Gloom And Doomer

Inside Falluja, an Iraqi boy inspected rubble on Tuesday after an overnight American airstrike. (From today's NY Times)

Falluja

Brace yourself, people of Falluja, the yanks are coming to save you.

"If we're told to go, it'll be decisive," Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the commander of nearly 40,000 marines and soldiers in western and south-central Iraq, said in an interview. "The goal will be to limit the damage, limit the casualties and do it as rapidly and decisively as possible. We're not here to destroy the town. We're here to give it back."

The planned full scale assault on Falluja would have already taken place if not for the US elections. The Pentagon has determined that in order for planned January elections to have even the slightest credibility the US needs to rapidly retake several Iraqi cities so the inhabitants have at least the appearance of a chance to take part in elections.

Bringing the blessings of democracy to Fallujans is going to be bloody, extremely bloody, but hey sometimes you need to destroy a village in order to save it, right?

The comments of the marine commander above make it very clear that he will make every effort to limit both marine and civilian casualties . Who could blame him for focusing much more on protecting his own? Limiting civilian casualties is of course desirable but when entering a city of 300,000 (many fled in April but returned after an earlier assault was aborted) to remove an insurgency that is not in uniform, and is living and hiding among the populace, a blood bath is a certainty. The only way to prevent our guys from being picked off the way they have been over and over again in the last year is to lay down unambiguous rules of engagement. It is predictable that these rules will be to assume anyone you see is a hostile, in military parlance it will be a "free fire zone". Noncombatants will be wise to remain hunkered down indoors. Should they be unfortunate enough to have an upstairs neighbor fire a shot then they will find their building reduced to rubble with them in it. This is urban warfare.

Fear of political fallout when the full scale of the carnage comes out is the reason that we have not already implemented the plans. Why go forward in the first place? So Bush can fulfill his promise of holding elections in January regardless of the practicality of this timetable and he can declare victory in February and begin to bring troops home before we have a full scale mutiny in our military.

If Bush wins on Tuesday this assault will go forward. Many innocent people will be slaughtered. Bush may not actually wait until the day after the election to mount the full scale assaults. His advisors might well think that a better idea is to start the invasion on Sunday in order to try to unite the country behind its commander in chief while our men and women in uniform are in harms way. The bad news about civilian casualties can easily be withheld through election day.

Bush will be shown in profile, deep in thought and worry, the weight of the world on his shoulders as a dim light burns behind him and he stairs from a window of the White House praying for the safety of our troops, a look of firm resolve on his face. What an image! Four more years! Democratic attack ads will appear unseemly during such circumstances.

Oh, by the way, we have to do the same thing in Ramadi.

One More Week

The stakes of this election have never been higher. I am preparing myself for the nastiest final week of a presidential campaign in my lifetime. The news from Baghdad has gone from terrible to catastrophic. The economic picture is no better. Oil futures are at an all time high just as thermometers are starting to go down. Logic would seem to dictate a slam dunk for the challenger given the sorry state of the country. But the incumbent has an ace in the hole. He counts on a base of support from pro-life voters who today read about an 80 year old Chief Justice undergoing cancer treatment and a challenger who has sworn to appoint justices who will uphold Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. No amount of bad economic news, no amount of evidence of corruption in the awarding of contracts, no amount of evidence of incompetence or deceit in the conduct of the Iraq war will sway these voters. Their eyes are on the prize of a packed Supreme Court who they count on to stop babies from being murdered. Their numbers are large and their commitment to their cause so great that they have tunnel vision when it comes to Bush.

The only way they can be beaten is if the silent majority, in the words of the refreshingly moderate by comparison, Richard Nixon, oppose this disastrous administration at the ballot box.

So get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote! If we vote, we win. Then the real work to build a country where people have access to decent health care and education, so we don't have so many unwanted pregnancies in the first place, can begin.

I predict a landslide for Kerry.

John Kerry For President

The New York Times has endorsed John Kerry for president in an absolutely scorching editorial rebuke of the Bush junta. It's about time the "gray lady" woke up to the reality of this administration from hell. Good reading. I only wish the Times had questioned the build up to the Iraq war instead of acting as cheerleader for the administration when the airing of opposing viewpoints could have made a difference and saved our country from the nightmare we now find ourselves in.

