Iraq War Blogswarm: Three Trillion Lies And Still Going Strong

Today, as we mark that dark mid-March day in 2003 when President Bush, complete with a raised fist pumping air like he was about to go into the final playoffs to give "'em one more for the Gipper..." gesture and dispatched the first soldiers off to war, the cold, harsh light of day makes it a heluva lot easier to see all the lies.

After all, it was not just one single lie that Bush used to get us into Iraq but a multitude of them, including:

weapons of mass destruction everywhere>

doctored intelligence reports that led to the outing of CIA covert operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, because Bushies did not like that Wilson's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, would not pretend Niger "yellow cake" uranium story was true

Saddam was about to launch a campaign to make kittens and puppies in perfect little American suburbia all sick

the war would take a few days to a few weeks, completely pay for itself, and there is "absolutely no way" to lose it

the entire world sees the war as right which is why we had to pay them and bully them into joining the "coalition of the willing"

actions in Iraq certainly won't distract us from catching Osama bin Laden, regroup al Qaeda, or exhaust our resources for the global war on terror

Need I list more?

A Blogswarm To End All Swarms? Dream On!

However, the March 19th blogswarm commencing now is not to be taken lightly. Indeed, this war has never been a lightweight when it comes to brutality, sheer horror, the depths of human depravity, the ridiculously small amount of lying it took for Bush to get America to buy into a war that was not, nor was it ever, making torture sound like the most patriotic thing an American can do, anything to do with September 11th or al Qaeda, etc.

The race in November is, at its core, part of a much more fundamental competition against those who turn fascism into proud patriotism and bankrupted our nation at the same time securing record profit for banks who brought about the foreclosure crisis and energy companies demanding tax payers build them free refineries while we say thanks! for those $4/gallon at the umps.

We need a leader who can take us OUT of Iraq ASAP and not in the 100 years or so Republican presidential candidate John McCain recently proudly proclaimed it may take.

The McCain, Republican Way: Less Jobs, More War

Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films brings us its latest hard-hitting film, this one driving it home about Iraq, McCain, the war machine and on, ad infinitum.

BTW, Brave New Films is also looking for assistance in helping fund their effort. I know money is tough, but for those with the wallet and the heart, check the links at the film.

If It's An Election Year, Then It MUST Be Time For More Terror Alerts

Gee, where have we heard THIS before?

Is it any surprise we're hearing all this talk now of big, bad terror attacks planned soon - right now for Europe (Spain, etc.), but I'm sure we'll see this extended to us - when we have a presidential election come November? After all, they need to build up the case for supported "all war, all the time" guaranteed us by whatever GOP candidate rides into the Oval Office on the numbers from rigged electronic voting machines.

Perhaps you can spend your "huge" tax rebate check buying bullets for the Pentagon(again).

Iran: The Bushies' Deadliest Game Ever

I talk with many progressive, moderate and increasingly, well right of center Republicans who these days not just readily admit but rant and rave themselves that the Bush Administration's logic on almost everything it does is so very bad as to be criminal (meaning: OK, we gave him the benefit of the doubt for a long time, but you can't fuck this much up without a PLAN!). On Iran, even some of the neocon fans, however, are reeling from this administration's latest approach.

The IAEA studied Iran's capabilities for some time and said that Iran is not ready to do any real damage with nuclear power to anyone (even Israel, which is often the greatest fear though Israel's got MUCH bigger ones and a penchant to use their weaponry with some abandon). Major U.S. intel on Iran determined Iran really poses no threat and, because the intel determined this, it's sat hidden for a year.

NOW, the day AFTER other national intelligence tells us Iran is in no position to do us or anyone else much damage for some years to come, what do the Bushies do?

Why, they scream louder that we need to attack Iran ... you know, before they attack us. Then, in a few years and several trillion dollars (not to mention untold numbers of lives lost, because Iran DOES have enough of a military to hurt us in ways Iraqis could not organize while we're being told that the U.S., perhaps with Israel, could go after Iran's so-called nuclear reactors which would kill millions of Iran citizens), Karl Rove can come out again, like he did this past weekend, and claim Congress made Bush do it.

I'm a pretty compassionate person. But when it comes to the Bushies, I'd take a page out of the great lyrics for "Sweeney Todd" (for a pacifist, this is my all time FAVORITE musical oddly enough), the fantastic musical turned into a Tim Burton film for Christmas release with Johnny Depp:

Never forget. Never forgive.

American Empire Building Disguised As Legit Aid to Third World Countries

Robb Kidd at Evolving Peace (another blog from my neck of the Vermont woods, Montpelier, still the only state capitol without a McDonald's) has a very solid piece up about the World Bank and the whole new horrific levels of corrupt behavior thanks to President Bush's appointment of neocon-man Paul "He puts the wolf in..." Wolfowitz. Wolfie, of course, was allowed to resign when indictment would be much more appropriate - and not just because Wolfie couldn't control his penis or his penis' playmate.

