Saddam--911, lather, rinse, repeat. We mean what we say. Resolute, strong leadership, the world is better for it.

Kerry still isn't coherent on this one--if Saddam Hussein was not a threat, John, should W have known that? Should you?

Lehrer isn't doing a horrible job, but the "pre-emptive" war just came up and it is the wrong question. There is a difference between "pre-emptive" and "preventative" war, and W has us bogged in the latter.

The Atriosians are noticing all of Bush's rapid eye blinks. Over at Kos, Tom Schaller has has the dope on the social and anthropological significance of winks and blinks, it is interesting reading. All of Bush's facial tics are out in force tonight, the smirk is being surpressed but still lurks and an odd echo of it shows up occasionally.

The Kossacks are celebrating, but I call this one a tie right now. Bush didn't have a meltdown, his verbal skills were actually adequate. O' course, all of his facts were wrong. I still want to know where his Texas twang came from, the rest of the family doesn't have it. One of the things I've noticed is that Texans who move elsewhere and want to eradicate the beast have a couple of words that they can never disguise in places like Ohio. Dan Rather and Jim Lehrer are two such Texans, so was my last ex-husband. The give away words are "school" and "I'm." I recommend that you read Molly Ivins for the Texas transliteration of those words, native Texans cannot get them right in TV news diction school. Bush pronounces them like a graduate of Phillips Andover.

He's a Crawford Homeboy Fraud.

Discussing Russia, he'll have "effective disagreement" with Vladumur Putin. WTF? What's "effective disagreement." Vladumur. What a man of the world.

I doubt that any souls were saved this evening, it was dueling stump speeches and I don't think John Kerry wins with this tactic.

Those of you in Toronto are free to circulate my resume to interested emploiyers. I haven't added the geek stuff yet. Let me know if I need to get on it.

The history tone-deaf American electorate won the debate tonight.

FUBAR

While you are watching the debate (the "foreign policy" event of the group of three) tonight, keep the following in the back of your mind:

Via Will Bunch's Campaign Extra,From: [Wall Street Journal reporter] Farnaz Fassihi
Subject: From Baghdad

America's last hope for a quick exit? The Iraqi police and National Guard
units we are spending billions of dollars to train. The cops are being
murdered by the dozens every day-over 700 to date -- and the insurgents are infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. military has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to get rid of them quietly.

I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: "Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?"

An Historian has Questions

Of God and War
By ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER Jr.

Published: September 30, 2004

Do you really believe that there are fewer terrorists plotting against America today than there were before you began the invasion of Iraq?

Your version of Christianity supports and blesses preventive war. What relation is this to the Christianity preached by the pope and by mainstream Protestants who oppose preventive war?

Since you obviously did not anticipate the troubles in Iraq, what do you plan to do to the incompetent advisers who misled you and are responsible for the deaths of more than 1,000 American G.I.'s and 20,000 Iraqi civilians? Or do you not see an accountability problem? President John F. Kennedy fired the people who led him into the Bay of Pigs. Why do you not do likewise?

I'll be blogging the debate live tonight. See Froomkin's blogger survey in tomorrow's washintonpost.com.

As American As....

Blogger Big Tino nails the Peter Angelos deal that will allow DC to get a MLB team (after more than 30 years of no baseball in the nation's capitol.) Big T says:

Here’s the next hustle. Teach Black kids to idolize the sports team owners instead of the players. You know, “Shaq studied free throws to become a better player, but Peter Angelos studied tax law and municipal finance to become a better owner.” I’m serious. This needs to be the next big thing!

Here's the deal (and it is ingenious): if he can demonstrate that the DC team is costing him any gate or season ticket sales, the other owners will make up the difference. Only OPEC (outside of Halliburton and the Carlyle Group) has managed to create such a self-protective coterie of "entrepreneurs" (thieves by any other name.) Here's a link to the WaPo headline.

I'm a fan of the game so I'll be glad to see its return. I learned my baseball in the cheap seats at Fenway, falling in love with the game's perennial heartbreakers, the Red Sox, in baseball's holiest temple ("Thwpwpwpt," Bronx Bombers...) from some of the most knowledgable fans of the game. One of my co-workers is already lobbying our office to pick up a pair of season tickets, which is just good business sense, and means that the staff can pick up a couple of games a year each. Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium will be the home of the new team until the new stadium can be built (and this in a city which already has three professional sports venues) and RFK is old fashioned, no club suites until the new thing comes around.

Angelos in Baltimore has driven his team into the ground--a technique that works in a game which has a draft, but doesn't work so well in the baseball monopoly. Given that the O's have stunk for a few seasons, Angelos's coup is that he's guaranteed himself an income with a team that stinks and will continue to stink for as long as he wants to second guess his GM and scouts. I understand that as a labor lawyer, he's a genius. As an owner, he's a business man first and a lover of the game someplace way down the list.

Here's just a guess: this post will generate more heat than anything I've written on politics.

The Truly Frightening DOJ

Operation American Repression?
An Army [ed. :non-commissioned] officer in Iraq who wrote a highly critical article on the administration's conduct of the war is being investigated for disloyalty -- if charged and convicted, he could get 20 years.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Eric Boehlert

Sept. 29, 2004 | An Army Reserve staff sergeant who last week wrote a critical analysis of the United States' prospects in Iraq now faces possible disciplinary action for disloyalty and insubordination. If charges are bought and the officer is found guilty, he could face 20 years in prison. It would be the first such disloyalty prosecution since the Vietnam War.

The essay prompted a swift response from Lorentz's commanders. In an e-mail this week to Salon, Lorentz, declining to comment further on his piece, noted, "Because of my article, I am under investigation at this time for very serious charges which carry up to a 20-year prison sentence." According to Lorentz, the investigation is looking into whether his writing constituted a disloyalty crime under both federal statute (Title 18, Section 2388, of the U.S. Code) and Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
....
Prosecutions are rare, however, says Grant Lattin, a military lawyer and retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, because members of the military "have the constitutional right to express their opinions pertaining to the issues before the public. Short of there being classified material and security issues, people can write letters about military subjects. If you look at the Army Times, you'll see letters from people on active duty complaining about this and that."
....
As for Lorentz's case, Lattin, who served as a Marine judge advocate, says it's not uncommon for commanders to threaten soldiers with legal action in order to make a point: "If they know there's an offense for a disloyal statement, I wouldn't be surprised if he said, 'Knock it off.'" Lattin doubts that in the end Lorentz will face prosecution for his writings. "After this gets to lawyers and prosecutors who think about the consequences and the First Amendment, I don't think this will go anywhere."

Lessee: the Ashcroft DOJ has prosecuted 5,000 "terrorism" cases under the Patriot Act and been unable to win one conviction, but they are ready to prosecute this soldier for telling the truth? Truly, we are ruled by idiots.

War Rooms

Digby notices something I've been talking about for a year: Bushco is at war with the CIA, always a dangerous thing for a president to do. Digby quotes Novakula:

A few hours after George W. Bush dismissed a pessimistic CIA report on Iraq as ''just guessing,'' the analyst who identified himself as its author told a private dinner last week of secret, unheeded warnings years ago about going to war in Iraq. This exchange leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other.

Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a select group of private citizens. He was not talking off the cuff. Relying on a multi-paged, single-spaced memorandum, Pillar said he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam. This was not from a CIA retiree but an active senior official. (Pillar, no covert operative, is listed openly in the Federal Staff Directory.)

For President Bush to publicly write off a CIA paper as just guessing is without precedent. For the agency to go semi-public is not only unprecedented but shocking. George Tenet's retirement as director of Central Intelligence removed the buffer between president and agency. As the new DCI, Porter Goss inherits an extraordinarily sensitive situation.

Pillar's Tuesday night presentation was conducted under what used to be called the Lindley Rule (devised by Newsweek's Ernest K. Lindley): The identity of the speaker, to whom he spoke, and the fact that he spoke at all are secret, but the substance of what he said can be reported. This dinner, however, knocks the Lindley Rule on its head. The substance was less significant than the forbidden background details.

The Bush-CIA tension escalated Sept. 15 when the New York Times reported a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was circulated in August (not July, as the newspaper reported), spelling out ''a dark assessment of Iraq'' with civil war as the ''worst case'' outcome. The NIE was prepared by Pillar, and well-placed sources believe Pillar leaked it, though he denied that at Tuesday night's dinner.

The immediate White House reaction to the NIE, from spokesman Scott McClellan, was to associate it with ''pessimists'' and ''hand-wringers.'' With Iraqi interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi at his side at the United Nations, Bush said of the CIA: ''They were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.''

A few hours later, Pillar discussed the Iraqi war in a context of increased aversion to the United States -- an attitude he said his East Asia section at the CIA was aware of three years ago and feared would be exacerbated by U.S. military intervention. When Pillar was asked why this was not made clear to the president and other higher authorities, his answer was that nobody asked -- not even Tenet.

The CIA official spokesman said Pillar's West Coast appearance was approved by his ''management team'' at Langley as part of an ongoing ''outreach'' program. However, the spokesman said, Pillar told him that the fact I knew his name meant somebody had violated the off-the-record nature of his remarks. In other words, the CIA bureaucracy wants a license to criticize the president and the former DCI without being held accountable.

I always take Novak with a huge helping of salt because of his need to celebrate himself (all these "private dinners" that he goes to, for example, are a way of saying "I'm special and you aren't," something you hear out of narcissistic personality disorder cases all the time) rather than let the news value of his reporting speak for itself, but this column stands the "stink" test. I've been hearing for a while that Bushco is at war with both CIA and the State Department (which are at war with each other, and that's probably a good thing.) This is a dangerously dysfunctional government, not a good thing with a nuclear threat growing in North Korea and Iran. This government cannot walk and chew gum. Whatever happened to W's "axis of evil," anyway?

The Madness of Crowds

With Oil Near $50 a Barrel, Gas Prices Start to Inch Up
By SIMON ROMERO

Published: September 29, 2004

HOUSTON, Sept. 28 - As the price of crude oil flirts with $50 a barrel, gasoline prices are heading up again, ending an unusual period in which gasoline prices were falling even as oil prices rose.

Crude oil and gasoline prices began moving in opposite directions in June, a conundrum that was a pleasant surprise for motorists in the peak summer holiday season.

Last week, however, gasoline prices jumped 5.1 cents a gallon, to a national average of $1.917 a gallon, still below the record average of $2.06 a gallon in May but 33 cents higher than a year ago, the Energy Department said. If crude oil prices keep going up, as many oil industry officials predict, gasoline prices are expected to keep climbing as well, as is the price of home heating fuel.

The end to the divergence between crude oil and gasoline prices was inevitable, industry analysts say, for a simple reason: supply and demand were behind the abnormal movement this summer, and are behind it now.

When adjusted for inflation, gasoline remains cheaper than during the oil shocks of the late 1970's and early 1980's; gasoline reached a record national average of about $2.80 a gallon in 1981 when the impact of inflation is taken into account.

Still, the odd price movement in the summer struck many as suspicious. Some suggested the possible political motivation of oil companies trying to influence the presidential election. "Take a look at what has been going on since about mid-June 2004,'' said a posting on one Web site, www.abovetopsecret.com. "Crude has made a steep upward turn, yet months later gas prices are still decreasing. Well, there is an election year coming up."

Iraq is a mess, gas is going up and the economy, a fragile flower is nosing south as we enter those last weeks before the election. Let's see how Karl Rove puts lipstick on this pig. Even the vast unwashed are beginning to notice that something is wrong:

Confidence of Consumers Shows a Drop

Published: September 29, 2004

By Reuters

Consumer confidence edged lower again in September after falling in August, as persistent worries about the job market weighed on sentiment, a report released yesterday said.

The Conference Board, a private forecasting group, said its index of the mood of consumers fell to 96.8, from a revised 98.7 in August. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast a rise to 99.

Consumer worries about the labor market have clouded the outlook for consumer spending, which powers two-thirds of the nation's economy. Soaring oil prices, which crimped spending in the second quarter, pose another threat to economic growth.

"Confidence in the state of the economy is diminished and within that, confidence on job prospects is the biggest factor," said Richard J. DeKaser, chief economist at the National City Corporation. "I would guess that the impact of higher oil prices is feeding through as well. The problem with energy prices is that when they rise, there's nowhere to run."

The percentage of consumers surveyed who said jobs were hard to get rose to 28.3 percent, from 26 percent, while those who viewed jobs as plentiful fell to 16.8 percent, from 18.4 percent.

"The recent declines in the index were caused primarily by a deterioration in consumers' assessment of employment conditions," said Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board's Consumer Research Center. "Soft labor market conditions have clearly taken a toll on consumer confidence."

I read the lay-off numbers yesterday. Major manufacturors and the airlines are taking a hosing.

The Scripps-Howard piece I gave you yesterday said that 25% of the voters make up their mind at the last minute (and that this is not a rational decision.) My income has been flat to negative since 1999. I'm guessing I'm not alone.

When "Optimism" Is A Lie

Growing Pessimism on Iraq
Doubts Increase Within U.S. Security Agencies

By Dana Priest and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 29, 2004; Page A01

A growing number of career professionals within national security agencies believe that the situation in Iraq is much worse, and the path to success much more tenuous, than is being expressed in public by top Bush administration officials, according to former and current government officials and assessments over the past year by intelligence officials at the CIA and the departments of State and Defense.

While President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have delivered optimistic public appraisals, officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged, officials say.

People at the CIA "are mad at the policy in Iraq because it's a disaster, and they're digging the hole deeper and deeper and deeper," said one former intelligence officer who maintains contact with CIA officials. "There's no obvious way to fix it. The best we can hope for is a semi-failed state hobbling along with terrorists and a succession of weak governments."

"Things are definitely not improving," said one U.S. government official who reads the intelligence analyses on Iraq.

"It is getting worse," agreed an Army staff officer who served in Iraq and stays in touch with comrades in Baghdad through e-mail. "It just seems there is a lot of pessimism flowing out of theater now. There are things going on that are unbelievable to me. They have infiltrators conducting attacks in the Green Zone. That was not the case a year ago."

This weekend, in a rare departure from the positive talking points used by administration spokesmen, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell acknowledged that the insurgency is strengthening and that anti-Americanism in the Middle East is increasing. "Yes, it's getting worse," he said of the insurgency on ABC's "This Week." At the same time, the U.S. commander for the Middle East, Gen. John P. Abizaid, told NBC's "Meet the Press" that "we will fight our way through the elections." Abizaid said he believes Iraq is still winnable once a new political order and the Iraqi security force is in place.

Actually, things have been sliding downhill for months, but the media hasn't told you that. The security situation in Iraq began deteriorating well over a year ago. We told you that here.

This is reason enough to turn out the incompetants who are running things. Rummy lives in W's world of spin, not the real world. And none of them have a plan to rescue the situation.

Abizaid is a political creature, not a military one. He does not reflect the views of the military professionals at the Pentagon. He's one of W's useful idiots, and I guess he doesn't have the strength of mind to understand that he will be W's Westmoreland. History will not be kind to him.

Oh, WaPo, where have you been while Iraq was sliding down hill? You've been one hell of a cheer leader for this unnecessary war from the beginning. You are not going to be held harmless from your sins.

Covert Actions and Wet Work

The Bush Administration takes heat for a CIA plan to influence Iraq's elections
By TIMOTHY J. BURGER; DOUGLAS WALLER

President Bush and interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi insisted last week that Iraq would go ahead with elections scheduled for January, despite continuing violence. But U.S. officials tell TIME that the Bush team ran into trouble with another plan involving those elections — a secret "finding" written several months ago proposing a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favored by Washington. A source says the idea was to help such candidates — whose opponents might be receiving covert backing from other countries, like Iran — but not necessarily to go so far as to rig the elections. But lawmakers from both parties raised questions about the idea when it was sent to Capitol Hill. In particular, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi "came unglued" when she learned about what a source described as a plan for "the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections." Pelosi had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue.

Rice spokesman Sean McCormack says, "I cannot in any way comment on classified matters, the existence or nonexistence of findings." But, McCormack says, "there have been and continue to be concerns about efforts by outsiders to influence the outcome of the Iraqi elections, including money flowing from Iran. This raises concerns about whether there will be a level playing field for the election. This situation has posed difficult dilemmas about what action, if any, the U.S. should take in response. In the final analysis, we have adopted a policy that we will not try to influence the outcome of the upcoming Iraqi election by covertly helping individual candidates for office." A senior U.S. official hinted that, under pressure from the Hill, the Administration scaled back its original plans. "This was a tough call. We went back and forth on it in the U.S. government. We consulted the Hill on this question ... Our embassy in Baghdad will run a number of overt programs to support the democratic electoral process," as the U.S. does elsewhere in the world.

I wish I could say that the Bush admin is unique on this, but the fact is that we've been doing it for years. If we don't use the CIA to outright install dictators, we manipulate elections. This is old news, although Bushco is more blatant about it than most (Venezuala, Equitorial Guinea, Argentina, most recently.) What IS unusual is that it got leaked, and this looks like a pretty high level leak.

Now, I have to go change out of these wet clothes and into something cozy. The remnents of Jeanne visited us this afternoon, just in time for the commute home. I know a whole lot more about tropical air masses than I want to, and the rain on the walk to the subway and home from the bus was flooding and wind-driven. This might be a hot bath kind of night. Why does reading the news like this make me feel like I need soap and hot water.

Cat Speaks

Something Bad Has Begun
* The former Cat Stevens says he hasn't changed but the U.S. has.

By Yusuf Islam, Yusuf Islam, the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, was deported to Britain last week after being refused entry into the United States.

God almighty! Is this the same planet I'd taken off from? I was devastated. The unbelievable thing is that only two months earlier, I had been having meetings in Washington with top officials from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to talk about my charity work. Even further back, one month after the attack on the World Trade Center, I was in New York meeting Peter Gabriel and Hillary Rodham Clinton at the World Economic Forum!

Had I changed that much? No. Actually, it's the indiscriminate procedure of profiling that's changed. I am a victim of an unjust and arbitrary system, hastily imposed, that serves only to belittle America's image as a defender of the civil liberties that so many dearly struggled and died for over the centuries.

Need I say that any form of terrorism or violence is the antithesis of everything I love and stand for? Anyone who knows me will attest to this. I have spent my life in the search for peace and understanding, and that was mirrored clearly in my music. Since becoming a Muslim, I have devoted my life to education, charity and helping children around the world.

