Fearmongering and the Wingnut Obsession With TV Shows

Let's start the morning off with something so deranged and full of the fantastic that it reads like, well, every other doomsday scenario plot line ever conceived. Playing the part of the rugged, crusty, cynical and morally supreme scientist who warns the government--but, dammit! the government won't listen because it's full of liberals!--is Dr. William Graham.

The United States “would quickly revert to an early 19th century type of country.” except that we would have 10 times as many people with ten times fewer resources, he said.

“Most of the things we depend upon would be gone, and we would literally be depending on our own assets and those we could reach by walking to them,” Graham said.

America would begin to resemble the 2002 TV series, “Jeremiah,” which depicts a world bereft of law, infrastructure, and memory.

In the TV series, an unspecified virus wipes out the entire adult population of the planet. In an EMP attack, the casualties would be caused by our almost total dependence on technology for everything from food and water, to hospital care.

Within a week or two of the attack, people would start dying, Graham says.

“People in hospitals would be dying faster than that, because they depend on power to stay alive. But then it would go to water, food, civil authority, emergency services. And we would end up with a country with many, many people not surviving the event.”

You don't say...

Asked just how many Americans would die if Iran were to launch the EMP attack it appears to be preparing, Graham gave a chilling reply.

“You have to go back into the 1800s to look at the size of population” that could survive in a nation deprived of mechanized agriculture, transportation, power, water, and communication.

“I’d have to say that 70 to 90 percent of the population would not be sustainable after this kind of attack,” he said.

America would be reduced to a core of around 30 million people — about the number that existed in the decades after America’s independence from Great Britain.

The modern electronic economy would shut down, and America would most likely revert to “an earlier economy based on barter,” the EMP commission’s report on Critical National Infrastructure concluded earlier this year.

Barter system? Jeremiah? The 1880s? My, goodness. The wingnut fantasy of the future world they wish to create is this--no one is allowed to rule but the wingnuts and the swimsuit models, and the swimsuit models have to barter sex with the wingnuts for the food that the wingnut slaves--you and me--have to grow for them. Now that's a TV show no one would watch.

In May 2007, then Undersecretary of State John Rood told Congress that the U.S. intelligence community estimates that Iran could develop an ICBM capable of hitting the continental United States by 2015.

But Iran could put a Scud missile on board a cargo ship and launch from the commercial sea lanes off America’s coasts well before then.

The only thing Iran is lacking for an effective EMP attack is a nuclear warhead, and no one knows with any certainty when that will occur. The latest U.S. intelligence estimate states that Iran could acquire the fissile material for a nuclear weapon as early as 2009, or as late as 2015, or possibly later.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld first detailed the “Scud-in-a-bucket” threat during a briefing in Huntsville, Ala., on Aug. 18, 2004.

Never mind the fact that, during the last test of missiles, Iran seemed more like a pretender than a player, but why rain on the fearmongering parade? Never mind the fact that America stood against a far deadlier enemy for decades and won without shredding the Constitution (President Reagan had a guy or two that tried, but half-assing your way through life never gets you anywhere).

The simple fact is this--these weapons have been around for a very long time, and people with the motive, the reason, the capability, and the inclination to use them against us have had them for as long as these weapons have been around. We are peeing down our legs in fear over nearly-dead mullahs and cash-poor aging revolutionaries who can't control much past a pretty good intelligence gathering network and a secret police apparatus that can't quite tamp down dissent throughout Iran as they would like. They are watching the world oil market run away from them and their crumbling oil producing infrastructure. Their only hope of having any hold on their own destiny is to pray that a handful of terrified American politicians will take them more seriously than the rest of the world does and turn them into the next Powerful, Menacing, Sworn Enemy of American Liberty. When Iran is posturing, the wingnuts take two conflicting positions: they paint Iran as a massive threat, but they downplay Iran's capability to withstand a sustained attack from Israel and the US. Which is it then? Are they a threat, or are they a joke?

I suspect that if someone had just laughed at the Iranians, none of this would be happening right now.

--WS

Hate to Have to Tell You This, But Joe Klein is Right Again

Joe Klein gets another thing right--is this a trend?

I have now been called antisemitic and intellectually unstable and a whole bunch of other silly things by the folks over at the Commentary blog. They want Time Magazine to fire or silence me. This is happening because I said something that is palpably true, but unspoken in polite society: There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003. Their motivations involve a confused conflation of what they think are Israel's best interests with those of the United States. They are now leading the charge for war with Iran.

Happily, these people represent a very small sliver of the Jewish population in this country. Unhappily, their views have had an impact in the highest reaches of the Bush Administration--and seem to have an influence on John McCain's campaign as well. Happily, the Bush Administration seems more interested in talking to the Iranians than in launching on them--and, according to my Israeli friends, the Israelis are not going to do anything foolish, either. I remain proud of my Jewish heritage, a strong supporter of Israel and a realist about the slim chance of finding some common ground with the Iranians. But I am not willing to grant these ideologues the anonymity they seek.

You can argue this all you want, but the neoconservative cabal, AIPAC, and Joe Lieberman are all connected to this policy in some way, and to how it was carried out long after the war should have ended.

I keep feeling like we should have settled this in 2005. I keep feeling like, if sanity had prevailed, several thousand Americans would be alive right now. One thing is certain beyond all else--we are long overdue for a discussion as to who is responsible for not ending the Iraq War (rather, the occupation) when it should have ended. It was not the people who made ill-informed votes in 2002. It was the people who propped up the policy past 2005, making apology after apology and excuse after excuse, which is when we should have withdrawn from Iraq. Yes--duh, we should never have gone in. But what Fallujah should have taught us was that you cannot destroy a city to save it, and it should have taught us that the fight was not worth fighting. No reasonable person can conclude that al Qaeda in Iraq ever had a shot at taking over Iraq. In fact, they would have been wiped out quicker if we weren't in Iraq.

--WS

Crazy Neocon Tries to Get in the Awl Bidness

When you're responsible for a debacle, the natural human inclination is to hide your head in shame. Herbert Hoover didn't exactly hide from view, but he sufficiently removed himself from public life in order to spare his fellow Republicans the horror of having to be photographed standing next to him. Richard Perle? Fuck it, he's trying to sneak his way into the oil business in Iraq.

