First Draft

'Hey guys, you made it'

On the end of things: 

The final column of around 100 mostly U.S. military MRAP armored vehicles carrying 500 U.S. troops trundled across the southern Iraq desert from their last base through the night and daybreak along an empty highway to the Kuwaiti border.

Honking their horns, the last batch of around 25 American military trucks and tractor trailers carrying Bradley fighting vehicles crossed the border early Sunday morning, their crews waving at fellow troops along the route.

"I just can't wait to call my wife and kids and let them know I am safe," Sgt. First Class Rodolfo Ruiz said as the border came into sight. Soon afterwards, he told his men the mission was over, "Hey guys, you made it."

Nine years. Billions and billions of dollars. Thousands killed and wounded. And lots of columnists who were happy as hell to cheer on a war they or their children would have no part in fighting, just because to do otherwise would make them liberal, or possibly French. 

In the coming years we're going to hear lots of very smart people on our televisions tell us very gravely that it all seemed like a good idea at the time, or that if it didn't, we were all as a country understandably traumatized by 9/11 and needed to blow some shit up, or were especially susceptible to lies by those who wanted to blow some shit up. 

Never forget that not everybody lost their minds. Never forget that some people stood up. Never forget that some people fought back. 

I guess we can all forget it now. I guess it's all okay. 

Until the next time. 

A. 

Condi Shows Up to Shoot the Wounded

Imagine if you'd said something back when it could have been of use to someone.

A.

The Fool Who Follows Him

Taking advice from the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the earth. No wonder people want Rick Perry in the Republican race for president.

A thank you to the 457 people who e-mailed this to me. My blood pressure is always so nice and low before I check my inbox.

A.

Nobody's Responsible for the War

Seriously:

Rumsfeld is the latest to join a circular firing squad of former Bush administration officials continuing their bureaucratic disputes in published form ---- what former Bush Pentagon official Doug Feith dubbed the "I-was-surrounded-by-idiots school of memoir writing."

In his own book, Feith blamed Colin Powell and the CIA.

Former CIA chief George Tenet wrote a memoir blaming Vice President Dick Cheney and Rice.

Bremer's memoir blames Rumsfeld. Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's book blamed Karl Rove. Rove's memoir blamed McClellan.

Bush revealed that he considered replacing Cheney.

Rumsfeld, for his part, fingers Bremer as "reluctant to cede any significant authority" to the Iraqis.

But hey, as long as everybody's responsible, we have no choice but to move forward and look toward winning the future and not account for anything!

A.

Armistice Day

Remembering:

Millions across the globe on Thursday paid their respects to those who sacrificed their lives during the First World War.

In Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and several senior government and military officials gathered to remember the fallen.
 
More than 1.3 million French troops died during the conflict, the largest losses for an individual country with the Allied forces.

And we lost our fucking minds when they refused to sign on to our Great Iraqi Adventure, because they clearly were insufficiently brave.

A.

Well, It's All Okay Now, Joe Klein

Joke Line apologizes for being a mealy-mouthed prick, but hey, he didn't really mean it, anyway:

It is appropriate that Obama's speech to the DAV will not be remembered as vividly as George W. Bush's puerile march across the deck of an aircraft carrier, costumed as a combat aviator against a golden sunset, to announce — seven years and tens of thousands of lives prematurely — the "end of combat operations." Obama's announcement was no celebration. It was a somber acknowledgment that amends will be made to those whose lives were shattered and that their courageous service in an unnecessary cause will be honored. A national discussion about America's place in the world, and the military's excessive place in our foreign policy, would also be appropriate in the wake of this disaster, but I'm not holding my breath. 

As for myself, I deeply regret that once, on television in the days before the war, I foolishly — spontaneously — said that going ahead with the invasion might be the right thing to do. I was far more skeptical in print. I never wrote in favor of the war and repeatedly raised the problems that would accompany it, but mere skepticism was an insufficient reaction too. The issue then was as clear as it is now. It demanded a clarity that I failed to summon. The essential principle is immutable: we should never go to war unless we have been attacked or are under direct, immediate threat of attack. Never. And never again.

Well, Joke, it didn't really demand clarity. It demanded that you sit at the table with the pot-smoking hippies and listen to them play their digeridoos or whatever and smell their patchouli while the cool kids were over at the other table fucking Dean Wormer's wife and giving everybody wedgies. That's all this was about and that's all this will ever be about so long as our national pundit class is composed entirely of fucking sheltered children who have no idea how anything functions outside their gated mental communities.

If the war had been a glorious success? If in the wake of our freedom bombs people had decided they loved us more than they loved their dead children and built statues of George W. Bush in every public square and Iraq made Orange County look like a ghetto? Then Joke would be apologizing for being insufficiently supportive, having only once weakly approved of going to war, and being even more skeptical in print about what in retrospect was so perfectly obvious. Then he'd be talking about the moral clarity demanded of us in order to kick those hippies right in the face, because this isn't for one second about being right or wrong.

This is Joke apologizing for having been, marginally, kind of, sort of, spontaneously, and only on TV, on the losing side.

Via Balloon Juice's comments.

A.

Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

Bring the troops home.

A.

Guns, No Butter

Another entry in the "ain't democracy in Iraq wonderful" dossier:

A senior Iraqi spy has accused the prime minister, Nour al-Maliki, of handing out thousands of guns to tribal leaders in a bid to win votes. The claim was made by Iraqi National Intelligence Service former spokesman, Saad al-Alusi, a week before Iraq's general election, in which allegations of vote buying and exorbitant handouts have become widespread.

Maliki, who faces a bitterly contested final week of campaigning ahead of the7 March poll, has been photographed handing out guns to supporters in southern Iraq, engraved with a personal message from his office. However he denies that the delivery of weapons, along with cash payments, were improper.

Alusi, who was the INIS spokesman until he was asked to move to another ministry eight days ago, said some 8,000 guns were ordered from a Serbian supplier at the end of 2008 for use by intelligence officers. However he claimed Maliki "denied our contract at the last minute and made his own contract of 10,000 pistols, which he has used as election propaganda for himself and his party.

Well, isn't that special?  I wonder if some of our wingers will follow al-Maliki's example since they're so enamored of Iraqi "democracy." This could inspire Rick Perry to do likewise in Texas or perhaps it's a way for the faltering candidacy of Kay Bailey Hutchison to get, uh, fired up. After all, vote buying has a long and glorious history in Texas.

Meanwhile In The U.K.

The Chilcot inquiry into Britain's role in the Iraq War had its star witness last week, former Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Artful Dodger was nervous but polished. He was also unrepentant despite all the blood that has flowed from his being W's poodle and obeying his master's call to war.

Even if Blair's testimony was unsatisfying and the questioning not tough enough, the U.K. is to be praised for holding public hearings into the fiasco and calling the decision makers to the witness stand. We'd all like to see Bush, Cheney, Rummy and the lot testify under oath or should I say lie?

Here's how ITV News covered Blair's testimony. They also spent some time talking to the protesters; many of whom lost relatives in Iraq:

Meanwhile In The U.K.

It's been ignored by the American MSM but there's a serious investigation going on about British entry into the Iraq War. Tony Blair is, quite rightly, taking it in his dimpled chin. The latest shoe to drop involves the contents of a private letter to the Prime Minister from his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw:

Jack Straw privately warned Tony Blair that an invasion of Iraq was legally dubious, questioned what such action would achieve, and challenged US claims about the threat from Saddam Hussein, it was revealed today .

Straw, foreign secretary at the time, gave what now seems prophetic advice in a letter marked "secret and personal", 10 days before Blair met George Bush at the US president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. That was nearly a year before the invasion.

In his letter, about which he is expected to be questioned when he testifies at the Chilcot inquiry this week, Straw warned Blair, then prime minister: "The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few … there is at present no majority inside the PLP [parliamentary Labour party] for any military action against Iraq."