Here is a teaser:

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Vote

Today, thanks to Vote By Mail in Oregon, I finally did what I have been itching to do for 2 and 1/2 years. I received my ballot in the mail today and I voted to fire George Bush, and it felt grrrreat! Only 16 days until the rest of the country can join me. I will spend much of that time convincing as many people as possible to do the same. I spoke to my Democratic House District Leader the other day and learned that we are absolutely trouncing the Republicans in new voter registrations in our district by nearly 6 to 1.

The rest of the country probably sees Oregon as very liberal but the reality is different. The city of Portland is very liberal and much of Eastern and Southern Oregon are decidedly conservative. Gore defeated Bush in Oregon in 2000 by a mere 6,765 votes. This time I predict a much greater margin for Kerry. The get out the vote effort here has been incredible, the old timers that I have talked to have never seen anything like it. House districts are broken up into many precincts, a precinct committee person (PCP) can be chosen by receiving just three votes from neighbors to fill a 3 year term. In the past many precincts have not had a PCP due to lack of interest. In fact most precincts have not had anyone in this position for years. This summer in my county alone, there were 100 new Democratic PCP's and nearly all of them are canvassing door-to-door, putting up signs, and doing everything they can to get out the vote. These folks are fired up.

I just wish that I had put more time in over the last 2 weeks because the voter registration deadline has obviously passed. The surprising thing, after getting over the initial anxiety of knocking on strangers doors, is how much fun it has been and how much many of my neighbors expressed gratitude and appreciation for what I was doing. As Howard Dean would say, "Yeeeeeaaugh!"

Naomi Klein Explains It All

Here is another highly recommended article that appeared in Harper's last month. I have long leaned toward the opinion that all military conflicts have some underlying economic basis. Nation states like corporations act in their own self-interest, or at least try to. Countries do not really go to war for altruistic reasons. In order to get people to actually fight and die they will not hesitate to cast the decision to go to war in the most noble light possible but leaders do not really send their nation's sons and daughters to die in a foreign land in order to release its inhabitants from misery. Never have, never will. Participation in a war needs to "serve" a nation's "interests". This does not mean that wars are never justified, it just means that we need to look past the propaganda used to sell a war to its underlying economic justifications. Why do I bring this up? Now that all of the original justifications for the Iraq war have been thoroughly discredited the one that Bush supporters are hanging there hat on is, "Saddam was a bad guy who was torturing and killing his own people." I will certainly agree that he was a bad guy but he had been a bad guy for a very long time and he certainly has a lot of bad guy company among the world's leaders. I am not a child and don't like to be treated like one. So why did we really go to war?

Some have said that the Iraq war is all about oil. This is way overstated, it is not just about oil, but it most certainly is about commerce. Klein's take on the neo-cons' war has the ring of truth to it for me. She lays out a very good case for how the neo-conervative's blind faith in their economic dogma led them into the disaster of Iraq.

Read this article (especially you, Phil).

Here is a little teaser:

Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most perfect and uncompromised form. A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets, previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment. Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flooded across the border, local businesses and family farms would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the country would practically rebuild itself.

Why Bush is Not a Conservative

I just read a very good article in The New Republic Online. The article is available free but you will have to register with them (relatively painless) in order to read it. It is written by a conservative, Robert George, who explains very eloquently why he cannot vote for Bush and why real "conservatives" should not vote for him. It really is one of the best criticisms I have seen yet on the Bush administration. The fact that it is written by a dyed in the wool conservative, I think, gives it more punch. I tend to think that all of the points George makes should be obvious to anyone who is paying even slight attention to what has been going on, but the habit of supporting a Republican is so strong among most self-identified conservatives that I believe they have been blinded by misplaced loyalty. In short, they think the emperor has clothes, because they cannot deal with the horribly embarrassing reality that they face.

Congratulations to George for acting like an adult. Several months ago I actually had a small amount of hope that real conservatives would stand up and save their party from re-nominating Bush, but alas they failed to lead and chose to cling to power instead. It is now quite clear that the Dems are running to the right of the Republicans, at least on matters of fiscal responsibility.

Bastards!

Read this. Is nothing sacred? It seems the other side has been ripping up voter registration cards of democrats in Nevada. Who would think anyone would do something this sleazy in Nevada?!

