Plesch and Butcher examine "what the military option might involve if it were picked up off the table and put into action" and conclude that based on open source analysis and their own assessments, the US has prepared its military for a "massive" attack against Iran, requiring little contingency planning and without a ground invasion.The study excerpted here is from the paperThe study concludes that the US has made military preparations to destroy Iran’s WMD, nuclear energy, regime, armed forces, state apparatus and economic infrastructure within days if not hours of President George W. Bush giving the order. The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.When asked why the paper seems to indicate a certainty of Iranian WMD, Plesch made clear that "our paper is not, repeat not, about what Iran actually has or not." Yet, he added that "Iran certainly has missiles and probably some chemical capability."
- Any attack is likely to be on a massive multi-front scale but avoiding a ground invasion. Attacks focused on WMD facilities would leave Iran too many retaliatory options, leave President Bush open to the charge of using too little force and leave the regime intact.
- US bombers and long range missiles are ready today to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a few hours.
- US ground, air and marine forces already in the Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan can devastate Iranian forces, the regime and the state at short notice.
- Some form of low level US and possibly UK military action as well as armed popular resistance appear underway inside the Iranian provinces or ethnic areas of the Azeri, Balujistan, Kurdistan and Khuzestan. Iran was unable to prevent sabotage of its offshore-to-shore crude oil pipelines in 2005.
- Nuclear weapons are ready, but most unlikely, to be used by the US, the UK and Israel. The human, political and environmental effects would be devastating, while their military value is limited.
- Israel is determined to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons yet has the conventional military capability only to wound Iran’s WMD programmes.
- The attitude of the UK is uncertain, with the Brown government and public opinion opposed psychologically to more war, yet, were Brown to support an attack he would probably carry a vote in Parliament. The UK is adamant that Iran must not acquire the bomb.
- The US is not publicising the scale of these preparations to deter Iran, tending to make confrontation more likely. The US retains the option of avoiding war, but using its forces as part of an overall strategy of shaping Iran’s actions.
Most significantly, Plesch and Butcher dispute conventional wisdom that any US attack on Iran would be confined to its nuclear sites. Instead, they foresee a "full-spectrum approach," designed to either instigate an overthrow of the government or reduce Iran to the status of "a weak or failed state." Although they acknowledge potential risks and impediments that might deter the Bush administration from carrying out such a massive attack, they also emphasize that the administration's National Security Strategy includes as a major goal the elimination of Iran as a regional power. They suggest, therefore, that:This wider form of air attack would be the most likely to delay the Iranian nuclear program for a sufficiently long period of time to meet the administration’s current counterproliferation goals. It would also be consistent with the possible goal of employing military action is to overthrow the current Iranian government, since it would severely degrade the capability of the Iranian military (in particular revolutionary guards units and other ultra-loyalists) to keep armed opposition and separatist movements under control. It would also achieve the US objective of neutralizing Iran as a power in the region for many years to come.Butcher says he does not believe the US would use nuclear weapons, with some exceptions.
However, it is the option that contains the greatest risk of increased global tension and hatred of the United States. The US would have few, if any allies for such a mission beyond Israel (and possibly the UK). Once undertaken, the imperatives for success would be enormous.
"My opinion is that [nuclear weapons] wouldn't be used unless there was definite evidence that Iran has them too or is about to acquire them in a matter of days/weeks," notes Butcher. "However, the Natanz facility has been so hardened that to destroy it MAY require nuclear weapons, and once an attack had started it may simply be a matter of following military logic and doctrine to full extent, which would call for the use of nukes if all other means failed."
"Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East" – written by well-respected British scholar and arms expert Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, a former Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) and former adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European ParliamentThe recent increase in propaganda designed to justify the war against Iran is especially noticeable from the News Corp publications and particularly FOX News.
