Mort Kondracke’s (of Fox News) new column in Roll Call is as Josh Marshall at TPM notes, “sickening.”

All over the world, scoundrels are ascendant, rising on a tide of American weakness. It makes for a perilous future.

President Bush bet his presidency — and America’s world leadership — on the war in Iraq. Tragically, it looks as though he bit off more than the American people were willing to chew.

The U.S. is failing in Iraq. Bush’s policy was repudiated by the American people in the last election. And now America’s enemies and rivals are pressing their advantage, including Iran, Syria, the Taliban, Sudan, Russia and Venezuela. We have yet to hear from al-Qaida.

- Mort Kondracke

As Marshall points out…

It really does seem as though the cardinals of DC punditry are constitutionally incapable of believing that George W. Bush has ever — in the real sense — gotten anything wrong or that they, the Washington establishment, has gotten anything wrong over the last six years.

I don’t like to use such words but I can only think to call the denial and buck-passing sickening. I can’t think of another word that captures the gut reaction.

This is all right out of the playbook of any despot or megalomaniac. Comparisons to Hitler are always dangerous rhetorical devices, but in the case of ‘The Decider’, they are becoming increasingly apt. Particularly in this instance, as it was while Hitler’s delusional fantasies came crumbling to the ground under the weight of Allied bombs, he proceded to blame the collapse of the Third Reich not on his overambitious and ideologically driven war plans, but on the weakness and inabilities of the German people. These being the same German people he had built an entire political career and short-lived empire upon by exclaiming to be the Ubermensch Aryan race, for whom defeat was all but impossible, under the leadership and command of the Nazis.

Another good TPM Post on the topic points out…

This is a central, perhaps the central issue in the whole shambling, tragic, dingbat debate. But we don’t return to it often enough. Saying the American people don’t have what it takes to finish the job, or come up with a new job or, really, figure out a way to help George W. Bush keep his job in Iraq amounts to blaming the public for the lies this White House told to get the country into the war. It’s really that simple.

Read The Complete Post

Here is a prescient prediction from historian Gwynne Dyer, first published in March of 2003. Of particular interest here, one which we have noted on episodes of UnCommon Sense TV, is the origins of the use of the term “Shock and Awe.” From Prescott to George Herbert to Dubya, those Bush boys sure have something for that Reich thing.

Historical analogies are often misleading, but have you noticed that Saddam Hussein, in recent TV broadcasts, looks more and more like Joseph Stalin? That’s how he’s positioning himself politically, too. Like Stalin during the Second World War, he is effectively telling Iraqis to forget about the socialist ideology, the purges and all the rest, and unite against the foreign invader. As in the old Soviet Union, a lot of the citizens seems to be listening.

Stalin’s finest hour was in 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union with the confident expectation of destroying it in a matter of weeks. He had this brilliant new military technique, blitzkrieg, which allowed relatively small numbers of German troops to spread ’shock and awe’ among the defenders (the phrase was first used in the Nazi magazine ‘Signal’) and achieve a rapid victory at low cost.

The blitzkrieg technique had beaten France in six weeks in 1940, and Hitler calculated that it ought to work even better against the Soviet Union because the vast majority of Soviet citizens hated Stalin and the Communist Party. Stalin’s secret police had murdered millions of people, and all the non-Russian citizens of the multi-national empire Soviet Union (essentially, the old Russian empire) hated Russian rule. So masses of Soviet troops would defect at the first opportunity, and the non-Russian half of the population would greet the Germans as liberators. Sound familiar?

In July of 1941 the German army launched its armored columns into the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, and within weeks its tanks were many hundreds of kilometres (miles) inside the country. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops were cut off and left behind as the tank spearheads raced for Moscow; points of resistance were bypassed in the interest of speed; ’shock and awe’ was the essence of the strategy.

But the cut-off Soviet troops did not surrender, the garrisons of the bypassed towns attacked the German supply lines, and the people did not strew roses at the feet of the invaders. Most Soviet citizens remained loyal to their country despite the monstrous character of its ruler. The German spearheads ultimately got quite close to Moscow, but after such delays that winter closed their offensive down and the Soviet capital was never captured. Instead the war turned into a nightmare battle of attrition that eventually destroyed the German army.

Read The Complete Report

Add America’s “Decider” George III to the list. Robert Fisk brings up some good points here, though the assumption that Bush’s public statements necessarily match his true thoughts and beliefs is unsupported by any empirical evidence that I’m aware of.

More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia - and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself - as he apparently did in Amman yesterday - that the United States will stay in Iraq “until the job is complete”? The “job” - Washington’s project to reshape the Middle East in its own and Israel’s image - is long dead, its very neoconservative originators disavowing their hopeless political aims and blaming Bush, along with the Iraqis of course, for their disaster.

