Magpie

Friday, September 7, 2007

Step right up folks! See the amazing disappearing benchmarks!

Although our Dear Leader doesn't recall the benchmarks that he himself set up for judging the success of the surge in Iraq, Salon's Tim Grieve remembers them quite well indeed.

This magpie wants to think that the Democrats in Congress will remember Dubya's benchmarks—and how very few of them have been met—when they pass judgment on the surge later this month. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Labels: Dubya, Iraq, Memory failure, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:12 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Earth to Dubya, Earth to Dubya ...

This magpie really has to wonder what planet our Dear Leader is on after reading this account of his arrival in Australia:

"We're kicking ass," he told Mark Vaile on the tarmac after the Deputy Prime Minister inquired politely of the President's stopover in Iraq en route to Sydney. [Emaphsis and incredulity added]

The word 'delusional' doesn't even begin to cover it.

Via Sydney Morning Herald.

Labels: Australia, Cluelessness, Delusions, Dubya, Iraq, Occupation

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:30 PM | Get permalink

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

No future.

And I thought I was pessimistic about the state of the US. I've got nothing on Chris Floyd, who's already willing to write an obituary for the American republic:

The annus horribilis of 2007 has turned out to be a year of triumph for the Bush Faction -- the hit men who delivered the coup de grâce to the long-moribund Republic. Bush was written off as a lame duck after the Democrat's November 2006 election "triumph" (in fact, the narrowest of victories eked out despite an orgy of cheating and fixing by the losers), and the subsequent salvo of Establishment consensus from the Iraq Study Group, advocating a de-escalation of the war in Iraq. Then came a series of scandals, investigations, high-profile resignations, even the criminal conviction of a top White House official. But despite all this -- and abysmal poll ratings as well -- over the past eight months Bush and his coupsters have seen every single element of their violent tyranny confirmed, countenanced and extended.

he war which we were told the Democrats and ISG consensus would end or wind down has of course been escalated to its greatest level yet -- more troops, more airstrikes, more mercenaries, more Iraqi captives swelling the mammoth prison camps of the occupying power, more instability destroying the very fabric of Iraqi society. The patently illegal surveillance programs of the authoritarian regime have now been codified into law by the Democratic Congress, which has also let stand the evisceration of habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act, and a raft of other liberty-stripping laws, rules, regulations and executive orders. Bush's self-proclaimed arbitrary power to seize American citizens (and others) without charge and hold them indefinitely -- even kill them -- has likewise been unchallenged by the legislators. Bush has brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas -- and even arbitrarily stripped the Justice Department of the power to enforce them -- to no other reaction than a stern promise from Democratic leaders to "look further into this matter." His spokesmen -- and his "signing statements" -- now openly proclaim his utter disdain for representative government, and assert at every turn his sovereign right to "interpret" -- or ignore -- legislation as he wishes. He retains the right to "interpret" just which interrogation techniques are classified as torture and which are not, while his concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and his secret CIA prisons -- where those "strenuous" techniques are practiced -- remain open. His increasingly brazen drive to war with Iran has already been endorsed unanimously by the Senate and overwhelmingly by the House, both of which have embraced the specious casus belli concocted by the Bush Regime. And to come full circle, Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin are now praising the "military success" of the Iraq escalation -- despite the evident failure of its stated goals by every single measure, including troop deaths, civilian deaths, security, infrastructure, political cohesion and regional stability. This emerging "bipartisan consensus" on the military situation in Iraq (or rather, this utter fantasy concealing a rapidly deteriorating reality) makes it certain that the September "progress report" will be greeted as a justification for continuing the "surge" in one form or another.

It is, by any measure, a remarkable achievement, one of the greatest political feats ever. Despite Bush's standing as one of the most despised presidents in American history, despite a Congress in control of the opposition party, despite a solid majority opposed to his policies and his war, despite an Administration riddled with scandal and crime, despite the glaring rot in the nation's infrastructure and the callous abandonment of one of the nation's major cities to natural disaster and crony greed -- despite all of this, and much more that would have brought down or mortally wounded any government in a democratic country, the Bush Administration is now in a far stronger position than it was a year ago.

