Send a letter to the President about Iran

Please join me in signing a letter to President Bush opposing a war with Iran. This can be done at StopWarOnIran.org

You can use the letter that they have written or you can write your own letter, or you canduse their letter as an outling and edit it to suit yourself as I have done.

This is a small thing that only takes a little time but records your voice as a voice against the madman in the White House.

Thanks, Gregory

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Rice, Secretary of Defense Gates, U.N. Secretary-General Ki-moon, Congressional Leaders and media representatives:

You are taking our great nation down the path to war again without the least shred of evidence for your outlandish claims against Iran.

You have seeded the media with false reports of an alleged nuclear threat posed by Iran. You have misled people with your presumed need for the U.S. to take military action. These reports recall your lies about the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" issued before the war on Iraq.

In the lead up to the illegal invasion of Iraq, Mr. President, you and your Administration asserted that Iraq possessed massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and that it was capable of launching an attack - nuclear, chemical and biological - on the U.S. within 45 minutes.
Mr. President, you said that the U.S. had to attack immediately, and could not "wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

You lied to the American people then about Iraq, and you are doing it again about Iran.

Iran is not a threat to any US interests. Iran has not invaded any other country in over 200 years. I wish I could say the same about my country. I wish I could say that my country never overthrew the legitimate government of Iran and installed a "royal" dictator on a throne against every true value of American democracy.

I add my voice to oppose a new war in the Middle East. I urge an immediate end to your campaign of sanctions, hostility, and falsehood against the people of Iran. I oppose any new U.S. aggression against Iran. Iran can be a good partner in the world if we only treat them with respect and honesty. The USA needs funds for human needs, not for endless war against fake enemies.

Sincerely,

Votes and Vetos

Portside Tidbits
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007
From: Gregory Wonderwheel
Subject: Votes and Vetos.

A veto by any other name is just as effective. The
Democrats are using a double standard when is comes to
impeachement of Bush and funding the war on Iraq. When
it comes to impeachment, the Dems are vetoing putting
the measure forward because they say they don't have
the votes to pass it. Yet when it comes to funding the
war they put if forward becasue they say they don't
have the votes to override a veto.

In practice, the Congress doesn't have to worry about
the presidential veto if they exercise their "veto" of
the funding bill in the same way that they veto
impeachment. The President's funding bills are
effectively "vetoed" if Congress just doesn't let any
funding measures out of committee. While the Democrats
can't vote to override a veto, they should be able to
not vote at all as long as funds are for continuing the
war and thus their veto defunds the war.

For (small d) democrats Impeachment Is the Issue of the Day

Why should you care? Well, because in a democracy the People are sovereign. Think about that. It means that there is no king, queen, nobility, or anyone who has a greater authority to say what kind of nation we will be. You are as equally in control of this country as any other voter. Sure your control is "diluted" in ratio to the number of voters, but it is still your control.

It is the apathy and disorganized mental condition that propaganda creates that allows people like George Bush and Nancy Pelosi to take your sovereign control from you, because you are isolated in your thinking processes. We are only one election away from a change in any direction! If overnight, a majority got tuned-in to the same thought waves and voted for real change, real honesty, real compassion, then the country would change. But fear prevents it, and the fear is created by the propaganda system that is maintained and supported by both the Republicans and the Democratic parties.

The Democratic leadership, like Pelosi, need to be spanked. It is not that they "don't get it." They get it quite nicely, thank you. They get it that they can keep in power by distraction, by pretense, so they never have to deliver the goods. If they keep the big bad Republicans as the fall guy then they can keep the show going. And the political show they perform is no more real than professional wrestling. Sure they get real bruises, but it is all choreographed with the gentleman's agreement that at the end of the day the system won't be changed so that the program can continue next week.

Here is a hopeful sign that the grassroots are awakening. Dave Lindorff in his Counterpunch column titled "Excuse Us, Nancy Pelosi" passed along a letter from Kathy Ember, a Democratic Committee member in Pennsylvania, and president of the Kutztown Democratic Club.

I am the president of a very active grassroots Democratic club just outside Philadelphia in PA. Recently, I got an email from Nancy Pelosi, asking all of us to help build the grassroots.

EXCUSE me Nancy, but we have been working our butts off out here for years trying to do just that. WE are the ones that put that Democrats back in power in Congress. We've been there for you, but you have let us down by not holding the current administration responsible for their crimes.

Not only are you losing us...you are making it impossible for us to "build the grassroots". Do you know how people look at you now when you ask them to join the Democrats? They laugh in your face. Why, they want to know, should we join or support a party that has done nothing toward getting out of Iraq or impeaching this president?

I am in contact with other Democratic clubs across PA. Some have recently changed the word "Democrats" in their name to a lower case "d". Others have abandoned their association with the Democrats altogether and have formed instead "citizen action groups."

When will the Democrats in Washington wake up and realize that it's not impeachment that will hurt the party...it is the lack of it.

