A New Phase of Bright Spinning Lies About Iraq

Three days before Christmas, the Bush administration launched a new salvo of bright spinning lies about the Iraq war. “In an interview with reporters traveling with him on an Air Force cargo plane to Baghdad,” the Associated Press reported Thursday morning, Donald Rumsfeld “hinted that a preliminary decision had been made to go below the 138,000 baseline” of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Throughout 2006, until Election Day in early November, this kind of story will be a frequent media refrain as the Bush regime does whatever it can to prevent a loss of Republican majorities in the House and Senate. By continuing to fortify large military bases in Iraq — and by continuing to escalate an air war there courtesy of U.S. taxpayers but largely outside the U.S. media frame — the White House is determined to exploit every weakness and contradiction of antiwar sentiment inside the United States.

There’s a lot for the pro-war propagandists to exploit. American opponents of this war often emphasize the deaths and injuries of U.S. troops and the anguish of loved ones at home. At the same time, to whatever extent it’s a conscious strategy or a genuine nationalistic form of narcissism, Americans who denounce the war commonly seem to be playing to a media gallery that can easily acknowledge the importance of American lives — but downplays the loss of Iraqi lives unless those tragedies can be pinned on enemies of the U.S. occupation.

What’s on the horizon for 2006 is that the Bush administration will strive to put any real or imagined reduction of U.S. occupation troop levels in the media spotlight. Meanwhile, the Pentagon will use massive air power in Iraq.

Norman Solomon | CommonDreams (read more. . .)

December 23rd, 2005 || PermaLink

So 9/11 Means it’s OK to Spy on Americans?

Here is a curious fact about the government of this country spying on its citizens: It always goes wrong immediately. For some reason, it’s not as though we start with people anyone would regard as suspicious and then somehow slip gradually into spying on the Girl Scouts. We get it wrong from the beginning every time. Never seem to be able to distinguish between a terrorist and a vegetarian.

The Department of Defense has just proved this yet again with its latest folly of mistaking a flock of Florida Quakers for a threat to overthrow the government. A few months ago, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth tried to check out a copy of Mao’s “Little Red Book” and wound up being interviewed by two feds. Cointelpro and all those misbegotten Nixon-era spy programs were always making ludicrous mistakes.

The usual suspects, like that silly congressman Dan Burton, solemnly try to scare us with the dread specter of war, as though they alone are the hard-headed pragmatists, while only woolly minded liberals care about the Constitution. “Don’t these people realize we’re at war?” Well, yes. Why that justifies treating Unitarians like Islamofascists is beyond me.

Molly Ivins | Daily Camera (read more. . .)

December 22nd, 2005 || PermaLink

Do we govern or are we governed?

If we’re Americans, we realize that the president is but our employee. He works for us. He takes an oath to abide by the immutable principles of a Constitution that begins with the three magnificent words, “We, The People.” If we’re Americans, we realize that there is not a system of “our” rights and “their” rights. Every abridgement — potential or actual — of someone’s civil liberties is an attack on them all. If we’re Americans, we realize that there is more to the country than its economy, that there is more to the system than its military. The Eastern bloc people didn’t shake off the petrification of the Soviet bloc just because they wanted blue jeans and the Beatles. They wanted Jefferson and Madison, too, and all the raucous, unruly freedom that came after them. It is a big moment because it is one of those moments that forces on us the fundamental question that a wise old teacher of mine once said was at the heart of the American experiment:

Do we govern or are we governed?

If we are governed, then nothing that’s been revealed in the past several days matters very much. However, if we govern, then it’s goddam well time for us to get on with it. Russ Feingold shouldn’t be out there alone. Where’s John Edwards? Where’s Hillary? Why is John McCain’s straight-talkin’ mouth suddenly full of mush and marbles? Where’s anybody who wants to be president on the subject of the towering and illegal presumption of the current one? Where’s the media, so concerned about the First Amendment that they can’t be bothered with the next several? The president has declared himself beyond the law, beyond the Congress, beyond the people, beyond all reasonable limits, and beyond the Constitution he swore to preserve, protect, and defend. He has made himself a king, and he’s declared himself proud of it. There’s John Lewis, who knows better than all of us what’s at stake.

Where’s everybody else?

Charles Pierce | Altercation (read more. . .)

December 21st, 2005 || PermaLink

The Nadir of Occupation

In American proconsul Paul Bremer’s 2003 master plan, last week’s election was meant to be the culminating act in entrenching democratic rule in Iraq. Instead it marks the nadir of the American enterprise there. The brutal failure of that enterprise, and of the similarly unlawful tactics employed in the war on terror, has boosted terrorist ranks worldwide, dealt grievous blows to the notion that human rights and the rule of law are essential elements in building democracy, and brought the US’s standing to its lowest point in generations.

