Let us pause and count the ways the conduct of the war in Iraq has damaged America’s image and needlessly endangered the lives of those in the military. First, multilateralism was tossed aside. Then the post-invasion fiasco muddied the reputation of military planners and caused unnecessary casualties. The W.M.D. myth undermined the credibility of United States intelligence and President Bush himself, and the abuse of prisoners stole America’s moral high ground.

Now the use of a ghastly weapon called white phosphorus has raised questions about how careful the military has been in avoiding civilian casualties. It has also further tarnished America’s credibility on international treaties and the rules of warfare.

White phosphorus, which dates to World War II, should have been banned generations ago. Packed into an artillery shell, it explodes over a battlefield in a white glare that can illuminate an enemy’s positions. It also rains balls of flaming chemicals, which cling to anything they touch and burn until their oxygen supply is cut off. They can burn for hours inside a human body.

The United States restricted the use of incendiaries like white phosphorus after Vietnam, and in 1983, an international convention banned its use against civilians. In fact, one of the many crimes ascribed to Saddam Hussein was dropping white phosphorus on Kurdish rebels and civilians in 1991.

But white phosphorus has made an ugly comeback. Italian television reported that American forces used it in Falluja last year against insurgents. At first, the Pentagon said the chemical had been used only to illuminate the battlefield, but had to backpedal when it turned out that one of the Army’s own publications talked about using white phosphorus against insurgent positions, a practice well known enough to have one of those unsettling military nicknames: “shake and bake.”

New York Times | Editorial (read more. . .)

Murtha’s call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen the White House’s resolve. Administration officials “are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious threat to their policy-both on substance and politically,” the former defense official said. Speaking at the Osan Air Force base, in South Korea, two days after Murtha’s speech, Bush said, “The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. . . . If they’re not stopped, the terrorists will be able to advance their agenda to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, and to break our will and blackmail our government into isolation. I’m going to make you this commitment: this is not going to happen on my watch.”

“The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”

Seymour M. Hersh | The New Yorker (read more. . .)

No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had “issued increasingly dire warnings” about Iraq’s mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, “never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.” The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations and in the president’s 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam’s fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, “President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda.”

The information was delivered in the President’s Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the “few credible reports” of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam’s antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

Frank Rich | New York Times (read more. . .)

In a series of speeches, Bush stated: “We owe the troops something. We will finish the task for which they gave their lives. We have to honor the sacrifices of the fallen by completing the mission.” For Cindy, this attempt to link the honor of Casey to the leveling of cities, the use of cluster bombs that maim Iraqi children, the raiding of Iraq homes, the infamy of Abu Ghraib, the senseless deaths of more American youth, is outrageous.

“How does Bush honor soldiers by killing more of their buddies?” Cindy asks. “I know my son better than anyone on earth, and I know he is appalled by the continued carnage in his name. As a mother, why would I want any other mother - American or Iraqi - to go through the same pain that I am suffering?”

With a directness characteristic of all her writing, she says: “I demand that you, Mr. Bush, stop using my son’s name and my family’s sacrifices to continue your illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq.”

Nor is Cindy alone in addressing what Chris Hedges calls military “necrophilia.” “All wars feed on martyrs,” writes Hedges. “The mention of the dead instantly shuts down all arguments for compromise or tolerance. It is the dead who rule. They speak from beyond the grave urging the nation onward to revenge. The cause, sanctified by the dead, cannot be questioned without dishonoring those who gave their lives.”

Military invocations of death often resemble those ancient rituals in which tribal leaders required human sacrifice to appease the gods of war. Bush, however, is a sophisticated barbarian. He knows that, without identification with our troops, his morally indefensible war would be repudiated by the American people. It is America’s emotional attachment to their troops, who are prepared to risk their lives when their country is under a real attack, that has - so far - saved Bush from self-destruction. And that is why, of course, he delivers so many speeches against the backdrop of the troops.

Would our fallen troops want their own comrades to meet untimely deaths? Would they invite us to take more revenge on Iraqis who possess no weapons of mass destruction? If they could speak to us from beyond, would they not cry out, as did the dead soldiers in Kipling’s epitaph: “If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied”?

Paul Rockwell | t r u t h o u t (read more. . .)

If you’re looking for revisionist history, don’t waste your time on the war’s critics. Google up Cheney’s bitter critique, in the 2000 campaign, of President Bill Clinton’s military initiatives, specifically the need for more burden sharing by allies and a sharply defined “exit strategy.” At the time, there were about 11,000 American troops in Bosnia and Kosovo, working alongside about 55,000 from allied countries. If only!