That's clear enough. But the Democratic leadership still believes it can ride the tiger's tail and not be accountable to the grassroots.

Look at the numbers. After being elected in sea change of party control, the Democratic leadership has now steered Congress into an historically low approval rating!

August 21, 2007
Congress Approval Rating Matches Historical Low
Just 18% approve of job Congress is doing

by Jeffrey M. Jones

GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- A new Gallup Poll finds Congress' approval rating the lowest it has been since Gallup first tracked public opinion of Congress with this measure in 1974. Just 18% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, while 76% disapprove, according to the August 13-16, 2007, Gallup Poll.

We have to assume the Democratic Party leadership is not "stupid." So why don't they "seem" to care? As I see it, their tunnel vision fixation on maintaining the two-party power sharing system with the Republicans means that they will not dare to do anything that would rock the structural boat. Of course, as the Clinton impeachment showed, the Republicans have no such qualms when it comes to exercising power. In fact the Republicans relish in such power plays because they know that as long as they can maintain that they are acting on their principles, that their base won't abandon them. They know that like a battered wife, the Democrats are too frightened to pull the plug on the two-party marriage of convenience. The Democrats on the other hand do not have any clear "principles" and would not assert them if they did because to do so would threaten the marriage.

So why should you care? Because if you don't care you are letting your country be ruled by people who don't care about your freedom. When the principle of the rule of law becomes a mere political expedient, then every other principle is a mere sham. If you don't care, then you are supporting the two-party dictatorship that has usurped the sovereignty of the people every bit as much as the one-party dictatorships do. Because in the end, while the two-party dictatorship allows for more "play" or "slack" in the totalitarian control, it maintains the limits of that control just as rigorously.

So when the grassroots can be manipulated to put the Democrats into majority in Congress, still the Democrats will do nothing to support the principles of democracy held by the grassroots if it looks like to do so would rock the boat of political bureaucracy. To say it another way, the Clinton impeachment achieved its purpose to hamstring Clinton without hamstringing the money behind the presidency and Congress. If Bush were to be impeached, the situation is different, because that would threaten the money behind the Congress and the presidency. It would threaten the war profits, the oil profits, and the political profits that profit the Democrats just as much as the Republicans.

Now let's look at how this factors into the excuses that John Conyers says publicly. I believe that Conyers, if left to decide for himself, would put impeachment on the table, but I also believe that Conyers is,if nothing else, a loyal person and his loyalty extends directly to the Democratic Party leadership who has stated clearly that impeachment is off the table. In that situation, Conyers won't contradict Pelosi, and instead he provides her with excuses.

So what does Conyers say? In his recent interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, Conyers offers up once again the usual lame excuses.

We also are trying to make sure that we don’t bring resolutions or hearings that would put the election in jeopardy.

This is their key strategy point. They actually argue that the Democrats have a better chance in the 2008 elections if they do not pursue impeachment. I think Ember's letter and the Gallup Poll approval ratings demonstrate how hollow that strategy is.

We could close down the Congress -- I have been in more impeachment hearings than anybody in the House or the Senate. And our legislative attempts to reverse so many things would come to a stop.

Well, actually, until the Iraq war is closed down, the Congress too should be closed down for other business. That's not hyperbole. We are in the midst of perpetrating an ongoing criminal enterprise in Iraq. It is bad enough that we are stealing their resources and high jacking their vehicle of democratic self-determination, but we, by our presence as a hostile invading and occupying force, are the primary proximate cause of the thousands of thousands of civilian deaths, whether or not our troops are pulling the trigger.

Instead of reversing the war, the Democrats have continued to fund the war. Instead of reversing the Patriot Act Democrats have supported continuing unAmerican surveillance of citizens. Instead of reversing the flight of business, Democrats have supported enhanced trade with China. The list goes on and on. One wonders what the Democrats are crowing about when they claim to have reversed anything?

AMY GOODMAN: Why would impeachment hearings put the election in jeopardy?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, because unless I’ve got the Constitution in one hand and a calculator in the other, so I’ve got any kind of hearings on removing both the President and the Vice President -- or putting it in reverse, remove the Vice President and then the President -- within the months remaining, would require 218 votes in the House of Representatives. That’s my calculator giving me this information. And then, in the Senate we need two-thirds to convict. Notwithstanding all of my progressive friends that would love to see me start impeachment hearings, those votes I do not think exist in the House of Representatives or in the US Senate.

This question about counting votes prior to impeachment investigation has not been clarified by Conyers. Is he actually talking about the 218 votes necessary to simply refer the matter of impeachment to his committee or is he talking about the 218 votes needed to adopt articles of impeachment after they might be recommended by the committee?

If the latter then it is a red herring at best, because then Conyers is pretending that the Nixon precedent has no educational value. Impeachment proceedings led to Nixon's resignation without the House ever voting on the bill of impeachment. Why? Because it was the hearings themselves that became convincing. More recently, we have seen Rove and Gonzales resign when the heat of investigations got too close. Impeachment hearings would shed light on the facts and create the opportunity for people to see the truth and identify why impeachment is warranted.