Consistently I have condemned the attacks of 9/11, stating that the slaughter of innocents, the taking of hostages and coldblooded killing of women and children have nothing do with the teachings of Islam. I've openly and publicly repudiated the actions of groups that resort to such acts of inhumanity — whatever their names. Any allegations to the contrary are fabricated. The Koran equates the murder of one innocent person with the murder of all of humanity.

Ever since I embraced Islam in 1977, people have regularly tried to link me with things I have nothing to do with. Take the Salman Rushdie case as an example, or the regurgitating of the accusation that I support groups like Hamas.

I am a man of peace, and I denounce all forms of terrorism and injustice; it is simply outrageous for anyone to suggest otherwise. The fact that I have sympathy for ordinary people in the world who are suffering from occupation, tyranny, poverty or war is human and has nothing to do with politics or terrorism.

Thank God my daughter and I were relieved of our ordeal and delivered home safely. I also thank all those who prayed for me and supported me through this dark episode; I have never harbored any ill will toward people of God's great Earth anywhere — and wish the reverse was also true.

Where is the outrage? Are Americans so freaking stupid that they really think that the "everything is different" after 9-11 is that human rights and civil liberties have gone by the board? We are living in a country governed by an administration which came to power in an illegal coup, in which the routine abrogation of the rights of the innocent are not just tolerated but encouraged by the legislature (here comes Patriot II) while the media and the citizens profess no interest what so ever. I find my countrymen's indifference to all of this abhorent.

Joining the Shrill

How Dare Kerry Speak Up

The suggestion that terrorists support Sen. John F. Kerry for president is ugly, but basically silly. The suggestion that Kerry supports the terrorists is flat-out disgusting. President Bush has allowed surrogates to spread the former idea, but he himself has helped to promote the latter. Last week, Bush declared that Kerry's criticism of him and his Iraq policy "can embolden an enemy" and called Kerry "destructive" to the war on terror.

Since election day 2000 and through his first term, Bush has talked a better game of democratic values than he has played. And he is not one for nuances in any event. But the point here is not subtle: The right to criticize the policies of those in power is not just one of democracy's fringe benefits; it is essential to making the democratic machinery work. And questions of war and peace — dead young Americans, dead Iraqis, a radicalized Middle East, billions of dollars: Was it worth all this? — are the ones that need democracy the most. Why would any president even wish to plunge this country into war and keep it there without a level of support from the citizenry that is strong enough to survive the obvious counterarguments?

Bush's own campaign strategy has put the events of 9/11 and their aftermath at the center of this election. The president asks to be reelected based on the claim that his response to that event has been a success. It would be convenient for him if any challenge to this notion were considered beyond the pale. Increasingly convenient, in fact, as the word "success" seems less and less applicable. But Bush's convenience is not what this election is about.

This attempt to delegitimize criticism rather than rebut it comes as part three of a three-part Republican strategy. (At least we hope there are only three parts.) Part one was the first wave of Swift boat ads (and the ridiculous hoo-ha around them), raising questions about Kerry's Vietnam service. From there it was an easy leap to part two, the second Swift boat wave and the accompanying fuss about Kerry's leadership of the Vietnam antiwar movement. Part three drives it all home: As during Vietnam, so during Iraq. The guy is still at it, disloyally attacking his own country in wartime and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

I invite those of you who are unfamiliar with the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950's to go back and take a gander at them. If this means I've joined the ranks of the shrill, so be it.

Nuremburg Tactics

Supporters Get Incentive Plans at Bush Rallies
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Want to see the president when he comes to your town? Get in line - to make phone calls for his campaign.

....
Campaign rallies may be as old as politics itself, but in this year of earliests, firsts and most-expensive-evers, the Bush campaign has taken this most basic form of communication to a new state of the art, by pressing audiences to work as foot soldiers, before, during and immediately after Bush events.

The tactic points up a stark difference between the presidential campaigns: while Senator John Kerry is using his rallies and forums to try to reach undecided voters and to close the deal with standoffish Democrats, Mr. Bush is packing his audiences with supporters who must identify themselves as such in questionnaires and whipping them into brigades ready to blitz crucial districts to get every last voter to the polls.

Kerry aides scoff at the invitation-only audiences and what they say is the shanghai-ing of volunteers. "We don't require oaths of allegiance, and we don't take people captive," said Tom Shea, director of the Kerry campaign in Florida, after turning out close to 10,000 people for a rally in Orlando last Tuesday where, he said, 700 people signed up to help.

But Donald P. Green, a professor of political science at Yale and the author of "Get Out the Vote! How to Increase Voter Turnout," said Mr. Bush's strategy was inspired. "There's a basic principle in experimental psychology, that the hand teaches the heart," Professor Green said. "You've now made phone calls for George Bush; that helps solidify your commitment to the campaign. If you weren't enthusiastic and committed already, you might be now."

At a rally in Bangor, Me., last Thursday, Katrina Waite had driven nearly two hours and then waited seven more under a sweltering sun to see the president. The reward for her early arrival? A spot way in back, atop a flatbed truck, where she downed cups of water fetched by her two children to stave off the heat.

Ms. Waite said her mother had earned a spot up front. "She did three hours of phone calling to get it," she said, peering to try to pick her mother out in the crowd.

This tactic pulls the Calvinist "doctrine of the the elect" up to a whole new level. Bushco left 'way behind the idea of "mainstream" a great long while ago. These are fanatics.

That Ought to Keep the Little Bastards

Umm, I just spent an hour with dead soldiers and NBC wants me to care about if it is Leno or Conan?

Excuse me. The fact that an illegitimate Bush administration is fighting a war in a country with which we had no beef (and his father supported), soldiers are dying, and I'm supposed to give a rat's ass about this? None of these guys are funny and I could use a little funny right now.

To distract me from the fact that Bush turned Iraq into a meat grinder. Oh, yeah. That. Television is the IED for the American viewer and it trumps facts.

Meteorology--The Sequel

I look at a lot of models when I look at hurricane forecasting, and this is why I told you, after Hurricane Isabel devestated the urban east coast last year, that we were heading into a bad patch. I'm waiting on the remnents of Jeanne this evening, and it probably won't be a real bad event here, but friends in Florida are dealing with hurricane exhaustion. Ask the folks in Richmond, Virginia, what a tropical storm can look like.

We are headed for a lot more of this: the decadal models point to greater activity in the coming years. The beaches are built up like they never were before and the exposure by the insurance industry is likely to become unbearable, if the models bear out. Add to that the RISK reports by major re-insurers predicting greater meteorological chaos caused by global warming and I think I'd get a little alarmed.

2004 might be the year in which we noticed that something new is going on. We'll see.

Busy Bumper

Sorry about the dearth of posting today. I suspect the rest of the week will be like this: I'm in a crunch time at work, trying to come up to speed with the new data base, making marketing calls to publicize our annual event, getting reports off the new data base (thank God for Ibuprofen,) going to the bookstore to look for aftermarket manuals on the new data base and so forth. I think I squeezed lunch in between meetings. Meetingsmeetingsmeetings. But I had new clothes.

The bookstore didn't provide much help, and it is the best IT bookstore in Washington. I'm going to appeal, as I so often do, to you remarkable readers for help. I know about the O'Reilly books and picked up a frequent buyer card today. Here is what I need: an overview/guide for Visual FoxPro and a quickie cheat sheet. The query language in GT Pro (the data base) is NOT intuitive and I need to reconfigure some of the fields in the data entry side and on the query side to make them more user friendly. The Implementation folks at KTS, the vendor for the application, are remarkably helpful, but at $150 an hour by phone, I need to get independent as soon as possible.

Yes, I have a pretty decent, if broad, understanding of data bases and how they retrieve information. I need to deal with the quircks of this application and I need it now. There is a users' group, but it is still pretty sparse. The query language gets closer to the machine than most users want to go, and I need to make it friendly. Readers? Any help?

Tribalism and its Discontents

Watch out for those voters

By PAUL CAMPOS
Scripps Howard News Service
21-SEP-04

When it comes to politics, the average person is an idiot. Depressing evidence for this claim can be found in a recent New Yorker essay by Louis Menand, which surveys the political-science literature regarding why people vote the way they do.

The conclusions from this literature include:

_ No more than 10 percent of the population can be said to have a coherent political belief system, using even a loose definition of that term. Most people's political beliefs, to the extent they have any at all, suffer from a lack of what political scientists call "constraint" _ i.e., little or no logical connection exists between the positions they hold. For example, a large proportion of voters see no contradiction between being in favor of both lower taxes and increased government services.

_ Perhaps a quarter of all voters vote on the basis of factors that have no "issue content" whatever. They vote for candidates who seem likable, or optimistic, or for those whose campaign posters are particularly eye-catching. According to Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, millions of voters in the 2000 presidential election based their votes on what the weather had been like lately.

_ Voters are remarkably bad at calculating their own self-interest, even when their self-interest and their political beliefs coincide. Bartels gives the following example. Only the richest 2 percent of Americans pay estate taxes. Yet among people who believe that the rich ought to pay more taxes, and who also believe that growing income inequality is a bad thing, two-thirds also favor repeal of the estate tax. Menand observes that this sort of data helps explain the otherwise puzzling fact "that the world's greatest democracy has an electorate that continually 'chooses' to transfer more and more wealth to a smaller and smaller fraction of itself."

Even if we ignore how many people have no coherent political beliefs, or base their voting on irrational factors, the sheer ignorance of the average American should take us aback. Seventy percent of Americans can't identify their senators or their congressman. Around 30 million can't find the United States on a map.

Now consider that the upcoming presidential election will almost certainly be decided by voters who have not yet decided for whom they are going to vote (in 2000, 18 percent of voters made their decision in the final two weeks of the campaign, and 5 percent _ far more than the decisive margin _ made their decision on Election Day itself). It's safe to say that almost everyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to national politics, and who has anything resembling coherent political beliefs, has already decided what he or she is going to do on Nov. 2, at least in regard to the presidential election.

But the cold fact is that tens of millions of Americans don't fit that description. They normally pay no attention to politics; whatever political beliefs they do have tend to be wildly inconsistent; and they base their votes on frankly irrational factors.

These are the crucial swing voters in the crucial swing states, who will decide who should occupy the world's most powerful political office for the next four years.

I found this last night (at The Agonist) but didn't blog because I wanted to think about it some more. Intuitively, this MSNBC poll feels right: most of my family hold political views which are incoherent and not in their best economic interest. I've been thinking about this particularly in regard to the things I heard from Canadians on my recent trip north: admittedly, most of my friends are classical social democrats, but Canada is a majority social democratic nation, so my views are held by the Canadian majority if not the American one. The "industrialized west" are social democrats of one stripe or another and Americans stick out for the strong conservative streak which has grown since Goldwater re-made the Republican party. I'm going to view this for the moment as an artifact of the rise of Evangelical Christianity over the last 30 years, an Evangelicalism of a particularly moralistic stripe, which has always appealed to some of the darker corners of the American psyche.

There is something in the human spirit which means that we each want to be seen as "special," and one of the cheap ways we do that is by joining an in group and then demonizing every other group. The Bush campaign has elevated appealing to this tendency to an art form. It is one of the basest parts of our anthropology and that is only one of the reasons I despise it so. Our solidarity in our common humanity, and appeals to that, are some of the best parts parts to which we can appeal.

A Very Public woman

At last, a public woman comes along who lets a woman's life be complicated, funny and ironic. I could do a lot with that and a billion dollars. I'd also give my eyeteeth to sit down with a Dubonnet with her, the idea of a beer with Bush being profoundly uninteresting to me.

It's long and worth it: THE CANDIDATE’S WIFE
by JUDITH THURMAN
Teresa Heinz Kerry is an uncharted element on the road to the White House.
Issue of 2004-09-27
Posted 2004-09-20

Late in August, while the Republicans convened in New York, the Kerrys vacationed on Nantucket. They resumed campaigning on Labor Day weekend, and Heinz Kerry spent the holiday in her home state, marching with thousands of citizens in a Pittsburgh parade and speaking at a sparsely attended union picnic and rally in Philadelphia. It took place on a pier near the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, across the Delaware River from Camden, New Jersey. The audience of steamfitters, longshoremen, and janitors had come with their children and wore the T-shirts of their locals.

Heinz Kerry’s hair was windblown and her cheeks rosy. Her acid-green suit was the color of an immense tanker, the Chemical Pioneer, slowly steaming up the river behind the stage. “No war is worth fighting if the people in our country aren’t defended by good schools, jobs, and health care,” she told the audience. It was a new speech: lean of detail, punchy, brief, and delivered with the ease of a seasoned candidate. The shy whisper and distracting tics were gone. At one point, she leaned over to joke with an elderly black woman sitting on a folding chair in the front row who said that she was ninety and had plenty of opinions. There was laughter and applause. “I’m a woman of a certain age and I deserve my opinions,” Heinz Kerry said to the audience. “I’ve earned them the old-fashioned way.”

A week later, when Heinz Kerry was on her way to Pittsburgh with Wren Wirth (her close women friends take turns keeping her company on the road), I asked her what she thought about the increasingly vicious campaign, and the cheap caricatures of her personal eccentricities. “It’s sad that in America people have to put up with that kind of thing,” she said. “It’s sadder still that people like it.” Her voice on the phone sounded serene—neither embattled nor tinny with false optimism. Her syntax was baroque and elegiac, perhaps with fatigue, and her sentences were curiously wonkish and poetic at the same time. “I am grateful that, being as old as I am”—she mentioned her age twice in the course of a five-minute conversation—“I have developed an interesting way to deal with it that I didn’t know I had in me, which is contextualizing what is said, not reading either the puffy things which would give me an oversized head or the things which would give me a shrivelled heart.” She spoke of Bush’s promise to reduce health-care costs, pointing out that he had just raised Medicare premiums for the elderly by seventeen per cent. “I never thought there would be so many lies,” she said. “It’s been quite amazing. But I don’t dwell there, I dwell in a better house, a house of hope.”

The Kossaks have been going nuts over Liz Edwards' appearance in the diaries. Me, I want to spend a little time picking THK's brain. If any of you readers have any pull with the Kerry campaign, let them know that Teresa gets interview space here, if she wants it.

The Shabby WaPo

A New Tax Cut

Sunday, September 26, 2004; Page B06

This latest cut, which ended up with a price tag of $146 billion, most of it to be paid in the next five years, is the outgrowth of lawmakers' bogus bid to look as if they had a modicum of fiscal responsibility on the last go-round. Then, they insisted that the tax package couldn't cost more than $350 billion over 10 years. They achieved that illusion by jury-rigging the bill to have its most popular tax breaks expire this year -- limiting the ostensible cost while knowing full well that their weak-kneed colleagues wouldn't dare risk looking like tax-hikers with an election looming.

The inevitable extension came about in a particularly cynical and anti-democratic way. Leaders dispensed with bothersome rituals such as hearings, committee markups, floor debate and amendments. They hijacked a tax bill that was supposed to help the working poor and that therefore had been languishing in conference for months. They recalibrated it so that the working poor got the tiniest slice of the benefits, and then they took it directly to the floor, where it could not be amended -- no requirement, for example, that the cuts be paid for. In the Senate, just three brave souls dared withstand the pressure: retiring Democrat and deficit hawk Ernest F. Hollings (S.C.) and two moderate Republicans, Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) and Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.). John F. Kerry wasn't so courageous; he supported the tax-cut extensions.

And was it, as advertised, a middle-class tax bill? Certainly, middle-class families get help. According to an analysis by the Brookings-Urban Institute Tax Policy Center, taxpayers earning between $50,000 and $75,000 will receive an average tax benefit of $353 next year as a result of the bill. Taxpayers earning between $200,000 and $500,000 will see their average tax burden fall by nearly $2,400. More than half of the bill's benefits go to taxpayers earning more than $100,000 a year, although they account for fewer than 13 percent of all taxpayers. If all of this were without cost, it wouldn't much matter. But the tab will come due down the road. And those who will end up having to pay are, more likely than not, the children of the middle class that is the supposed beneficiary of this election-year pandering.

The WaPo ed board follows the Bush administration through the looking glass. Excuse me, in what form of arithmetic is a tax cut "without cost?" The thousandaires working for the Post think that it doesn't matter that the majority of the cuts go to the 13 percent of the richest Americans and that this has no significance in and of itself? The Post doesn't think, apparently, that there is any moral dimension to tax policy and economics. If that's what they are teaching in the J schools these days, God help us all. On the page facing the Post eds is a Broder column taking the media to task for shoddy, cheer-leaderish coverage of Iraq and the Bush admin in general. I guess the ed board doesn't read their own columnists.

Partisanship in the Pew

GOP urges Catholics to shun Kerry

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | September 26, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The Republican Party is attempting to convince Roman Catholics that Democratic nominee John F. Kerry is "wrong for Catholics" and at odds with his church.

Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee launched a website called "KerryWrongForCatholics.com" that takes the Massachusetts senator to task for voting against the Defense of Marriage Act, favoring civil unions for gays and lesbians, opposing vouchers for private schools, and taking stands on abortion and other issues that are contrary to church teachings.

The GOP site points out where Kerry, a Catholic, is at variance with the Vatican. A section on Kerry's stance on same-sex unions, for example, is headlined: "Kerry Said Vatican Should Not Instruct Catholic Politicians, Calling It 'Inappropriate.' "

The site suggests that Bush, a Methodist, has a stronger record on Catholic values.

Private groups also have been urging Catholics to oppose candidates who favor abortion and other issues the church condemns. Earlier this month, a nonprofit organization called Priests for Life announced a $1 million campaign, including television commercials, aimed at persuading voters to support candidates who oppose abortion. Another nonprofit, Catholic Answers, is issuing millions of voter guides that list five "nonnegotiable" issues for Catholic voters: abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, and "homosexual marriage."

The combined effect of the party and private efforts could be as significant politically as the swift boat veterans attack on Kerry, the difference being that this one is occurring without blistering television commercials and is mostly "below the radar screen," according to John Green, who studies religion and politics at the University of Akron.

The Bush campaign's enthusiasm for bending religion to partisan aims is one of the most despicable faetures of this year's ugliest ever presidential race. Bushco hasn't come right out and said that "God is a Republican," but they sure would like both evangelical and Catholic voters to go there.