History’s “deniers” are many - and all subject to the same folly: faced with overwhelming evidence of catastrophe, they take refuge in fantasy, dismissing evidence of collapse as a symptom of some short-term setback, clinging to the idea that as long as their generals promise victory - or because they have themselves so often promised victory - that fate will be kind. George W Bush - or Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara for that matter - need not feel alone. The Middle East has produced these fantasists by the bucketful over past decades.

Stay the course. That’s what they said at Stalingrad, isn’t it?

Read the complete article in The Independent

This is an interesting little animated piece detailing the changing map of empires coming and going throughout history. Puts things in some historical perspective (something many citizens of the United States of Amnesia do not have a lot of, I’m afraid to say).

View The Map

Wow. Hey, maybe it was the ‘terrorists’ who stole the Diebold source code missing from Maryland in order to hack our elections.

Vice President Dick Cheney said on Monday insurgents had stepped up attacks in Iraq to try to sway next week’s U.S. elections and they were constantly surfing the Web to keep tabs on American public opinion.

“Whether it’s al Qaeda or the other elements that are active in Iraq, they are betting on the proposition they can break the will of the American people,” Cheney told Fox News. “…They’re very sensitive to the fact that we’ve got an election scheduled.”

Cheney, a driving force in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, spoke eight days before congressional elections with polls showing Bush’s Republican party at risk of losing control of Congress to the Democrats.

Voter disaffection over Iraq, where the U.S. military death toll for October has reached 100, is seen as a critical factor that could hurt Republican chances in the Nov. 7 ballot.

Cheney said America’s enemies in Iraq possessed the Internet savvy to monitor U.S. developments, helping them to time attacks aimed in part at influencing the elections. But he cited no evidence to back the theory.

Read The Full Article Here

There is no longer any doubt or mistake about it. These warmongers are criminally negligent fools who should not just be removed from office, but held legally liable for their crimes.

Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan Donald Rumsfeld told his team to start planning for war in Iraq, but not to bother planning for a long stay, a high-ranking military official said in an interview.

“The secretary of defense continued to push on us … that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”

Scheid said the planners continued to try “to write what was called Phase 4,” or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn’t stay, “at least we have to plan for it,” Scheid said.

“I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that,” Scheid said. “We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

Read The Complete Report

It’s also worth recalling the standards for justice and the punishments meted out in Nuremburg (Article 6 is of particular interest here, I would think). Ah yes, those were the good old days, back when America was prosecuting war criminals instead of promoting them.

This has been talk in the press about a split up of Iraq amongst ethnic lines as a possible outcome since before the invasion. Now the discussion goes towards the fact that the risk that needs mitigation is of a Shia breakaway attempting to become part of Iran. The Administration’s primary plan has always been to rule Iraq’s oilfields as a unitary puppet-state; three states just makes matters more complicated and easier to lose control of. In addition, the Shia faction has always been most likely to become a client of Iran if left to its own devices; yoking it to the Sunnis and the Kurds helps to prevent this. Remember that Khomeini spent most of his exile from the Shah in the holy city of Qum in Iraq; there is a long-standing relationship between the areas going back to Roman times, when the Euphrates marked the boundary between Rome and Sassanid Persia. However, the Shias own the all-important port at Basra. Without Basra, oil cannot be easily exported to the West; pipelines and roads north most efficiently serve the Russians, not Americans or “international” oil companies. Therefore, the Americans must control Basra and either one of the two main oil regions, southern or northern/Kurdish. Unfortunately, the Shia hold Basra and the south, and the Americans’ best allies (although one questions their common sense) are the Kurds in the north. Ultimately, they are all going to realize that their best interests are served by selling their own oil to the SCO, either directly to Russia by the Kurds, or indirectly by allowing Iran to act as their agent in the case of the Shia.

Whether America catches on or not, the Shanghai Cooperative Organization has essentially re-established the Cold War geostrategic balance with two major differences: Iran is now firmly in the other camp; and we have reached the slow downside of the Peak Oil phenomenon — and most importantly, the sharp downside of U.S. and British internal supplies. Alaska, Texas, and the North Sea are all in declining production, and the major new Gulf find is actually quite small and extremely difficult to get to by historical standards, as well as smack-dab in the middle of hurricane territory. I am becoming convinced that World War III has indeed begun — an extended network of strategic alliances based on intent to dispute possession of key territories at all costs. And Americans fondly rely on their past history of expansion to believe that they can’t be defeated … a foolish idea, since no empire is eternal, and they all believe they’re unbeatable until they get dusted.

