Bush administration prepares to withdraw from Iraq

In spite of last week's bluster and bombast, the LA Times reports that the Bush administration is preparing to withdraw from Iraq beginning in the Spring.

Condi Rice says the training of Iraqi troops is progressing so that they can replace the American troops. This indicates that the U.S. troops can be removed from Iraq since the key was when Iraqi troops could replace them. This is actually just a fig leaf to cover necessity. The real problem is that the U.S. troops can no longer sustain the mission there and will have to be removed.

The actual state of Iraqi troops is probably no better than it was early in the Fall, when it was announced that there was only a single battalion capable of replacing the U.S. troops.

The only thing that remains is the schedule for withdrawal of troops, determining what U.S. support units will remain to support the Iraqis, and to determine how the Bush Administration is going to blame this retreat on the Democrats.

Are the big oil firms preparing to grab Iraqi oil fields?

This is only one report, but AP usually is reliable. If this is true that Kuwait's largest oil field (the second largest in the world) has passed its peak production, then there may well be a good reason for American oil firms to have pushed the Iraq Invasion.

The two largest economies in the world importing foreign oil are the U.S. and China, and China's demand is increasing rapidly. China is working world-wide to lock up production contracts, and the Middle East is the largest available pool of oil, so for the U.S. to get control of it before China does could seem like a worthwhile reason to invade Iraq.

Anyway, here is the report.

The Guardian on al Qaeda

Here is a good "outside the U.S." source of information on al Qaeda. The Guardian.

John Rendon - Bush's master of propaganda

In October 2001, John Rendon was given a secret $16,000,000 contract to target Iraq and other enemies with propaganda. Rendon was closely allied with Ahmed Chalabi, having helped to install him as head of the Iraqi National Congress after which he served as the media advisor to the IND. He had ten years earlier gotten a contract with the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power" and had made millions on government contracts after that.

So what?

Consider this from the Rolling Stone Article:

Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the agency's twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies. According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA's work is now performed by private contractors -- people completely unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs -- or how much unchecked power they enjoy.

Just one example. It is against the law for a government agency to present propaganda to the U.S. people. Has Rendon obeyed this law? If not, what can he be charged with? He is not a government employee.

Go read the whole Rolling Stone Article. You will not regret the time.

What does the public thnk about the Iraq War?

Ruy Teixeira discusses the results of several polls on Iraq and the Bush administration. The result is a bleak view for the Bush Presidency.

A (Newsweek) Poll reports Bush's handling of Iraq at exactly 30 percent. There is no reason to think this rating will not get lower.

The latest Gallup poll reports that of 491 respondents, 54 percent agree that "In view of the developments since we first sent our troops to Iraq, do you think the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq, or not?" Since August this response has averaged 53.7 with extremes at 49 and 59.

The same poll offered these choices:

• withdraw immediately (19%)
• withdraw in 12 months (33%)
• withdraw, take as many years as necessary (38%)
• send more troops. (7%)
• no opinion (3%)

That's 52 percent who want to withdraw immediately or in 12 months.

Teixeira also reports what John Mueller said in his article “The Iraq Syndrome” in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

The most striking thing about the comparison among the three wars [Korea, Vietnam and Iraq] is how much more quickly support has eroded in the case of Iraq. By early 2005, when combat deaths were around 1,500, the percentage of respondents who considered the Iraq war a mistake -- over half -- was about the same as the percentage who considered the war in Vietnam a mistake at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive, when nearly 20,000 soldiers had already died.

This lower tolerance for casualties is largely due to the fact that the American public places far less value on the stakes in Iraq than it did on those in Korea and Vietnam. The main threats Iraq was thought to present to the United States when troops went in -- weapons of mass destruction and support for international terrorism -- have been, to say the least, discounted. With those justifications gone, the Iraq war is left as something of a humanitarian venture, and, as Francis Fukuyama has put it, a request to spend "several hundred billion dollars and several thousand American lives in order to bring democracy to ... Iraq" would "have been laughed out of court."....

Growing opposition to the war effort....has little to do with whether or not there is an active antiwar movement at home. There has not been much of one in the case of the Iraq war, nor was there one during the war in Korea. Nonetheless, support for those ventures eroded as it did during the Vietnam War, when antiwar protest was frequent and visible.....