How can this be? The answer is simple: the United States is no longer a democratic country, or even a degraded semblance of one.

I know I say this a lot, but ... it's really worth your time to go read the entire post.

My view of our current political situation in the US isn't quite as dark as Floyd's, but he makes a very persuasive argument about the degree of danger to democracy that Dubya, his minions, and his Democratic enablers represent. Dismissing his argument as paranoia only makes it more certain that the tombstone will soon be placed over the grave of the long democratic experiment in the US.

Via The Sideshow.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Dubya, Fascism, Iran, Iraq, Paranoia, Telling It Like It Is

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:20 PM | Get permalink

Monday, September 3, 2007

Little or no blogging today.

Faced with having to comment on Dubya's ~~visit to~~ photo-op in Iraq or—even worse—having to say anything about this, taking the day off seems to be a wise move.

See y'all tomorrow.

Labels: Dubya, Iraq, Petraeus, Propaganda

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:04 PM | Get permalink

Friday, August 31, 2007

The occupation that just keeps on giving (2).

Cholera is on the rise in northern Iraq as sanitation and medical systems break down from the stresses of coping with thousands of internal refugees. So far, 5000 people have been afflicted with the disease.

"The disease is spreading very fast," Dr Juan Abdallah, a senior official in Kurdistan's health ministry, told a UN agency. "It is the first outbreak of its kind here in the past few decades."

Doctors in Sulaimaiyah in Iraqi Kurdistan have appealed for help because of the rapidly increasing number of cases, saying there is a shortage of medicines. Although the city has been less affected by fighting than almost anywhere in Iraq, Unicef says that mains water is only available for two hours a day and many people have dug shallow wells outside their homes.

"There is a shortage of medicines to control the disease and the focal point [the source of the disease] hasn't been identified yet," Dr Dirar Iyad of Sulaimaniyah General Hospital told the UN news agency Irin. Ten people have already died and he expects more deaths to occur "over the next couple of days as victims are already in an advanced stage of illness."

The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has risen from 50,000 to 60,000 a month, the UN High Commission for Refugees reported earlier this week.

Via UK Independent.

Labels: Epidemics, Iraq, Occupation, Public Health

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:16 AM | Get permalink

Monday, August 27, 2007

Revealed! The secret paymaster for Iraq's insurgents.

Is it Osama? Or Iran? Nope, you're way off the mark.

It turns out that a major source of funding for Iraq's insurgency is the US treasury. According to a report by McClatchy's Hannah Allam, insurgents are financing at least part of their attacks on US forces by shaking down contractors in Anbar province. In return for cash (siphoned from US reconstruction funds), the insurgents allow contractors to move people and supplies, and carry out their projects with a modicum of safety. At minimum, this protection racket has generated hundreds of thousands of US dollars since 2003. It's more likely, say Iraqi government sources, that the figure is actually in the millions.

A U.S. company with a reconstruction contract hires an Iraqi sub-contractor to haul supplies along insurgent-ridden roads. The Iraqi contractor sets his price at up to four times the going rate because he'll be forced to give 50 percent or more to gun-toting insurgents who demand cash payments in exchange for the supply convoys' safe passage.

One Iraqi official said the arrangement makes sense for insurgents. By granting safe passage to a truck loaded with $10,000 in goods, they receive a "protection fee" that can buy more weapons and vehicles. Sometimes the insurgents take the goods, too.

"The violence in Iraq has developed a political economy of its own that sustains it and keeps some of these terrorist groups afloat," said Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh ...

"I put it right in my contracts as a line item for 'logistics and security,'" said one Iraqi contractor who is still working for a major American company with several long-term projects in Anbar. "The Americans think you're hiring a security company, but how you execute it is something else entirely. This is how it's been working since Day 1."

One Iraqi contractor who is working on an American-funded rebuilding project in the provincial capital of Ramadi said he faced two choices when he wanted to bring in a crane, heavy machinery and workers from Baghdad: either hire a private security company to escort the supplies for up to $6,000 a truck, or pay off locals with insurgent connections.