In their goofy "Fact Sheet" the White House issued today about how marvy they've handled Katrina reconstruction, they include something not within spitting distance of a "fact": "The Administration Has Provided A Total Of $16.7 Billion In Federal Funds As Part Of The Largest Housing Recovery Program In U.S. History."Then is also from Rick Perlstein
Doesn't that sound like $16.7 billion has been spent? Not really. That was the amount set aside. As I noted below, as of March, only $1 billion of it had been spent, almost all in Mississippi; then when the world found out what was going on, HUD spent but another $3.8 of it.
Meanwhile, let's remember what Katrina housing "recovery" has actually looked like. Remember the formaldahyde trailers? The government-issued campers contaminated wiht a carcinogen. Reported the Washington Post a couple of weeks back, "Concerns about formaldehyde contamination have existed for more than a year, but FEMA was slow to react, and when it did, downplayed the health risk. But lawsuits, environmental groups and warnings by independent experts and doctors have pushed FEMA to seriously re-evaluate the risks."
Here's one from last October. Within the homelsand security bill, congress specified qualifications for any new FEMA chief: "a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management," and not less than five years of executive leadership."And people really don't think that the Bush administration can really be as incompetent as its performance has suggested. But the fact it that first they are incompetent, then they lie about what they have done, and they hide all of that behind a wall of secrecy so that no one can really be sure how incompetent they really are or how egregious their lies really are.
Bush signed the bill with a smile, noting specifically that it would "help our government respond to emergencies and natural disasters by strengthening the capabilities of the Federal Emergency Management Agency." The White House emailed that statement to reporters.
Then, quietly, the next week—anyone remember?—Bush dribbled out an 8 PM signing statement asserting that he wouldn't follow the provision because it "rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office."
Yes: he said that the only people experienced and knowledgeable to hold an office were people who weren't experienced and knowledgeable.
Conservatives and Liberals both try to take the lessons of the past, learn from them, and use them to predict future events. That ability to see reality as being past, present and future is unique to human beings. This plays out in (among many other things) the ways government functions.
Government is always a group experiment in trying to do those things today that provide the best outcomes tomorrow. A good government is one that gathers evidence, develops theories or ideologies of cause and effect and tries to govern from those theories or ideologies.
The difference between a theory and an ideology is (1) how perfect decision-makers expect the ideas of cause-and-effect that make it up are expected to be and (2) how the decision-makers act when it fails. Governing is deciding how to allocate resources and act today so as to achieve a better-predicted future. So let's look at the process of predicting the future and acting today in order to achieve a preferred tomorrow.
That process involves gathering data on events that have occurred in the past, learning which events appear to cause others to occur, and seeing the resulting outcomes. We then choose to take actions in the near future which will be more likely to result is the ultimate futures we prefer. The discipline of General Semantics calls this time-binding and defines it as "the distinctive human ability to build on the accumulated knowledge of others." Every human being does this.
The knowledge that some events cause other events to happen is called a theory. The more often we see that one event, "A", appears to cause another event, "B", to happen, the more certain we are of the theory that event "A" will cause event "B." We use such theories to guess what is the best action to take today to result in the future outcome we most desire. But "theories" come in a wide variety of strength or reliability. Some are pure guesses; some are almost certainties.
Physicists and chemists have developed some very strong theories about the causes and effects in their intellectual realms. Theories in history and the social sciences never approach the degree of certainty that is possible in the physical sciences. Strong theories in the physical sciences result from isolating cause "A" and result "B" from all other confounding possible causes for result "B", then measuring all the objects and forces that remain within the isolated system. Advances in the physical sciences have come from isolating the items studied, identifying every object within the isolated set of items, measuring the forces within that set and then manipulating the forces to a measured degree and measuring the result.
The process of isolating the system, identifying and measuring the objects and forces inside it, and repeatedly testing measured changes in that system to prove cause-and-effect has proven very successful, although it still hasn't worked to give reliable weather predictions.