Straw warned of two legal "elephant traps". He said, "regime change per se is no justification for military action", and "the weight of legal advice here is that a fresh [UN] mandate may well be required."

Sigh.

If only Mr. Straw had followed the example of his predecessor, Robin Cook, and resigned from the Cabinet in protest instead of enabling Bush and Blair's mad dash to war. (Cook resigned as leader of the House of Commons in opposition to the war.)

Straw's assessment of the situation was spot on but his judgment about staying in office was errant. British pols resign from the government all the time over policy disputes and/or matters of principle. If only some of our pols would do likewise. Paging Colin Powell...

Life During Wartime

Married and shipping out:

Two 19-year-olds are the first couple to be married in a civil ceremony in Cook County in 2010.

Janette Diaz of Schererville, Ind., and Jeremy Rodriguez of Chicago said their vows at 9:30 a.m. with County Clerk David Orr presiding. Rodriguez, a U.S. Marine who has already served one tour of duty in Iraq and will be doing a tour in Afghanistan in 2011, leaves Monday for Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

The couple arrived for their marriage at 6 a.m., well before the office opened at 9 a.m.

A.

I Love My People

U RAH RAH WISCONSIN:

According to a military official, detainees at a Wisconsin National Guard camp in Iraq are using Brett Favre as a manner of getting at the guard troops there.

"They know Favre by name," said First Lieutenant Tim Boehnen, who is from New Richmond, Wis. 

"One of the big words they know now is shenanigan.  They'll constantly talk about 'Favre shenanigans,' 'He's so good for the Vikings,' and 'The Packers have got to really feel bad about that one.'  "

According to Boehnen, it started when troops there started decorating their camp in Packers colors.

"We try to allow our troops to have as much fun in the compound as they can while still maintaining our professional manner," explained Boehnen.

"We spend a lot of time painting and making our compound our own and representing us.  Obviously, wherever Wisconsinites go, we bring the Packers with us."

Once the decoration job happened, detainees became curious.

"They obviously then started up the conversations, and started talking about Brett Favre.  They soon learned about Favre going to the Vikings, and things just started going downhill from there."

Via Maitri.

A.

Boy, I'm Glad We Defunded ACORN

Solved damn near all our problems:

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

A.

Must-see TV

I may have, on occasion, professed that I rather like Rachel Maddow, and I've more than once posted here about her.  This one, though, isn't just fangirl squee, trust me.

Maddow knocked it out of the park last night with this Tom Ridge interview. If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth your attention. The clip below is one of three, the other two are on her show site. She devoted over half the program to the conversation with Ridge, starting with the topic of whether politics influenced DHS terror alerts, whether Ridge has  backtracked on statements to that effect made in his new book, then moving on to Iraq intelligence and the failured FEMA response to Katrina.

It's a remarkable bit of broadcasting, not just for what Ridge says or doesn't say, and not just for Maddow's tenacious questioning. What really struck me as I watched it was that something real was happening here, something we don't see very often. By "real" I obviously don't mean Ridge is telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Rather that, as the interview unfolds, there's a palpable sense that we, along with Ridge, really don't know where it's going to end.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Build a Library in Iraq

David needs our help.

A.

They're Finally Throwing Flowers and Candy

AP Photo.

It won't be over, not for a very long time:

So far, more than 200,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated at VA medical facilities -- three times what the VA projected, according to a Government Accountability Office analysis. More than one-third of them have been diagnosed with mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder, acute depression and substance abuse. Thousands more have crippling disabilities such as brain or spinal injuries. In each of the last two years, the VA has underestimated the number of veterans who would seek help and the cost of treating them -- forcing it to go cap in hand to Congress for billions of dollars in emergency funding.

Heckuva job, Bushie.

A.

Leaving

On Tuesday:

BAGHDAD – Iraqi security forces bolstered checkpoints and banned motorcycles from the streets of Baghdad as they prepared Sunday for more violence before this week's withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from the capital and other cities and towns.

Despite the increased checks, a roadside bomb targeting a U.S. convoy in eastern Baghdad wounded six bystanders. It was unclear if anyone in the convoy was injured, police said.

A car bomb also exploded in the parking lot of a police academy in western Baghdad, killing one police officer and wounding six others, police said, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Iraq's main Sunni political bloc joined Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in describing the June 30 deadline for the U.S. withdrawal from urban areas as a turning point for the country.

Al-Maliki's government has declared Tuesday National Sovereignty Day and decreed a public holiday.

A.

People From Whom I Would Not Take Advice

Little Dougie Feith, who is still insisting he made George W. Bush a perfectly good war and Bush fucked it up:

This last problem may be on the way to being solved. In 2004, at the Pentagon's urging, President George Bush created a new State Department office for civilian stabilization and reconstruction missions. He directed that office to create a Civilian Response Corps (CRC) so the president can mobilize trained civilian volunteers the way he already can mobilize volunteers for the military reserve. President Barack Obama is supporting this effort, and the Corps will receive $323 million if Congress approves the budget Mr. Obama submitted last week.

You mean the kind of reconstruction missions you and your pals Wolfowitz and Perle opposed while you were trying to hand the country over to Ahmed Chalabi?

Those?

Historically, when civilians have not been available for such work, it has fallen to U.S. military personnel. In Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, American soldiers and Marines have had to organize municipal governing councils, arrange for basic services (such as electricity), and manage hospitals. These tasks divert the military from its core combat-related missions and could be better done by skilled civilians.

Like those Blackwater/KBR/Halliburton fellows!

The answer to that last question may be for Congress to direct the Pentagon to lend State a number of planners, especially some with experience in managing the military reserve.

BWAHAHAHAHA. Yes, because the Pentagon planners did such a bang-up job providing for the reconstruction of Iraq after we blowed it all up. Let's get those guys on the case.

A.

Doug Feith Just Can't Help Himself

Obama's decision to withdraw from Iraq proves I was RIGHT!

President Obama highlighted U.S. accomplishments in Iraq: doing away with Saddam Hussein's regime, helping establish a sovereign government, dealing al-Qaeda in Iraq "a serious blow," and lifting Iraq out of "tyranny and terror." His plan for ending the war is designed to preserve the value of these accomplishments. Rightly, his emphasis is on securing U.S. success, not cutting losses.

His speech effectively repudiated the extreme antiwar rhetoric of recent years. There was no mention of Iraq as a disaster, a fraud or even a blunder. He presumably still thinks the war should not have been fought, but Obama chose not to make this point, accentuating the positive instead.

In setting aside the 16-month exit timetable that he had promised while running for the White House, and on other issues, Obama unapologetically demonstrates that, while campaigners can be simplistic and rigid, responsible officials grapple with complexities and require flexibility. So we should expect that, if necessary at the time, he will extend his new 18-month timetable for ending the U.S. combat mission. He has built substantial flexibility into his new plan: First, he intends to keep a U.S. force of 35,000 to 50,000 troops in Iraq beyond August 2010. And second, he says that U.S. forces will continue to conduct "targeted counter-terrorism missions" even after our "combat mission" ends.

This Iraq speech was cautious. It neither represents nor promises ultimate victory in Iraq. But it does flatly contradict those war critics who damned the U.S. effort as an irredeemable failure. It represents the defeat of the defeatists.

Wow. I think Dougie might have a little crush here on Obama As Excuse For Me To Once Again Blame Hippies For My War Sucking.

And you know, really, I don't think anybody expects of the president of the United States the same phraseology used on the campaign trail. I don't think that was the point. I think Obama's a little past the "How about this shitty war, Cleveland, huh?" stage of his career. I think by virtue of the giant mandate given Obama he's pretty much absolved himself of the need to prove that the war needs to end. There's nothing more to be gained here. It's over. Should we ever again be in the position to get argued into a war by a bunch of stupid bullies, then it's time to pull out the flamethrower again, but for now, in Iraq? Continuing to whale on Doug and the people who fucked this all up is, for the president, inelegant.

