The biggest, fastest growing communications technology ever and the U.S. is falling behind

From Reed Hundt [*] at TPM Cafe: The world is seeing a cell phone explosion that has no previous counterparts.

In Iran five million new cellphone subscribers signed up in the first quarter of this year. That's more than the number of new subscribers in the United States.

China Mobile has about 500 million subscribers. That's of course more than the American population. CM will add the same number to its total within less than a decade. [Snip]

In less than 10 years, between 2 and 3 billion people globally will be cellphone users. This is by far the largest, fastest, and most important extension of communications capability ever seen.

Because the U.S. sells monopoly rights to sections of the radio wave spectrum and then does not regulate prices, terms of service, or quality of service, the U.S. is falling behind other nations in cell phone capability and use.

The means for forming groups, gathering information, developing beliefs, sharing values, and taking action --what we apprehend now as social networks -- will become as widespread and effective as mobile communications itself. The handheld device will become the essential technology for performing the mechanical job of interacting within and between societies.

No single part of government in the United States pays much attention to these trends; the various parts that pay some attention lack responsibility and accountability; the implications of the new mobile web vastly outstrip government's capability to think about those implications. I am making a critique about the structure of government and not the people in government. Businesses in this field, on the other hand, are well aware of what's going on.

A natural monopoly (any form of system that sells access, phone companies being the prime example) will always work to prevent customers from switching to another company by either restrictive contracts or technically crippling their product so that it will not work with another companies system. Then they will overprice the product and limit innovation since innovation costs extra and does not increase the monopoly profits.

As one commenter points out we get "Locked phones, insanely expensive charges for the most meager of services, the inability to get "real" internet access for a reasonable price." "France, France mind you, is offering 100/50MB down and up for $40 a month!"

Another says that his friends from South Korea look at the junk being sold as cell phones here in the United States and just shake their heads. They come from a modern nation that offers good cell phones and service.

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[*] Reed Hundt served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, 1993-97. Since that date, he has written and lectured about information sector politics, as well as served on various technology company boards.

Should Cindy Adams be protected under a Press shield law or policy?

Cindy Adams is the gossip columnist for the New York Post. From Radar on line. we learn that Ms. Adams somehow learned and then published that the D.C. Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, was planning to dump her current lawyer and replace him with one who would challenge the law against Prostitution that Ms. Palfrey is charged with violating.

This is information available only to Ms. Palfrey, her attorneys, and the Prosecution in her case and was under court seal. Ms. Palfrey alleges that the leak was a dirty trick by the Prosecution intended to use the "media outlets to disseminate or spin misleading information about Jeane."

If true, this is a severe violation of professional ethics by the Prosecution. The spokesperson for the Department of Justice denied that anyone in the Prosecution had done such a thing.

Cindy Adams has been subpoenaed to testify who her source was.

Publishing this leak does not seem to have any socially redeemable features. It seems to me that it could only act to make a fair trail for Ms. Palfrey more difficult to achieve. So my question is - should Cindy Adams in particular and the Press in general expect any legal right to withhold the name of Ms. Adam's source?

Most leaks from whistle-blowers are provided by people who have a personal act to grind. Such leaks have allowed the public to learn of some real crimes and injustices. But at the same time, the current administration has clearly provided leaks of otherwise classified information to be published by favored members of the press so that the position of the Bush administration could be put out while the arguments against the Bush administration's positions are hidden behind the veil of government secrecy. If someone in the Prosecutors office leaked this information to Cindy Adams, this is a case in which the Prosecution is violating a court seal in order to try Ms. Palfrey in the Press.

I used to support a Press Shield Law, but cases like this and like Judy Miller at the New York Times have caused me to have strong second thoughts. Without a Press Shield Law reporters like Cindy Adams will have to promise not to reveal a source and then take the legal heat on themselves when subpoenaed. That leaves the reporter and their publication with having to answer whether the benefit of publishing the leak is worth the legal heat.

There seems to be very little value in the publication of this leak in a gossip column.

Al Qaeda is not al Qaeda in Iraq - Bush wants them confused

James Wimberly reports on the way the testimony from Petreaus and Crocker dropped the phrase "al Qaeda in Iraq" (AQI) in favor of the less accurate "al Qaeda."

Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11.

Al Qaeda in Iraq is an organization created in Northern Iraq by the Jordanian criminal Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The organization was originally named Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Group of Monotheism and the Holy Struggle). There has never been a close association between AQI and al Qaeda. AQI has no record of attempting to attack Americans in America and no known capability or motivation to do so.

Confusing the two groups serves only to justify the lies used to drag America into the unnecessary war in Iraq. It is a Republican ploy to attempt to avoid responsibility for the greatest single foreign policy blunder ever made by an American President.

So what? Here's what, from TPM:

As Spencer Ackerman notes, the non-al-Qaeda Sunni insurgents have accounted for most of the U.S. military casualties in Iraq. There likely has been some reduction in Sunni insurgent violence against U.S. troops in Anbar this year, and in fact the U.S. strategy of joining with the Anbar Sunnis against al Qaeda in Iraq is probably part of the reason Petraeus is downplayng the Sunni insurgency at the moment.

But whatever the short-term exigency, this has been a conflict marked by our inability, unwillingness, or idealogical aversion toward accurately identifying our enemies. Even the use of the blanket term "enemy" is misleading in a conflict with multiple competing interests, where alliances come and go, and in which the enemy of thy enemy is not necessarily thy friend. [Snip}

...the strategic and tactical miscalculations arising from the misidentification, to put it charitably, of the competing groups there crippled whatever chance there was of the U.S. effort succeeding.

An strong argument can be made that the confusion of various enemy groups and conflation of them into al Qaeda is (and has been) a propaganda tool used by the Bush administration to fool the American public into believing that there was a legitimate 9/11-related reason for invading Iraq in the first place and then for convincing the American public to keep troops in Iraq when the mismanagement of the occupation by Jerry Bremer and the CPA allowed the insurgency to develop. But there is more.

This administration is filled with decision-makers who believe their own propaganda, chief among them being Bush himself.

Don Rumsfeld felt that the American military was the most powerful in the world because it could deliver combat power anywhere in the world and take out targets almost anywhere. Unfortunately, combat power does not win a counter-insurgency. In fact, the inappropriate use of that combat power has the effect of alienating the population who has to be convinced to oppose the insurgents. That means that a counter-insurgency is at its base dependent on large quantities of accurate and honest Intelligence.

When the decision-makers doesn't understand the nature of the war they are fighting and depend on what their own propaganda says to make decisions in the war, then the insurgents can be expected to win.

That's why it is critically important to distinguish between al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq. The Bush administration has shown repeatedly that it cannot make those fine distinctions. That is why Petreaus and Crocker were on Capital hill the last two days trying to dress up conflicting statistics to show that there is "Light at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq. But it's a road show selling a charade.

With someone else as President besides Bush and with Dick Cheney absent, the occupation of Iraq might possibly have muddled through to a result that would not be so starkly a total failure as the occupation of Iraq has shown itself to be. We'll never know. With them there, there is no possibility of anything that can even be papered over to resemble success.

Two of seven 82d Airborne sargeants dead in Iraq

On August 19th the New York Times published an OpEd written by seven 82d Airborne Division sergeants nearing the end of their tours in Iraq.

This morning Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher reports that two of those seven soldiers were killed in a vehicle accident in Western Baghdad. Sgt. Omar Mora (from Texas City, TX) and Sgt. Yance Gray (Ismay, MT) died Monday. Each is survived by a wife and daughter.

Another of the seven, Staff Sergeant Jeremy Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head as the OpEd was being prepared for publication last August. He is being treated in a military hospital in the United States and is expected to survive.

The Republicans are pushing fear again. - That process started WW I, too.

Kevin Drum points out that all we are hearing from the media is "al Qaeda this" and "al Qaeda that." But what they don't say is that the various supposed branches of al Qaeda are not really connected. Al Qaeda as headed by Osama bin Laden does not contribute to or direct the actions of AQI (al Qaeda in Iraq.) This is all part of the Myth of AQI.

When Gen. Petreaus says that Americans are fighting al Qaeda, he means the organization in Iraq which was created by the jordanian Zarqawi, not the al Qaeda which is headed by Osama bin Laden.

It is to the advantage of the Whahabi extremists like Osama bin Laden to make themselves appear more effective than they really are. The AQI have a similar motivation to appear more threatening, so they have adopted the name (but not the direction) of al Qaeda.