He chose the latter, and got $120,000 for a U.S. contract he estimates to be worth no more than $20,000. The contractor asked that specific details of the project not be disclosed for fear he'll be identified and lose the job.

"The insurgents always remind us they're there," the contractor said. "Sometimes they hijack a truck or kidnap a driver and then we pay and, if we're lucky, we get our goods returned. It's just to make sure we know how it works.

"Insurgents control the roads," he added. "Americans don't control the roads — and everything from Syria and Jordan goes through there."

Despite the widespread and longstanding diversion of American money into insurgents' pockets, the US embassy in Baghdad refused to answer McClatchy's questions about the shakedowns. An embassy spokesperson said only that US contracts contain 'checks and balances' that prevent any 'irregularities' from occurring.

Yeah. Right. And I'm the f'n empress of the universe.

Via McClatchy Washington Bureau.

Labels: Insurgency, Iraq, Occupation

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:11 AM | Get permalink

Saturday, August 25, 2007

I'd walk away from a nut case, too.

In the current issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has an interesting piece on the new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy and how France is changing under his presidency. Buried at the end of the article is what I'd argue is the most important part of Gopnik's whole piece—for those of us who live in the US, anyway:

The catastrophe in Iraq has had an unlooked-for effect: not to stoke anti-Americanism in a new generation but to make America seem almost marginal. For almost two hundred years, Americanization in Europe has been synonymous with modernization—that’s why the Statue of Liberty stands in New York Harbor, as a gift of the Third French Republic, the fraught state that appeared after Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire failed. It was a gift not from a complacent old world to a nascent new one but from a newborn republic to one that, after its civil war, was firm and coherent. The point wasn’t that Europe would not abandon us; it was that we would not abandon old Europe to the despots.

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from. [Emphasis added]

Yet another thing we have Dubya's administration to thank for: Going from being the so-called world's only superpower to a new life as the crazy guy on the international block in only six years.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Dubya, France, Iraq

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:13 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, August 23, 2007

I think the press is finally noticing ...

... that Dubya is pulling reasons for staying in Iraq out of his butt.

Dubya's speech to the VFW yesterday (see this earlier post) seems to have finally pushed a number of US reporters over the edge. Good examples are this video clip featuring MSNBC's David Shuster [WMV file, thanks to Crooks and Liars], and this commentary by Joseph Galloway, McClatchy's senior military correspondent:

This week we saw two President Bushes in action. In a news conference in Canada, he acknowledged that while security has improved somewhat thanks to the surge, the Iraqis have made little progress toward meeting the benchmarks. Two days later, speaking at the National VFW convention in Kansas City, the president spoke at length about the need to stay the course in Iraq indefinitely.

He pleaded for the patience he said is needed to win in Iraq, and surprisingly put forward the example of the Vietnam War and our withdrawal from there after 10 years and 58,249 dead American troops as a reason why we must stick to our guns in Iraq.

He trotted out his administration's now shopworn fear tactics, arguing that persisting in this senseless war will prevent a massacre of millions in Iraq and attacks on us at home by a reinvigorated al Qaida.

The more things change in this administration, the more they stay the same. [Emphasis added]

In fairness, though, I should point out that McClatchy (and its previous incarnation as Knight Ridder) has been almost the only mainstream US news organization that's been critical of Dubya's Iraq adventure right from the start.

Via McClatchy Washington Bureau.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Big fat idiots, Dubya, Iraq, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Cheney uses the the Q-word to describe Iraq.

On C-SPAN back in 1994, no less.

Can you say 'quagmire', Mr Cheney?

I guess a few years running Halliburton opened Cheney's eyes to the error of his ways, eh?

Via MoveOn.org.

Labels: Cheney, Iraq, Quagmire

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:34 PM | Get permalink

Of course the surge in Iraq is working.

As Dubya and his minions started reminding us five months ago, we needed to give the administration until September to start showing results of the so-called surge in Iraq. Then General David Petraeus would be issuing a report on whether things were going as planned.