A former Pentagon advisor who was an early advocate of invading Iraq has been looking into entering the potentially lucrative oil business there, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Citing documents outlining a possible deal and people close to the negotiations, the Journal said Richard Perle has been looking into drilling in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, near the city of Erbil.

A consortium led by Turkish AK Group International is working out a deal to drill there and a US representative for the company's chief executive told the paper that Perle is involved.

In an e-mail to the daily, however, Perle said he was "not involved in any consortium" involving the two Kazakh men the paper said he was working with on the deal.

Here's hoping he loses his shirt, has to sell everything he owns, and gets dumped in an alley by his business partners after they pay a hooker to drug him. If Richard Perle thinks he's smart enough to get into business with the Turks and the Kazakhs in the Kurdish region of Iraq, all we can say is, go for it, dude. It's not like you have blood on your hands.

--WS

Porter Goss Named to Ethics Panel? Unbelievable

This is a terrible decision:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday announced joint appointments to a landmark ethics review board that for the first time will allow private citizens to review allegations against members.

Still, four out of six members of the board for the newly created Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) will be former members of Congress, including former CIA Director Porter Goss (R-Fla.), who will serve as co-chairman.

It must mean that no one remembers the extremely unethical behavior of Mr. Goss, nor his association with Kyle Foggo, Brent Wilkes, and all of those hookers. What's next? Is Duke Cunningham going to be let out of prison so he can come back and be the new Inspector General for the Department of Defense? What an abysmal choice. A disgrace on a par with picking the fox to count the chickens each night inside of the henhouse with the lights off.

Speaker Pelosi, you should have fought this and you should be ashamed to have your name associated with putting such a disgraceful man on an ethics review board. Goss has no ability to judge ethics or advise any government agency on how to conduct itself.

--WS

Another Dishonest Wingnut Sent Packing

When they say he's going to take on a diminished role, does that mean he'll be shambling around the building in his pajamas at four in the afternoon?

Brit Hume, a top anchor and executive with Fox News since the channel was launched 12 years ago, plans to step down at year's end. But he won't disappear entirely.

Sources familiar with the situation say that Hume, 65, will give up his job as Washington managing editor and anchor of "Special Report." They say he is near a deal to continue with Fox in a senior statesman role, not unlike that of Tom Brokaw at NBC, for roughly 100 days a year.

In his new role, Hume would be a senior political analyst, substitute for Chris Wallace as host of "Fox News Sunday" and anchor special events.

As Fox News hemorrhages viewers and gets caught doing ridiculous, unprofessional things while failing to serve the public's interest, expect to see more infighting and backbiting. Hume is merely a scapegoat for the failures of others. While O'Reilly, Hannity and Cavuto may seem untouchable, they have a pretty good chance of joining Hume, Gibson, Malkin, Burns, and Hill on the way out the door.

Good riddance--his diminished role signifies that the American public is sick and tired of being lied to--but that Fox News isn't going to change. Somewhere, a country is running out of wingnuts to put on TV.

--WS

T. Boone Pickens Refuses to Pay

Proof positive that the whole "Swift Boat Vets for the Truth" bullshit was a lie financed by well-heeled businessmen who should now be held responsible for the devastating debacle that is the Bush Administration:

A Vegas gambling expert counts himself among those questioning Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens' refusal to pay $1 million to Swift boat veterans who claim they won Pickens' challenge to disprove political claims he made in 2004.

Some Vietnam veterans are claiming that Texan businessman T. Boone Pickens is going back on his word to pay $1 million to anyone who can find inaccuracies in claims made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential election. Agreeing with the veterans, oddsmaker Ben Eckstein says that failing to deliver on a bet is "sacrilegious." "In the world of betting and gambling, your word is your bond," said Eckstein, president of America's Line, a sports and entertainment oddsmaking business. "Whether it's a $7 bet or a $500,000 bet, once it's made and once you shake on it, it should be done."

Pickens' wager originated when he offered $1 million to anyone who could find falsities in the claims made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group he had financially supported during the 2004 presidential election. He issued the challenge during a November 2007 dinner for the American Spectator magazine.

Essentially, it boils down to this: Pickens has been proven wrong, the ads were full of fabrications, and it just goes to show that you can't trust these people. That's why we have to fight them and turn the tables on them. That's why we can't trust them to be good Americans--that goes out the window when being a "good American" might separate these bastards from a nickel. They lie, cheat and steal and do whatever it takes to win. Unless we hit these people in the mouth, put them on the ground, and show them we mean business, they're going to continue to sneer at the "high-mindedness" of liberals and continue getting their way.

And, no, Pickens didn't serve in Korea--he was 22 years old in 1950. Another classic example of the wingnut in repose: finance the effort to smear a Veteran and hope no one notices the fact that, during the Korean War, Pickens was not in uniform, no where to be seen, and safe at home. Pickens could have served as an officer--he could have volunteered. He could have put his life on the line and done something to defend this country. He chose to make money instead.

--WS

Max Boot and the Tendencies of Chickenhawks

Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall points out the idiocy of Max Boot:

It's sad to see articulate and intelligent, if terribly misguided, writers still trying to justify their Iraq catastrophe by claiming its no different from World War II and our decades' long stationing of troops in Germany and Japan.

Today we have the instance of Max Boot ...

I could just imagine an Andrew Sullivan of the 1940's writing something similar about Harry Truman's crazy idea to station troops in Germany and Japan without an exit strategy: "In fifty years' time, the West Germans will not be able to defend themselves against the Soviet Union? Or East Germany? Please." As it happens, the West Germans wouldn't have been able to defend themselves against a broad array of enemies without a long-term American troop presence. That presence has served other important goals too, namely reassuring Germany's neighbors that it would never threaten the peace of Europe again and fostering Germany's internal democratic development. But just because we've had troops in Germany and Japan for 60 years-and in South Korea for more than 50 years-doesn't mean we're occupying those countries. We are there are the request of democratically elected governments.

I wouldn't include Max Boot in the "articulate" or "intelligent" groups because he's clearly just another wingnut trying to tap into that feel-good sentiment about the only war we're allowed to admire. That's why the wingnuts also love comparing everything to the War of Northern Aggression. Max Boot is a wingnut welfare candidate--if it wasn't for the newspaper paying him, some wingnut organization would cobble together a salary for him and simply ask him to put up with smelly guys in cheap suits who sound a lot like Ron Paul. Nothing he says stands up to any kind of informed scrutiny. If you've just watched Saving Private Ryan, you can read what he's said and yell your approval and wait for the next war movie to come on AMC.

