Within the corporate culture in general, achievement is no longer connected to reward or failure to punishment. CEOs routinely see their earnings rise by millions while their companies’ stock plummets. Meanwhile, at lower levels in the hierarchy, white-collar folks get laid off simply because they have been successful enough to make their salaries a tempting cost cut. Thus the relationship between accomplishments and success seems to have been inverted. “Wall Street has traditionally rewarded people who succeeded,” a consultant on executive pay is quoted as telling the New York Times. “Now they are rewarding people who fail.”

Moving into the realm of politics, take the case of Karl Rove, the man who - all the current evidence suggests - outed CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson in retaliation for her husband’s refusal to go along with the myth of an Iraqi nuclear threat. If a Democrat were to reveal the identity of a CIA agent or otherwise leak classified material to the press, you may be sure he or she would be tarred, feathered and suspended from a lamppost within hours of the crime. But Rove carries on with his vicarious presidency - continuing to promote Bush’s voter-repelling social security plan and playing a visible role in the selection of the new supreme court justice.

Far more serious crimes are no less amply rewarded. Of the top perpetrators in the various prisoner abuse scandals, Donald Rumsfeld still holds his post as defence secretary; Condoleezza Rice has been promoted to secretary of state; and torture-memo lawyer Alberto Gonzales has moved up to become the US attorney general. Only one general with a hand in the abuse - Janis Karpinski, the former head officer at Abu Ghraib - has suffered a demotion. Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of US forces in Iraq, is being considered for promotion to four-star general, and Maj Gen Barbara Fast, his head of intelligence-gathering in Iraq, has been given command of an Arizona army base where soldiers are taught interrogation techniques.

And what about the war itself? Four years ago, a Saudi militant, based in Afghanistan, engineered the 9/11 attack, leading the US to invade … Iraq. What message does this send to Norway or Lesotho? That when it comes to US foreign policy, there is no connection between crime and punishment, or even cause and effect?

Barbara Ehrenreich | Guardian (read more. . .)

A report by the Pentagon’s own Mental Health Advisory Team-completed in January but only released last week-found that 54 percent of soldiers stationed in Iraq described morale in their individual units as “low or very low.” In recent testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, U.S. Undersecretary for Defense David Chu, who is in charge of personnel recruitment for the military, admitted that “there is a reduced propensity to join the military among today’s youth. Due to the realities of war, there is less encouragement today from parents, teachers, and other influencers to join the military.”

Chu said parents and other “older advisers to young Americans” whose views on military service were shaped by the Vietnam War have become a chief obstacle to military recruiters, adding that he was also “lamenting the failure” of the media to report all of the “positive successes” of the military along with the news of bombings and growing insurgency.

In reality, as Editor and Publisher reported the day before Chu gave his testimony, the news media has actually been failing to report the horrors of war, as “few graphic images from Iraq make it to U.S. papers.” And as Newsweek war correspondent Joe Cochrane observed just three days before Chu gave his testimony, one reason for the lack of positive news from Iraq is that reporters no longer dare venture out from Baghdad’s barricated Green Zone “unless they’re embedded with U.S. soldiers. That wasn’t the case early last year, when foreigners could walk the streets outside the Green Zone, shop in local markets, and, most important to journalists, talk to the Iraqi people. Those days are long gone.” And even inside the Green Zone, the situation is scarcely better: “Heavily armed troops guard government buildings and hospitals, menacingly pointing their weapons at any one who approaches. Soldiers manning checkpoints can use deadly force against motorists who fail to heed their instructions, so the warning signs say, and I have no doubt they’d exercise that right in a heartbeat if they felt threatened. All this fear and tension, and inside a six square mile area that’s supposed to be safe.”

Cochrane says he has “always been something of an optimist” but reached his “breaking point” during his recent visit to Iraq. “Say what you will about whether the United States was justified to invade this country,” he wrote. “We’re well into the game, and it’s too late to argue over who got the ball first. But prior to April 2003, there were no suicide bombers in Baghdad, there was 24-hour electricity and people went out at night. Now, if you drive into town from the airport, there is a legitimate possibility you will get killed.”

Sheldon Rampton | CounterPunch (read more. . .)

We have run out of troops and money, the rest of the world has run out of patience with our stupidity, and the upper regions of the Bush administration may be crumbling under pressure of a prosecutor’s investigations and eroding public support.

Bush administration neocons such as Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Libby, along with their cheerleaders at Fox “News”, the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, and the New York Times’ Judith Miller will go down in history as the architects and enablers of the greatest strategic blunder in American history. The neocon dream of conquering the Middle East for Israel and destroying Islam as a force is now in history’s trash heap of failed adventures along with such miscalculations as Hitler’s march into Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In seeking to get to the bottom of the Valerie Plame affair, federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is bringing us back to the Big Question: Who cooked the books in order to justify the invasion of Iraq? Was the ringleader Vice President Cheney? Was it Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his neocon cadres? Or was it President Bush himself? What role did Condi “Mushroom Cloud” Rice play in the orchestrated deceit of Congress and the American public?

In the American system, high government officials, no matter how powerful their positions, are not the law. They are subject to the law, which they are sworn to uphold, and when they violate the law they are held accountable.

The US invasion of Iraq was illegal and unwarranted. Those who conspired to bring this war about must be identified and punished. Otherwise the United States will sink from the rule of law into the rule of men.