Here's a Catholic with a slightly different perspective, one endorsed at some pretty high levels:

A dove in good company

September 24, 2004

BY ANDREW GREELEY

''War,'' the pope said on Jan. 13, 2003, ''cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring common good except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after military operations.''

The teaching on the Iraq war is not ''authoritative.'' Yet, ought not Catholic conservatives, who virtually worship the pope, at least listen to him respectfully on this subject?

Why don't American Catholics react to the pope's warning about the war? Mostly, I suspect, because they don't know about it. The national media pay little attention to the pope save when they bash him for something. The rhetoric of the Vatican is often so complicated that it is not entirely clear what is being said. The Catholic media (official diocesan papers), with some exceptions, are afraid to offend their super patriotic leadership. Some parish priests may be reluctant to quote the pope on the Iraq war for fear that their people will be angry.

A constant concern in the pope's comments is fear of the death of innocent civilians. Iraqi deaths don't count, quite literally. The Defense Department refuses to count them. Some estimate that Iraqi casualties are as high as 30,000. If the war goes on long enough, Americans may kill as many Iraqis as did Saddam Hussein. Today, every time someone dies in Iraq, Americans are blamed because if they had not come, these people would still be alive.

Yet, most Americans are unconcerned about the death of Iraqi civilians. They wear towels on their heads and walk around in their pajamas. They speak a funny language and believe in a funny religion. They scream at us with hate. Why should Americans worry about them? They're barely human.

Bottom line? The Catholic vote is a whole lot more complex than black-and-white Bushco understands.

A Little Extrospection

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursel's as others see us!--Rabbie Burns

You Scare Us
Bush is giving Latin America the willies

By Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Fuentes is the author, most recently, of "Contra Bush," which will be translated into seven languages.

U.S. support for brutal dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay in the name of anti-communism caused great suffering. The overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile. The Central American wars in the 1980s and their high body counts. These Latin American grievances were balanced by a perception that the U.S. never formally renounced the principles of international law and the hope that it would reaffirm them again.

What is alarming about the Bush administration is its formal denunciation of the basic rules of international intercourse. With us or against us, President Bush declares starkly and simplistically. The U.S. acts according to its own interests, "not those of an illusory international community," asserts national security advisor Condoleezza Rice.

Is it strange that many Latin Americans should see in these statements an aggressive denial of the only leverage we have in dealing with Washington: the rule of law, the balance obtained through diplomatic negotiation?

Not only out of self-interest, but also as participants in the global society, many Latin Americans worry that U.S. unilateralism is incompatible with the multilateralist nature of globalization. This was the warning issued by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo at last year's Harvard commencement. Add Chilean President Ricardo Lagos' perception that the world community is postponing the urgent global agenda of creating an adequate social-program fund, strengthening human rights and overcoming the chasms between haves and have-nots. And top it with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's plea to the French National Assembly: Fight vigorously against terror but also against the underlying causes of terror: hunger, ignorance, inequality and distorted perceptions of other cultures.

Fortunately, these composite voices of Latin American statesmen found a powerful echo in North America, when former President Clinton warned that you do not defeat terror if you do not figure out how to work with an interdependent world.

These voices, these warnings, these hopes have been disowned by the Bush administration. "With us or against us," Bush has said. It hardly matters. Offensive as these words are to the international community, I believe that Latin America, in particular, will not forget the outright deceptions of the Bush era: the shifting rationales for an unnecessary war and a disastrous postwar occupation; the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the targeting of one tyrant (Saddam Hussein) among many (Kim Jong II, Robert Mugabe, Moammar Kadafi); the utter lack of foresight that an occupied Iraq would rise against the foreign occupiers and try to fashion its own political future out of its complex religious, tribal and cultural realities, all of them ignored by the neoconservatives in Washington.

But while not forgetting these mistakes and deceptions, we would put the accent on the restoration of the rule of law, the thrust of cooperation and the attention due to 3 billion human beings living in poverty, ignorance and illness. When Bush and his bellicose minions are gone, these problems will still be around. We in Latin America should try to bring them forward as the real agenda for this troubling century.

Fuentes is correct in addressing "this troubling century," but he is blind if he thinks that the end of Bushco will end American blindness to Latin America. There is a substantial fraction of the American electorate which doesn't much like foreign aid or foreigners, particularly those of an hispanic stripe.

As much as I hate to say it, and I do, Bushco and the 50/50 nation aren't the problem but the symptom of a rich and divided nation being hauled unwilling into the 21st century. We are the biggest kid on the block, and we are still a mere teenager, unwilling to look at adult responsibilities and adult risks. We aren't cool headed, we are easy to provoke and we tend to overlook what we don't want to see.

The world would be well served by a wealthy, powerful and realistic America, but I don't see that happening in the next four years or the next 20. What I hear at the hair stylist, the watercooler and family gathering is American myopia. If you asked the person sitting next to you in church this morning to point to Iraq on a world map, I'm pretty sure I'd know the response you'd get.

On the Ground

Violence in Iraq Belies Claims of Calm, Data Show

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 26, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Sept. 25 -- Less than four months before planned national elections in Iraq, attacks against U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces and private contractors number in the dozens each day and have spread to parts of the country that had been relatively peaceful, according to statistics compiled by a private security firm working for the U.S. government.

Attacks over the past two weeks have killed more than 250 Iraqis and 29 U.S. military personnel, according to figures released by Iraq's Health Ministry and the Pentagon. A sampling of daily reports produced during that period by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials.

Reports covering seven days in a recent 10-day period depict a nation racked by all manner of insurgent violence, from complex ambushes involving 30 guerrillas north of Baghdad on Monday to children tossing molotov cocktails at a U.S. Army patrol in the capital's Sadr City slum on Wednesday. On maps included in the reports, red circles denoting attacks surround nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq, except for Kurdish-controlled areas in the far north. Cities in the Shiite Muslim-dominated south, including several that had undergone a period of relative calm in recent months, also have been hit with near-daily attacks.

In number and scope, the attacks compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq's interim prime minister that the instability is contained to small pockets of the country.

Speaking with President Bush at the White House on Thursday, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi said the security situation in Iraq was "good for elections to be held tomorrow" in 15 of the country's 18 provinces. Elections for a national assembly are scheduled for January.

Allawi told Washington Post reporters and editors on Friday that "for now the only place which is not really that safe is Fallujah, downtown Fallujah. The rest, there are varying degrees. Some -- most -- of the provinces are really quite safe."

Um, Rajiv, I think you aren't getting out of the hotel a lot and are acting as the credible shill for the Bushies.

Here is what I hear elsewhere:

Human Dignity, Crazy Mike, and Indian Country
by Jim Lobe

The reason why Washington is having such a difficult time persuading others of its good faith and its good works in the "war on terror" was best illustrated Tuesday this week.

While President George W. Bush told the UN General Assembly that the U.S. belief in "human dignity" – a phrase he used no less than 10 times – was the main U.S. motivation for pursuing the war, two articles that appeared in two major U.S. newspapers the same morning offered an altogether different subtext.

The first piece, titled "Indian Country," was written by one of the administration's geo-strategic gurus, Robert D. Kaplan, and published on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Kaplan, who is writing a series of books about the U.S. military, extolled the wonders of U.S. Special Forces operating in small units from "forward operating bases" (FOBs) without direction from any "Washington bureaucracy" and outside the scrutiny of the global media.

Just like "in the days of fighting the Indians," wrote Kaplan, "the smaller the tactical unit, the more forward deployed it is, and the more autonomy it enjoys from the chain of command, the more that can be accomplished."

Unbeknownst to Kaplan and, presumably, to Bush, as well, the Los Angeles Times that morning was publishing a front-page article that gave one example of precisely what such a unit could do.

Based on reports by a UN team, the Washington-based Crimes of War Project, and the office of the Afghan Armed Forces attorney general, the Times described how U.S. Special Forces at one FOB in southeastern Afghanistan last year beat and tortured eight Afghan soldiers over no less than 17 days, until one of their victims, 18-year-old Jamal Naseer, died.

The eight were taken to the Special Forces FOB near Gardez on March 1, 2003, after they were seized while manning a security checkpoint amid suspicions, apparently planted by local faction leaders competing for US support, that Afghan army units in the area were selling arms to the Taliban.

According to the consistent testimony of the men, they were "pummeled, kicked, karate-chopped, hung upside down and struck repeatedly with sticks, rubber hoses and plastic-covered cables," the Times reported. "Some said they were immersed in cold water, then made to lie in the snow. Some said they were kept blindfolded for long periods and subjected to electric shocks to their toes."

During their ordeal, they were never given medical help or even provided with a change of clothes.

No wonder the Iraqis are sometimes having difficulty remembering that we are the good guys. It would be easier to remember if we actually WERE the good guys, but we are acting just like the next boot on the neck of your ordinary Iraqi, the new boss is the same as the old boss.

The New Boss

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Saturday September 25, 2004
The Guardian

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

I was raised by the rules of my Scandanavian ancestors: pillage first, then burn. These chaps are incompetant.

New Experience

Well, gang, I did something today I haven't done in six years: I went shopping. It isn't an activity I particularly enjoy, but I haven't had new clothes or shoes in more than six years. It wasn't a particularly big splurge, Target isn't expensive, but I have some new tops and slacks that don't look like they go back to graduate school.

I want to thank everyone for their suggestions for the "business casual" shopping experience. I have new chinos in a couple of colors and a pair of sweater sets. Shoes I'll tackle tomorrow at the Off Broadway shoe outlet.

It's been so long since I've been in a department store that I found myself somewhat overwhelmed: there is so much stuff that it is quite confusing if you aren't used to it. Time to hit the Lands End catalog

Through the Looking Glass

Bush rejects Saddam 9/11 link
Bush maintains Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda are connected

US President George Bush has said there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 11 September attacks.

As recently as last Sunday, Vice-President Dick Cheney, refused to rule out a link between Iraq and 11 September, saying "'we don't know".

Actually, Dick, we do know. No thanks to you.

Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country.

Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it's likely Saddam was involved.

The belief in the connection persists even though there has been no proof of a link between the two.

President Bush and members of his administration suggested a link between the two in the months before the war in Iraq. Claims of possible links have never been proven, however.

Veteran pollsters say the persistent belief of a link between the attacks and Saddam could help explain why public support for the decision to go to war in Iraq has been so resilient despite problems establishing a peaceful country.

The president frequently has called the Iraq war an important centerpiece in the United States' war on terror. But some members of the administration have said recently they don't believe there is a direct link.

The Post poll of 1,003 adults was taken Aug. 7-11 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

A Time magazine/CNN poll released Saturday said most Americans — 71% — believe the United States has done a good job in Iraq since the end of major fighting, while 26% said it has done a poor job.

Bush Denounces Kerry for His Remark on Allawi
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: September 25, 2004

RACINE, Wis., Sept. 24 - President Bush hit back hard at Senator John Kerry on Friday for what he called Mr. Kerry's attacks on Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of Iraq, who stood by the president's side this week as steadfastly as a member of the Bush campaign.

"This great man came to our country to talk about how he's risking his life for a free Iraq, which helps America, and Senator Kerry held a press conference and questioned Prime Minister Allawi's credibility,'' Mr. Bush said at a speech in the southern Wisconsin town of Janesville. "You can't lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility. The message ought to be to the Iraqi people: 'We support you.' The message ought to be loud and clear: 'We'll stand with you if you do the hard work.' ''

The president was referring to Mr. Kerry's remarks on Thursday in Columbus, Ohio, where the senator said Dr. Allawi was contradicting himself by asserting that terrorists in Iraq were on the defensive, after saying foreign fighters were coming into his country from across the border.

In what has become a furious daily exchange over Iraq by the two presidential candidates, the Bush campaign seized on Mr. Kerry's comment as a slur unworthy of a man seeking to occupy the White House.

"For a man who has made his centerpiece for being president the ability to magically bring allies to the table, you don't accomplish that by insulting and denigrating one of our most important allies in the war on terror,'' said Nicolle Devenish, the Bush campaign's communications director.

Mr. Kerry's campaign replied that he had not insulted Dr. Allawi but was just questioning his outlook. Campaign officials added that the Bush administration had no credibility on Iraq and that in recent days the president, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage had contradicted one another on Iraqi elections scheduled for January.

Mr. Bush has said America will keep its word to have elections in January; Mr. Cheney has said the Iraqis will decide. Mr. Rumsfeld said Thursday and again Friday that elections could be held in three-fourths or four-fifths of Iraq if insurgents prevented them elsewhere, but Mr. Armitage told a House committee on Friday that voting should go on in all of Iraq.

"The administration's credibility on Iraq collapsed today,'' Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, Mr. Kerry's running mate, said in a statement on Friday. Mr. Edwards added that "for a president who is fond of saying we should not send mixed messages, you need a scorecard today to keep up with all the different and contradictory statements from the White House.''

Mr. Bush's campaign billed his event, at a Janesville conference center, as a forum to promote his education policies. But the education issues he sought to advance - expanding Pell grants, strengthening community colleges, providing loans for workers who return to school for job retraining - were overshadowed by his sharp words against his challenger on Iraq.

"Earlier this week, my opponent said he would prefer the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to the situation in Iraq today,'' Mr. Bush said of Mr. Kerry's recent remarks that the American-led invasion had made the United States less safe. "You know, I just strongly disagree. It's tough work, no question about it. We've done tough work before. But if Saddam Hussein were in power, our security would be threatened.''

Exactly HOW did Saddam Hussein threaten our security? I seem to recall that Osama bin Laden was behind the September 11, 2001, attacks. Where is he?

Bush is campaigning on the stupidity of Americans, and he may very well win because the media and the public ignore objective facts. Iyad Allawi is a CIA-supported thug, appointed by Bush. What does this have to do with freedom and democracy?

Kerry questions the legitimacy of Bush's actions and Bush responds with bluster rather than answers. If we put up with this, shame on us.

Even the Rats Leave

via yankee doodle:

German TV Set to Pull Iraq Reporters After Warning
Fri Sep 24, 2004 01:49 PM ET

German TV Set to Pull Iraq Reporters After Warning
Fri Sep 24, 2004 01:49 PM ET
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BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's biggest television network, ARD, said on Friday it planned to pull out its two correspondents in Iraq after a foreign ministry warning that German journalists could be singled out for kidnappings.

Separately, the Spanish government has recommended to media that they withdraw their correspondents from Iraq following the increase in attacks and kidnappings there, the newspaper El Mundo said on its Web site on Friday.

The Spanish news agency EFE has withdrawn its only Spanish correspondent, Jose Manuel Seage, from Baghdad, a senior journalist at the agency said.

More than 100 foreigners have been abducted in Iraq since April in a deepening campaign, among them two French journalists who are still being held. Most hostages have been released, but around 30 have been killed.

The German foreign ministry last week strengthened a warning originally issued in March 2003 that mentioned journalists and the "very high risk" of kidnapping. But it declined to comment specifically on the issue on Friday.

A spokeswoman for Suedwestrundfunk, the regional broadcaster in the ARD network in charge of television coverage from Iraq, said: "The temporary withdrawal of our correspondent is being prepared."

A spokesman for another ARD broadcaster said the network's radio correspondent would return to the Jordanian capital Amman on Saturday and report from there until further notice.

Until this month, almost all the kidnapped foreigners were snatched on Iraq's perilous roads. But the capture of foreigners in Baghdad in operations that seem carefully planned is an escalation that has alarmed foreign embassies and firms.

Ya think the "insurgents" (i.e. ordinary Iraqis who don't like being shot at) might have planned this?

God Almighty and the Almighty Dollar

Defense and the National Interest, Chuck Finley's amazing site, is one of the places I go to further my education in military strategy and logistics. He has two articles up right now which ought to cause everyone some pause.

BTW, I think that Steve Gilliard and I both told you that Iraq was lost a long time ago.

From D-N-I.net:

Destroying The National Guard

The fact of the matter is that Versailles on the Potomac does not care about the rest of the country in any respect, so long as the tax dollars keep coming in. My old friend King Louis XVI might be able to tell Rumsfeld & Co. where that road eventually ends up.

Under "Fair Use" of Title 17 USC S107-8, I'm excerpting some of Elaine Grossman's work from the same site. The news is not good and it is not clear that W. understands this:

Inside The Pentagon
by Elaine M. Grossman
September 23, 2004

The defense panel’s third alternative is perhaps the most controversial: to “scale back the number and/or objectives of stabilization missions.” Bush has repeatedly said he intends to “stay the course” in Afghanistan and Iraq, noting the importance of following through on U.S. commitments abroad. Kerry maintains a similar stance on this question.

I'm hoping that Kerry "gets it" but just can't say it yet. I don't think that American voters are prepared to hear how bad the quagmire is just yet. One has to have "optimistic" language to speak with Americans, no matter how bad the situation is, and, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to craft such a message just now. So I'll give it to you straight: we are in a world of hurt, we can't pay for it and I don't know how it will end. Some pundits who have a philosophical model more broad than mine say that this is the end of the illusion of empire and Pax Americana. I think that both empire and Pax Americana were illusions in the first place and never very well fixed in the facts of history. We'll throw another couple of hundreds of billions of dollars down another shithole war and still wonder why we are on the bottom of the list of "industrialized" countries with the worst healthcare, education and lifespan statistics.

The theocrats would have you believe that the USA is a miracle. It ain't. When you give a buck to the Pentagon, the same buck doesn't miraculously pop up someplace else (W's "tax break.") Believing in God doesn't cancel simple arithmetic.

Coffee and tired feet

Thank you.

An anonymous reader sent a gift certificate via Amazon, and because of it (and him or her) I will shortly be the proud owner of a new coffee system (we can't call them "coffee pots" anymore, and this one is amazing,) along with a new pair of shoes, my first pair in six years. My tired dogs stuffed themselves into some old pumps this week and I remembered why I hate heels so much, these things ain't shaped to human feet.

Coffee and shoes are the critical elements for the urban commuter. Thank you, anonyreader. I hope you'll get it back in better, more pain-free blogging (my dogs hurt, and I start the day EARLY with a caffeine boost) and a few words for the wise.

I'll begin blogging at The American Street on Sunday. I'll be e cross posted here, but I urge you to read AmStreet's supply of authors. It is a great privilege to be invited to join. I've got an Gadflyer article coming up shortly (tomorrow will be a writing day) so you can pick your poison.

