The American press doesn’t seem to have the guts and/or brains to take the initiative to point out the obvious. At least our allies the British don’t have the same reluctance to take on the truth of the matter. But it is not surprising to get such refreshingly concise analysis as this considering this is the paper that George Orwell used to work for.

We can only see off the serious threat we face if we separate real Muslim grievances from al-Qaida’s homicidal mania

George Bush sometimes sounds more like the Mahdi, preaching jihad against infidels, than the leader of a western democracy. In his regular radio address to the American people on Saturday he linked the British alleged aircraft plotters with Hizbullah in Lebanon, and these in turn with the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

All, said the president of the world’s most powerful nation, share a “totalitarian ideology”, and a desire to “establish a safe haven from which to attack free nations”. Bush’s remarks put me in mind of a proverb attributed to Ali ibn Abu Talib: “He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.”

In the United States a disturbingly large minority of people - polls suggest around 40% - remain willing to accept Bush’s assertions that Americans and their allies, which chiefly means the British, are faced with a single global conspiracy by Islamic fundamentalists to destroy our societies.

In less credulous Britain one could nowadays fit into an old-fashioned telephone box those who believe anything Bush or Tony Blair says about foreign policy. Many of us are consumed with frustration. We know that we face a real threat from Muslim fundamentalists, and that we are unlikely to begin to defeat this until we see it for what it is: something infinitely more complex, diffuse and nuanced than the US president wishes to suppose.

Read The Complete Article

A good expose on the true underpinnings of what this God forsaken war in Lebanon is about and who was behind making it happen (many being the same cast of characters we all unfortunately quite familiar with here). Israel seemed to be taken in by the allure of enacting their own “shock and awe” campaign, only to have to rush in troops when it worked as smashingly well as the American version in Iraq only a handful of years earlier.

Amid the political and diplomatic fallout from Israel’s faltering invasion of Lebanon, some Israeli officials are privately blaming President George W. Bush for egging Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into the ill-conceived military adventure against the Hezbollah militia in south Lebanon.

Bush conveyed his strong personal support for the military offensive during a White House meeting with Olmert on May 23, according to sources familiar with the thinking of senior Israeli leaders.

Olmert, who like Bush lacks direct wartime experience, agreed that a dose of military force against Hezbollah might damage the guerrilla group’s influence in Lebanon and intimidate its allies, Iran and Syria, countries that Bush has identified as the chief obstacles to U.S. interests in the Middle East.

As part of Bush’s determination to create a “new Middle East” – one that is more amenable to U.S. policies and desires – Bush even urged Israel to attack Syria, but the Olmert government refused to go that far, according to Israeli sources.

One source said some Israeli officials thought Bush’s attack-Syria idea was “nuts” since much of the world would have seen the bombing campaign as overt aggression.

Read The Full Article Here

The President is required to immediately go back to Congress for Authorization to Keep Troops in Iraq!

The Current military situation in Iraq does not reflect the originally stated Immediate National Threat Presented to Congress for the authorization of Use of Force. The subsequent use of American armed forces and financial expenditures to support such forces under these new conditions have not been authorized by Congress or the American People.

The Administration must realize that it does not have the legal authority to promote its failed war policy outside its original stated national threat mandate. United States Military force has not been authorized to support one side or the other of the religious sectarian violence within Iraq, no more than it would be authorized to support a particular religious group within America. There is a separation of Church and State in America and that holds true in democracies we are fostering around the world. American military Men and Women have not been sent to Iraq no are we authorized by any law, to intercede militarily to impose or support a type of religious belief either Sunni or Shiite within the country of Iraq.

Tax dollar expenditures in the billions and American lives of over 2,500 have currently been spent to eliminate the immediate threat Iraq posed to America and this has been done. Any further military actions or monetary expenditures against Iraq outside the original congressional mandate are illegal under American Law and International Law and would open Americans up to Civil and Criminal liabilities.

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

Other People’s Blood
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

June 8th, 2006

For the smug, comfortable, well-off Americans, it doesn’t seem to matter how long the war in Iraq goes on - as long as the agony is endured by others. If the network coverage gets too grim, viewers can always switch to the E! channel (one hand on the remote, the other burrowing into a bag of chips) to follow the hilarious antics of Paris, Britney, Brangelina et al.

The war is depressing and denial is the antidote. Why should ordinary citizens (good people, religious people, patriots) consider their role in - and responsibility for - the thunderous, unending carnage? Enough with this introspection. Let’s go to the ballpark, get drunk and boo Barry Bonds. The nation is in deep denial about Iraq. For years the president and his supporting cast of arrogant, bullying characters have tried to put the best face on this war. They had no idea what they were doing when they ordered the invasion of Iraq, and they still don’t. Many of the troops who were assured that the Iraqis would welcome them with open arms are now dead. And there’s still no plan.