Since the planned report was first announced, there's been a lot of skepticism about its value, and about whether it would just be a rubber stamp for Dubya's continuing Iraq adventure. Well, now we know.

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report's data.

Wanna lay any bets as to whether the September report says that everything is going as planned in Iraq?

I guess you have to admire the administration's lack of tact and trust. I mean, your average corrupt government would be satisfied to let a general know what conclusions he should come to and then let him write the report himself. In Dubya's regime, however, even the most loyal minions can't be trusted to do the job right, so the White House has to write its own lies.

Via LA Times.

Labels: Insurgency, Iraq, Pentagon, Stupidity, Surge, White House

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:10 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, August 9, 2007

The US occupation of Iraq just keeps on giving.

In this case, that gift is the millions of refugees who've fled Iraq for neighboring countries. About 1.4 million of those refugees have landed in Syria, and they now make up 8 percent of that country's population. The presence of the refugees is 'pushing Syria to the edge,' according to a report by freelance journalist Hugh Naylor.

"The situation is starting to scare a lot of people," said Samir Taqqi, a political analyst at the Orient Center for Studies, a Damascus think tank.

Public services are deteriorating. State-run hospitals, inundated by tens of thousands of Iraqis seeking free medical care, are short on staff and medical supplies. Unable to afford serving cafeteria food, many are asking patients to bring their own.

At public schools across Damascus, the capital, overwhelmed teachers are forced to work double shifts to accommodate Iraqis pushing class sizes to as high as 70 students. Meanwhile, rolling power blackouts blanket the city for up to five hours a day because the country's electrical grid can't meet increasing energy demands during one of the warmest summers on record. Blackouts in some suburbs reportedly last up to 12 hours.

"The Syrian economy doesn't have the resources to sustain current subsidies for food and energy," said Taqqi.

One way to understand the magnitude of Syria's refugee crisis is to try to imagine what things in the US would be like if, over the course of 4 years, more than 28 million Mexican refugees poured into the country as the result of a civil war. Both the sheer magnitude of the immigration and the presence of a large, unstable country next door would wreak havoc on the US economy and political institutions. While I doubt that Dubya's administration had any idea of the refugee problem that would result from the US-led invasion of Iraq, this magpie is certain that Syria's refugee-related troubles aren't causing anyone in the White House to shed even crocodile tears.

As Naylor's report points out, however, Syria is not the only country dealing with a huge influx of Iraqi refugees. Jordan is hosting 700,000 Iraqis — in other words, more than 1 in 10 residents of Jordan have fled Iraq. This situation is no doubt reminding Jordanian officials (and probably the Syrian government as well) of an earlier influx of Palestinian refugees that resulted in armed battles between government forces and armed Palestinian militants in the early 1970s.

Addition: I didn't quite complete my thought there at the end. The reason I brought up the experience of the Jordanians in dealing with a large Palestinian refugee population was to draw an analogy between the regional results of the Israel/Palestine conflict and the current occupation of Iraq. In the latter confict, action — or lack of action — by the US created and perpetuated a state of affairs (lack of a viable Palestinian state) that has kept the region in an uproar for the last 40 years or so. And which, arguably, led to the 9/11 attacks. My suspicion is that the refugee crisis in Syria and Jordan may be one of the first signs that the Iraq occupation is causing similar regional problems — and that no one in the White House gives a sh*t.

Via SF Chronicle.

Labels: Iraq, Occupation, Refugees, Surge, Syria

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:30 AM | Get permalink

Monday, August 6, 2007

About those 190,000 weapons missing in Iraq.

This magpie wasn't surprised to hear the news, given that Dubya's military has this longstanding problem with keeping tabs on armaments.

If our Dear Leader couldn't see that arms were kept out of the hands of Iraq's insurgents in 2003 and 2004, why should his minions be doing anything different now?

Labels: Dubya, Incompetence, Insurgency, Iraq, Occupation

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:35 PM | Get permalink

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Is Dubya brilliant or what?

The prez, from a speech about Iraq he made earlier today:

Either we'll succeed, or we won't succeed.