Moreover, support for the war declines whether or not war opponents are able to come up with specific policy alternatives. Dwight Eisenhower never seemed to have much of a plan for getting out of the Korean War -- although he did say that, if elected, he would visit the place -- but discontent with the war still worked well for him in the 1952 election; Richard Nixon's proposals for fixing the Vietnam mess were distinctly unspecific, although he did from time to time mutter that he had a "secret plan." Wars hurt the war-initiating political party not because the opposition comes up with a coherent clashing vision -- George McGovern tried that, with little success, against Nixon in 1972 -- but because discontent over the war translates into vague distrust of the capacities of the people running the country.

So support for the Iraq War as it is currently being fought has stabalized at "Not worth it, time to figure a way out within a year." and history suggests that the opponents during an expenisive overseas war do not have to propose a plan to get the advantage of such popular dislike for the war. Unless I am wrong, I seem to recall that the Republicans took the House in 1952.

Who lost Iraq?

That is the question Americans need to focus on now - because Iraq is a lost cause for America.

Of course, it was a fool's errand in the first place. The idea behind the invasion was to remove Saddam and allow the Iraqi's to establish a democratic government in his place. There was no consideration that Iraq might have been a nation only because a dictator such as Saddam or Tito in Yugoslavia was holding it together by force.

In such a case, removing the dictator has two possible outcomes. Either a new dictator heeds to appear, or the "nation" will devolve into its component parts. The decision regarding which of the two results will usually be made by civil war until the dictator appears, the components negotiate a peace or an outside force intervenes to force a peace.

That third choice was for the U.S. invaders to impose a peace on Iraq using U.S.-controlled military forces. They could then establish the kind of government we wanted them to choose. That is what the U.S. did in Italy, Germany and Japan after WW II. The USSR performed a similar function in the Eastern Bloc. But the U.S. did not have enough troops to do that in either Iraq or Afghanistan. They also had no allies who would provide the number of additional troops needed, and they (stupidly) disbanded the Iraqi Army as soon as the CPA took over under Jerry Bremer.

Saddam was a really nasty tyrant, but his military had already been demonstrated to be markedly inferior to that of the U.S. So Bush and Cheney wanted him replaced, and knew they could remove him. But the first function of any government is to provide peace and stability to its country.

The Republicans simply assumed that in the absence of the dictator the free and intelligent individuals of the state of Iraq would gather and form a democracy.

Bad assumption. Iraq is a tribal nation in which only 40.4% of the people age 15 and over can read and write. The absence of literacy in over half of the people in the nation means a sharp distrust of government systems unless each individual knows that the administrators are of their tribe.

So the Bush administration has removed the head of state, Saddam, and disbanded his government and his army. But they do not have enough troops in country to stop the civil war that is to be expected, and the troops that are there provide a reason for Iraqis to support the insurgency against the occupiers.

Unless we can get more troops, we are going to pull out and leave the civil war to expand. Training Iraqi forces is actually training the militias who will fight that civil war.

A positive outcome for the U.S, in Iraq is very unlikely. Who lost Iraq? Bush and Rumsfeld who undertook a jop that neither understood and that the U.S. had neither the troops nor the stomach for.

Afghanistan is already gone. See this article for a description of the disaster there.

A searchable list of Bush admin lies about Iraq

This --> is a link to a searchable list of 237 "misleading statements" (polite for "Lies.") about Iraq that have been made by Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell.

Click through, choose which speaker you want to check on or leave it blank and get all 237, five at a time.

My source for the link is Seeing the Forest.

Repubs to abandon Iraq soon, blame Democrats

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa. made his demand that the House pass a deadline to withdraw from Iraq, which the Republicans modified to an idiotically simplitic and totally unreasonable bill to withdraw immediately in an effort to put the Democrats on record as demanding an immediate pullout from Iraq. Why?

Here is the difference between Murtha's proposal and the one the Republicans demanded a vote on.

Dave Johnson explains.
Note how he describes the building of a narrative.

As I have written before, the war in Iraq is going very badly and the Republicans do not want to be left as the responsible parties when the elections come around next November. So Bush will pull many or most of the troops out of Iraq beginning next Spring or Summer and will have done it by early October 2006. (I have been consistently writing this since last January.) But removing the troops is an admission of failure, right?

