Summary: An eviscerating critique of how the Republican party has won elections by obscuring actual issues with phony controversies, aided and abetted by a shallow and insipid media. At times Greenwald’s denunciations are repetitive, but he provides more than enough infuriating examples to amply justify his evident anger.

Glenn Greenwald’s third book, Great American Hypocrites, is an expose of the invented controversies and character-based myths that Republicans use to win elections. Even though public opinion polls show that Americans consistently favor the Democratic party’s position on all or nearly all issues, the Republicans have been winning elections for the past twenty years through ad hominem attacks and the creation of a political mythology - portraying themselves as strong, rugged, manly, salt-of-the-earth regular joes, while their Democratic opponents are demonized as weirdos, elitists and effete freaks. In this endeavor, they have been assisted by the media, which has largely abandoned its duty to inform the public in favor of obsessing over phony, invented non-stories and irrelevant trivialities. (Does Michael Dukakis look silly in a helmet? Did Al Gore claim to have invented the Internet? Does John Kerry like windsurfing? Is Barack Obama a secret Muslim who refuses to wear a flag pin?) As Greenwald shows, not only do these character myths obscure the real issues that matter to Americans’ lives, in most cases they are the polar opposite of the truth.

Greenwald’s paradigmatic example of a Great American Hypocrite is John Wayne. Famed as the all-American actor, the swaggering cowboy whose steel and grit is often invoked by Republican politicians, Wayne’s personal life tells a different story. When his fellow Hollywood stars such as Clark Gable and Henry Fonda volunteered to fight in World War II, Wayne squirmed out of the draft and stayed home (and largely built his career on the movies he made in the absence of competition). To make up for that cowardice, he spent the rest of his life advocating jingoistic right-wing politics - supporting McCarthyite policies, championing the Vietnam War, and loudly attacking anyone who opposed these things as cowards and subversives. He also adopted the stance of a right-wing moralizer, denouncing films that he thought undermined traditional values. Meanwhile, Wayne himself had three marriages, all of which were plagued by adultery and allegations of spousal violence; in both of his two subsequent marriages, he married his mistress almost immediately after divorcing his then-wife.

The second chapter of the book targets the press, which Greenwald labels “vapid [and] easily manipulated”. He outlines the tactics by which right wing character assassination is amplified by the media: sleazy right-wing tabloids, most notably the Drudge Report, publish rumor and innuendo which is then loyally picked up and regurgitated by more mainstream press outlets. Most media outlets, of course, proclaim themselves as above this sort of thing, but they claim they have to report on it, because that’s what “the public” (by which they mean themselves) wants to know about. The press has become obsessed with these petty manufactured scandals to the extent of almost completely pushing out coverage of actual issues - to the extent that, in 2006, more people knew about John Edwards’ haircut than knew Saddam Hussein was not responsible for 9/11.

The next three chapters concern the media narratives pushed by the Great American Hypocrites. First and foremost is the way Republicans depict themselves as tough, resolute warriors, while casting aspersions on the courage and patriotism of their opponents. If you’re like me, you’ll find this chapter the most infuriating of the book - because, as Greenwald chronicles again and again, conservatives who pulled out all the stops to avoid military service when they had the chance spent much of their subsequent political careers dragging their Democratic opponents - who often did serve honorably - through the mud.

As but one example, conservatives cheered when the U.S. military named an aircraft carrier after Ronald Reagan, but mocked and taunted when a submarine was named after Jimmy Carter. This, despite the fact that Reagan was a Hollywood actor who never served in the military in his life, while Carter is an actual veteran who served with distinction on a real nuclear submarine. Similar examples are easy to come by: the vicious demonization of Senator George McGovern, an Air Force veteran who flew 35 combat missions and won the Distinguished Flying Cross, as weak and lacking in courage. Another is the smears against John Kerry, who volunteered for some of the most dangerous duty in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, a truly incredible array of right-wing idols and conservative pundits - such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Lieberman, Bill Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and many more - all avoided military service when they had the opportunity. Today, these right-wing warriors sit comfortably at home in cushy jobs and proclaim their own courage because they are willing to send other people into combat. They view war as an exciting spectacle, like a video game, one that gives them opportunity to brag about their masculinity. As Greenwald notes, it’s the ability to playact as a tough guy, rather than actual evidence of toughness, that the Republicans and the media are obsessed with.

Next up is the Republicans’ depiction of themselves as wholesome, moral Christian family men. This is an especially laughable claim in light of the adulterous relationships, broken marriages, drug-abuse and prostitution allegations, and other scandals that typify the leaders of the conservative movement: Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Rudy Giuliani, Dan Burton, Henry Hyde, Mark Foley, David Vitter, Ted Haggard, and others. As one example, Greenwald quotes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich blasting current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “San Francisco left-wing values”. By way of illustration, Pelosi has been married to her husband Paul since 1962, and have raised five children. Gingrich, meanwhile, famously dumped his first wife while she was in the hospital for cancer treatment, refused to pay child support after the divorce, then later divorced his second wife Marianne after having an affair with one of his congressional aides.