We need to get these stories out. Republicans across the country have taken drastic measures to rig our elections. It is no longer a few isolated stories but a clear pattern of abuse, they know that in a fair election with a large voter turnout their guy will lose. These people care about nothing but holding on to power so they are resorting to the most open kind of fraud and deception because they intend to win at any cost.

They are not patriots and they are anti-American. Backlash time! I have never been so eager to vote in my whole life.

...... Here is some past sleaze pulled by the GOP.

The Day After

As terrible as Bush has been I am seeing a silver lining in his horrible administration. Apathy seems to be dying, tens of thousands of people have registered to vote and record numbers are volunteering their time and energy to get this jerk kicked out of office.

I believe we will win, but then what? To me we need to focus this massive energy unleashed by Bush's horrendous administration to prevent a repeat of what he was able to foist on the American public. Bad times present great opportunities for the ushering in of progressive ideals, but there is a real danger that we will go back to sleep once a more benign administration takes office.

A great deal of "ink" in the blogosphere is spent attacking the terrible job our media has done. Let's do more than preach to the choir and get organized to take back the FCC. Let's pretend broadcast media is brand new and figure out how to force it to pay attention to the public interest again. The airwaves belong to all of us the same way the air does. Let's revive the Fairness doctrine (eliminated during Reagan's term), strengthen limitations on media consolidation to force corporations to spin off media outlets, lets return to rules which restricted the percentage of advertisements allowed per broadcast hour (eliminated during Reagan's term). Let's take some of the money out of elections by forcing broadcasters to grant free time to our candidates so they can present themselves and their ideas to the public.

In November we will take back our government. In January lets take back the media! The future of the Republic depends on it.

GO!

Orwell Spins In His Grave

Up is down, right is left, war is peace. As Cheney would say, "It's hard to know where to begin," in refuting the crazed Vice President's statements justifying Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Although the report says Saddam's weapons program had deteriorated since the 1991 Gulf War and did not pose a threat to the world in 2003, it also says Saddam's main goal was the removal of international sanctions.

Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on Thursday that a report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, who found no evidence that Iraq produced weapons of mass destruction after 1991, justifies rather than undermines President Bush's decision to go to war.

.........``As soon as the sanctions were lifted he had every intention of going back'' to his weapons program, Cheney said.

Cheney said the report also concluded that the United Nations' ``Fuel for Food'' program ``was totally corrupted by Saddam Hussein. There were suggestions employees of the United Nations were part of the scheme as well.''

``The suggestion is clearly there by Mr. Duelfer that Saddam had used the program in such a way that he had bought off foreign governments and was building support among them to take the sanctions down,'' Cheney said.

That being the case, there was no reason to wait to invade Iraq to give inspectors more time to do their work, Cheney said.

``The sanctions regime was coming apart at the seams,'' Cheney told a later forum in Fort Myers. ``Saddam perverted that whole thing and generated billions of dollars. ... He used the funds to corrupt others.''

So if I understand Cheney's argument it goes something like this:

Though we asserted that we knew with certainty that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and that this in itself justified invading Iraq, disarming him and removing him from power, what we really meant was that he had no WMD of any kind. Having UN inspectors prove that Saddam actually had no WMD and in fact did not even have plans for developing WMD posed a grave threat to the world since this proof may encourage the UN Security Council to lift sanctions on Iraq, therefore enabling Saddam to begin to reconstitute his WMD programs. So the real threat at the time of invasion was from our allies, not from Iraq. The great and gathering threat was that the UN would lift sanctions. We needed to invade when we did to protect us from UN actions, not an immediate Iraqi attack.

OK. That makes since. Why didn't the President just say, "At the moment Saddam is very weak and vulnerable. Due to the No-Fly zone covering 2/3rds of his country, his complete lack of WMD and air power of any kind, a weakened military unable, due to over a decade of sanctions to properly defend the country, our forces will not be met with strong organized resistance at this time. There will never be a better time to invade his country and capture or kill him. America and our allies are in no danger at this time from Saddam, but if the UN displays weakness and loosens or fully lifts sanctions off of Iraq, Saddam could use newly available resources to strengthen his defenses and therefore one day become more difficult to remove from office. So, although there is no imminent threat, now would be the optimum time for an invasion, especially given the American public's anger and confusion over our failure to protect the country on 9/11. And besides, he tried to kill my daddy."