This all gives George Bush and the Republican Party an excuse to make the Islamic terrorist threat both much larger than it really is, and make it appear to be a real threat to the existence of America.

It ain't.

The Wahhabi terrorist threat is little more than the threat presented by the Anarchists early in the twentieth century. The Anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated The American President William McKinley. The anarchist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Either would have been happy to crash a hijacked airliner into their target, but airliners did not exist in those day. The overreaction of the Austrians against their Serbians enemies that set off WW I was a problem if the command structure of the Austro-Hungarian government, not the direct result of the assassination of the Archduke.

What is the difference?

Technology.

The idiot assassins who attacked America on September 11, 2001 had technology that the earlier Anarchists couldn't touch. Ten men took down the World Trade Center by merely high-jacking two airliners. (Who remembers the Pentagon? - less than the Murragh Building in Oklahoma City.)

So the new terrorists/Anarchists are more dangerous than the Anarchists, right?

That depends. They can each kill a few more people in each attack, but they have no more power to change American society than Leon Czolgosz or Gavrilo Princip did.

Timothy McVeigh killed a lot more people in Oklahoma City (168) than either Czolgosz or Princip dit, with no more reason and no more danger to American society. Same motivation, but an advance in technology. That's all.

But Gavrilo Princip started World War I, right? No, that was the responsibility of the military high command and the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (who tried to use the assassination as an excuse to solve their Serbian problem) and Kaiser Wilhelm who promised the Austro-Hungarian Emperor that he would back them up if the Russians mobilized to support their Serbian fellow Slavs.

Emperor Franz Ferdinand had a lot more reason to feel threatened by the radical Serbians than George W. Bush had to feel threatened by the Iraqis, but the idiotic reaction to start a war was very similar.

The military overreaction by Bush and the Republican Party is creating a lot more enemies than it is suppressing.

Gen. Petreaus is a good General representing the Republican Party

Listening to Gen. David Petreaus testify before Congress is fascinating. The man is an excellent soldier, by all accounts a leader who is far above average, extremely bright and well-educated, and is clearly well-prepared and smooth in his presentation. He is probably the best single General we could have commanding in Iraq.

He is also very clearly a Republican. No surprise, that. Since Vietnam the officer corps of the Army has felt culturally more closely akin to the Republican Party. Then when Donald Rumsfeld took office as Secretary of Defense in 2001 he personally approved every promotion to flag rank in the military, assuring that only dedicated Republicans got the jobs.

It is also obvious that the War in Iraq and its' resulting disastrous occupation was desired entirely by the American Republican Party. The Republicans wanted the invasion of Iraq, they lied their way into it, and they got it. The Invasion and Occupation of Iraq is entirely a Republican war. It is an American war only because the Republican Party had to use the military that belongs to all of us.

So is it any surprise that the Republican General commanding the troops in the Republican war and occupation in Iraq has gone before Congress this week to defend that disaster? Gen. Petreaus and Ambassador Crocker have both done a very good job of defending the Republican strategy for the disaster in Iraq.

Is it any surprise that Moveon.org should feel that the General who is supposed to be working for all Americans, regardless of political orientation, should feel betrayed by Gen. David Petreaus?

The Moveon.org advertisement in the New York Times calls the General on his loyalty to the Republican Party rather than to America.

The Republican leaders really don't like what Moveon.org wrote in their advertisement, because the Republicans have no electoral base left outside the fear-ridden national security voters. The Republicans in Congress obviously got a memo today to attack Moveon.org over that advertisement, but Moveon.org has it right. Gen. Petreaus is defending the Republican Party at the cost of the lives of his own troops.

The Iraq war and occupation was desired by the Republican Party. It was lied for by the Republican Party. It is a Republican war and a Republican Party disaster, and Gen. David Petreaus is a Republican General commanding American troops in the disaster that party created. And all he offers is continued high-levels of troop involvement in the nasty occupation for the foreseeable future.

It is not just Gen. Petreaus who is betraying America. The Republican Party has betrayed America and will not back down.

We should never forget. Iraq is not an American War and Occupation. It is a Republican Party War and Occupation. Every death, American and Iraqi, that occurs in that country is the direct fault of George Bush and the Republican Party which has backed his every mistake.

It's time to contribute to Moveon.org so that they can continue to buy advertisements for all Americans. Click here. They are defending America from the Republicans.

Petreaus, Crocker say the plan is to stay in Iraq until Bush leaves office

Petreaus has promised that there will be some troop reductions - a handful of Marines within a month or so and beginning next April sufficient Army Brigades and Marine Regimental Combat Teams will be withdrawn to bring the number of U.S. troops in Iraq at roughly 130,000. That's the same level as when the surge started.

Then, if the Iraqi Army can replace the Americans, the number may possibly (were his fingers crossed?) be down to about 100,000. From the LA Times:

The plans also would allow Bush to live up to his pledge to the defining mission of his presidency, and perhaps to improve his chances for a decent legacy. He can say he left office pursuing a strategy that was having at least some success in suppressing violence, a claim that some historians may view sympathetically.

"Bush has found his exit strategy," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former government Mideast specialist now at the Brookings Institution. As Petraeus met with lawmakers and unveiled chart upon chart showing declining troop levels, the U.S. commander seemed to have opened a new discussion about how the United States would wind up its commitment to Iraq. Yet viewed more closely, his presentation, and that of U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, were better suited to the defense of an earlier strategy: "stay the course."

Petraeus said the government might be able to consider withdrawing some troops below pre-"surge" levels under some circumstances. But Crocker's emphasis was on how long it would take Iraq to chart its new path, and on the necessity for American support into this dim and distant future.

As Bush has promised since someone finally convinced him that his personal war in Iraq is a disaster - he is going to punt the Iraqi problem down to the next President.

The only two reasons for this are to provide something resembling a positive legacy for Bush when he leaves office, and to leave it to the Democratic President who will replace him to pull the troops out of Iraq and face the right-wing demagogues yelling "You Lost Iraq!"

That is a benefit for Bush and a benefit for the Republicans who want to run on national security. That offers no benefit to the Iraqi nation or people, and no benefit to America. But that has never bothered Republicans, has it?

Neuroscience: conservative brains and liberal brains work differently

A clear, simple experiment at New York University and UCLA demonstrates that conservatives quickly learn routine reactions to a stimulus, but that when the situation changes to make the routine reaction wrong, their brains do not function to override the learned routine easily. When the situation changes and makes the routine response wrong, liberals are 4.9 times more likely to show activity in the portions of the brain that deals with conflicting incoming data and 2.2 times more likely to get the correct answers.

The article published in the LA Times today went on to say:

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

It appears to me that this study is demonstrating that conservatives are more oriented towards focusing on making routine processes more efficient, while liberals are more capable of quickly adapting to a changing environment.

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I suspect that this relates to the differences between Authoritarian personalities and non-authoritarian personalities. A person who is trying to focus on a specific task wants someone else to bring up the supplies, take away the results and prevent distractions from interfering with the task to be performed. This isn't just because it makes someone's job easier. It is a direct result of the limited nature of every human being, described by Herbert Simon's concept of Bounded Rationality.

A person with such attitudes belongs belongs deep inside an organization, and most organizations cannot function efficiently without such people. But there does have to be someone else who keeps track of those distractions which can interfere with the performance of individual tasks. Sometimes the entire set of tasks need to be stopped and replaced because no one wants the output. Failure to make changes like that are what killed the steam locomotive manufacturers. It took entirely new companies to produce diesel-electric locomotives. Someone has to recognize the need for changes and to implement the new ideas which might deal with those changes.

Consider reading John Dean's Conservatives without Conscience and Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians.

Also, an excellent measure of the distinction should be Tolerance for Ambiguity. Conservatives will have a low tolerance for ambiguity, while liberals will have a greater one. This research demonstrates the cognitive processes that lie behind the behavioral differences.