Finally, Greenwald deals with the supposed conservative position of favoring limited government. Many conservatives said this during Bill Clinton’s presidency, but when their own side got into office, that principled stance vanished in a flash. It was replaced with enthusiastic support for all the radical claims of unlimited executive power advanced by the Bush administration - secret wiretapping without warrants, torture of detainees, arbitrary and indefinite detention at the executive’s discretion, the claimed power to violate laws passed by Congress, and more. John Ashcroft, for example, during the Clinton years strongly opposed government eavesdropping powers far less expansive than the ones he would actually go on to implement as Bush’s Attorney General.

The book closes with a discussion of John McCain. Other than his atypically honorable military service, Greenwald argues that McCain is the very image of the Republican party: his support for unchecked presidential power, his open advocacy of preemptive war as a tool of American imperialism, his support from a fawning and uncritical media, and last but not least, his personal life - in which he divorced his first wife, who raised their children while he was captive in Vietnam, to marry a young, wealthy heiress whose fortune he used to launch his political career.

I have only two complaints about this book. First is that, while Greenwald’s targets are fully deserving of the scathing condemnation he heaps on them, the language does get repetitive at times. There are places where I think it could have been edited down without in any way detracting from the point. If anything, the behavior of these Republican hypocrites is so self-evidently outrageous as to require little in the way of additional condemnation to drive the point home.

Secondly, and more seriously: This book has no footnotes! Although there are copious quotes from blogs, newspapers and TV shows, there’s nothing to indicate where any of this source material was drawn from. I don’t understand the reason for this omission. I have no reason to believe any of his quotes are inaccurate, but it would be better to verify that for myself. Their omission weakens an otherwise superb book, but does not undercut the righteous anger of Greenwald’s argument.

According to McClatchy, the Veterans Administration withheld inconvenient information regarding the number of veterans who have attempted suicide:

The Veterans Administration has lied about the number of veterans who’ve attempted suicide, a senator charged Wednesday, citing internal e-mails that put the number at 12,000 a year when the department was publicly saying it was fewer than 800.

“The suicide rate is a red-alarm bell to all of us,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. Murray also said that the VA’s mental health programs are being overwhelmed by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, even as the department tries to downplay the situation.

This site thinks so. 

If you hunt through the categories, you’ll see many ideas better than occupying Iraq while incurring tens of thousands of U.S. troop casualties.

Price Of Oil
Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant

Our Saudi Friends
Keefe, The Denver Post

Tanking Economy
Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner

Iraq Milestone 4000
Brian Fairrington, Cagle Cartoons

McCain and the Iraq War
Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant

What is a meaningful way of understanding the immense amount of money the United States spends in Iraq each day? This simple video by American Friends Service Committee compellingly gets this point across.

How does one most fairly frame this issue of what the United States is spending in Iraq? It’s not only a matter of whether we should be in Iraq for strategic reasons (every reason presented by the Bush Administration has proven to be untrue). It’s also a matter of whether there are vastly superior ways of spending that immense amount of money (there are, as illustrated by the video below).

I’ve previously tried to illustrate the immense expense we are incurring in Iraq here , here , here and here.

I refuse to use the term “war” when referring to the U.S. occupation of Iraq for these reasons.

Do you remember the many politicians and news media personalities who assured us that we needed to go to “war” with Iraq and that it would be easy, fast and relatively painless for American soldiers?   Well, Huffpo has put many of those quotes in one convenient place, breaking them into basic categories, such as:

CAKEWALK!

HOW MANY TROOPS WILL BE NEEDED?

WHAT ABOUT CASUALTIES?

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST?  and HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?

Here are some key quotes from “How long will it last?”:

“Now, it isn’t gong to be over in 24 hours, but it isn’t going to be months either.”
- Richard Perle, Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, 7/11/02

“The idea that it’s going to be a long, long, long battle of some kind I think is belied by the fact of what happened in 1990. Five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”
- Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 11/15/02

“It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could be six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
- Donald H. Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 2/7/03

“It won’t take weeks… Our military machine will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there’s no question that it will.”
- Bill O’Reilly, 2/10/03

“There is zero question that this military campaign…will be reasonably short. … Like World War II for about five days.”
- General Barry R. McCaffrey, national security and terrorism analyst for NBC News, 2/18/03

“Our military superiority is so great — it’s far greater than it was in the Gulf War, and the Gulf War was over in 100 hours after we bombed for 43 days… Now they can bomb for a couple of days and then just roll into Baghdad… The odds are there’s going to be a war and it’s going to be not for very long.”
- Former President Bill Clinton, 3/6/03

“I think it will go relatively quickly…weeks rather than months.”
- Vice President Dick Cheney, 3/16/03

We must remember that these aren’t mere words.  Saying these sorts of words had consequences that many people still don’t seem to appreciate (given that many of the people who pushed a “war” with Iraq now want to start a “war” with Iran).   Glenn Greenwald wrote about this moral obtuseness of many of those people who led the charge to invade Iraq:

The most unadorned admissions of error amount to little more than a concession that they simply assessed the costs and benefits inaccurately. And even with that extremely narrow concession, none of them — either in Slate or elsewhere — even reference in passing the fact that the war they cheered on ended the lives of hundreds of thousands (at least) of innocent Iraqi citizens and caused the internal and external displacement of millions more. That just doesn’t exist in the calculus.

