[wgscott]

Did one woman's obsession take America to war?

She is a conspiracy theorist whose political conceits have consistently been proved wrong. So why were Bush and his aides so keen to swallow Laurie Mylroie's theories on Saddam and terrorism? By Peter Bergen
Peter Bergen
Monday July 5, 2004

The Guardian [London]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,38...103550,00.html

[Ninong]

How we got into Iraq is an open book. We just didn't realize how little hard information the hawks (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, et al) really had. Even Colin Powell was taken in by some of it and George Tenet has resigned rather than face the music. Cheney, in particular, put tremendous pressure on the CIA to come up with evidence linking Saddam to WMD's. And when he wasn't happy with the results, he got directly involved himself.

It was Dick Cheney who sent former Ambassador Wilson to Niger to investigate the British reports that Saddam's agents were trying to buy enriched uranium. We know he was told in early March of last year that the documents were forgeries. And yet these same documents were used as proof after Cheney knew they were forgeries. I believe both Colin Powell and Bush the Younger were kept in the dark on this one for quite some time.

Then, when all hell breaks loose, Cheney claims that he was not told by the CIA about Wilson's findings. Cheney commissioned this trip. Are we to believe that he was not interested in the results? Wilson believes strongly that it was Cheney's Chief of Staff who leaked the fact that his wife was a covert CIA agent to that moron Bob Novak. Has anybody asked Scooter Libby to take a lie detector test yet?

I believe Hans Blix has it right about what happened. He said that certain people in the administration were so convinced that Saddam had to have WMDs that they overinterpreted (diplomat speak) their intelligence. Blix is now convinced that Saddam probably did destroy all of his WMDs years ago just as he claimed. I am not saying that we should believe anything Saddam Hussein ever said but in hindsight it appears that he may have been telling the truth on that subject.

What makes this hard for people like Cheney to accept is because they were the guys paying Chalabi all these years to come up with "evidence" of WMDs. And Chalabi was paying people to defect and say whatever it is they needed to say to become rich and live in L.A. Even George Tenet knew Chalabi was a fraud. Colin Powell knew he was a phony. Only Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believed all the intel he was giving them. Poor Chalabi, he must have though this was Iran 50 years ago and we were going to install him as the new "Shah" of Iraq. They finally cut off his $300,000+ monthly allowance after they learned that he was the one who told the Iranians that we had broken their code.

Bottom line: Saddam's a bad guy but so are a lot of other tin horn dictators around the planet. What about that little jerk in the slave state of North Korea? We should not have invaded Iraq if we wanted to fight Al-Qaida. We still haven't cleaned up the mess in Afghanistan yet. And our new president there is president of Kabul only.

Was oil a major factor in our decision to invade Iraq? Yes, but it wasn't the prime motivating factor, it was just a fringe benefit. Revenge was the number one reason we invaded Iraq.

The problem now is how to get out of there as fast as possible without the country falling apart.

[wgscott]

Oil per se isn't the number one reason. Control of the oil supply, however, is a good candidate.

If by "revenge" you mean killing a bunch of Iraqis because we were attacked by a bunch of Saudis, I'm not sure I buy it. We could have alway attacked the country next door where Saudis come from.

Iraq, according to the US Department of Energy, contains the second largest proven oil reserves on the planet. *We are rapidly approaching the point at which 1/2 of the oil reserves on the planet have been exploited and consumed. *Hence there is now an acute need to bring Iraqi oil back on line for exploitation.

If killing Iraqis for demonstration effect was the main goal, Clinton was far more effective, with 1.2 million corpses, mostly childern not even born in 1991, piling up faster than Madeline Albright can say "It was worth it".

Chabali is a convenient excuse, but this idea that they were somehow mislead is itself a bit misleading. Propaganda does that. What I find remarkable is that the CIA is willing to allow the administration to state falsely that the CIA had bad intelligence. The CIAs intelligence was in fact quite accurate, as was Israeli intelligence [the two being inseparable anway]. They got it right,i.e., that Iraq posed no credible threat to any of its neighbors, let alone the US.