There seems to be a mood of ecstatic joy in regards to the downfall of Paul Wolfowitz from heading of the World Bank and while many may have noticed that Mr. Wolfowitz had been a chief architect of the Neo-Cons disastrous implantation of the war in Iraq, they now celebrate with glee his down fall with little discussion revolving around the harsh reality that he was perfect for the World Bank position.
The World Bank has nothing to do about raising the quality of living for “the undeveloped world” but for the mere purpose of creating further markets of development. While to the mere outsider the World Bank produces an imagery of wholesome concern; however that is far from the real truth of the matter. The World Bank has been a tool for venture capitalists in further procuring their desires of developing and exploiting the undeveloped world. Instead of using military force the World Bank goes into the “undeveloped world” and installs loans to spur economic development that perpetuates them into system of subservience.

On paper it sounds nice, but in reality these loans subject the population to dramatic changes to their environment and create an environment of greater poverty. In Mexico farmers were discouraged from growing corn due to the abundance of US corn and now with the greater demand for ethanol corn prices have skyrocketed and many Mexicans are left without their most basic staple for food. Mexican peasantry who had left the farms for the promises of greater economic freedom are now in a pinch since corn is no longer cheap to them. Now they are unable to support themselves and are in need of work, so left with little options the opportunities north of the border look good to them.

Catch the rest here.

Frank Rich: "Operation Freedom From Iraqis"

As Rich wisely pointed out in his Sunday (May 27th) column, everyone rushes now to blame the Iraqi citizens for a war they did NOT invite us to wage, for which neocon lies were fabricated to provide the excuse. This is another must-read.

When all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch rationalization has now become America’s sorriest self-delusion in this tragedy.

However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people in the administration’s reckless bet to “transform” the Middle East. From “Stuff happens!” on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq exuded contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now this animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the war’s dead-enders are pinning the fiasco on the Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as much as the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming “aliens” from Mexico.

Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave “God’s gift of freedom.”

It’s easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A “secure” Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.

But his silence about Iraq’s mass exodus is not merely another instance of deceptive White House P.R.; it’s part of a policy with a huge human cost. The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.

Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum. Sweden, which was not in the coalition of the willing, plans to admit 25,000 Iraqis this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January hearings conducted by Ted Kennedy, says it will raise the number for this year to 7,000 (a figure that, small as it is, may be more administration propaganda). A bill passed by Congress this month will add another piddling 500, all interpreters.

In reality, more than 5,000 interpreters worked for the Americans. So did tens of thousands of drivers and security guards who also, in Senator Kennedy’s phrase, have “an assassin’s bull’s-eye on their backs” because they served the occupying government and its contractors over the past four-plus years. How we feel about these Iraqis was made naked by one of the administration’s most fervent hawks, the former United Nations ambassador John Bolton, speaking to The Times Magazine this month. He claimed that the Iraqi refugee problem had “absolutely nothing to do” with Saddam’s overthrow: “Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”

Cold, calculating, cowardly bastards this Washington lot. Read the rest of Rich here.

In The "Haven't The Iraqis Suffered Enough?" Department

ABC News' blog The Blotter says one GOP lawmaker - this the one who was behind renaming "French toast" and "French Fries" to Freedom Coronaries-on-Cheap - thinks disgraced Pentagon official/neocon engineer and even more disgraced head of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz should be sent to Iraq as a mayor.

I say the Iraqis have suffered enough!

But perhaps we could send Wolf and Rummy and all those numb-minded neocons to Iraq for a day where we let civilians play Whack-a-Mole with their heads and family jewels (that's ball sacks to those of you who hate euphemisms).

Bush and Benchmarks: More Lies and Games At Expense of U.S. Troops' and Civilians' Lives

Why is everyone applauding President Bush for his statement yesterday that he thought "benchmarks" might be a good idea re: Iraq?
First, Bush should NEVER have been given a blank check to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, no matter what cost (financial, logistical, and human lives) in Iraq (and for this, I hold every single member of Congress as responsible as I do Cowboy Clown Dubya). I was one of a large but often none too vocal group who saw quite clearly that Bush and Cheney and the Neocon Express were taking us into Iraq on a case made of lies and greed. To this day, more than four years after the first American forces landed in Iraq, Bush and Cheney continue to promote the idea that Iraq somehow had some large part in planning and executing the September 11th, 2001 (9-11) attacks on the U.S. when it seemed clearly untrue back in 2003 and disproven countless times since then.

Second, Bush won't allow ANY compromise on his part whatsoever. He may say that benchmarks may be a good idea, but he certainly won't allow any checks and balances applied to what he wants to do in Iraq. He says this only to fool Americans into thinking he'll play ball; he doesn't even care that now a majority of Republican voters want troops out of Iraq in the next six months.

Third, don't fool yourself. Bush will be out of office before the U.S. is out of Iraq.

What's Your Call on The Iraq Funding Bills And Veto?

Considering Bush and the current White House define "compromise" as complete capitulation from the other party, how do you see the matter resolved re: Monday's Congressional Iraq funding-with-withdrawal-timetable Bush raced to veto?