If theories in weather prediction are not yet perfect, then those in history and social systems are extremely weak. The subjects studied in history and the social sciences are complex systems that do not allow chains of cause-and-effect to be isolated from unexpected outside events. In addition, history does not really repeat itself in detail. On top of that, historical data is, for the most part, whatever is accidentally recorded at the time of an event. Measurements of what event historical event "A" caused another historical event "B" are extremely rough in the best of cases.
Government, however, is an institution designed to do those things today that provide improved outcomes tomorrow, so it sits squarely in the middle of history and the social sciences. Theories of government, history and the social sciences tend to be based on estimates of which guess is better than the others, and cause-and-effect relationships based on such data are rarely very accurate and never precise.
But even with the very best of data, human beings have very limited ability to analyze data and make predictions if the data comes from complex systems. Humans can observe that one event will usually lead to another event as long as nothing from the outside those events interferes, but in human social systems there is always a set of interfering events, too many to take account of. The result is that human beings can predict simple things reasonably well, but cannot identify cause-and-effect in systems very well.
But we are human beings. It is a characteristic of the human being to try to predict what will happen in the future and to cause a better future. Politicians build their careers on providing ideas that if we do something, "A", it will cause event "B" to occur in the future. Or the opposite - if we don't do "A" then "B" will NOT occur. Politicians fight other politicians to apply social resources to their preferred action "A" rather than the alternative "A-prime" proposed by another politician, or to prevent event "X" so that event "Y" will not occur.
Both Conservatives and Liberals play this prediction game. Each takes advantage of the accumulated knowledge from the past on which to base the theories of cause-and-effect they try to sell the voting public. Let's skip the part that describes how the theories determine which facts from history are considered more important than others and go straight to what happens when the theory is used to determine which actions should be taken today fails to achieve the desired future outcomes.
Theories of future outcomes are guesses made with greater or lesser ranges of uncertainty. They are not and cannot be certainties. Performing and action "A" today to cause a result "B" tomorrow is always an experiment. So what happens when the outcomes of an action do not match the results the theory the action was based on? What does the decision maker do when the experiment fails? Here is the difference between conservatives and liberals.
Liberals take the results that don't match those predicted by the theory and go back to revise the theory for future use. Check the measurements. See if all the objects and forces in the theory were accounted for and if any new ones appeared in the experiment. Find out what changed from what was expected, and take the changes into account before using the theory again in the future.
Conservatives reject the evidence that the theory failed. Instead of revising the theory, they defend it. Here are the conservative's defense measures:
It strains credulity to think that the senator can provide an explanation for his guilty plea if he did nothing more than accidentally brush someone’s foot with his shoe and pick up a piece of paper off the floor.So - if he is homosexual he should resign, and the evidence as they see it make it extremely unlikely that he is NOT homosexual. But they continue to say
The Judeo-Christian tradition says that the standard for identifying the truth is that “by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact is confirmed.” The senator’s guilty plea, when added to the officer’s testimony, satisfies the biblical standard for confirming the essential truth of what happened, and unless the senator can provide a compelling and convincing explanation for his plea, we will need to regretfully accept that the fact of his behavior has been established. It seems unlikely that he can “unring the bell” his guilty plea has sounded.
One larger issue must be addressed. The Republican Party platform clearly rejects the agenda of homosexual activists. The Party, in the wake of the Mark Foley incident in particular, can no longer straddle the fence on the issue of homosexual behavior. Even setting Senator Craig’s situation aside, the Party should regard participation in the self-destructive homosexual lifestyle as incompatible with public service on behalf of the GOP.This is a call for the purge from the Republican Party of such people as Sen. Craig, and very likely Ralph Reed or Sen. Lindsay Graham.
No member of the Republican Party in the 1860s could represent his party and be a slaveholder at the same time. Nor can the Republican Party of today speak with authority and clarity to the moral issues that confront our society and at the same time send ambivalent messages about sexual behavior. It is time for the Republican Party to be the party that defends the American family in word, deed, and by personal example.
