Peter Galbraith Should Not Get Away With This

Apparently, during the years that hawkish democrat, Peter Galbraith, was promoting war in Iraq, and helping draft the new Iraqi constitution, he had a deal on the back burner brewing which now appears to be poised to score him about $100 million. He sleazily and corruptly kept his oil company involvement secret for years while writing thought pieces for the NYT and others. He was contractually obligated to reveal any conflict of interest, but dishonestly ducked that requirement. For an in depth account, check out Glenn Greenwald's write-up.

We all knew that Cheney and Bush were oil men, and that Cheney's company Halliburton had benefited extraordinarily from the war in Iraq. (I still, for the life of me, can't understand why that connection garnered such a collective yawn from our populace.) Read here how Dennis Kucinich was called a liar for trying to warn America about the corruption leading us into war:

Dennis Kucinich on Meet the Press, February 23, 2003:

MR. RUSSERT: Congressman, you made a very strong charge against the administration and let me show you what you said on January 19. "Why is the Administration targeting Iraq? Oil." What do you base that on?

REP. KUCINICH: I base that on the fact that there is $5 trillion worth of oil above and in the ground in Iraq, that individuals involved in the administration have been involved in the oil industry, that the oil industry certainly would benefit from having the administration control Iraq, and that the fact is that, since no other case has been made to go to war against Iraq, for this nation to go to war against Iraq, oil represents the strongest incentive...

MR. PERLE: It is a lie, Congressman. It is an out and out lie.

Richard Cohen, February 25, 2003:

"Liar" is a word rarely used in Washington...So it was particularly shocking, not to mention refreshing, to hear Richard Perle on Sunday call Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) a liar to his face...

Kucinich himself seemed only momentarily fazed by Perle's sharp right to his integrity and went on, indomitable demagogue that he seems to be, to maintain that the coming war with Iraq will be fought to control that nation's oil...How did this fool get on "Meet the Press"?

[S]omething truly awful has happened. The looming war has already become deeply and biliously ideological. By that I mean that the extremes on both sides -- but particularly the war's opponents -- no longer feel compelled to prove a case or stick to the facts.

—Jonathan Schwarz

A big round of applause for Jonathon Schwarz for finding all those quotes!!!!

Goodbye Pres. Bush (cough, cough).

It's been quite the 8 years, what with stealing the 2000 election with the help of your brother conveniently located as the Governor of Florida; the 9-11 attacks (Bin Laden determined to attack US, so easy to misunderstand); attacking the WRONG country in wake of said attacks -- Saudi Arabia, Iraq, so easy to get confused; the complete trashing of the constitution--who needs the fourth amendment anyway? If I haven't done anything bad then my telephone calls are an open book, not to mention my car and my house. And the 8th? Pshaw; only sissies complain about torture.

Goodbye, Bush. Goodbye, goodbye. And, as is traditional, don't let the door hit you too hard on the way out.

PS. The Hague is beautiful this time of year, or so I've heard. And handcuffs? Hott. And Kinky. Double plus awesome.

More Shoe-Throwing

Bush invades Iraq for no discernable reason and causes the death of upwards of a million Iraqis.

Muntazer Al-Zaidi throws two shoes at Bush and causes no damage.

Guess which one is getting "interrogated".

Iraq to US--U can go nao, kthxbye.

Prime Minister al-Maliki won't sign an agreement to allow US troops to stay in Iraq without a timetable for withdrawal: "The goal is to end the presence (of foreign troops)."

In response, the White House states (and this may be a paraphrase, but only barely) "uh, he didn't really mean that."

Other breakup lines Iraq might try:
We have to break up, America, because I'm gay.
It's not you, America, it's me.
My schedule is really busy right now, but maybe next Millenium.
You're Drunk (on power.) Time to go home. I'll call a Taxi.

The virtue of the vicious - Oscar Wilde's def. of Patriotism

I've always found the idea of patriotism terrifically distasteful.

Patriotism writ small --
I remember thundering student football assemblies in High School designed to whip up what can only be described as "hate" against the opponent high school. Chance geographical location = required disdain. I persuaded a handful of friends (preen, preen) that they were the equivalent of Nuremberg rallies; we all ditched, in the name of international peace.

Patriotism writ large --

Freedom fries? Remember? Why did we invade Iraq? My country right or wrong? How many Iraqis dead (1M+) or displaced (5M+)? If this is patriotism, not for me.


Quoting a vet I heard on the radio, Chance Cox; "I look at my American flag and think: "Not that good, not that bad." Kudos.

Bush, having laid the groundwork, may get to bomb Iran!

From the Asia times, we find that the Bush administration may have set a timetable to bomb Iran in August of this year. This is troubling for many reasons, the main being that it is totally and completely and utterly crazy, with a side of more crazy. The Bush administration has been unable to prove that Iran is delivering weapons to Iraq; while decrying Iranian's building of nuclear power plants, it has helped the Saudis get the same exact technology.

This is even more troubling, as Asmiral William Fallon, the former Commander-in-Chief of Centcom (US Military Central Command over the Middle East) resigned in March, to be replaced by David Petraus. Fallon was widely seen as flat-out refusing to attack Iran under his leadership. Now he's gone, and Petraeus seems to have an itchy trigger finger.

