Each disaster of Bush’s presidency triggers remembrance of another. Bush’s neglectful behavior before Katrina recalls his studious indifference to terrorism on the eve of 9/11. His refusal to respond to the briefing by Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, that the levees would likely be breached eerily repeated his administration’s dismissive attitude toward Clarke’s warnings and the Aug. 6 PDB on bin Laden. From 9/11 to Katrina, the pattern, we can now recall, is remarkably consistent.

Remembrance of Bush’s fiascoes does not overshadow the reality that they are not sealed in the past but are continuing catastrophes. As new failures unfold, the old ones appear in their refracted light. Memories of Bush’s damage acquire deeper meanings with each new calamity.

Consider: In the New Orleans black community of the Lower 9th Ward, only 200 of its original 14,400 residents have returned to their blasted homes. Though statistics are unavailable, it is likely that Hezbollah has already rebuilt more homes in southern Lebanon than Bush has a year after Katrina in the Lower 9th Ward.

Sidney Blumenthal | Salon  (read more. . .)

The warmongers, imperialists, and just plain greedy who wish to use up US troops to gain their ill-gotten goods love to use the word “appeasement.” Anyone who stands against their expansionist ambitions will be tagged with this term. In the lexicology of the Rabid Right, it evokes British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to negotiate with German Chancellor Adolph Hitler. It is certainly the case that Hitler was a genocidal maniac and not the sort of man with whom one could usefully negotiate. But not all negotiation is equally fruitless. Before that incident, by the way, “appeasement” had a positive connotation, of “seeking peace.”

The rightwing use of the term appeasement, however, turns it on its head. Taken seriously, the doctrine of “no appeasement” on the right would mean we are stuck in perpectual war, always doomed to be on the offensive, always dedicated to gobbling up more of other people’s territory and wealth even at the expense of living in constant dread of being blown up and being forced to give up the civil liberties which had made American civilization great.

It would never be possible to negotiate a truce with any enemy. That would be appeasement. It would never be possible to compromise. That would be appeasement. It would never be prudent to withdraw troops from a failed war. That would be appeasement. In other words, the rightwing doctrine of “no appeasement, ever” actually turns you into Hitler rather than into Churchill.

Juan Cole | Informed Comment  (read more. . .)

Both the United States and Israel have been at the mercy of the same illusion, that the hammer of military force is the tool to use against every threat. To oppose the rush to war is not to deny that threats are real, but only to insist that war is as likely to exacerbate the threat as to eliminate it. In the age of weapons of mass destruction, especially, the old dichotomy between “realists” and “idealists” is a false one. Now the argument against war starts not from a moralizing pacifism, but from a profoundly realistic assessment of what actually happens when violence takes over. When mass destruction and pain are inflicted to no purpose, the old lesson of ethics reverses itself: If the ends don’t justify the means, nothing does.

This is the kind of reckoning that should be going on in America and Israel today. The failures are not of tactics or strategy, but of insight and history. Across the last 60 years, wars have been waged to no purpose. Millions of civilians have been killed. Enemies have been empowered, not defeated. That history is denied with every national budget drawn to give primacy to weapons, at the expense of humane investments that attack structures of violence at the source. The only justification for these terrible wars today will be if they lead to new thinking tomorrow.

James Carroll | Boston Globe  (read more. . .)

As the anniversary approaches, we hear again some voices of reason and some voices of passion, from those who tried to penetrate the sophistry and bring some clarity to the public. Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, co-chairmen of the 9/11 commission, describe in their new book “Without Precedent” the freakish political reaction to the panel’s conclusion that there were no operational links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. After the president publicly contradicted their findings, and the vice president attacked the press for its account of them, Kean found himself at a news conference searching for the right words: The commission found “there is no credible evidence that we can discover, after a long investigation, that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were in any way part of the attack on the United States,” he said.

Kristen Breitweiser, most prominent of the 9/11 widows who became known as the Jersey Girls, voted for Bush in 2000. Her late husband, Ron, idolized Cheney. But in her new autobiography, Breitweiser recounts the fear that overtook her while watching the 2004 Republican National Convention. “I heard the expressions ‘war for a lifetime’ and ‘9/11′ repeated endlessly,” Breitweiser writes in “Wake-Up Call.” “I started thinking about Caroline and her future. I started getting scared about her safety. I didn’t want to hand her a war for the next hundred years. That wasn’t my job as a mom.”

If we now are embarked on a contemporary hundred years’ war, what will historians say was its cause? Certainly 9/11 was the watershed event, but before that was the founding of Israel in 1948 and before that, the carving up of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. What separates Bush from other world leaders who have tried to contain the centrifugal forces of the Middle East is not a lack of historical information or sound advice or allies who seek the same goals.