So the Republicans are trying to blame the Democrats for undercutting the mission in Iraq. This is going to be the Republican message in the Fall of 2006 leading to the election.

The Republican Party controls the House, the Senate and the Presidency. The Republican Party decided to go to war in Iraq with no real justification. The war is going badly because of the Republican administration incompetence. So they want out before they take a hit in the November 2006 election. They are working hard now to blame the Democrats for their failure.

Are the conservative Republican House leaders losing control of the Party?

The weakness of President Bush has permitted the moderate House Republicans to vote their constituencies, if not their conscience, and the Republican leaders are left looking weak.

A large part of this is the ability of Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer to keep control of the Democrats so that the Republicans can't "cherry-pick" a few votes from across the isle to cover for moderate Republicans they are losing. Michael Crowley provides the story.

It's a year from the mid-term elections. The weakness of the Republican Party and the failure of the Iraq War is going to leave the Republican Party in real problems. When having such problems the Republicans have invariably resorted to really nasty politics. Expect dirty tricks, nasty attacks of which the Swift Boat-type attacks will be only part, and efforts to steal elections next year.

If you want to see what kind of year 2006 is going to be, go look at This Diary by Tom Kertes at Booman Tribune. He presents the Rovian Rules for politics.

Knight-Ridder offers four more Bush-Cheney assertions

Knight-Ridder offers four new assertions that are currently being made by Cheney and Bush about the War in Iraq. Each assertion is provided with context that indicates why it is misleading and in one case flat false. The assertions are listed below. Go read K-R's responses here.

ASSERTION: In a Veterans Day speech last Friday, Bush said that Iraq war "critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs."

ASSERTION: In his speech, Bush noted that "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate - who had access to the same intelligence - voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power."

ASSERTION: In his Veterans Day address, Bush said that "intelligence agencies around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein."

ASSERTION: Stephen Hadley, the president's national security adviser, told reporters last Thursday that the Clinton administration and Congress perceived Saddam as a threat based on some of the same intelligence used by the Bush administration.

"Congress, in 1998 authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence," Hadley said.

And Rumsfeld, in briefing reporters Tuesday, seemed to link President Clinton's signing of the act to his decision to order four days of U.S. bombing of suspected weapons sites and military facilities in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq.

In one case the assertion is simply untrue. In every other, Bush/Cheney provides a sliver of truth in a highly misleading interpretation. The effort is to provide their core supporters with something to say, even if (as is true of all of these assertions) the statement is clearly false to anyone who has followed the issues.

Bush-Cheney are simply trying to keep a vocal minority supporting them. This is not a debate. This is an effort to frustrate any search for the truth and demand accountability. Go read my earlier comment here for an explanation of what they are attemmpting to achieve.

This article is a beautiful example of the same techniques used to mislead the nation into war. It worked for them in 2002, so they are continuing to use the same techniques to avoid the blame for what they did.

28 statments by Cheny to mislead us into the Iraq War.

This is a list of 28 quotes Vice President Cheney has repeatedly made that are at best misleading. Each is quoted with an explanation of how it is wrong or misleading. Click here for the list.

How does a politician survive a sustained attack?

This is what George W. Bush does according to Josh Marshall.

We've noted before that in scandals or political nominations the decisive issue is not the number of opponents, the intensity of their opposition or even the quality of their arguments. The decisive issue is most often whether the scandalee or the nominee has some committed base of support, even if it only amounts to a distinct minority.

Josh is discussing the current White House attack back against its critics, but I wanted to point out the technique being used.

Bush isn't talking to those of us who know he has failed as President. He is talking to his committed base and giving them something to argue back with. They may be a minority of the voters, but they can prevent him from being removed as President. They set up a roadblock against the attacks, and allow time to recover and comeback.

It is my opinion that the media does not like to do the same story over and over. If he can outlast the media, then he has a chance to survive. Let's watch to see what happens to his polls.

Balanced Budget economists terrified of American finances

How bad are American finances?

To hear Walker, the nation's top auditor, tell it, the United States can be likened to Rome before the fall of the empire. Its financial condition is "worse than advertised," he says. It has a "broken business model." It faces deficits in its budget, its balance of payments, its savings — and its leadership.