What I want to add is this--conservatives are informed by movies and television programs, not by experience. A scarce handful have seen military service while the rest avoided military service when their nation needed them. Those "chickenhawks" are able to squawk because they're in no danger of having to serve. The media is full of chickenhawks--and that amplifies the message of other chickenhawks. If the media actually were "liberal" you'd hear viewpoints that the media was comfortable presenting to people. Instead, you have a social strata of men in this country who control the media who deliver a message to the American people that help absolves them of their inherent chickenhawk tendencies. Fred Hiatt, are you listening? They can comfortably sit on their collective asses and sell their war by the turn of clever marketing--make THIS war just like World War II and, by extension, make THEM the the heroes of the war they feel like they should be because they sat on the dead asses and advocated it.

It's time to restore sanity in this country, and we need to stop listening to men who have never served calling for war. It should be a no-brainer. I won't be satisfied til these men are laughed out of the discussion every time they pipe up.

--WS

Juan Cole Throws Cold Water on the Wingnuts

I'm just going to take a sizable chunk of what Juan Cole has to say and repost it here--it's a brilliant piece of analysis. It debunks the wingnuts, it throws badly-needed cold water in the face of the neocons, and it encapsulates "why" we will never give up this fight:

...Monday's Pentagon-provoked story saying that Hizbullah of Lebanon is training Shiite radicals at camps in Iran.

I am suspicious of this story not because it is necessarily untrue (how would I know?) but because it shares with typical Bush administration propaganda the 'gotcha' technique in which questions of proportionality, significance and causality do not arise.

Thus, Dick Cheney repeatedly claimed that he had evidence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who he simplistically linked with al-Qaeda, got hospital treatment in Baghdad. Cheney said that would have been impossible unless Saddam was actively hosting him. And if Saddam was giving hospital treatment to al-Zarqawi, then ipso facto the Baath regime was allied with and supporting al-Qaeda.

But Cheney's entire argument is false from beginning to end. First of all, the Iraqi secret police put out an APB on al-Zarqawi when they thought he had entered their country, and were clearly afraid of him. There is no evidence that the regime afforded al-Zarqawi hospital care. Even if he had gotten treated, it was not proof of Saddam's complicity with him or with al-Qaeda. These little tiny details were built up into a narrative that was intended to carry the audience along without their being able to ask any questions about it. How good was the proof for what Cheney alleged? Was al-Zarqawi really al-Qaeda back then? How important was he? How big an impact did his presence in Iraq have?

There were also repeated allegations from Cheney and others that Saddam was training al-Qaeda operatives at Salman Pak. Wrong.

Under torture, Ibn al-Sheikh Libi told the US that Saddam was training al-Qaeda operatives in the use of poison gas. It was a lie. That is the problem with putting people in so much pain that they will tell you anything. Cheney and Rice parroted this falsehood over and over again.

After the war and occupation began, Pentagon spokesmen actually alleged that 90% of the violence in Iraq was committed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his group. But what, was he an Arab version of the Flash, able to run from Mosul to Baghdad in a few minutes? And when he was killed, nothing changed, so he wasn't all that important.

Since Cheney and Rice wanted to go to war with Iraq so as to open its petroleum resources to exploitation by American firms, it really was immaterial to them if the things they were saying were true or not. They have never evinced any shame or regret. They are happy. They accomplished their goal.

We should not allow this sort of thing to happen again. The Pentagon story about Iran is fishy for these reasons:

The main pro-Iran militia in Iraq is the Badr Corps of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. Iran is happy with Badr's vast influence. Badr has conflicts with the Mahdi Army. Why should Iran undermine its own client by favoring the latter? And note that the US never condemns Badr, which until recently was actually part of the Iranian military until recently.

The information on the supposed Hizbullah training in Iran seems to have come from two or three captured Lebanese Shiites. That is a very small number. The US has 24,000 accused insurgents in captivity. If it only has a handful of Lebanese Shiites, then they just aren't very important. The Principle of Proportionality holds.

Moreover, the allegations may have been produced by US torture of the captives and so may not be reliable.

Then even if it were true, how important is it? The Mahdi Army is tens of thousands of slum kids. Sadrism goes back to the 1990s in Iraq and is a mass movement. Iran had nothing to do with them historically. Moreover, how important is all this? Have, like, 4 Lebanese guys really trained all that many Mahdi Army militiamen? How many exactly? How much more effective would they be as a result? Wouldn't the political support of millions of Iraqi Shiites in the South really be the source of Muqtada al-Sadr's power and authority?

What is being alleged is too small to produce a really big, nation-wide effect in Iraq. The Mahdi Army fought the US military for two long hard months in spring of 2004, and for another month in August. Iran was not around.

This is why I can't help but continue to question what we're being told. I'm so sick of being lied to. I'm so sick of the lies and the manipulation. If we keep repeating these denunciations and keep supporting the people like Juan Cole, who debunk this nonsense, we'll keep spreading the word and we'll get stronger and stronger.

BREAKING - When The Generals Lied - The Briefings Are History

This doesn't surprise me, but that's what the news dumps are for--putting the bad news out when no one will see it.

The secretary of defense will no longer brief retired military officers-turned-network television analysts, the chief Pentagon spokesman said Friday.

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Robert Hastings said he suspended the program this week amid media scrutiny of the practice.

An article in the Sunday New York Times alleged that the analysts were used to push the Bush administration's messages topics including the war in Iraq and what was going on in the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The report also claimed that some of the analysts were involved in business contracts with the Pentagon -- information the newspaper said was rarely or never disclosed, even to the networks.

The briefings were started by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2003, during the buildup to the war in Iraq.

Hastings said that since his arrival at the Pentagon this year, the group of analysts has not met with Defense Secretary Robert Gates. But he was unclear whether the analysts had ever met with Gates, who took over the post in December 2006.

And with good reason--Gates isn't interested in lining the pockets of sycophants. That's the difference between Gates and Rumsfeld. Gates isn't going to let anyone profit from what he controls. Case closed.

