That was then, this is now.

You know what they say, ‘9/11 Changed Everything.’

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The top story in the Guardian of the U.K, but not mentioned in US papers.

It serves to highlight yet one more aspect of the whole sordid, part Machiavelli,
part Rube Goldberg policy devices the neo-cons and Busheviks in Washington are employing. This, like all these kinds of ‘games’, are doomed to failure. Its truly sad, and so completely unnecessary, especially the incalculable costs to life and treasure that this is entailing for people everywhere.

The US military has embarked on a new and risky strategy in Iraq by arming Sunni insurgents in the hope that they will tackle the extremist al-Qaida in Iraq.

The US high command this month gave permission to its officers on the ground to negotiate arms deals with local leaders. Arms, ammunition, body armour and other equipment, as well as cash, pick-up trucks and fuel, have already been handed over in return for promises to turn on al-Qaida and not attack US troops.

The US military in Baghdad is trying to portray the move as arming disenchanted Sunnis who are rising up in their neighbourhoods against their former allies, al-Qaida and its foreign fighters. But the reality on the ground is more complex, with little sign that the US will be able to control the weapons once they are handed over. The danger is that the insurgents could use these weapons against American troops or in the civil conflict against Shia Muslims. Similar efforts by the US in other wars have backfired, the most spectacular being the arming of guerrillas against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

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Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich publicly ruminates in an article in The Washington Post over the death of his son in Iraq, and pinpoints the true nature of this war’s cost, the cynicism behind its supporters and the cause for its continuation.

Bacevich gets to the point here…

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove - namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life: I’ve been handed the check. It’s roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation’s call to “global leadership.” It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It’s the way our system works.

Bingo.

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In case you start feeling ‘discouraged’ by the killings at Virginia Tech, don’t fret. Just keep in mind that many parts of America are ’stable’ now.

“[M]any parts of Iraq are stable now. But, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day - this discourages everybody.”

- Laura Bush, February 26, 2007

Larry Johnson brings this issue into succinct perspective here, in regards to America’s reaction to the horrible killings at Virginia Tech, and our perceptions of the situation in Iraq…

The next time you hear Dick Cheney or George Bush blame the public attitude regarding Iraq on the media’s failure to report “good news”, examine carefully our reaction to the shooting at Viginia Tech.  Look at our collective shock.  Our horrified reaction. The public sorrow.  Yet, in truth, this is an exceptional, unusual day in America. It is not our common experience.  But we cannot say the same about Iraq.

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Over the cliff with George and Dick? Tom Engelhardt provides some disturbing analysis of the storm being brewed up by our neo-con artists in regards to ‘regime change’ in Iran.

After all, to anyone not delusional - which leaves out you-know-who and his vice president - a massive air assault on Iran, surely involving bunker-busting missiles with staggering explosive power, would seem to be an act of madness. The decision to attack Iran would be the equivalent of setting off an advanced IED directly under the main highway of what’s left of global order.

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The possibility of an attack on Iran has been a long time on the horizon. You’d have to start back at that moment before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when, as Newsweek reminded us, one quip of the bolder neocons was: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” You’d have to go back to January 2005, when reporter Seymour Hersh, in a New Yorker piece, “The Coming Wars,” wrote, “In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran,” and added that, in close cooperation with the Israelis, “the Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer.”

You’d have to go back to March 2005, when ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern pointed out at Tomdispatch.com that “Bush administration policy toward the Middle East is being run by men… who were routinely referred to in high circles in Washington during the 1980s as ‘the crazies’” and who, he warned, might well head for Iran next.

You’d have to go back to August 2005 when, in the American Conservative magazine , former CIA official Philip Giraldi warned: “In Washington it is hardly a secret that the same people in and around the administration who brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran” — possibly involving an “unprovoked nuclear attack” on that country. A contingency plan was, he claimed, being drawn up in the Pentagon, “acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.”

The litany goes on and on. Read more Here

There was an article recently by Nick Cohen in The Observer recently (no longer online) which was fairly interesting to me. Personally, I still know wrong from right in my daily personal life, but in world affairs I’m a bit lost. I know that the bungled Iraq War is a disaster for American energy security, but that particular issue is something for neocons to be mad about, not “moral” people. The disastrous situation in Iraq now actually gives me an easy out, a way to still be against Bush’s war and say I was rightly against it all along. But I was originally against it because I thought Bush was planning to acquire Iraq as the “51st state”, which it turns out he wasn’t. The Coalition Provisional Authority DID cede power to an elected Iraqi government. So was removing Saddam a morally wrong idea, or merely a strategic blunder? What was the moral thing to do?