Even though most Republicans/conservatives/libertarians support getting U.S. troops out of Dodge City East ASAP, Bush has never been inclined to listen to anyone but his strange little circle of neocon nitwits.

Maureen Dowd: "More Con Than Neo"

I think MoDo pegged this in her April 14th column I'm belatedly referencing: "con" in the term neocon has never meant conservative but "confidence" operators whose game is to part you from your money, your trust, your possessions, and your good sense (and many other important values). The entire column is here, but I offer a healthy snack-sized portion:

Usually, spring in Washington finds us caught up in the cherry blossoms and the ursine courtship rituals of the pandas.

But this chilly April, we are forced to contemplate the batrachian grapplings of Paul Wolfowitz, the man who cherry-picked intelligence to sell us a war with Iraq.

You will not be surprised to learn, gentle readers, that Wolfie in love is no less deceptive and bumbling than Wolfie at war.

Proving he is more con than neo, he confessed that he had not been candid with his staff at the World Bank. While he was acting holier than thou, demanding incorruptibility from poor countries desperate for loans, he was enriching his girlfriend with tax-free ducats.

He has yet to admit any real mistakes with the hellish war that claimed five more American soldiers yesterday, as stunned Baghdad residents dealt with bombings of the Iraqi Parliament, where body parts flew, and of a bridge over the Tigris, where cars sank.

But he admitted Thursday that he’d made a mistake when he got his sweetheart, Shaha Ali Riza, an Arab feminist who shares his passion for democratizing the Middle East, a raise to $193,590 — more than the taxpaying (and taxing) Condi Rice makes. No doubt it seemed like small change compared with the money pit of remaking Iraq — a task he once prophesied would be paid for with Iraqi oil money. Maybe he should have remunerated his girlfriend with Iraqi oil revenues, instead of ripping off the bank to advance his romantic agenda.

No one is satisfied with his apology. Not the World Bank employees who booed Wolfie and yelled, “Resign! Resign!” in the bank lobby.

Not Alison Cave, the chairwoman of the bank’s staff association, who said that Mr. Wolfowitz must “act honorably and resign.”

Not his girlfriend, who says she’s the suffering victim, forced by Wolfie’s arrival to be sent to the State Department (where, in a festival of nepotism, she reported to Liz Cheney).

And not his critics, who say Wolfie has been cherry-picking again, this time with his anticorruption crusade. They say he has used it to turn the bank into a tool for his unrealistic democracy campaign, which foundered in Baghdad, and for punishing countries that defy the United States.

Wolfie also alienated the bank by bringing two highhanded aides with him from Bushworld, aides who had helped him with Iraq. One was the abrasive Robin Cleveland, called Wolfie’s Rottweiler. The other was Kevin Kellems, known as Keeper of the Comb after his star turn in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” where he handed his boss a comb so Wolfie could slick it with spittle for TV. (Maybe his girlfriend didn’t get enough of a raise.) Like W., Wolfie is dangerous precisely because he’s so persuaded of his own virtue.

Just as Ms. Riza stood behind her man on the Iraq fiasco, so Meghan O’Sullivan stood behind W.

Ms. O’Sullivan, a bright and lovely 37-year-old redhead who is the deputy national security adviser, is part of the cordon of adoring and protective female staffers around the president, including Condi, Harriet Miers, Karen Hughes and Fran Townsend.

Even though her main experience was helping Paul Bremer set up the botched Iraq occupation and getting a reputation back in Washington “for not knowing how much she didn’t know,” as George Packer put it in “The Assassins’ Gate,” Ms. O’Sullivan was officially promoted nearly two years ago to be the highest-ranking White House official working exclusively on Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was clear that she was out of her depth, lacking the heft to deal with the Pentagon and State Department, or the seniority to level with W. “Meghan-izing the problem” became a catch phrase in Baghdad for papering over chaos with five-point presentations.

See Rozius Unbound for the Rest.

Absolute Must Read/Must See: A Probe of the Press and Iraq by PBS' Bill Moyers

Regular readers know of the extremely high esteem in which I hold Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher magazine (the journal of the press about the press). While I link to him and the online magazine frequently, I implore you to catch Greg's latest piece about the new Bill Moyers' PBS documentary upcoming about the press and America's war with Iraq labeled "devastating (and then you need to be sure you see this documentary):

The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal." E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.

The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again -- yet Moyers points out, "the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses."

Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, "The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should've all been doing that."

At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.

But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, "I don't think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war…We didn't dig enough. And we shouldn't have been fooled in this way." Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to "dig deeper," and he replies, "No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas….nope, I don't think we followed up on this."

Now They Call It Treason To Debate Iraq

Frank Gaffney, one of the loudest of the neocons, has called Congress' efforts to debate the Iraq War - close to four years after we pushed into Baghdad - an act of treason. He wrote this in a Washington Post editorial discussed by Glenn Greenwald at Salon (I got right in, no ad first).

Hey, buddy, if you want to talk about treason, I'm serious that Bush, Cheney, and the neocons are certainly guilty of it! In fact, I'm investigating what it takes to have charges of treason filed. If a mere mortal can do it, I just may.