More strikingly, not a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not — and has no right to — invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven’t attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: “Wars that aren’t directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn’t be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason.” Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.

I’ve spent a lot of time studying Republican political anatomy.   You see, I’m not only an armchair anthropologist, but I’m a social neuro-surgeon (a brand-new expertise, created today).   After careful review of all available relevant data, I have developed a precise chart (click on the thumbnail below) detailing each of the major features of the modern Republican brain.  

No, you won’t find “Iraq” on this anatomical diagram, even though it reveals each of the major neural substructures found in the modern Republican brain.  That’s because the modern Repubublican has developed relatively recently.  No specialized “Iraq” module has thus had time to evolve. You will nonetheless find each of the brain structures that, working together, compel the instigation of multiple fear-induced, needless, destructive, ineptly planned, corrupt and potentially non-ending military conflicts in the Middle East. 

Whenever sufficient numbers of these malignant features are found in the brains of those who hold substantial political power, one can expect the atrophy of an entire country, absent immediate and dramatic political resuscitation. 

Without further ado, here it is.  Just click on the thumbnail for all the gory details:

If you’d like to review some fascinating and rigorous psychological data of what it means to be a conservative, check out this post regarding a study by Frank Sulloway or this post considering the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

With the possible spoiler of Mike Huckabee, it’s clear that John McCain is set to be the candidate the Democrats need to beat in November. The irony of the ongoing battle between Hillary and Obama is that, policy-wise, they just aren’t that different. There were some real differences between the Republicans, but those differences are not what McCain seems to be gearing up to run on. He is all about Iraq.

McCain has to convince hardline conservatives that he’s their guy. Why? Because he has occasionally backed some responsible legislation, like McCain-Feingold. He refused to sugarcoat our waning industrial possibilities while campaigning in Michigan. He has spoken positively about amnesty programs for illegal immigrants. He has not always been a friend to Big Business. True Red Republicans of the Bush League see the potential for fiscal treason in McCain—that he might raise taxes, control campaign spending, or propose, back, and sign Democratic-sounding legislation that would take the country toward *gasp* Socialism.

I have a hard time squaring complaints from anyone that McCain is somehow not a fiscal conservative when Bush just put forward a three-point-one TRILLION dollar budget (with the largest slice for defense spending since WWII). It just goes to show, all the rhetoric about Democratic profligacy is really just a complaint that the Dems spend the money on things the Republicans don’t like. It’s not the money, it’s the programs.

Setting that aside, though, McCain obviously doesn’t think he can sway them all. So he’s about to start campaigning hard on the pitfalls of an Iraq withdrawal. I will wait for the P-word to rear its ugly torso—Patriotism. The suggestion will be made that anyone wishing to pull out is somehow not patriotic. We saw this under Bush, aspersions cast on some of the most loyal, patriotic, and demonstrably courageous people who suggested that maybe this war was a bad idea and that, furthermore, we more or less screwed it up by going in blind, deaf, and predetermined.

I hear echoes of the Sixties all over again, and of all the people who should know better, it is John McCain. (”Pull out…doesn’t sound manly to me, Bub. I say leave it in there till the job is done and they’re thoroughly messed up.”)

The problem is, this may well play for the American voter. When we have serious doubts, we tend to stick with what we’re doing rather than risk change. We have to have our faces rubbed in the muck of bad decision-making before we finally say—in sufficient numbers to matter—enough is enough. I am not sanguine about the political maturity of the American people.

And the thing is, we aren’t getting our faces rubbed in it. We’re adapting. Gasoline is high, the American industrial base is shrinking, we have infrastructure problems galore, but we’re making accommodations and doing fine, thank you. People complain, but by and large we haven’t actually lost anything that matters. So much of this debate is still in the realm of hypotheticals, theories, ideas, and potentials.

So we look to the Democratic candidates and what do we see? One old school politician who would probably do a fine enough job and maybe make a few worthwhile changes, mainly around the edges, and one young firebrand who is promising Big Changes. And a serious look at their policies shows that, really, they differ by degrees, not ideas. It’s going to devolve into a popularity and demographics battle. Which barrier do we want to break first? Gender or race? And underlying that, is the question no one wants to ask: does it really matter anymore?