That's why I'm so glad we went in-depth with this story and I think we both feel vindicated for our outrage. I was mocked on Sunday and Monday on another blog, which shall remain nameless, for being bent out of shape about this. Well, for those folks, and for the Generals who lied and made money, I got one thing to say:

Who's laughing now, bitches?

Doug Feith explains it all

And lets just put it this way...Clarissa did a better job.

You must understand...mistakes were made...But Doug "Stupidest fucking guy on the planet" Feith insists that he wasn't the one making them. It was everyone around him, you see. That is the case he makes in his soon-to-be-remaindered (premaindered?) book.

He argued that former secretary of state Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were the ones who failed to challenge the logic of going to war -- not him. He suggested that Powell, Armitage, Franks, former Iraq viceroy Jerry Bremer and even Feith's old boss, Donald Rumsfeld, should be blamed for the postwar chaos in Iraq -- not him. He blamed then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for the way she operated ("fundamental differences were essentially papered over rather than resolved"). He accused the CIA of "improper" and unprofessional behavior. And he implicitly blamed President Bush for not cracking down on insubordinate behavior at the State Department.

Yet at the same time, Feith told the CSIS crowd that he disapproved of the "snide and shallow self-justification typical in memoirs of former officials," or what Feith cleverly called the " 'I-was-surrounded-by-idiots' school of memoir writing." Feith pointed out that he supported his account with 140 pages of notes and documents. And yet, in his hour-long panel discussion, Feith seemed to be of the impression that he had, in fact, been surrounded by idiots.

There was, for example, the question of the campaign waged by Feith and his section of the Pentagon against the CIA when the agency argued that there was no evidence of al-Qaeda having ties to Saddam Hussein. "The CIA and the intelligence community should not be shading intelligence," Feith lectured. But the self-justification missed the obvious point: The CIA was correct.

Lacking a hint of a scintilla of a clue about "irony"; the soulless, craven, neocon fuck continues to blithely stumble along, as clueless as Mr. Magoo, assigning blame like he's the Queen of Hearts shouting "off with their heads!" (Have I set a record for pop culture references in a blog post yet? Can someone check on that for me?)

Hey - there is plenty 0f blame to go around, no doubt about it. There are at least a score of administration officials that should go to The Hague. And Feith is in the top ten, no doubt about that, either.

He is an idiot, and he is a liar. And as he does not have the decency to just go the fuck away, let's let someone we actually respect and admire, Pat Lang, relate a recap of the comedy stylings of this Doug Feith, via the marvelous Steve Clemons at the Washington Note:

Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly has a great recap of what former Pentagon spy-master Pat Lang and former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson had to say at a University of District of Columbia forum on May 7th.

Here's some Feith fun from Pat Lang:

Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq.

It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon's worldwide spying operations.

In early 2001, his name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon's office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam.

One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department's number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government's national security apparatus.

Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia.

"He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me," Lang recalled, "which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers -- they always had briefing papers, you know -- about me.

"He's looking at this stuff, and he says, 'I've heard of you. I heard of you.'

"He says, 'Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?'

"And I said, 'Yeah, that's really true.'

"That's too bad," Feith said.

The audience howled.

"That was the end of the interview," Lang said. "I'm not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out."

Feith, of course, like the administration's other Israel-connected hawks, didn't want "Arabists" like Lang muddying the road to Baghdad, from where -- according to the Bush administration theory -- overthrowing Saddam Hussein would ignite mass demands for Western-style, pro-U.S. democracies across the entire Middle East.

How the hell can I top that?

Stupidest fucking guy on the planet, indeed.

Hey Chickenhawks

Somewhere, there's a soldier from another country making a sacrifice to keep America safe. The next time you see a chickenhawk, kick him in his tailfeathers and ask him when he plans to enlist and go fight in the war on terror.

The new Dutch Minister of Defense just lost his son in Afghanistan:

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The son of the new Dutch defense chief was killed Friday by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, and the Taliban claimed they deliberately made him a high-profile victim of their deadly insurgency.

Lt. Dennis van Uhm, 23, was one of two Dutch soldiers killed in the explosion 7 miles (12 kilometers) northwest of Camp Holland, the Dutch military base in restive Uruzgan province, spokesman Lt. Gen. Freek Meulman said. Two more soldiers were injured, one critically.

Meulman was standing in for Gen. Peter van Uhm, who was installed as defense chief only on Thursday and would likely have delivered the news had his son not been among the victims.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi claimed that the militants knew in advance about Van Uhm's movements.

"When he came out the Taliban planted a mine, which killed him," Ahmadi said in a phone call from an undisclosed location.

The Dutch government, however, rejected the claim.

"Our information is that there is no indication of any link between this cowardly deed and the fact that it was the son of the defense chief," Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende told reporters in The Hague.

Did Drudge have anything to do with this? Probably not--it was Prince Harry he was trying to get killed. Yet another brave young person from one of our NATO allies falls in battle, and not one chickenhawk has the decency to stop advocating for war and sign up to go fight. Do they even notice how ridiculous they look these days? Sitting on their fat little asses while others do the job they tell us HAS to be done but by anyone BUT them?

No mercy for the fucking chickenhawks, ever.

The Washington Post Editorial Page Blows Chunks

I can't think of good headlines. But the WaPo's editorial page really, really sucks when they write stuff like this:

THE FIFTH anniversary of the invasion of Iraq prompted a flurry of speeches from President Bush and the Democratic candidates who hope to inherit the White House next year. Sadly, what they had in common was their failure to grapple with hard realities -- beginning with the elusiveness of any clear or quick path toward Mr. Bush's promise of "victory," or that of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to "end this war."

Mr. Bush's address dwelt on the success of the initial military campaign of March 2003, then skipped ahead to the "surge" of the last year. The president deservedly claimed credit for launching the latter campaign, which has drastically reduced the level of violence in Iraq. But he went on to claim that, more than turning "the situation in Iraq around," the surge "has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror." That sounded at best premature, given the tenuousness of the security gains and the slowness of Iraqi leaders to strike political deals that could truly stabilize the country.

First of all, you'd have to be completely ignorant to assert that the surge has "dramatically" reduced the violence. Paying the Sunnis off with guns and money and keeping the Mahdi Army from reconstituting itself was what did the trick. "Surging" in more troops simply put more strain on our military. That's good strategy? Giving guns and money to the people who were killing us and making more troops spend more time in Iraq?