The author, a born and bred leftist, says that the European Left was against the war just because they hate America and that they have lost their moral compass. It’s a tad long-winded, but here’s the meat of it:

In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

A part of the answer is that it isn’t at all clear what it means to be on the left at the moment. I doubt if anyone can tell you what a society significantly more left wing than ours would look like and how its economy and government would work (let alone whether a majority of their fellow citizens would want to live there). Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone. Disgraced by the communists’ atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government. Even the modest and humane social democratic systems of Europe are under strain and look dreadfully vulnerable.

It is not novel to say that socialism is dead. My argument is that its failure has brought a dark liberation to people who consider themselves to be on the liberal left. It has freed them to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically, America. I hate to repeat the overused quote that ‘when a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything’, but there is no escaping it. Because it is very hard to imagine a radical left wing alternative, or even mildly radical alternative, intellectuals in particular are ready to excuse the movements of the far right as long as they are anti-Western.

On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini’s old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery. In Greece, where the previous generation had overthrown a military junta, the police had to fire tear gas at leftists who were so angry at the prospect of a fascist regime being overthrown that they armed themselves with petrol bombs.

A few recognised that they were making a hideous choice. The South American playwright Ariel Dorfman, who had experienced state terror in General Pinochet’s Chile, published a letter to an ‘unknown Iraqi’ and asked, ‘What right does anyone have to deny you and your fellow Iraqis that liberation from tyranny? What right do we have to oppose the war the United States is preparing to wage on your country, if it could indeed result in the ousting of Saddam Hussein?’

His reply summed up the fears of tens of millions of people. War would destabilise the Middle East and recruit more fanatics to terrorist groups. It would lead to more despots ‘pre-emptively arming themselves with all manner of apocalyptic weapons and, perhaps, to ‘Armageddon’. Dorfman also worried about the casualties - which, I guess, were far higher than he imagined - and convinced himself that the right course was to demand that Bush and Blair pull back. Nevertheless, he retained the breadth of mind and generosity of spirit to sign off with ‘heaven help me, I am saying that I care more about the future of this sad world than about the future of your unprotected children’.

- Posted by JK

Something which came our way from Steve Hammons of the Populist Party of America…

What can we learn about the desires for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq on the part of some government officials, Washington think tank intellectuals, journalists, war profiteers and average Americans?

Most of what has been discussed and written about on these topics has centered on the thinking, theories and intelligence information put forth by these individuals and groups.

But what about the deeper psychological and moral aspects of people who have enthusiastically sent thousands of American troops to violent deaths and severe, permanent injuries?

What about the inner nature of people who so desired this war which has also resulted in the deaths of and injuries to tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including women and children?

We probably don’t need to be rocket scientists or licensed psychiatrists and psychologists to try to look at some of the reasons why these officials, journalists and everyday people wanted war and were so eager to sacrifice our fellow Americans and loved ones as well as innocent Iraqis.

Maybe we just need to do some good, old-fashioned soul-searching. The parents, spouses, children and friends of our troops who have been killed and injured have certainly done this already. And more are required to do it with each passing day.

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When will the American Media and Government hold equally accountable the other people feeding insurgents in the Iraq war? The Saudi Arabian Government is providing financial, military and personnel aid to the Sunni insurgents also. We never hear President Bush or the media demanding they Saudi back off its support to the Sunni insurgents as he does his rhetoric against the Iranians. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers that hit us on September 11, 2001 were from Saudi and so was Bin Laden! These people are friends of the Bush family. But they are still killing American Soldiers.

- Posted by Michael Boetjer, Captain U.S. Army (Ret.), Double Blue Star Father, Fort Wayne, Indiana

An interesting article from the U.K. Telegraph about the economic situation in Iran. I don’t get the impression that the Iranians are all hot to trot about pushing the nation into a war with “The Great Satan?” It certainly doesn’t sound like the Iranian president is standing up against the US from a position of real political power.

First, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alienated the rest of the world with his religious extremism, nuclear ambitions and global grandstanding. Now, due to domestic failures and economic incompetence, he is doing the same to ordinary Iranians

Sound like somebody else we know? Looks like we have the populace of two nations being led to the brink of war by their clueless, unpopular, theological zealot leaders.

