Once in a while I read msfe's posts for a good laugh. Case in point, his cut and paste directly above this one. You can always count on msfe to paste the garbage, Dowd among them.
Political death of a usurper An unwinnable war in Iraq and the deceit that led to it have destroyed the credibility of the prime minister George Galloway Monday July 14, 2003 "Now does he feel/ his secret murders sticking on his hands;/ now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;/ those he commands move only in command,/ nothing in love: now does he feel his title/ hang loose about him, like a giant's robe/ upon a dwarfish thief." Thus Angus spoke of the Scottish usurper Macbeth, whose ambition led him deep into a river of blood. Less poetically, Clare Short, Mo Mowlem and Robin Cook are saying much the same of their former cabinet colleague. I predicted before the war that Iraq would be the political death of Tony Blair, and it is now almost Shakespearean how the pain from his self-inflicted wounds is written across his face. It is as if he is physically diminishing before our eyes as his authority bleeds into the sands of Iraq. Each new day brings another stab at Blair's credibility: former cabinet members in public, current ministers in private, using the round of summer parties to distance themselves from the fading king. From Hans Blix, the BBC and the press, from two former heads of the joint intelligence committee and now, perhaps fatally, from across the Atlantic, fall blow after hammer blow. Suddenly, comparing the two main war leaders to wolves - which has got me into such difficulty with the Labour hierarchy - seems very tame indeed. Always travelling light on ideological baggage, never having won or wanted the affection of the Labour clan, Blair's main asset was his "Trust me, I'm a regular guy" reputation. Now it is gone and will never be recovered. That Iraq was lynched by Bush and Blair has become plain as a pikestaff. Take the saving of Private Jessica. Said at first to have been shot and held hostage by Iraqi doctors, and now revealed to have been in their care after a road traffic accident, her story serves as a metaphor for the mendacity so deep and treacly-black it might be an oil sump: from the 45-minute warning to the banks of the Niger and the sweepings of the internet floor. In their occupation of Iraq, the US and British armies have entered the gates of hell. Soon it will be 100 degrees at midnight in Baghdad, but there will be no respite from the need for full body armour. In two weeks, armed attacks on coalition forces have nearly doubled to 25 per day. More than 200 have been wounded and over 40 killed in combat since "victory" was declared by President Bush. Morale among US forces is dropping towards Vietnam-type levels, with heavy drug consumption, and commanders turning a blind eye to the prostituting of Iraqi women. No doubt the spectre of troops "fragging" overly strict officers is on their minds. So hot is the welcome to these "liberators" that the US has now evacuated its forces from both the vast campus of Baghdad University and from the hub of the sharpest armed action, in Fallujah. The latter gives the lie to the repeated calumny that those fighting the occupation are merely "Saddamist remnants". In truth, Fallujah is the heartland of the Jubbur tribe, arch-enemies of Saddam whose leaders were purged by the Takriti Ba'ath party bosses more than a decade ago. No fighting in this area could take place without the Jubbur, so it must be more than nostalgia for the old regime that is fuelling it. Throughout the Calvary of Vietnam, resistance was routinely described as coming from unrepresentative "hardline elements" or outside the country's borders. The deeper Johnson and Nixon sank into the quagmire, the more they spread the war, to neighbouring Cambodia and new killing fields. Look out for "hot pursuit" operations in the months to come into Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran. In Vietnam, the Americans installed a succession of puppet governments in whose name they could claim to be fighting. Though as bereft of electoral legitimacy as a Jeb Bush Floridian plebiscite, the Vietnamese juntas had a social base. Yesterday's jokers, the "Iraqi Governing Council" - handpicked by Iraq's US governor, Paul Bremer - make South Vietnam's General Thieu look like an authentic national leader. Without hundreds of thousands of foreign troops, they would be swept away in a gale of derision. Iraqis want Britain and America out of their country, that much is abundantly clear. Only independently supervised elections to a constituent assembly can produce Iraqi leaders fit to face the outside world and rebuild their country. Tony Blair can run around the world on grand diplomatic tours. He can bask in the adulation of the Republican right in the US Congress. But he cannot hide from the fact that he has lost the plot at home. He has entered that twilight which saw the departure in tears of Mrs Thatcher in a taxi from the Downing Street she once bestrode like a colossus. The foreign affairs select committee was wrong when it said the jury was out on the Blair war. Both the public and the Labour movement jury has already returned its verdict of guilty. Mr Blair will soon exit the political stage; it would be better t'were done quickly. · George Galloway is Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin and a columnist for the Scottish Mail on Sunday