Meanwhile a 6' Arab on dialysis continues to elude us.

[wgscott]

Oh, by the way, we won't be getting out any time soon. The stated plan is to keep > 140,000 US troops there for at least 5 more years. The largest US embassy staph assigned to any country is currently being put in place in Iraq. The new US ambassador, John Negroponte, cut his teeth in Honduras, where he presided over Reagan's Contra war, teaching the "freedom fighters" how to make lampshades from the skins of Nicaraguan civilians. Should we (a) have elections in the fall, (b) have no election theft in the fall and (c) have the other guy actually take office after getting more votes, the situation will likely become worse because Kerry has vowed to increase the US presence, and all the "anyone but Bush" Democrats will quickly fall into line and support the war/occupation.

So when people tell me my vote for Ralph is equivalent to a vote for Bush, I say "good." People won't wake up to what is happening until they find themselves forced to do the Munich two-step goose-step.

[Ninong]

Originally Posted by wgscott

Oil per se isn't the number one reason. Control of the oil supply, however, is a good candidate.

Same thing.

If by "revenge" you mean killing a bunch of Iraqis because we were attacked by a bunch of Saudis, I'm not sure I buy it.

No, I'm not talking about 9/11 at all. They were intent on attacking Iraq before 9/11, even before they took office in January 2001. "Revenge" on the part of Rumsfeld and Cheney for being ignored by Bush the Elder when he listened to Colin Powell and refused to go into Baghdad. Revenge on the part of Bush the Younger for the attempt by Saddam to kill his father.

Chabali is a convenient excuse, but this idea that they were somehow mislead is itself a bit misleading.

The only people who were misled were the public at large and a few less-hawkish members of the administration. People like Cheney and Rumsfeld couldn't care less if Chalabi was manufacturing the evidence he knew they wanted.

What I find remarkable is that the CIA is willing to allow the administration to state falsely that the CIA had bad intelligence. The CIAs intelligence was in fact quite accurate, as was Israeli intelligence [the two being inseparable anway]. They got it right,i.e., that Iraq posed no credible threat to any of its neighbors, let alone the US.

The career people may have "got it right" but the man at the top shaded it to appease his overlords and he has now fallen on his sword -- "it's a slam dunk." According to this report, the CIA deliberately withheld information that did not support the views that they knew were held by Cheney and his pals: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...NGEH7H79B1.DTL

Meanwhile a 6' Arab on dialysis continues to elude us.

He's 6'5". And don't forget about the one-eyed mullah.

[Ninong]

Originally Posted by wgscott

Oh, by the way, we won't be getting out any time soon.
The stated plan is to keep > 140,000 US troops there for at least 5 more years. The largest US embassy staph assigned to any country is currently being put in place in Iraq. The new US ambassador, John Negroponte, cut his teeth in Honduras, where he presided over Reagan's Contra war, teaching the "freedom fighters" how to make lampshades from the skins of Nicaraguan civilians. Should we (a) have elections in the fall, (b) have no election theft in the fall and (c) have the other guy actually take office after getting more votes, the situation will likely become worse because Kerry has vowed to increase the US presence, and all the "anyone but Bush" Democrats will quickly fall into line and support the war/occupation.

Kerry may not win the election. I will vote for him because I am a Democrat but he reminds me of Mondale or McGovern with Gore's personality. If he wins, it will mean that a lot of people voted for him as the anybody-but-Bush candidate because his politics are too far to the left of mainstream America. Sure, he will carry 80% of San Francisco, but the rest of the country is not San Francisco. Or Santa Cruz. Or Berkeley. There are still places like Dallas.

We can't have "free" elections in Iraq if the polling places are being car-bombed. And we can't have "free" elections if we continue to do the stupid things that we have been doing, such as having the Marines lay siege to Falluja and then when the civilian death toll gets too high, turning the city over to the same people who were shooting at us and naming a Republican Guard general to lead them. Tactics like that will radicalize Iraq into various semi-independent city states.