"1) Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, today.High personnel turnover is a symptom of a poorly run organization. It is an especially bad sign when the guys at the top are all leaving at once. This isn't politics so much as it is bad management and an attempt to politicize the DoJ. And, like Alberto Gonzales himself, the major problems of the DoJ have come out of the White House.
2) Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty announced his resignation May 14th.
3) Acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer (the Department's #3) announced that he was withdrawing his nomination for the position June 22nd.
4) Kyle Sampson, Gonzales' chief of staff, resigned March 13th.
5) Department White House liaison Monica Goodling resigned April 6th.
6) Michael Elston, McNulty's chief of staff, resigned June 15th.
7) Executive Director of the Executive Office of United States Attorneys Michael Battle, announced his resignation in mid-February.
8) Bradley Schlozman, an attorney in the Counsel to the Director staff at the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, formerly the U.S. attorney for Kansas City and a former acting assistant attorney for the Civil Rights Division, resigned mid August.
And, finally, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Wan Kim was another notable resignation (on August 23rd), although Kim's troubles were unrelated to the firings scandal.
By STEVEN LEE MYERSOK. So Karen Hughes left long ago, and Karl Rove just resigned. Less well-known are Harriet Miers and Dan Bartlett who have also left.
WACO, Tex., Aug. 27 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.
Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation, submitted his to President Bush by telephone on Friday, the official said. His decision was not immediately announced, the official added, until after the president invited him and his wife to lunch at his ranch near here.
Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the Attorney General's resignation had not yet been made public.
Mr. Bush had repeatedly stood by Mr. Gonzales, an old friend and colleague from Texas, even as he faced increasing scrutiny for his leadership of the Justice Department, including his role in the dismissals of nine United States attorneys late last year and questions about whether he testified truthfully about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. [Snip]
Mr. Gonzales's resignation is the latest in a series of high-level departures that has reshaped the end of Mr. Bush's second term. Karl Rove, another of Mr. Bush's close circle of aides from Texas, stepped down two weeks ago.
The official said that the decision was Mr. Gonzales's and that the president accepted it grudgingly. At the same time, the official acknowledged that the turmoil over his tenure as Attorney General had made continuing difficult.
"The unfair treatment that he's been on the receiving end of has been a distraction for the department," the official said.
First the administration did everything they could to undermine Barak and help Sharon get elected. Then they stood by and clapped as Sharon dismantled the Palestinian Authority. Then they pushed for Palestinian elections, publicly backed Fatah, and watched Hamas sweep to victory. Then they gave a green light to a disastrous invasion of Lebanon. And this led to a total victory of Hamas in Gaza.This is what the Bush - Cheney administration has done so far. Their ideologically-based and reality-free efforts have all failed and mostly made things worse than they were before.
Now the Palestinians are divided, Israel is weak, and the prospects of a peace process lie in ashes. How can this administration 'refurbish' a peace process that lies in cinders? Is this 'realism'?
We have 'liberated' the Arab Shi'ites of Iraq and backed a Shi'a dominated government there for the last four years. Our new strategy is to make a 'political-military alliance with the dominant Sunni Arab powers -- especially Saudi Arabia'?
The real 'realism' is that we have utterly failed in our Mideast policies, and we better start facing up to the consequences. Permawar is not the answer. We don't have the money.
We need to start planning for a future where we do not dominate the Middle East. This will involve significant economic risks...especially for the availability of cheap and readily available energy. It also suggests that Israel should start getting serious about a permanent, sustainable accommodation with the Palestinians and their neighbors. Keeping a few of their most ardent and unquestioning supporters, like Joe Lieberman, in the U.S. Senate is not going to be enough to sustain an acceptable level of security. We cannot continue to take on the blowback risks and international hit to our moral standing that our support for Israel currently entails.
That's 'realism'.