Thanks, readers, for all you've done for me. I hope I can continue to provide content that matters to you. I learned today that PayPal is a scam and I'm going to move my buttons elsewhere. And get my checking account the hell off of their system. This should be completed by the end of the weekend. I don't want to have your data get hosed if you choose to contribute. I'm moving to the Amazon Honor System. If you need help to move, let me know. I'm a sysadmin now and I can do global changes.

[She snores when she gets this tired. It ain't pretty.]

Laundry, I need to do laundry; Let the carpers have their turm, you are more than up to it.

It Depends on What the Meaning of the Word "IS" IS

Pop singer is forced to leave US
US aides say he has terrorist ties

By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff | September 23, 2004

The artist formerly known as Cat Stevens was forced to leave the country yesterday on a flight out of Logan International Airport because he was recently placed on several watch lists for possible links to terrorists, federal officials said.

The 56-year-old pop singer, who changed his name to Yusuf Islam after becoming a Muslim, was aboard a London-to-Washington flight that was abruptly diverted to Bangor Tuesday afternoon, after federal officials learned that he was among the passengers.

He was flagged "because of concerns about activities that could potentially be related to terrorism," the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

"Also, more recently, the intelligence community has come into possession of additional information that further heightens the concerns [about] Islam," the statement said.

Federal officials would not provide details of what activities had raised concerns about the man who became a pop star in the 1960s and 1970s with hits such as "Wild World," "Morning Has Broken," and "Peace Train," only to abandon his career after converting to Islam in the late 1970s.

But Muslim groups in the United States and Britain criticized federal authorities for their treatment of Islam, a high-profile peace activist who has used profits from his famous songs to form charities, establish four Islamic schools in London, and give money to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as well as to children in Iraq.

Islam had been in the United States twice in the last year without incident, first in February to speak at a United Nations conference and then in May to promote his new DVD of his last North American tour in 1976.

The Council of American-Islamic Relations, the largest Islamic civil liberties group in the United States, called on the Bush administration yesterday to give more explanation for why Islam was deported.

The group compared his case to that of Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar who was supposed to begin teaching at the University of Notre Dame this fall, but was denied entry to the United States. The council suggested that the policy is "not the way to win the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide."

"When internationally respected Islamic personalities like Yusuf Islam and Professor Tariq Ramadan are denied entry to the United States, it sends the disturbing message that even moderate and mainstream Muslims will now be treated like terrorists," Nihad Awad, the council's executive director, said in a statement.

Anas Altikriti, a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said in an interview, "It does seem more and more that those voicing dissenting views on US foreign policy will be forbidden from entering the country."

Note how our competant Homeland Security types allowed this threat to get on a plane in the first place. We are governed by idiots who think that a peace activist with an Islamic name is a threat...

I got pulled out of line for two extra security searches on the way home from Canada yesterday morning, which seems of a piece with this bit of hysteria. I wonder when the Blair administration is going to come screaming about this outrage against one of its most harmless citizens. Is there anyone besides France which is going to stick up for the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights?

France pours cold water on Bush's sunny vision of Iraq

UNITED NATIONS : France, one of the harshest critics of the war that brought down Saddam Hussein, stressed it would not commit troops for Iraq despite appeals from the United States and United Nations.

As Iraq Prime Minister Iyad Allawi met in Washington with US President George W. Bush and hailed the war as a success, France poured cold water on any slim hope it might send forces to help ease the post-war chaos.

"As everyone knows, France did not approve of the conditions in which the conflict was unleashed. Neither today nor tomorrow will it commit itself militarily in Iraq," French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said.

"In Iraq, violence is exploding. Only when the Iraqis themselves take control of their future ... will the country be able to escape the chaos which could destabilise the entire region," Barnier told the UN General Assembly.

The bitter divisions over the war have re-emerged in the opening days of the two-week annual debate of world leaders at the United Nations, especially after a pointed exchange Tuesday between Bush and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Annan has asked for nations to contribute troops to help protect UN staff who are working to help prepare for elections in Iraq before the end of January -- but no nations have yet committed any forces.

Whether or not the international community is going to be moved to help get President Kerry out of Bush's quagmire remains to be seen, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Meaningful elections in Iraq in January? Don't bet your butt on it:

Rumsfeld Raises Prospect of Limited Iraq Elections

Reuters
Thursday, September 23, 2004; 5:05 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday raised the possibility that some areas of Iraq night be excluded from elections scheduled for January if security could not be guaranteed.

"Let's say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great," Rumsfeld said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

"Well, so be it. Nothing's perfect in life, so you have an election that's not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet," he said.

By damn, if Florida in 2000 was good enough for the US, it's good enough for the rest of the planet. I don't read Rumsfeld's statement as a judgement on Afghanistan or Iraq as much as I read it as a cautionary statement on November: imperfect democracy is good enough for Bush. That's what put him in office in the first place.

Once More Down the Rabbit Hole

The guy is a CIA shill, a strongman we put in to replace the other strongman we put in. Let's do a little reality testing, shall we? The WaPo doesn't seem up to it, but we are.

Iraq's Dynamo
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi Generates a Can-Do Aura

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 24, 2004; Page C01

Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi leans on a lectern in the Rose Garden, a swagger in his pose. He's side by side with President George W. Bush, a man who knows something about swaggering. Allawi doesn't look out of place -- not here, perhaps not anywhere.

His eyebrows arc upward. His glasses ride low on his nose. He looks stern and focused and intense, even as he looks charmed and amused, kind of avuncular, like an Iraqi Tony Soprano, but in a fine charcoal gray suit.

None of this is to suggest a thug. That's not quite right. By training, Allawi's a neurologist. But there is the temper to consider, as when he got angry with some aides not too long ago and slammed his hand on a table -- hard -- and broke his right wrist. And there's the unfounded but popular Baghdad street rumor of his recent gunplay against some bad guys. Not to mention his work in the 1990s with the CIA, including a bungled coup plot.

He is a man on a mission that has consumed his life, a man of single-minded focus born, perhaps, that night in London in 1978 when intruders presumed to be Saddam Hussein's henchmen tried to hack him apart with axes. His leg was almost severed. His chest suffered a cleaving blow. The hospital had him for nearly a year, and the quest to recover Iraq from Hussein has had him for nearly three decades more.

So at yesterday's Rose Garden ceremony, at this time of beheadings, body counts and car bombs, he is telling of his efforts to tamp down the uprisings, to make sure elections can go forward in January, to sway tribal leaders in places like Fallujah to get with the program, with democracy and development.

He has zero popular support, but those good suits just make the WaPo go all Noonan over how manly he is. The situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, but the WaPo gets dizzy over a good suit. Tell me how nuts this is? Here is the real story, via Juan Cole:

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani continues to be concerned as to whether elections will be held in January in Iraq, and whether the outcome will reflect the Shiite majority in Iraq. He is worried that the system adopted, of nation-wide party lists, favors a small set of parties, mainly expatriate. Since the six major parties listed include the two (Sunni) Kurdish parties and the largely Sunni Iraqi National Accord (primarily ex-Baathists) led by Iyad Allawi, as well as the mixed Iraqi National Congress, I think Sistani is afraid that the al-Da`wa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq--the two main Shiite parties-- could end up with a minority in parliament.

Odysseus had to steer between the two monsters of Scylla and Charybdis. So to does the US in Iraq.

Is it not interesting that the American public is willing to buy the lies that the Iraqis are unwilling to swallow?

Once in a Blue Moon

Once upon a time, I belonged to some BBs, some prodigy boards, and some list-servs. We lived all over the world, but we got to know each other through our online passions and presences. And then we arranged some parties and real magic happened.

In the last few weeks, I've had a chance to get to know a couple of my favorite bloggers and I've come out of it thinking that my taste is pretty good, some of the finest evenings of my life have come out of these interactions.

I note that Bumpers have a pretty substantial presence in the DC metro area and along the east coast. Would you lot like to get together? I can do event planning in my sleep and would be happy to provide us with a venue (and probably conference rates, if you'd need to stay over in a motel/hotel.) Would you like to be part of a shin-dig? I can suggest some dates. Would you all like to meet each other? I'd like to meet you, if you want to make it happen. There are enough of you now that such an idea is not outlandish. This could be an evening at a pub for the locals, or something more elaborate if you far-flung want to make a weekend in DC out of it. Either would be easy for me to do as a conference planner, a larger gathering will take a bit more starch out of me, but only a bit, and a bit more cash out of you, not for me but for a venue. You decide.

Tell me what you'd like and I'll see what I can do. I have this cozy idea that you'd all rather fancy each other and I'd give my left....something or other (I broke that nail this evening, so I can't give it to you) to make it happen, if you want to do it. I'm your humble servant to the community here. Tell me what you'd like, I'll tell you what's possible. :>}

Just asking....

Back home, to my own computer. Mmmm. More later this weekend, the week was both sweet and hard, like the old fashioned candy my grampa used to give me, and I may need to sleep for a full 12 hours. Tired like this only comes around long enough to throw out a really crazy idea, but I promise you that I'll remember this one in the morning.

You've been very good to me, and I want to be very good to you as we come up on the blogiversary of this site in November. I want to give something back and I now have a tiny bit of the wherewhithall. Your suggestions are welcome.

Falls the Shadow

The hollow world of George Bush

The power of positive thinking is the president's shield from reality

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday September 23, 2004
The Guardian

Bush explained that, for him, intelligence is not to inform decision-making, but to be used or rejected to advance an ideological and political agenda. His dismissal is an affirmation of the politicisation and corruption of intelligence that rationalised the war.

In his stump speech, which he repeats word for word across the country, Bush explains that he invaded Iraq because of "the lesson of September the 11th". WMD goes unmentioned; the only reason Bush offers is Saddam Hussein as an agent of terrorism. "He was a sworn enemy of the United States of America; he had ties to terrorist networks. Do you remember Abu Nidal? He's the guy that killed Leon Klinghoffer. Leon Klinghoffer was murdered because of his religion. Abu Nidal was in Baghdad, as was his organisation."

The period of Leon Klinghoffer's murder in 1985 on the liner Achille Lauro (by Abu Abbas, in fact) coincided with the US courtship of Saddam, marked by the celebrated visits of then Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld. The US collaborated in intelligence exchanges and materially supported Saddam in his war with Iran, authorising the sale of biological agents for Saddam's laboratories, a diversification of his WMD capability.

The reason was not born of idealism, but necessity: the threat of an expansive Iran-controlled Shia fundamentalism to the entire Gulf.

The policy of courting Saddam continued until he invaded Kuwait. But realpolitik prevailed when US forces held back from capturing Baghdad for larger, geostrategic reasons. The first Bush grasped that in wars to come, the US would need ad hoc coalitions to share the military burden and financial cost. Taking Baghdad would have violated the UN resolution that gave legitimacy to the first Gulf war, as well as creating a nightmare of "Lebanonisation", as secretary of state James Baker called it. Realism prevailed; Saddam's power was subdued and drastically reduced. It was the greatest accomplishment of the first President Bush.

When he honoured the UN resolution, the credibility of the US in the region was enormously enhanced, enabling serious movement on the Middle East peace process. Now this President Bush has undone the foundation of his father's work, which was built upon by President Clinton.

Bush's campaign depends on the containment of any contrary perception of reality. He must evade, deny and suppress it. His true opponent is not his Democratic foe - called unpatriotic and the candidate of al-Qaida by the vice-president - but events. Bush's latest vision is his shield against them. He invokes the power of positive thinking, as taught by Emile Coue, guru of autosuggestion in the giddy 1920s, who urged mental improvement through constant repetition: "Every day in every way I am getting better and better."

It was during this era of illusion that TS Eliot wrote The Hollow Men: Between the idea/ And the reality/ Between the motion/ And the act/ Falls the Shadow."

Truthtelling in American politics has always been, at best, a sometime thing, but the stakes of Bush's lies, "faith-based" or otherwise, has gotten all out of proportion with what should even be self-interest for him. When a psychopath embarks on a course which is self-destructive and liable to take a lot of others with him, even the most conservative court in the land would issue an order to have such a person placed in psychiatric custody.

I was reminded of the "occasional" nature of American truthtelling while at a lecture in Toronto last night. Do you Americans, those of you educated in our public schools, ever remember being taught that the War of 1812 was begun by us and lost by us? You don't remember learning that? Funny, neither do I and I was an honors student in American History.

Anywho, I'm looking forward to the day when we once again have a government in which senior presidential aides not only have heard of T.S. Eliot, but can also quote him. I have a hard time imagining, say, Karl Rove doing such a thing.

NOT MAROONED IN TORONTO

I overstated the case: I may have extremely limited access to the 'Net during my training days, but "marooned in Toronto" I am not. While the hotel I'm staying at is beached in an office park (dead after 5 PM) and I am carless, the Torontonians I know have stepped up to the challenge and I will not have spent one night on this trip in my hotel room for the entire evening. I have been wined and dined and entertained. Those of you who have read this blog for a while know that I'm quite mad for this beautiful country and the warm and hospitable people who inhabit it.

Last night I had dinner with pogge, one of the Canadian polibloggers whose work I have read and admired since he went live last October. In person, one finds the gentle, self-deprecating and wry humor and intelligence which are so much the hallmark of his written style. pogge writes from his authentic self, a quality I much prize in a medium which is so flooded with poseurs of both the left and right.

I will get to see Fr. Judy again this evening at a history lecture at the church where she is completing the second year of her curracy in the Anglican Church of Canada. She and I met four years ago in a discernment program for women examining career change at midlife. We both landed in the seminary a few months later, she to pursue ordained ministry and I to fine-tune my pastoral and theological skills for spiritual direction, retreat leadership and teaching. This is one of those friendships in which the conversation has never had a beginning and a pause of a year or so can be picked up exactly where we left off.

I'll be on a plane back to DC in the wee, small hours of tomorrow morning to put in a full day at the office with all of the new things I've learned, but I'm never again going to let a space of four years pass before I return to Canada. I'll be back again to Toronto next summer (for the first paid vacation of my life, I believe) and wander for the first time in the parklands of "cottage country" north of Toronto, the amazing lakes and forrests of Northern Ontario.

If there is a flaw in the Canadian national character, it is in what happens when they get behind the wheel of a car: either Canadians are optimists who have stared down their fear of death, or they have a death wish. The highways here are not for the timid or the impatient, but the beauty of the place and the warmth of the (otherwise) sane Canadians are ample pay-off for the stout of heart and stick shift.

Toronto is worth a week on its own, one of the most diverse cities in North America with a rich cultural life and one of the most attractive city centers in the eastern part of the continent. I look forward to my return. Farewell, but not goodbye, Toronto.

Words from the Wise

Plenty of US news all over the A section of the Globe and Mail this morning, but this is the story that caught my eye:

A wiser Internet?

By JACK KAPICA
Globe and Mail Update

The Internet, which was once limited to colleges and was largely the preserve of young people, is now attracting greyer users, a new survey says.

And not only are older Canadians going on-line, they are going on-line with better technology and spending more time in cyberspace.

The report, called Canadian Interactive Reid Report and released Monday by Ipsos-Reid, says that currently 60 per cent of people 55 years of ago and older have Internet access. Last year, only 48 per cent of that age group used the Internet.

Older Canadians are also embracing high-speed access. Almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of those 55 years of age and older with Internet access have high-speed Internet access.

Older Canadians are also spending more time on-line. The mean number of hours spent on-line per week is 9.6 hours, a substantial increase over the 6.8 hours per week reported at this time a year ago.

But if older people are thronging to the Net, they still trail younger users, whose mean time on-line is 12.5 hours per week. But they are closing the gap — at this time last year, older users spent 5.7 fewer hours per week on-line than their younger counterparts, but now the gap is at 2.9 hours per week.

"Compared to younger adults, it took older adults a lot of time to embrace the Internet," Ipsos-Reid vice-president Chris Ferneyhough said in a release. "But it appears that they've finally accepted it as a means to communicate, entertain, and educate."

But older Canadians still trail younger Canadians in taking part in different activities on-line. Only 41 per cent of those 55 years of age an older have done on-line banking, while 55 per cent of younger users have. Also, 41 per cent of those aged 55 and over purchased a product or service on-line, compared to 51 per cent of those under 55 years of age.

Older Canadians are also less likely than younger Canadians to use the Internet for shopping. Only 39 per cent said they tried comparison-shopping for a product on-line, while 55 per cent of those under 55 years of age said they did.
Older Canadians are embracing one activity as enthusiastically as their younger counterparts: on-line investing. In that area, 13 per cent of both older and younger Canadians have bought or sold investments on-line.

Mr. Ferneyhough interpreted the results of the survey as a signal to marketing people to adjust their demographics.

"Marketers need to pay attention to this group of on-line users, because they represent the fastest growing and wealthiest contingent of on-line Canadians," he said.

We may not be as fast, but we do catch on eventually.

My mom's fledgling steps on the Internet are being repeated all over North America. Welcome aboard, Mom.

Marooned in Toronto

Hi, all.

The office laptop has no ethernet capability, so I'm basically nearly internet free until I return to DC. I have a little free time on the lunch hour between training sessions, and I'll try to update then, but it will be light posting until Thursday.

I'm visiting an old friend and using her machine this evening, my first experience with an iBook. Sweet machine.

Press Poodles

This Time Bill O'Reilly Got It Right

CNN is hemorrhaging in quality and viewers so fast — for reasons that have more to do with its lugubriousness and identity crisis than politics — that this dust-up may prove but a footnote to its travails. But its casual abandonment of even a fig leaf of impartiality ratifies a larger shift in the news landscape that reached its historical watershed at the Republican convention. That was when Fox News for the first time scored a ratings victory over every other network, the Big Three broadcast networks included.

Fox's feat has since been trivialized by most of its rivals as the inevitable triumph of a partisan channel speaking to its faithful. But there's something else at work here. It's not just that Fox is so good at pandering to its core constituency but that its competition is so weak at providing the hard-hitting, trustworthy news that might draw an alternative crowd. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes aren't stupid. They have seized upon that news vacuum in the marketplace and filled it with fast-paced, news-like bloviation that can be more entertaining (and often no less informative) to watch than its rivals even if its bias gives you heartburn.

