Go to Working4Change and submit your catchy slogan describing Bush's plan for Iraq -- whatever that is. It's your contribution to reframing the debate. The winner of the contest will direct a $5,000 donation from Working Assets to a nonprofit working for peace.
New data shows better technology and tactics are keeping fatalities down, but injuries remain high.Saving more American lives in the war zones means more people must be treated for amputations and other serious injuries, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
In Iraq, a series of explosions, gunbattles, car bombs and executions over the past 48 hours have left at least 192 dead, including eight U.S. soldiers. In one attack, a car bomb was detonated at a police checkpoint near the Ministry of the Interior, killing at least 16 people.
I have to hope something does, anyway.
All I can say is there is good chemistry and not an easy out from 1st to 8th in the line-up. Names like Russell Martin, Nomar Garciaparra (w/ Mia Hamm!) Andre Ethier, Chad Billingsly, Takashi Saito, Rafael Furcal.
I tell you, I'm going to hang with them a while longer.
I'll have to think about this. Excuse me while I retire to reflect and comtemplate on this issue.
The President: I square it because, -ah- imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein who had the capacity to make a weapon of mass destruction, who was paying suiciders to kill innocent life, who would -- who had relations with Zarqawi. Imagine what the world would be like with him in power. The idea is to try to help change the Middle East.The demand for Rumsfeld's head represents the last desperate bastion of scoundrels seeking to cover their complicit asses from the unmistakably deepest debacle in American foreign policy in history.I also wrote that these are the voices who are whispering over Bush's shoulder the familiar old Vietnam era refrain,
'Send more troops.Yesterday, we heard both messages from Neo-Republican, Joe Lieberman on CBS' "Face the Nation." The Connecticut Senator called for more troops and then said,
Pst!
Send more troops!
Yeah. I think there's--three years ago in October on this show you asked me and I said that I believe that it was time for new leadership at the Pentagon. I think it's still time for new leadership at the Pentagon. With all respect to Don Rumsfeld, who has done a grueling job for six years, we would benefit from new leadership to work with our military in Iraq.Of course, that's not the tune he was singing when he wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal on May 14, 2004, Let Us Have Faith: Why Rumsfeld must stay:
Many argue that we can only rectify the wrongs done in the Iraqi prisons if Donald Rumsfeld resigns. I disagree. Unless there is clear evidence connecting him to the wrongdoing, it is neither sensible nor fair to force the resignation of the secretary of defense, who clearly retains the confidence of the commander in chief, in the midst of a war. I have yet to see such evidence. Secretary Rumsfeld's removal would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America's presence in Iraq.
The cry for Rumsfeld's scalp is the screed of those leaders in both national parties who did not exercise the timely due diligence assigned to their high office by the Constitution; who went along with George Bush's jingoism, "Let's get Iraq while we're at it." Now that the un-provoked, unnecessary, largely unilateral invasion and unplanned occupation of Iraq (UULUIUOI) is going from bad to worse - and worse still - they understandably have buyers' remorse. But, instead of admitting their error on the war, our misled leaders obfuscate the issues with the alibis that the UULUIUOI's implementation or implementors were wrong.We who have served this country cannot stand by silently while the President and his spokespeople attack critics of their deeply flawed policies as 'soft on terrorism'. The Administration has repeatedly failed to seek diplomatic solutions to problems that are only inflamed by the use of military force. They need to start talking with the Iranians immediately.The statement signed by former U.S. military, national security and foreign policy officials calls for immediate direct talks with the government of Iran, without preconditions, and cautions against the use of military action to resolve the current crises in the Middle East or to settle differences over Iran's nuclear program. Full text:
We believe that the U.S. occupation of Iraq continues to divert our nation's resources from addressing adequately the most serious threat to our national security, Al Qaeda.
We also believe that the President's failure to engage immediately and without preconditions in direct talks with the government of Iran, and the Administration's continued consideration of military action against that country, could lead to disastrous consequences for security in the region and for U.S. forces in Iraq.
As former military leaders and foreign policy officials, we call on the Bush Administration to engage immediately in direct talks with the government of Iran without preconditions to help resolve the current crisis in the Middle East and settle differences over the Iranian nuclear program.Signers
We strongly caution against any consideration of the use of military force against Iran. The current crises must be resolved through diplomacy, not military action. An attack on Iran would have disastrous consequences for security in the region and U.S. forces in Iraq, and it would inflame hatred and violence in the Middle East and among Muslims everywhere.