And now, none other than Bushes old press secretary, Scott McClellan, has written a tell-all book documenting how "the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated 'political propaganda campaign' led by President Bush and aimed at 'manipulating sources of public opinion and 'downplaying the major reason for going to war.'"

"The Iraq [Iran] war was not necessary," he concludes.
"Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake."


h/t george, daily kos

US Foreign Policy at its finest

So, the Bush administration has decided to actively help Saudi Arabia get nuclear power. You may recall Saudi Arabia as the country that gave us 15 of the 19 9-11 attackers, plus Osama Bin Laden himself.

At the exact same time, the Bush administration seems to be doing its best to gin up an excuse to invade Iran over the same issue -- nuclear power -- in spite of, ah, no proof at all that Iran is a danger.

A plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the United States realized none of them was from Iran.

If Napoleon couldn't pull it off, neither can George W.

Here is a picture of most of Iraq.


View Larger Map
Do to my lack of maddd html skillz I cannot preset a picture zooming into the Iraq coastline, but dear reader, if you were to click on the down arrow once and on the right arrow once, you could see the tiny sliver (36 miles) of the Persia Gulf coastline that the Brits in their infinite wisdom allotted Iraq.

It has only two more or less deepwater ports large enough to handle the sorts of ships required to move massive amounts of troops out of Iraq. See the funnel? Zoom in more to the coastline.

One, port, Umm Qasr, is directly on the border with Kuwait, while the other, smaller port, Al Faw, sits directly on the border with Iran. Also notice how the dividing lines between both Kuwait and Iran run right down those relatively tiny waterways.

It's roughly half of a world away to get supplies from the US to one of the Iraqi deep sea ports.

It's 277 miles from Basra to Iraq. And only a couple of lanes. On Bad roads. Few people have been spotted throwing flowers, lately, though their pitching arms seem to be in prime shape.

The supply lines lengthen.

Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric currently using his Madhi army to battle competing Shiite politician Nouri-Al Maliki (elected head of the Iraqi parliament), has pitched his current battle in Basra; right over our escape route.

We have approximately 158,000 troops in Iraq. Carriers, only two of which can only land at a time along the minimal Iraqi coast, only seem to hold about 3000 troops (apart from required staff). (This is way out of my area of expertise, comments appreciated.) Even if our troops to make it to Basra, what then?

Even Napoleon couldn't get his troops safely out of Moscow.

I'm afraid.

Tiny refutation of the Iraq war.

It's a colonial war.  That is sooooo last century.  Gee whiz.  The Cool Countries will never eat lunch with us now. 

Political Rant number 1

I promised political rants, so here goes:

Vietnam was a rather gigantic blunder, seeing as how the entire premise of the war was based on the fact that the Americans totally misunderstood that the only people that the Vietnamese hated worse than us was the Chinese.

You see, for you young’uns out there, we gave as the reason to be in Vietnam that the Vietnamese regime under Ho Chi Minh (our North Vietnamese enemy) would align with the Communist world (read China), unless, uh, we, uh, killed lots of them and, uh, you know, won, some undefined sort of winning thing. Not so much. We wasted about 58,000 American men, including, almost, my father; somewhere around a million Vietnamese, and as an added bonus, destabilized Laos and Cambodia, setting up the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, leading to another, roughly 1.5 million Cambodians dead. Go USA.

The CIA took out the democratically elected Prime minister of Iran, Mossadegh, in 1953, and installedthe Shah Reza Pahlavi, ensuring that the Middle East saw us as the Bad Guys. The Vietnam debacle, and our inability to learn from it plus our earlier Meddling in Iran’s affairs both led directly to today’s debacle–which shall not be named.

A brief interregnum -- After World War I, the Germans couldn't believe that they actually had lost, and so blamed someone -- Jews mostly, with this word that I cannot remember-- so, WW 2.

We did the same. The failure of the Vietnam war was blamed on the "liberal media" setting us up for a reprise. Why did we fail in Vietnam? Long rant (will follow) but basically because, uh, they all hated us. Duh. And we were killing them for no particular reason that made any sense.

On to Iraq.
The Iraq war is a failure. Nouri-Al Maliki, current prime minister of Iraq, is the head of the Dawa party–an early backer, of among other things, the Iranian revolution. Remember that? There was this hostage thingie that mysteriously ended moments after Reagan was elected. In return, the Dawa receive actual support from Iran.

Scroll back a few years. They also bombed the American and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983. Al-Maliki, the current Prime Minister of Iraq and our ally, lived in exile in Iran and was just over there to broker a peace deal with Muquta Al-Sadr, who is and has always been an Iraqi nationalist. He and his father, for example, never went into exile in Iran.

So, we’re backing the pro-Iranian terrorist (see previous American embassy bombings) regime in Iraq right now against the pro-Iraqi faction, while at the same time calling out Iran as the next great Satan. Got that? We’re backing the same side we’re fighting. How can this be seen as anything but a gigantic disaster of monumental proportions?

The surge? Are you kidding? Al Sadr stood the Mahdi army down in August. As they weren’t fighting (so much) casualties decreased. But wait! The Mahdi army is back and, for all intents and purposes, just won the battle of Basra. This is a long winded way of saying the fate of Iraq is out of our hands; what is happening is beyond our control. What exactly are we doing over there right now, other than being targets?

Taking out Iraq was the worst possible action in the war on terror. We should just have hired Osama a PR firm. Would have been cheaper.