That sounds a little different from what the President actual did say which was: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." This little gem was delivered to a terrified audience in Cincinnati by our Commander in Chief on 10/7/02. Three days later on 10/10/02 the House and Senate passed identical resolutions authorizing the use of force by the President in Iraq.

It is very instructive to go back and read that entire Cincinnati speech, available in full on the White House's website. It's almost like the Nixon tapes, the "smoking gun" from another era. The president's own words condemning him as a liar. Here is a relevant passage, though I strongly recommend reading the entire lie, I mean thing:

"Tonight I want to take a few minutes to discuss a grave threat to peace, and America's determination to lead the world in confronting that threat. The threat comes from Iraq. It arises directly from the Iraqi regime's own actions -- its history of aggression, and its drive toward an arsenal of terror. Eleven years ago, as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons, and to stop all support for terrorist groups. The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."

Notice the complete lack of qualifiers? The president did not say that we have evidence that may indicate the possession of proscribed WMD, he does not say that there was a significant amount of intelligence that refuted these claims, he says THEY HAVE IT! A man of certainty. Just what we need in a leader, right?

This a good place to address some of the rhetoric we have heard recently from both the President and VP on the above mentioned resolution authorizing the use of force.

At the time of the vote on the resolution and all the way up to the actual invasion of Iraq, Bush said again and again that this was not a vote for war. He assured us that war was not inevitable. He pledged to do everything in his power to avoid the use of force and that he only wanted UN resolutions to be enforced. Yet in the first two debates both Bush and Cheney characterized Kerry and Edwards' votes for this resolution as, "he voted for the war." Remember also that a key portion of the resolution was that it stated congressional support for efforts by the President to work through the United Nations Security Council to enforce resolutions related to Iraq. Cheney in fact has now admitted that in point of fact the Bush administration had no intention whatsoever of working through the UN and in fact were rushing to war to avoid perceived future UN actions. If Kerry and Edwards deserve any criticism it is that they were foolish enough to believe administration deceptions and outright lies.

This new report on WMD proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that in fact the President lied to the nation in the above speech. This doesn't stop the Deacon of Deception, Dick Cheney from declaring, and I am paraphrasing; "See, we were right."

Doesn't Clinton's feeble, "I guess that would depend on what your definition of is, is" defense pale in comparison to this latest linguistic acrobatics?

I need an aspirin.

Support Our Troops

Read these letters from our troops.

Read 'em and weep.

I Don't Know, I Don't Know .....

Actually I do know where I'm a gonna go when the volcano blows.

Council Crest Park in Portland is the highest point in the city and has a spectacular view, on a clear day like today, of Mt Saint Helens, Mt Ranier, Mt Adams and Mt Hood. I took some time this afternoon to wander up there and watch the mountain for an hour and a half. There were fewer people up there than I expected since there was a big steam release just two hours before I got there. The weather today is beautiful and I used the time to strike up a conversation with a cyclist named Bruce who was also stopping by on the off chance that he would witness something special. We had a great conversation about politics, volcanology, economics and the war in Iraq. Quite an enjoyable afternoon.

At one point in our conversation about Iraq and Bush's ineptitude we were interrupted by a guy, sitting on a wall two feet from us, who said he recently returned from a year and half in Iraq. He told us that we should be careful not to forget the soldiers over there while we were criticizing Bush. Bruce immediately said that one of our main reason for criticizing the war was that we were concerned about our soldiers. Bruce asked him to give us his perspective on the war. The guy said that it was impossible for him to tell if the Iraqi's felt good about our being there or not. He said one moment they were smiling at you and the next minute a 12 year old kid was pointing a rocket propelled grenade launcher at you. He defensively said that Saddam did have mass graves with 5,000 people in them and that he should have been attacked but he also felt that now that Saddam was gone we should get the hell out of there and let them "kill eachother" since we could not stop them. After discussing the situation for a few minutes the guy reluctantly admitted that Kerry was more likely to extricate us more quickly than Bush from Iraq, but he said either way, "it won't be quick".

It felt good to get so quickly from this guy wanting to rip our heads off to general agreement in a matter of minutes. If only we could all talk about our involvement in this war so calmly there would be more hope for a solution.

St. Helens didn't erupt and neither did this marine. As he left I thanked him for his service to me and my country and then looked at Bruce and said, "that was great!" He agreed.