But the real victim of the war is Iraq. Despite the exercise of awesome US power and the expenditure of billions of dollars, the security situation grows worse by the month. Iraq remains the most violent country in the world, with a leadership that dare not set foot among its people. But President Bush is not prepared to countenance any compromise in his original war goals. Despite recent talk of pulling down troop levels, he finally declared that “we will settle for nothing less than victory”.

The carnage in Iraq is not primarily caused by the insurgents. It is the death squads run by the Shia and Kurdish militias - according to former US diplomat James Dobbins, who is now with the Rand Corporation - who bring about a greater threat of civil war. Indeed the former US-appointed Iraqi leader Ayad Allawi has accused Jalal Talabani’s regime of committing human-rights abuses against Sunnis that are as egregious as those under Saddam Hussein.

Last week’s election will do nothing to hasten the winding-down of the occupation, which is the principal obstacle to peace in Iraq, and the country is breaking down into violent communal fiefdoms. The US introduced sectarianism in Iraq as one of its very first acts of occupation, by reorganizing this secular nation’s politics along explicitly religious and ethnic lines. This was purportedly done to crush the Ba’ath party, but the larger target was Arab nationalism, as was the case when Israel encouraged Hamas as a counterpoint to the PLO.

Salim Lone | Guardian (read more. . .)

December 20th, 2005 || PermaLink

The Most Important Question of All in Bush’s Domestic Spying Scandal

In his defense, the President has tried to deflect attention by repeatedly saying he needed to order these operations to protect Americans. Fine – but it still doesn’t answer the real question. If the surveillance operations he ordered were so crucial and so important to protecting our country, how come he didn’t get a warrant? Surely something so critical to our security would have easily elicited a warrant from a FISA court already inclined to issue warrants in the first place, right?

And that gets us right back to the most important question: why would the President deliberately circumvent a court that was already wholly inclined to grant him domestic surveillance warrants? The answer is obvious, though as yet largely unstated in the mainstream media: because the President was likely ordering surveillance operations that were so outrageous, so unrelated to the War on Terror, and, to put it in Constitutional terms, so “unreasonable” that even a FISA court would not have granted them.

This is no conspiracy theory - all the signs point right to this conclusion. In fact, it would be a conspiracy theory to say otherwise, because it would be ignoring the cold, hard facts that we already know.

David Sirota | huffingtonpost (read more. . .)

December 19th, 2005 || PermaLink

Refiguring the Iraq Body Count

Almost as soon as President Bush gave the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation as “30,000, more or less,” aides hastened to downplay the number as “unofficial,” plucked by Bush from “public estimates.”

The president may have been quoting figures published by iraqbodycount.org, which has tabulated a death toll as high as 30,892 purely on the basis of published press reports of combatrelated killings. As IBC readily concedes, the estimate must be incomplete because it omits unreported deaths.

There is, however, another and more reliable method for estimating figures such as these: nationwide random sampling. No one doubts that the result accurately reflects the overall situation if the sample is truly random and the consequent data correctly calculated. That, after all, is how market researchers assess public opinion on everything from politicians to breakfast cereals.

In 2000, a team led by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health used random sampling to calculate the death toll in the Congolese civil war at 1.7 million. This figure prompted immediate action by the U.N. Security Council. No one questioned the methodology.

In September 2004, Roberts led a similar team that researched death rates in Iraq before and after the 2003 invasion. Making “conservative assumptions,” the team concluded that “about 100,000 excess deaths” among men, women and children had occurred in 18 months. Most were directly attributable to the breakdown of the healthcare system prompted by the invasion. Violent deaths had soared twentyfold.

Andrew Cockburn | Los Angeles Times (read more. . .)

December 18th, 2005 || PermaLink

Democracy and Delusion in Iraq

We are unwilling to come to grips with a very simple truth — the majority of people in the Middle East prefer an Islamic rather than a secular government. Economic development does not ensure a steady march towards a secular, diverse society. Heavens (irony intended) just look at us. Despite our economic prowess and alleged sophistication, religious fundamentalists in our own country have succeeded in bringing great pressure to bear on our government and our media.

So, what does all of this mean? In the coming year the Shia-led government in Iraq will flex its new muscle. They will expand beyond the two torture centers already discovered and press ahead with their campaign against the Sunnis. While there are some secular Shia who willingly mingle with Sunni neighbors, the Shia activists with the guns are religiously driven and intent on ensuring the new government pays proper homage to their particular faith.

Larry C. Johnson | AlterNet (read more. . .)

December 17th, 2005 || PermaLink