February 03, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE IT

What do you get if you combine hubris, stubbornness, and incompetence? You get George W. Bush, of course, with his sidekick Dick Cheney. A new National Intelligence Estimate shows that now there is not one, but four, civil wars going on in Iraq. Bush was warned by a number of people of the dangers of occupying Iraq. He never had to attack Iraq in the first place, but PNAC thought it would be a swell idea to take over Iraq, install a puppet "democracy," and control the oil. Now Bush has opened the gates of hell. This column by Maureen Dowd is at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:

Even after releasing parts of an intelligence report so pessimistic that it may as well have been titled “Iraq: We’re Cooked,” Bush officials clung to their alternate reality, using nonsensical logic and cherry-picking whatever phrases they could find in the report that they could use to sell the Surge.

In the 2004 National Intelligence Estimate, civil war was a worst-case scenario. In the 2007 one, Iraq has zoomed past civil war to hell: “The Intelligence Community judges that the term ‘civil war’ does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgent attacks on coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence.”

As John McLaughlin, the former acting director of central intelligence, told The Times’s Mark Mazzetti: “Civil war is checkers. This is chess.”

Far from Dick Cheney’s claim of “enormous successes” and Gen. William Casey’s claim of “slow progress,” the report shows that any path the U.S. takes in Iraq could lead to a river of blood. It says that in the absence of any strong Sunni and Shiite leaders who can control their groups, prospects are dim for a cohesive government, much less a democracy.

WAR A MEANS TO DESTROY MIDDLE CLASS

The United States spends far more on the military than any other country in the world. We neglect pressing needs at home such as health care, education, environmental cleanup, job training, and housing so we can burn money on military expenditures. There were various motivations for attacking Iraq, and for the continuing "war on terror," but the war effectively drains off money that could better life for the working people of this country. Right-wingers don't care about us. They want cheap labor and things like Social Security, pensions, and benefits get in the way of their profits. This article by Margie Burns is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

There is no parallel between the “war on terror” and America’s effort in World War II, and Churchillian posturing by this White House should be viewed with enlightened skepticism. If they really wanted to guide adolescent males around the globe into nonviolent, constructive action rather than into terrorism, they would pursue policies congruent with that objective.

They would also have taken sensible steps at home to safeguard our chemical sector and nuclear industry, borders and ports, steps not taken to this day.

I have now had six years to observe the Bush team (I certainly never took them seriously, except for the harms done, when they were back in Texas), and my working hypothesis is that, when you’re looking at the Bush team, you have to think simple and crude. The real desideratum of this administration is basically to undo decades of twentieth-century shoring up the middle class, meaning loosely 90 percent of the population. The result is cheap labor; the means is global war. The president in his most recent State of the Union address falsely named fighting terrorism – fending off young males who come by various avenues to use guerrilla tactics -- “the defining struggle of our time.”