A true patriot does not confuse government with country. A patriot’s loyalty is to his country, and loyalty to country requires holding government accountable.

Paul Craig Roberts | CounterPunch (read more. . .)

The point here is that the invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond. The war has gone badly, and the viciousness of the Iraq insurgency has put the torch to the idea of further pre-emptive adventures by the Bush administration.

But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.’s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet’s finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.

Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10.

That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely.

Bob Herbert | NYTimes (read more. . .)

When the second Bush administration returned Saddam Hussein to the center stage of U.S. foreign policy, it was time to reprise countless stories about his evilness, while again eliding the cozy relationship that Hussein had long enjoyed with Washington. (When I accompanied former U.N. assistant secretary-general Denis Halliday to a private meeting in Baghdad with Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz in late January 2003, Aziz glanced at the latest Time magazine, which Halliday had just given to him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was on the cover. “Rumsfeld has become quite a warmonger,” Aziz said. “He did not seem so when he came and visited us in the 1980s.”) The Iraqi dictator had not ordered an attack on another country since 1990, and his military capabilities had obviously diminished — but comparing him to Hitler fit like an old shoe.

One of many politicians eager to keep putting it on was “moderate Republican” Christopher Shays, who repeatedly invoked memories of the Third Reich to justify an invasion of Iraq. Days before Congress passed the war resolution in October 2002, Shays went on MSNBC and used the Hitler analogy as part of a slick repertoire about Saddam.

“The burden of proof rests on those to prove that he hasn’t continued his programs of mass destruction,” Shays said. “That’s where the burden of proof is. I’ve been in no classified briefing that said he has stopped his program. In every instance, he’s moving ahead with it. And it’s not one bomb. It’s many. And we’re talking about — the only thing he’s basically waiting for and trying to acquire is the enriched uranium or plutonium, the nuclear-grade material to make a bomb. It is about the size of a softball. You can touch it and it’s not detectable. We will not allow Saddam Hussein to have nuclear weapons.”

A minute later, Shays executed another smooth shuffle: “We’re not talking about a criminal act that we have to prove in court. We’re talking about the logic of events. Someone said to me, ‘Prove that he will use his nuclear weapons.’ To me, that’s like saying, ‘Prove Hitler’s Germany was going to go into Poland.’ We knew he went into Czechoslovakia. We knew he went into Austria. We knew he was building up his armament. We knew what he was about. We could never have proved he was going into Poland.” An all-purpose formulation: When nothing need be proven, then no war need be justified, ahead of time or later on.

Norman Solomon | AlterNet (read more. . .)

In political terms, 9/11 is a gift that keeps on giving to George W. Bush. It’s a golden goose that the right wing is determined to keep feeding.

The previous few presidents could rely on intermittent warfare to rally their domestic forces around the flag. But today, the “war on terror” provides the president with a nonstop set of options for drawing attention away from scandalous stories that could undermine his administration.

The Bush team has made good on a promise from Donald Rumsfeld, two weeks after 9/11, that “this will be a war like none other our nation has faced.” In an op-ed article that appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 27, 2001, Rumsfeld declared: “Forget about exit strategies’; we’re looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadlines.”

This “sustained engagement” — the supposed “war on terrorism” — has become the ultimate propaganda weapon and open-ended cashier’s check for an administration that will do whatever it can to retain power. Already, vast amounts of taxpayer money have been squandered and countless lives have been destroyed. Sooner rather than later, we must void this blank check.

Norman Solomon |CounterPunch (read more. . .)

Three men in an unmarked sedan pulled up near the headquarters of the national police major crimes unit. The two passengers, wearing traditional Arab dishdasha gowns, stepped from the car.

At the same moment, a U.S. military convoy emerged from an underpass. Apparently believing the men were staging an ambush, the Americans fired, killing one passenger and wounding the other. The sedan’s driver was hit in the head by two bullet fragments.

The soldiers drove on without stopping.

This kind of shooting is far from rare in Baghdad, but the driver of the car was no ordinary casualty. He was Iraqi police Brig. Gen. Majeed Farraji, chief of the major crimes unit. His passengers were unarmed hitchhikers whom he was dropping off on his way to work.

“The reason they shot us is just because the Americans are reckless,” the general said from his hospital bed hours after the July 6 shooting, his head wrapped in a white bandage. “Nobody punishes them or blames them.”

Angered by the growing number of unarmed civilians killed by American troops in recent weeks, the Iraqi government criticized the shootings and called on U.S. troops to exercise greater care.

U.S. officials have repeatedly declined requests to disclose the number of civilians killed in such incidents. Police in Baghdad say they have received reports that U.S. forces killed 33 unarmed civilians and injured 45 in the capital between May 1 and July 12 — an average of nearly one fatality every two days. This does not include incidents that occurred elsewhere in the country or were not reported to the police.

The continued shooting of civilians is fueling a growing dislike of the United States and undermining efforts to convince the public that American soldiers are here to help. The victims have included doctors, journalists, a professor — the kind of people the U.S. is counting on to help build an open and democratic society.

“Of course the shootings will increase support for the opposition,” said Farraji, 49, who was named a police general with U.S. approval. “The hatred of the Americans has increased. I myself hate them.”

Richard C. Paddock | Los Angeles Times (read more. . .)