For you and I, of course, it's Tuesday. So I note that Doug's employed:

Senior fellow at the Hudson Institute

Doug's in some heady company over there. Robert Bork, Meyrav Wurmser, Norman Podhoretz ... The whole wingnut welfare band got back together! You can tell it's a quality place, too, by the way people's bios cite their numerous appearances on Fox News and especially the O'Reilly Factor.

It's like the Next Republican Administration Waiting Room. I gotta get me a fellowship.

A.

Cheney: Why So Serious, Iraqis?

Why don't you love us?

MR. LEHRER: The president has also said that he made some mistakes in the last eight years. Did you make any?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, make mistakes - I can think of places where I underestimated things. For example, talking about Iraq, the extent of which the Iraqi population had been beaten down by Saddam Hussein was greater than I anticipated. That is, we thought that the Iraqis would be able to bounce back fairly quickly once Saddam was gone or the new government established and step up and take major responsibilities for governing Iraq, building a military and so forth and that took longer than I expected.

You solipsistic asshole. "Bounce back?" Sure, we'd just sort of blowed up their home and killed their leader and told them to loot all they wanted because freedom was untidy, and by the way fuck your libraries, we have oil fields to protect, you can always buy the priceless antiquities of Babylon back on Ebay, you stupid bitches. Sure, we'd just done all that in pursuit of weapons they didn't have and terrorists they didn't harbor, but why on earth would they not want to step right up and work with us? Honestly, I can't figure it out.

This has been a wingnut article of faith for some time, that everything would have been fine if the Iraqis had been properly grateful for the freedom killing we did of them, instead of acting like children throwing an IED tantrum, and you expect this sort of shit from Little Green Fucktards and the Freepi, but you don't expect it out of the mouth of the vice president of the United States. Or maybe you do, which is why in six days he's going to be unemployed.

A.

Had To

Had to:

GAFFNEY: May I state my position rather than you stating it? May I do that? My position is that it’s regrettable that any Americans died. It is regrettable that they had to die, but I believe they did have to die.

It's a little too easy and cheap to ask what precisely Gaffney has lost because of this war, not only because I don't believe you have to have friends in a war to give a fuck about whether that war was a mistake, but also because I don't think there's any personal stake that could convince me Gaffney is uttering some kind of profound truth here.

It's a little too easy and cheap to make qualifications for holding an opinion, like you have to be a woman to take a position on reproductive rights or be black to give a shit about racism or be gay to think marriage shouldn't be a way to bludgeon your morality into everybody's world. You don't have to have someone you love in harm's way to say what Gaffney said, so I don't want to go that route; you just have to be a complete and total jackass and that tendency crosses all manner of life circumstances and for the most part political spectra. HAD TO? Really? It's the blithe nature of the statement that chills and sickens me. Had To.

Had to, why? Because, as Chris Matthews so aptly points out (ack, wash off the cooties I got from writing that), Frank Gaffney needed to feel better. Frank Gaffney and all his warblogger friends and all the people who waved their red white and blue pom-poms around and baked an American flag cake and knitted the troops a scarf, they need to feel better about what they were doing. They need to feel good about it now, especially now, as the darkness is starting to settle in and Bush is on his way out and Marley's Ghost comes clanking up the stairs after them. No bit of undigested potato this, the karmic bitchslap's coming and you can hear it in the hopeless desperation in his words: Had To.

Here's the thing, about being sure you're saving the world. What you want is to be right, partly because you think that's the easy way out but mostly because your nightmare is basically what Gaffney's facing: In over his head, in over the heads of two countries, you can't let go of the line tethering you to your idea because your idea's all you've got left and if that's wrong, who are you then? Why did you do what you did, if it wasn't a question of had to? If you had a choice, if you frame everything you do in your entire life as a choice, and take away all the "had to" in your head, would you do anything differently? And if the answer to that question is yes, then you start wondering what on earth you're doing, and feeling bad about how much you lied to yourself and everyone around you, and recognizing that you have been a tremendous douchebag making excuses for yourself. Excuses like Had To.

For Frank Gaffney and a lot of other members of the We Love Fucking Freedom So Have Some Shoved Up Your Ass And Like It Corps, that kind of self-awareness isn't really an option. So they just repeat the excuses louder, until even Chris Matthews, who is the king of going along with whatever the popular storyline is at the moment and making up justifications later, looks at you  and says, "I'm going to send you three ghosts, motherfucker, be ready."

A.

Proved Fucking Right

Column:

Asked by Congress in 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, how many troops it would take to win the war that President George W. Bush was planning to wage there, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki replied, "I would say that what's been mobilized to this point - something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We're talking about posthostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence."

Several hundred thousand.

It staggered the senators who were listening. After all, they were being told by the president and his deputies that the war with Iraq would be quick and easy, requiring a relatively small force. A cakewalk, the president's conservative pundit allies were saying. Easy-peasy. Now here was this guy, talking about how hard it would be.

"And so it takes a significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this," Shinseki told the Senate.

For his honesty and sound judgment, the lifelong army officer, the first American of Asian ancestry to become a four-star general, was attacked, marginalized and finally driven into retirement, the subject of mockery during the early days of the war. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Shinseki's numbers were "wildly off the mark." The chairman of the Joint Chiefs called Shinseki's statement a "guestimate."

Four years later, with Iraq in flames, President Bush was finally forced to listen to the man he had his small-minded surrogates deride. In calling for what is now known as the "troop surge" to pacify the country, Bush said, "Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have."

To which anybody paying attention when Shinseki spoke was shaking his head saying, "No kidding, pal."

A.

Obama To Bush

"How would you like to SUCK MY BALLS?"

Seriously, is there another interpretation of Obama's appointing the guy whose reaction to the war in Iraq was "The ... hell?"

A.

The Stakes

No more like this.

There's just under one month left before the election.

And I don't know about you, but I'm fucking sick of looking at this.  For five-and-a-half years I've been checking that page.  Almost 4,200 of our brothers and sisters have had their lives abbreviated by this clusterfuck of a war.  It has to end.  I know the economy's in the shitter, and McCain is a crazy old coot, and gas costs four bucks a gallon.  But let's not forget about this stupid fucking unnecessary war.  Hell's not hot enough for the fucks who are responsible for it.  This war is a theft, and what's being stolen is not only treasure--it's human lives, too.  Hundreds of thousands of them, and surely more to follow.

Those are the stakes.

The Contrast That Counts

Maybe McCain can give one of his houses to homeless veterans.

Also, can I just say? Well done, Democrats. Well done, Obama campaign. Well done, bloggers everywhere. THIS is what I'm talking about when I say you don't skate backwards. More shitstorms like this one, please, from now until November.

A.

"The heavy-footed hoped to silence us"

Once, years ago, on a sunny afternoon, I almost died.

It was a boating accident, three teenagers miles offshore in a 16-foot Kestrel, a speedy British-built centerboard racing boat. It was an exhilaratingly windy day. The tall redheaded boy at the tiller was an experienced sailor, he knew how to make his boat fly. The other girl was my best friend, a star athlete.  Our feet tucked under the hiking strap, we were giddy with the speed, straining to lean back and out as far as we could over the wet chop, getting sprayed with each bounce, laughing our salty asses off. Then the hiking strap snapped.

We flew like watch springs in three separate directions, backwards. Tumbling over and down, then underwater forever.  Then up, gasping for air, separated from each other and unable to see over the whitecaps for more than a second at a time. It turned out that the Amazon athlete had lied to everyone for years about knowing how to swim. We were 16, of course we hadn't worn the life jackets.

We all made it. The redhead kid managed somehow to keep the jock from drowning them both in her hysteria, I still don't understand how I was able to swim back to the half-sunken boat, dive underneath the limp sail and through the mess of floating ropes, find the life vests, then swim back against the current to the others. We had to float the six or seven miles back in, it was close to midnight by the time we made it, falling and stumbling ashore, our legs like jelly from being in the water so long. Ironically, all our parents were completely oblivious, each thinking their kid was at one of the other's houses. By the time they found out, we were safe home, loopy and tired, full of teenage bravado.