Walker's not the only one saying it. As Congress and the White House struggle to trim up to $50 billion from the federal budget over five years — just 3% of the $1.6 trillion in deficits projected for that period — budget experts say the nation soon could face its worst fiscal crisis since at least 1983, when Social Security bordered on bankruptcy.

Without major spending cuts, tax increases or both, the national debt will grow more than $3 trillion through 2010, to $11.2 trillion — nearly $38,000 for every man, woman and child. The interest alone would cost $561 billion in 2010, the same as the Pentagon.

Like so many disasters in which Bush has ignored warnings and led the nation into, this set of disasters in predictable, inevitable, and could mostly have been headed off under a responsible administration.

The trouble is, even if Bush listens and recognizes the problems, the solutions he will propose will be nothing more than political wedge issue aimed at winning the next election and unacceptable to most of America. George W. Bush is the worst President ever to damage America!

Go read the whole thing at USA Today.

Campaign funding - Democrats moving to small donors

Tom DeLay and the Republicans have operated the "K-Street Project" in order to obtain the lion's share of corporate donations and to cut the Democrats out of access to them. Howard Dean has come in as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee and sharply increased the number of donations from small donors who give less than $250. MyDD has a report on this that ends:

So, Democrats are shut out of K Street, and the money that comes with it, as part of a systematic effort by the Republican Party to soak up as much corporate and lobbying money as possible. In response, Democrats find that they can raise even more money than they did in the past by turning to small, individual donors. Then, K Street and big donors get upset with Democrats for not paying attention to them anymore. Sounds like karmic comeuppance to big donors and lobbyists to me. If lobbyists and big donors really wanted the same amount of access to Democrats and Republicans, then they wouldn't have abandoned Dems and given in to the Republican K Street project in the first place. It is as though big donors and lobbyists broke up with Dems, then Dems went out and found someone who was better for them anyway, and now the lobbyists and big donors want Dems back. Well, I say hard cheese to lobbyists to big donors. They had their chance. They blew it. They can ram it.

Is it any wonder why Democrats are doing so well among Independents these days? You have one party, Republicans, trying to suck up as much as possible to the rich, to large corporations, and to lobbyists. You have another party, Democrats, trying instead to appeal to small donors and build a nationwide grassroots movement independent of powerful, wealthy interests. You tell me who is going to appeal more to people who feel shut out of the system. You tell me which is a better way for American politics to operate. Democrats should broadcast these developments as far and as wide as they can. Amidst the Republican culture of corruption, this is good government at work. This will appeal to what I once deemed the "non-ideological reformers" as much as any issue or platform position ever could. We need to get the word out. Democrats are taking their party back.

Does Bush believe in anything except retaining power?

Bush was given a golden opportunity to use 9/11 to unify America behind him, work to reduce terrorism, and build a stronger America. Instead he used it to win the 2002 midterm elections for the Republican Party. Today he uses the War in Iraq as a club to hit anyone who questions his handling of Iraq, the Middle East, and the War on Terror. Any criticism of Bush automatically is translated into not supporting the troops.

Kevin Drum has a really insightful post on this subject. This from Kevin:

After a calculated display of bipartisan mourning for public consumption, the Bush administration thereafter refused to consult with or even take notice of the existence of an opposition party. Republican consultants advised their clients to use the war as a wedge issue in reelection campaigns and the Republican leadership declared rhetorical war on mild-mannered Tom Daschle. Andy Card talked about marketing plans for the Iraq invasion. The White House cynically proposed a union-busting plan for the Department of Homeland Security designed solely to arouse Democratic opposition. The President told cheering audiences that Senate Democrats didn't care about the security of the country and campaigned tirelessly even against congressmen who had supported him. In Georgia, Max Cleland was likened to Osama bin Laden.

And it worked: Republicans won the election. And Democrats finally woke up and realized that George Bush was more interested in using the war as a partisan club than he was in actually fighting terrorists.

And that's not all. Unlike his father, Bush deliberately timed the vote on the war declaration for maximum impact on the 2002 midterms; he delayed progress on the UN declaration in order to maintain that as hot button for his base; and the Downing Street Memos make clear that the timing of "spikes of activity" against Iraq were related to the midterm elections as well.

The rest of the world sees this too and asks the obvious question: If Bush himself treats the war on terrorism as just another partisan club, like tort reform or tax cuts, why should anyone else take it any more seriously? It's a hard question to answer.