In my misbegotten youth, I used to be what they call a Single Issue Voter. Was a time I voted against anyone who wanted to erode the Second Amendment. Yes, I was one of those Right to Bear Arms purists. I had bought into the argument that an armed populace kept the government in line and the first step towards tyranny is to disarm the population at large. There’s truth to that in history, but today, here, in this country, it’s a rather weak argument. Power doesn’t work that way. Not to say it couldn’t, but for now it simply doesn’t.

I could also argue that anyone wishing to tamper with the Constitution was de facto untrustworthy. Which may also be true. People doing good for me whether I want it or not is loathesome. Make the subject anything but guns and you see this immediately.

But the truth is, single issue voting only means you’re not informed, interested, or intellectually capable of understanding multiple issues. Or it means you don’t care about anything else, which is just as bad. It is stupid.

As it has transpired, most of the Second Amendment purists voted into office in the last forty years have also brought with them a whole suite of ideologies I cannot abide. They are, many of them, the natural constituency of the George W. Bush League. That single issue—preserving an unquestioned right to own, carry, and by implication use something which I, in fact, do not own or carry—comes packaged with people whose other policy positions I find absurd or dangerous.

The word Balance comes to mind. Tricky at the best of times.

McCain will campaign on a single issue. Oh, there will be other policy positions he’ll talk about and want to deal with, but at present it looks like he’s going to threaten America with the awful prospect of “pulling out” if we vote for the Democrats. He will polarize people over a Single Issue that will push all the rest to the side in an emotional gambit to convince us to—wait for it, he may yet use the phrase—Stay The Course.

In such an environment, the first casualty is reason. You can’t even get close to truth without that.

I would really like to see the two Democratic front-runners make a deal, put together a ticket that can roll over this irrationalism. The Republicans are once again demonstrating their major strength—they’re forming ranks and closing up behind a candidate and they will see it through as a group. For a bunch of people who profess to believe in American Individuality, they sure can cast it aside quickly enough for their Cause. Democrats traditionally devour each other.

The one factor we have left to see whether McCain has a reasonable shot or not is who he picks as a running mate. Because that will indicate who he thinks his successor will be, ought to be. As it appears right now, if Hilary and Obama made a deal and ran together, it would be the best of all possible worlds. Either one of them is acceptable to me.

I suppose I should say whether I think we should get out of Iraq. Saying— believing—that we should never have gone in to begin with is not the same thing. Now it would be like making a mess of a paraplegic’s kitchen, then leaving without cleaning up the mess. So I guess I’m forced into the opinion that we would be ill-advised to simply pull out until Iraq really does have a security base that works well enough. Otherwise, they will be divvied up by the various factions outside their borders. Iran has, in fact, an old score to settle, and they are more dangerous to future peace in the region than Iraq ever was. Saddam ultimately was just greedy. The Iranian hierarchy are Inspired.

But that doesn’t mean I’d vote for John McCain—all the other things he’s bringing to the table are things I do not really support.

Single Issue Voting is for morons.

Fred Kaplan’s has written a new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He argues that George W. Bush’s failures stem from two great misconceptions: A) that the world changed after Sept. 11, when it didn’t, and B) that the United States emerged from the Cold War stronger than before, when in fact it was weaker. Here’s what I found especially interesting (from Part I of excerpts of this book published by Slate.com):

If America’s Cold War presidents had adopted Bush’s strategic post-9/11 strategic outlook, they would have attacked the Soviet Union at some point during the long standoff, on the grounds that Communism was the “root cause” of many problems. If Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had thought the way Bush did while planning the strategy for World War II, they would not have formed an alliance with the Soviet Union in order to beat Nazi Germany, because Communism, especially Josef Stalin’s version of it, was evil, too. They might even have declared war on both Russia and Germany—and, in their high moral dudgeon, suffer catastrophic defeat.

The great divide in thinking about American foreign policy these past few years is not so much between Realists and Neoconservatives; it’s between realists (with a small r) and fantasists.

Congratulations to these kids.   They’re absolutely justified.  The military has no right to coerce high school students into taking tests that make it easier to recruit the students. The test the kids resisted, the ASVAB is a covert recruiting tool.  If kids want to go to Iraq, let them go to the recruiter’s office. 

Perhaps the rule should be that countries that don’t show the utmost care for nuclear weapons shouldn’t be allowed to have any.  Oops, that’s us, according to the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Air Force said Friday it has punished 70 airmen involved in the accidental, cross-country flight of a nuclear-armed B-52 bomber following an investigation that found widespread disregard for the rules on handling such munitions.

“There has been an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards at Minot Air Force Base and Barksdale Air Force Base,” said Maj. Gen. Richard Newton, the Air Force deputy chief of staff for operations.

Newton was announcing the results of a six-week probe into the Aug. 29-30 incident in which the B-52 was inadvertently armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and flown from Minot in North Dakota to Barksdale in Louisiana without anyone noticing the mistake for more than a day.