Pattern of Corruption By PAUL KRUGMAN - NY Times More than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq, which didn't have significant weapons of mass destruction and wasn't supporting Al Qaeda. We have lost all credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support; Tony Blair is still with us, but has lost the trust of his public. All this puts us in a very weak position for dealing with real threats. Did I mention that North Korea has been extracting fissionable material from its fuel rods? How did we get into this mess? The case of the bogus uranium purchases wasn't an isolated instance. It was part of a broad pattern of politicized, corrupted intelligence. Literally before the dust had settled, Bush administration officials began trying to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq. Gen. Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from "people around the White House" urging him to link that assault to Saddam Hussein. His account seems to back up a CBS.com report last September, headlined "Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," which quoted notes taken by aides to Donald Rumsfeld on the day of the attack: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." But an honest intelligence assessment would have raised questions about why we were going after a country that hadn't attacked us. It would also have suggested the strong possibility that an invasion of Iraq would hurt, not help, U.S. security. So the Iraq hawks set out to corrupt the process of intelligence assessment. On one side, nobody was held accountable for the failure to predict or prevent 9/11; on the other side, top intelligence officials were expected to support the case for an Iraq war. The story of how the threat from Iraq's alleged W.M.D.'s was hyped is now, finally, coming out. But let's not forget the persistent claim that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, which allowed the hawks to pretend that the Iraq war had something to do with fighting terrorism. As Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence official, said last week, U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently agreed that Saddam did not have a "meaningful connection" to Al Qaeda. Yet administration officials continually asserted such a connection, even as they suppressed evidence showing real links between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia. And during the run-up to war, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, was willing to provide cover for his bosses â just as he did last weekend. In an October 2002 letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, he made what looked like an assertion that there really were meaningful connections between Saddam and Osama. Read closely, the letter is evasive, but it served the administration's purpose. What about the risk that an invasion of Iraq would weaken America's security? Warnings from military experts that an extended postwar occupation might severely strain U.S. forces have proved precisely on the mark. But the hawks prevented any consideration of this possibility. Before the war, one official told Newsweek that the occupation might last no more than 30 to 60 days. It gets worse. Knight Ridder newspapers report that a "small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department" were sure that their favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, could easily be installed in power. They were able to prevent skeptics from getting a hearing â and they had no backup plan when efforts to anoint Mr. Chalabi, a millionaire businessman, degenerated into farce. So who will be held accountable? Mr. Tenet betrayed his office by tailoring statements to reflect the interests of his political masters, rather than the assessments of his staff â but that's not why he may soon be fired. Yesterday USA Today reported that "some in the Bush administration are arguing privately for a C.I.A. director who will be unquestioningly loyal to the White House as committees demand documents and call witnesses." Not that the committees are likely to press very hard: Senator Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, seems more concerned about protecting his party's leader than protecting the country. "What concerns me most," he says, is "what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the C.I.A. in an effort to discredit the president." In short, those who politicized intelligence in order to lead us into war, at the expense of national security, hope to cover their tracks by corrupting the system even further.
