Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has been all over the news tonight, everywhere you turn. He has a new book out entitled What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. Since Politico.com broke the news early of his accusations, he's been under steady attack by his fellow Republicans, accusing him of being brainwashed or confused or dishonest or all three, so he moved up the promotional interviews that were planned for the book's official release date (Monday) to Thursday night, and unsurprisingly found himself welcome on more talk shows than any author of his stature could possibly expect. The long and short of it: he swears he was telling the truth the whole time up at the podium, so far as he knew it, but that everybody else in the White House was lying to him, and until he got out of there, he didn't have enough objectivity to realize that he shouldn't have been giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Uh, yeah. Right.

I took the opportunity to pull out the three times I mentioned Scott McClellan in this blog while he was still White House press secretary: "Good Day for the Good Guys" (Nov 9, 2005), "The first vice president to shoot a man since Aaron Burr" (Feb 16, 2006) and "Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Told You So" under "Sleepy-Time Quicktakes" for March 1st, 2006. Let me refresh your memory. In the first, I referred back to an incident so shameful that I hadn't felt the urge to pile on poor Scotty at the time, when he got caught openly lying out of his own mouth to the press corps, swearing up and down to their faces that the President's video phone call conversation with a group of US troops in the field wasn't rehearsed and that they weren't told what questions to ask, after the reporters already had videotape of the rehearsal, showing exactly that, in hand. From that day forward, he became exactly useless to the Bush administration. Completely. It is an absolute rule going all the way back to the first White House press secretary during World War II that the press secretary may omit any facts he doesn't want to tell, may refuse to answer any question, but the one thing he must not do or the press will crucify him is knowingly lie to a reporter. So, from then on, every single time Scott McClellan went up to the podium, the press got more angry and more dismissive of him and more rude to his face, particularly when he was put in the untenable position of lying to the press some more over Dick Cheney's hunting accident, repeating stories about the incident that had been well documented to be false for at least a day and a half by that point. He also got caught lying about torture in CIA-run prisons even after reporters had actual torture victims on the record, showing their torture wounds. For all of these lies, he was openly booed at the podium. I predicted at that point that he wasn't long for the job; two months later, I turned out to be right, as he was fired by Bush's new White House chief of staff ... and replaced by someone who knew the rules of the job, by someone who (just as importantly) didn't share Scott McClellan's naked and blatant hatred for the White House press corps.

Bush spokespeople are calling McClellan a disgruntled ex-employee.

I'll bet he is. He did his job exactly the way Bush, Cheney, Rove, and the rest wanted him to do it, and he got fired for it. And now he's taking it out on them. Is he telling the truth? For gods' sake, people, this is Scott McClellan. What on earth would possess you to think he's telling the truth? Has he ever? In his life? Told the truth to a reporter? I wouldn't bet good money that the man was capable of telling the truth to save his life!

And this act of flagrant retaliation (whether honest or dishonest), and all the aggravation it's bringing to the White House, and all the aggravation it's going to bring to John McCain by bringing back into the news cycle just how dishonest the war is, right at the point where McCain wants to change the subject to the War on Terror with the usual tired old trope of "vote Democrat and die"? This could all have been avoided, if it weren't for one of Karl Rove's more "brilliant" ideas, the kind of outside-the-box thinking that got him labeled "Boy Genius" by his co-workers. Rove's idea, enthusiastically supported by Cheney, was that one of the mistakes past Republican administrations made was hiring people who were good at their jobs, hiring people based on their proven skills and track record applicable to the job they're being given, only to find out afterwards that they wouldn't consistently and reliably run their new job according to the President's and the Party's political principles. So the word went down: hire based on loyalty, not competence, because (in Rove's "brilliant" opinion) it's easier to teach competence to someone loyal but dumb than to teach loyalty to someone competent and smart.

Yeah, but then you end up with a White House full of people who are loyal and dumb and incompetent, who end up embarrassing themselves and you, and who then write the most bitter, angry tell-all books ever written by White House staffers when they take the blame for it, not you, without even doing you the courtesy of waiting until you're out of office. Not the smartest idea you've ever had, Karl.

We're into one of the major "driving" holidays in the US, the traditional unofficial start of summer. And that's not to mention a day that a lot of Americans need to travel, because officially, it's Memorial Day, a day of special annual funeral services for our war-veteran dead, and this year (as with the last four Memorial Days), there are a lot of families with new reasons to gather from all over the country, with especial urgency to gather, at military cemetaries. It's also (for those reasons) a traditional weekend for gasoline prices to fluctuate upwards, because of the rising demand from the "summer driving season" and the need for refineries and resellers to swap out their stock of winter-grade gasoline for (also more expensive to make) lower-smog summer-grade gasoline. So even if oil weren't trading about the previously unthinkable price of $135 a barrel (up from $45 a barrel 4 years ago, from $15 a barrel during the Reagan administration) this would be a weekend when gas prices would be going up. Just not as high as they are, breaking $4/gallon for regular unleaded in places scattered all over the country, and averaging only a little less than that. And not a few voters have been saying for weeks now that their vote in November will be determined almost entirely by their opinion of which candidate will do the most to lower the price of gasoline. (Europeans who are going to give us hell over that: save it. Nobody here needs or wants to hear it. No, really, don't bother opening your mouth.)