A strategy of diplomatic engagement with Iran will serve the interests of the U.S. and its allies, and would enhance regional and international security.
In the recent bust of the London plot against civil aviation, Bush-Cheney have an opportunity to rediscover and co-opt the position which John Kerry inadvertently stumbled upon in 2004, and to claim it was theirs all along.occasionally military. . . primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world.In an interview with Matt Bai published in October, responding to a question about what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, Kerry said
We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.
One of the reasons why this interview is important intellectual turf is that it is the source of Senator Kerry’s stated use of the word nuisance in discussing world terrorism. This statement spawned a whole genre of Republican attacks alleging an emasculated or minimalist approach to the GWOT on Kerry’s part. This was dismissed by the Bush league as "the swatting of flies".
In pursuing the UULUIUOI, Bush and Cheney usurped the established and successful American policy of deterring Saddam Hussein and instituted the most catastrophic blunder in American foreign and military history.Democrats are fed up with the bipartisanship that gets the wrong things done. . . . The day of reasonable, centrist politics for most Democrats is over.Lieberman's determination to delay his departure from the Senate at all costs will amount to an unbecoming epilogue for which his biographers will have to deal. He is like an athlete playing past his time. So far, in his four-day effort to do so, he discloses his true colors.
Over because the other side doesn't practice it. Over because this president who launched a war deceitfully and with insufficient planning and troops doesn't deserve it. Over because if you disagree with the president over his disaster in Iraq, you are accused of wanting to cut and run, of not supporting the troops.
If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them, and they will strike again.His state's constituents are smart enough not mistake Lieberman for bipartisan. True centrists don't cozy up with radically Un-American Neocons. His loyalties are clearly not to his (former) party. In fact, he has already switched parties. Since Tuesday, Lieberman has become Bush's other poodle, second to Tony Blair.
It's a different tune now. I hear comparisons of Ned Lamont to Eugene McCarthy, disrobing emperor LBJ in the 1968 New Hampshire presidential primary. Ned L. has proven that the party of loyal opposition does not have to tip-toe around our self-anointed "war-time president" like a bunch of Lilliputians. As someone observed last week, ". . . Democrats like Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden shift progressively more in favor of withdrawal from Iraq and is certainly going to alter the entire spectrum of political views over the issue of Iraq, not only for Democrats, but for Republicans, too. In short, this is likely to be the turning point -- downward -- for the Bush presidency."Political seismographers are detecting a sea change. Like Lieberman's overstay in the Senate, things have gotten so bad on a national and international scale that Democrats have been provided with an opportunity and an excuse to make a dramatic improvement.
I do not agree with Cindy on Afghanistan - not at all. And there may be a number of other things she has said I should quibble with. She's a loose cannon, all right. (There's no shortage of those in our world, is there?) I anticipate readers who hold objections to what she is alleged to have said at one time or another.A Lamont victory will embolden Democratic candidates elsewhere to become even more stridently antiwar in the fall campaign. A Lamont victory will make the Iraq war the only cutting issue in the midterm elections -- and probably the 2008 presidential campaign as well.
A Lamont victory also would deal a setback to President George W. Bush because Lieberman has been his most prominent crossover Democratic ally on the war issue. And Lamont's victory would accelerate Progressives' growing efforts to cast the Nov. 7 midterm congressional elections as a national referendum on the war, rather than as a patchwork of local races about local issues favored by Republican strategists.
The Lieberman-Lamont contest is a classic intraparty clash with echoes of the titanic 1968 Democratic primary. Hubert Horatio Humphrey was wrapped in the cloak of Democratic entitlement and liberal orthodoxy. But his dirty underwear represented the epitome of fawning obsequious, and sycophantic servility to LBJ's Vietnam war. Humphrey then, as with Lieberman today, represented the cork in the bottleneck of democracy which prevented our form of government from rescuing our nation from further self-mutilation.'Send more troops.That's why getting Momentum Joe's head on the platter is more important than Rumsfeld's. And more appropriate because Joe's scalp represents all of the compliant enablers of Bush and Cheney's UULUIUOI. If Joe gets buried in this Connecticut Primary, the war party and its fellow travelers will be served a notice written on the wall. They're all going to be wondering, 'Who's next'?