Second of all, there's been no political reconciliation. Hence, the surge has not succeeded. All that work for nothing.

The president at least recognizes, from "hard experience," how quickly progress in Iraq can unravel. Yesterday he pledged not to order troop withdrawals beyond the five brigades due to return home by this summer unless "conditions on the ground and the recommendations of our commanders" warrant it. That means that if Mr. Obama or Ms. Clinton become president, he or she will be the commander in chief of at least 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Yet their speeches suggest an understanding of the conflict and the stakes for the United States that is as detached from reality as they accuse Mr. Bush of being when he decided on the invasion.

What progress? When was there ever "progress" or success after Baghdad fell? The country went immediately into a tailspin of violence and looting. Once there was nothing left to steal, nationalism kicked in. Iraqis were embarrassed that their country had collapsed in front of the American Army. The Fedayeen Saddam kicked in almost immediately and began attacking US convoys. From there, we went from destroying Fallujah to staging elections with CIA help to flooding the country with the incompetent kids of Republican Party donors.

The idea that there will only be "100,000" troops in Iraq is laughable. Even Petraeus is making noises that if 30-40,000 troops were to be pulled out, the fragile hold they have on things would collapse.

Barely acknowledging the reduction in violence, the Democratic candidates insist that U.S. troops are, as Ms. Clinton put it, "babysitting a civil war." In fact, the surge forestalled an incipient civil war, and U.S. commanders and diplomats in Iraq don't hesitate to say that if American forces withdrew now, sectarian conflict would probably explode in its full fury, causing bloodshed on a far greater scale than ever before and posing grave threats to U.S. security.

Forestalled? That's insane. We watched ritualized ethnic cleansing for over a year. We watched as they killed their neighbors and drove millions into exile. We then turned around and helped wall off enclaves to try to stem the tide. Really, does the WaPo editorial page read its own reporting?

How can we say that sectarian conflict will explode? Seen the news? It HAS already exploded. It CONTINUES to explode. Therefore, when it happens in the future, we won't have US troops as a convenient target. You see, by aligning ourselves with one side, we become the target of the other side in a sectarian conflict. To suggest that all of sudden the Shia and Sunni will start to fight when we leave is to argue from a position of ignorance only someone like Bill Kristol could appreciate.

BOTH Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton propose withdrawing U.S. troops at the most rapid pace the Pentagon says is possible -- one brigade a month. In the 16 months or so it would take to remove those forces, they envision the near-miraculous accomplishment of every political goal the Bush administration has aimed at for five years, from the establishment of a stable government to agreement by Iraq's neighbors to support it. They suppose that the knowledge that American forces were leaving would inspire these accords. In fact, it more likely would cause all sides to discount U.S. influence and prepare to violently seize the space left by the departing Americans.

Well, the quickest way to get them to reconcile their differences is to start leaving the Green Zone undefended. If the elite in Iraq want to continue being safe and secure, they'll damned sure stop fighting each other and they'll stop jockeying for position.

See, modern Iraq is just one long sectarian-based negotiation with guns and bombs to get as much leverage as possible. If that means a minor ministry, so be it. If that means a few bombs across town going off, so be it. They're not going to stop--no matter how many US troops occupy the country--trying to get as much power and leverage as they can. We enable them to do so. We provide just enough security to ensure that they can fight each other. When they attack our troops, it sends a signal to all observers--look what we can do to the Americans. Look how we can attack them. We are powerful. We do what you can't, and that is, kill Americans to preserve the dignity of the Iraqi people. Join us so we can drive out the Americans and make Iraq great again. That's what they're saying through what they do.

With equal implausibility, the Democratic candidates say they would leave limited U.S. forces behind to prevent al-Qaeda from establishing bases. They assume that an Iraqi government that had just been abandoned by the United States would consent to the continued presence of American forces on its territory. In all, Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama speak as if they have no understanding of Iraqi leaders, whom they propose to treat as willing puppets.

The Iraqi leadership are puppets only because our military power and our CIA intervention and our tens of thousands of contractors relegate them to that status. There is virtually no way to counter such disgusting wingnuttery on the editorial page--none. Once you start arguing that al Qaeda might take over Iraq and establish bases, every reasonable argument falls flat in the face of such delusional thought. It's the last refuge of the scoundrels. They know that will never happen. They know that, at it's peak, AQI was accounting for 5-10% of all attacks, and that was in the days of Zarqawi.

Here's how ridiculous that argument is--after we killed Zarqawi, the pattern of violence was unchanged. We spent all that time and effort going after a minor thug while the country burned. To now wave the "AQI" threat around is dishonest wingnuttery. We are in the middle of a civil war. We are not fighting "international Islamic Terrorism" in Iraq. We're creating more of it.

If there was a glimmer of sense in Mr. Obama's speech, it lay in his acknowledgment that "we will have to make tactical adjustments, listening to our commanders on the ground, to ensure that our interests in a stable Iraq are met and to make sure our troops are secure." Ms. Clinton conceded that "the critical question is how we can end this war responsibly" and added "it won't be easy." In fact it will be terribly hard -- and it can't be done responsibly in the way or on the timeline the two Democrats are proposing. We can only hope that, behind their wildly unrealistic campaign rhetoric, the candidates understand that reality.

No, Obama or Clinton are just riding this out. They don't want to sit and listen to every neocon that the US media enables. They don't want to use up all of their time responding to people like Richard Perle and John Bolton and Michael O'Hanlon--men who were wrong five years ago, wrong every day since then, and so wrong now as to be laughable. Who needs it?

Once a Democrat wins, they'll pull troops out of Iraq in order to please the base that gets them elected and they'll do so because they don't want to continue bankrupting this country while draping the Iraq war across their shoulders.

No one--and I mean no one--is going to bail George Bush out this time.

You're Kidding, Right?

It's like we're all on acid...everything is distorted and messed up...nothing makes any sense...and the neocons keep telling everyone how things really aren't:

`Enormous Credibility'
``He's got enormous credibility there, and is able to say to them in words of one syllable that they need to get their act together,'' John Bolton, the former UN ambassador, said.

Cheney plans to travel throughout the country. Among the topics on his agenda are pushing Iraqi leaders to pass an oil law that would help encourage international energy companies to invest in production, said a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the trip.