But in that first slow-motion half hour, out there fighting those waves, nothing had been certain.

And here's the thing. It doesn't matter what you're doing, where you are, flailing and drowning on the open sea, or asleep on your couch. It doesn't matter how old, young, smart, dumb, poor or rich you are, on skid row or behind a huge desk in the corner office.  Nothing ever is certain, ever. Merrily fucking merrily, life, and safety, is but a fake out, a total illusion. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  He doesn't know how to get back to Kansas either, no matter what he says.

'Regard all dharmas as dreams'.

That also applies to politics and presidential elections. What, you disagree? Don't argue with me, argue with an esteemed poet. In 2007, Adrienne Rich was honored by the organization Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), a New York non-profit that singles out deserving activists working for social justice to receive their annual Risk-Taker Awards:

This campaign? This election? It's today. It's tomorrow. Wherever the edge of your envelope is, it's time to push it. It's time to be a risk taker. No matter what they tell us otherwise, no matter how they try to scare the crap out of us, or lull us into trusting their version of reality, it's time, our time. We have a choice every day to stay scared when they get the best of us, or to keep breathing through it, trusting ourselves in the midst of the uncertainty.  Because it's all uncertainty.

That's the other other thing. You already know this, all of you, but the conventions, then the election, and then... we have to keep it up.  Even when/if our guy wins, we have to keep it up.  We're going to have to fight him, and we are going to have to fight the other guys, and they will never give up. Every cabinet appointment, every agency head, every judge, every anybody, every bill, every vote, every anything. None of it is certain.

"Thank you demons, for coming today. Come again tomorrow then. And from time to time, we will converse."

Rich lays it out for us, the true risks of silence, what it costs to speak, and why we have to pay that cost, have to make that choice to remain fully conscious of the nature of realities both internal and external.

The second poem is one of Rich's own, and by all means, go watch her read it, in the original video here.

For more information on the work of JFREJ, visit their website

They're Not Like Us

Not that this is new, but HONESTLY:

He seems to think the Iraqis are sad and mad because we liberated them instead of letting them liberate themselves. It's nice that Tommy Friedman likes this happy rhetoric of liberation, though it's a bit different from the days when he was saying we invaded Iraq so our soldiers could go door to door telling Iraqis to Suck. On. This. I don't know how much our soldiers actually did this, but in any case Little Tommy Friedman can't get himself to understand that maybe Iraqis are sad and mad because we invaded and occupied their country and then hundreds of thousands of people died.

[snip]

But more than that, we may remember that many Iraqis did, in fact, fight for it. They didn't fight for it in the way Tommy Friedman imagines they should have, which I think involves having a staring contest or something. They fought for it by killing a lot of people and blowing a lot of things up.

I know it's a DFH thing to say, that people who do bad things should at least be understood, if only because you can't fight something you don't get, but come the fuck on. It's not like this is a way of behavior we've never seen before. For Friedman to pretend that this wasn't visible coming about twenty miles down the pike is unconscionably dense, even for a splendid specimen of garden implement like him.

I am really coming to dislike this right-wing meme that Iraqis simply aren't grateful enough for the glorious freedom we gave them. It's been clear since at least 2005 that that was going to be the way we got out of this war and pretended not to be the asshole: blame the people whose country we blew up for not wanting to rebuild it themselves with duct tape and baling wire in their infinite spare time, you know, the vast hours they have to spend twiddling their thumbs, in between trying to find clean water and dodging mortar fire. That's how we're going to excuse what we did, by blaming them for not liking it. "Eh, we tried, but you ungrateful bitches threw it back in our faces and then blew some stuff up like animals. Fuck you. You don't DESERVE the glory of our incoming grenades!"

Moreover, I am getting incoherent about the condescending, patronizing tone of Friedman and his "expert" columnist ilk. It's just beyond the fucking pale to look at suicide bombings and political violence as somehow "other," as something so alien we couldn't possibly, no, we would never. Christian Bale takes his shirt off a lot in Batman Begins (bear with me, here) so I watch it pretty much every time it's on whatever random cable channel is providing background just for the push-up scene, but in talking about how to wreck civilizations: "In Gotham we tried a new kind of weapon: Economics." Sad that I should have to go to a movie about a fucking comic book character for a point that should be made by the likes of our newspaper columnists. Like, say, Tom Friedman. Who is busy pointing out how much better than this we are. We fought for our freedom. We don't do suicide bombings. We don't do political violence. We're different.

Here's a clue for the golf outing set: Just because our people die of poverty and preventable disease (mostly) quietly and out of sight of elite columnists like Friedman doesn't make us a place free of political violence. Poverty is political violence. Substandard health care is political violence. And yes, drive-by shootings and systemic neglect of entire swaths of humanity referred to as "the ghetto" constitute political violence. Just because nobody's waving a flag when they die doesn't make our society any more reasonable or moral.

Walk a mile from Friedman's shiny office. Walk a mile from my house. Open your fucking eyes. We "fought" for this society, and it's full of violence, and most of it begot by the same things that cause violence anywhere. Take hundreds of desperate people, wall them off from their fellow men and women, and tell everybody to forget they exist. Let their sewer pipes rot. Shut off their heat. Ignore the holes in their streets. Skip their housing inspections, and when they call to complain, tell them there's nothing you can do. See how grateful they are for your benevolence then. See how different it looks from fucking Baghdad. We're all people. We're all the same. We do this to each other and then we dare act like we don't understand?

Friedman thinks he's standing on a pedestal here. It's a rickety stack of wooden boxes, half of them rotted, teetering this way and that, and he hears the roar of the storm coming to knock it all over and thinks it's applause. You mentally tone-deaf asshole, Tom. You ought to be ashamed.

Schmuck.

A.

Doug Feith Takes Your Questions

Scout, who likes to raise my blood pressure as early as possible in the day, sends this over to the Doug Feith Desk here at First Draft World HQ. And I pass it along to you all. Be polite. Not because he deserves it, but because you do.

For what it's worth, here are mine:

Why did your book not address the scandal over Larry Franklin's resignation and subsequent guilty plea? Did you not feel it was important to explain why your office harbored a traitor?

If you truly felt that the Bush administration was taking the wrong tack by proposing a lengthy occupation of Iraq, as you've posited in numerous interviews, why did you not resign and speak up immediately, and try to save thousands of Iraqi and American lives?

A.

Cheney's Idea of Flowers and Candy

Oy.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — One U.S. soldier was killed and five others were wounded today in a bizarre shooting incident near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad, according to U.S. and Iraqi authorities.

Iraqi authorities said a member of the town council, which is part of the U.S.-allied Iraqi government, carried out the shootings,

An Iraqi police captain, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the incident, said local council member Raed Hmood Ajil opened fire on the U.S. troops for unknown reasons and was killed at the scene by American forces. The account could not immediately be verified.

The U.S. military could confirm only that "initial reports indicate one Coalition forces (soldier) killed in action, five Coalition forces soldiers wounded in action and one enemy killed in action" at 1 p.m. today in the Salman Pak area.

There's A Stunner

Look. I drove home yesterday from a picnic in a rainstorm, listening to the radio simulcast of the 60 Minutes program on this. Very instructive in some ways (seriously, of course nobody speaking Arabic would monitor this thing, actual knowledge of anything that could prove useful is a drawback in this administration), very annoying in others, in that everybody involved just seemed shocked as hell that an American propaganda channel was viewed by its audience as ... an American propaganda channel. How dare those Arab rubes not swallow the freedom we so generously feed them? How dare they be aware of the most basic facts about something? The nerve!

And as usual the "You're PAYING for this!" construct pisses me off. Not that I'm thrilled to be shelling out cash for something that doesn't work, but in the realm of Iraq War fuckups, this one hardly cracks the top ten. Get back to me about Al Hurra when we've stopped paying Halliburton.