What much of the other news media have offered as an alternative has not been an alternative at all. At some point after 9/11, the news business jumped the shark and started relaying unchallenged administration propaganda — though with less zeal and showbiz pizazz than Fox. The notorious March 2003 presidential news conference at which not a single probing question was asked by the entire White House press corps heralded the broader Foxification to come. As Michael Massing, a frequent critic of this newspaper and others, put it on PBS's NewsHour, the failure of the American news media to apply proper skepticism to the administration's stated rationale for war in Iraq is "one of the most serious institutional failures of the press" since our slide into Vietnam. Mr. Massing attributes some of this to the fear of challenging a president then at the height of his popularity. Whatever the explanation — and there are many, depending on the news organization — the net effect was that the entire press came off as Fox Lite. The motive to parrot the administration line may not have been ideological, as it was at Fox, but since the misinformation was the same, news consumers can't be blamed for finding that a distinction without a difference.

The W.M.D. flimflam was hardly the last time that government propaganda supplanted journalism. Though the chagrined major newspapers have since worked hard to compensate for their prewar lapses, the electronic media that give most Americans their news have often lagged behind, especially cable. From Jessica Lynch to "Mission Accomplished" to, most recently, the bogus charges of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, there is a tendency to give administration-favored fiction credibility first, often cementing the spin into fact well before the tough questions are asked (if they're ever asked). It's a damning measure of the news media's failure to provide a persuasive dose of reality as an antidote to Washington fairy tales that so many Americans came to believe that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, not Saudis. A Newsweek poll just two weeks ago shows that 42 percent of Americans (among them, 32 percent of Democrats) still believe that Saddam was "directly involved" in the 9/11 attacks.

I'm listening to Tweety and wondering when the press is going to wake up to the fact that they've been played. It doesn't seem to bother them one bit.

Okay. I'm out of here. Next post from Toronto.

Ignorance=Death

Abduction, murder, mayhem in the week the peace was lost
As the spread and severity of violence increases, Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad finds the Iraqi government's position more hopeless than ever

19 September 2004

The US public is just as ignorant of the surging violence in Iraq because, ironically, it is now too dangerous for American television crews and print journalists to cover it. In the battle for Najaf in August, US correspondents with the dateline "Najaf" on their copy, or reports to camera, were often "embedded" with US forces several miles away from the fighting. The result? Network news in the US gives the quite false impression that Iraq is a crisis under control.

Security for foreigners - including the foreign media - has got even worse since Najaf. Kidnappers are better organised and more brazen, as the expert seizure of the British hostage, Kenneth Bigley, and his two US colleagues demonstrates. They were snatched from their villa in the affluent al-Mansur district of Baghdad, while two Italian women aid workers, who are still missing, were kidnapped by a large gang in their office in the centre of Baghdad in the middle of the day. Even Iraqi journalists with local contacts travel with trepidation down the main road south from Baghdad through the resistance bastion of Mahmoudiyah, or west through Fallujah and Ramadi.

Mr Allawi, an avuncular-looking man resident in London for 30 years, always had a difficult task. He has almost no political base in Iraq and is therefore reliant on the 138,000-strong US military. His first concern should have been to make friends and try to expand the constituencies supporting him, but his dilemma is that the one of the few things that unites Iraqis outside Kurdistan is dislike of the US military occupation - polls in June showed it had the support of 2 per cent of the Arab population. Mr Allawi needs to distance himself from the Americans, but he cannot, because he depends on them.

To his credit, he did try at first to chart a more independent course. In early July he mooted an amnesty for insurgents who had not launched suicide bombs against Iraqis, but had killed American troops. US officials were aghast, since this was a tacit admission that attacks on American soldiers are popular.

Mr Allawi also tried at first to conciliate the Shia militant Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers, but by August he was locked into a battle in Najaf with Mr Sadr's Mehdi Army. The Prime Minister wanted to show that he was not going to be pushed around, but some 400 Iraqis were killed and 2,500 wounded, according to the Health Ministry in Baghdad. Worse, the fighting was almost all done by the US army and air force, and although the Mehdi Army finally withdrew, the battle failed to eliminate Mr Sadr or his militiamen as a powerful force in Iraqi politics.

Mr Allawi has made conciliatory statements in recent weeks, but as he speaks the US launches air strikes against "terrorist" targets in Fallujah, Ramadi and Sadr City. Against American claims that these are carried out with pinpoint accuracy, Iraqis see television footage of children, swathed in bandages, being carried into hospitals by weeping parents. In Haifa Street last week, US helicopters fired twice into a crowd, killing 13 people, while claiming that they had come under anti-aircraft fire. But footage of the moments before the rockets struck, killing the al-Arabiyah satellite television correspondent, proved that there was no gunfire.

The police and the Iraqi army are being rapidly built up - its would-be recruits are frequently slaughtered as they queue for jobs - but these are not combat troops. Mr Allawi needs some kind of accommodation with Iraqi militants, but he cannot do so, because Washington wants to persuade US voters before the presidential election in November that it has the crisis in Iraq under control. This rules out compromising or negotiating with what the White House claims are a tiny minority of militants - the battered remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime or foreign fighters linked to al-Qa'ida.

Given such oversimplification, the US and the interim government cannot avoid alienating a country fragmented by ethnic, religious, social and political divisions. The most important communities are the Shia Arabs (60 per cent of the population), the Sunni Arabs (18 per cent) and the Kurds (18 per cent). But Iraqis also live in a world of strong family, clan, tribal and regional loyalties, providing a multitude of friction points.
....
Iraqis are desperate for security, but the country is getting more dangerous by the day, and Mr Allawi is blamed. American officials, however, are more interested in putting an optimistic gloss on what is happening in the run-up to the presidential election. "We never thought it would be easy," said US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage last week. "We do expect an increase in violence as we approach the January elections."

Mr Armitage could hardly have missed the point more comprehensively. Not only would Mr Allawi lose any kind of vote today, elections acceptable to most Iraqis cannot be held in a country so divided and racked by violence. The struggle for power in Iraq is only beginning - and it will be fought with guns, not at the ballot box.

I read the US press this morning and note that they have completely missed the point: Iraq is lost, and has been since the end of the invasion. This hopeless enterprise should cost Bush the election, but neither Kerry nor the somnolent American press are ready to call him on it. How many more billions, how many more lives, are we going to spend on this fecklessness?

Fantasyland

The WaPo ed board reveals itself to be the knaves and fools I always thought they were:

Mr. Bush and Iraq

Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page B06

Whatever his rhetoric, Mr. Bush deserves to be judged by this record. In our view, it is one of courage in setting goals and steadfastness in sticking to them but also one of extraordinary recklessness and incompetence in execution. It may be that the current disorder in Iraq was inevitable following a U.S. invasion and that a wiser approach could not have prevented it. Yet we believe Mr. Bush could have achieved much more. Now he tells voters he will stay the course; the way to make that promise convincing is to be honest with Americans about the challenge he now faces -- and to lay out a realistic response to it.

Courage and steadfastness? Where the hell did that come from? The fratboy coward has never displayed anything close. He likes tax cuts that cause historic budget deficits, off-shoring of American jobs and unnecessary wars. I don't see anything here that screams courage and steadfastness. The WaPo ed board must be shooting Afghan smack.

Psychodrama

'Failure is not an option, but it doesn't mean they will avoid it'
By Michael Smith
(Filed: 18/09/2004)

The Prime Minister knew the US President was determined to complete what one senior British official had already described as the unfinished business from his father's war against Saddam Hussein.

There was no way of stopping the Americans invading Iraq and they would expect Britain, their most loyal ally, to join them. If they didn't, the transatlantic relationship would be in tatters. But there were serious problems.

A Secret UK Eyes Only briefing paper was warning that there was no legal justification for war. So Mr Blair was advised that a strategy would have to be put in place which would provide a legal basis for war. It was also vital that the Prime Minister should be able to persuade the public that war was justified and, just as importantly, convince those among his backbench MPs who were becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to another US-led war.

Sir David Manning had briefed Sir Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador, and outlined the strategy to Mr Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice.

He had been stranded in Washington on September 11 and he and Ms Rice had forged a good working relationship dealing together with the immediate aftermath of the al-Qa'eda attacks.

If he could persuade her that the British plan would work, then the Prime Minister would have a much less difficult task in getting Mr Bush to hold off until they could make it legal, until they could persuade the UN Security Council to give them the mandate for war.

The memo arrived in Downing St late on the evening of Wednesday, March 14, and was immediately sent by secure fax to Barcelona where Mr Blair and his Foreign Secretary Jack Straw were preparing for a two-day EU summit on economic reform.

Mr Straw clearly had grave reservations about the whole idea of toppling Saddam.

Any British action had to be "narrated with reference to the international rule of law", Mr Straw insisted. He warned that his legal advisers were telling him that it would almost certainly need a fresh UN mandate to make it legal, a mandate the Americans didn't feel was necessary and the rest of the Security Council was unlikely to give. He questioned the rationale behind the whole enterprise. Whatever the allies put in Saddam's place, it was unlikely to be much better. But the problem for Mr Blair was that he knew there was no stopping the Americans. That much was clear from the Secret UK Eyes Only "options paper" on Iraq given to him on Friday, March 8, 2002.

The Prime Minister was at Chequers when he sat down to read it and in need of some good news. He and other ministers had repeatedly told MPs and television interviewers that no decision had been made to go to war but the increasingly belligerent talk coming out of Washington was making even members of his Cabinet jittery.

Mr Bush had reportedly told one aide: "F*** Saddam. We're taking him out". It no longer seemed to be a question of if; all the discussion was of how soon, with increasing talk of an invasion that autumn when conditions on the ground in Iraq would be ideal.

Don't you just love the way W's little familial psychodrama has already cost more than a 1,000 US lives and over 17,000 wounded, along with someplace north of 20,000 Iraqi civilians? HW and Bar must be so proud.

And still half of the country wants to re-elect this miscreant in November?

UPDATE: A little more from the Torygraph.

Secret papers show Blair was warned of Iraq chaos
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 18/09/2004)

Tony Blair was warned a year before invading Iraq that a stable post-war government would be impossible without keeping large numbers of troops there for "many years", secret government papers reveal.

The documents, seen by The Telegraph, show more clearly than ever the grave reservations expressed by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, over the consequences of a second Gulf war and how prescient his Foreign Office officials were in predicting the ensuing chaos.

They told the Prime Minister that there was a risk of the Iraqi system "reverting to type" after a war, with a future government acquiring the very weapons of mass destruction that an attack would be designed to remove.

The documents further show that the Prime Minister was advised that he would have to "wrong foot" Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, and that British officials believed that President George W Bush merely wanted to complete his father's "unfinished business" in a "grudge match" against Saddam.

But it is the warning of the likely aftermath - more than a year in advance, as Mr Blair was deciding to commit Britain to joining a US-led invasion - that is likely to cause most controversy and embarrassment in both London and Washington.

More than 900 allied troops have been killed in Iraq since the end of the war, 33 of them British. More than 10,000 civilians are believed to have been killed.

At least 13 civilians died yesterday in a suicide bomb attack on a police checkpoint in Baghdad. The Iraqi health ministry said a further 45 civilians had died in US air attacks on Fallujah overnight.

Straw resigned on the eve of war, knowing that this was going to be a cock-up.

Strain and that Rhymes with Pain

A Familiar Strain Is Felt In Stateside Guard Unit

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 19, 2004; Page A01

FORT DIX, N.J. -- The 635 soldiers of a battalion of the South Carolina National Guard scheduled to depart Sunday for a year or more in Iraq have spent their off-duty hours under a disciplinary lockdown in their barracks for the last two weeks.

The trouble began Labor Day weekend, when 13 members of the 1st Battalion of the 178th Field Artillery Regiment went AWOL, mainly to see their families again before shipping out. Then there was an ugly confrontation between members of the battalion's Alpha and Charlie batteries -- the term artillery units use instead of "companies" -- that threatened to turn into a brawl involving three dozen soldiers, and required the base police to intervene.

That prompted a barracks inspection that uncovered alcohol, resulting in the lockdown that kept soldiers in their rooms except for drills, barred even from stepping outside for a smoke, a restriction that continued with some exceptions until Sunday's scheduled deployment.

The battalion's rough-and-tumble experience at a base just off the New Jersey Turnpike reflects many of the biggest challenges, strains and stresses confronting the Guard and Reserve soldiers increasingly relied on to fight a war 7,000 miles away.

This Guard unit was put on an accelerated training schedule -- giving the soldiers about 36 hours of leave over the past two months -- because the Army needs to get fresh troops to Iraq, and there are not enough active-duty or "regular" troops to go around. Preparation has been especially intense because the Army is short-handed on military police units, so these artillerymen are being quickly re-trained to provide desperately needed security for convoys. And to fully man the unit, scores of soldiers were pulled in from different Guard outfits, some voluntarily, some on orders.

As members of the unit looked toward their tour, some said they were angry, or reluctant to go, or both. Many more are bone-tired. Overall, some of them fear, the unit lacks strong cohesion -- the glue that holds units together in combat.

"Our morale isn't high enough for us to be away for 18 months," said Pfc. Joshua Garman, 20, who, in civilian life, works in a National Guard recruiting office. "I think a lot of guys will break down in Iraq." Asked if he is happy that he volunteered for the deployment, Garman said, "Negative. No time off? I definitely would not have volunteered."

A series of high-level decisions at the Pentagon has come together to make life tough for soldiers and commanders in this battalion and others. The decisions include the Bush administration's reluctance to sharply increase the size of the U.S. Army. Instead, the Pentagon is relying on the National Guard and Reserves, which provide 40 percent of the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Also, the top brass has concluded that more military police are needed as security deteriorates and the violent insurgency flares in ways that were not predicted by Pentagon planners.

These soldiers will be based in northern Kuwait and will escort supply convoys into Iraq. That is some of the toughest duty on this mission, with every trip through the hot desert bringing the possibility of being hit by roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and sniper fire.

The drilling to prepare this artillery unit for that new role has been intense. Except for a brief spell during Labor Day weekend, soldiers have been confined to post and prevented from wearing civilian clothes when off duty. The lockdown was loosened to allow soldiers out of the barracks in off hours to go to the PX, the gym and a few other places, if they sign out and move in groups.

"There's a federal prison at Fort Dix, and a lot of us feel the people in there have more rights than we do," said Spec. Michael Chapman, 31, a construction worker from near Greenville, S.C.

Who do you ask to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Holy Scare Tactics, Batman

Chuck Currie sent this along last night:

GOP Mailing Warns Liberals Will Ban Bibles

Fri Sep 17, 7:22 PM ET

By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee (news - web sites) warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if liberals win in November.

The literature shows a Bible with the word "BANNED" across it and a photo of a man, on his knees, placing a ring on the hand of another man with the word "ALLOWED." The mailing tells West Virginians to "vote Republican to protect our families" and defeat the "liberal agenda."

Chuck remarks:

No liberal is going to take your Bible away. The worst thing we will do is insist enough funding is put in place in our schools so that everyone is literate enough to read the Bible when they get home. Bush won’t make that promise. He just wants to scare you.

I spent last evening with friends I haven't seen in a long time. They are older than I and they admit that they have never experienced a political campaign so grounded in lies and scare tactics as the Bush project. They are Jewish and spent the day yesterday touring the National Holocaust Museum here in DC and found the parallels pretty frightening. I do, too.

Labor News

Tourism Industry Losing Sleep as Hotel Strike Looms
Just recovering after 9/1l, the area's travel and convention business could suffer a new blow

By Debora Vrana, Times Staff Writer

From his office just outside the nation's capital, Steve Schultz is planning a trade show that would fill the Los Angeles Convention Center with electrical contractors for several days in November.

However, with a strike or lockout threatening to idle thousands of Los Angeles hotel workers, Schultz may be looking for a new venue or, at the very least, other places for his conventioneers to spend the night. His group, the National Electrical Contractors Assn., is made up primarily of business owners who employ union members — and are sensitive about labor issues.

"I don't know if they will cross picket lines or not," said Schultz, head of convention planning for the Bethesda, Md.-based NECA. One option: moving his event and its 6,000 attendees to another city.

"I don't want to say yes or no yet," Schultz said this week. "We don't know what is going to happen."

But one thing is clear. The possibility of a hotel workers strike has many analysts concerned that it would be another blow to L.A. County's $11-billion tourism and convention industry, now in the early stages of recovery from a dramatic downturn after 9/11.

"It's bound to be a problem," said Patrick Ford, president of Lodging Econometrics, a hotel industry data firm in Portsmouth, N.H. "If we're going to end up in a strike, we're just hoping it will work out quickly."

Nearly 2,000 waiters, housekeepers and other union workers at nine Los Angeles County hotels voted this week to authorize their leadership to call a strike if contract talks collapse. The hotels' 5,600 rooms represent nearly 10% of the upscale lodging in the area. Four of the hotels are just blocks from the convention center and make up about 53% of the upper-end lodging in downtown L.A., said Bruce Baltin, a senior vice president at PKF Consulting.

Negotiations are on hold, and federal mediators have been called in to try to settle the dispute, which centers on healthcare benefits and the length of the new contract. In the meantime, the situation remains volatile. On Thursday, 17 laundry workers at downtown's Wilshire Grand were locked out and their jobs quickly filled by replacement workers. The union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, contending that the lockout was illegal.

Hotel owners have vowed to operate with replacement workers during a strike or a lockout, but labor strife at some local hotels could persuade some travelers from outside California to avoid Los Angeles altogether.

Nine graphs into this story and we have yet to hear what the issues are or anything from the labor side of the dispute. Read to the end of the piece, there is nothing from the Union, and tying this strike to 9/11 (which, as I recall, didn't happen in LA) just seems bogus. If this is reporting, then I'm an effing brain surgeon.

The WaPo, hardly labor's friend, does a better job:

Optimism Scarce for Avoiding Hotel Strike
Employers Claim Lack Of Good Faith in Talks

By Dana Hedgpeth and Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 18, 2004; Page E01

Yesterday afternoon in the spacious lobby of the Marriott Wardman Park, the biggest hotel in Washington, doormen rarely needed to open the door. The cocktail lounge was empty, and bartenders passed the time wiping down a counter that was already clean.

It reflected a sense of quiet unease that characterized both the city's largest hotels and their 3,800 unionized employees as both sides braced for a strike.

Officials of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union said yesterday that a strike at 14 large hotels, whose union contract expired Wednesday, is imminent. The hotels filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that the Local 25 has not bargained in good faith by refusing to engage in meaningful negotiations. The hotels are seeking an investigation and finding in their favor by the NLRB.