In our system of impeachment, the impeachment investigation is not supposed to start out with 218 votes in favor of impeachment itself. If Conyers is using this line of "not having 218 votes" as not having 218 votes in favor of impeachment, then Conyers is deliberately misleading the American people about the fundamental purpose of impeachment hearings which are to hear and decide whether to recommend or dismiss any action on impeachment to the full House.

The committee hearings should begin when there is simply enough probable cause to believe the president might have committed "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Under usual House Practice (see Section 6, page 540):

In most cases, impeachment proceedings in the House have been initiated either by introducing resolutions of impeachment by placing them in the hopper, or by offering charges in a resolution on the floor of the House under a question of constitutional privilege. Deschler Ch.14 Sec.5.

The House website on how bills work describes the usual hopper method in this way:

Introduction and Referral to Committee

Any Member in the House of Representatives may introduce a bill at any time while the House is in session by simply placing it in the "hopper" provided for the purpose at the side of the Clerk's desk in the House Chamber. The sponsor's signature must appear on the bill. A public bill may have an unlimited number of co-sponsoring Members. The bill is assigned its legislative number by the Clerk and referred to the appropriate committee by the Speaker, with the assistance of the Parliamentarian. (Emphasis added)

So, Putting those two sources together, it looks like impeachment would need to get an initial 218 votes for referral to committee only if the hopper method was not used. According to the House website, the hopper method is a routine referral to committee, if the Speaker approves the referral.

It appears that Speaker Pelosi is personally preventing the usual hopper method for referral to committee and that is what she means by "not on the table." Why has Conyers or the reporters interviewing him not made this clear? Thus it requires a resolution under constitutional privilege and 218 votes to refer impeachment to the committee only in order to get around Speaker Pelosi's apparent block at the hopper.

To get past Pelosi's block, the question is not about 218 votes to impeach, but about 218 votes to refer to committee for hearings on a recommendation or dismissal of impeachment charges. Any Representative who doesn't vote to refer the question to the committee is voting against impeachment even before the committee is allowed to put evidence on the record. That is a very hard vote to justify, because it is saying there should be no impeachment no matter what evidence is presented or what he has done. For example, the vote to refer to committee the impeachment charges against Nixon was 410 to 4. But after the hearings and the evidence only 6 of the committee's 17 Republicans voted to recommend articles of impeachment to the full House. Thus 11 Republicans still voted against. But only 4 voted against referral. So that shows that even though they were against impeachment when it mattered, they wouldn't vote against impeachment merely being referred to committee.

A representative who voted against even considering the evidence would be voting against a fair process and a hearing on the charges, not against articles of impeachment themselves. If that's the way they want to vote, then let them try to justify that to their constituents. Which way would Conyers and Pelosi vote?

If the chips were down and 218 would not support even a referral to committee, then those who didn't would really have their reelections put into jeopardy by impeachment becoming the central issue of their reelection. That is presumably the real reason that Pelosi doesn't want to put even the referral vote to the House.

After the evidence is in, a Representative can say he or she has reviewed the evidence and does or doesn't believe impeachment is warranted. But realistically, before even one item of evidence is considered, how many Representatives are not going to vote simply to refer the matter to the committee? As long as the Democratic leadership prevents the vote then we, the People, will never know. We will not have the Representative's vote as a matter of public record, no matter what Conyers' calculator is secretly whispering in his ear.

The committee hearings develop the evidence that should lead to the votes, not the other way around. After referral to the Judiciary Committee, the committee votes on the articles first, and then presents them to the full House. It is the presentation to the Judiciary Committee that organizes the evidence and forms the basis for writing the specific language for the articles of impeachment that then require a majority vote of the committee in order to put them before the full House.

By claiming to require 218 votes before he even allows the vote to refer to committee to be considered, Conyers is acting to close off an investigation before it can be started. It is not hard to think of a law enforcement metaphor that prevents an investigation. For example this is like the policemen who believes no jury would convict the perpetrator because he is an important member of the community, so the cop doesn't investigate and never hands over a report to the DA. If a majority of the House of Representatives is so bold as to vote against the basic idea of having a committee review whether there is enough evidence for impeachment or not, then the People need to know their names.

It appears that Conyers and the Democratic Party leadership are preventing a vote even on referral to committee in order to allow those who are against even considering impeachment from being exposed to public scrutiny and accountability.

If after the presentation of the evidence, there are not 218 votes to pass a bill of Impeachment to the Senate, then the Constitution has done its job, i.e., the prosecutor has reviewed the evidence and found it wanting. But until hearings are done and an actual bill containing articles of impeachment is up for a vote before the House, constituents throughout the nation just do not have the basis or avenue for lobbying their individual Representatives to vote for or against impeachment.