A.

Hitchens & Feith: Like A Law Firm That Gets Sued A Lot

Hitchens wonders why:

As I write this on the first day of June, about a book that was published in the first week of April, the books pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe have not seen fit to give Feith a review.

I don't know, Chris, maybe because he is at best a complete ignoramus and at worst a complete fucking liar? Yeah, that's right, I'm uncivil. Civility wasn't doing me any good and my blood pressure kept going up, so fuck it. From the day he arrived in Washington Douglas Feith has been involved in promoting the absolute worst possible foreign policy anyone could come up with. I mean if you tried, if you and a team of experts from the University of Chicago sat down and TRIED with a whiteboard and a blender full of margaritas to come up with a foreign policy more batshit than this, you couldn't, and for that this guy has done nothing but rise in the halls of power. Last I checked he wasn't suffering unduly, and not for nothing but maybe the reason the NYT, Post, LAT and the Globe haven't reviewed him is because "Asshole's Assistant Publishes Book Even Paul Bremer Thinks Is Dumb" is a little too much even for our increasingly coarse public discourse.

Schmuck.

A.

Damn

Heckuva job, Chimpy.

ST. LOUIS (AP) - The father of the first female soldier from Missouri to die in Iraq wants Congress to force the Army to reopen its investigation into her death.

John Johnson, father of LaVena Johnson, said yesterday that he met in April with Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, as well as others.

[snip]

Army Pfc. LaVena Johnson was found dead July 19, 2005, in a small contractor’s tent in Balad, Iraq, after only eight weeks in the country. Army investigators and coroners ruled she had shot herself in the mouth with an M-16 rifle.

Johnson contends his daughter was attacked, raped and had her body dumped in the tent, where a fire was started in hopes of destroying her remains.

[snip]

Johnson said he presented Skelton and others the names of nine other military women who were raped or murdered while in the service. He said he became aware of their stories as he investigated his daughter’s.

He said there’s a pattern and "whoever is behind this must have significant rank or prestige."

He said color photographs, documents and autopsy reports he has obtained from Army investigators indicate his daughter was scratched, bruised and burned and that her genital area showed evidence of lye "to destroy DNA evidence." An autopsy performed at Dover Air Force Base concluded that she died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The St. Louis medical examiner reached the same conclusion after Johnson had his daughter’s body exhumed for a second autopsy.

The Pentagon reported in March that men and women in uniform reported 2,688 sexual assaults last year. That compares to 2,947 reported the year before and 2,400 in 2005.

Crusade

Oy.

FALLUJAH, Iraq — At the western entrance to the Iraqi city of Fallujah Tuesday, Muamar Anad handed his residence badge to the U.S. Marines guarding the city. They checked to be sure that he was a city resident, and when they were done, Anad said, a Marine slipped a coin out of his pocket and put it in his hand.

Out of fear, he accepted it, Anad said. When he was inside the city, the college student said, he looked at one side of the coin. "Where will you spend eternity?" it asked.

He flipped it over, and on the other side it read, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16."

"They are trying to convert us to Christianity," said Anad, a Sunni Muslim like most residents of this city in Anbar province. At home, he told his story, and his relatives echoed their disapproval: They'd been given the coins, too, he said.

It Starts To Look Needy, Man

Dougie on how the preznit ate his war:

Before the war, administration officials said that success would mean an Iraq that no longer threatened important U.S. interests – that did not support terrorism, aspire to WMD, threaten its neighbors, or conduct mass murder. But from the fall of 2003 on, the president defined success as stable democracy in Iraq.

This was a public affairs decision that has had enormous strategic consequences for American support for the war. The new formula fails to connect the Iraq war directly to U.S. interests. It causes many Americans to question why we should be investing so much blood and treasure for Iraqis. And many Americans doubt that the new aim is realistic – that stable democracy can be achieved in Iraq in the foreseeable future.

If only we'd defined success as LOTS OF DEAD PEOPLE AND STUFF GETTING BLOWED UP, we'd be so successful now!

The fact that he says these things out loud with no sense of irony at all is evidence of a moral dyslexia so profound I'm tempted to send him a care package full of cookies and the number of a very reliable shrink.

Hat tip to Scout.

A.

'What Was So Honest About It?'

"Errors are not lies," says Feith, and that's the last sentence before he starts stammering.

I like Stewart's comparison of errors vs. lies to manslaughter vs. homicide. Either way, somebody's dead at the end, so somebody else should GO TO JAIL.

Thanks to jjj.

A.

Bye Doug

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you:

Speaking of Iraq, the Georgetown Hoya newspaper last week quoted a student saying she was "displeased that university officials have not asked" former Pentagon undersecretary Douglas Feith"to return to teach next year."

Asked about Feith's status, Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown's foreign service school, told us that when Feith was hired -- something that caused an uproar among the faculty -- it was understood he "was on a two-year appointment." Any decision not to renew should not be seen as "a judgment on his performance," Gallucci said, noting that Feith's students' "course evaluations were really good."

Feith, author of a bestseller about his Pentagon days called "War and Decision," said he hadn't decided what to do next. "I'm intensely occupied with book stuff," and there are "several things I'm thinking about," he said.

Word is that keeping Feith on beyond the two-year term again would have infuriated a number of faculty members. Well, there are always those "dead-enders," as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld so eloquently noted back in June 2003.

Not that he'll be unemployed, living on the street, like the veterans of the war he helped start. The Wingnut Welfare State is in full-on slurp mode with regard to Feith, as evidenced by this interview with Hugh Hewitt sent to me by Scout. Hewitt, who makes like a circus seal at any neocon he gets his mitts on, is really pulling out all the stops here:

HH: Now you are widely understood to be one of the deep, dark circle of neocons. Do you wear that badge as an honor or as something that’s a misjudgment of who you are?

---

HH: And I think the left today uses that term primarily to attach to people who are staunch supporters of Israel, and people who are open to the use of American military power to achieve important objectives. Do you think that’s a fairly safe assertion as to when neocon gets thrown around?

---

HH: Right, right, and that’s very important. And the distortions in the public record, which we’re going to go through, are many and important. But I want to start with a more global question, that War And Decision answers in a sort of backwards way. Six and a half years after 9/11, five years after the invasion of Iraq, does the American public, Doug Feith, have a good grasp on the network of jihadists, and the threat they pose?

---

HH: It doesn’t take enormously large numbers, but it does underscore for America the nature of the threat, if, in fact, there are enormously large numbers. If it takes twenty jihadists to make a jihadist picnic, how many jihadist picnics are out there?

---

HH: To set up the last hour of our conversation, Doug Feith, this is the short segment, why does everybody at the CIA and State hate Chalabi, the head of the exiled Iraqi National Congress, and many people believe to be, if difficult but nevertheless the most effective operator in post-war Iraq? Why did there develop such an animus towards him?

---

HH: I’m sure they will. I’m curious, did 60 Minutes ask to talk with you at length as they have those who have been eager to sort of attack the Bush administration strategy in the war? Have anyone in the book returned fire at you yet?

I won't quote Feith's answers, because ... if you want to hear the same five talking points repeated over and over you can just scroll down to the Gaggle posts where it's actually funny. I will advise Herr Hewitt, though, to be careful if he keeps this up. It's a matter of physics. Sooner or later you're gonna just snap it right off.

A.

Feith Tonight

I'll be on the radio here tonight at 6 p.m. CST, to talk about Feith's book and Special Plans, and in preparation for that, I poured a generous dose of whiskey into my coffee and listened to Feith on Hannity's show, a bit generously hosted by Spocko's Brain.

