I am an Iraqi woman, and I am boycotting the elections. Women who do vote will be voting for an enslaved future. Surely, say those who support these elections, after decades of tyranny, here at last is a form of democracy, imperfect, but democracy nevertheless?

In reality, these elections are, for Iraq’s women, little more than a cruel joke. Amid the suicide attacks, kidnappings and U.S.-led military assaults since Saddam Hussein’s fall, the little-reported phenomenon is the sharp increase in the persecution of Iraqi women. Women are the new victims of Islamic groups intent on restoring a medieval barbarity and of a political establishment that cares little for women’s empowerment.

Having for years enjoyed greater rights than other Middle East women, women in Iraq are losing even their basic freedoms — the right to choose their clothes, the right to love or marry whom they want. Of course women suffered under Saddam. I fled his cruel regime. I personally witnessed much brutality but the subjugation of women was never a Baath Party goal. What we are seeing is deeply worrying: a reviled occupation and an openly reactionary Islamic armed insurrection taking Iraq into a new dark age.

Houzan Mahmoud, Seattle P-I | read more |

Sergeant Beatty gives his answer in one of the film’s most poignant passages: “If you watch this, you’re going to go get your popcorn out of the microwave and talk about what I say. You’ll forget me by the end. …”

The words land so hard because we are already forgetting, or at least turning our backs. In Washington the gears are shifting to all Social Security all the time. A fast growing plurality of the country wants troops withdrawn from Iraq, but being so detached from the war they are unlikely to make a stink about it. The civilian leaders who conceived this adventure are clever at maintaining the false illusion that the end is just around the corner anyway.

They do this by moving the goal posts for “mission accomplished” as frequently as they have changed the rationale for us entering this war in the first place. In the walk-up to the Inauguration, even Iraq’s Election Day was quietly downsized in importance so a sixth V-I Day further off in the future could be substituted. Dick Cheney told Don Imus on Inauguration morning that “we can bring our boys home” and that “our mission is complete” once the Iraqis “can defend themselves.” What that means, and when exactly that might be is, shall we say, unclear. President Bush and Prime Minister Allawi told the press in unison last September that there were “nearly 100,000 fully trained and equipped” Iraqi security forces ready to carry out that self-defense. Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this month that there are 120,000. Time magazine says this week that the actual figure of fully trained ground soldiers is 14,000, but hey: in patriotism as it’s been redefined for this war, loving the troops means never having to say you’re sorry - or even having to say the word Iraq in an Inaugural address.

Frank Rich, New York Times | read more |

With casualty lists and grieving families growing daily, you have to wonder why the same hawks who dreamed up the war and are therefore responsible for the resulting carnage and misery, continue to maintain their influence in the White House and Pentagon and are now actively promoting yet another war, this time against Iran, a country larger, more populated, and with a far more sophisticated military than Saddam ever had.

Their conventional reason is that Iran either has nuclear weapons or is planning to manufacture them - a rationale that conceals an imperial agenda cloaked in a false crusade for freedom and democracy.

The truth is, as with Iraq and its non-existent WMDs and non-connection ties to 9/ll, no evidence is offered save that of anonymous Iranian exiles, ” a walk-in source …not previously known to U.S. Intelligence,” reported the Washington Post. Sound familiar?

Murray Polner, HistoryNewsNetwork | read more |

The bomb was delivered by a USAF F-16. (Don’t you warm to that word, ‘delivered’ - it’s so wonderfully innocuous: “I delivered some flowers”; “You delivered a baby”; “They delivered a 500 pound GBU-30 bomb that obliterated a house and blew its occupants to bits”.) It was guided to its target by a precision system that depends on amazingly sophisticated devices. It can’t miss. And on January 8 it didn’t miss. It smashed into the house it was programmed to destroy.

But it was the wrong house.