Paul Wolfowitz, who fashioned the phony intellectual underpinnings of this catastrophe, told us that Iraqi oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. He was as wrong about that as the president was about the weapons of mass destruction. (And as wrong as Dick Cheney was last June when he said the insurgency was in its last throes.)

Here are the facts: The war so recklessly launched by the amateurs in the Bush White House has already taken scores of thousands of lives, and will ultimately cost the United States $1 trillion to $2 trillion.

No one has been held accountable for this. While Mr. Bush’s approval ratings are low, the public has been largely indifferent to the profound suffering in Iraq. This is primarily for two reasons: Because most Americans have no immediate personal stake in the war, and because the administration and the news media keep the worst of the suffering at a safe distance from the U.S. population.

The killing of American troops is usually kissed off with a paragraph or two in the major papers, and a sentence or two, at best, on national newscasts. (Imagine if someone in your office, sitting at a desk across from you, were suddenly blown to bits, splattering you with his or her blood. You wouldn’t get over it for the rest of your life. This is what happens daily in Iraq.)

The many thousands of Iraqis who are killed - including babies and children who are shot to death, blown up, or incinerated - remain completely unknown to the American public. So not only is there very little empathy for the suffering of Iraqis, there is virtually no sense among ordinary Americans of a shared responsibility for that suffering.

Despite the frequently expressed fantasies expressed by President Bush and some of the leading politicians of both parties, the idea of a U.S. victory in Iraq is an illusion. The nightmarish violence is rising, not receding. Iraq is not being pacified. A suicide bomber blew himself up in a bustling market in Basra over the weekend, killing 27 and wounding scores. On Sunday, 20 people were stopped and pulled from their vehicles on a highway near Baquba and shot to death.

John Burns, writing in yesterday’s New York Times, told us: “The death toll in one of the most grisly recent attacks, in the village of Hadid, near the Diyala provincial capital of Baquba, rose to 17 on Tuesday when the police delivered nine severed heads to the Baquba morgue in the fruit boxes in which they were found in the village.”

Eight other heads had previously been found.

Instead of beginning to pull our troops out of Iraq, we are sending more in. The permanent Iraqi government, which was supposed to be the answer to everybody’s prayers, is a study in haplessness. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda’s man in Iraq, remains at large. (As does Osama bin Laden, somewhere in Pakistan.)

As was the case with Vietnam, the war in Iraq is a fool’s errand. There is no clear mission for American troops in Iraq. No one can really say what the dead have died for. And yet the dying continues.

When it all finally comes to an end (according to President Bush, on somebody else’s watch) we’ll look around at the hideous costs in human treasure and cold hard cash and ask ourselves: What in the world were we thinking?

Tom Engelhardt and Michael Schwartz lay out this expose on how the media is simply flat out failing in its coverage on Iraq.

Among those quiet, behind-the-scenes stories of daily life that could be found on the political Web but rarely in the mainstream media were the draconian privatization plans the Bush administration imposed on Iraq after Baghdad fell. And yet, if you don’t understand what these plans did to the daily economic lives of most Iraqis, as our regular news just about never does, there is simply no way fully to grasp the dismal failure of the Bush administration in that country.

Read the complete article on LewRockwell.com

In a related story, Paul Reickhoff of the IAVA talks about the first war film to be shot by the troops themselves.

The War Tapes is a must see for every American–including Laura Ingraham and anyone else who thinks they have Iraq figured out.

This is the only film that provides an opportunity for people to really see what life is like in Iraq for our troops. The entire film was shot by the soldiers themselves. For a full year, they took the cameras with them everywhere. This is no Michael Moore film. In March 2004, as the insurgency grew, members of a New Hampshire National Guard unit arrived in Iraq–with video cameras. In The War Tapes, soldiers tell their own stories, as they lived them. The footage is nothing short of amazing.

Read more on this on Paul Reickhoff’s blog at The Huffington Post.

Scott Ritter makes some salient points once again…

It is high time for the anti-war movement to take a collective look in the mirror, and be honest about what they see. A poorly organized, chaotic, and indeed often anarchic conglomeration of egos, pet projects and idealism that barely constitutes a “movement,” let alone a winning cause. I have yet to observe an anti-war demonstration that has a focus on anti-war. It often seemed that every left-wing cause took advantage of the event to promote its own particular agenda, so that “No War in Iraq” shared the stage with the environment, ecology, animal rights, pro-choice, and numerous other causes which not only diluted the anti-war message which was supposed to be sent, but also guaranteed that the demonstration itself would be seen as something hijacked by the left, inclusive of only progressive ideologues, and exclusive of the vast majority of moderate (and even conservative) Americans who might have wanted to share the stage with their fellow Americans from the left when it comes to opposing war with Iraq (or even Iran), but do not want to be associated with any other theme…

His hardest hitting point is also one of the more uncomfortably true ones.