The Democrats and Conyers have established a shell game of excuses. Conyers is standing in the way of the voters and preventing us from weighing in on impeachment through our representatives by keeping impeachment off the table so our representatives can rebuff us by saying Conyers won't let it get on the table. Until there is a vote, each representative can hide behind the screen of obscurity. If there are not 218 Representatives who would even vote to refer impeachment to the Judiciary Committee, then that would end the matter quickly, the People would know who they are, and the People could decide if they should be reelected in 2008.

AMY GOODMAN: What would be the reasons you would list for impeachment, if you weren’t holding your calculator, just holding the Constitution?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Oh, OK. Well, to me, we can accomplish probably as much as we would need to to make the record clear that there has been a great deal of violation of the sworn oath of office, abuses of power, through the hearings and inquiries that we can conduct. But it isn’t that -- and no one has ever heard me suggest that we don’t think that there is conduct that could be proven to be impeachable.

But when Ron Dellums and Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug and William Fitts Ryan of New York, when we -- Parren Mitchell -- when we introduced an impeachment resolution, the first one against a sitting president in over seventy-five years, when Richard Nixon was being investigated, it was at the beginning of his term. And although he had been overwhelmingly reelected, there was time for us to have the hearing. This -- the timing of an administration which will go down in history as probably one of the most disappointing, there isn’t the time here for it.

So, why doesn't Conyers remember that Sam Ervin also didn't want to investigate Nixon until he was forced by public pressure? If it took public pressure on Ervin it will take public pressure on Conyers as well.

Now we see Conyers playing the card of desperation by saying, "There isn’t the time here for it." Is that a hoot or what? Of course there is time. And of course he is doing everything in his power to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy by his own delaying tactics. I call this playing a desperation card because it is so lacking in substance. It is nothing more than B.S., i.e.,blowing smoke.

Why isn't there time? According to the History Place article on Nixon's impeachment, Sen. Sam Ervin began the Watergate investigation in February of 1973 for the purpose of investigating all of the events surrounding Watergate and other allegations of political spying and sabotage After a nearly year-long court battle over the release of Nixon's tapes, the three articles of impeachment against Nixon were approved by the House judiciary committee on the three days of July 27, 29, and 30, 1974. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. Thus, impeachment achieved its purpose from the beginning of the investigation to resignation in 18 months. There is no foreseeable reason for such a protracted delay of Bush's impeachment investigation in the courts. All the evidence against Bush is already in the public domain. It merely needs to be presented at a judiciary committee in an organized fashion to create the record. There are 17 months left in Bush's presidency and with no need for an original investigation like Watergate to occur we have plenty enough time.

In fact there was no preliminary investigation conducted by the House in Clinton's impeachment. According to the History Place entry on Clinton's impeachment, impeachment proceedings were initiated on October 8, 1998. The House and the Judiciary Committee did not need to conduct original investigations itself and instead relied upon testimony presented at the committee hearings. The Judiciary Committee sent a list of 81 questions to Clinton for him to either admit or deny under oath, and his responses then became the basis for one of the articles of impeachment. The committee voted on articles of impeachment on December 11, 1998, and upon the passage of H. Res. 611, Clinton was impeached on December 19, 1998, by the full House of Representatives. And the Senate trial lasted from January 7, 1999, until February 12, 1999. Thus, the impeachment and trial of Clinton took only four months. We have that much time.

There are books already published with the allegations of Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors. It would only take a relatively short time to present the case for impeachment by the appropriate witnesses. It should take only three or at most four months for the House to vote on articles of impeachment, but even if it took nine months, there would still be enough time for a Senate trial and impeachment would be worth it.

There is also the question of whether or not impeachment would be made moot by the end of Bush's term. In other words, the Constitution may allow impeachment of a president even after he has left office. Certainly it is arguable that if impeachment proceedings are begun while the president is in office, because Article I Section 3 of the Constitution provides that judgement may extend to "disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of Honor, Trust or Profit under the United States" that an impeachment is not made moot simply by the president leaving office, because the judgement disqualifying from future office would still be an effective punishment. I would argue that leaving office would make impeachment moot only if removal from office were the only judgement available. [This is an interesting Constitutional question that I haven't researched yet. If anyone knows references to this question please email me.]

And besides, even if the Republicans could delay a vote on impeachment until January 2009 and that would make impeachment constitutionally moot, impeachment proceedings would still have been the right thing to do and in the name of upholding the rule of law. Conyers acts like he doesn't understand that the rule of law is an even more important legacy than whether or not Bush is able to run out the clock. By putting impeachment on the table now, Conyers would be saying that no matter how close to the end of a term a president is, he or she can't escape the checks and balances of our Constitutional democracy. However, by refusing to allow impeachment proceedings to go forward, it is Conyers who is preventing justice and it is Conyers who is thumbing his nose at our Constitutional system of protections. It is Conyers who is letting a criminal president get away with murder. It is Conyers who is establishing the precedent that a president doesn't have to worry in the least about committing high crimes and misdemeanors if he is near the end of his term.