Kevin Drum tracks Republican Hawk evolution

This is definitely one of Kevin Drum's more insightful posts. He tracks how the Republican Hawks have evolved to succeed in the varying and rapidly downward spiralling environment of the Republican war in Iraq. From primitive "War Hawks", they have evolved first to become "Pottery Barn Hawks." But as the Republican War in Iraq spiraled even further downward, they have now morphed into what Kevin calls "Chaos Hawks." Here is Kevin's analysis:

In the beginning were the War Hawks, and much did they counsel the powerful to do battle against the evildoer Saddam. Then came the war, and the looting, and the Heritage Foundation hordes, and the hawks lamented exceeding loud and many soon repented of their ways. Yea, verily, they presently transformed themselves into Pottery Barn Hawks, eager to fix the disaster they had helped create and thus redeem themselves in the eyes of the faithful. In the fullness of time, though, the disaster ripened and flowered and became impossible of resolution, and the hawks despaired. Success had become unachievable, yea unto their own generation and the generation to come after them. In short, life sucked.

So what's a Pottery Barn hawk to do? The answer, lately, is: become a Chaos Hawk. First, admit that Iraq is hopeless, thus demonstrating that you're not completely out to lunch. After all, the surge has produced only tiny gains in a few highly localized areas and has no chance of replicating those successes on a wide scale. The Iraqi government is dysfunctional, the police forces are dysfunctional, the army is years away from competence, militias are engaged in a ruthless campaign of sectarian cleansing, infrastructure is declining, and refugees are fleeing the country at a rate of thousands per day.

Having admitted, however, that the odds of a military success in Iraq are almost impossibly long, Chaos Hawks nonetheless insist that the U.S. military needs to stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Why? Because if we leave the entire Middle East will become a bloodbath. Sunni and Shiite will engage in mutual genocide, oil fields will go up in flames, fundamentalist parties will take over, and al-Qaeda will have a safe haven bigger than the entire continent of Europe.

One question Kevin does not address is whether the hawks have evolved into an entirely new species yet.

I doubt it. There is little reason to believe that a modern "Chaos Hawk" could no longer interbreed with a primitive "War Hawk."

Likely effect of disastrous employment figures

Bonddad referred me over to Mish's analysis of the really, really bad employment report. His analysis is:

Two days ago in Mass Layoffs Soar I proposed "One of these months there is going to be a massive "unexpected" downward jobs revision. More than likely that will be used as an excuse by the Fed to cut (or further cut) rates. It won't help."

So Soon?

The August BLS Employment Situation Report shows that "One of these months" has already arrived.

Nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-4,000) in August, and the unemployment rate remained at 4.6 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Over the last 3 months, total payroll employment changes have averaged 44,000 per month and private sector employment changes have averaged 72,000 per month (as revised). In August, employment in manufacturing, construction, and local government education declined, while job growth continued in health care and food services.

Participation Rate Sinks to 65.8%

How does the BLS hold the unemployment rate low with such pathetic numbers? The answer is of course the participation rate.

"In August, the civilian labor force edged down to 152.9 million, and the labor force participation rate decreased to 65.8 percent. The declines were largely due to a drop in labor force participation among teenagers; their participation rate fell to 39.7 percent."

Well participation rates can't go negative so this source of nonsense will eventually have to stop.

Mish is saying that the employment figures were only as positive as they were because the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is fudging the figures like mad. Or, as he states it, there is a great deal of BLS "moonbat activity" designed to make the already bad looking numbers from showing the true dimensions of the disaster that has occurred. If economic numbers in tables don't cause your eyes to glaze over I strongly suggest that you go read his report in full.

From the macroeconomic point of view, these numbers point to the coming problem in the economy.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) = Consumption (C) + Investment (I) + Government Expenditures (G). [GDP=C+I+G)]

But since Bush took office, "I" and "G" have not become significantly larger. Think about it - for the tax cuts to have kept the economy working, "I" would have had to increase. it didn't. What has kept the economy from going into recession has been the continued consumer ("C") spending.

But real wages have not increased since the Clinton administration. Consumption spending ("C") has been the main cause of any increase in GDP since Bush entered office, and that has been manipulated to prevent recessions from causing Bush to be defeated for reelection in 2004.

As I wrote earlier, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wanted Bush reelected and the Republicans to remain in power. He did it by lowering interest rates and by failing to regulate the quality of mortgage loans that banks were issuing.

The resulting housing bubble kept both employment its resulting consumption spending artificially high. But the economy needed to go into recession early in Bush's first term, so the efforts to artificially pump up the economy required more and more effort as time went on. Or to say it another way, the housing bubble was created to artificially pump up the economy for political purposes, but the longer the bubble was permitted to last, the more damage it did to the economy.

Greenspan started slowly rising the interest rate in February 2005 to try to slowly correct the damage he had done, but it didn't work.

A housing bubble takes a long time to demonstrate its damage. I'm sure that the mortgage companies could see it in 2006, but it did not become publicly known until the largest mortgage company in the nation (Countrywide) announced that it was having problems in early 2007. The damage of the bubble has been slowly surfacing since then, The credit crisis from this Summer are just the latest effects. Countrywide has announced that it expects a 25% drop in mortgage lending next year, and is now laying off 20% of its workforce (a number that has not yet made it into the BLS statistics.)

There are more economic problems to come. The only thing no one knows is how severe they will get. Recession? More likely now than not.

One thing about this, though, is that the President usually gets credit or blame for the status of the economy because he was in office when it happened, no matter what he did. In this case, however, George Bush and the Republicans are directly responsible, and demonstrably so.

The Bush administration has been faulted for politicizing a lot of things that should not be politicized so that they can keep Republicans in power. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has just resigned over the scandal of politicizing federal Justice. Michale Brown was fired as head of FEMA because FEMA had been made a dumping ground for unqualified political activists and the disaster in New Orleans proved it. Here we can see how the same process of politicizing everything the government touches has also effected how the economy is managed by the Federal Reserve.

There is nothing in America (or Iraq) that the Republicans and the Bush administration have touched that is not the worse for it. Our next recession (among many other disasters) has been worsened by our Republican party.

Remember that when you go to vote next. That vote is the only protection we, the average American people, have from the Republicans.

Who specifically ordered the disbanding of the Iraqi Army?

Who actually did order the disbanding of the Iraqi Army?

It is widely recognized now that, after the initial idiotic decision to invade Iraq in the first place, the worst screw up of the entire Iraqi adventure was the disbanding of the Iraqi Army. The most likely culprits have been George W. Bush himself and L. Paul Bremer. But Bush recently told his biographer that it was not his policy to disband the Iraqi military. He stated that the decision was not according to policy, and he implied that L. Paul Bremer was probably the culprit.

But "Jerry" Bremer came back with his OpEd in the New York Times stating that he was not the person who changed the policy. Bremer says that when he ordered the Iraqi Army disbanded he was following the policy he was given from higher up.

Assuming that both are telling the truth (something I always find difficult to assume about Bush, but maybe I should in this case) who actually did direct the Iraqi Army to be disbanded? Fred Kaplan over at Slate addresses this issue in his article Who Disbanded the Iraqi Army? And why was nobody held accountable?.

Kaplan makes several very interesting points.

1. On March 10, a week before the Iraq invasion, the National Security Council unanimously agreed that only the politically active Iraqi "bad guys" (less than 5% of the government) would be removed from government during the occupation. Bush was Present.


2. On March 12 the same NSC members agreed unanimously that the Iraqi Republcan Guard would be disbanded, but not the regular military. Bush was again present.


3. Bremer issued CPA directive No. 2 his second day on the job in Iraq. He had been given his marching orders before leaving the States.


4. Bremer wrote in his memoire that he was given the directions by by Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.


5. Feith reported to Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. Wolfowitz reported directly to Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld.


6. Bob Woodard wrote in State of Denial that Rumsfeld told him the order came from sowewhere else.

So who gave Rumsfeld the order to disband the entire Iraqi military? Kaplan continues:

My guess is it came from Vice President Dick Cheney, if only because his is one of the most leakproof offices in Washington. Had the order originated someplace else, that fact would have leaked by now. It's like the dog that didn't bark in the Sherlock Holmes story; unbarking dogs in this administration, especially at this late date of decrepitude, tend to be the hounds in Cheney's kennel.

But where did Cheney get the idea? A good guess here is that it came from that familiar meddler of the era: the Iraqi exile, chief neocon guru, and suave banker-mathematician, Ahmad Chalabi.

Chalabi, recall, was interested in two things above all, once Saddam Hussein was toppled: removing Baathists from every level of activity in Iraqi politics and society and installing his militia, the Free Iraqi Forces, as the foundation of a new Iraqi army. (Soon after Saddam's overthrow, Wolfowitz arranged for a military transport plane to fly a few hundred of these militiamen to Nasiriya; they vanished almost instantly into the streets. After that, Chalabi had himself briefly appointed to head the official de-Baathification commission.)