Feith essentially said -- during the occasional break in Hannity's usual schtick of "liberals don't know the history of the world, I DO!!!!" -- that Bush screwed up and trusted the CIA when it came to WMD. It was a repeat of a claim he made on CNN here:

He also went into a routine about how he never held with the idea of creating democracy in Iraq, a direct contradiction of what David Neiwert came up with in the piece we published in Special Plans about the Bush Doctrine. According to Feith, handing Iraq over to the exiles and Chalabi (he's careful not to use the name on Hannity, you'll notice) was the way to go, and "that was the view that prevailed at State, lost at the White House but won in Baghdad." In other words, don't look at Rumsfeld and me, look at Colin Powell. Yeah. Good luck with that line.

It doesn't really surprise me that Hannity doesn't ask the natural follow-up, which is, "Doug, you were at the Pentagon until August 8, 2005. By then the US had had, in your mind, the predicted disastrous occupation government in Iraq for more than a year. Yet you sat back and watched instead of quitting and speaking up then. Why?"

I suspect the answer would involve a lot of squirming, which is why the question never even occurred to Hannity.

In addition, Feith said that 9/11 focused Americans on the idea that countries could have weapons of mass destruction. At which point I turned the sound off lest the screaming scare the neighbors. As I recall, 9/11 focused Americans on anthrax and airplanes, with a sideline into how we could lay hands on some red-white-and-blue body paint and beat the shit out of Sikh cab drivers. WMDs weren't our main concern until Dick Cheney started talking about them.

I don't expect intellectual honesty from this crowd, really, but I do expect some basic understanding of what went on while they were, you know, engaged in government service. Jesus.

A.

"He is Iraq's Katrina itself"

From Juan Cole:

So Congress abdicated to Bush.  Bush has abdicated to the generals in the field. 

That is not a Republic.  That is a military dictatorship achieved not by coup but by moral laziness.

Ironically, what officers like Petraeus need from Bush is not deference but vigorous leadership in the political realm. Bush needs to intervene to work for political reconciliation in Iraq if Petraeus's military achievements are to bear fruit. But Bush seems incapable of actually conducting policy, as opposed to starting wars. Bush happened to Iraq just as he happened to New Orleans. He cannot do the hard work of patiently addressing disasters and ameliorating them. He just wants to set people to fighting. Crush the Sadr Movement, perhaps the most popular political movement in Iraq? He's all for it. Risk provoking a wider conflagration in the Middle East by worsening relations with Iran? Sounds like a great idea to him. Bush campaigned on being a 'uniter not a divider' in 2000. In fact, he is the ultimate Divider, and leaves burning buildings, millions of refugees, and hundreds of thousands of cadavers in his wake. He is not Iraq's Brownie. He is Iraq's Katrina itself.

Just as New Orleans's Ninth War will still be a moonscape when Bush goes out of office, so will Iraq. 

So well said from Mr. Cole. And as I noted with photos about a year ago--Bush's legacy will be the tale of these 2 cities:

Baghdad:

New Orleans:

Baghdad:

New Orleans:

Goblety Gook

What the fuck does this mean?

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration had abandoned the benchmarks [Congress set for Iraq] as a strict standard of progress because establishing a secure Iraq would also depend on factors other than political and military progress.

[snip]

Asked for elaboration, the senior administration official said, “It’s a very hard concept to explain publicly because it doesn’t feature a sort of setting of the dial. It features what we call a running assessment.”

Column: Just Say You're Sorry, Doug

Link:

The key to being really, really, really bad at your job, apparently, is to be so brazenly bad about it that people are too astonished to call you on it.

The above sentence is the first entry in a long list of things I learned about life from watching the Bush administration. I'd call it "Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten," but I understand that title's taken.

Watching former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith on "60 Minutes" Sunday night and reading his new book, I'm struck more than ever by the truth of it.

A.

Remember This During Gen. Betrayus' Testimony

America wants out.  Gallup:

Which do you think is better for the US:  to keep a significant number of troops in Iraq until the situation there gets better, even if that takes many years, or to set a timetable for removing troops from Iraq and to stick to that timetable regardless of what is going on in Iraq?

All Americans
Set a timetable for withdrawl:  60%
Keep troops in Iraq until the situation gets better:  35%

Democrats
Set a timetable for withdrawl:  81%
Keep troops in Iraq until the situation gets better:  15%

Independents
Set a timetable for withdrawl:  61%
Keep troops in Iraq until the situation gets better:  32%

Republicans
Set a timetable for withdrawl:  32%
Keep troops in Iraq until the situation gets better:  65%

More Doug Feith

From the glorious Culture of Truth:

Kroft: you're an idiot - what are you doing now?

Feith: teaching at Georgetown

Feith: if Bush had listened to me and put Chalabi in charge things would have been fine

Kroft: General Franks says you're the dumbest mother fucker on the planet

Feith: ah - but not Venus or Mars, right

Kroft: people seem to hate you

Feith: they are just pissed because i faked intelligence to trick america in to war

Kroft: oh so just whining

A.

Puppet Trouble

Huh-Oh.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blasted the U.S. State Department for renewing its contract with the Blackwater security firm, saying the company has yet to answer for what he called a "massacre" last year.

The Iraqi government was not consulted on the State Department decision, he said.

"No judicial action has been taken and no compensation has been made," al-Maliki said Sunday. "Therefore, this extension requires the approval of the Iraqi government, and the government would want to resolve the outstanding issues with this company."

[snip]

... al-Maliki said Sunday that the renewal of Blackwater's contract isn't final "because they committed a massacre against Iraqis and until now this matter has not been resolved."

What to Do?

Throwing these fucksticks in federal prison would be a good start.

Seriously--now what? 

Hopefully, come January, we can start to fix some of the damage from the Bush years. That set of tasks makes the labors of Heracles look like a fucking Sunday school picnic.  Basically, we need an entire overhaul of foreign and domestic policy.  (Sounds kind of simple when you put it like that, doesn't it?)  Despite the vital nature of fixing things, however, we face an even more important job:  How do we keep this shit from ever happening again?

Reading Athenae's description of and reaction to Steve Kroft's interview with Douglas "Stupidest Fucking Guy on the Planet" Feith, I'm at a loss for answers.   So here's me trying to work something out.

I'm thinking that, even if the press hadn't totally abandoned skepticism in 2002-2007, this war would still have gone on.  Can you imagine Feith (or Wolfowitz, or Perle, or smartass Rumsfeld, or snarling Cheney, or dumbfuck Bush) acting any differently if they'd been confronted with their lies before the war?

Honestly, the only way to stop this entire fuck-up would've been a huge victory for Gore in 2000.  Once these rotten Republican cocksuckers had power, it was over.  They had to be stopped before they had control of the government.

So how do we do that?  Well, it seems that this whole "blogging" thing might actually be important to that.  Not what I do, mind you.  I just find funny pictures and swear a lot.  But words matter.  They do.  It's something Steve Gilliard (rest his world champion of writing soul) reminded us about from time to time.  Words matter.  The right wing crazies have controlled the debate in this country, and controlled the narratives, for far too long.  The list of acceptable ideas to mention in public ranges from center-right to bomb-the-fuck-out-of-everyone-and-eat-the-poor-for-Jeebus.   There just wasn't any place to discuss liberal/progressive/non-batshit-insane-and-horridly-cruel ideas.  I know that many of us started shouting into the void following the 2000 election.  It's what got me into blogs, first as a commenter at Eschaton, then at my own little place, and finally here.  We knew there was something dreadfully wrong about that entire contest.  It was like watching a heavyweight boxer lose a fight to a hamster.  How the fuck did that happen? 

The right wing nutjobs have spent years honing their rhetoric and studying how to exploit the weaknesses of our press.  And they did a great job.  As Athenae points out, reporters are often lazy and ignorant, as opposed to biased.  I'd throw in "shallow," as well, especially as pertains to the press who cover campaigns.  I'd also add "thin-skinned."  Because, when we started calling them on their laziness, ignorance, and shallowness, they responded by throwing hissy fits.  I guess that is a lot easier than self-reflection and evaluation.