If the People's sovereignty is not upheld at the very minimum by at least having hearing of the impeachment charges against George Bush, who is arguably the worst criminal president in our history, then Conyers and the Democratic Party are the one's who should be held responsible and accountable for aiding and abetting Bush's crimes. Not only that, they will be laying the foundation for the future crimes of future presidents even yet to be born.

The Lessons of History: Juan Cole and George Bush

Juan Cole's recent essay "Pitching the Imperial Republic - Bonaparte and Bush on Deck" published at Tom's Dispatch once again shows why Cole is our most insightful Middle East observer. (This same essay is also available in The Nation retitled as "Bush's Napoleonic Folly".) Using his research for his new book Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East he compares President Bush to Napoleon and the relevance and lessons of Napoleon’s expedition in Egypt to our current American occupation of Iraq.

THIS IS A MUST READ for anyone who accepts that history has any value. Otherwise, you might just as well forget all about history and accept the propaganda that Bush feeds you.

Here are a couple excerpts from this marvelous comparison of the two republican tyrants.

My own work on Bonaparte's lost year in Egypt began in the mid-1990s, and I had completed about half of Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East before September 11, 2001. I had no way of knowing then that a book on such a distant, scholarly subject would prove an allegory for Bush's Iraq War. Nor did I guess that the United States would give old-style colonialism in the Middle East one last try, despite clear signs that the formerly colonized would no longer put up with such acts and had, in the years since World War II, gained the means to resist them.

Both men were convinced that their invasions were announcing new epochs in human history. Of the military vassals of the Ottoman Empire who then ruled Egypt, Bonaparte predicted: "The Mameluke Beys who favor exclusively English commerce, whose extortions oppress our merchants, and who tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile, a few days after our arrival will no longer exist."

Bonaparte's laundry list of grievances about them consisted of three charges. First, the beys were, in essence, enablers of France's primary enemy at that time, the British monarchy which sought to strangle the young French republic in its cradle. Second, the rulers of Egypt were damaging France's own commerce by extorting taxes and bribes from its merchants in Cairo and Alexandria. Third, the Mamluks ruled tyrannically, having never been elected, and oppressed their subjects whom Bonaparte intended to liberate.

This holy trinity of justifications for imperialism -- that the targeted state is collaborating with an enemy of the republic, is endangering the positive interests of the nation, and lacks legitimacy because its rule is despotic -- would all be trotted out over the subsequent two centuries by a succession of European and American leaders whenever they wanted to go on the attack. One implication of these familiar rhetorical turns of phrase has all along been that democracies have a license to invade any country they please, assuming it has the misfortune to have an authoritarian regime.

Liberty as Tyranny

For a democracy to conduct a brutal military occupation against another country in the name of liberty seems, on the face of it, too contradictory to elicit more than hoots of derision at the hypocrisy of it all. Yet, the militant republic, ready to launch aggressive war in the name of "democracy," is everywhere in modern history, despite the myth that democracies do not typically wage wars of aggression.

Here's a great example of the "liberation" of those who oppose "liberation". How does one spell "Falluja"? My how we have evolved! Resistance fighters were then called half-savage barbarians and now we call them terrorists.

"Heads Must Roll"

In both eighteenth century Egypt and twenty-first century Iraq, the dreary reality on the ground stood as a reproach to, if not a wicked satire upon, these high-minded pronouncements. The French landed at the port of Alexandria on July 1, 1798. Two and a half weeks later, as the French army advanced along the Nile toward Cairo, a unit of Gen. Jean Reynier's division met opposition from 1,800 villagers, many armed with muskets. Sgt. Charles Francois recalled a typical scene. After scaling the village walls and "firing into those crowds," killing "about 900 men," the French confiscated the villagers' livestock -- "camels, donkeys, horses, eggs, cows, sheep" -- then "finished burning the rest of the houses, or rather the huts, so as to provide a terrible object lesson to these half-savage and barbarous people."

Cole's history clearly shows that Bush (and those in Congress who continue to vote to fund the Iraq invasion and occupation) have not learned a thing from history. It can't even be said that Bush and his posse had learned from Napoleon's mistakes and crafted a new and improved invasion of liberation. No, instead from the phony rhetoric of "liberation" to the bombing of civilian areas of resistance Bush has merely repeated the pattern of Napoleon's delusions and depredations.

It is interesting to compare Cole's trenchant historical comparisons with Bush's feeble attempt to evoke history in his recent Asia speech. Most of the news reports about Bush's speech focused on his comparison to Vietnam and his claim that to pull out of Iraq now would result in disaster for the Iraqis and their neighbors as the pull-out from Vietnam did for the Vietnamese and Cambodians. Bush of course ignored the facts by conveniently forgetting the role of the US bombing in Cambodia in the rise of Pol Pot. Bush also conveniently forgot that the original partition of Vietnam by foreign powers was a non-starter and that there would be no end to the Vietnam conflict until there was a fair vote on reunification, a vote which the USA had promised Ho Chi Minh and then reneged on. Likewise today, the major news media ignore that the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces was a non-starter in terms of "nation building" and that until the illegally ensconced foreign troops are removed from Iraq that there can be no resolution to the creation of a civil government.