In other words, CPA Orders No. 1 and 2 fit Chalabi's twin agendas perfectly.

So Kaplan believes that Dick Cheney is responsible for the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi military. No one else had the power to override the unanimous decisions of the members of the National Security Council. Cheney's close connections with the convicted embezzler, known NeoCon and suspected Iranian agent Ahmed Chalabi and Cheney's intention to install Chalabi is President of Iraq are well known.

This does rather fit with Dick Cheney's pattern of making disastrous decisions. He has made most of the major foreign policy and military decisions for the White House, and every single one of them has turned out bad.

If it was Cheney who directed the disbanding of the Iraqi military then he apparently failed to tell George W. Bush about his action. If that turns out to be true, then I will have to apologize the Bush for assuming that his failure to recall his directive to disband the Iraqi Army was a symptom of his psychotic mental state.

Instead it is a symptom of Bush's delegation of the day-to-day rule of government to Cheney and Bush's failure to check up on the things Cheney was doing. There is no management school that teaches a form of delegation in which you simply get someone else to do the job for you and never bother to understand or check on what they are doing. That's not management. It's ignorance and laziness. That's simply acting as a figurehead for those who are doing the real management and making excuses for their failures.

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Bremer's CPA orders:

1. Barred members of the Baath Party from all but the lowliest government posts. Issued first day in Iraq.
2. Disbanded the Iraqi army. Issued second day in Iraq.

[h/t to Kevin Drum and to Josh Marshall.]

At last we begin to get Republian defenders for Larry Craig

OK. I previously commented on the political aspects of the Larry Craig Affair, and I really thought it was over. I forgot to factor in the "It's all the Democrats' fault!" crowd. Fortunately, Rick Perlstein found these choice comments by Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan.

Ann defends Sen. Craig by stating that liberals are practicing gay-bashing (but calling it hypocrisy) and besides, Sen. Craig didn't really do anything. He was set up.

Pat has a less coherent argument. Sen. Craig was set up, and it is all a great smear job by the Idaho Statesman, a newspaper running a witch-hunt and looking for anything in Sen. Craig's entire life that would discredit and smear him. The problem is less about Craig's character than it is about the character of those investigating him. Again, it is all the liberals fault. But then Pat goes on into the land of confusion where only someone who rode the Nixon rocket into the ground during Watergate and still believes it was a Democratic coup-de-etate could go: "

Republicans immediately denounced him, stripped him of all his seniority rights, and ordered an ethics committee investigation and a study of whether more immediate action should be taken...

[Here Pat leaves consistency and focus to the jackals. Unlike the way Pat started, blaming the liberals for castigating Craig, now they have another crime they are guilty of. Silence when Craig is attacked by his fellow Republicans.]

The silence of most Democrats is understandable. If you belong to a party that declares homosexuality a moral lifestyle, that perhaps should be elevated to the level of matrimony, then what would Craig be guilty of, other than being horribly indiscreet?

So you see? It was - the Democrats Oops his fellow Republicans - who stripped Craig of his seniority and filed ethics charges against him (Safe to do, unlike David Vitter, Larry Craig will be replaced by another Republican.)

But it is still the Democrats fault for not coming to Republican Sen. Craig's defense and defending him from his fellow Republicans when they have attacked him.

Then Pat's final paragraph channels Richard Nixon. Pat quotes him as saying "Count your friends when you're down, Nixon always advised." I guess when writing about Republican nastiness and corruption you can never to wrong quoting Richard Nixon.

As for me, I admit to not knowing what the fuss is all about. Sen. Craig's situation is not a particularly pleasant one, but it is made a great deal worse by the gay-bashing which Republicans have been practicing to attract social conservative voters, and by their perception that the Mark Foley scandal had in their defeat in keeping control of the House of Representatives in 2006.

Because of those perceptions, a homosexual Republican politician always runs this kind of risk. They have to stay in the closet (like Lindsay Graham appears to) and don't learn what forms of behavior are socially acceptable when trying to find a sex partner. Then when they do go over the edge, they are treated much more harshly than heterosexuals like David Vitter are. Vitter may be promiscuous, but since he is heterosexually promiscuous, so his inappropriate use of prostitutes can be excused with a wink-and-a-nod.

I feel sorry for Craig's family, but any homosexual Republican politician is automatically playing with fire. It is sad on a human level that Sen. Craig got burned. But I also don't like Republican behavior and the lack of empathy they demonstrate for anyone they don't know, so I don't feel too very sorry for him.

Larry Craig is toast. He's gone. He's no more. He is an ex-Senator

Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) has really found himself in trouble. He pleaded guilty in early August to misdemeanor disorderly-conduct charges that came from his arrest in June by an undercover police officer in a men's restroom at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport

When this became public, he then announced that he intended to resign from the Senate by September 30 of this year.

Then, for reasons that are not clear, Sen. Arlene Specter convinced his to change his intent (no resignation had been submitted) and fight the charges. (See the video at Talking Points Memo for the back story on this.) Such a fight would require that his guilty plea to the court in Minneapolis be somehow withdrawn, a process that is not likely to succeed and also that the Senate Republicans not go forward with the Ethic complain they filed against him. But even if it did succeed in withdrawing the plea and halting the Ethics investigation, the real issue would center on what the voters in Idaho want him to to.

Now we have a poll on those voters. It is not pretty. According to New Survey USA Poll:

What should Craig do?

52% Leave Senate
29% Serve Out Term, Don't Run
17% Serve Out Term And Run Again
2% Not Sure

TPM Election Central also says "When asked to rate the respect they have for Craig on a scale of one to 10, the largest percentage, 30%, choose one."

Three term Senator from Idaho Larry Craig has reached the end of his Senate career, and is unlikely to have any further career in politics.

Bush misremembers - Per Bremer It was policy to disband the Iraqi military

The recent report from Robert Draper's book "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush" said that Bush claimed " 'The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.' somehow it didn't happen."

Paul Bremer appears to feel that he followed the policy he was given when he disbanded the Iraqi military, but now is being blamed for unilaterally deciding to take that action on his own. Here is his denial in a New York Times OpEd published September 6, 2007.

How I Didn’t Dismantle Iraq’s Army

By L. PAUL BREMER III

“The Iraqi Army of the future cannot be an extension of the present army, which has been made into a tool of dictatorship.” — Report by the Department of State’s Future of Iraq Project, May 2002

IT has become conventional wisdom that the decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s army was a mistake, was contrary to American prewar planning and was a decision I made on my own. In fact the policy was carefully considered by top civilian and military members of the American government. And it was the right decision.

By the time Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, the Iraqi Army had simply dissolved. On April 17 Gen. John Abizaid, the deputy commander of the Army’s Central Command, reported in a video briefing to officials in Washington that “there are no organized Iraqi military units left.” The disappearance of Saddam Hussein’s old army rendered irrelevant any prewar plans to use that army. So the question was whether the Coalition Provisional Authority should try to recall it or to build a new one open to both vetted members of the old army and new recruits. General Abizaid favored the second approach.

In the weeks after General Abizaid’s recommendation, the coalition’s national security adviser, Walter Slocombe, discussed options with top officials in the Pentagon, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. They recognized that to recall the former army was a practical impossibility because postwar looting had destroyed all the bases.

Moreover, the largely Shiite draftees of the army were not going to respond to a recall plea from their former commanders, who were primarily Sunnis. It was also agreed that recalling the army would be a political disaster because to the vast majority of Iraqis it was a symbol of the old Baathist-led Sunni ascendancy.

On May 8, 2003, before I left for Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave me a memo titled “Principles for Iraq-Policy Guidelines” that specified that the coalition “will actively oppose Saddam Hussein’s old enforcers — the Baath Party, Fedayeen Saddam, etc.” and that “we will make clear that the coalition will eliminate the remnants of Saddam’s regime.” The next day Mr. Rumsfeld told me that he had sent the “Principles” paper to the national security adviser and the secretary of state.

Meanwhile, Walter Slocombe’s consultations with Americans officials in Washington and Baghdad showed that they understood that the only viable course was to build a new, professional force open to screened members of the old army. Mr. Slocombe drafted an order to accomplish these objectives. I sent a preliminary draft of this order to the secretary of defense on May 9. The next day I sent the draft to the Defense Department’s general counsel, William J. Haynes, as well as to Mr. Wolfowitz; the under secretary for policy, Douglas Feith; the head of Central Command, Gen. Tommy Franks; and to the coalition’s top civil administrator at the time, Jay Garner, asking for comments.