Pst!
Send more troops!'
. . . .as the Lebanon war continues to destroy innocent lives - most of them Lebanese - the conflict seems to be increasingly aimless. The Israeli air force has succeeded in killing perhaps 50 Hizbollah members and 600 civilians and has destroyed bridges, milk factories, gas stations, fuel storage depots, airport runways and thousands of homes. But to what purpose?Click on the link below to read the first portion of Fisk's column.
Does the United States any longer believe Israel's claims that it will destroy Hizbollah when its army clearly cannot do anything of the kind? Does Washington not realise that when Israel grows tired of this war, it will plead for a ceasefire - which only Washington can deliver by doing what it most loathes to do: by taking the road to Damascus and asking for help from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria?
What in the meanwhile is happening to Lebanon? Bridges and buildings can be reconstructed - with European Union loans, no doubt - but many Lebanese are now questioning the institutions of the democracy for which the US was itself so full of praise last year. What is the point of a democratically elected Lebanese government which cannot protect its people? What is the point of a 75,000-member Lebanese army which cannot protect its nation, which cannot be sent to the border, which does not fire on Lebanon's enemies and which cannot disarm Hizbollah? Indeed, for many Lebanese Shias, Hizbollah is now the Lebanese army.
So fierce has been Hizbollah's resistance - and so determined its attacks on Israeli ground troops in Lebanon - that many people here no longer recall that it was Hizbollah which provoked this latest war by crossing the border on 12 July, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two others. Israel's threats of enlarging the conflict even further are now met with amusement rather than horror by a Lebanese population which has been listening to Israel's warnings for 30 years with ever greater weariness. And yet they fear for their lives. If Tel Aviv is hit, will Beirut be spared. Or if central Beirut is hit, will Tel Aviv be spared? Hizbollah now uses Israel's language of an eye for an eye. Every Israeli taunt is met by a Hizbollah taunt.
And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a century? Extraordinary precedents are being set in this Lebanon war.
In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these past three decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a people have lost their terror, they cannot be re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now discovering in Iraq.
And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West, America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be another 9/11.
A Dog Story
All of a sudden, Barney beserked, went on a rampage and ripped apart a $900,000 collection of rare teddy bears. Barney started on Mabel, a 1909 German-made Steiff teddy bear once owned by Elvis Presley, currently owned by English aristocrat Benjamin Slade and worth £40,000.Barney has been a model guard dog for over six years. I still can't believe what happened.
Either there was a rogue scent of some kind on Mabel which switched on Barney's deepest instincts, or it could have been jealousy: I was just stroking Mabel and saying what a nice little bear she was. He started with Mabel, took a very large chunk out of Mabel almost severing her head, and then went mad. It took about 20 minutes to bring him out.
After West recovered Mabel's body, the Dobbie then went on the rampage for about 15 minutes, grabbing everything in his path until he was collared.It is entirely normal for the guard dogs to be off their lead to sniff around. Ironically, our insurance company insisted we had a dog.This story is not intended to be allegorical. Not at all.
I don't know what's going to happen to Barney. He is such a sweet dog normally. His owner is very shocked about the whole thing.
We just never expected anything like this to happen.
Up to 100 bears were involved in the massacre. It was a dreadful scene.
We will be holding an internal investigation as to why Mabel was left out - and heads will roll over this.
I'm sure Mabel can be repaired, but I fear that the bear's value will have seriously decreased.
I have apologized profusely to Sir Benjamin, but he just yelled at me. He couldn't believe we had allowed this to happen.
Iraqi policemen inspect the wreckage of a bus containing the remains of killed soldiers near Tikrit. . . . . CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but you won’t catch anyone saying it’s Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report.Booksellers report that there have been an explosion of works published on Iraq, but the American people are not buying them. They have become curiously incurious about Bush's un-provoked, unnecessary, largely unilateral invasion and unplanned occupation of Iraq (UULUIUOI).
This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined.
The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. “It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror,” said Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on July 18. “I mean, it’s summertime.” Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.