Local 25, the complaint says, has been "spending large portions of the negotiating sessions attacking the Employers' spokesmen, making personal insults and falsely accusing the Employers and their spokesmen of lying rather than engaging in bargaining."

John A. Boardman, executive secretary-treasurer of Local 25, said the accusations are unfounded. "They're the ones that walked out of negotiations; they're the ones that canceled sessions," he said. "I'm sort of amazed they can come out and say we're the ones not bargaining."

The union is demanding a two-year contract instead of the traditional three-year agreement. Union officials argue that such a contract would give them more leverage against national hotel chains because it would expire in 2006, the same year as those in New York and other major cities. The employers want a three-year contract.

The Post actually tells you what the major sticking point is, but fails to repeat a point it made in a front page story on the dispute from yesterday: the Union is also filing an Unfair Labor Practice Act complaint, claiming "surface bargaining" on the part of management, that is, showing up for the meetings but not bargaining on substance. The Post also hosted an on-line chat with Boardman of Local 25, UNITE-HERE, yesterday. The Post was never so labor-friendly back in the day when I was in the trenches, routinely holding ed board luncheons with management, while we couldn't even get a reporter with any knowledge of labor law to cover us.

In the third city which could be effected by a job action, the local paper of record is silent on its front page. It is strangely silent inside, too. If you don't look at it, maybe it will go away. The New York Times continues its long, slow collapse into the third rank of American journalism.

MBA Presidency

Via Nathan Newman:

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS THE ALLY OF UNION-BUSTERS AND THE ENEMY OF WORKING AMERICANS

America needs a change at the top. As professors and scholars of management, we are charged with educating the next generation of leaders. As citizens in a democracy, we take seriously our responsibility to speak out on matters of public policy, especially when the common good and the long term viability of the economy are at stake. We cannot be silent while the Administration of George W. Bush attacks the gains of working people over the past hundred years. It would be bad enough if the Bush administration were merely trying to turn the clock back to the "good old days" of untrammeled managerial prerogatives and unfettered markets. In reality, however, this administration is forging an ever more noxious mix of private economic interests and covert public power. Our economic, social, health, and environmental security is threatened as never before.

University affiliations are listed for purposes of identification only.

See, it's not just me. The pros think so, too.

Clueless

Bob Herbert is a national treasure. This morning, he brings tears to my eyes.

This Is Bush's Vietnam
By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 17, 2004

Richard VandeGeer was not the last American serviceman to die in the Vietnam War, but he was close enough. He was part of the last group of Americans killed, and his name was the last of the more than 58,000 to be listed on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. As I stood at his grave, I couldn't help but wonder how long it will take us to get to the last American combat death in Iraq.

Lieutenant VandeGeer died heroically. He was the pilot of a CH-53A transport helicopter that was part of an effort to rescue crew members of the Mayaguez, an American merchant ship that was captured by the Khmer Rouge off the coast of Cambodia on May 12, 1975. The helicopter was shot down and half of the 26 men aboard, including Lieutenant VandeGeer, perished.

(It was later learned that the crew of the Mayaguez had already been released.)

The failed rescue operation, considered the last combat activity of the Vietnam War, came four years after John Kerry's famous question, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Although he died bravely, Lieutenant VandeGeer's death was as senseless as those of the 58,000 who died before him in the fool's errand known as Vietnam. His remains were not recovered for 20 years - not until a joint operation by American and Cambodian authorities located the underwater helicopter wreckage in 1995. Positive identification, using the most advanced DNA technology, took another four years. Lieutenant VandeGeer was buried at Arlington in a private ceremony in 2000.

The Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation put me in touch with the lieutenant's family. "I'm still angry that my son is gone," said Mrs. VandeGeer, who is divorced and lives alone in Cocoa Beach. "I'm his mother. I think about him every day."

She said that while she will always be proud of her son, she believes he "died for nothing."

Lieutenant VandeGeer's sister, Michelle, told me she can't think about her brother without recalling that the last time she saw him was on her wedding day, in May 1974. "He looked so handsome and confident," she said. "He wanted to change the world."

Wars are all about chaos and catastrophes, death and suffering, and lifelong grief, which is why you should go to war only when it's absolutely unavoidable. Wars tear families apart as surely as they tear apart the flesh of those killed and wounded. Since we learned nothing from Vietnam, we are doomed to repeat its agony, this time in horrifying slow-motion in Iraq.

Three more marines were killed yesterday in Iraq. Kidnappings are commonplace. The insurgency is growing and becoming more sophisticated, which means more deadly. Ordinary Iraqis are becoming ever more enraged at the U.S.

When the newscaster David Brinkley, appalled by the carnage in Vietnam, asked Lyndon Johnson why he didn't just bring the troops home, Johnson replied, "I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war."

George W. Bush is now trapped as tightly in Iraq as Johnson was in Vietnam. The war is going badly. The president's own intelligence estimates are pessimistic. There is no plan to actually win the war in Iraq, and no willingness to concede defeat.

I wonder who the last man or woman will be to die for this colossal mistake.

Explain to me again why someplace in the neighborhood of half of the electorate wants to vote for President Iraq Failure?

Habeus What?

Out of the Brig
‘Enemy combatant’ Yaser Hamdi will soon be released from a military prison without facing any charges.
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 4:58 p.m. ET Sept. 15, 2004

Sept. 15 - The first U.S. government-declared "enemy combatant" in the war on terror will soon be released from a military prison in South Carolina under an agreement that will allow him to fly home to Saudi Arabia as a free man, administration officials tell NEWSWEEK.

The result, officials say, is a highly detailed agreement that is expected to be made public later this week. It will result in Hamdi being flown back to Saudi Arabia on a U.S. military aircraft without ever being charged with any terror-related activity—a symbolic victory for critics who have long pointed to the case as a prime example of what they see as the Bush administration's overreaching in combating the terrorist threat.

This is some sort of Constitutional victory? Hamdi is being deported without ever having been charged or allowed to answer those charges. The W administration applies the Bill of Rights selectively, at best. I guess patriotism mean winking at the Constitution.

Stretched Too Thin

General Warns of a Looming Shortage of Specialists
By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: September 17, 2004

WASHINGTON, Sept. 16 - The chief of the Army Reserve warned on Thursday that at the current pace of operations in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army faced a serious risk of running out of crucial specialists in the Reserves who can be involuntarily called up for active duty.

The remarks by the officer, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, throw a spotlight on the military's existing mobilization authority, under which Reserve and National Guard personnel can be summoned to active duty for no more than a total of 24 months, unless they volunteer to extend their tours.

As military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq continue with no end in sight, General Helmly said he was increasingly concerned that a growing number of soldiers with critical specialties that are contained mainly in the reservist ranks will exhaust their two-year stints, making it increasingly difficult to fill the yearlong tours of duty that have become standard. The skills include civil affairs and truck driving.

"The manning-the-force issue for me is the single most pressing function I worry about," General Helmly told reporters at a breakfast meeting.

Of the 205,000 members of the Army Reserve, about 43,500 are mobilized now; 22,600 of those are deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf.

General Helmly did not say when the Army might begin to run out of some reservists to call to active duty, but the average mobilization for members of the Reserves throughout the military has increased to 342 days this year from 156 days in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

General Helmly's cautionary comments echoed a major finding of a report issued this week by the Government Accountability Office, formerly the General Accounting Office. That report concluded that if the Department of Defense's mobilization policy restricted the time that reservists could be called to active duty, "it is possible that D.O.D. will run out of forces." General Helmly said he had not yet seen the report.

GIs claim threat by Army
Soldiers say they were told to re-enlist or face deployment to Iraq

By Dick Foster, Rocky Mountain News
September 16, 2004

COLORADO SPRINGS - Soldiers from a Fort Carson combat unit say they have been issued an ultimatum - re-enlist for three more years or be transferred to other units expected to deploy to Iraq.

Hundreds of soldiers from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team were presented with that message and a re-enlistment form in a series of assemblies last Thursday, said two soldiers who spoke on condition of anonymity.
....
A Fort Carson spokesman confirmed the re-enlistment drive is under way and one of the soldiers provided the form to the Rocky Mountain News. An Army spokesmen denied, however, that soldiers who don't re-enlist with the brigade were threatened.

The form, if signed, would bind the soldier to the 3rd Brigade until Dec. 31, 2007. The two soldiers said they were told that those who did not sign would be transferred out of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team.

"They said if you refuse to re-enlist with the 3rd Brigade, we'll send you down to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is going to Iraq for a year, and you can stay with them, or we'll send you to Korea, or to Fort Riley (in Kansas) where they're going to Iraq," said one of the soldiers, a sergeant.

The second soldier, an enlisted man who was interviewed separately, essentially echoed that view.

"They told us if we don't re-enlist, then we'd have to be reassigned. And where we're most needed is in units that are going back to Iraq in the next couple of months. So if you think you're getting out, you're not," he said.

The brigade's presentation outraged many soldiers who are close to fulfilling their obligation and are looking forward to civilian life, the sergeant said.

"We have a whole platoon who refuses to sign," he said.

A Fort Carson spokesman said Wednesday that 3rd Brigade recruitment officers denied threatening the soldiers with Iraq duty.

"I can only tell you what the retention officers told us: The soldiers were not being told they will go to Iraq, but they may go to Iraq," said the spokesman, who gave that explanation before being told later to direct all inquiries to the Pentagon.

Sending soldiers to Iraq with less than one year of their enlistment remaining "would not be taken lightly," Lt. Col. Gerard Healy said from the Pentagon Wednesday.

"We realize that we deal with people and with families, and that's got to be a factor," he said.

"There's probably a lot of places on post where they could put those folks (who don't re-enlist) until their time expires. But I don't want to rule out the possibility that they could go to a unit that might deploy," said Healy.

Under current Army practice, members of Iraq-bound units are "stop-lossed," meaning they could be retained in the unit for an entire year in Iraq, even if their active-duty enlistment expires.

A recruiter told the sergeant that the Army would keep them "as long as they needed us."

It's a good thing there are no other threats in the world that might need boots on the ground....

A Better World?

Hmmm. The LAT seems a little sceptical:

Unease Shadows Bush's Optimism
The president doesn't waver, but others do as casualties mount and security withers.

By Tyler Marshall, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — A combination of escalating bloodshed, gloomy assessments and deteriorating security conditions in Iraq are challenging the Bush administration's upbeat view of the struggle to establish democracy in the beleaguered Middle East nation.

A growing sense of unease is visible among Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress as bombings and kidnappings continue to rise along with the death toll.

The new challenge to the administration's view of events comes at a crucial time for President Bush, as the interim Iraqi government struggles to prepare for elections in January and as the Iraq issue dominates his bid for reelection.

Campaigning Thursday in Minnesota and upstate New York, Bush acknowledged "ongoing acts of violence," but quickly returned to a central — and positive — message on Iraq: that U.S. policies are succeeding and Iraq is on the verge of democracy and free elections.

"It wasn't all that long ago that Saddam Hussein was in power with his torture chambers and mass graves, and today this country is headed toward elections," he said in St. Cloud.

To shore up that message, Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, will visit Washington next week and will address a joint session of Congress.

Amid the new disquiet over the administration's Iraq policy, Democratic presidential contender Sen. John F. Kerry charged during a campaign speech Thursday to the National Guard Assn. in Las Vegas that Bush was trying to hide the truth from the American people.

"Two days ago, the president stood right where I'm standing and did not even acknowledge that more than 1,000 men and women have lost their lives in Iraq," he said. "He did not tell you that with each passing day, we're seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings."

Kerry's remarks drew a sharp response from Vice President Dick Cheney a few hours later at a campaign rally in Reno, where Cheney said he was "stunned by the audacity of that statement."

Cheney, of course, will say anything as Bush's attack dog. You'd think he could bring the dead back to life.

The LAT continues:

U.S. Death Toll in Iraq at Least 52 This Month
Insurgents kill three Marines. In Baghdad, three civilians -- two Americans and one Briton -- are kidnapped from their home.

By Ashraf Khalil and Patrick J. McDonnell, Times Staff Writers

BAGHDAD — Iraqi insurgents pressed their assault on U.S. and allied forces Thursday as two Americans and a Briton were kidnapped from their Baghdad house and three Marines were killed, bringing the number of U.S. military deaths in the country this month to at least 52.

The brazen abduction of the employees of a Middle East-based construction firm continued a violent week that has left more than 200 Iraqis dead, and it followed a similar kidnapping of two Italian women from their office 10 days ago.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the abduction, but almost all of the more than 120 kidnappings of foreigners in Iraq have been carried out by militant groups seeking to drive out U.S. forces, aid workers and foreign companies involved in supporting military and reconstruction efforts.

Most kidnappings of foreigners in Iraq have occurred on the nation's lawless roads, but the spread of abductions to homes and offices has sparked new fear among an international community already feeling besieged. Some companies have pulled out of the country, despite the money to be made on reconstruction projects.

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad identified the two Americans as Jack Hensley and Eugene "Jack" Armstrong. Their ages and hometowns were not released. The British Embassy confirmed that the third man was one of its citizens, but it did not identify him.

An Iraqi government official said the three men worked for Gulf Services Co., based in the United Arab Emirates, but it was unclear whether they were security guards or held other positions with the firm.

LA Times Iraq War Casualty Database

Click on the link and find the people we've lost. WE have lost them. Don't forget that. For the families, George W. Bush is a weapon of mass destruction.

If the world is a safer place without Saddam Hussein, I would love to know how.

Fantasy v. Reality

Bush rejects bleak Iraq intelligence assessment

By Guy Dinmore in Washington
Published: September 16 2004 07:33 | Last updated: September 16 2004 18:55

Iraq is making broad economic and political progress, the Bush administration insisted on Thursday, responding to a leaked intelligence report setting out a bleak assessment of Iraq's prospects up to the end of next year.

The report a classified National Intelligence Estimate that represents the collective judgment of the various branches of the US intelligence community was the first known overall assessment of Iraq for two years. It was approved in July by John McLaughlin, acting head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and initiated by George Tenet, his predecessor, who stepped down on July 9.

According to the New York Times, the 50-page report sets out three scenarios, ranging from the most favourable tenuous stability in political, economic and security terms to the worst case, of civil war.

An official told the Financial Times it was also critical of the administration's failure to anticipate the insurgency and widespread looting that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The White House responded by saying that progress was being made on all fronts of the president's five-point plan for Iraq's economic and political reconstruction, and that elections would go ahead as scheduled in January 2005. President George W. Bush had been clear to the American people that challenges lay ahead, a senior official said.

If wishes were horses....

Growing Consensus That Iraq Is Hopeless
by Jim Lobe

After weeks of hurricanes and controversies over swift boats in Vietnam and Texas and Alabama National Guard records, Iraq is beginning to creep back onto the front pages, and the news is uniformly bad.

"Security and economic problems continue to overshadow and undermine efforts across the board," including health care, education and governance, according to a report their project released last week. Among other things, it noted that despite a massive school-building and rehabilitation program, children are increasingly dropping out to help their families survive an economy where almost half the working population remains unemployed.

I seem to recall telling you a year ago (as did Steve Gilliard) that this was going to be a disaster and it would look about like this.

W can pretend that he hasn't made a mess and that everything is going swimingly in Iraq. Facts are stubborn things, however, and the coffins coming back to Dover may be hidden, but the families who receive them know.

If half of the American electorate wants to vote on a fantasy, there isn't much I can do about it. This president is a fantasist, a delusionist, and if that is what the voters want, the rest of us can move to Canada or live with it.

His fantasies, in Iraq, on the budget, will kill this country. I'm not sure I want to be around to watch.

The Missing

Press Reports on U.S. Casualties: About 17,000 Short, UPI Says

By Mark Benjamin, UPI

Published: September 15, 2004

NEW YORK (UPI) Nearly 17,000 service members medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan are absent from public Pentagon casualty reports commonly cited by newspapers, according to military data reviewed by United Press International. Most don't fit the definition of casualties, according to the Pentagon, but a veterans' advocate said they should all be counted.

The Pentagon has reported 1,019 dead and 7,245 wounded from Iraq.

The military has evacuated 16,765 individual service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries and ailments not directly related to combat, according to the U.S. Transportation Command, which is responsible for the medical evacuations. Most are from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The Pentagon's public casualty reports, available at www.defenselink.mil, list only service members who died or were wounded in action. The Pentagon's own definition of a war casualty provided to UPI in December describes a casualty as, "Any person who is lost to the organization by having been declared dead, duty status/whereabouts unknown, missing, ill, or injured."

The casualty reports do list soldiers who died in non-combat-related incidents or died from illness. But service members injured or ailing from the same non-combat causes (the majority that appear to be "lost to the organization")are not reflected in those Pentagon reports.

In a statement Wednesday, the Pentagon gave a different definition that included casualty descriptions by severity and type and said most medical evacuations did not count. "The great majority of service members medically evacuated from Operation Iraqi Freedom are not casualties, by either Department of Defense definitions or the common understanding of the average newspaper reader."

It cited such ailments as "muscle strain, back pain, kidney stones, diarrhea and persistent fever" as non-casualty evacuations. "Casualty reports released to the public are generally confined to fatalities and those wounded in action," the statement said.

A veterans' advocate said the Pentagon should make a full reporting of the casualties, including non-combat ailments and injuries. "They are still casualties of war," said Mike Schlee, director of the National Security and Foreign Relations Division at the American Legion. "I think we have to have an honest disclosure of what the short- and long-term casualties of any conflict are."

A spokesman for the transportation command said that without orders from U.S. Central Command, his unit would not separate the medical evacuation data to show how many came from Iraq and Afghanistan. "We stay in our lane," said Lt. Col. Scott Ross. But most are clearly from Operation Iraqi Freedom where several times as many troops are deployed as in Afghanistan.

Among veterans from Iraq seeking help from the VA, 5,375 have been diagnosed with a mental problem, making it the third-leading diagnosis after bone problems and digestive problems. Among the mental problems were 800 soldiers who became psychotic.

A military study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July showed that 16 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq might suffer major depression, generalized anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. Around 11 percent of soldiers returning from Afghanistan may have the same problems, according to that study.

Since the Veterans' Admin health resources are already overwhelmed by the needs of vets of past wars, and Bush is trying to cut what little resources for vets we have now, I'm sure that we are all looking forward to more homeless vets living in boxes on our streets. According to HUD, most of us are about one paycheck away from the same status.

Le plus c'est change...