On May 13, en route to Baghdad, Mr. Slocombe briefed senior British officials in London who told him they recognized that “the demobilization of the Iraqi military is a fait accompli.” His report added that “if some U.K. officers or officials think that we should try to rebuild or reassemble the old R.A. (Republican Army), they did not give any hint of it in our meetings, and in fact agreed with the need for vigorous de-Baathification, especially in the security sector.”

Over the following week, Mr. Slocombe continued discussions about the planned order with top Pentagon officials, including Mr. Feith. During that same period, Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the field commander of the coalition forces in Iraq, received and cleared the draft order. I briefed Secretary Rumsfeld on the issue several times, and forwarded a final draft of the proposed order for his approval on May 19.

Walter Slocombe subsequently received detailed comments on the draft order incorporating the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, making clear that the top civilian and military staff in the Pentagon, as well as the commanders in the field, had reviewed the proposal. Another coalition adviser, Dan Senor, spent the night of May 22 coordinating the text of the announcement with Mr. Rumsfeld’s close adviser Lawrence Di Rita. Apart from minor edits to the order, none of the military or civilian officials raised objections to the proposal to create a new Iraqi army or to formally dissolve Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus.

On May 22, I sent to President Bush, through Secretary Rumsfeld, my first report since arriving in Iraq. I reviewed our activities since arrival, including our de-Baathification policy. I then alerted the president that “I will parallel this step with an even more robust measure dissolving Saddam’s military and intelligence structures.” The same day, I briefed the president on the plan via secure video. The president sent me a note on May 23 in which he thanked me for my report and noted that “you have my full support and confidence.” [Snip]

The decision not to recall Saddam Hussein’s army was thoroughly considered by top officials in the American government. At the time, this decision was not controversial. ... The first I heard of doubts about the decision was in the fall of 2003 after the insurgency had picked up speed.

These two men, George W. Bush and L. Paul Bremer, both failed disastrously in Iraq. Now they are arguing over whose fault the single most critical failed decision of the occupation was. Neither of them want to take the blame for the disaster.

I'd say that Bremer has a bit more credibility than Bush does. First, Bush tries to claim he simply doesn't remember just what happened, while Bremer offers details along with what numerous other people said on the subject, other people who can be contacted to confirm what was said. When Bush forgets what happened and Bremer provides extensive detail, the credibility rests with Bremer.

Then there is the fact that Bush rarely seems constrained by the facts when he says anything. He says what he wants his audience to believe without regard to whatever reality supposedly lies behind what he says. Bush can't be trusted. Bremer is not known to be so loose with the facts or disconnected from reality. Again, the credibility rests with Bremer.

Of course, the key point to remember is that bush was in charge, so even if he doesn't remember screwing up the occupation, he is still responsible for it even more than Bremer is.

Rudy is lying about 9/11. See video

The former Director of Emergency Management for New York says that Rudy Giuliani is lying about what he did in advance of September 11, 2001, what he did not that date, and what he did afterwards. Then Rudy "...profited financially from his association with the tragedy after leaving office in 2001."



I guess from the Republican point of view that somehow does qualify him to run for President. He is another lying, incompetent crook with a sense of grandiosity and entitlement. Who else are the Republicans going to nominate?

The surge is a success - if the numbers are true

The Bush administration has been spreading a lot of numbers around that purportedly show that the surge has been 'successful.' Has it? Well, it depends on how good the numbers really are.

Karen DeYoung has published a story on those numbers and there sources. The headline tells the story - "Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in Iraq: Military Statistics Called Into Question." The story is published on page A16 of today's Washington Post.

The short story is that the numbers simply don't support any assertions that the surge has worked. Just like in Vietnam, the government is trying to pass off fake numbers or badly analyzed numbers to prove what they want the American people to buy.

The current short-list for nominees for Attorney General

According to TPM Election Central, Roll Call offers its short list of potential nominees for the job of Attorney General.

• Former Solicitor General Ted Olson


• Former Attorney General Bill Barr and also Bio of Bill Barr from Forbes


• Former Deputy Attorney General George Terwilliger III


• D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman


• Former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson


• Michael Mukasey, a former judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Roll Call supposedly offers bios of these guys, but Roll Call is Subscription only, so I am linking to wikipedia and a few other sources of biographical data on these people.

Terrorism: massive existential threat or just a few very nasty bandits?

Can we trust the conservatives to be honest about how many terrorists are out there and how effective they are? Or are they in business to exaggerate those numbers to maintain political power here in the U.S.?

Consider. The Republican Party needs a massive threat to America so that they can be elected to defend this nation. 1989 was the second worst year of the twentieth century for them (after 1929.) When the USSR collapsed and Communism disappeared, the reason for electing Republicans disappeared with the Communists.

In 1997 the (NeoConservative) Project for the New American Century showed the searching for a new reason for conservatives to run for election in their complaint that "American foreign and defense policy is adrift." Twelve years after the collapse of Communism they were saved by Osama bin Laden's attack on the U.S. on September 11, 2001. Suddenly Middle Eastern terrorists became the new threat to the existence of America and the American Way of Life (as defined by Republicans.)

The Bush administration was already even in 2001 recognized as somewhere between marginal and failing. They had canceled the ABM Treaty, established the Anti-Ballistic Missile System and gotten their tax cut, and the disinterested Bush who was their leader decided to take the month of August off. They had nothing left to do. September 11 changed that, permitting Bush - Cheney to ram through the long-desired dream of the NeoConservatives, a military attack on Iraq.

The attack would be quick, American troops in and out in a few months, and the grand principles of the free market with minimal government interference would create a highly productive free market democracy that would be a beacon to all the Middle East, inviting them to join in the great conservative revolution that was going to sweep the world.

Didn't work, of course.

After the conservatives under Paul Bremer dismantled the government, military and police forces of the autocratic state-economic system that controlled Iraq, there was nothing left to build on. Since anyone who had been part of the previous government (and remember - that includes the economy) had the "Wrong Attitudes" for a free market small government society, such previous government members were not allowed to participate in the new Iraq that the American conservatives were creating.

American conservatives consider a person's belief in conservatism to be more important as a job qualification than demonstrated knowledge and experience on the job. So in America we got Michael Brown, a good conservative known by another high-ranking conservative to be head of FEMA. The staffing policies of conservatives destroyed FEMA and they destroyed Iraq.

Is it any surprise that the unemployed and unpaid previous members of the government and military of Iraq would try to force the American troops out of their nation? And if someone is going to force the most powerful military force in the world out of a nation they have invaded, then the only way to do it is asymmetric Warfare. Asymmetric warfare is another term for what the news media call "Terrorism."

The short story is that the U.S. created the Iraqi Insurgency by both invading Iraq and by the mismanagement of the occupation under Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and NeoCon members of the American Enterprise Institute.

An insurgency needs support from outside the nation it is operating in, so the Iraqi Insurgents were not going to turn down training, equipment and foreign fighters offered by another enemy of America, al Qaeda. The question is, has al Qaeda taken over the Sunni Insurgency in Iraq?

They certainly have not taken control of the Shiite Insurgents. One tactic the al Qaeda members have used is to bomb Shiite mosques to try to get the Shiites to attack Sunnis, because this would make the Sunni Insurgents more dependent on al Qaeda as well as jack up the overall level of violence in Iraq.

This has led both Shiites and Sunnis to attack American forced to try to get them to withdraw from Iraq. The Bush administration, however, has defined leaving Iraq as "Losing Iraq" and as being defeated by al Qaeda. To support this they offer what appear to be highly inflated numbers of the number of al Qaeda fighters operating in Iraq. It is only by inflating the numbers of actual al Qaeda fighters operating in Iraq that the Bush administration is able to justify keeping U.S. troops there in a nation where we are attacked daily and where we have no real objective to fight for except to just keep our troops there in the Middle East!