In the virtually unreported other portions of Bush's Asia speech Bush made reference to the continued occupation of Japan by US troops now going on for over 50 years. (Yes, we are still occupying Japan.) Mark Shields, the "liberal" analyst on PBS's The News Hour, pointed out two important differences: first, in the over 50 years of occupation of Japan not a single US soldier has been assassinated by a resistor to the occupation, and second, and most important in my view, during the reconstruction of Japan not a single reconstruction contract went to an American corporation. Thus, even when Japan provided an historical example of an occupation that succeeded, this most fundamental variable (of how to rebuild a nation by giving the contracts for reconstruction to the nationals) was ignored by Bush in favor of making his friends, cronies, and political contributors rich with US tax dollars. This is how the modern republicans and Republicans plunder the treasury.

If you care to learn from history don't believe George Bush, just read Juan Cole.

The Democrats'. Disgrace

The President has commuted the sentence of convict Scooter Libby so that Libby won't have to do the prison time he was sentenced to do. The Democrats are crying "Discrace!", but it is the Democrats who bear the responsibility for this most recent discrace.

Since the Democrats have refused to charge Bush with his crimes of starting wars based on lies, why shouldn't the criminal Bush commute the sentence of his convict henchmen? The Democrats have let it be known that Bush can do what he wants and the most they will do is whine about it. So what does he care whether the Democrats conplain? If the Democrats had come into office in January 2007 with a bill of impeachment Bush would never have felt he could interfere with Libby's sentence. It is the Democrats' disgrace that they have let Bush have a free pass and not impeached him. This is what they get for it.

The War IS Lost

Harry Reid, US Senate majority leader, is right: the War in Iraq is lost.

"This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week."

He's late in coming to the realization, but in this case, better late than never. Also the War in Afghanistan is lost. And based on its flawed conception from the beginning, Bush's whole phony "War on Terrorism" was lost from day one.

Bush's inchoate wars on the world are so bizarre that they can only be grasped under the category of truth is stranger than fiction.

Today's example of the lost war in Iraq is the BBC story Bombs hit Baghdad police station

Two car bombs have exploded at a police station in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, killing at least 12 people and wounding about 82 others, police say.
The attack took place in the southern, mainly Shia neighbourhood of Bayaa.

The first bomber sped through a checkpoint before exploding his car in front of the station, the other detonated his car at the checkpoint.

So much for Bush's "surge" strategy which is all public relations and no reality check. Yet Bush has the continuing unmitigated insanity to state in the face of the facts that his surge is "meeting expectations". Whose, expectations? It must be the private expectations of his perverted fantasy world, because it is not the expectations he has voiced to the American people that are being met.

There is no basis to believe that the surge strategy of adding 30,000 troops to a lost war is going to turn it into victory. The surge of bombings is winning.

An average of 80-90 Americans die each month. And US personnel have just had their tours extended by another three months.

But, as it has always been since the 2003 invasion, it is the Iraqis who suffer most.

No-one knows the exact figures, but at the end of another week of unspeakable, random carnage, hundreds more Iraqi families are grieving.

There is just no way that a US "surge" of any amount of troops, even 300,000, can "win" this war. Why? Because even if 500,000 troops are inserted into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will never defeat the spirit of the people of Iraq for self determination. The most that can ever be accomplished by Bush's war of occupation is to turn Iraq into a prison nation under lock down.

In fact this is exactly the US strategy, as it is building the first prison wall around the Sunni enclave of Adhamiya:

US troops in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, are building a wall around the Sunni district of Adhamiya, which is surrounded by Shia communities.
The 5km (three-mile) concrete wall is part of a strategy to "break the cycle of sectarian violence", a US military spokesman said.

At least two more walls are on the drawing board demonstrating only that the twisted imaginations of the Bush administration know no bounds.

Why the surge won't work is clearly evidenced in the occupation scenario. The police who must have the support of a sufficient number of Iraqis to be credible simple cannot establish the requisite level of credibility while they are tied to the hip of an invading and occupying army. As the story about bombs hitting the police station clearly describes:

Police stations are often targeted by insurgents who say officers are betraying the country by working alongside government and US-led forces.

The only way to take away the rationale for attacking the police is to remove the US forces from the equation.

This is not occupied Japan with an Emperor who can maintain continuity and cohesion for the people during the rebuilding process. This is not Germany, divided and occupied by four conquering armies and totally devastated and shocked by its own attack on the rest of the world with a population feeling the guilt of its hubris and defeat.