The missiles were supposed to be taken to Louisiana, but the warheads were supposed to have been removed beforehand.

. . . and says the obvious, I should add.  Last week, it was retired General Sanchez, who blasted the Bush Administration, calling it “incompetent” in the way it has run the Iraq occupation.

This week, it’s Retired General John Abizaid, former CENTCOM Commander, who spoke about Iraq:

During a round table discussion on “the Fight for Oil, Water and a Healthy Planet” at Stanford University on Saturday, Gen. John Abizaid (Ret.), the former CENTCOM Commander, said that “of course” the Iraq war is “about oil“: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that,” Abizaid said of the Iraq campaign early on in the talk.

“We’ve treated the Arab world as a collection of big gas stations,” the retired general said. “Our message to them is: Guys, keep your pumps open, prices low, be nice to the Israelis and you can do whatever you want out back. Osama and 9/11 is the distilled essence that represents everything going on out back.”

Project Censored has just released its list of top censored stories for 2008.  Civil rights violations of U.S. citizens and economic abuses invited by the U.S. government are prominent thoughout this list.   Sobering and depressing.

Here are some terrific video clips of President Eisenhower and, more recently, of former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel. 

As Gravel plainly states, no president since Eisenhower has dared to talk about the elephant in the room, the military industrial complex.  Our leaders rarely speak of it because it has so thoroughly corrupted our foreign policy and our leaders. 

In an alternet.org article entitled “The Mega-Lie Called the ‘War on Terror’: A Masterpiece of Propaganda,” Richard Behan sums up the evidence exposing the “War on Terror” for what it really is: a repulsive attempt to achieve world dominance through militaristic means.  The article includes a succinct chronology substantiating the author’s claims.

What is the basis for the “terror” of the “War on Terror”?  Good question: 

Impeachment will expose the fraudulence of the “War on Terror” and liberate us from the pall of fear the Bush administration has deliberately cast upon the country. Both political parties will be free to speak the truth: Terrorism is real and a cause for concern, but it is not a reason for abject fear.

We need only compare the hazard of al Qaeda to the threat posed by the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. On the one hand is a wretched group of sad fanatics — perhaps 50,000 in all — clever enough to commandeer airliners with box cutters. On the other was a nation of 140 million people, a powerful economy, a standing army of hundreds of divisions, a formidable navy and air force and thousands of nuclear tipped intercontinental missiles pre-aimed at American targets.

We were a vigilant but poised and confident people then, not a nation commanded to cower in fear. We can and must regain that strength and self-assurance.

I recently discussed American foreign policy with an attorney over lunch.  Over the years, this fellow had generally shown himself to be thoughtful on many issues.  He is a meticulous lawyer, charged with parsing out bits of relevant evidence regarding the dozens of cases on which he works every day.

It eventually became clear that he fully supported the U.S. attack on Iraq, though he was agonized over how badly the “war” was going.  Why did he support the Iraq invasion?  This is where the conversation got strange:  Because of what “they” did to us (allegedly the 9/11 attacks).  It’s because of what “they” planned to do (impose Muslim culture on all Americans).  It’s because of what “they” stand for (”they hate freedom”).   Further, we simply need to make them pay.   We can’t let “them” get away with what “they” did on 9/11.  

It became clear through this conversation that, for my acquaintance, all Muslim countries are the same.  None of them can be trusted.  All of them are at least somewhat guilty for 9/11.   I challenged his over-generalizations, but my acquaintance would not back off.  For him, all Muslims are bad.  Further, it was clear to him that we couldn’t do nothing about 9/11.  Doing something (no matter what it was) is far better than doing nothing.

It has repeatedly occurred to me that without the federal government’s 6-year national license to engage in bigotry and misdirected vengefulness, the invasion of Iraq would have been extremely difficult to sell. Based upon numerous conversations I’ve had with people who supported the Iraq invasion, bigotry and misdirected vengefulness justified their support of the invasion.  For many people these things continue to justify any future U.S. military action in the Middle East.  “They” have it coming.

In “The Real Lessons of 9/11,” Gary Kamiya does a much-needed psychological analysis on those people who have supported the sustained and misdirected U.S. military violence in the Middle East.  Kamiya has really thought things through.  Kamiya’s Salon.com article is an extraordinary piece of writing.  The bottom line is that the mainstream media has not questioned the shameful emotions and ideology that justified Bush’s crusade in the minds of all too many people.  Here are a few excerpts from the article, but I highly recommend clicking on the link and reading the whole thing:

Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his “war on terror.” He has incessantly linked the words “al-Qaida” and “Iraq,” a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated.

Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. Bush’s reaction to 9/11 was to declare a “war on terror,” of which the Iraq adventure was said to be the “front line.” The American establishment signed off on this war because of 9/11. To oppose Bush’s “war on terror” was to risk another terror attack and dishonor our dead.