To be fair, Dubya's speech was longer than that one sentence. But if you go read it, I defy you to prove that the summary of the prez's speech would amount to much more than what I quoted.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Cluelessness, Dubya, Iraq

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:42 AM | Get permalink

Friday, April 27, 2007

I'd been wondering where Riverbend has been.

She hadn't posted since February, and when a blogger who lives in Baghdad doesn't post for awhile, you have to worry.

It turns out that part of the reason for Riverbend's extended silence is that she and her family are getting ready to leave Iraq.

So we've been busy. Busy trying to decide what part of our lives to leave behind. Which memories are dispensable? We, like many Iraqis, are not the classic refugees—the ones with only the clothes on their backs and no choice. We are choosing to leave because the other option is simply a continuation of what has been one long nightmare—stay and wait and try to survive.

On the one hand, I know that leaving the country and starting a new life somewhere else—as yet unknown—is such a huge thing that it should dwarf every trivial concern. The funny thing is that it’s the trivial that seems to occupy our lives. We discuss whether to take photo albums or leave them behind. Can I bring along a stuffed animal I've had since the age of four? Is there room for E.'s guitar? What clothes do we take? Summer clothes? The winter clothes too? What about my books? What about the CDs, the baby pictures?

The problem is that we don't even know if we'll ever see this stuff again. We don't know if whatever we leave, including the house, will be available when and if we come back. There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends ... And to what?

It's difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.

The decision of Riverbend's family to leave their country may be a small thing when looked at in isolation, but it's just another example of a decision that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis make every year. Meanwhile, Dubya and his supporters continue to claim that the occupation of Iraq is succeeding.

I wish Riverbend and her family a happy, peaceful life in whatever country they wind up in. And I hope that it's safe for them to return home sooner, rather than later.

Labels: Iraq, Riverbend

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:01 AM | Get permalink

Monday, April 23, 2007

Another hostage crisis is in progress.

Paul Krugman bears the news in his latest NY Times column:

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it's a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren't met.

If you're a Times subscriber, you can read the whole thing here. If not, the column has been kindly bootlegged here at Welcome to Pottersville.

Labels: Congress, Dubya, Iraq, Supplemental

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:07 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Why the f'n hell does the US need a 'war czar'?

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Dubya is having trouble finding anyone who's willing the be the 'war czar' — a new position that will 'oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies.'

A big question went unasked in the Post's article (and in the blog comments that I've seen): Doesn't the US already have someone whose job it is to oversee the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq? Someone called the 'commander in chief'?

Just asking.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Afghanistan, Dubya, Incompetence, Iraq, Pentagon

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:23 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Dubya's administration keeps on supporting the troops.

This time, it's a plan to add three months to the tour of duty of troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to ABC News, the Pentagon could approve the plan as early as this week.

Every time I think Dubya's gone as low as he can get, there's news like this extension.

More: The Pentagon has made the three-month extension official.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Afghanistan, Dubya, Iraq, Pentagon

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:19 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Who's winning the 'war on terrorism'?

It ain't the US.

Some experts warn that the successes [sic] of Bush's war on terrorism have been undercut by huge security costs, strains on the U.S. military from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and resentment of the United States abroad.

"Look at al Qaeda's plans," said Michael Scheuer, who once led the CIA team devoted to finding al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. "They're very simply defined in two phrases: spread out America's forces and bleed the United States to bankruptcy. I'd argue America has been under attack successfully every day since 9/11 from that perspective.

"If you're looking at it from the cave, or wherever al Qaeda is hiding at the moment, you have to be pretty happy with the way the world is moving," he said.

The rest of the Washington Post article where I got that quote isn't particularly interesting, so I wouldn't go read the rest of it unless I had lots of time on my hands.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', al-Qaeda, Iraq, Osama bin Laden

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:29 PM | Get permalink

Dubya can't count.

For some reason, the prez seems to think that 57 is a bigger number than 119.

At his press conference this morning, Dubya berated the Democratic Congress for taking 57 days (so far) to pass his supplemental funding request for the Iraq occupation.