Americans aren’t against the war in Iraq because it is wrong; they are against it because we are losing.

Read His Full Post on Alternet Here

As if we need anything else to underline the total mismanagement of the war in Iraq. The Defense department is currently training up 10,000 Navy personnel through a crash course in urban warfare in order to rotate them into Jobs in Iraq that are currently being performed by the Overstretched Army personnel. From not enough troops, to not enough armor for individuals or vehicles, disbanding the defeated Iraqi Army, torture prisons, financial mismanagement, and sweet heart deals to Halliburton and the manipulation of intelligence or out right lies to start the war in the first place, this administration has bungled the entire war against Terror. The Administration never admits they are wrong or holds accountable those who have made these mistakes (Heck of a Job Rummy‚ “I am the decider here”)! Now the latest great Idea is to send Sailors to the middle of the desert to prop up a failed policy in Iraq and cover up the ill advised cuts and policy set forth by the Defense Department. It defies rational that the Secretary of the Defense Department and current administration can even stay in power while we the American People must pay them people for the job they are doing! The elected officials that supported them all need to be voted out of office even if they are running uncontested! There should be an immediate criminal investigation into the Iraq war, that those who propagated this myth upon the American People should be held criminally accountable!

- Posted by Michael C. Boetjer for USTV Media
Former, Captain U.S. Army
Double Blue Star Father
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Michaelboetjer@aol.com

Good post from Josh Marshall on the New Yorker article by former ambassador Peter Galbraith on the absolute disaster that the Bush administration’s Iraq policy (or lack of it).

“In his State of the Union address, President Bush told his Iraq critics, ‘Hindsight is not wisdom and second-guessing is not a strategy.’ His comments are understandable. Much of the Iraq fiasco can be directly attributed to Bush’s shortcomings as a leader. Having decided to invade Iraq, he failed to make sure there was adequate planning for the postwar period. He never settled bitter policy disputes among his principal aides over how postwar Iraq would be governed; and he allowed competing elements of his administration to pursue diametrically opposed policies at nearly the same time. He used jobs in the Coalition Provisional Authority to reward political loyalists who lacked professional competence, regional expertise, language skills, and, in some cases, common sense. Most serious of all, he conducted his Iraq policy with an arrogance not matched by political will or military power.”

Highly recommended. Read the insightful and quite appropriately titled New Yorker article “The Mess” by Peter Galbraith, a man who knows something about dealing with places that have been FUBAR (Croatia in the 90s, East Timor, etc…)

A near year to come of withdrawal buzz, speculation, and even a media blitz of withdrawal announcements, the question is: How can anybody tell if the Bush administration is actually withdrawing from Iraq or not? Tom Engelhardt suggests keeping your eyes directed at our “super-bases.” There are at least four such “super-bases” in Iraq, none of which have anything to do with “withdrawal” from that country. These bases practically scream “permanency.”

Read this eye-opening report here…
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=59774

And Bush keeps on asking for more and more cash from Americans to continue to develop these outposts. They say when you want to get to the bottom of an investigation, ‘follow the money’. Well, this report from the Los Angeles Times provides more detail on where that money is going.

Reinforcements to Vietnam? Oops, I Mean Iraq
By Ray McGovern

“It would take 500,000 men to do it and even then it could not be done.” So spoke General Jacques Leclerc, the French World War II hero sent to Vietnam in 1946 to estimate how many troops would be required to take back that country. Leclerc’s estimate would still be valid two decades later when over 500,000 US troops were in Vietnam, as Barbara Tuchman notes in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

Fast forward to General Eric Shinseki’s testimony to Congress on February 25, 2003 just three weeks before the invasion of Iraq. When asked how many troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq, Shinseki said “several hundred thousand.” Three days later Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz dismissed Shinseki’s estimate as “far off the mark,” but it is now clear that they had no idea what the occupation of Iraq would require.

“There are no insurgents in Fallujah,” says Mohammed Latif, once a senior intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein’s regime and now commander of the Iraqi brigade controlling the city. Washington has been blaming the conflict in Fallujah partly on “insurgents.” Resistance to the occupation is a far more accurate description, and there is plenty of that in Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq.

Words make a big difference. In Vietnam we labeled the Vietnamese Communists “terrorists” and “insurgents.” This obscured for far too long the reality that they comprised a deeply nationalist movement determined to resist any and all invaders - however powerful. In this kind of war kill ratios have little meaning. Killed: 58,000 US troops; 2 to 3 million Vietnamese.

Read Ray McGovern’s Full Essay Here