U.S. May Be Forced to Go Back to U.N. for Iraq Mandate By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS - NY Times WASHINGTON, July 18 â The Bush administration, which spurned the United Nations in its drive to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq, is finding itself forced back into the arms of the international body because other nations are refusing to contribute peacekeeping troops or reconstruction money without United Nations approval. With the costs of stabilizing Iraq hovering at $4 billion a month and with American troops being killed at a steady rate, administration officials acknowledge that they are rethinking their strategy and may seek a United Nations resolution for help that would placate other nations, like India, France and Germany. Administration officials contend that they are being practical, but within their ranks are policy makers sharply critical of the United Nations and those who would consider it humiliating to seek its mantle after risking American lives in the invasion that ousted Mr. Hussein. The administration's quandary deepened today, when Russia announced that it would consider sending peacekeeping troops but only with a United Nations mandate that set out a specific mission and timetable. President Bush's meeting this week with Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, was part of a flurry of consultations in recent days between administration and United Nations officials. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, reached out to diplomats on the Security Council, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell emerged from a meeting with the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, saying he was discussing ways to expand international support for the Iraq occupation, including seeking a new United Nations resolution. Mr. Powell said Security Council Resolution 1483, which was approved in May and calls on all members to assist in Iraq's reconstruction, should be enough "cover" for countries to claim an endorsement from the United Nations. But he acknowledged that the nations that matter most are not buying that. "There are some nations who have expressed the desire for more of a mandate from the United Nations, and I am in conversations with some ministers about this, as well as with the secretary general of the United Nations," Mr. Powell said. The discussions reflect a growing sense that the reconstruction of Iraq will require a new international alliance. For all their rapid success in the military phase, the American-led forces are struggling to establish stability and normalcy in Iraq. A Pentagon advisory panel that just returned from Iraq reported a pressing need for international assistance. Even supporters of the administration's policy say its efforts are in jeopardy, and minute military planning gave way to disarray once the major combat ended. "It's increasingly clear there was really some underestimation of the number of people who would be required after the regime fell, and the length of time required to stay there," said Paul Saunders, director of the Nixon Center, a nonpartisan research organization whose honorary chairman is Henry A. Kissinger. Mr. Saunders said there were two reasons for the United States to go back to the United Nations. "It would be helpful to diffuse responsibility for this massive undertaking, and share any dissatisfaction with others and not be the sole target ourselves," he said. "Externally, it's also helpful in rebuilding some of the relationships that were strained in the dispute over going in." Several nations have chafed at the idea of submitting their troops to American-British control. Others, which clashed with the United States and withheld support for a resolution authorizing war, want to tweak Washington for disregarding them. India dealt the administration a sharp blow this week, refusing to send peacekeeping troops unless they operated under the auspices of the United Nations. The administration, which had lobbied New Delhi strenuously, had been hoping for a full division of 17,000 peacekeepers, which would have made India the second largest military presence in Iraq after the United States. The administration had been particularly eager to enlist the Indians, because their presence is widely seen as a bellwether for numerous other developing countries. Continued
U.S. May Be Forced to Go Back to U.N. for Iraq Mandate (Page 2 of 2) In Moscow, Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov said that Russia would consider sending troops but that a new United Nations resolution was "the most likely way of securing the participation of a large number of countries." One diplomat on the United Nations Security Council said virtually no additional nations â with the exception of some in pro-American Eastern Europe â were willing to place their troops under American or British control in Iraq. "It would create a lot of problems for them," said the diplomat, who has been courted by White House officials. Currently, 19 nations have a troop presence in Iraq, and Pentagon officials say 19 more have promised to send forces. About 13,000 non-American troops are now in the country, most of them British, compared with about 147,000 Americans. Some military experts say the United States should move quickly to reduce the overwhelmingly American cast to the occupation. More foreign peacekeepers could relieve American troops who are already taxed by combat and extended stays, and now must contend with tedious chores, like protecting