Iraqis did not attack the world. They didn't attack anyone. They have not one iota of a national sense of defeat caused by their own military adventurism that would provide the mitigating factor to accept the humiliation from the presence of an occupying army. There is no point at this stage in discussing what the US might have done to make a transition possible. The US didn't protect the government structure or the public infrastructure and, instead, allowed wide spread looting of every public facility except the Oil Ministry, including hospitals and museums. Under that scenario after May 2003 the US has had no subsequent ability to appear credible by continuing the occupation.

Today, the only realistic and moral plan is to withdraw immediately and leave the Iraqis to be allowed to settle their own affairs. The war against Hussein was won quickly, but on the other hand, by a complete lack of planning and foresight, the war of occupation against the Iraqi people was lost quickly. This war is still lost. Now we owe the Iraqis reparation funds. We do not owe them an occupying army that only prevents reconstruction and reconciliation.

ADDENDUM 4/27/07
Last night I watched "Afghanistan: The Other War" from Frontline/World, and this story clearly demonstrates why the war in Afghanistan is as lost as the war in Iraq. The program is centered about a NATO unit attempting to make friends with a local village. Everything that could go wrong goes wrong. It is a completely updated demonstration of the old army slang SNAFU ("situation normal, all f**ked up").

A Canadian NATO unit comes to the Afghan village Elbak and makes wants to "win the hearts and minds" of the people. They promise to fix 12 generators used for pumping water. Well they couldn't find or buy the parts, such as spark plugs, anywhere and only end up fixing two. Then they set up a medical treatment day and announce it in the area only to have to close the clinic early with people standing in line wating for their children to see the doctors because, as they announce, they have run out of medications.

Then a US Special Forces unit comes into the area without consulting with the NATO unit and pick up a villager as a suspected Taliban. The villages vouch for the man to the Canadian NATO unit that is there to "make friends" and ask them to get the man released, but the NATO sergeant says she has no authority with the US unit. This of course highlights the complete absurdity of having two separate commands in the same area and demonstrates the fundamental inability of the war makers to understand how to "win" a war of occupation against indigenous resistance fighters. Failing any reasonable ability to "win" they have already lost.

Another more fundamental and completely misunderstood element of the war is that the NATO unit came to the village with the goal of working with the village so the people there would "be on our side" in the war. Words fail to describe the compete idiocy of the premise. From Alexander the Great to Ghengis Khan to NATO, thousands of years of history tell the tale of a people who have watched invading armies pass through. These people are smart enough to be "on the side" of the current invading army, whether they are NATO, US Special Forces, or the Taliban. The moronic notion that fixing some generators and giving a day of medical care (even if they were successful, which they weren't) will cause a people "choose a side" is so completely beyond any historical reality check that one wonders how these people waging war were able to travel the thousands of miles to get there in the first place.

Then to top it all off, after several weeks of setting up a temporary fort outside the village, the NATO unit is told to withdraw and go elsewhere completely taking down Camp Martello as if it was never there. The narrator laments the fact that this is now going to leave the village wide open and defenseless to Taliban retaliation for having cooperated with the invading army. One of the military people says what a shame it is that the villages "brought this on themselves" completely transferring the responsibility for their impending doom to the villagers who had no say in the NATO forces coming in the first place and no say in their departure.

The war in Afghanistan is as lost as the war in Iraq because the war makers are completely clueless about what it is that they are doing there and have no workable or reasonable plan for their presence.

Reality Testing Fails at PBS

Here's a BBC bit about President Bush's recent comments at the Nato summit in Riga:

He rejected the use of "civil war" as a term to describe the fighting in Iraq, preferring to say: "The battles in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of a struggle between moderation and extremism that is unfolding across the broader Middle East."

One wonders why the fierce opposition to the term "civil war"? The Bush administration is doing everything it can to prevent the term "civil war" being given credibility. However, like it's "war on terror" in Iraq even in this war of propaganda the Bush administration is losing. The Los Angeles Times over a month ago began officially using the term civil war for the Iraq situation and this week NBC announced that it too would begin using the term civil war officially.

Last night on PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer there were four "journalists" talking about whether it is a "civil war" in Iraq. Though the foreign editor from the LA Times, Marjorie Miller, described her paper's adoption of the term and the Bush propagandist from Yale DONALD KAGAN, Professor of History, said "I don't see how it helps" to call it a "civil war", none of the four journalists, including the New Hour's reporter JEFFREY BROWN, ever bothered to even state the definition of "civil war." This clearly demonstrates the complete lack of reality testing that is evident today in the national media.

Well for those who like their reality tested by the facts, here is the definition from Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary:

civil war
One entry found for civil war.
Main Entry: civil war
Function: noun
: a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country

So DONALD KAGAN, a professor of history at Yale University, says,

"It has been very significantly Sunni against Shia, perhaps in a more cloaked form. The majority of the government is, after all, Shiite, as the majority of the country is. The Sunnis have been insurgents because they refuse to accept the fact that their minority will no longer be allowed to lord it over the majority. The first job has always been to convince the Sunnis, however we do it, that they must accept the new realities.