Of course America was enraged and fearful after the attacks. But reacting to the attacks as we did, like an angry drunk in a bar, was not in our national interests. It was vital that we think clearly about our response, who attacked us, why they did, and what our most effective response would be. But here the American establishment ran up against its ideological blind spot — its received ideas about the Arab/Muslim world. Combined with the hysterical emotionalism, those ideas, which amount to a kind of de facto bigotry, allowed Bush to push through one of the most bizarrely gratuitous wars in history.

Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by “extremists,” demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.

If you somehow haven’t yet figured out how the incessant lies of FOX led us to begin the senseless bloody occupation of Iraq, you can catch it all again. Except it’s about Iran now. This video comparing the FOX campaigns against Iraq and Iran is almost unbelievable. Is there anyone really willing to believe such disinformation a second time around? But we’re in full swing and there’s no powerful media voice blowing the whistle.

Here is a Yahoo.com story on this video comparison.

Amy Goodman had this to say about the run-up to the invasion of Iraq:

FAIR did a a study. In the week leading up to General Colin Powell going to the security council to make his case for the invasion and the week afterwards, this was the period where more than half of the people in this country were opposed to an invasion. They did a study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, ABC evening news and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. The four major newscasts. Two weeks. 393 interviews on war. 3 were anti-war voices. 3 of almost 400 and that included PBS. This has to be changed. It has to be challenged.

The question is whether enough people running mainstream media care enough to vigorously contest the current round of lies regarding Iran.

We suspected it.  Now we know it.   The Gitmo trials were cooked, according to this article from MyWay: 

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - An Army officer with a key role in the U.S. military hearings at Guantanamo Bay says they relied on vague and incomplete intelligence and were pressured to declare detainees “enemy combatants,” often without any specific evidence.

His affidavit, released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a 26-year veteran of military intelligence who is an Army reserve officer and a California lawyer, said military prosecutors were provided with only “generic” material that didn’t hold up to the most basic legal challenges.

So how did the process really work?

The military held Combatant Status Review Tribunals for 558 detainees at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in 2004 and 2005, with handcuffed detainees appearing before panels made up of three officers. Detainees had a military “personal representative” instead of a defense attorney, and all but 38 were determined to be “enemy combatants.”

Abraham was asked to serve on one of the panels, and he said its members felt strong pressure to find against the detainee, saying there was “intensive scrutiny” when they declared a prisoner not to be an enemy combatant. When his panel decided the detainee wasn’t an “enemy combatant,” they were ordered to reconvene to hear more evidence, he said.

Ultimately, his panel held its ground, and he was never asked to participate in another tribunal, he said.

You’ve got to read this description of the new American embassy under construction in Bagdad (the title: ”The Colossus of Bagdad”).  This monstrous construction project is unbelievably arrogant and excessive.  It will be the largest embassy on the planet.

As an outpost, this vast compound reeks of one thing: imperial impunity. It was never meant to be an embassy from a democracy that had liberated an oppressed land. From the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control center suitable for the planet’s sole “hyperpower,” dropped into the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It was to be Washington’s dream and Kansas City’s idea of a palace fit for an embattled American proconsul—or a khan.

This is terrific writing characteristic of TomPaine.com.  But this is not just a story about a construction project.  Rather, it is a story of the corrupt leaders of our nation.  This story makes me acutely embarrassed to be an American.  No, I don’t want to leave the U.S.  I want to change it.

Some of us of are having a discussion in another thread about military recruitment strategies. Personally, I think those of us opposed to the war should be directing our energies toward counter-recruitment rather than accepting the poverty draft as a fact of life. We should also do everything we can to support AWOL and deserting soldiers who have experienced the futility of our presence in Iraq firsthand. If you know anyone in the military who wants to get out, please give them the GI rights hotline number: 1-800-394-9544 and the GI rights web site: http://girights.objector.org
This leads me to the title of this post: a documentary about the last real revolutionary working-class social movement in this country’s history: the GI movement against the Vietnam war.
From the Sir! No Sir! website:

In the 1960’s an anti-war movement emerged that altered the course of history. This movement didn’t take place on college campuses, but in barracks and on aircraft carriers. It flourished in army stockades, navy brigs and in the dingy towns that surround military bases. It penetrated elite military colleges like West Point. And it spread throughout the battlefields of Vietnam. It was a movement no one expected, least of all those in it. Hundreds went to prison and thousands into exile. And by 1971 it had, in the words of one colonel, infested the entire armed services. Yet today few people know about the GI movement against the war in Vietnam.

You can watch the theatrical trailer here, the extended 12 minute trailer here, and the punkass crusade counter-recruitment spot here.

Summary: A scathing, informative chronicle of the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq, yet one that speaks with compelling plausibility of all the missed opportunities to turn things around.