The U.S. is in the process of pulling five of 20 combat brigades out of Iraq, totaling about 20,000 soldiers. Petraeus has said he wants to take time to assess security after the withdrawal ends in mid-July.

At least 3,978 U.S. military personnel have died in Iraq and another 29,395 have been wounded, according to Department of Defense figures.

A majority of the U.S. public, 53 percent, said a victory in Iraq isn't possible, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll conducted March 7-10. Fifty-two percent said most troops should be withdrawn by 2009.

Enormous credibility? Conduct diplomacy with one-syllable words?

Fuck if I can't figure out what's going on. You'd have to be on acid to believe this shit.

Speaking of being on acid:

CNN’s Kyra Phillips speaks to some Iraqi soldiers about the U.S. presidential election and democracy in Iraq. While they spoke enthusiastically about the American soldiers teaching them discipline and how to effectively combat their enemies in Iraq, the soldiers were less effusive in their praise for those managing the war and their plans for bringing about democracy. Phillips tried in vain to locate any McCain supporters among the group.

“Just to be perfectly clear here, I did ask them are you following any of the republican candidates?…Do you want to talk about John McCain? Within that whole group, not one wanted a republican in the US presidential seat. They were all for a democrat. They were all for that type of change because they said they were living a republican war.”

Wow! CNN found a whole bunch of "fake troops" who hate America! Sarcasm intended.

Petraeus Betrays the Neocons

The neocons must be wondering if he really is their guy:

BAGHDAD, March 13 -- Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of a reduction in violence to make adequate progress toward resolving their political differences, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday.

Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.

The general's comments appeared to be his sternest to date on Iraqis' failure to achieve political reconciliation. In February, following the passage of laws on the budget, provincial elections and an amnesty for certain detainees, Petraeus was more encouraging. "The passage of the three laws today showed that the Iraqi leaders are now taking advantage of the opportunity that coalition and Iraqi troopers fought so hard to provide," he said at the time.

Thanks to being watered-down or outright rejected in a form that would be fair to all, those laws mean nothing in the context of Iraq--all they do is disenfranchise the Sunnis and reinforce the power grab of the Shia majority.

What's funny is that Petraeus basically contradicts Kagan, O'Hanlon, and a whole host of delusional fools like McCain, Huckleberry Graham and whoever else you want to throw in there.

Hey--maybe, just maybe--Petraeus wants to have a career past January 20,2009. Do you think that might explain why he's undercutting the basic neocon talking points?

War is "Romantic?"

Well, you're not going to believe what Bush said today:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush got an earful on Thursday about problems and progress in Afghanistan where a war has dragged on for more than six years but been largely eclipsed by Iraq.

In a videoconference, Bush heard from U.S. military and civilian personnel about the challenges ranging from fighting local government and police corruption to persuading farmers to abandon a lucrative poppy drug trade for other crops.

Bush heard tales of all-night tea drinking sessions to coax local residents into cooperating, and of tribesmen crossing mountains to attend government meetings seen as building blocks for the country's democracy-in-the-making.

"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

Yeah, he said that serving in Afghanistan was "in some ways romantic."

This is one of those moments where you drop to one knee and just weep for the spectacle that is the state of the leadership of this country. A grand folly is all they are now. A pathetic, debased and delusional folly entirely of their own making.

Gender Politics From Ace of Spades

Only a handful of delusional right wing hate merchants rise to the spectacular level of misplaced snark, misogynistic declarations of intent to do something that would never happen, and overall shitheadedness as Ace of Spades.

Fixed the logo for you, by the way.


Hitchens vs. Poehler, Silveman, Wiig, Etc.

...Now, I mention this, because if you click on that vid, you might be a bit taken aback by Hitchens seemingly casual exclusion of "dykes" and "Jews" (and "hefty" women too) from the female sex altogether. I was; I started out this post asking what the hell he was trying to say here. Vanity Fair milks the comment by doing a sinister three stage zoom in as he says "dykes, or hefty, or Jews."



However, whether you agree with his point or not (and I don't -- he's just making shit up as he goes to be provocative, but there's no crime in that), it isn't the offhandedly brutal bit of antisemitism (and anti-lesbianism, and No Fat Chickery) it seems to be at first. He's just rescuing his point by setting those three categories apart and branding them a sub-type of male humor.

Anyway, more ammo for the gender war, I guess.

Man, is Kirstin Wiig cute. I would hit that like the cannonball hitting the fat guy's belly in slow motion.

By the way, I'm not really kissing up to women again in saying Hitchens is just making shit up. Of course man are more frequently funny than women, and of course men are funnier than women on average, and all the rest of it. I mean, duh.



But his original article claimed there were no funny women (except those male-ish dykes, Jews, and fatties), which is obviously just stupid.

Uh huh. Glad to know you would "hit that." Too bad the only thing you're hitting is the floor when the blood runs out of the pencil-sized dick you're rubbing like a lotto ticket on payday.

Kagan Asserts There Is No Ethnic Cleansing In Iraq

You just can't ever take a break from watching these dishonest liars:

JIM LEHRER: So, Mr. Kagan, what Mr. Rosen is saying, essentially that both sides are laying low, the Sunnis for their reasons, the Shias for their reasons, that this is not a permanent thing.

FREDERICK KAGAN: Well, there's a magnificent myth out there that Mr. Rosen just reiterated for us that there are no mixed areas in Iraq anymore and that the cleansing is completed.

And it's astonishing to me that someone who's been in Baghdad for as long and as much as Mr. Rosen has been could say something like that. There are still Shia areas in western Baghdad, not only in Kadamiyah, around the Kadamiyah shrine, in which there will always be Shia, but also in west Rashid.

JIM LEHRER: What does that mean?

FREDERICK KAGAN: It means that you still have -- in neighborhoods that are predominantly Sunni, on the west side of the river, which is historically the Sunni side of the river, you still have Shia enclaves that are within those neighborhoods.

Now, they're more consolidated than they had been before, certainly. At a low level, you certainly have seen that kind of consolidation, but there is no natural dividing line between Sunni and Shia in Baghdad, let alone around Baghdad, let alone in Diyala.