[Ninong]

Originally Posted by wgscott

So when people tell me my vote for Ralph is equivalent to a vote for Bush, I say "good."

Here are a few more folks who agree with that sentiment:

Among those who have given recently to Nader are Houston businessman Nijad Fares, who donated $200,000 to President Bush's 2000 inaugural committee; Richard J. Egan, the former ambassador to Ireland, and his wife, Pamela, who have raised more than $300,000 for Bush; Michigan developer Ghassan Saab, who has given $30,000 to the RNC since 2001; and frozen food magnate Jeno Paulucci, and his wife, Lois, who have donated $150, 000 to GOP causes since 2000 alone.

All have donated the maximum $2,000 to Nader's campaign since April, records show. -- S.F. Chronicle, 7/9/04

[wgscott]

So?

Should Kerry give back all the millions and millions of dollars in campaign contributions from people and corporations that also gave money to George Bush (to hedge their bets in a two-faction/one party state)? Why isn't that an issue?

We now have four president/vp candidates who are pro-war, pro-Iraq corporate/military occupation, pro-"Patriot" Act, and support construction of a set of barriers that encircle Palestinian cantons "aka the Wall" despite rulings by the Israeli Supreme Court and the World Court against its legality.

Bush is hinting that he will suspend even the current electoral facade if there is another terrorist attack this summer or fall, and all these people care about is whether I vote for Ralph Nader?

[Ninong]

Not many people are worried about Bush carrying California, so it's OK to vote for Nader there. BTW, how does that work? Do you have to write his name in on the ballot? I don't believe he's on a single state ballot yet, right???

[PerryinCA]

I am totally against the patriot act, and the israeli situation is horrid, but I really don't see how we could possibly pull out of Iraq without losing the small amount of international optimism we have left. Should we seriously reconsider the way we are proceeding and implementing a puppet government, of course, but the Iraqis need support/security assitance of the USA and NATO for the near future. Although, to me that mean allowing them at least some control over occupying forces.

When you dummy it down, you make Bush and Kerry seem much more alike than they are. I think the nations social implications need to be looked at when comparing the two. I am suprised someone who is so anti-big-religion would make even minor comparison.

The Nader of today is nothing like the Nader of 10 years ago. Even some of his former top council and supporters think it's time for him to hang it up. Nothing good can come out of his running.

I am not a big Kerry supporter either, but he is by far the better of two evils that may end up president this coming term.

[wgscott]

Suicide Right on the Stage

The Demise of the Green Party

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR


"Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive."



Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)


So this is what alternative politics in America has degenerated to: Pat LaMarche, the newly minted vice-presidential candidate of the Green Party, has announced that she might not even vote for herself in the fall elections. The Greens, always a skittish bunch, are so traumatized by the specter of Bush and Cheney that they've offered up their own party-born out of rage at decades of betrayal by Democrats from Carter to Clinton-as a kind of private contractor for the benefit of those very same Democratic Party power brokers.

Take a close look at what LaMarche, a not-ready-for-primetime radio "personality", had to
say to say to her hometown newspaper in Maine only days after winning the nomination in Milwaukee.

"If the race is tight, I'll vote for Kerry," LaMarche said. "I love my country. But we should ask them that, because if Dick Cheney loved his country, he wouldn't be voting for himself."

This is the sound a political party makes as it commits suicide.

LaMarche's running mate, David Cobb, is no better. The obscure lawyer from Texas is a dull and spiritless candidate, handled by some truly unsavory advisors (more on them in future columns). In action, he functions as a kind of bland political zombie from a Roger Corman flick, lumbering across the progressive landscape from Oregon to Wisconsin and back again, to the tune of his liberal political masters. The tune? The familiar refrain of "Anybody But Bush."