Former U.S. diplomat and ambassador Peter Galbraith has been deeply and personally involved with the affairs of Iraq for over twenty years. In his new book The End of Iraq, he writes of how the Bush administration’s incompetence and mismanagement of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has led to a bloody civil war within its borders. He argues that the only realistic solution to this problem is the partition of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines into three states, and furthermore, that this division has been a long time coming and might have positive dividends both for the U.S. and for other countries in the region.

The Bush administration’s catastrophic ineptitude has long been obvious to an observer of the news, and Galbraith leaves no stone unturned recounting their blunders, some of which are truly staggering. For example, despite Bush’s State of the Union claim (later shown to be false) about how Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium “yellowcake” from Africa suitable for reprocessing into a bomb, the fact is that Iraq actually had pre-existing stores of yellowcake - under International Atomic Energy Agency seal - which the Bush administration made no effort to protect in the aftermath of its invasion, and which was subsequently stolen by looters. Apparently, although the threat of Iraqi possession of yellowcake was so serious as to merit immediate war, the actual yellowcake which Iraq possessed did not justify military protection.

Another stunning example is the al-Qaqaa munitions facility, a complex of bunkers containing hundreds of tons of high explosive which, again, was left unguarded after the invasion and subsequently stolen. Much of this explosive no doubt ended up in the hands of insurgents, where it has been used ever since to fashion roadside bombs and other weapons of destruction to be used against both American troops and other Iraqis. Vials of infectious diseases like polio and HIV, some of which had the potential to be weaponized, were also stolen from Baghdad’s Public Health Laboratory. Despite Colin Powell’s frightening pre-war incantation of Iraq’s plans to create biological weapons, these stores went unguarded for over a week after the U.S. invasion before they were taken.

Other failures, though of less military significance, had enormous cultural significance - such as the U.S. failure to protect Iraq’s museums and libraries, which likewise fell prey to looters who smashed or stole some of the most ancient archaeological remnants of human civilization. Iraq’s National Library was burned down, literally erasing over a hundred years of the country’s history. The Ministry of Irrigation, which was looted and burned, lost the plans and blueprints for thousands of canals, dams and pumping stations delivering the water Iraqis need to live. Yet American troops were ordered to protect one Iraqi government compound, and a cynic could probably have guessed which one: the Oil Ministry, naturally.

The looting and chaos which followed the invasion, and which was not planned for or mitigated, was the first of the Bush administration’s great blunders. But the second part of this one-two punch ensuring the failure of the occupation was its subsequent ham-handed attempt to restore order, in the person of L. Paul Bremer, Coalition Provisional Authority administrator. Bremer was dispatched to oversee reconstruction and ended up ruling Iraq like a dictator for months, repeatedly preventing Iraqis from holding free elections because he feared the government they would elect would not be to George W. Bush’s liking. In the meantime, reconstruction was bungled and billions of dollars were squandered by Bremer’s untrained, unqualified political appointees (most of whom were chosen in preference to experienced diplomats because of their conservative political bona fides). The failure to restore even basic services like electricity for months on end cemented most Iraqis’ view of the U.S. as arrogant, incompetent occupiers.

All of these blunders and many others can be laid squarely at the feet of the Bush administration. The highly placed neoconservatives who ruled the White House had grandiose visions of rebuilding Iraq in their own image, as a secular, pro-American democracy. But their plans were conceived in dangerous ignorance of the actual political conditions in Iraq, coupled with hopelessly naive fantasies of how the Iraqis would eagerly welcome us (summed up by Dick Cheney’s comment that he expected them to greet American soldiers as “liberators”). The level of ignorance was astonishing: as recently as two months before the invasion, Galbraith recounts, President Bush not only did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shi’ites, but did not know what those words even meant. He was unaware that there were multiple sects within Islam. Similarly, Bremer was given only two weeks to prepare for overseeing Iraq, whereas even routine ambassadorial assignments usually involve months of study and preparation. Of such culpably willful ignorance were the seeds of subsequent failure planted.

Today, Iraq is a bloody patchwork of fiefdoms, with Sunni-Shi’ite civil war raging in the streets and a gridlocked government unable to agree on many fundamental aspects of how power will be shared. Ironically, the biggest beneficiary has been Iran, which for twenty years trained and funded the Shi’ite politicians who now hold the majority in Iraq’s government and are steadily moving the country toward an Iranian-style theocracy. For all Bush’s bellicose rhetoric about the “axis of evil”, he has succeeded only in substantially empowering the one member of that group that probably poses America the greatest direct threat.

Galbraith meticulously details all this and more. And yet, in a way, his book is truly fair and balanced. Bizarre though it sounds, even to me, his book has made me aware of the good which the invasion of Iraq has accomplished.

I’m not speaking of absurdly trumpeted reports about how many schools we have painted, nor about how Baghdad’s security has improved because powerful American senators now need only a hundred armed guards and five attack helicopters to stroll through it. No, I’m speaking of Iraq’s oft-forgotten third ethnic group, the Kurds.