Hmmm. Should I say it in words or with pictures? It kinda doesn't matter where you live in Iraq when there's ethnic cleansing involved. Millions have been displaced. But if you want to advance the notion that there has been no ethnic cleansing, the first thing you do is ignore the obvious--there are walls everywhere:



The next thing you do is hope that no one finds things like this article in Stars & Stripes, when the policy was enacted:

“We have been going into neighborhoods and sealing off certain exit and entrance points during initial sweeps,” Caldwell said. “Those were temporary measures.”

Caldwell, however, said that U.S. and Iraqi forces would continue to erect permanent barriers around city marketplaces. So far, he said, coalition forces had erected more than 3,000 individual sections of concrete blast walls throughout the city since the plan went into effect two months ago. These barriers included both Jersey barriers — short concrete dividers commonly seen on roadways in the United States — and larger 20-foot blast walls that commonly surround bases and living areas.

According to Wednesday’s news release from Multi-National Corps-Iraq, “the wall [in Adhamiyah] is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence. Planners hope the creation of the wall will help restore law and order by providing a way to screen people entering and exiting the neighborhood — allowing residents and people with legitimate business in, while keeping death squads and militia groups out.”

A similar effort by U.S. troops in south Baghdad was reported earlier this month by the Wall Street Journal.

“That community [in Adhamiyah] will be completely gated and protected,” Lt. Col. Thomas Rogers, 407th Brigade Support Battalion, was quoted as saying in the release. “It’s really for the security of all the people of Adhamiyah, not just one side or the other.”

Adhamiyah is the Sunni enclave on the eastern side of the river, so that explains why Kagan didn't mention it. Here's a map to explain it all:



Yeah, no wonder Kagan doesn't want to talk about the completely segregated, Sunni-populated, walled-off area of Baghdad that completely refutes his assertion. You can't stop watching these slimy bastards try to slide off the hook for this war and you can't stop going through their public statements, looking for every lie and every vain attempt at rehabilitating their tattered and destroyed reputations.

Feith Settles No Scores and Achieves Nothing With His New Book

This is the kind of thing that normally gets ignored on the weekends, but here goes. Douglas "the Fucking Stupidest Guy on the face of the Earth" Feith writes a book:

WASHINGTON - In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.

Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush's policies.

Among the disclosures made by Feith in "War and Decision," scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush's declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that "war is inevitable." The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a "momentous comment."

So it's really kind of hard to keep blaming Democrats for this war, isn't it? The original AUMF was designed to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq if the weapons inspectors weren't allowed to do their job. But BEFORE that even happened, he had made up his mind to go to war anyway. And the guy who played on the team that got everything wrong is now trying to write a book five years later that tries to say that they got everything right?

What a fucking joke. This is the best indication of where Feith is utterly and completely delusional:

Others have criticized Feith's plan as relying too heavily on Iraqi exile politicians, including Ahmed Chalabi. Feith says that he considered Chalabi one of the most astute and democratically minded Iraqis but that he had no special brief for him. Instead, he charges that the State Department, the CIA and the military's Central Command were pathologically opposed to the exiles and to Chalabi in particular.

Now, why would he want to invoke Chalabi at this point? Hasn't it been proven that Chalabi was a liar and that he had no possibility of influencing anything positive in Iraq? The Iraqis don't trust Chalabi--he always has been a liar and an opportunist, plain and simple.

Of course, there's always that neocon saw--blame the CIA:

Feith continually denounces the CIA, accusing it of producing poor intelligence, intruding on the formulation of policy, and then using leaks to the media to defend itself and attack its bureaucratic opponents. Most notably, he charges that intelligence officials ignored and refused to investigate possible links between al-Qaeda and Hussein's government.

The CIA was being politicized from within at that point. Anyone trying to get the truth to the decision makers was being silenced. If Powell had simply received the dissenting material from agencies like the CIA and the DIA, he would never have given his disasterous report to the United Nations. General Tommy Franks was never going to let the Iraq War be his legacy. He was hell-bent on getting out of town as soon as he could. And he recognized Feith for what he was--the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the Earth:

He reports, as others have, that Franks, who commanded the U.S. invasion force, treated him disrespectfully, sometimes rolling his eyes when Feith asked a question. But he indicates that Franks's disregard grew partly out of the general's lack of interest in planning for the postwar period. When Feith tried to talk to him about one aspect of that, Franks walked around the table, leaned over and said, "Doug, I don't have time for this [expletive]." He concludes that Franks failed in part because of advice he received from his advisers at the CIA and the State Department.

In contrast with the reputation of Gen. Richard B. Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for pliability, Feith reports that Myers grew irate at what he saw as administration attempts to get around the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners following the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Myers, he writes, threatened to bypass Rumsfeld and take his concerns directly to Bush, but calmed down after being told that the administration would distinguish between legitimate prisoners of war and al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.

In summarizing his view of what went wrong in Iraq, Feith writes that it was a mistake for the administration to rely so heavily on intelligence reports of Hussein's alleged stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear weapons program, not only because they turned out to be wrong but also because secret information was not necessary to understand the threat Hussein posed.

Hussein's history of aggression and disregard of U.N. resolutions, his past use of weapons of mass destruction and the fact that he was "a bloodthirsty megalomaniac" were enough, Feith maintains.

He blames both the CIA and Powell, who outlined the weapons case in a February 2003 speech at the United Nations, for overemphasizing the threat. But Feith appears to ignore the crucial role that statements from Cheney and Rice, about the imminence of "mushroom clouds" emanating from Iraqi nuclear weapons, played in the case the administration made for war.

It's a wonderful attempt at ignoring the history. Here's Chris Suellentrop on Feith in 2004:

Of all the revelations that have surfaced about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal so far, the least surprising is that Douglas Feith may be partly responsible. Not a single Iraq war screw-up has gone by without someone tagging Feith—who, as the Defense Department's undersecretary for policy, is the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian, after Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz—as the guy to blame. Feith, who ranks with Wolfowitz in purity of neoconservative fervor, has turned out to be Michael Dukakis in reverse: ideology without competence.

It's not that the 50-year-old Feith is at fault for everything that's gone wrong in Iraq. He's only tangentially related to the mystery of the missing weapons of mass destruction, for example. (Though it's a significant tangent: An anonymous "Pentagon insider" told the Washington Times last year that Feith was the person who urged the Bush administration to make Saddam's WMD the chief public rationale for going to war immediately.) Nor was it Feith who made the decision to commit fewer troops than the generals requested. (Though Feith did give the most honest explanation for the decision, saying last year that it "makes our military less usable" if hundreds of thousands of troops are needed to fight wars.) But if he isn't fully culpable for all these fiascos, he's still implicated in them somehow. He's a leading indicator, like a falling Dow—something that correlates with but does not cause disaster.