Brian Cloughley, CounterPunch | read more |

The culpability for the war can be traced to those same Senate hearings in 2002, when Colin Powell said:”We can have debates about the size of the stockpile … but no one can doubt two things. One, they [Iraq] are in violation of these resolutions … And second, they have not lost the intent to develop these weapons of mass destruction.”

Politicians, the mainstream media and the public alike accepted this line of argument, without debate, thus setting the stage for an illegal war.

UN weapons inspections were never given a chance. Ever since the Clinton administration ordered them out of Iraq in 1998, the US has denigrated the efficacy of the inspection process. This was a policy begun by Clinton, but perfected by Bush in the build-up to war. In October 2002, a month after Saddam Hussein agreed to the unfettered return of weapons inspectors, the US defense department postulated the existence of secret production facilities, protected by a “concealment mechanism” designed to defeat inspectors. Thus, even if they returned, a finding of no WMD was meaningless.

Inspectors did return, and they found nothing. Iraq submitted a complete declaration of its WMD holdings, which was dismissed as lies by the Bush administration. Everyone seemed to accept this rejection of fact. “Intelligence information” was assumed to be infallible. And yet it was all just hype.

There was never any serious effort undertaken by the Bush administration to find Iraqi WMD. Prior to the invasion, the US military re-designated an artillery brigade as an “exploitation task force” designed to search for WMD as the coalition advanced into Iraq.

Scott Ritter, Guardian | read more |

This week, in a closed meeting with African-Americans, Mr. Bush asserted that Social Security was a bad deal for their race, repeating his earlier claim that “African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people.” In other words, blacks don’t live long enough to collect their fair share of benefits.

This isn’t a new argument; privatizers have been making it for years. But the claim that blacks get a bad deal from Social Security is false. And Mr. Bush’s use of that false argument is doubly shameful, because he’s exploiting the tragedy of high black mortality for political gain instead of treating it as a problem we should solve.

Let’s start with the facts. Mr. Bush’s argument goes back at least seven years, to a report issued by the Heritage Foundation - a report so badly misleading that the deputy chief actuary (now the chief actuary) of the Social Security Administration wrote a memo pointing out “major errors in the methodology.” That’s actuary-speak for “damned lies.”

In fact, the actuary said, “careful research reflecting actual work histories for workers by race indicate that the nonwhite population actually enjoys the same or better expected rates of return from Social Security” as whites.

Paul Krugman, New York Times | read more |

Even as the neocons revelled in their influence, Bush’s glittering generalities, lofted on wings of hypocrisy, crashed to earth. Would we launch campaigns against tyrannical governments in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or China?

Of course, the White House briefed reporters, Bush didn’t mean his rhetoric to suggest any change in strategy.

Unfortunately for Condoleezza Rice, such levels of empty abstraction could not glide her through her Senate confirmation as secretary of state without abrasion.

With implacable rigidity, she stood by every administration decision. There was no disinformation on Saddam Hussein’s development of nuclear weapons of mass destruction; any suggestion that she had been misleading in the rush to war was an attack on her personal integrity. The light military force for the invasion was just right. And it was just right now.

Contrary to Senator Joseph Biden of the foreign relations committee, who stated that there are only 14,000 trained Iraqi security forces, she insisted there are 120,000. Why, secretary of defence Rumsfeld had told her so.

Then, implicitly acknowledging the failure to create a credible Iraqi army, the Pentagon announced that the US forces would remain at the same level for the next two years. Rice’s Pollyanna testimony was suddenly inoperative.

The administration has no strategy for Iraq or for the coerced American army plodding endlessly across the desert.

Representative Tauscher wonders when the House armed services committee, along with the rest of the Congress, will learn anything from the Bush administration that might be considered factual: “They are never persuaded by the facts. Nobody can tell you what their plan is and they don’t feel the need to have one.”

On the eve of the Iraqi election, neither the president’s soaring rhetoric nor the new secretary of state’s fantasy numbers touch the brutal facts on the ground.

Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian | read more |