In a time of war, it's irresponsible for the Democrat leadership -- Democratic leadership in Congress to delay for months on end while our troops in combat are waiting for the funds. The bottom line is this: Congress's failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines. And others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to. That is unacceptable to me, and I believe it is unacceptable to the American people.

Members of Congress say they support the troops. Now they need to show that support in deed, as well as in word. Members of Congress are entitled to their views and should express them. Yet debating these differences should not come at the expense of funding our troops.

Congress's most basic responsibility is to give our troops the equipment and training they need to fight our enemies and protect our nation. They're now failing in that responsibility, and if they do not change course in the coming weeks, the price of that failure will be paid by our troops and their loved ones.

Congress is failing. They're irresponsible. They're endangering the troops. Pretty strong words, eh?

Given that language, I have to wonder why Dubya didn't give the same tongue-lashing to the Republican Congress when it waited 86 days to pass the supplemental bill for the occupation in 2005. Or when it waited 119 days to pass the bill just last year. Wasn't that irresponsible? Didn't the delay put the troops' lives in danger? Nope, the 119-day delay was 'a fiscally responsible way to provide much-needed funds for the War on Terror.'

Today's comments by the prez are just another desperate attempt to make it look like the Democrats are responsible for the continuing failures of the administration's Iraq adventure, and not the series of bad decisions made by Dubya, his advisors, and the Republican-controlled Congress. And they're yet another example of the contempt in which our Dear Leader regards the intelligence of people like you and me.

Labels: Congress, Dubya, Iraq, Press Conference, Supplemental, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:45 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, March 29, 2007

It's business as usual in Washington while people keep dying in Iraq.

And journalist Matt Tabibi is even less impressed with how Democrats are dealing with the Iraq occupation than I am. Writing in Rolling Stone, Tabibi suggests that Democratic congressional leaders have come up with a strategy that gives the appearance of confronting Dubya over Iraq, but doesn't involve taking any of the political risks that would be associated with actually doing something to stop the carnage.

In my visits to Washington in the past few months I've heard different stories from Democratic congressional aides about what the party's intentions are. Some say they think the leadership is just going to stall and pass a bunch of non-binding, symbolic, Kumbayah horseshit to help propel whoever the Democratic candidate is into the White House two years from now. Others claim with a straight face that all of these non-binding resolutions are only a start, that the strategy is to really end the war via a death-by-a-thousand-cuts type of legislative grind, with the leadership sending to the floor bill after bill after bill designed to eat away at either war policy or war funding. They claim that all of these votes are exercises in coalition-building, necessary steps to gathering the support needed to pass real biting measures later on.

But I'll believe that when I see it. Right now, it all looks too convenient....

You'll know that something real is going on in Washington when either a) the Democrats force the "antiwar conservatives" to actually cast a vote on whether or not to cut off spending for the war, or b) a dozen or so more Republicans cross the picket line to set up a possible override of a Bush veto. Until and unless one of those unlikely moments arrives, it sure looks like what we've got is one of those rare "good for both teams" baseball trades, an arranged standoff in which everybody gets to suck a little of that hot nourishing blood in the ballooning antiwar poll numbers.

My sense of this whole ballet from the start has been that with each passing season, as the antiwar rhetoric increases both among the public and in Washington, we'll see a corresponding increase in both financial and personnel commitment in the Iraq theater. The logic here is irresistible; Bush will not preside over what he perceives to be a surrender, and the Democrats will not cast a vote "against the troops" in an election season. So what we'll get is a lot of what we just saw -- non-binding antiwar votes hitched to troop increases and/or "short-term" funding boosts. It's worth noting that the same political logic that led the Bush White House to fund the war as an emergency long after it ceased to be an unexpected expenditure will now appeal to the Democrats, and for the same reason; so long as the money is in an "emergency" bill, they will be able to pretend, before voters, that the commitment is temporary.

Via AlterNet.

Labels: Congress, Iraq, Nancy Pelosi, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 8:42 AM | Get permalink