But words matter.  If they didn't, the rich motherfuckers who benefit from having the GOP in power wouldn't subsidize shit like the National Review or the Weekly Standard.  They wouldn't pay skanky-ass, tranny-chic, Taliban wannabe Ann Coulter scads of money to spew her bile if words didn't matter.  And don't even get me started on that dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks piece of shit Jonah Goldberg.  (Liberal Fascism?  I'll have what you're smoking, please).  Rich people don't like losing money, and they wouldn't shell out millions of dollars to keep these fourth-rate hacks sitting at keyboards if there was no return. 

How do we fight that?  How do we beat people who get paid good money to lie, proudly and publicly, about everything? 

It would be nice, I suppose, to have some rich-ass liberals underwrite progressive voices.  We have far, far better writers than the fucksockets on the right.  And most of us do this shit for free, in between day jobs and personal lives, while dealing with bills and spouses and friends and children and pets.  Can you imagine what it would be like if Athenae had all day to load her rhetorical bazooka and take aim?  (Provided she could stay off the sauce for five minutes, of course.  Kidding!)  There are lots of other great options, too: the wicked-smart Juan Cole, the tough and funny GNB people, the amazing snark of TBogg and Sadly, No!

We need to support these people.  Because words matter.  So, all you rich liberals who regularly read this site (*cough cough* donate to us *cough cough*)--if your ideals are important, start writing checks. 

You can just mail me cash, though. 

'A Combination of Ideology and Incompetence'

Philippe Sands, author of the Vanity Fair piece on the torture memo, talks about Doug Feith's role in it:

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Douglas Feith, who he was, his significance, your extended interview with him in Washington?

PHILIPPE SANDS: I can talk to him. He—it’s one of the great things about America—my own country is not so open—but you can just get in touch with people, call them up, email them, find their spouses and partners, and say, “Can I come and talk to you?” And Mr. Feith said yes. And I’m very grateful to him for that.

He’s a rather flamboyant character. Someone described him to me as a sort of an Energizer bunny. He likes to speak. He’s got a rather big opinion of himself and the role that he played. He talked rather frankly, I think probably too frankly, about his role in all of this. And in particular, he had an absolutely crucial role in being the person who drafted the memo for President Bush, which caused the Geneva Conventions to be, if you like, suspended from application at Guantanamo.

On the 7th of February, 2002, President Bush adopted the decision that none of the detainees at Guantanamo would be able to rely on any protections under the Geneva Conventions, including the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or torture. And Doug Feith described to me how he and General Myers worked together, and that he, in particular, took the steps to ensure that none of these detainees could rely on Geneva. And I put it to him, “Isn’t the consequence of getting rid of Geneva that there’s essentially a blank page? All the constraints on abusive interrogation are gone.” And his response was, “That was precisely the point.” And I thought that was rather telling, because the administration has never owned up to the fact that the reason they dis-applied Geneva was precisely to open the door to aggressive interrogation.

AMY GOODMAN: He was Under Secretary of Defense. Now, he—

PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, he was Under Secretary of Defense in charge of policy. So here I am talking to the guy who’s responsible for US policy on treatment of detainees. And I put it to him, “Did it never occur to you that by opening the door to this type of interrogation, you would expose American soldiers or Americans to the same sort of treatment?” And he really just didn’t—he basically said, “We never really thought through all of these issues.” It was rather shocking.

Shocking's one word for it. Your outrage meter just gets worn out from slapping the needle into the red zone every time some wingnut says something insane like that, and really, that's what this is, and why our media were caught so flat-footed by the Bush administration's operations.

We're used to our politicians bending the truth. We're used to a lie, even a big lie. We're not used to thousands of them, repeated, over and over, loudly, and evidence to the contrary being so completely dismissed, like it isn't there. We're used to people whom, when pointed out in a mistake or a lie or a deception and shamed, to admit it, sack up, step down, and deal. We're not used to this, or at least, we weren't (you can argue we should have been and I'd agree with you). You should all watch Feith's face when Steve Kroft confronts him with video proving his statements false, it's total incomprehension, like, "So?" And then he just launches right back into the lie again, only slightly louder, and Kroft is ... shocked? Disgusted? More like confused. I've just proved this guy's a liar and a fraud ... why is he continuing the lie?

They find the most outrageous thing they can and they do it and then they yell, top of their lungs, that they're proud of it and by the way, screw you if you don't agree. You could argue it out, of course, but you have to get over the brazenness of it first. That's taken a good long time, for a lot of people, to get past the point where you're staring, openmouthed, going, "Did he just SAY that? Out LOUD?"

From Sands' piece in Vanity Fair:

Feith’s argument prevailed. On February 7, 2002, President Bush signed a memorandum that turned Guantánamo into a Geneva-free zone. As a matter of policy, the detainees would be handled humanely, but only to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity. “The president said ‘humane treatment,’ ” Feith told me, inflecting the term sourly, “and I thought that was O.K. Perfectly fine phrase that needs to be fleshed out, but it’s a fine phrase—‘humane treatment.’ ” The Common Article 3 restrictions on torture or “outrages upon personal dignity” were gone.

“This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”

He was really a player. I could argue it out, but I need a minute, to get over my hair standing on end that he just said that, right out loud.

A.

Debunking Douglas Feith: 60 Minutes Liveblogging

First of all, the tags on his book are priceless:

dumbest f_cking guy on the planet (34) idiot (16) wingnut welfare (15) treason (12) high crimes (11) hubris (8) corruption (7) fiasco (7) immoral (7) benedict arnold (4) ignorance (4)

Me: So how strong a drink should I watch Feith on 60 Minutes with?

Mr. A: Not very strong.

Me: Quoi?

Mr. A: If you want to throw things, you'll need to be able to aim.

Story produced by L. Franklin Devine and Michael Rosenbaum. It would have killed you both to have dirty hippies on this show talking about how Feith was, you know, wrong, guys? Your opposition voices are quotes from other ex-admin officials' books? I'm glad the piece was as harsh as it was, don't get me wrong, but it might have been nice to hear a little more from the people who were onto this story long before George Tenet decided he'd had enough of being Bush's buttboy and was looking for someone to make him look good.

Here we go:

Steve Kroft: His boss Donald Rumsfeld called Feith "one of the most brilliant individuals in government." There's a dude you want giving you a ringing endorsement these days. Yay.

Kroft's not giving him too much ground here: "If he doesn't sound like a warrior, it's because he isn't." CHICKENHAWK. You can say it.

Feith gives Bush's war rationale as "we're going to attack you because sooner or later you're going to attack us and we want to pick when we want to fight you." He talks about Saddam in the context of a broader "group of people who wanted to do us harm" sense, which fits in almost exactly with what Dave Neiwert wrote about in Special Plans, the ideology of the Bush Doctrine.

"Our main goal was preventing the next attack." Well, did a bang-up job on that one, unless you're rather narrowly defining attack, in which case, well, that's just depressing and sad.

Kroft gets a NICE one in here: "So you're saying you didn't think it was important to go after the people who were responsible for it [9/11], it was more important to go after the people who weren't responsible for it?" Well done. That, for any journalists reading, is what calling them on it looks like.

"Anticipatory self-defense," is apparently with Feith is calling "sticking our national dick in the bees' nest" these days, btw.

DAMN, journalism. Feith just flat-out lied that nobody said Iraq was an imminent threat, and Kroft counters with the video of Rumsfeld, who was quoted before praising Feith's brilliance, saying just that, and Bush, Cheney and Powell. Let's see how he weasels out of this:

WEASEL: "It is true that there was a serious error for the CIA to say that there were stockpiles ..." blah blah blah, cover, passive voice, "it was a terrible mistake for the administration to have made." Doug, you know, it's a mistake when you spell someone's name wrong. That's a mistake. This isn't a mistake. This is something else.

Mr. A: See why you wanted a weaker drink?

Me: Damn it. Here, you throw the damn shoe.