Washington Monthly has just published an article by Andrew Tilghman entitled The Myth of AQI . [AQI is al Qaeda in Iraq, which is not the same as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. Using the same name allows AQI to seem larger and more fearful than they really are.] Here is Tilghman's story on the numbers of al Qaeda fighters that actually exist in Iraq:

What if official military estimates about the size and impact of al-Qaeda in Iraq are simply wrong? Indeed, interviews with numerous military and intelligence analysts, both inside and outside of government, suggest that the number of strikes the group has directed represent only a fraction of what official estimates claim. Further, al-Qaeda's presumed role in leading the violence through uniquely devastating attacks that catalyze further unrest may also be overstated. [Snip]

In a background briefing this July in Baghdad, military officials said that during the first half of this year AQI accounted for 15 percent of attacks in Iraq....Yet those who have worked on estimates inside the system take a more circumspect view....spectrum of estimates, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent....But even the low estimate of 8 percent may be an overstatement. [Snip]

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization." [Snip]

The view that AQI is neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed is widespread among working-level analysts and troops on the ground. A majority of those interviewed for this article believe that the military's AQI estimates are overblown to varying degrees. If such misgivings are common, why haven't doubts pricked the public debate?
[Also quoted in Kevin Drum's Washington Monthly blog]

It is rather clear that the Bush administration is lying about the size of the actual al Qaeda force operating in Iraq. But they have to, since otherwise it becomes clear that the major cause of the insurgency in Iraq is the presence of American occupying troops.

The Shiites (20% of the population) and the Sunnis (60% of the population) almost entirely want the U.S. troops out of Iraq. The Kurds (20% of the population), who are not involved in the insurgency - counter-insurgency fighting that is tearing Iraq up would rather we did not leave, as we are their protection from the rest of the Iraqi's, Iran and Turkey.

But if AQI is actually only about 850 full-time fighters, and we have 160,000 troops and nearly as many contractors tied down in Iraq just to deal with them, then the Taliban and the al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan and Afghanistan are getting a free ride from us. The Bush administration is fighting the insurgency they created in Iraq themselves and letting the rest of the terrorists in the world go merrily along their way with no interference.

This is just more Bush administration - conservative Republican incompetence at work, concealed by more lies. Lies and incompetence are the hallmarks of the Bush administration. And every time it looks like they are hitting rock bottom, they find new ways to go even deeper to new levels of incompetence covered by lies.

This administration has to go. Soon.

So? B-52 flies from one B-52 base to another? So what?

The story about a B-52 bomber taking off from a B-52 base in Minot, ND and flying to the B-52 base at Barksdale, LA should have been a non-event. How could anyone even guess what the payload was? Obviously someone leaked it. Why?

Larry Johnson offers some additional data. Like, for example, "the only times you put weapons on a plane is when they are on alert or if you are tasked to move the weapons to a specific site." Also relevant is the fact that Barksdale, LA is where the B-52's are staged to the Middle East.

As Larry says, why would the Air Force need to move nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to the base from which flights going to the Middle East normally begin?

Click on the label "Iranian War" below for my previous posts on the buildup to the attack on Iran.

Another Bush delusion

From Think Progress we find out more about Bush's beliefs from the book "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush" by Robert Draper.

The U.S. Intelligence Agencies admitted in 2004 that Saddam had not had any WMD's. However

Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs. [p. 388]

This is the man who says that he is America's 'decider.' As I pointed out earlier he said

"And in apparent reference to the invasion of Iraq, he [Bush}continued, “This group-think of ‘we all sat around and decided’ — there’s only one person that can decide, and that’s the president."

Bush is a man who suffers from delusions, and he is also the man who will ultimately decide if the U.S. has to attack Iran.

Bush and Cheney are rumored to have directed the start of a propaganda effort to justify an attack on Iran. See White House to insanely market another war.

Just because a proposed action is insane does not mean that some supporters might not consider it useful to them. Both the Bush administration in the U.S. and the administration of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are both losing support inside their respective nations.

Bush and Cheney are both willing to take on ideas others consider not only wrong and unworkable, but even insane. Both consider disagreement to be disloyalty. They ignore both expert opinion and the experts themselves. Mahmoud Ahmadinehad has a reputation for similar behavior. Both are in political trouble at home, and both appear likely to run the risk of another war just to maintain power.

The rumors of the roll-out of another effort to market a war need to be considered seriously.

Can Bush come out of his delusional fog long enough to realize that a war with Iran will be a disaster? I seriously doubt it.

Craig withdraws intent to resign from Senate

And we thought it was all over last week. The minute that word got out that he had pleaded guilty to a charge that he was trolling for sex in a Minneapolis Airport men's room, the Republican Party in general came down on him with as many feet as they could find. Unlike Louisiana Sen. David Vitter who admitted on TV that he had paid prostitutes for sex and was in touch with the D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey, Sen. Craig had been arrested for sending classic signals in the men's room trolling for male sex.

The Republican reaction was perfectly clear.

Sex with prostitutes = "OK."

Homosexual sex in a public men's room = "Senator! Begone! And do not again darken our Senate building!"

The Republicans even performed the extremely unusual act of filing a Senate Ethics complaint against Larry Craig, a member of their own Party.

So last Saturday Sen. Craig announced his retirement from the Senate, to be effective September 30.

Or so we thought.

Apparently Sen. Craig only announce his intent to resign at the end of September, and as Sen. Specter points out on FOX News, an 'intent to resign' can be withdrawn.

Go see the video at Talking Points Memo for what Paul Harvey used to call "The rest of the Story." Josh Marshall has some really good Washington insider background data for you in the video.

Sen. Craig may have decided to unresign, but he is up for reelection in 2008 in Idaho. It will be interesting to see if he even enters the primary race for his own seat. Or if he does, how the Idaho Republican Party will treat him.

What can I say? I really enjoy watching Republicans boil one of their own in oil. It's more fun when the victim fights back, too.

The unethical unconstitutional radical so-called 'conservative' Republicans

Digby writes about the way conservative Republicans have gradually removed any hint of ethics in American elections whenever and wherever they can. Nixon was the first great example, followed by the secret deal between Republicans and the Iranian groups who held the American Embassy personnel until after the 1980 election so as to ensure the defeat of Carter.

The partisan idiocy that was the impeachment of Bill Clinton followed, but after that came the presidential election of 2000 in which Justice Scalia not only contributed the fifth vote to stop the Florida recounts, he specifically said when he did it "The Constitution does not guarantee a free vote."

I don't think any of us knew just how jarring that assault would be until the election of 2000, when an attack on the vote became quite direct. Al Gore was the winner of the popular vote and the intended winner of Florida's electoral college vote. It was close. But regardless of the Republican mantras about hanging chads and "divining the will of the voters," from the first moments of the election controversy there was no doubt that the butterfly ballot in Miami caused people to vote in error and if that hadn't happened, Al Gore would have been the clear winner in Florida. The intention of the voters was clear, even if the technical difficulties in rectifying it weren't. We know who the voters chose.

But the Republicans cared nothing for the intention of the voters and didn't even want to count the votes that might have legitimized their own man's victory. They used every mechanism and lever of power at their disposal in spite of the fact that they knew they hadn't really won. And they knew we knew they hadn't really won. That a strictly partisan 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court ratified that maneuver was perhaps one of the most shocking attacks on the spirit of American democracy yet. Supreme Court Justice Scalia even made a point of saying that there was no right to vote in the constitution, which is true. But I don't think many Americans believed before that day that a Supreme Court justice would use that fact as a way to justify installing a man in the presidency who hadn't been the people's choice. Now we know.

(See also The Dallas Examiner.)

Then followed the removal of the elected California Governor.

California followed with a GOP financed recall election of the Democratic Governor, a radical departure from the past where recalls had been understood to be used only to remove criminals from office, not truncate the term of a duly elected executive simply because the political conditions allowed you to do it. Interestingly, this sort of radical direct democracy had been endorsed by that old rock-ribbed conservative Karl Marx, when he wrote favorably about the recall provisions of the Paris Commune. One would say this was a matter of strange bedfellows, but these modern Republicans studied communism with fervor and came to admire many of its adherents' political tactics. And in any case, it was a matter of political opportunity rather than philosophy. They would just as easily argue the opposite case. Their philosophy is to take power, period.

All of this is just about elections. They govern in the same way, as laid out in Charlie Savage's new book "Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy."

As Charlie Savage points out, this administration has been centralizing power into the Presidency. It doesn't matter who holds the Presidency. The forms of power that the Bush - Cheney administration have pulled into the Executive Branch will be there for any future President to use. I don't think they every intended for Democrats to again elected and install a President, but it would be a great irony if the powers that Cheney (in particular) have pulled into the Presidency were used against the Republicans in the same ways Republicans have been using them against Democrats for the last eight years.