Bumpers,

I arrived home from work today to discover an intriguing invitation in my inbox. Kevin Hayden of The American Street wrote to invite me to join the stable at that blog. Since I'm in extremis as I try to figure out how to combine blogging and working life, why not throw another variable into the mix? I responded with a delighted (and somewhat alarmed) "yes," and you will find me posting one day a week on that site (day TBD) once I return from my Toronto trip next week. Newsblogging here at Bump is going to be hard--the next couple of weeks at work are going to be so busy that keeping myself "up" on the news will be next to impossible. Since the Bump went live last November (and particularly since I got a faster computer and moved to Mozilla as my browser) I've routinely kept two to three dozen sources active and regularly updated on the task bar. And that also meant I was reading a couple of dozen stories before each post. I can't do that anymore and continue to get the boss's work done, so I'm going to need to refine my technique and refocus the blog. I'll be experimenting and want to hear from you about what is satisfying.

For years and years, I've been a letter writer. Before email was wide-spread, I wrote pen and paper letters to friends and family. Now that everyone has email, I frequently end my day with a "summing up" of the day to one of my regular correspondents. It may be that the Bump becomes that nightly letter, along with a morning summary of what to keep your eyes open for each day. I don't know what will work best, but I'm going to be pitching change-ups for the next couple of weeks.

I don't know what the connectivity issues will be while I'm in Toronto next week--I've got the office Dell laptop and the hotel has broadband cable. I've got a Telco cable to plug the machine in: can my savvy readers tell me if I need to get a cable modem for this thing to be able to use what the hotel offers? This is new territory for me. I'm upgrading the home machine to cable broadband in a couple of weeks (the speed will increase my functionality as a blogger) and don't know squat about this technology. O' course, one of the people I'll be seeing in Toronto is one of my resident experts in this area, but I'm always open to learning new things. I'm leaving Sunday afternoon, so if I need to purchase some gee-gaw for connectivity, I need to know about it in time to do something about it.

Beyond the technology, I also plan to spend time with friends while I'm Toronto, one old and one virtual, so a couple of my evenings will be taken. While in the mountains last weekend I got to meet two of my favorite bloggers, Fr. Bojangles and his wife. On this Canadian trip, I look forward to meeting pogge and talking blogging and Canadian and American politics with another liberal. This year, we've lots to talk about.

These are some of my plans and desires. What do you think? Toronto is one of my favorite cities on earth, but the per diem the office offers means that much restaurant crawling is out of the question. It is a great book store city, so I'll probably crawl a few of those on my own dime. Anything else I shouldn't miss on my one or two free nights? Telling me to sit in the hotel and blog isn't going to cut it. ;>) This is my first trip out of DC in four years (beyond family weddings and funerals) and I'd like to actually experience the city. I've already toured the islands and the CN Tower, what's next?

Kevin credited "the perception and the serenity" of my work for his invitation, for which I thank him. I suspect that regulars here might have a different perspective. I try to be perceptive. I get to serenity about once a month, on my best days and not by my own means. And it is usually an accident.

After I return, I'll be getting geeky with SQL and CSS and your advice, as always, is welcome. I'm in new territory.

I now have two reports who know more than I do. I don't like that. I've been put in charge of the IT section. My cat knows what to do with this and the carpet won't like it.

Talk to me. Help!

Yellow

On the ride into work this morning, I was meditating on all the bogus ways that "morality" is being invoked in this year's campaigns, particularly the presidential one, though it is hardly limited to that. Duke University Divinity School's Stanley Hauerwas is considered the foremost moral theologian working in the academy today--a Methodist, he is also taught in Catholic schools. I've been quite captivated by him since I first became acquainted with his work four years ago.

One of the central themes of Hauerwas's theology is the role of suffering in accountability: a genuine moral code MUST include your willingness to suffer for what you believe to be true. Any morality which does not include this willingness is not truly moral. Hauerwas's bottom line is always accountability: moral choices which do not include accountability are meaningless. It is interesting, at least to me, to think about this idea within the context of the Bush TANG flap and the Iraq war. Here is a man who believed (in the face of what evidence, I wonder?) that the Viet Nam war was meaningful, but was not willing to suffer for his belief. The suffering of others is not transferable--others cannot do your suffering for you. Among the wealthy and powerful in this country, it is common for the sweat of others to be purchased in order to discomfit the powerholders as little as possible, but genuine suffering cannot be bought off.

Bush's habits of moral shirking have not changed in 20 years. Running his campaign on the backs of the young men and women who are killed and wounded in Iraq will not purchase him virtue. He does not know this because he doesn't understand the idea of personal worth as a result of personal action: in order to be esteemed, one must do estimable things. The other day Josh Marshall pointed to Bush's"moral cowardice. This is what the phrase means from a systematic theological point of view. Since Bush makes much of his theology, it is reasonable to criticize him on these grounds.

Steadfastness

It would be foolish of me to say that "this is the issue of our time" when our economy is teetering on a cliff. But if this is not one of the issues that turns the election, then we have truly not been paying attention. Sidney lets the generals speak for themselves, and I add in Juan Cole's summary of the facts on the ground.

Far graver than Vietnam

Most senior US military officers now believe the war on Iraq has turned into a disaster on an unprecedented scale
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday September 16, 2004

The Guardian

'Bring them on!" President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is "winning" in Iraq. "Our strategy is succeeding," he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday.

But, according to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. There's no analogy whatsoever between the situation in Iraq and the advantages we had after the second world war in Germany and Japan."

W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency". According to Terrill, the anti-US insurgency, centred in the Sunni triangle, and holding several cities and towns - including Fallujah - is expanding and becoming more capable as a consequence of US policy.

"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group," he told me. "We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. The political culture is more hostile to the US presence. The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."

After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare. "I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.

"If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation," Terrill explained. "Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators." He describes the religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."

"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination. They will be tainted by their very association with the foreign occupier. In fact, we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq."

General Odom said: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for US aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."

Terrill believes that any sustained US military offensive against the no-go areas "could become so controversial that members of the Iraqi government would feel compelled to resign". Thus, an attempted military solution would destroy the slightest remaining political legitimacy. "If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."

General Hoare believes from the information he has received that "a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "after the first Tuesday in November. That's the cynical part of it - after the election. The signs are all there."

He compares any such planned attack to the late Syrian dictator Hafez al-Asad's razing of the rebel city of Hama. "You could flatten it," said Hoare. "US military forces would prevail, casualties would be high, there would be inconclusive results with respect to the bad guys, their leadership would escape, and civilians would be caught in the middle. I hate that phrase collateral damage. And they talked about dancing in the street, a beacon for democracy."

Dr. Cole reports:

*In Ramadi, running gun battles broke out between local Sunni nationalists and US Marines. Guerrillas set off a bomb, killing 1 person. Altogether the fighting killed 13 and wounded 17.

*Near the southern Shiite shrine city of Karbala, an unknown assailant assassinated Labib Mohammadi, an employee of Iran's pilgrimage commission in Iraq.

Stay the course?

Since our president and Defense secretary don't seem to take the committment of blood and treasure very seriously, it will be up to us voters to school them.

Coffee

I'll see you in the morning. I'm still negotiating the change between full-time blogging and full-time employment with a very busy job. By next week I expect to have the tools I need to blog at work successfully. Hang with me until then, I promise some surprises on the weekend for those who read deeply, if not well.

News you need this weekend.

More later,
Melanie

No-Nothingism

Since the cable news networks won't tell you, the tale will need to be told here. George W. Bush is losing Iraq and adding to the calculus of terror. Kerry is not doing a good job of telling this story and this leaves me angry, as I do not want to be on the losing side of this story. The stakes are too high.

News Analysis: Americans seem not to focus on the war

Brian Knowlton/IHT IHT

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Despite a dramatic flare-up of violence in Iraq that has produced a long list of American military casualties and even longer lists of Iraqi casualties in scores of daily bombings, reaction in the United States seems muted and the Kerry campaign appears to have derived little gain from the issue.
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In part, this may reflect the success of administration efforts, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, to convince Americans that the war in Iraq is a war against terrorists, that blood spilled there will ultimately make the United States safer and that there is thus no alternative but to persist. Televised scenes from Iraq of mounting chaos could change that calculus. But in recent weeks, Americans seem not to have focused on the news from Iraq, appearing more preoccupied with reports on the wave of hurricanes that have threatened Florida.
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President George W. Bush on Tuesday addressed a National Guard group in Las Vegas, and paid tribute to those fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. "In these crucial times," he said, "our commitments are kept by the men and women that wear our uniform."
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He did not react directly to the latest paroxysm in Iraq or to suggestions that matters there may be seriously deteriorating. Earlier, in a rally near Denver, supporters applauded as Bush underlined the notion that action overseas could prevent attacks on the homeland. "We're staying on the offensive," he said. "We'll strike the terrorists abroad so we will not have to face them at home."
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Even Bush's Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, has not made the issue a centerpiece. He devoted the bulk of a speech Tuesday in Milwaukee to domestic issues like health care and Social Security, where polls show him with greater support than he holds on terror and national security matters.
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"Things are getting worse," Kerry said about Iraq, in a statement responding to Bush's speech. "It was wrong for America to go it alone, and now every American is paying the price."
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Earlier, in a prepared text, Kerry repeated his recent line that "of all George Bush's wrong choices, the most catastrophic choice is the mess he's made in Iraq." Kerry said again that had he been president, "I would have done almost everything differently" there.
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But Democrats have had little luck in seeking to separate, in voters' minds, the issue of the fight against terrorism, where Bush enjoys strong backing, from the traumas flowing from the war that he launched in Iraq.
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A few months ago, amid intense combat and the prisoner-abuse scandal, Bush and Kerry were running about even in opinion polls on the question of who would better handle the situation in Iraq.
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But a Gallup Poll in early September, which followed weeks of negative publicity questioning Kerry's Vietnam War record, showed Bush leading Kerry by 54 percent to 41 percent on that question.
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Bush's lead on the question, apparently lifted by the Republican convention in New York, swelled even despite extensive publicity about the 1,000-death milestone among U.S. troops in Iraq.
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Analysts, and some administration supporters, noted that the number is still small compared to previous wars. And in a country approaching 300 million people, where soldiers come disproportionately from rural areas and small towns, most Americans do not personally know anyone who has died in the war.
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Surveys show that the Al Qaeda-Iraq link has taken root in many voters' minds. Cheney still asserts such a connection, and Bush less directly suggests one, though the national commission on Sept. 11 terror attacks said it had found evidence only of isolated contacts.
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Cheney said Friday that Iraq "had provided sanctuary and support for terrorists in the past" and that "there was a relationship with Al Qaeda."
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Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, said Sunday that Cheney was irresponsibly clouding the issue of a supposed link.
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"From this day forward, this administration should never suggest that there is" a link, Edwards said. "Vice President Cheney should not say the kinds of things he said Friday, and the president should not mislead the American people by implying there is a connection between the attacks of Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein."
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Bush has, of late, emphasized U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq and to establish a stable democracy there. He has said that this will not be easy, but glossed over the complexities of how to reach that objective. "We will stay the course so that they can develop an army and police force of their own so they can defend themselves," Bush said Monday, referring to both Iraq and Afghanistan. "We're going to get - get the job done as quickly as possible, and then our troops will come home with the honor they've earned. And the world will be better off."
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Bush strategists have said for months that they do not expect U.S. military deaths to seriously undermine support for the president, so long as the public accepts the underlying rationale for war, considers it winnable and the death toll does not surge dramatically.

And the underlying rationale for war is what? Which lie is Kerry going to allow to go forward? And how many civilian deaths are tolerable (of course, our Viet Nam style toleration of inflated "enemy" dead goes on the record)?

And what happened to "Osama Bin Laden," dead or alive? Where is Al Qaeda? Where are those weapons of mass destruction? Pakistan was selling them to our enemies and now we are sending them jets? What's up with that?

We Are Family

My nose is burned, those things I used to call "sun freckles" on the back of my hands are now starting to look like what my grandmother used to call "liver spots," but it was a magical weekend with some of my favorite animals (we humans might be smarter than most, but our basal ganglia hang in the world of animals.) I say it this way because the weekend was shaped by a puppy and a kitten, and the way they interacted with each other and we with them, in about the purdiest package of earth that can be found in a three hour drive from my little patch.

Those of you who are old enough to remember Jayne Meadows will appreciate Sadie, the giant Golden Puppie. She even has the eye-bat down to an art. Her gold and platinum coat is irresistable, and she is starting to do the "settle down" from puppy to dog, but she's still a little too enthusiastic for even a Golden. She's a knock you down and lick your glasses kind of dog, if you let her. If you don't, she'll roll over on her back and let the tongue hang out of her mouth. Ho'.

The kitten is another project: bro and SIL have taken on two at once. The little orange streak is a feral rescue. She doesn't fight or anything, she just hides. But she came out this week. And even did a turn in everyone's bed every night. Both are going to be fine, but both are long term projects.

As is family. We are all still learning how to be it, and I'm glad we tried again this week.

I deeply appreciate what the bro and SIL are doing to make the earth favorable to family formation. They don't always get it all right, but they are tilling the soil and I deeply appreciate it, seeds can't grow without this work. When I get to the point where I have some new financial resources to toss into the pot, I have some further ideas. We'll let them steep in the pot on the back of the stove over time. And then see what develops when the wild child, my place in the family order, starts sprouting Ivy.

My SIL, a tiller of soil, one who
grows truly excellent green things, is spading the family earth and coming up with new soil. Earthworms and all.

I'm going to hold that in my heart for a few days while I also contemplate the utterly viscious parcheesi game that got perpetrated on me Sunday night. I must come from truly hardy stock to have survived so long amid these people.

We played this game as children and must have forgotten some of the rules or where never taught them. This is a game of chance and strategy that is every bit as withering as anything I have ever played and we never laughed so hard, games are a wonderful way to get the family cards on the table, if you are in the mood. We just laughed until the muscles between our ribs hurt, it was a gonzo moment, and I pray for one for you. At some point, giving up control in the face of absurdity becomes compelling and if you don't succumb, I think you have a little pointy face and live in the sewer.

If you play the Parcheesi rules out to their natural conclusion, you are going to be playing for a long time. If you do, you will find out things about your playing partners which aren't particularly attractive. This is much more revealing than living in "Big Brother House," which is the only excuse for having it on the air. Oh, you don't remember why that is, do you? I'll be along to explain it to you in another day.

Grow some peace and wisdom and add it here. We haven't done such a good job ourselves and we're waiting for you.

Melanie

Blog break

I'm leaving for the mountains Sunday morning, back Tuesday. I haven't taken a day off the blog since Christmas, and this feels like it might be a good time for a break. The bro has Internet access on a slow dialup, so I might write something if I get a yen, or I might just take a break to regenerate and think of new uses for the blog. The bro and his bride have a lovely alpine A-frame, heavy on the windows, a block from the water, so I'll have other priorities. They have a boat.

My changing responsibilities at work may make it easier to post during the day, but it won't be like the old days when I posted every hour or so. Additionally, I'm being sent to Toronto next weekend for extensive training on the office's new database, and whether or not I can blog from Toronto will depend on 'Net availability in whatever hotel I end up in (tba). If my Toronto readers can suggest something in Scarborough, I'd be grateful. Best corporate headquarters are just off the Don Valley Parkway. I'm hoping to meet up with some friends in the city while I'm there (including pogge, Fr. Judy, and The Sisterhood of St. John the Divine, I consider the superior a friend of mine.

While in the mountains for the next couple of days I'll be thinking about the article The Gadflyer has asked for and the retreat workshop I'll be leading for these folks in a couple of weeks. The bro is a computer geek, so I'll be picking his brain on DB topics, SQL and other stuff he knows as I claim my incipient geekhood. He's actually done the course work, I'm going to be picking this up on the fly.

And you will be on my mind. My friend and immediately past boss, Sharon, "got it." You are my community and she understands that. It is going to take a couple more days in the office to set this up, but I will have Mozilla in the office before the end of next week. Blah, blah, blah, my boss over-rules the sysadmin, who hates downloads. The only browser on the desktop is IE. I can't believe I blogged with this thing FOR MONTHS. It is a piece of crap. Moz is light and fast and infinitely more capable, and less hackable than IE. Click on the link and download the superior browser. I'd love to check my stats and discover that most of my readers are using Mozilla. Try it. It will make you happy. Get rid of that piece of MS garbage.

I'll have more to say about Open Source technology later next week, as my consultants are urging some downloads I haven't been able to try yet.

Florida readers, my prayers are with you. Jeebus, this has been the hurricane season from hell.

I won't be watching the Sunday gasbags, I'll be on the road to a slice of paradise. I'll be back here for sure late Tuesday in time for whatever remnant of Ivan hits the mid-Atlantic. Now, that's something to look forward to, I'm glad I brought my umbrella home.

Hard Truths

The coming conflagration in Iraq
Insurgents are slowly extending their control

By Ed Blanche
Special to The Daily Star
Saturday, September 11, 2004

BEIRUT: Iraqi insurgents are slowly but surely extending their control over key cities in the notorious "Sunni Triangle" north and west of Baghdad, a creeping consolidation of their influence that bodes ill for the fumbling transitional government and the U.S. forces propping it up. Continued uprisings by Shiite irregulars of the Mehdi Army militia, led by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, scion of a revered religious family, point to the possibility of Shiite militants seizing and holding other "no-go zones" in southern Iraq, further undermining the putative central government in Baghdad.

Whether this phenomenon deepens the rift between the Sunni minority, the pillar of Saddam Hussein's grotesque regime, and the long suppressed Shiite majority and pushes Iraq toward the long-feared fragmentation remains to be seen. The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London concluded in a briefing paper published on Sept. 1 that with the way events are unfolding in Iraq, the country will be fortunate if it manages to avoid a break-up and civil war, a development that would have dangerous ramifications for the entire Middle East.

"The fragmentation scenario goes to the very core of the identity debate within Iraq, and is related closely to the issue of 'who rules' the country in the future," the institute's assessment said. "It is, sadly, a not unlikely scenario."

Eighteen months after the U.S. invasion of March 2003, the fighting in Iraq is getting worse rather than waning, and it will get worse still as general elections scheduled for January 2005 loom closer. The U.S. military death toll passed the grim milestone of 1,000 on Sept. 7 - 988 soldiers and three civilian employees of the Defense Department - while the number of wounded exceeded 7,000 since the start of the war in March 2003.