Bland, yes, but it worked, thanks to the likes of Medea Benjamin and the pompous Ted Glick. At their recent convention in Milwaukee, the Green Party, heavily infiltrated by Democratic Party operatives, rejected the ticket of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo in favor of the sour campaign of Cobb and LaMarche.



This won't harm Nader much. Indeed, it may liberate him. Free of the Green Party's encyclopedic platform, Nader can now distill the themes of his campaign to the most potent elements (war, jobs, corruption and the environment) and, unburdened by the concern of party building, Nader can, if he chooses (and he should), focus his efforts only on the battleground states, where Kerry must either confront Nader's issues or lose the election. It's as simple as that.


The fatal damage in Milwaukee was done to the Green Party itself, where Cobb and his cohort sabotaged the aspirations of thousands of Greens who had labored for more than a decade to build their party into a national political force, capable of winning a few seats here and there and, even more importantly, defeating Democrats who behave like Republicans (cf: Al Gore). The fruits of all that intense grassroots organizing were destroyed in an instant.




But behold: the rebuffed Nader continues to poll nearly 6 percent without the Green Party behind him. Yet, you can't discern Cobb's numbers with an electron microscope. Of course, the pungent irony is that's precisely the way Cobb and his backers want it. So, the Greens have succeeded in doing what seemed impossible only months ago: they've made the quixotic campaign of Dennis Kucinich, which still chugs along claiming micro-victory after micro-victory long after the close of the primaries (indeed there have been more victories after the polls closed than before), seem like a credible political endeavor.


Of course, Cobb and Kucinich share the same objective function: to lure progressives away from Nader and back into the plantation house of the Democratic Party. But at least Kucinich remained a Democrat. Cobb and LaMarche were supposedly leaders of a political party that formed not in opposition to Republicans, but from outrage at the rightward and irredeemable drift of the Democratic Party. Apparently, the Green Party has not only lost its mind, it's lost its entire central nervous system, including the spine--especially its spine. They've surrendered to the politics of fear.

And once the white flag is raised there's little chance of recovering the ground you've given up.

Always nearly immobilized by an asphyxiating devotion to political correctness, the Green Party has now taken this obsession to its logical extreme by nominating a pair of political cretins at the top of its ticket. Under the false banner of the Cobb/Lamarche campaign, the Green Party is instructing its members to vote for its candidates only in states where their vote doesn't matter. This is the so-called safe state strategy.

Safe? Safe for whom? Not for Afghan or Iraqi citizens. Not for US troops. Not for the detainees at Gitmo, Bagram or Abu Ghraib. Not for migrant farm laborers or steelworkers. Not for the welfare mother or the 2 million souls rotting in American prisons. Not for the spotted owl, the streams of Appalachia or the rainforests of Alaska. Not for the residents of Cancer Alley or the peasants of Colombia or teen age girls slaving away in Nike's toxic Indonesia sneaker mills.
Not for the Palestinians, the Lakota of Pine Ridge or elementary school students from the hard streets of Oakland. Not for the hopeless denizens of death row or three strikers in for life for a gram of crack or gays hoping to unite in marriage or even cancer patients seeking simple herbal relief from excruciating pain.

A crucial player in this unsavory affair was Medea Benjamin, the diva of Global Exchange. In
rationalizing her decisive vote backing the Cobb/Lamarche ticket, Benjamin emitted this
profundity: "John Kerry is not George Bush." Apparently, that tiny sliver of genetic variation is
all it comes down to these days. Yes, Medea, you're right. Kerry is simply Kerry, a
bona fide war criminal, with a record of political infamy that is just as malodorous as that of George
Bush-only it's longer. Over the past four years, Kerry has been complicit in the enactment of some of Bush's most disgusting policies. Indeed, these days Kerry offers himself up mainly as a more competent manager of the Bush agenda, a steadier hand on the helm of the Empire.