Irony may provide a level of justice, but I'm not sure we want to keep on living in the America the Re[publicans have been building.

Psychotic individuals often don't remember their mistakes

From the New York Times article of the interviews with Bush about his Presidency, one thing is clear. He takes responsibility for the decisions which have come out of the White House.

And in apparent reference to the invasion of Iraq, he [Bush}continued, “This group-think of ‘we all sat around and decided’ — there’s only one person that can decide, and that’s the president.”

Yet when asked if he directed that the Iraqi Army be disbanded, this was his reply:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

So according to Bush, he did not direct the disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But he is the only one who can 'decide.' So it must have been a decision made by Paul Bremer, the Proconsul in Iraq, right?

Bremer refuses to take the blame, and he has the documents to prove the decision came out of the White House. From today's New York Times article:

Mr. Bremer indicated that he had been smoldering for months as other administration officials had distanced themselves from his order. “This didn’t just pop out of my head,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday, adding that he had sent a draft of the order to top Pentagon officials and discussed it “several times” with Mr. Rumsfeld.

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House is not commenting on Mr. Draper’s book, said Mr. Bush indeed understood the order and was acknowledging in the interview with Mr. Draper that the original plan had proved unworkable.

“The plan was to keep the Iraqi Army intact, and that’s accurate,” the official said. “But by the time Jerry Bremer announced the order, it was fairly clear that the Iraqi Army could not be reconstituted, and the president understood that. He was acknowledging that that was something that did not go as planned.”

But the letters, combined with Mr. Bush’s comments, suggest confusion within the administration about what quickly proved to be a decision with explosive repercussions.

Indeed, Mr. Bremer’s letter to Mr. Bush is striking in its almost nonchalant reference to a major decision that a number of American military officials in Iraq strongly opposed. Some senior administration officials, including the secretary of state at the time, Colin L. Powell, have reportedly said subsequently that they did not know about the decision ahead of time.

Gen. Peter Pace, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in February 2004 that the decision to disband the Iraqi Army was made without the input of the joint chiefs. “We were not asked for a recommendation or for advice,” he said. [Snip]

Mr. Bremer said he sent a draft of the proposed order on May 9, shortly before he departed for his new post in Baghdad, to Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials.

Among others who received the draft order, he said, were Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense; Douglas J. Feith, then under secretary of defense for policy; Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, then head of the American-led coalition forces in Iraq; and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Bremer said that he had briefed Mr. Rumsfeld on the plan “several times,” and that his top security adviser in Baghdad, Walter B. Slocombe, had discussed it in detail with senior Pentagon officials as well as with senior British military officials. He said he received detailed comments back from the joint chiefs, leaving no doubt in his mind that they understood the plan.

Josh Marshall at his TPM makes the following points:

in pretty much all the books on the Iraq fiasco it's clear that this was a decision that came with Bremer from Washington. And my recollection at least is that this very much came out of the Chalabi/Feith/Wolfowitz 'clean slate' approach that dominated the early days of the occupation. So the idea that Bremer somehow came up with this on the fly or that the Americans were forced to confirm some sort of fait accompli flies in the face of all the evidence and, it would seem now, ample documentary evidence in Bremer's possession.

So Bush is the President and 'The Decider.' He takes responsibility for what his administration does.

He just doesn't remember doing it. Is that a lie or a symptom of psychosis?

White House to insanely market another war.

The idea that our government would market a war that only a few top leaders considered necessary would have seemed incredible back before Bush stole toe Presidency in 2000. Then, beginning in about September 2002 they did exactly that, marketing and conducting the disaster in Iraq. That peremptory war in Iraq solved the problem of the essentially toothless intransigence of Saddam at the cost of totally destroying Iraq as a nation and - so far - destroying the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and at present conducting an occupation of Iraq that is burning through $3 billion per week.

No one would be stupid enough to try double-or-nothing and begin marketing another war even before there appears to be any resolution of the mess in Iraq would they? Not if they were sane they wouldn't. But if an organization can be described as "insane" the Bush administration would be the prime example.

Just because an idea is crazy and unworkable doesn't seem to stop the Bush administration. That said, the current rumors that the Bush administration is starting to roll out the marketing for another peremptory war, this time with Iraq, needs to be considered seriously. So this article in the New Yorker should be considered a warning of the intended actions of the insane Bush administration.

Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington. Rubin can’t confirm his friend’s story; neither can I. But it’s worth a heads-up:

They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

True? I don’t know. Plausible? Absolutely. It follows the pattern of the P.R. campaign that started around this time in 2002 and led to the Iraq war. The President’s rhetoric on Iran has been nothing short of bellicose lately, warning of “the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.” And the Iranian government’s behavior—detaining British servicemen and arresting American passport holders, pushing ahead with uranium enrichment, and, by many reliable accounts, increasing its funding and training for anti-American militias in Iraq—seems intentionally provocative. Perhaps President Ahmedinejad and the mullahs feel that they win either way: they humiliate the superpower if it doesn’t take the bait, and they shore up their deeply unpopular regime at home if it does. Preëmptive war requires calculations (and, often, miscalculations) on two sides, not just one, as Saddam learned in 2003. When tensions are this high between two countries and powerful factions in both act as if hostilities are in their interest, war is likely to follow.

Just because a proposed action is insane does not mean that some supporters might not consider it useful to them. Both the Bush administration in the U.S. and the administration of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are both losing support inside their respective nations.

Bush and Cheney are both willing to take on ideas others consider not only wrong and unworkable, but even insane. Both consider disagreement to be disloyalty. They ignore both expert opinion and the experts themselves. Mahmoud Ahmadinehad has a reputation for similar behavior. Both are in political trouble at home, and both appear likely to run the risk of another war just to maintain power.

The rumors of the roll-out of another effort to market a war need to be considered seriously.

Right-wing contradictory thought

Glenn Greenwald demonstrates how illogical and contradictory the ideas that pass for right-wing conservative thought really are. He starts with a like from Thomas Sowell's Townhall column today:

We all believe that people are innocent until proven guilty. Some on the left believe that they are innocent even after being proven guilty.

Glenn then goes on to quote Sowell when he whined that Lewis Libby isn't really guilty, even though the jury determined that Fitzgerald proved to them he was.

Then Glenn goes on to point out that American conservatives consider Jose Padilla guilty of planning a dirty bomb attack on America even when he was not charged and held with no attorney, no trial, and no hope of either just because our fearless leader said he was guilty. The finally gave up and never tried him on that. But he was guilty because Ashcroft and Bush said he was.

Why do right-wing conservatives think so irrationally? From Dr. bob Altemeyer's book "The Authoritarians" Glenn quoted:

A high [right-wing authoritarian] can have all sorts of illogical, self-contradictory and widely refuted ideas rattling around in various boxes in his brain, and never notice it. . . .

Research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and -- to top it all off -- a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic.
[Emphasis mine - Editor WTF-o]

The guys running our foreign policy right now are this kind of irrational, illogical authoritarians. Look at that description again. "...sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and -- to top it all off -- a ferocious dogmatism...."

Conservatives really are that bad, both financial conservatives and religious fundamentalists. And they promote fellow "True-believers" rather then people with a demonstrated proficiency on the job, so that they can surround themselves with others who will not point out their sloppy and compartmented irrational thinking.

Why there are fewer civilian deaths in Baghdad now.

Steve Benen at TPM provides an explanation for why civilian casualties are down in Baghdad compared to last Fall before the "surge" started.

While the U.S. was increasing the number of American troops operating inside Baghdad, the Shiites were conducting ethnic cleansing. The Sunnis who used to dominate western Baghdad are now essentially gone, and are replaced with Shiites. From Newsweek:

When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias' cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they've essentially won.

Steve then quotes Matt Yglesias:

"Maybe Bush can change his line to the idea that if we just keep staying the course for 4 or 5 more years, casualties will drop massively because everyone will already be dead or displaced. Or maybe someone can explain to me again about how we can't leave Iraq because of the ethnic cleansing that'll happen without us around."

We aren't keeping our troops in Iraq to prevent ethnic cleansing. When the ethnic cleansing in Iraq is finished the sectarian violence will end, and we can declare victory and get out. We are watching the ethnic cleansing go on and hoping that it will bail us out.