Vote for Barack Obama for President in November.

First, let me start you off with a fairly good primer, compiled by two Associated Press business reporters for the driving weekend: John Porretto and John Wilen, "AP Impact: What Makes Up the Price of Gas?," Associated Press, 5/24/08. It'll walk you through where the money is going, and why, step by step, penny by penny. Short answer: oil prices are vulnerable to speculation, like anything traded on a commodities market. Demand is up and supply is steady, but not enough to explain the hike. The price is taking an especial hammering when measured in US dollars, because the US dollar is dropping in value like a rock against almost every other currency in the world. There's also a risk premium, that is to say, prices go up when oil dealers get nervous about whether or not there'll be a supply disruption next month, a "hedge" against next month there being, say, civil war in Nigeria, or a US bombing of Iran, or Iraq's Sunni Arabs returning to sabotage of Iraqi oil facilities, or chaos in Russia, or civil war or coup d'etat in Venezuela, or any problem in any country that could lead to it temporarily dropping out of the oil-selling business. Then come the various taxes, but they haven't gone up in the last four years; the cost of refining, which has gone down over the last four years; and the profits to the gas stations, which have basically vanished over the last four years, which is why they're all remaking themselves as grocery stores and fast-food places that just happen to sell gasoline (at a loss). So no, really, the price hike is almost entirely due to the falling US dollar and the oil traders' increasing fears that US foreign policy is going to wreck yet another oil producing country.

This article doesn't say, but I've heard the "risk premium" estimated in other articles about oil trading, lately, as $25 to $30 a barrel just from the Iraq occupation alone. Furthermore, history strongly suggests that the Iraq War is also the reason for the other major factor, the reason why the US dollar is going down the toilet. Or rather, not the war itself, nor even its ruinous cost, but something more fundamental than that: the way we're (not) paying for it. When the US goes to war, there are only two ways to pay for it. All Americans, especially the wealthy but really no, all Americans, can make shared sacrifices, accepting rationing, accepting higher taxes, to pay the cost of the war. Or we can just print the money. In this case, we're just printing the money, specifically, we're issuing another almost 20% of the budgeted debt in government bonds (debt) for off-budget "war supplemental" funding, and unlike in some previous wars, we're not selling War Bonds at deeply discounted rates to the public out of patriotism, we're selling them at sharply rising rates on the open market, especially to China and Saudi Arabia. And whenever the US runs the printing presses to pay for a major war, the currency plummets in value; there's a reason why the phrase "not worth a Continental Dollar" was slang for "worthless, not worth the paper it's printed on" for a hundred years after the Revolutionary War. And that's why this graph (taken from GasBuddy.com via stlouisgasprices.com) shows that the steep rise in prices corresponds exactly to the war in Iraq, and not just to the war in Iraq (or else the price would have jumped at the beginning and plateaued) but, more importantly, to our total accumulated war debt:



So if you don't want to see runaway inflation get worse and runaway unemployment set in with it, like we had the last time, back in the 1970s when two presidents in a row (then one Democrat, Johnson, and one Republican, Nixon) both decided to fund a major land war in Asia without raising taxes or selling discounted War Bonds to the American public, your first priority should be to elect the person you trust the most to end the war in Iraq, to not just stop the pointless dying and the war crimes and the war profiteering and the endless series of blows to our reputation and the reputation of secular democratic free market capitalism and the easy recruiting bonanza for Islamists but to also stop the endless and unaffordable money hemorrhage, as fast as possible. And if you're at all honest with yourself, you know that that man is Barack Obama.

I was waiting for clarification on this: Defense Secretary Robert Gates just told Congress that in addition to the nearly $200 billion just for one year's worth of costs related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (mostly Iraq), the army wants another $3 billion over 4 years to increase the overall number of soldiers in the US armed forces, the US Army by 65,000 and the total US National Guard by another 9,000. The clarification I was waiting for was, "to be spent on what?" The answer, in an article by Associated Press military writer Robert Burns just now ("Gates expects to approve Army expansion"), is that that's just the routine personnel costs of having that many more soldiers on duty. That answer has me scratching my head, because it utterly fails to answer my question:

What, exactly, does Defense Secretary Gates intend to do, or for that matter does anybody in the Bush administration intend to do, to persuade 74,000 Americans to enlist? And that would need to be a net gain of 74,000, that's 74,000 on top of however many extra they have to replace a couple of hundred dead per year, at least a thousand per year too wounded to return to duty, and far higher than usual percentages refusing to re-enlist. If we call the total around 100,000, that's 25,000 more, per year, that they have to persuade to enlist or re-enlist than are already doing so. What's more, Gates made it clear that he's not going to go back to the route we went in the 70s and early 80s, where the Army is the last-chance employer for the unemployable; no, he says that he's going to bring Army recruiting standards, the minimum qualifications to join the Army, back up from where they were lowered last year.