There was a time when neoconservatives sought to hold the moral and intellectual high ground. There was some- thing inspiring in their vision of America as a different kind of superpower--a liberal hegemon deploying its might on behalf of subjugated peoples, rather than mere self-interest. As the Iraq war has curdled, the idealism and liberalism have drained out of the neoconservative vision. What remains is a noxious residue of bullying militarism. Kristol's arguments are merely the same pro-war arguments that have been used historically by right-wing parties throughout the world: Complexity is weakness, dissent is treason, willpower determines all.It is true. Kristol does have good standing in the Washington establishment. This is a deep indictment of the Washington establishment.
Kristol's good standing in the Washington establishment depends on the wink-and-nod awareness that he's too smart to believe his own agitprop. Perhaps so. But, in the end, a fake thug is not much better than the real thing.
I have no idea whether Beauchamp’s story was accurate. But at this point I have seen enough of the Neocon corner’s war fables to immediately discount anything that emerges from it. One example: back last spring, when I was living in Baghdad, on Haifa Street, I sat in the evening reading a report by one of the core Neocon pack. He was reporting from Baghdad, and recounted a day he had spent out on a patrol with U.S. troops on Haifa Street. He described a peaceful, pleasant, upscale community. Children were out playing on the street. Men and women were out going about their daily business. Well, in fact I had been forced to spend the day “in the submarine,” as they say, missing appointments I had in town. Why? This bucolic, marvelous Haifa Street that he described had erupted in gun battles the entire day. In the view of my security guards, with which I readily concurred, it was too unsafe. And yes, I could hear the gunfire and watch some of the exchanges from my position. No American patrol had passed by and there were certainly no children playing in the street. This was the point when I realized that many of these accounts were pure fabrications.As the disaster in Iraq deepens and the 2008 election gets closer, we can expect more lies from Kristol and his fellow neocons, stacked on top of efforts to destroy those who disagree with the lies and cover-ups.
Researchers in England and Switzerland have figured out ways to confuse the sensory signals received by the brain, allowing people to seem to be standing aside and watching themselves. [Snip]So who is looking out from behind your eyes if whoever it is can be fooled into thinking it is looking at the back of your head?
Dr. Henrik Ehrsson of University College London's Institute of Neurology and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, explained that he was interested in a person's perception of the "self."
"I'm interested in the question of why I feel that my self is located inside my physical body. How does my brain know that I am standing right here," he said.
And what would happen to the self if a person could effectively move their eyes to another part of the room and observe themselves from an outside perspective? Would the self move with the eyes, or stay in the body, he wondered.
So seated volunteers were fitted with head-mounted video displays that allowed them to view themselves from behind, using a pair of video cameras, one for each eye.
A researcher would stand behind them and extend a plastic rod which they could see toward the area just below the cameras. At the same time another plastic rod, which they could not see, touched their chest.
The volunteers said they experienced the feeling of being behind their own body watching. Many found it "weird" and seemingly real, though not scary.
They felt "that their center of awareness 'self' is located outside their physical bodies and that they look at their bodies from the perspective of another person," he reported.
"The idea is to change the visual input and its relationship to the tactile information," he said. "The brain is always trying to interpret sensory information. The brain can trick itself."
In a second test, Ehrsson connected sensors to the skin to measure electrical conductance, which indicates emotional response.
He then allowed them to watch a hammer swing down to a point below the camera, as though it were going to hurt an unseen portion of the virtual body.
Their skin conductance registered emotional responses including fear, indicating they sensed their selves had left their physical bodies and moved to the virtual bodies where the hammer was swung.
The research has applications in neuroscience and also potentially in industrial applications involving virtual reality, he said.