Allowing the breakdown is now discussed regularly as the only “realistic” solution politically, however, it won’t give the Bushies what they want — a captive oil-producing territory. That’s probably why they’re starting to threaten to move on Iran as well. Of course, if they do, they will destroy *our* country pretty much as thoroughly as they will Iran. But hey, the economy is going to head for its permanent slide beginning next year, anyway. There’s no coming out of this tailspin; the point of no return is past. The Iraq war will finish us whether or not we commit lunacy in Iran.

P.S.: Don’t worry too hard. “If the end of the world is nigh, it is time to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes to Cincinnati twenty years late.” - Mark Twain

- Posted by Cynndara Morgan for USTV Media

Gabriel Kolko delivers this sober analysis on the limits of traditional military power, and the ever-increasing dangers we face with the proliferation of more readily available nuclear weaponry.

Technology is now moving far faster than the diplomatic and political resources or will to control its inevitable consequences—not to mention traditional strategic theories.  Hizbollah has far better and more lethal rockets than it had a few years ago, and the U. S. Army has just released a report that light water reactors–which 25 nations, from Armenia to Slovenia as well as Spain, already have and are not covered at all by existing arms control treaties—can be used to obtain weapons-grade plutonium easily and cheaply. 

Within a few years, many more countries than the present ten or so will have nuclear bombs and far more destructive and accurate rockets and missiles, not to mention the means to deliver them accurately. Weapons-poor fighters will have far more sophisticated tactics as well as far more lethal equipment, which makes the heavily equipped and armed nations lose the advantages (as in Vietnam and Iraq) of their overwhelming firepower. The battle between a few thousand Hizbullah fighters and a massive, ultra-modern Israeli army proves this.  Among many things, the war in Lebanon is a window of the future, and either the Israelis cease their policy of bluster and intimidation, and finally accept the political prerequisites of peace with the Arab world, or they too will eventually be wrecked by cheaper nuclear weapons.

Read The Full Article

This seems some kind of surreal nightmare from an apocalyptic comic book story, but alas, it is true. The war criminals currently grasping the levers of power in the American government are in the throes of finalizing plans to attack Iran and plunge the world into complete turmoil (birth pangs of a new Mideast and all, you know. Dawning of a New World Order). And these people call themselves ‘Christians’. So much for ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers’ I guess. But then, that is sooo Pre-9/11 mindset. Don’t you know, 9/11 everything changed. Everything. Even our values and principles. Or so say the neo-con artist ‘christians,’ the ultimate apocalyptic post-modernists.

As reports circulate of a sharp debate within the White House over possible US military action against Iran and its nuclear enrichment facilities, The Nation has learned that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have issued orders for a major “strike group” of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran’s western coast. This information follows a report in the current issue of Time magazine, both online and in print, that a group of ships capable of mining harbors has received orders to be ready to sail for the Persian Gulf by October 1.

The ironies in this report abound. A military spokesman named “Kafka” and the ship leading the attack armada is the Eisenhower, named after the President and war hero general who warned us that the greatest danger to our republic lay within from the monied interests of the military-industrial-congressional complex. It is truly tragic that his name is being used as a moniker for a weapon to initiate the kind of process he warned us most emphatically against.

Read the full report, “War Signals” by Dave Lindorff in The Nation

Read here former Senator Gary Hart’s take on the impending attack against Iran and its use as an “October Surprise” to influence the coming Congressional elections

Sign the Don’t-Attack-Iran Petition

Robert Parry distills the history of the Bush family’s involvement with Iran, the hostages, Iran-Contra arms sales, and the importance of these facts in the impending Bushevik march towards war.

This investigative report is ESSENTIAL reading for every American, and before it becomes too late. It is also provides good insight into the tangled relationship between the U.S. and Israel.

Having gone through the diplomatic motions with Iran, George W. Bush is shifting toward a military option that carries severe risks for American soldiers in Iraq as well as for long-term US interests around the world. Yet, despite this looming crisis, the Bush Family continues to withhold key historical facts about US-Iranian relations.

Those historical facts – relating to Republican contacts with Iran’s Islamic regime more than a quarter century ago – are relevant today because an underlying theme in Bush’s rationale for war is that direct negotiations with Iran are pointless. But Bush’s own father may know otherwise.

Read The Complete Consortium News Report

Global Research reports on Iran’s preparations for an impending American attack. This is getting beyond serious now. If we as Americans do not put an end to this criminal irresponsibility, we will be just as responsible as the German people were for their acquiescence to the war crimes perpetrated in their names.

A blistering editorial from the Hartford Advocate on the pressing need for regime change at home now, before its too late. It also brings to light the true nature of the potentially devastating power of nuclear weapons today.