That's good to know. Also, I expected to hear that that $3 billion request was just for cash incentives, that it wouldn't even count the routine personnel costs. So I'm pleased to hear that I was wrong about that, pleased to know that Secretary Gates understands that there aren't that many people in America who can be hired to die to protect Iraqi Shiite death squads from Iraqi Sunni death squads, and protect Iraqi Kurdish death squads from both Iraqi Sunni death squads and from our NATO allies across the border in Turkey, just for the money, no matter how sweet you make the money. That's not who the American people are, and I'm relieved to know that the Secretary of Defense knows this.

But that still doesn't answer the question, it just rules out the bad answers. How, exactly, does either George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton intend to persuade tens of thousands of Americans who hadn't been planning on going down to the Army recruiting station to do so, to volunteer to put their lives on the line in Iraq? I realize that they don't have to persuade the majority to support the war; 25,000 per year is still only 1/40th of a percent of the enlistment-age public. But so far they haven't done any of the things you'd need to do to persuade the public, in a democracy, that what we're fighting for in Iraq is worth the risk of sacrificing their lives. Not only have they not even started to do so, but they haven't even laid out a plan for what they're going to do if they ever do start!

I think maybe they think that they are making that case, when George Bush gets up there and peevishly whines about how the American people need to give him the benefit of the doubt that he knows more than we do, and trust him when he keeps saying the words "9/11" and "al Qaeda" and "Iraq" in the same paragraph, without any meaningful details or coherent explanations of what he means (or even heartfelt ones). Who if anybody in America has ever been persuaded of anything by peevish whining, I have no idea. They may think that if that isn't enough, then surely it's enough when a very grumpy and bitter Dick Cheney goes on Sunday morning talk shows that few if any potential recruits watch and attempts to bully or browbeat the hosts of those shows into believing that the war in Iraq is what's keeping us safe from Osama bin Laden somehow, not that bullying or browbeating people into enlisting in the military has ever worked very well in a democracy, either.

A few months back, the US Army had a major TV and movie-trailer advertising campaign aimed at the parents of Army-aged kids, trying to persuade them not to talk their kids out of enlisting. Even then, they didn't even try to make the case that what's going on in Iraq is worth fighting for; all they had to offer were the same arguments they use in peace-time about saving money for college, learning trade skills, and building character. And in the last month or more, they seem to have given up on even that. So who's out there making the case, if even the Army isn't seriously trying to? When terrorists (that we don't like) massacre civilians in Iraq, why don't I see tearful parents weeping on my TV screen every night for a week? Why don't I hear the names of every child that al Qaeda in Iraq or the Mahdi Army or any other in-country terrorist group accidentally or intentionally kill so often that I have them memorized? Where are the atrocity stories that are supposed to outrage me into demanding we stomp our enemies flat? The people we're fighting against in Iraq understand the importance of explaining to their potential recruits why the Americans have to be fought against; they sure make sure that everybody in the world hears about our atrocities. Why am I not hearing about theirs?

Look, all 3 of the plausible front-runners in the Democratic Party are saying we're going to be there until at least mid 2009, and maybe to 2013. And that makes them the anti-war party, compared to the Republicans, who not only want to keep us fighting in Iraq for another 40 to 70 years but who are also chomping at the bit to also invade Iran and Syria. And this week even Secretary Gates grudgingly admitted to Congress, after hearing some blunt questions about how effective an anti-American propaganda tool Blackwater has been, that he's learning to have doubts about the long-term wisdom of depending so heavily on mercenaries. Taken together, that means troops, lots more troops. If we can't quit no matter who wins the election, then it's time for somebody to get serious about winning the damned thing. When are they going to start to do the very first minimum thing that would be necessary if that's what we're going to do, namely persuade vast numbers of Americans to voluntarily enlist in it?

Ever since reviewers got their hands on advance copies of Alan Greenspan's latest book, The Age of Turbulence, one and only one line has been reprinted and reported on and discussed all over the world, in every country in the world: "I'm saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows -- the Iraq war is largely about oil." He spent last week backing away from the literal, obvious meaning of the line. His clarification is that he's not saying we invaded Iraq in order to seize and steal their oil, but that we invaded Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein from manipulating oil prices to our disadvantage, to keep his military from threatening oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz. Whatever. The moment the sentence hit the web, fuzzy-headed liberals jumped for joy: look, a smart guy like Alan Greenspan agrees with us! Over at The Nation, in particular, they're literally all over it.