It is his own distorted thinking, a trait that is personal and not political, and has put the United States on a path that runs through darkness.

Marie Cocco | Daily Camera  (read more. . .)

“Islamo-fascism” looks like an analytic term, but really it’s an emotional one, intended to get us to think less and fear more. It presents the bewildering politics of the Muslim world as a simple matter of Us versus Them, with war to the end the only answer, as with Hitler. If you doubt that every other British Muslim under the age of 30 is ready to blow himself up for Allah, or that shredding the Constitution is the way to protect ourselves from suicide bombers, if you think that Hamas might be less popular if Palestinians were less miserable, you get cast as Neville Chamberlain, while Bush plays FDR. “Islamo-fascism” rescues the neocons from harsh verdicts on the invasion of Iraq (”cakewalk… roses… sweetmeats… Chalabi”) by reframing that ongoing debacle as a minor chapter in a much larger story of evil madmen who want to fly the green flag of Islam over the capitals of the West. Suddenly it’s just a detail that Saddam wasn’t connected with 9/11, had no WMDs, was not poised to attack the United States or Israel — he hated freedom, and that was enough. It doesn’t matter, either, that Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites seem less interested in uniting the umma than in murdering one another. With luck we’ll be so scared we won’t ask why anyone should listen to another word from people who were spectacularly wrong about the biggest politico-military initiative of the past thirty years, and their balding heads will continue to glow on our TV screens for many nights to come. On to Tehran!

It remains to be seen if “Islamo-fascism” will win back the socially liberal “security moms” who voted for Bush in 2004 but have recently been moving toward the Democrats. But the word is already getting a big reaction in the Muslim world. As I write the New York Times is carrying a full page “open letter” to Bush from the Al Kharafi Group, the mammoth Kuwaiti construction company, featuring photos of dead and wounded Lebanese civilians. “We think there is a misunderstanding in determining: “‘Who deserves to be accused of being a fascist’!!!!”

“Islamo-fascism” enrages to no purpose the dwindling number of Muslims who don’t already hate us. At the same time, it clouds with ideology a range of situations — Lebanon, Palestine, airplane and subway bombings, Afghanistan, Iraq — we need to see clearly and distinctly and deal with in a focused way. No wonder the people who brought us the disaster in Iraq are so fond of it.

Katha Pollitt | The Nation (read more. . .)

The Israeli military extensively used US-made cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon, which is a war crime. The bombs frequently do not detonate, so now south Lebanon is littered with deadly fist-size bomblets that will inevitably kill and disfigure children and other civilians.

The US State Department will investigate whether Israeli deployment of these weapons in civilian areas violated secret agreements under which Washington supplied them to Israel.

Nothing will come of the investigation, given the clout of the Israel lobby in Washington, but someday the relative of an innocent maimed Lebanese may decide to take revenge on the country that supplied the cluster bombs. And the American public will ask in astonishment why anyone should hate us.

Juan Cole | Informed Comment  (read more. . .)

The Iranians have also enjoyed the fruits of an incredibly reckless decision by the Bush administration — again encouraged by the neoconservatives — to back Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon. Tehran’s friends in Hezbollah are now the toast of the Arab world, and they are well on their way to destabilizing Iran’s enemies (and America’s allies), destroying any chance to revive the peace process, and radicalizing Muslims around the world. What benefit, if any, the U.S. or Israel derived from this latest misadventure is hard to see.

At still another level of policy, the Bush administration has fought to prevent the imposition of automobile fuel economy standards or other conservation measures that would begin to free us from Iranian threats to withhold oil. While the White House occasionally pretends to be interested in new energy technologies, the government has done little or nothing to pursue real energy independence. But then, that is simply the inevitable result of electing George W. Bush as president, a failed oilman more concerned with chopping brush and making fart jokes than foreign policy.

And then there’s Dick Cheney, the real author of these disastrous policies. It is the vice president who has provided the bureaucratic muscle behind the neoconservatives, whose patronage he has long enjoyed at the American Enterprise Institute. Cheney too has a curious history with Iran, as the former chief executive of Halliburton, a company that blithely and repeatedly violated U.S. sanctions against Iran through foreign subsidiaries. As a congressman, Cheney was also the most outspoken apologist for the secret arms trading with the Iranian mullahs, despite their record of supporting terrorism against American troops, that almost brought down the Reagan administration.

But Cheney is an opponent of Tehran, as are his comrades at the Weekly Standard, in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the ranks of neoconservatism. They aren’t secretly trying to give aid and comfort to Tehran.

It only looks that way.

Joe Conason | Salon  (read more. . .)