Feith hauls out the "WMD program related abilities and stuff" defense. He's being rather humorless about this, saying there was a memo laying out all the "horribles" as in possibilities of things that could go wrong. And let me just ask, because I've been turning it over in my head since this afternoon when I read the CBS story again, it doesn't make it better that you considered all the ways this might go wrong and then didn't fix them, it makes it WORSE, because it goes from "nobody could have anticipated" to "we anticipated and then just decided ah, fuck it, who gives a shit?"

JESUS. The gentlest thing I can say about him is that he needs to go back to grown-up school.

Kroft's reading the memo now. It lays out basically everything that's happened. Feith's totally deadpan. Butter wouldn't melt, as my mother would say. This clearly hasn't upset him in the slightest. Worse, he thinks this exonerates him, I mean, Jesus H. Franklin Delano Roosevelt CHRIST, he thinks this makes it okay. They KNEW all this could happen and they did nothing. Not a thing.

Feith's talking blithely about "the downsides of war." I don't have the words for this part. I simply don't. I'm used to writing about humans.

He says they didn't anticipate the insurgency. My editor on Special Plans once asked did I know if this guy had ever read Shakespeare, because, really.

Kroft is really earning my respect here. He's reading Feith's own book at him to disprove something that just fell out of Feith's mouth.

Disbanding the Iraqi Army. Feith says it was Bremer's idea, and didn't sign off it. He disavows all responsibility for sending, in Kroft's words, "4,000 unemployed armed men" into the streets. Kroft's trying to get him to say yes or no. Feith: "The army was dissolved." Passive voice again. "The decision was whether to reconstitute it." Kroft can't pin him down.

Feith says if Chalabi had been handed Iraq, we'd all be smoking freedom weed right now.

Hee, Kroft just asked him about the Tommy Franks quote: "Stupidest ... guy on the face of the planet." Feith says it was very bad of General Franks to swear. NO REALLY: "Some people, when they deal with political controversy, use harsh language."

Feith calls the Congressional report calling him out an "unfounded rebuke."

Kroft ends the segment noting that Feith is donating all the proceeds (note that he said all the PROCEEDS, not profits, there's a very big difference and I wonder if Harper Collins knows it) from the book to a Foundation he's created to benefit veterans. Wouldn't it have been easier not to write the book in the first place, cease your whining about how you made a nice war and then Bush fucked it up, and donating your Pentagon salary during the time you were working really hard at ruining hundreds of thousands of lives? I'm asking, because it seems excessive.

If you'll excuse me, I need to go scrub my brain with a brillo pad now. You know, one of the weirder experiences working on Special Plans was that I spent three months essentially reading everything Feith and his colleagues had ever written, and the more time you spend inside their heads the more Stockholmed you get, until you start thinking, "Yeah, why the fuck SHOULDN'T we go kick around the Middle East beating the shit out of countries that don't like our friends or us? America! Fuck YEAH!" Watching this interview reminded me of how utterly fucking creepy it was being immersed in the worldview of somebody who has utterly no conception of the possibility he might be totally wrong.

A.

Feith: I'd Do It Again

Pretty much:

The risks of war, says Feith, were well known and documented in a memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that Feith refers to as "the parade of horribles" in his upcoming Harper Collins book, War and Decision. They included ruining the reputation of America overseas, strengthening Muslim militant resolve and triggering the ethnic strife occurring in Iraq now. What they didn’t anticipate? "That the Bathist regime, even after it was overthrown, would be in a position to organize and recruit for and to finance and command an insurgency," says Feith. His book also addresses the fact that the smaller and more mobile American force conducting the attack saved U.S. lives, but was too small to control the country after the initial fighting, allowing widespread looting.

Feith acknowledges that few people are pleased about the war, but he believes it was and still is the right thing to do for America. "I think the president made the right decision given what he knew. … And to tell you the truth, even given what we’ve learned since," he tells Kroft.

First of all, "few people are pleased about the war?" Lots of people are DEAD ABOUT THE WAR, is the more pressing problem, I would think. That I in my office with my keyboard am upset is not so much paramount in the face of all the COFFINS. Stay classy, Dougie.

Second, does he think he deserves some kind of cookie for acknowledging what everybody watching TV knew in August 2003 or thereabouts? I seem to recall his boss jollying it up with the press about how messy freedom is and whatnot, and lots of sicko math about eggs and omelettes, and ain't nobody said nothing back then. But now that Bush and his war kind of suck, here comes Doug, acknowledging some problems with it.

Is there a gene for self-awareness that these guys were just born without?

A.

Heckuva Job Dept.

Way to go, Chimpy.

Senior Army and Marine Corps leaders said yesterday that the increase of more than 30,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has put unsustainable levels of stress on U.S. ground forces and has put their readiness to fight other conflicts at the lowest level in years.

In a stark assessment a week before Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is to testify on the war's progress, Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's vice chief of staff, said that the heavy deployments are inflicting "incredible stress" on soldiers and families and that they pose "a significant risk" to the nation's all-volunteer military.

"When the five-brigade surge went in . . . that took all the stroke out of the shock absorbers for the United States Army," Cody testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee's readiness panel.

He said that even if five brigades are pulled out of Iraq by July, as planned, it would take some time before the Army could return to 12-month tours for soldiers. Petraeus is expected to call for a pause in further troop reductions to assess their impact on security in Iraq.

"I've never seen our lack of strategic depth be where it is today," said Cody, who has been the senior Army official in charge of operations and readiness for the past six years and plans to retire this summer.

[snip]

The nation needs an airborne brigade, a heavy brigade and a Stryker brigade ready for "full-spectrum operations," Cody said, "and we don't have that today."

Soldiers and Marines also lack training for major combat operations using their entire range of weapons, the generals said. For example, artillerymen are not practicing firing heavy guns but are instead doing counterinsurgency work as military police.

The Marine Corps' ability to train for potential conflicts has been "significantly degraded," said Gen. Robert Magnus, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps.

Surge

Another sign of succes.

Violent civilian deaths in Iraq have climbed to their highest level since mid-2007, Iraqi government figures showed on Tuesday, due to a spike in violence between Iraq security forces and Mehdi Army fighters.

A total of 923 civilians died violently in March, up 31 percent from February and the deadliest month since August 2007, according to figures released by Iraq's interior, defence and health ministries.

[snip]

The latest Iraqi data showed 102 police officers and 54 soldiers were killed, compared with 65 and 20 respectively in February, and that 641 insurgents had been killed and 2 509 detained.

"people making the decisions can't handle that responsibility anymore"

Face it there isn't a number that could make the Freepi think it wasn't such a good idea.

But some local families who lost loved ones to this war think 4000 is enough...

It's nearly been three years since Mark Maida died while serving in Iraq.

At his parents home their is a whole room dedicated to the fallen soldier.

Pictures, plaques and even Mark's drivers license.

There isn't a day that goes by that they don't think of him.

"I get up at 4am because that's when he use to call. I still think about him and can't go back to sleep," says Mark Maida's father Ray.

There aren't any pictures of Shane O'Donnell at his brothers apartment.

Eric O'Donnell says he relies on memories and this tattoo on his forearm to remember Shane.

"I thought it was something i could remember him by, i mean not that i would ever forget him, but more like a badge of honor," O'Donnell says.

Ray Maida's other son also served in Iraq.

He remembers a conversation with his sons about their views on the war during their deployment "Both didn't feel like we belonged in Iraq," Maida says.

Eric O'Donnell says his views on the war are up in the air, but after reaching the grim milestone of 4,000 dead- he says one thing is clear.

"I think it's been obvious now that the people making the decisions can't handle that responsibility anymore," O'Donnell says.

Many have argued that pulling the troops out of Iraq now would mean that those who were killed died in vain.

But the Maida's say keeping them their will mean more heart ache for more families.

"I personally feel I cant completely come to peace with Mark's death until all the soldiers are home," says Diane Maida.          

86 Wisconsin Soldiers have died serving in Iraq.