Kevin Drum also discusses the Newsweek article. He points out the fact that

"I've mentioned in passing once or twice before that one possible way for Iraq's civil war to end is simply through attrition. If we just wait it out long enough, eventually someone will win and the fighting will stop — regardless of what the United States Army does or doesn't do."

It does seem pretty self-evident - If we just stay and allow our military people to continue in the occupation, ultimately the problems there will go away. All we have to do is ignore the costs and fail to ask what "winning" will look like.

Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) running again under a cloud

From Taegan Goddard's Political Wire we get the report that while John doolittle is running again for reelection to his house seat, his connection to the Abramoff scandal has the Republican Party worried about whether he is vulnerable. He

...may face as many as three primary challengers next year, the Sacramento Bee reports.

Doolittle defeated Democratic challenger Charlie Brown by three points in 2006, and with Brown to run again, Republican leaders are growing increasingly worried. NRCC Chair Tom Cole said whether Doolittle would seek re-election was an open question, despite Doolittle's insistence otherwise.

Abramoff is the gift that just keeps on giving to Democrats.

Rep. Renzi (AZ-R) expects to be indicted

Laura Rozen found this report at the end of an article by Chicago Tribune.

In 2005 House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) was forced to resign while under investigation for his ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. And Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) pleaded guilty to a felony and is serving a 30-month sentence for his dealings with Abramoff. Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) recently said he would not run for re-election, privately telling his staff that he expects to be indicted for his ties to Abramoff.

Earlier posts on Rep. Rick Renzi can be found here:

• Arizona's Rep. Rick Renzi to Retire
  Washington Post, August 23, 2007


• Rep. Renzi was involved in the US attorney removals
  April 24, 2007


• Rep. Renzi (AZ - R) expected to resign as soon as today
  april 27, 2007


• Details on Rep. Renzi corruption.
  April 21, 2007.


• FBI raids personal business of Arizona Rep. Rick Renzi.
  April 20, 2007


• Rick RenziWikipedia on Rick Renzi.

Two things are particularly interesting about Rick Renzi's career. His father was a General at Fort Huachuca, AZ which is the home of the U.S. Army Intelligence School, and Rick Renzi's career for close to 20 years of service with the Department of Defense is a mystery.

From Wikipedia - Rick Renxi - Early life and education:

He attended high school in Annandale, Virginia before moving to Sierra Vista, Arizona in 1975, where his father, now-retired U.S. Army Major General Eugene Renzi, served at Fort Huachuca.

and also Wkipedia - Rick renzi - Career prior to Congress

Where Renzi lived and what he did in the 1986–1997 period is unclear. In a letter to the Arizona Daily Sun in July 2002, Renzi said "The only time I have not lived in Arizona is when I served our nation overseas on a Defense Department program, or when I entered law school at age 39" [which would be 1997 or 1998].[11] But according to an August 2002 Associated Press article, Renzi said that between college, starting in the late 1970s, and his return some 20 years later, he had lived in Flagstaff for only a total of seven years

These facts strongly suggest that Rick Renzi was a "Spook" (Intelligence operative) of some kind for much of his early career.

Since he was also politically active, working for Republican Senator Jon Kyl while he got his law degree, it seems reasonable to suspect that he was connected in some way with Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Republican ex-Representative from San Diego, CA and currently felon in federal prison.

Wikipedia also makes the point that "He has owned a $765,000 two-story, six-bedroom home on five acres there since 1991, according to Fairfax County, Virginia, property records."

A civil servant working for the DoD does not make enough money to buy a six-bedroom home worth $765,000, nor does an aide to a U.S. Senator. Where did the money come from?

There is more to Rick Renzi's resignation than just the Abramoff Investigation, but it is probably connected.

The D.C. Punditry has Stockholm Syndrome

Wikipedia defines Stockholm Syndrome as "a psychological response sometimes seen in an abducted hostage, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger (or at least risk) in which the hostage has been placed." Kidnap victims, for example have been known to become emotionally attached to their victimizers, and even defend their captors and their motives after they were freed.

The victim, in other words, becomes an emotional captive of their victimizer.

Glenn Greenwald describes the relationship between Karl Rove and the the D.C. Pundits thus:

Rove's function is to manipulate the media, conceal information from them, and induce them to say what is politically beneficial to the President. In a world where political journalism performs its most basic functions, media manipulators like Rove are the natural enemy of journalists. But for our pundit class, Karl Rove is the North Star of what they do -- he provides their instructions, their leaks, their scoops, their access. And as the purveyor of Beltway political power, he is their most admired leader.

If you view the D.C. Pundits as the victims and Karl Rove as their victimizer, then we can really only assume form their slavish attention to every word Rove says as though spoken by a God or a genius then the D.C. Pundit Corps must be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

Bush has plans for post Presidency

The New York Times provided a glimpse into how Bush sees his life after he leaves the Presidency.

...in an interview with a book author in the Oval Office one day last December, he [Bush] daydreamed about the next phase of his life, when his time will be his own.

First, Mr. Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.” With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, “I don’t know what my dad gets — it’s more than 50-75” thousand dollars a speech, and “Clinton’s making a lot of money.”

Then he said, “We’ll have a nice place in Dallas,” where he will be running what he called “a fantastic Freedom Institute” promoting democracy around the world. But he added, “I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch.”

For now, though, Mr. Bush told the author, Robert Draper, in a later session, “I’m playing for October-November.” That is when he hopes the Iraq troop increase will finally show enough results to help him achieve the central goal of his remaining time in office: “To get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence,” and, he said later, “stay longer.”

This comes from a book on the Bush Presidency by Robert Draper about to be published.

Mr. Draper agreed to share parts of his transcripts from those interviews, and the book itself, with The New York Times under the agreement that they would not be published until shortly before the book, “Dead Certain,” is officially released on Tuesday.

The transcripts and the book show Mr. Bush as being keenly interested in what history will say about his term despite his frequent comments to the contrary; as being in a reflective mode as his time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue dwindles; and, ultimately, as being at once sorrowful and optimistic — but virtually alone as commander in chief, and aware of it.

It is rather clear that he still has no idea how truly bad his Presidency has been. I wonder if he will somehow recognize how awful his administration has been, then perhaps learn to cope with his failure, or if he will simply continue to float cluelessly in a sea of unawareness.

I would guess that he will "float cluelessly." The reports will not be too his liking, so he will then he will blame others for misinterpreting his decisions and blaming him.

But there is still 17 months left for them to really mess things up worse. As I wrote yesterday in Plans for war with Iran well-advanced:

The recent increase in propaganda designed to justify the war against Iran is especially noticeable from the News Corp publications and particularly FOX News.

As for when the Bushies will pull the trigger on the attack, my bet is that they are watching the polls. The poll results are being looked at two ways.

The first focus of the "Attack Iran" propaganda effort being coordinated out of the White House is to see how much general approval they can get, especially among independent voters. They will pull the trigger as soon as they think the American electorate generally will support them, unless it means too many Republicans are likely to lose in the 2008 election as a result. The second focus is the 2008 election and how the attack on Iran will effect the Republican Party effort to regain control of the House and Senate in 2008.

Enough push back from people who recognize that this is an unnecessary war will delay it until November 2008. After that the White House has the rest of November, all of December and most of January to attack Iran. They will do it.

Why? Simple. They have no positive legacy anyway. But the hardliners are certain that Iran is an existential threat to the U.S. An attack on Iran would stop or severely delay any threat Iran poses. They know that the Democrats will not conduct the attack on the flimsy evidence that exists to so frighten the hardliners. The domestic political cost in the 2008 election will remain too high for them to conduct the attack before that election, but nothing prevents them from acting afterwards.

It is my opinion that the Bush hardliners will take that last 12 weeks in the White House after the election to conduct a "Hail Mary" action. The attack on Iran will be seen as the last chance for a big gain. They really think it will very possibly create - at the last moment - the positive legacy for the Bush administration that has eluded them for eight years now.

I wish I thought that was unthinkable, but I don't. It is a reasonable prediction to make about this administration. They are ready to attack Iran at a moment's notice, and the only thing stopping them is concern for the political consequences here in the U.S.

The Bush people think they can frighten and bludgeon their foreign enemies into submission, and they don't see that they are actually creating frightened, angry enemies who will do whatever it takes to stop this rogue nation, America, from destroying the rest of the world.

Talk about a prescription for disaster!

Meanwhile, Bush drifts along in a fog of ignorance and indifference. His post Presidency will be more of the same.