buildings. Peacekeepers from other countries also might lessen Iraqi resentment toward the Americans. "Iraqis are extremely sensitive about being occupied," said Robert C. Orr, the Washington director of the Council on Foreign Relations, who took part in the Pentagon's advisory panel. "It just doesn't feel the same if an Indian or Pakistani soldier is on the corner than if it's an American in Kevlar." Administration officials have been reluctant to return to the United Nations on Iraq matters since the nasty breakdown of talks in the Security Council over whether to authorize war. The standoff was particularly damaging to relations with France and Germany, which sought to give United Nations inspectors more time to seek prohibited Iraqi weapons. Before the American-led attack, United States officials and lawmakers chided their longtime allies, and the House of Representatives banned the term "French fries" from the cafeteria. Mr. Bush warned that the United Nations risked fading "into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society." Apart from the bad blood, administration officials worry that United Nations participation might force them to cede operational control over Iraq, even as the United States continues to pay most of the cost. Polls show that the French and the Germans are not convinced that the war was necessary. But they are eager to normalize relations with Washington, European officials say. "We are certainly not pleased to see the Americans having problems, because winning the peace is in the interest of everyone," said Jean-Marc de la Sablière, France's United Nations ambassador. The administration would particularly like help in covering reconstruction costs. It has set up a donors' conference for October but risks falling far short without a diplomatic breakthrough. Mr. Fischer, the German foreign minister, and Christopher Patten, the European Union's commissioner for external affairs, discussed the possibility of financial support in meetings with Mr. Powell this week. The catch to Europe's offer is that donations must be administered by an international organization, the United Nations Development Program or the World Bank. At the United Nations, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador, said it was unclear whether a new resolution might be offered to placate potential peacekeeping contributors. "It's a question of what potential contributors want, whether the Security Council could give them what they wanted and whether the authority on the ground could give them what they wanted," he said. A senior Indian diplomat in New York said today that some United Nations diplomats were arguing that the current resolution acknowledging the allies' control could be amended to meet the concerns expressed in New Delhi, Moscow and Paris. Others, he said, think a new resolution is required. Unless such a resolution could ensure that Indian troops were seen to be serving the needs of the Iraqi people â not those of the American and British occupiers â the diplomat said it would be difficult to get popular support for a decision to send troops. In private discussions, Ms. Rice has told diplomats that greater involvement by the United Nations may be on the horizon. Mr. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, are said to favor a United Nations role, while Vice President Dick Cheney and his aides have argued against it. Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said today that the administration was looking forward to a Security Council briefing next week by the United Nations representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and members of the new Iraqi Governing Council, to advance the discussions. Joseph S. Nye Jr., dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said it would be philosophically hard for some administration officials to return to the United Nations. "They'll disguise it; they'll find ways to excuse it," Mr. Nye said. "For some of them â in particular those who celebrated that we didn't use the U.N. â it will be painful."
America is a religion US leaders now see themselves as priests of a divine mission to rid the world of its demons George Monbiot Tuesday July 29, 2003 "The death of Uday and Qusay," the commander of the ground forces in Iraq told reporters on Wednesday, "is definitely going to be a turning point for the resistance." Well, it was a turning point, but unfortunately not of the kind he envisaged. On the day he made his announcement, Iraqi insurgents killed one US soldier and wounded six others. On the following day, they killed another three; over the weekend they assassinated five and injured seven. Yesterday they slaughtered one more and wounded three. This has been the worst week for US soldiers in Iraq since George Bush declared that the war there was over. Few people believe that the resistance in that country is being coordinated by Saddam Hussein and his noxious family, or that it will come to an end when those people are killed. But the few appear to include the military and civilian command of the United States armed forces. For the hundredth time since the US invaded Iraq, the predictions made by those with access to intelligence have proved less reliable than the predictions made by those without. And, for the hundredth time, the inaccuracy of the official forecasts has been blamed on "intelligence failures". The explanation is wearing a little thin. Are we really expected to believe that the members of the US security services are the only people who