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Steve Hammons elaborates on this and expanded points in his essay “Will Bush, Cheney Attack Iran? When and Why?.” This is a good historical and political analysis concerning the Iranian regime and the growing potential for catastrophic showdown between it and the U.S.

In recent US elections, the American people sent a strong message to the Bush administration and their supporters in Congress: the Iraq War and the direction the Bush administration has led the country is of great concern.

Americans saw that the killing and destruction in Iraq are beginning to seem pointless. The damage to our military and the financial costs to our nation do not seem worthwhile. The reasons for and intelligence prior to the Iraq invasion may have been fraudulent - consciously and purposely fraudulent.

Americans voted for moderate and progressive candidates to try to put a stop to this and lead the US in a better direction.

In recent elections in Iran, candidates for office who were allied with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were soundly defeated.

The Iranian people seemed to be saying that they did not approve of the bellicose and threatening statements and style of Ahmadinejad. The direction he is taking their country apparently has created great concern among Iranians.

The Iranian people voted for relatively progressive and moderate candidates to try to put a stop to this and lead Iran in a better direction.

Still, the political leaders of both the US and Iran seem to continue this escalating confrontation, placing the safety and welfare of their people and their nations, as well as the international community, at grave risk.

In a related vein, here is Robert Dreyfuss’ essay “Bush’s Trash Talk About Iran”

Since President Bush’s State of the Union address last Tuesday, the White House has manufactured a crisis that pits the United States against Iran. In what looks like the military and diplomatic equivalent of a full court press, Washington has unleashed a barrage of threats, maneuvers and limited military actions that seem calculated to set the United States on a collision course with Iran in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

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Were this not so deadly serious, it would be farcical. One goal, apparently, of U.S. threats and bluster against Iran in Iraq is an attempt to break ties between Iran and, say, SCIRI - even though SCIRI is organically tied to Tehran and even though it was created in 1982 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. Though SCIRI is happy to receive U.S. support as well (its turbaned leader recently visited the Oval Office), there is no question that the Shiite leaders in Iraq know that one day the United States will leave, while Iran, Iraq’s giant neighbor to the east, will always be there. Those realities seem not to have registered with Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, who told The Washington Post that even though SCIRI and Iran had close ties in the 1980s, “Now it’s a different situation, so there is a need for adaptation of what’s appropriate in terms of a relationship.” Perhaps, by invading the compound of SCIRI’s leader and seizing several officers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard there last month, Khalilzad thought he was sending the “appropriate” message that SCIRI needs to break its ties to Iran. Not likely.

Read the complete article Here

Surprise, surprise!

The Iraq Study Group may not have a solution for how to end the war, but it does have a way for its corporate friends to make money.

Welcome to the true meaning of the occupation of Iraq. Ever wonder why Dick Cheney and friends have worked so hard to keep those secret White House energy policy meetings from early 2001 a secret?

President Bush hired an employee from the U.S. consultancy firm Bearing Point Inc. over a year ago to advise the Iraq Oil Ministry on the drafting and passage of a new national oil law. As previously drafted, the law opens Iraq’s nationalized oil sector to private foreign corporate investment, but stops short of full privatization. The ISG report, however, goes further, stating that “the United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise.” In addition, the current Constitution of Iraq is ambiguous as to whether control over Iraq’s oil should be shared among its regional provinces or held under the central government. The report specifically recommends the latter: “Oil revenues should accrue to the central government and be shared on the basis of population.” If these proposals are followed, Iraq’s national oil industry will be privatized and opened to foreign firms, and in control of all of Iraq’s oil wealth.

The proposals should come as little surprise given that two authors of the report, James A. Baker III and Lawrence Eagleburger, have each spent much of their political and corporate careers in pursuit of greater access to Iraq’s oil and wealth.

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Here’s a good follow up piece by Tom Engelhardt on Bush family consigliere Baker and cohorts who worked to ensure that while the ISG would be filled with notable movers and shakers from numerous previous administrations, no one on it, nor any expert ‘team’ advising it, would represent the one point of view that a majority of Americans have by now come to support - actual withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq on a set timeline.” We can’t do that, you silly prole. There’s still gold in them their hills! Black gold. Texas Tea.

Read his report “Fixing The War”

Oh yeah, and in case anyone hasn’t gotten the memo yet, “War Is A Racket”