Kerry stands unapologetically for nearly every issue that caused the Greens to bolt the Democratic Party. He was present at the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council, the claque of neo-liberals that seeks to purge the Democratic Party of every last vestige of progressivism and reshape it as a hawkish and pro-business party with a soft spot for abortion-essentially a stingier version of the Rockefeller Republicans.

Kerry enthusiastically backed both of Bush's wars and now, at the very moment Bush is signaling a desire toretreat, the senator is calling for 25,000 new troops to be sent to Iraq, where under his plan the US military will remain entrenched for at least the next four years.

Kerry supported the Patriot Act without reservation or even much contemplation. Lest you conclude that this was a momentary aberration sparked by the post-9/11 hysteria, consider the fact that Kerry also voted for the two Clinton-era predecessors to the Patriot Act, the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 CounterTerrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which were just as bad if
not worse.

Although he regularly hams it up in photo-ops with the barons of big labor, Kerry voted for NAFTA, the WTO and virtually every other job-slashing trade pact that has come before the senate. Kerry, who has courted and won the endorsement of nearly every police association
in the nation, regularly calls for putting another100,000 cops on the streets and even tougher criminal sanctions against victimless crimes. He refused to reconsider his fervid support for the insane war on drug users, which has destroyed families and clogged ur prisons with more than 2 million people, many of them young black men, whom the draconian drug laws specifically target without mercy. Kerry backs the racist death penalty and minimum mandatory sentences.



A couple of weeks ago the Congressional Black Caucus jeered Ralph Nader when he spoke to them about his campaign, a bizarre reception for a man who has been a tireless advocate for civil rights and poor people. If this group of legislators actually cared about the welfare of their constituents, instead of merely their sinecure within the party, they would hire the twin ominatrixes of Abu Ghraib, Lynddie England and Sabrina Harman, to clip a dogleash on Kerry (whodisgustingly said he'd like to become the second black president) to interrogate him about his dreadful record on civil rights when he comes calling seeking their support. Of course, they won't. TheCongressional Black Caucus is perhaps the only political conclave with clout as vaporous as the Greens.


Kerry, and his top advisor Rand Beers (a veteran ofthe Clinton and Bush National Security Council),
crafted Plan Colombia, the brutal and toxic war on Andean peasants, waged for the benefit of oil
companies under the phoney rubric of drug eradication. His scrawny energy plan, devoid of any real emphasis on conservation or solar power, calls for more off-shore oil leasing, widespread natural gas drilling, transcontinental pipelines and strip-mining for coal. His deficit-fixated economic policy, scripted by Wall Street bond tycoon Robert Rubin, iseven more austere than Clinton's.

Like Joe Lieberman, Kerry markets himself as a cultural prude, regularly chiding teens about the kind of clothes they wear, the music they listen to and the movies they watch. But even Lieberman didn't go so far as to support the censorious Communications Decency Act. Kerry did. Fortunately, even this Supreme Court had the sense to strike the law down, ruling that it trampled across the First Amendment. All of this is standard fare for contemporary
Democrats. But Kerry always goes the extra mile. The senator cast a crucial vote for Clinton's wretched bill to dismantle welfare for poor mothers and theirchildren and, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he continues to hail the mean-spirited measure as a tremendous success. This is merely a precis of the grim resumé of the man the Green Party now supports through the proxy candidacy of David Cobb. The message of the Cobb campaign is: a vote for Cobb is a vote for Kerry.
Translation: a vote for Cobb is a vote for war, and everything that goes along with it. It's also a vote for political self-annihilation. David Cobb is the Jim Jones of the Green Party. Form a line and pass the Kool-Aid. Risk free voting? I wouldn't bet your life on it.

[wgscott]

Originally Posted by Ninong

Not many people are worried about Bush carrying California, so it's OK to vote for Nader there. BTW, how does that work? Do you have to write his name in on the ballot? I don't believe he's on a single state ballot yet, right???

Don't worry. This is a Democracy. I vote for whom I am told, and if Diebold is forced to give me a paper printout of my vote before they delete it, I will be grateful and pretend that my vote counted.