And then he has the audacity to say this is not a civil war. Obviously, KAGAN'S "new reality" doesn't include using language accurately to state the self-evident truths. Whether or not his simplistic description of the fighting as being between Shia and Sunni is accurate, it clearly and unambiguously meets the plain definition of civil war. Yet this professor says it does no good to call it a civil war. How could this be? How could it do no good to use the English language properly?

The answer of course is that like all propagandists, Professor KAGAN, doesn't want the language used plainly when it can be bent to his own ends, which he very clearly stated were the continuation of the Bush agenda in Iraq. KAGEN understands that if people see the fighting in Iraq for what it is as a civil war underneath an occupation, that the reason for the occupation evaporates unless we choose sides. And as we discovered in Vietnam, if we choose the wrong side we lose anyway.

As much as this segment exposed the muddleheaded propaganda of the Yale professor, I can't help but think that the whole piece by JEFFREY BROWN would have made much more sense and benefitted the public discourse to a far greater extent if he had only begun with the simple definition of civil war and measured the words of his interviewees against that conventional reality.

If we return to Pres. Bush’s quote at the top of this piece, we see that Bush does the classic bait and switch by claiming the war in Iraq is not a civil war because it is “part of a struggle between moderation and extremism that is unfolding across the broader Middle East.” Of course whether or not there are similarities in any other country between the sides fighting in Iraq is irrelevant to answering the question of whether the fighting in Iraq is “a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country.” The vast majority of deaths in Iraq are Iraqis killed by other Iraqis. That US troops are there killing Iraqis and being killed by Iraqis is only another layer of fighting which makes the occupation a political cover for the civil war.

President Bush’s continuing denial of the civil war in Iraq is like a veterinarian who can’t tell the difference between a horse and a crocodile. He can’t have much to say about how to be of help if he can’t even diagnose the species of the animal he’s dealing with. No one should believe that Bush is that stupid as to believe the propaganda is issues. The underlying problem with our democracy is that the national news media like PBS totally fails to measure the government’s propaganda against something as simple as a dictionary definition.

On another note of failed reality testing by PBS last night was the great presence of ex-President Jimmy Carter being interviewed about his new book "Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid". Here JUDY WOODRUFF, NewsHour Special Correspondent, was in the full glory of inside the beltway bias. There is a funny thing the journalists do when they interview someone like President Carter who presents a politically unorthodox view not countenanced by the opinion makers in the media. They take an adversarial position and call that being "objective." You don't see this approach when they interview people who are the purveyors of political orthodoxy with whom the publishers and editors agree.

Well, I'm happy to report that Pres. Carter gracefully put Ms. WOODRUFF in her reportorial place. Here's the exchange in which Pres. Carter politely outed WOODRUFF's bias.

JUDY WOODRUFF: President Carter, people would listen to what you're saying here, and they would read your book, and they would say, "He's putting the onus here on the Israelis." And many would return that by saying, "But wait a minute. It's the Palestinians who continue to fire rockets into Israeli land. It's the Palestinians who have kidnaped Israeli soldiers. It's the Palestinians that continue to perpetuate terrorist acts against the Israelis."

JIMMY CARTER: Sure, that's what you say, and that's the general consensus in the United States. The fact is that, when the Palestinians dug under the Israeli wall from Gaza and captured the Israeli soldier, one soldier, at that time, Israel was holding 9,200 Palestinians prisoner, including 300 children, almost 300, 293 children, some of them 12 years old, and holding almost 100 women prisoner.

And immediately, the Palestinians who took that soldier said, "We want to swap this soldier for some of our women and children." And the Israelis rejected that proposal and refused to swap at all with the Palestinians in the West Bank. That was the key to the issue.

So it's right that the Palestinians took a soldier, which they should release. But for Israel to keep 9,000 Palestinians and not release any of them is something that you don't mention in the question, and it's generally not even known in this country.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And we want to give you the opportunity to give that side of the story...

JIMMY CARTER: That's why I wrote the book.

JUDY WOODRUFF: ... as well, and that's why we're here talking to you about it.

JIMMY CARTER: I know.

WOODRUFF"S bias was again exposed in her final comments of the segment when she exited with these words:

JUDY WOODRUFF: President Jimmy Carter, with some passionately held views. We thank you very much for being with us on the NewsHour. We appreciate it.

Everyone who knows anything about reportage knows that the words "passionately held views" are code for "emotional and irrational beliefs." So, there she was getting a strong dose of reality testing from Pres. Carter, and her response was to dismiss him by saying in effect, "Well, that was nice, too bad you are irrational."

So much for the ability of PBS reporters to provide reality testing for the public. For now, we the public must gather our reality between the lines, using our own good sense to defend against the beltway propaganda presented by the government with the willing cooperation of the national media..