For the Record

Waking up to power

Here is a brilliant commentary by Keith Olbermann on Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence.  The comparison with the trajectory of Watergate---where Nixon's injudicious firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox was the final straw leading to Nixon's resignation---indicates how the political landscape has, since then, hardened into a seemingly impermeable crust of criminality and corruption.

At issue now as then, Olbermann suggests, is Cox's question of whether we are to be a nation of men, not laws.  I agree, but on the other hand it has always been persons, and more specifically certain of their virtues---their integrity, their compassion, their desire to do good, their desire to avoid shame---that have ultimately kept us safe from the abuses of those in positions of great political power.  What has happened since Nixon had the decency to resign is that right-wingers have woken up precisely to the fact that it wasn't laws that were preventing them from achieving their nefarious purposes; that if they ditched their scruples and shamelessly went for the gusto, nothing in particular would stop them.  The real question now, as then, is whether we are to be a nation of law-abiding persons, not criminals.  And what's different now is the answer given by those even at the highest stations of government: yeah, we're criminals; so what?

This right-wing strategy has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams thanks not just to the opposition's still playing by the old rules and assumptions, but also because almost no one has been able to admit to themselves or anyone else that criminals have been installed as the leaders of the U.S., much less take appropriate action to put them behind bars or at least out of office.  Human virtues are also the ultimate ground of the laws' being enforced, and here too things have evidently taken a turn for the worse.

The true measure of power

The true measure of power is how much you can get away with, which makes the gangsters running the U.S. effectively all-powerful.

Permanent presence in Iraq

Josh Marshall comments on Bush's comparing Iraq to Korea:

By saying that Korea is the model for the US military presence in Iraq, the president is saying that he envisions the US military presence in Iraq continuing for many decades into the future.

Or let's put that in more stark terms, for most of you reading this post, the president envisions US troops remaining in Iraq long after you're dead.

Talking about drawdowns in late 2007 or by the end of 2008 is basically a joke, in other words. Countries can really only think on forty or fifty year horizons. So what this means is that the US military presence in Iraq is permanent.

As TPM Reader DS made clear in the email we posted earlier, there's only one goal that makes sense of that strategy. And that is to permanently dominate the cluster of oil fields in southern Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran. Nothing to do with democracy, as though that needed saying. But also nothing to do with terrorism. We're permanently occupying Iraq to lock down the world oil supply.

But all that is commentary. The headline is clear enough to get the message out: the president wants US troops in Iraq for decades to come.

No wonder the U.S. "embassy" in Iraq is the size of 80 football fields.

What he said: Carter on the abominable Bush and Blair

On Bush:

Former President Carter says "Former President Carter says President Bush's administration is "the worst in history" in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy. [...]

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions.

On Blair:

In an interview with BBC radio, Carter was asked how he would describe Blair's attitude to US President George W. Bush. He replied: "Abominable. Loyal, blind, apparently subservient. [...]

Carter, US president from 1977 to 1981, suggested Blair could have made a crucial difference to US political and public opinion by distancing himself during the build-up to the March 2003 invasion.

Patrick Cockburn on Iraq

Tom Dispatch has gathered together some of Cockburn's excellent essays on the invasion and its consequences here.

Between 1 in 67 and 1 in 28

Via FDL, the BBC did a bit of math on the 2006 Lancet study and determined that 1 in 40 Iraqis have perished due to the Bush--Cheney/GOP/US corporate--right wing invasion -- that's using the publicized figure of 655K. Of course 655K is the average of the 95% confidence interval -- which actually ranges between 393K and 943K, or between 1 in 67 and 1 in 28.

By way of comparison, that's between 4.5 and 10 million Americans, between 120K and 290K New Yorkers, 477K and 1.1M Canadians, 313K and 750K Australians, or 7.3M and 17M residents of the EU -- eyeballing, within an order of magnitude of the fatalities of WWII.

Or, putting things on a personal level, I recall having read that the typical person vaguely knows 1500 people. That would amount to your knowing between 22 and 53 people killed in the war or aftermath.

Back in the Winter of '02--3, I made a sign for my apartment window saying 'Bush's Iraqi mass murder spree? No way!' I don't think I had a clear picture at the time of what this would amount to, numbers-wise, but I'm inclined to think the actual numbers so far meet any reasonable understanding of a "mass murder spree". 