When you time the initiation of a war of choice to use it to win the next election, which is priority? The war or the election? The answer is obvious. It is the election.

If the actions of the President are geared entirely to maintain his power and power for his party, and most of the American population gets no benefit from his administrartion (e.g. the failed government reaction to Katrina - Rita) why should any American be expected to support Bush and the Republican Party? They aren't working for America. They are working for themselves.

Anytime Bush or any Republican states that what some critic says threatens America or weakens the troops, you know it is because they feel personally threatened by the question and want to both change the subject and intimidate the questioner.

The Republican Party and Bush are not America. They do not represent America. They represent only themselves and are working only to enrich themselves as fast as possible. It is today's Republicans who are not Americans.

A list of W H officials who leaked Valerie Plame/Wilson's CIA status

Kevin Drum lists the White House officials who "leaked" Valerie Plame/Wilson's status as a CIA officer to members of the Press before Bob Novak published his column announcing she was a CIA "operative."

It is difficult to look at the pattern and conclude anything other than that this was a planned and coordinated release of information.

New info on Bush's mental condition.

Kevin Drum points to an article by Insight on the News, a Washington Times outlet that provides another inside look at Bush's behavior.

"Bush has become isolated and feels betrayed by key members of his staff. "The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions."

Click through and read Kevin Drum's brief summary of previous published reports on Bush's mental health.

This presents the possibility of the application of using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. From FindLaw:

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principle officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

It is unlikely that Cheney would apply the procedure in Section 4, but thye Fitzgerald investigation is getting close to Cheney, and he may well not be Vice President much longer.

The possibility of this occurring makes the choice of a new Vice President to replace Cheney more important than any Senate confirmation of a Presidential nomination that we have seen before.

So why DID Bush invade Iraq?

E. J. Dionne writes today:

there has been an entertaining chorus of claims that the charge is false but that everybody else did it -- other countries' intelligence services, assorted politicians in this country (especially Democrats). Lacking a defense, Bush's operatives have sought to construct a Potemkin universe of intelligence dupes.

In this blizzard of disinformation, though, the unique nature of Bush and his top advisers is conveniently overlooked. Everyone else in the world with the possible exception of Tony Blair recognizes the corollary to the now-accepted wisdom that Iraq possessed no unconventional weapons and posed no threat to the United States worthy of adjectives like grave, imminent, or even serious.

The corollary would be that knowing then what is known now, an essentially unilateral invasion of Iraq under conditions of haste and waste in March of 2003 would have been ill-advised in the extreme. Virtually alone in the world, Bush has proclaimed for months that he would have invaded Iraq even if he had known it posed no threat.

With all the reasons initially given by the Bush administration shown to be just so much hype to induce America to invade Iraq, and Bush essentially saying he knew that and would have invaded Iraq anyway, the question remains -- WHY?

Maybe someday he will write a memoir and explain his reasons. I won't suggest that he will or even can explain his rationale, of course. It will probably be something a third-grader could easily read.

The Dalai Lama speaks about science and Buddhism

Mark A. R. Kleiman offers a fascinating statement from his Holiness the Dalai Lama regarding how Buddhism reacts to the discoveries of science. This is the key paragraph:

If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

The Catholic Church, of course, takes the same attitude - after two to three hundred years, with much backsliding as the current Pope is demonstrating.

Conservatives are trying to change America into a much worse place.

This is a diary from My Left Wing which states a truely important truth of modern America. The author tells us how he became a middle-class tax paying American. Hint: He didn't inherit it, and he didn't win the lottery.

Was it my fault we were on welfare? No. Was it my fault that I received free lunch at school? No, not at all. But those in power in Washington want to make it the fault of every poor child in America. It’s the age of personal responsibility, you know. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you know. Well let me tell you, I didn’t have any bootstraps to pull myself up by even if I could have taken ‘personal responsibility’.

These days it is more important to those in Congress and in the Bush administration to give tax cuts to the wealthy while paying for it by throwing children out of school lunch programs, denying medical treatment for those too poor to afford it, and reducing yet again the amount of money available for education through the student loan program. And I won’t even go into the short-funding of the public schools which further reduces educational opportunities.

Capable children are born to families of all classes. Those children are the future of America.

How do we see them growing up into capable adults?