As a matter of substance, Levin's call for the Prime Minister to be replaced is, of course, completely nonsensical. As Hilzoy pointed out, the political failures in Iraq are not due to Maliki's failures and replacing him will therefore achieve nothing. Beyond that, as Rosen explained in the Democracy Now interview:The load of Levin crap is intended to allow the Democrats to win big in November of 2008. The beltway Democrats fear that if they attack the actions of the administration they can be painted as unpatriotic and as not supporting the troops while they are in combat. It is this avoidance of discussing the Administrations' idiocy that is causing the surreal "...recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day." which the 82d Airborne sergeants wrote about in their Sunday NY times OpEd.The Iraqi government doesn't matter. It has no power. And it doesn't matter who you put in there. He's not going to have any power. Baghdad doesn't really matter, except for Baghdad. Baghdad used to be the most important city in Iraq, and whoever controlled Baghdad controlled Iraq. These days, you have a collection of city states: Mosul, Basra, Baghdad, Kirkuk, Irbil, Sulaymaniyah. Each one is virtually independent, and they have their own warlords and their own militias. And what happens in Baghdad makes no difference. So that's the first point.Iraq is so disintegrated, so ethnically cleansed, so broken that, as Rosen points out, it does not really exist as an entity any longer:Iraq has been changed irrevocably, I think. I don't think Iraq even -- you can say it exists anymore. There has been a very effective, systematic ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad, of Shias --from areas that are now mostly Shia. . . . And Baghdad is now firmly in the hands of sectarian Shiite militias, and they're never going to let it go.Rosen reports that the number of externally displaced Iraqis is now close to 3 million -- most of them Sunnis, representing a sizable portion of the Iraqi Sunni population which, in turn, further ensures Shiite sectarian militia control of most of the country. Always obscured by the exciting debate over whether we are "winning" is what happens if we "win" -- the installation of an Iran-and-Syria-friendly Shiite "government" surrounded by an ethnically divided country armed and ruled by sectarian militias loyal to a whole variety of Middle East actors. In light of all of that, Sen. Levin's claim of "military progress" is just incoherent.
...casts such an attack as virtually inevitable prior to the end of the Bush presidency, and likely much sooner than that:The purpose of attacking Iran is to destabilize the Iranian government and cause it to fall and be replaced. But Glenn has the following opinion (as do i)Reports that the Bush Administration will put Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list can be read in one of two ways: it's either more bluster or, ominously, a wind-up for a strike on Iran. Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the IRGC, maybe within the next six months. . . .
Strengthening the Administration's case for a strike on Iran, there's a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC is the one obstacle to democratic and a friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It's another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking.
And what do we do if just the opposite happens -- a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it's not even a consideration. "IRGC IED's are a casus belli for this administration. There will be an attack on Iran."
Given our militarily weakened state, the latter goal seems virtually impossible. And, ironically as always, a bombing campaign against Iran would do more to strengthen that government than anything else we could do. But Iran is the Evil Enemy. And Enemies must be attacked and bombed and harmed. The people who think that way are very much still in control, beginning with the Oval Office, and it is very difficult to see how that outcome will be averted. Certainly the likes of Carl Levin aren't going to stop it.Anyone who thinks that a military attack on Iran will cause the overthrow of the Iranian government should look at the history of the Soviet Union.
The mountains and valleys surrounding Afghanistan are among the least understood parts of the globe, he says. And he believes his findings help policymakers understand and alleviate tensions in the volatile region. He's shared his research with the world and has had high hopes, particularly for successive U.S. administrations. In recent years that hope has been dashed.What did Bush and Cheney do? Same thing they did to New Orleans. They took their eyes off the ball and tried to solve a minor problem in Iraq by using military force. Bush and Cheney attack people. They don't do nation-building or city-building.
Until Bush came into office, Ahmed thought his words mattered to America. In the 1980s, he discussed Taliban resistance with ambassadors over tea. In the 1990s, he collaborated with policymakers to raise Afghanistan's profile in the Clinton White House. But during the Bush administration, he feels his risky research has been for naught.
The administration has "actively rejected expertise and embraced ignorance," Ahmed told me inside his fortress. Soon after the Taliban fled Kabul in late 2001, Ahmed visited Washington DC's policy elite as “the flavor of the month.” His bestseller Taliban had come out just the year before. The State Department, USAID, the National Security Council and the White House all asked him to present lectures on how to stabilize post-war Afghanistan.