The Kurds are the largest single ethnic group in the world with aspirations of creating their own state, which after reading Galbraith’s passionate account (he is a close personal friend of many leading Kurds, including Iraq’s current president, Jalal Talabani), I strongly believe they deserve. The Kurds have been denied their own state since World War I, and have suffered brutally at the hands of many rulers - especially Saddam Hussein, who initiated the genocidal Anfal campaign against them that made extensive use of poison gas. (Galbraith personally played a decisive role in bringing Hussein’s atrocities against the Kurds to light in the 1980s.) They have been repeatedly betrayed by many Western leaders, including both Ronald Reagan, who knew of but overlooked Hussein’s atrocities because at the time he was our ally in the Iran-Iraq war, and George W. Bush Sr., who promised American aid to the Kurds if they would rise up to overthrow Saddam and then failed to deliver, leaving them to be slaughtered by Saddam in retaliation. Even before the war the Kurds were independent in all but name, thanks to the protection of the American no-fly zone. But since the war concluded, they have made little effort to keep up even a pretense of being part of Iraq, and now rule their own territory in apparent peace and security far removed from the chaos prevailing in the rest of the country.

More so, Galbraith’s book convinced me - perhaps unintentionally - that the American invasion did not have to be a disaster. Despite the lies about Iraqi WMD put forth to scare Americans into supporting war, the Bush administration could have succeeded in the aftermath, if only they had planned for it with some marginal degree of realism. They could have rebuilt Iraq, probably not into the pro-American secular client state the neocons wanted, but perhaps a stable and peaceful state governed by power-sharing agreements similar to the ones enacted in Kosovo and Northern Ireland. Galbraith identifies several key points where an image of American competence could have set Iraq on this course, most notably in the first few days after Baghdad’s fall, when the failure to quickly provide security permitted the city to dissolve into a chaos of looting. If we had instead acted swiftly to preserve order and maintain Iraq’s existing government as much as possible, this war might have had a very different conclusion. In truth, it was the Bush administration’s hubris, its incurious and self-satisfied faith in the most wildly optimistic scenarios, that led them to plan for no other outcome and ultimately resulted in the bloody, costly occupation in which we have now become enmeshed.

In its closing chapters, The End of Iraq makes the case that partition of Iraq is now the only feasible option. In truth, I got the strong impression that it was inevitable all along, and that the American invasion only accelerated it. Iraq has never been a unified country with a national identity, such as Japan and Germany were. From the beginning, it was a state created on paper by far-removed imperialists, who drew its boundaries without regard for the mutually hostile and distrustful religious and ethnic groups they had penned in together. Only the ruthless use of force by Saddam Hussein and his predecessors held Iraq together this long. It is into this quagmire, fueled by hundreds of years of rivalry and enmities going back for generations, that America has unwittingly stepped. By pulling out now, we will substantially weaken our position in the region, but that damage was done from the beginning and staying would only make things even worse. The sooner we come to terms with the reality of the situation in Iraq and cast aside the ludicrous dreams of empire which the neocons cling to even now, the sooner we can begin crafting a solution that will prevent the senseless loss of more American and Iraqi lives and that may actually work in the long run.

From Alec Baldwin at Huffpo: 

Let’s chat about how the Army exploits economically deprived minorities and offers them careers in the military. Cash, clothes, a car. (Don’t hold your breath for that armor plating, though.) Some of these men have criminal records, which the Army, in order to meet recruitment numbers, has chosen to increasingly overlook. The Army is pitched as a chance to start your life over. To do something meaningful. To be somebody. To be a part of something where guns and aggression and codes of honor are taken out of the illegal gang arena and shifted over to “serving the American people.”

Don’t get me wrong. We need an army. Sometimes, we need to fight to uphold what we believe . . .

We’re all glad that the British sailors are back home.  Anyone following this story knows that these sailors were treated graciously by their Iranian captors.  Nonetheless, while in captivity, the British sailors admitted that they had been trespassing in Iranian waters when whey were apprehended.

But notice some of the things that have been said about the confessions of the British sailors in this piece by the Associated Press:

None of the sailors and marines freed by Iran will be punished for making apologies to the Iranians . . . The ministry said officials would examine the circumstances in which some of the 15 sailors and marines appeared in videos on Iranian state television offering regrets for entering Iran’s territorial waters, while Britain’s government has insisted they were in Iraqi waters.

Although experts said the broadcast admissions were almost surely made under duress, many British newspapers lashed out at the crew and the country’s military.

“Those were transparently cooked-up confessions. It would be wrong to criticize those people, and besides they were not betraying anything to put anyone at risk,” he said.

The consensus thus seems to be that even when the people taken captive are treated very well they can feel enough duress to confess to things that are false. 

Now let’s shift gears. Compare the above confessions to the confessions conducted through torture conducted by the United States. See here and