To underline the ferocity of the largely urban fighting that has now become an everyday affair in Iraq, 1,100 U.S. soldiers and marines were wounded in August alone, by far the highest monthly combat injury total since the conflict began. Sixty-six U.S. military personnel were killed in August, the highest monthly toll since May.

All told, the U.S. military estimated that attacks on its forces were averaging nearly 90 a day in August for a final tally of 2,700, the highest monthly level since George W. Bush fancifully declared major combat at an end on May 1, 2003.

The August casualty figures reflect the growing intensity of the fighting in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Sadr's militiamen (possibly aided by the Iranians) seized much of the city before withdrawing at the urging of Shiite religious leaders, and in the labyrinthine Sadr City quarter of Baghdad, as well as the Sunni cities of Fallujah, Baquba, Ramadi and Samarra. Given the Americans' reluctance to take casualties and their track record of surrendering territory to their foes, they may soon pull out of Sadr City as well. There seems little desire to expand the conflict.

All these remain under insurgent control two months after the transfer of political authority to the transitional government headed by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. He has sworn to crush the insurgency and on Sept. 5 he sent units of the fledgling Iraqi National Guard and the Iraqi police into the town of Latifiyya, a Sunni bastion 30 kilometers south of Baghdad and, backed by US forces, rounded up some 500 suspected militants.

That was the first such government action against a "no-go" Sunni stronghold since the June handover, and according to the Americans, more will follow as the U.S. and Allawi's government struggles to re-establish control over the turbulent country before the elections. But, as the Americans have already found to their cost, bringing rebel no-go zones to heel is no easy undertaking despite their firepower. And killing hundreds of Iraqis, civilians as well as insurgents, in the run-up to crucial elections is not the way to win hearts and minds.

But you have to read the foreign press to find out about it.

One World

has some interesting thoughts on the meaning of this day. If George W. Bush wants to craft a foreign policy based on an us vs. them worldview, he is largely the creator of the opposition. Juan tells us:

Dr. Cole is unwarrentedly optomistic with regard to Afghanistan, where a lack of sufficent force has defaulted us into a guerrilla war that we don't have a clue how to fight. Defense and the National Interest has more. If Clueless W wants to run his presidential campaign on "making us safer," he will have to provide some evidence.

Anniversary

This is an open thread for your remembrances of 9-11-01.

I'm watching Ivan and have to get out of here around noon. Back Tuesday.

Collective Amnesia

Rewriting The Record
By E. J. Dionne Jr.Friday, September 10, 2004; Page A29

So President Bush and Vice President Cheney get us to look the other way by focusing on the vague question of which candidate is "tough" enough to handle terrorists. This leads to such elevated forms of discourse as a convention video comparing John Kerry with a beret-wearing French poodle sock puppet named Fifi, and, this week, Cheney's scabrous observation that if voters "make the wrong choice" in this election, "then the danger is that we'll get hit again."

Faced with a Bush campaign based on amnesia and demagoguery, Kerry gave his big Iraq speech Wednesday at Cincinnati's Union Terminal, the same place Bush gave an October 2002 address justifying a U.S. attack on Saddam Hussein. If Kerry is lucky, his choice of venue just might encourage a look back at Bush's record.

Bush's speech of two years ago can only be read as an effort to scare our country into war. Iraq, Bush said, "is seeking nuclear weapons. . . . The Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons. . . . We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States."

And, oh, yes, Bush couldn't resist touting, through loose association, the supposed link between Hussein and Sept. 11 that the Kean-Hamilton commission has discredited. "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America," Bush said.
Why is it that what Bush told the American people before the war is no longer a live issue?

If Bush's rationale for war no longer holds up, neither does the administration's analysis of the aftermath. In his new book, "The Folly of Empire," John Judis cites a February 2003 Army War College report on Iraqi reconstruction.
Presciently, the report declared: "Long-term gratitude is unlikely and suspicion of U.S. motives will increase as the occupation continues. A force initially viewed as liberators can rapidly be relegated to the status of invaders should an unwelcome occupation continue for a prolonged time. Occupation problems may be especially acute if the United States must implement the bulk of the occupation itself rather than turn these duties over to a postwar international force."

But the administration seemed to think it was wiser than a bunch of smart military guys. On "Meet the Press" in March 2003, Cheney blithely dismissed Tim Russert when the host asked what would happen if "we're not treated as liberators but as conquerors." Would the American people be "prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties?"

Not to worry, said Cheney: "I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators." Cheney dismissed Gen. Eric Shinseki's view of how many troops an occupation would require: "To suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don't think is accurate. I think that's an overstatement." Have we forgotten this, too?

Many also forget the context of Bush's famous "bring 'em on" line of July 2, 2003. It was in direct answer to a question about whether, in light of rising casualty rates, the administration might want to get "larger powers" to join the U.S. effort in Iraq. Bush said he wasn't worried. After the "bring 'em on" line, his next sentence was: "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."

In judging whether this administration has the right answers to terrorism and war, voters can rely on the images. Or they can rely on the record.

Americans are notoriously a-historical. This works to the favor of an administration of lying, traitorous crooks.

The Usual Suspects

Click on the link and print this out to give to your Bush-loving friends and relations. This is as fine an explication of Bushco's utter incompetence as I've seen anywhere.

America right or wrong
Anatol Lieven
8 - 9 - 2004
The Bush administration responded to 9/11 by exploiting a force deeply rooted in United States thinking and behaviour: American nationalism. This force, says Anatol Lieven in an extract from his new book America Right or wrong, is now deforming the country’s relationship with the world and damaging America itself.

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were an atrocious assault on the American homeland. Any United States administration would have had to respond to them by seeking to destroy the perpetrators. The war to destroy the al-Qaida forces in Afghanistan and their Taliban backers was therefore a completely legitimate response to “9/11”, as are US actions against al-Qaida and its allies elsewhere.

Moreover, insofar as American nationalism has become mixed up with a chauvinist version of Israeli nationalism, it also plays an absolutely disastrous role in the US’s own relations with the Muslim world, and in fuelling terrorism. One might say, therefore, that while America keeps a splendid and welcoming house, it also keeps a family of demons in its cellar. These demons, usually kept under certain restraints, were released by 9/11.

The "demons" include American Exceptionalism, anti-intellectualism and knee-jerk reactionary isolationism, all familiar topics in these parts.

How to Do It Wrong

U.S. Targets 3 Iraqi Cities
The moves against Samarra and other insurgent strongholds are an attempt to bolster civilian control before elections in January.

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — U.S. forces rolled into the insurgent bastion of Samarra on Thursday and sought to reestablish Iraqi government control as aircraft pounded suspected guerrilla positions in two other strongholds: Fallouja in the west and Tall Afar in the north.

The show of strength — along with the stated U.S. resolve to crush a Shiite Muslim militia in a Baghdad neighborhood — underscored the military's determination to exert control over the whole country in the months leading up to elections scheduled for January.

"This is a significant step forward where the good people of Samarra are taking control of their destiny," said Maj. Gen. John Batiste, commander of the Army's 1st Infantry Division. His troops entered the city for less than 24 hours, oversaw the selection of new civic leaders, and declared the military's intention to return to help staff checkpoints in coming days.

The U.S. moves against the three insurgent centers come after a surge in attacks this week pushed American military fatalities in Iraq to more than 1,000. The actions appeared designed to dispel the perception that growing swaths of Iraq had become "no-go" zones for U.S. troops, which commanders here forcefully deny.

"We will never give up our right to maneuver in any of our areas," said Maj. Neal O'Brien of the 1st Infantry Division, which patrols four provinces north of Baghdad.

About 150 soldiers converged on Samarra on Thursday, a spokesman said, backed by tanks, armored personnel carriers and attack aviation. They met no resistance.

But commanders acknowledge that as many as 500 insurgents remain in the city. The guerrillas' preference is to strike at smaller U.S. or Iraqi units. In classic guerrilla style, they tend to hide their weapons and blend in among residents when faced with larger forces.

U.S. troops pulled out at the end of the day for lack of a secure base at which to spend the night.

Two months ago, a suicide bomber drove a truck carrying explosives into an Iraqi national guard facility in Samarra that was guarded by U.S. troops, killing five Americans and several Iraqis. Last year, the Army moved its main base out of the city after a mortar shell killed two soldiers as they exercised in a makeshift gym at the site.

U.S. and Iraqi government troops are not in full control of several areas of the country, including Samarra to the north of Baghdad, Fallouja and Ramadi to the west, and the largely Shiite neighborhood known as Sadr City in the eastern part of the capital, where a Shiite militia holds sway. Other cities and towns, such as Tall Afar in the far northwest, have become guerrilla bastions where the U.S.-backed interim Iraqi government exerts only limited control.

The lack of security has blocked tens of millions of dollars in reconstruction projects in hostile areas. U.S. officials have dangled the projects before local leaders as incentives to cooperate, with uneven results.

The Army has largely stayed out of Samarra since May, at the request of local sheiks and other leaders, a military spokesman said. Such requests are common in Iraq, where an armed U.S. presence is often viewed as an incendiary element that encourages resentment and violence.

U.S. officials have generally been willing to lower the military profile if Iraqi authorities can demonstrate an ability to maintain order and root out insurgents. But the military insists it must have freedom of movement when necessary.

In Samarra, the U.S. approach since spring had been to allow local leaders to work out a way to disarm or otherwise neutralize a stubborn insurgent force that had disrupted government and police activities in the ancient city of 200,000.

The largely Sunni Muslim population has long posed a major challenge for U.S. forces. Samarra was the site of a large-scale U.S. offensive last winter designed to flush out a guerrilla force thought to be composed of religious militants, anti-American nationalists and loyalists of ousted President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. During that offensive, a force of more than 3,000 soldiers also met little resistance as the guerrillas apparently blended into the populace to fight another day.

But in recent months, officials and residents say, Samarra had fallen back under de facto insurgent control. The Army blocked off the main bridge leading into the city in an effort to control access. A brisk boat service over the Tigris River provided an alternate access.

On Thursday, however, the Army declared "irreversible momentum" in the city, and said the bridge would be reopened as a "sign of good faith."

When politics drive military strategy, neither will go well.

???

While in the shower a couple of minutes ago, I heard NPR do an utterly uncritical piece on Doug Feith. The SCLM just don't get the neo-cons. More on this later today after I've some time to do a little digging.

Stunning Incompetence

How Many Deaths Will It Take?
By BOB HERBERT

Published: September 10, 2004

It was Vietnam all over again - the heartbreaking head shots captioned with good old American names:

Jose Casanova, Donald J. Cline Jr., Sheldon R. Hawk Eagle, Alyssa R. Peterson.

Eventually there'll be a fine memorial to honor the young Americans whose lives were sacrificed for no good reason in Iraq. Yesterday, under the headline "The Roster of the Dead," The New York Times ran photos of the first thousand or so who were killed.

They were sent off by a president who ran and hid when he was a young man and his country was at war. They fought bravely and died honorably. But as in Vietnam, no amount of valor or heroism can conceal the fact that they were sent off under false pretenses to fight a war that is unwinnable.

How many thousands more will have to die before we acknowledge that President Bush's obsession with Iraq and Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for the United States?

Joshua T. Byers, Matthew G. Milczark, Harvey E. Parkerson 3rd, Ivory L. Phipps.

Fewer and fewer Americans believe the war in Iraq is worth the human treasure we are losing and the staggering amounts of money it is costing. But no one can find a way out of this tragic mess, which is why that dreaded word from the Vietnam era - quagmire - has been resurrected. Most Washington insiders agree with Senator John McCain, who said he believes the U.S. will be involved militarily in Iraq for 10 or 20 more years.

To what end? You can wave goodbye to the naïve idea that democracy would take root in Iraq and then spread like the flowers of spring throughout the Middle East. That was never going to happen. So what are we there for, other than to establish a permanent military stronghold in the region and control the flow of Iraqi oil?

The insurgency in Iraq will never end as long as the U.S. is occupying the country. And our Iraqi "allies" will never fight their Iraqi brethren with the kind of intensity the U.S. would like, any more than the South Vietnamese would fight their fellow Vietnamese with the fury and effectiveness demanded by the hawks in the Johnson administration.

The Iraqi insurgents - whether one agrees with them or not - believe they are fighting for their homeland, their religion and their families. The Americans are not at all clear what they're fighting for. Saddam is gone. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The link between Saddam and the atrocities of Sept. 11 was always specious and has been proven so.

At some point, as in Vietnam, the American public will balk at the continued carnage, and this tragic misadventure will become politically unsustainable. Meanwhile, the death toll mounts.

Elia P. Fontecchio, Raheen Tyson Heighter, Sharon T. Swartworth, Ruben Valdez Jr.

One of the reasons the American effort in Iraq is unsustainable is that the American people know very little about the Iraqi people and their culture, and in most cases couldn't care less. The war in Iraq was sold as a response to Sept. 11. As it slowly dawns on a majority of Americans that the link was bogus, and that there is no benefit to the U.S. from this war, only endless grief, the political support will all but vanish.

(This could take awhile. In a poll done for Newsweek magazine this week, 42 percent of the respondents continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.)

We've put our troops in Iraq in an impossible situation. If you are not permitted to win a war, eventually you will lose it. In Vietnam, for a variety of reasons, the U.S. never waged total war, although the enemy did. After several years and more than 58,000 deaths, we quit.

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of September 11, 2001. Are we going to let Bush memorialize it with a pointless war? Oh, and by the way, we still haven't caught Bin Laden, and Afghanistan is still a war zone. Is there anything this crew can do right?

Fiction and Reality

The Dishonesty Thing
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: September 10, 2004

It's the dishonesty, stupid. The real issue in the National Guard story isn't what George W. Bush did three decades ago. It's the recent pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't, the White House's repeated claims that it had released all of the relevant documents when it hadn't.

It's the same pattern of dishonesty, this time involving personal matters that the public can easily understand, that some of us have long seen on policy issues, from global warming to the war in Iraq. On budget matters, which is where I came in, serious analysts now take administration dishonesty for granted.

It wasn't always that way. Three years ago, those of us who accused the administration of cooking the budget books were ourselves accused, by moderates as well as by Bush loyalists, of being "shrill." These days the coalition of the shrill has widened to include almost every independent budget expert.

For example, back in February the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities accused the Bush administration of, in effect, playing three-card monte with budget forecasts. It pointed out that the administration's deficit forecast was far above those of independent analysts, and suggested that this exaggeration was deliberate.

"Overstating the 2004 deficit," the center wrote, "could allow the president to announce significant 'progress' on the deficit in late October - shortly before Election Day - when the Treasury Department announces the final figures."

Was this a wild accusation from a liberal think tank? No, it's conventional wisdom among experts. Two months ago Stanley Collender, a respected nonpartisan analyst, warned: "At some point over the next few weeks, the Office of Management and Budget will release the administration's midsession budget review and try to convince everyone the federal deficit is falling. Don't believe them."

He went on to echo the center's analysis. The administration's standard procedure, he said, is to initially issue an unrealistically high deficit forecast, which is "politically motivated or just plain bad." Then, when the actual number comes in below the forecast, officials declare that the deficit is falling, even though it's higher than the previous year's deficit.

Goldman Sachs says the same. Last month one of its analysts wrote that "the Office of Management and Budget has perfected the art of underpromising and overperforming in terms of its near-term budget deficit forecasts. This creates the impression that the deficit is narrowing when, in fact, it will be up sharply."

In other words, many reputable analysts think that the Bush administration routinely fakes even its short-term budget forecasts for the purposes of political spin. And the fakery in its long-term forecasts is much worse.

The administration claims to have a plan to cut the deficit in half over the next five years. But even Bruce Bartlett, a longtime tax-cut advocate, points out that "projections showing deficits falling assume that Bush's tax cuts expire on schedule." But Mr. Bush wants those tax cuts made permanent. That is, the administration has a "plan" to reduce the deficit that depends on Congress's not passing its own legislation.

Sounding definitely shrill, Mr. Bartlett says that "anyone who thinks we can overcome our fiscal mess without higher taxes is in denial." Far from backing down on his tax cuts, however, Mr. Bush is proposing to push the budget much deeper into the red with privatization programs that purport to offer something for nothing.

As Newsweek's Allan Sloan writes, "The president didn't exactly burden us with details about paying for all this. It's great marketing: show your audience the goodies but not the price tag. It's like going to the supermarket, picking out your stuff and taking it home without stopping at the checkout line to pay. The bill? That will come later."

Longtime readers will remember that that's exactly what I said, shrilly, about Mr. Bush's proposals during the 2000 campaign. Once again, he's running on the claim that 2 - 1 = 4.

So what's the real plan? Some not usually shrill people think that Mr. Bush will simply refuse to face reality until it comes crashing in: Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, says there's a 75 percent chance of a financial crisis in the next five years.

Nobody knows what Mr. Bush would really do about taxes and spending in a second term. What we do know is that on this, as on many matters, he won't tell the truth.

I enjoy "magical realism" in novels and films. I don't particularly appreciate it in the budget process.

Losing

Iraq: The invisible war becomes visible
With 1,000 US service members dead in Iraq, Americans should do what the next of kin do every day -- remember and reflect

Bill Berkowitz, Working for Change

Spinning the 1000th death isn't surprising, but the appearance marked a departure from the past several months when benign neglect of the news media was the main course taken.

Be assured that you won't be alone: The next of kin of those who have died and the families of the wounded reflect on this tragedy every day.

I am not a pacifist. I DO think there are times and circumstances when American lives have to be committed and, sometimes, spent. I DO NOT think this should ever be done with the kind of casualness of the Bush/Cheney/Rummy cabal. It should cause agonising, lack of sleep. Do you want your kids and relations and neighbors sent out by simple-minded, black and white thinkers? War is a complex business and shouldn't be conducted by people who haven't gotten much further than the sandbox in their strategic thinking.

Catastrophic success? What horseshit. That's a euphamism for utter failure.

Who's Zooming Who

Greenspan: Recovery Regaining Momentum

By Warren Vieth, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Wednesday that the recovery was gaining momentum again after a spring slowdown, but he warned that Washington's burgeoning budget deficits posed a long-term threat to the economy.

Recent economic data suggest that "the expansion has regained some traction" since the second-quarter "soft patch," Greenspan told the House Budget Committee. Consumer spending and housing construction rallied in July, he said