cannot see that many Iraqis wish to rid themselves of the US army as fervently as they wished to rid themselves of Saddam Hussein? What is lacking in the Pentagon and the White House is not intelligence (or not, at any rate, of the kind we are considering here), but receptivity. Theirs is not a failure of information, but a failure of ideology. To understand why this failure persists, we must first grasp a reality which has seldom been discussed in print. The United States is no longer just a nation. It is now a religion. Its soldiers have entered Iraq to liberate its people not only from their dictator, their oil and their sovereignty, but also from their darkness. As George Bush told his troops on the day he announced victory: "Wherever you go, you carry a message of hope - a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, 'To the captives, "come out," and to those in darkness, "be free".'" So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons. The people who reconstructed the faces of Uday and Qusay Hussein carelessly forgot to restore the pair of little horns on each brow, but the understanding that these were opponents from a different realm was transmitted nonetheless. Like all those who send missionaries abroad, the high priests of America cannot conceive that the infidels might resist through their own free will; if they refuse to convert, it is the work of the devil, in his current guise as the former dictator of Iraq. As Clifford Longley shows in his fascinating book Chosen People, published last year, the founding fathers of the USA, though they sometimes professed otherwise, sensed that they were guided by a divine purpose. Thomas Jefferson argued that the Great Seal of the United States should depict the Israelites, "led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night". George Washington claimed, in his inaugural address, that every step towards independence was "distinguished by some token of providential agency". Longley argues that the formation of the American identity was part of a process of "supersession". The Roman Catholic church claimed that it had supplanted the Jews as the elect, as the Jews had been repudiated by God. The English Protestants accused the Catholics of breaking faith, and claimed that they had become the beloved of God. The American revolutionaries believed that the English, in turn, had broken their covenant: the Americans had now become the chosen people, with a divine duty to deliver the world to God's dominion. Six weeks ago, as if to show that this belief persists, George Bush recalled a remark of Woodrow Wilson's. "America," he quoted, "has a spiritual energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind." Gradually this notion of election has been conflated with another, still more dangerous idea. It is not just that the Americans are God's chosen people; America itself is now perceived as a divine project. In his farewell presidential address, Ronald Reagan spoke of his country as a "shining city on a hill", a reference to the Sermon on the Mount. But what Jesus was describing was not a temporal Jerusalem, but the kingdom of heaven. Not only, in Reagan's account, was God's kingdom to be found in the United States of America, but the kingdom of hell could also now be located on earth: the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union, against which His holy warriors were pitched. Since the attacks on New York, this notion of America the divine has been extended and refined. In December 2001, Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of that city, delivered his last mayoral speech in St Paul's Chapel, close to the site of the shattered twin towers. "All that matters," he claimed, "is that you embrace America and understand its ideals and what it's all about. Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of your Americanism was ... how much you believed in America. Because we're like a religion really. A secular religion." The chapel in which he spoke had been consecrated not just by God, but by the fact that George Washington had once prayed there. It was, he said, now "sacred ground to people who feel what America is all about". The United States of America no longer needs to call upon God; it is God, and those who go abroad to spread the light do so in the name of a celestial domain. The flag has become as sacred as the Bible; the name of the nation as holy as the name of God. The presidency is turning into a priesthood. So those who question George Bush's foreign policy are no longer merely critics; they are blasphemers, or "anti-Americans". Those foreign states which seek to change this policy are wasting their time: you can negotiate with politicians; you cannot negotiate with priests. The US has a divine mission, as Bush suggested in January: "to defend ... the hopes of all mankind", and woe betide those who hope for something other than the American way of life. The dangers of national divinity scarcely require explanation. Japan went to war in the 1930s convinced, like George Bush, that it possessed a heaven-sent mission to "liberate" Asia and extend the realm of its divine imperium. It would, the fascist theoretician Kita Ikki predicted: "light the darkness of the entire world". Those who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined only to engineer a hell.
"Those who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined only to engineer a hell." _____________________________ Sure sounds like the Husseins and one of their main supporters msfe.