Until last week, the antiwar position in the debate over Iraq closely resembled the pro-war position in the ancient debate over Vietnam. That is: It was a mistake to get in, but now that we’re in we can’t just cut and run. That was the logic on which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger took over the Vietnam War four years after major American involvement began and kept it going for another four. American “credibility” depended on our keeping our word, however foolish that word might have been. In the end, all the United States wanted was a “decent interval” between our departure and the North Vietnamese triumph - and we didn’t even get that. Thousands of Americans died in Vietnam after America’s citizens and government were in general agreement that the war was a mistake.

We are now very close to that point of general agreement in the Iraq war. Do you believe that if Bush, Cheney and company could turn back the clock, they would do this again? And now, thanks to Rep. John Murtha, it is permissible to say, or at least to ask, “Why not just get out now? Or at least soon, on a fixed schedule?” There are arguments against this - some good, some bad - but the worst is the one delivered by Cheney and others with their most withering scorn. It is the argument that it is wrong to tell American soldiers risking their lives in a foreign desert that they are fighting for a mistake.

One strength of this argument is that it doesn’t require defending the war itself. The logic applies equally whether the war is justified or not. Another strength is that the argument is true, in a way: It is a terrible thing to tell someone he or she is risking death in a mistaken cause. But it is more terrible actually to die in that mistaken cause.

Michael Kinsley | Washington Post (read more. . .)

The imperial dreams are in ruins. But the ruins, strangely, are not of things that were built and then collapsed; they are of fantasies. We are not dealing here with the decline of a new Rome. It is not that a great power has been brought down—although the casualties of the war, American and Iraqi, have been tragically real—but that a world of fancy and fraud has been exploded by facts.

And the one-party state at home? It was not the mirage that the empire was. The structure of the American state, and to a lesser extent the economy, really has been deeply altered. Real hundreds of millions of dollars have poured into the coffers of the GOP while real hundreds of billions poured into the pockets of the rich. Real laws were passed that tore gaping holes in the Bill of Rights. A real shift of the judiciary toward the radical right was set in motion. An unprecedented concentration of power—fusing government, corporations, the military, portions of the media and a hugely expanded secret police apparatus—was created. And yet this structure, too, has been shaken by recent events.

As happened in the Vietnam era, the war came home. The Administration’s disrespect for law led to law-breaking. Somehow, the law-enforcement system in and around the Justice Department has retained enough independence to serve as a check on abuses of executive power. Indictments have been brought, and others are likely to follow. The mechanisms whereby the foreign debacle has led to the domestic setbacks for the Administration are complex, but the broad outlines are already clear: The failed empire, in the shape of its failed war, has driven down the President’s support to the point at which others, cowed until now, feel free to attack him. The institutions of government and the economy, drawn like iron filings into the magnetic field of power, failed at first to check the Administration. But the public, represented by opinion polls, has stepped in, and the institutions are following. Not since the Soviet Union fell fourteen years ago have we witnessed a greater reversal of fortune.

Unmaking the conglomeration of unaccountable power built up around the Republican Party in recent years will hardly be the work of a week, and the outcome is anything but certain. But if the effort succeeds, historians may one day write that the fake American empire was the Achilles’ heel of the real one-party state.

Jonathan Schell | TomDispatch.com (read more. . .)

Maybe we ought to ask: what happens to the oil supply of the Crusader West when none of its representatives maintains a garrison in the Middle East? I use the term Crusader not to be cute, but to remind you how Europe and America are viewed by many people of the Middle East. They don’t like us. They have a longstanding beef with us. Some of them would like to punish us.

America is leading the current crusade because we are the society most desperately addicted to oil, and the Middle East is where two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil lies. The one thing that we apparently cannot bring ourselves to talk about is our addiction itself. The commuters whizzing around the edge cities and metroplexes of this land probably got a big charge out of Congressman Murtha’s anti-war blast taking over drive-time radio last Friday. I wonder if they thought about how it might affect their commuting.

This whole spectacle — both the inept war itself and our debate about it here at home — is particularly shameful for the official opposition, my party, the Democrats, because we could be talking about the so-called elephant-in-the-room, namely how we live in America and the tragic choices we’ve made, and the things we might do to change that — but the party leadership is too brain-dead or craven to do that. As long as we don’t, we’re going to be wrassling a tarbaby in the Middle East.

James Howard Kunstler | kunstler.com (read more. . .)