interview being screened on Saturday, how he had struggled with his conscience when making decisions about a potential war in Iraq.

If this was anything to do with trying to appeal to the electorate, he wouldn't be so excruciatingly honest
Stephen Pound
Labour MP

"When you're faced with a decision like that, some of those decisions have been very, very difficult, most of all because you know... these are people's lives and, in some case, their deaths," he said.

"The only way you can take a decision like that is to try to do the right thing according to your conscience."

He said: "I think if you have faith about these things, then you realise that that judgement is made by other people... and if you believe in God, it's made by God as well."

When asked if he had prayed to God on the matter, he replied: "I don't want to get into that...but yeah, of course, you struggle with your own conscience about it... in the end, you do what you think is the right thing." +++

TIT for TAT: 98,000 civilian fatalities in Iraq, Lancet report.

See Truthout, click on The Lancet Report.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030206D.shtml.

urying The Lancet Report
By Nicolas J. S. Davies
Z Magazine

February 2006 Issue

Over a year ago an international team of epidemiologists, headed by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, completed a "cluster sample survey" of civilian casualties in Iraq. Its findings contradicted central elements of what politicians and journalists had presented to the US public and the world. After excluding any possible statistical anomalies, they estimated that at least 98,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the previous 18 months as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of their country. They also found that violence had become the leading cause of death in Iraq during that period. Their most significant finding was that the vast majority (79 percent) of violent deaths were caused by "coalition" forces using "helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry," and that almost half (48 percent) of these were children, with a median age of 8.

When the team's findings were published in the Lancet, the official journal of the British Medical Association, they caused quite a stir and it seemed that the first step had been taken toward a realistic accounting of the human cost of the war. The authors made it clear that their results were approximate. They discussed the limitations of their methodology at length and emphasized that further research would be invaluable in giving a more precise picture.

A year later, we do not have a more precise picture. Soon after the study was published, US and British officials launched a concerted campaign to discredit its authors and marginalize their findings without seriously addressing the validity of their methods or presenting any evidence to challenge their conclusions. Today the continuing aerial bombardment of Iraq is still a dark secret to most Americans and the media present the same general picture of the war, focusing on secondary sources of violence.

[more]

IRAQ ON THE BRINK: Is the USA intervention already over, except for leaving?

March 1, 2006
Editorial
Iraq on the Brink

Iraq has moved perilously close to civil war. Everyone who knows anything about the tortured history of that country, cobbled together from disparate parts by British colonial officials less than a century ago, has always dreaded such an outcome.

Fear of civil war stayed the hand of the first President George Bush, when he turned back American troops and left Saddam Hussein in power. It generated much of the opposition to the current President Bush's invasion in 2003. Yet many critics of the invasion, including this page, believed that the dangers from civil war were so dire that American troops, once in, were obliged to remain as long as there was a conceivable route to a just peace.

The only alternative to civil war is, and has always been, a national unity government of Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. Unless these mutually suspicious groups can work together, the United States will be faced with the impossible task of trying to create a stable democracy that Iraqis have refused to create for themselves.

The chances of putting together such a government grew much smaller with the bombing of a major Shiite shrine in the largely Sunni city of Samarra last week, an attack that literally blew the lid off the simmering animosity between Iraq's two main religious factions. That hatred and distrust had been heated to a high boil by the sharp-shouldered and small-minded maneuvering over the formation of a new government.

To millions of enraged Shiites, all Sunni Arabs suddenly seemed indistinguishable from the Samarra bombers. Seeing that the weak-willed and poorly disciplined Iraqi security forces had utterly failed to protect their revered mosque and shrine, Shiites looked instead to the vicious and brutal sectarian militias run by leading Shiite political parties. They promptly unleashed a torrent of bombings and killings directed against Sunni mosques, mullahs and terrified civilians.

Those bloody reprisals have so far killed hundreds of people. They confirmed Sunni fears that the Shiite-led government would not lift a finger to protect their lives, families, property and mosques from a reign of terror inflicted by militias affiliated with the leading government parties.

The desperately dangerous situation that now prevails in Iraq could never have been created by Sunni terrorists alone, or by the dithering ambivalence of Sunni political leaders, who seem unable to decide from one day to the next whether they are ready to engage in the give-and-take of parliamentary politics. Much of the blame must also go to ambitious and revenge-minded Shiite political leaders, who, for the past year, have thwarted constitutional compromises and given members of their party militias key posts in the government security forces and Interior Ministry prisons. To this day, they continue to resist the formation of a broadly inclusive national unity government.

Some of the worst offenders on this score include the incumbent prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who has just been nominated for another term; his crucial ally Moktada al-Sadr, the rabidly anti-American cleric, politician and militia leader; and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who heads Iraq's most powerful Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

If Iraq can still be saved from its consuming hatreds, at least some of these major Shiite leaders will have to rise to the moment and abruptly change their ways. Kurdish leaders can help by pledging to withhold their support for Mr. Jaafari's renomination unless he agrees to a broadly representative national government. And Sunni leaders will have to embrace and take part in such a government, accepting the fact that they are a minority in the population and must get used to playing a secondary, though still significant, role.

If civil war broke out, innocent Shiite and Sunni civilians would suffer first, but the repercussions could spread far beyond Iraq's borders. The Shiite south would be further propelled into the political orbit of Iran, and Kurds in the north would claim independence, probably drawing in Turkey. The oil-free western and central Sunni area would be left impoverished, a potential no man's land that could become a home base for terrorists operating around the globe.

Iraq's elected leaders can still save their country. They must now prove that they want to. Time is rapidly running out.

It's Over, Mr. B. Time to Get Out. Now. Our Continued Presence is an Aggravation to the Peaceful Resolution of Differences that Only They Can Do

Poll of troops signals most hope U.S. leaves Iraq soon
USA Today, March 1.

The U.S. should pull out of Iraq "within the next year," said 72% of the 944 U.S. military personnel in Iraq who were surveyed for a LeMoyne University/Zogby International project, which was published today. Just under a quarter - 23% - said U.S. forces should stay "as long as they are needed."

At the Pentagon, spokesman Bryan Whitman told The Financial Times that U.S. personnel in Iraq are not unhappy about the way things are going in Iraq. That conclusion is “certainly not born out in our recruiting and retention statistics,” he said.

Columnist Nicholas Kristof, who previewed the poll today in The New York Times (available to Times Select subscribers), disagreed. He called the 72% result "one more bit of evidence that our grim stay-the-course policy in Iraq has failed."

Among other survey results: 58% of the soldiers said the mission is clear to them; and "a majority of the troops serving in Iraq said they were satisfied" with the body armor and other equipment they've been provided.+

MY comment. The dream of Mr. Bush was bold and adventurous. We might create a new democracy in a key place in the Middle East which might help transform and stabilize the region, as well as make it more accessible (military bases) and useful (oil) to our national interests. But there were many resttaints: Political realism would have recognized, as many did, the impossibility of imposing a democracy on a tribal culture, Rummy and Cheney and Bush were headstrong, not willing to examine the downside risks, which some of their own military advised (e.g. number required for occupation, etc). Understanding Muslim fundamentalism, which we should have learned from our fiasco in Iran back under Carter and preceding Presidents, and what the unprovoked invasion of a Muslim country would do for the cause of Osama's campaign of terrorism. We have done in response, exactly what Osama dreamed and more in response to 911. We have in reality fueled terrorism around the world not only agsinst the USA but also against the West. Bush's dream was a dumb, dumb deal from the beginning, for anyone willing to examine the realities.

This military adventure has also cost us greatly and will take many years to repair.
March 1, 2006.