Pre-election weekend linky post

• A cheering reflection on the cultural underpinnings of the left blogosphere political movement. Especially cheering when read as a sort of "happy face" take on the value of bricolage in response to Thomas Frank's depressing doctrine of the context of cool. Also most excellently proceeding from the core Lennon-ist exhortation to "try something new".
• Vids: good natured people and one fucking psycho. (Though I note that Big Time manifests a bit of stung-ness in response to a huge dis from his long time bud Ken Adelman.)
• Ramsey Clark, former USAG and Saddam's lawyer, worries about "victor's justice".
• There's a good deal to read on the incredibly hilarious "101st fighting keyboarders fuckup" reported by the Times over the weekend; most cheering is that Bush considered it a pet project and even engaged in a bit of sympathetic interpretative prediction of the reaction of the sweet cherries that the 101st would pluck from his document treasure trove: "Bush extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud that people who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren't released sooner. "If I knew then what I know now," Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, "I would have been more supportive of the war." " Note that this anecdote is from last March's Weekly Standard! [Backstory; more: apparently Laurie Mylroie and some other crazies, worried about the evaporating WMD justification for the Iraq invastion, enlisted PowerLine's moronic "Big Trunk" Mirengoff and others in pressuring a pair of congressmen to pressure Bush to pressure Bush's third CIA boss, Negroponte, to release 2 million pages of captured Iraqi docs on line. Or something like that. The goal was for an "army of Davids" -- in InstaIgnorance's asinine phrase -- to open-source translate them out of Arabic to provide the retrospective propaganda that would induce the war critics to shut up. Because we know how the right wing blogosphere is so knowledgeable about other cultures and so public spirited. For months, the IAEA was warning the Cheney Admin to take the docs down since they tell you in detail in Arabic how to build a nuke, info that the IAEA suppressed from the public until last March. Needless to say, they paid no attn until the NYT broke the story over the weekend. The national security party at work. I've been rotflmao all weekend!]
• A very cool formula to predict the outcome of a given congressional race without polls.
• The Clinton folk wargamed an Iraq takeover in 1999 and predicted that even with 400K troops, the likely outcome would be chaos. Rummy's New Model Army tried to do it with a third of that. Result? Chaos! (Incidentally, I've never seen a decent explanation of just why Rummy digs the light military so much. Maybe his thought is just as straightforward as this: with the same manpower a light military can fuck up a lot more places than a heavy military.)
   

Run away! Run away!

Oh, couldn't it have been predicted.  In the face of the coming Democratic onslaught (more of a motivation, evidently, than the ongoing Iraqi slaughter) many big-name cheerleaders for the war on Iraq have suddently gone anti-war, anti-Bush, and more generally anti-Republican.  Three days ago, invasion evangelists Sullivan and Hitchens outdid each other in overt sneering at Bush, having special fun with Bush's claim that things were going "fantastic" in Iraq, with Hitchens suggesting that Bush is a hallucinating incompetent, and Sullivan saying that Bush's claim indicated that he was "unhinged" and had "lost his mind".  Hitchens, coming out strong with his lee to port, rejected his characterization as a "conservative", stating that he "has no [dinner?--ed.] party affiliation"; Sullivan advised voters to take Bush's failure into account and indeed, spoke of the election as "an intervention".

As of yesterday, we learn that neo-conmen Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and David Frum have decided that invading Iraq wasn't such a good idea, after all:

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.'

Not that Perle et al. disclaim their PNAC policies, of course.  The fault lies in the implementation, you see: they just didn't count on Bush's [sic] admin being so incompetent, nor on the viciousness of the resistance.  Neo-cons don't seem to realize that such extrinsic failures don't get them off the hook; even putting aside the ludicrous and murderous tenets of the PNAC agenda, neocons are specifically responsible for the disaster in Iraq in their vision of invasion's failing to incorporate the likely contingencies.

October surprise

Some data:

1. The 13 Sep Weekly Standard reported Bush's "heads up" that two "interesting indicators" undermine predictions that the Dems take congress: in Bush's view, "these elections will come down to two things: one, firm belief that in order to win the war on terror there must be a comprehensive strategy that recognizes this war is being fought on more than one front, and, two, the economy". On the latter, he noted that gas prices are coming down. About the "comprehensive strategy" for fighting the "war on terror" on "more than one front", Bush was less specific. Whatever he had up his sleeve, this interesting post makes a plausible case that it is more than a "bluff".
2. The loathesome Rove has also been promising his buds an "October Surprise" to help win the elections.
3. Now, apparently, the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower, "bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles", has been issued orders that would put them on schedule to launch bombs on Iran on 21 October:

 

Colonel Gardiner, who has taught military strategy at the National War College, says that the carrier deployment and a scheduled Persian Gulf arrival date of October 21 is "very important evidence" of war planning. He says, "I know that some naval forces have already received 'prepare to deploy orders' [PTDOs], which have set the date for being ready to go as October 1. Given that it would take about from October 2 to October 21 to get those forces to the Gulf region, that looks about like the date" of any possible military action against Iran. (A PTDO means that all crews should be at their stations, and ships and planes should be ready to go, by a certain date--in this case, reportedly, October 1.) Gardiner notes, "You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It's a very significant order, and it's not done as a training exercise." This point was also made in the Time article.  

 

   

So what is the White House planning?    

   

On Monday President Bush addressed the UN General Assembly at its opening session, and while studiously avoiding even physically meeting Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was also addressing the body, he offered a two-pronged message. Bush told the "people of Iran" that "we're working toward a diplomatic solution to this crisis" and that he looked forward "to the day when you can live in freedom." But he also warned that Iran's leaders were using the nation's resources "to fund terrorism and fuel extremism and pursue nuclear weapons." Given the President's assertion that the nation is fighting a "global war on terror" and that he is Commander in Chief of that "war," his prominent linking of the Iran regime with terror has to be seen as a deliberate effort to claim his right to carry the fight there. Bush has repeatedly insisted that the 2001 Congressional Authorization for the Use of Force that preceded the invasion of Afghanistan was also an authorization for an unending "war on terror."

 

It seems pretty clear what the "October surprise" is to be.

I wonder how this will play with the US public. Plausibly, there's pretty serious war fatigue, so this might just backfire. But I can't find any polling data about this.

Today GWB defeated ObL ...

... in killing Americans:

The announcement Sunday of four more U.S. military deaths in Iraq raises the death toll to 2,974 for U.S. military service members in Iraq and in what the Bush administration calls the war on terror.

The 9/11 attack killed 2,973 people, including Americans and foreign nationals but excluding the terrorists.

(Of course the Bush numbers only count the "war on terra".)