Start with Abu Ghraib. Feith's office was in charge of Iraq's military prisons, but that's not the only reason his name keeps turning up in newspaper reports about the scandal. It was Feith who devised the legal solution for getting around the Geneva Conventions' prohibition on physically or psychologically coercing prisoners of war into talking. As a Pentagon official in the 1980s, Feith had laid out the argument that terrorists didn't deserve protection under the Geneva Conventions. Once the war on terrorism started, all he had to do was implement it. And even more damning than his legal rule-making is Feith's reported reaction to complaints by military Judge Advocate General lawyers about the new, looser interrogation rules. "They said he had a dismissive, if not derisive, attitude toward the Geneva Conventions," Scott Horton, a lawyer who was approached by six outraged JAG officers last year, told the Chicago Tribune. "One of them said he calls it 'law in the service of terror.' "

Abu Ghraib is only the latest of the Pentagon's Feith-based problems. During the buildup to the war, Feith oversaw the two offices that have since been criticized for politicizing intelligence and for inadequately planning for the occupation. The first group was known as the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Unit, and it was established to find links between terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. The group issued a report about connections between Iraq and al-Qaida that Rumsfeld had Feith deliver to CIA Director George Tenet in August 2002. This was reportedly the same report that Vice President Cheney recently called "your best source of information" on the links between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

But the report has been widely discredited. Tenet told a congressional committee in March that Cheney was mistaken about its reliability. And Daniel Benjamin, former director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, wrote in Slate that, far from proving Saddam-Osama ties, "the document lends substance to the frequently voiced criticism that some in the Bush administration have misused intelligence to advance their policy goals."

The other office Feith oversees, the Office of Special Plans, probably wrought even worse damage that the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Unit: Its job was postwar planning, which even many conservatives now admit has been a disaster. As USA Today's Walter Shapiro put it this month when he summed up a one-year anniversary panel discussion on Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute (hardly a bastion of the antiwar left): "An easy summary of the overall impression fostered by the panel would be: Right war, wrong postwar plan."

Why is Feith involved with all these foul-ups? How could one man be so consistently in error? Nearly every critique of the Pentagon's plan for Iraq's occupation blames the blinkers imposed by ideology. For example, The New Yorker reported last fall that Feith intentionally excluded experts with experience in postwar nation-building, out of fear that their pessimistic, worst-case scenarios would leak and damage the case for war. In the Atlantic earlier this year, James Fallows told a similar story: The Pentagon did not participate in CIA war games about the occupation, because "it could be seen as an 'antiwar' undertaking" that "weakened the case for launching a 'war of choice.' " The State Department's Future of Iraq Project, an effort that accurately predicted some contingencies that the Pentagon overlooked, was dismissed by Feith and company out of hand.

And while the Pentagon's assumptions of an ecstatic, sweets-and-flowers-bearing populace that would welcome the occupiers as liberators may have been understandable in February 2003, Feith continued to let ideology rule his decisions long after the "major combat operations" ended. Last September, Knight Ridder reported that Paul Bremer's request for more than 220 employees for the occupation had yet to be approved. Guess who was to blame? "It is taking forever because Feith only wants true believers to get through the gate," a senior administration official said.

And those true believers turned out to be young, inexperienced and incompetent Bush cronies and campaign workers. Feith is trying to avoid responsibility for a momentously stupid decision, one of many.

But, given all of that responsibility, there's that one tried and true attempt that virtually every former Bush Administration official is going to try when they make that feeble attempt at rehabilitating their reputations--throw the President's girlfriend under the bus:

Powell, Feith argues, allowed himself to be publicly portrayed as a dove, but while Powell "downplayed" the degree and urgency of Iraq's threat, he never expressed opposition to the invasion. Bremer, meanwhile, is said to have done more harm than good in Iraq. Feith also accuses Franks of being uninterested in postwar planning, and writes that Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser during most of Feith's time in office, failed in her primary task of coordinating policy on the war.

Even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while, right?

The neocons who manipulated us into war must NEVER be allowed to rehabilitate themselves, especially when they're simply trying to rewrite history and blame others.

Notice anything?

Generation Chickenhawk



The First Member of the Royal Family to See Combat Since World War I



Angelina Jolie in the Al-Waleed Refugee Camp, Iraq



If a member of one of our own "royal" families was secretly in Iraq or Afghanistan defending this country, and Drudge revealed it and put their life in imminent danger, would anyone care?

UPDATE - By Blue Girl

A Mistake? Really? So Why Not Just Fire Him?

What?

He May Be Unwelcome, but We’ll Survive

By CLARK HOYT
Published: January 13, 2008
IN 1972, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, was looking for a conservative columnist for his left-leaning Op-Ed page.

But, as described in “The Trust,” the authoritative history of the family that has controlled The Times for more than a century, Sulzberger neglected to involve John Oakes, his cousin and the editor of the editorial page, in the decision. Oakes was appalled when he heard about the negotiations, and not realizing it was too late, offered alternatives. How about Irving Kristol, he suggested.

More than 35 years later, Sulzberger’s son, Arthur Jr. — this time in full partnership with his editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal — has hired another conservative columnist for their left-leaning Op-Ed page: Irving Kristol’s son, William.

The choice of Safire, who retired in 2005, set off a storm of protest. “The Times could have saved themselves about 50 grand a year if they just sent an office boy over to the White House to pick up the press releases,” fumed Nicholas von Hoffman of The Washington Post. Kristol’s appointment has not fared any better.

[snip]

Of the nearly 700 messages I have received since Kristol’s selection was announced — more than half of them before he ever wrote a word for The Times — exactly one praised the choice.

That was probably James Carville. You know, the guy who wrote the judge in the Plame case and said all kinds of nice things about Scooter Libby.

Hey--here's a clue--when you get it wrong as completely and utterly as Kristol and when you blow your first column by confusing Michelle Malkin with Michael Medved--you should probably fire the person who doesn't have the common decency to quit out of abject shame.

Just sayin'.