Ahmed traversed the city’s bureaucracies and think tanks repeating “one common sense line”: In Afghanistan you have a “population on its knees, with nothing there, absolutely livid with the Taliban and the Arabs of Al Qaeda . . . willing to take anything.” The U.S. could "rebuild Afghanistan very quickly, very cheaply and make it a showcase in the Muslim world that says ‘Look U.S. intervention is not all about killing and bombing; it’s also about rebuilding and reconstruction…about American goodness and largesse.”
America has done the same thing to Pakistan, says Ahmed. After 9/11, the current administration embraced Musharraf’s military regime unquestioningly because it waved a big stick and assured Bush it would smash terrorists with it. America took Musharraf at his word. Meanwhile the dictator "pursued a dual strategy," hoarding U.S. funds while letting pockets of extremism grow.Bush never understood foreign policy. He failed to prepare for a terrorist attack on America because he could not conceive of it, and Cheney did not think that terrorism was possible unless it was state-supported. They both thought the Clinton administration people were ignorant and deluded when they briefed the incoming Bush administration that the greatest threat to America during the early 21st Century was going to be terrorism organized by non-state organizations.
For years Ahmed has been accusing Musharraf of deceit and calling for America to pressure him to democratize. Now, Ahmed says, America’s vocal, singular focus on terrorism makes it "virtually impossible to convince average Pakistanis that the war against extremism is not just America’s war, it is theirs too.” This lack of local buy-in exacerbates the threat of transnational terror.
Rove was hailed as a genius because he told everyone he was a genius. (And there was a certain genius in being able to get such a patently unacceptable candidate [Bush 43] into high office.) But the truth is that he has been swimming against a strong tide for some time. We have all been thinking that the Bush II administration was the high water mark of the conservative era, but it was actually a decade earlier --- around 1994. Then we entered into a period of parity and now, finally, the momentum seems to be on the progressive side.If Digby's argument is correct, then the Republicans (and especially the White House) have known they were declining at least since Bush 43 was appointed President in 2001. That would explain the major efforts to steal elections. They are in decline, and they reached the pinnacle using Rove's idea that a critical margin of voters would vote for perceived winners. That's the bandwagon effect. But it only works for you as long as you are perceived to be a winner.
Miraculously, 9/11 only temporarily stalled that momentum politically but it didn't reverse it, largely because Karl Rove missed the opportunity to actually change the course of that slow moving realignment by having Bush reach out to the Democrats and the rest of the world and forge a new sort of consensus. Rove had Bush go the other way and stoke the base. It was a fatal error. And it is the ultimate proof of Rove's arrogant mediocrity. He was given a chance to possibly accomplish what up to then had only been hype [create a permanent Republican majority.] and he made the wrong choice, most likely because he couldn't give up the idea that he could make it happen through his own strength of will. (We don't need no stinking consensus...) [snip]
Until they reinvent themselves into something new, their movement is moribund and has been that way for a lot longer than all of us realized. For the Republican party it's always morning in America, 1984. They are a nostalgia act and don't even know it.
WASHINGTON - Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer.Martin Marty made a statement in an interview with Bill Moyers that really fascinated me. He said that the unknown can be broken into two categories. One category is a "Problem" which can be isolated and placed in boundaries, then studied objectively and ultimately understood. The other category is a "Mystery" which cannot be isolated and studied objectively. Mysteries, since they have no boundaries, always include the researcher.
Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of “wet artificial life.” [Snip]
That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you’ll have to look in a microscope to see it.
“Creating protocells has the potential to shed new life on our place in the universe,” Bedau said. “This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.”
And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.
Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:
* A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.
* A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.
* A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.
One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a cell membrane — is “not a big problem.” Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.
His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over. [Snip]
In Gainesville, Fla., Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T) — molecules that spell out the genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.