People, if I had any doubt left in my mind about the subject, which I don't? If I needed no other proof, the fact that Alan Greenspan says that we invaded Iraq because of oil is literally all the proof I need that oil had nothing to do with Iraq war. As every liberal on the planet, it feels like, and every anti-American, and every anti-capitalist, and every Islamist jumped up to cheer for the fact that Alan Greenspan agrees with their silly "blood for oil" conspiracy theory, I've been sitting here at home, scratching my head quizically, and asking myself, "Since when do any of these people agree with anything that Alan Greenspan says?"

Can any of you name even one single time that Alan Greenspan has ever been right?

His original claim to fame is that he "ended the recession." Now, first of all, you need no more proof that this doesn't make him a genius than this: he wasn't Reagan's first Federal Reserve chairman. During the time between when Paul Volcker stepped down and when the recession ended, Greenspan didn't actually change any of Paul Volcker's policies. He made literally no contribution of his own, favorable or unfavorable, to the perceived "success" of Reaganomics. Secondly, his theory about how he (not Reagan, not Volcker, not anybody else but him) saved us all from runaway stagflation was by raising interest rates so that businesses had to lay people off and break their unions. This, like everything else the man has ever said, sounds good in a dorm room at 3:00 am after having not slept the night before ... but it doesn't hold up. Basically this theory asks you to flatly ignore history, to pretend that the fact that it had been 10 years since the OPEC embargo had nothing to do with the US economy's recovery, that it had been 10 years since the US's humiliating defeat in Vietnam had nothing to do with the recovery of the US economy. Worse than that, this theory also requires you to ignore the fact that the "recovery" of the US economy was no such thing: poverty rates went up, not down, and stayed up until Clinton came along. Nor should Clinton, or any other right-wing Democrat, get credit for ignoring Alan Greenspan's advice; they tried to keep unemployment high, and thanks to the dot-com bubble, failed. And there's the last reminder that Alan Greenspan's "full employment leads to runaway inflation" theory is so much long-disproved science (at best): unemployment fell through the floor, wages went up for the first time in decades, and inflation not only didn't ignite, it fell.

(If you absolutely insist on ignoring historical fact and needing a theoretical justification for what's wrong with Greenspan's anti-worker theory of what's good for the economy, he never once has even tried to address the question of who, exactly, is supposed to buy things that the economy makes. How a man who left that big a gaping hole in his economic thinking, among others, acquired a reputation as some kind of super-genius I have no idea.)

And it's not as if the central thesis of his entire career being wrong was the only thing stupid the man ever said or did. He got the dot-com bubble wrong, insisting that it wasn't actually a bubble, then insisting that the bursting of the bubble wasn't going to hurt the broader economy. He got the real estate bubble wrong. He endorsed the Laffer Curve, lobbying Congress for every Republican tax cut, predicting confidently after each tax cut that government revenues would rise. After every government tax cut, revenues fell. He endorsed NAFTA and the WTO, predicting that they would both lead to more US jobs; the result was more lost US jobs. He endorsed the New Economy after that, saying that it was good because the high-skill high-pay jobs like computer programming would stay here in the US; those jobs started leaving for India, Russia, and elsewhere. Like most die-hard Randroids (and the man's credentials as a literal personal disciple of Ayn Rand are not in question, he was a member of her inner circle), the man really is a moron on the subject of how business actually works and how economics actually works. So if Alan Greenspan says that we went to war in Iraq because of oil, I'm inclined to assume that it had nothing whatsoever to do with oil, because the man has literally never been right about anything important in his entire life. If at this point Alan Greenspan assured me that it wasn't raining outside, I'd grab an umbrella out of reflex without even bothering to look out the window.

Let's face it. I don't need ad hominem attacks to prove that he's wrong about this, as important as they are to make and as much fun as they are on top of that. What Alan Greenspan can't answer, just like he can't answer any other questions put to him, is this. If all we cared about was access to Iraq's oil, or if that was even an important consideration for us, all we had to do was what the entire rest of the planet was asking us to do: formally end the Gulf War, end the sanctions. Sure, it would have meant screwing over the Kurds, but we've been screwing over the Kurds at least once a generation since 1917, and we've never had any grief come out of it. On the contrary, screwing over the Kurds would have made one of only real and important allies in that region, Turkey, ecstatically happy, since American-protected Kurdistan has been a reliable base for terrorist attacks against Turkey; why we're taking the Kurds' side against a NATO ally that's stood by us since the beginning of the Cold War, the only long-term stable democracy in the entire Islamic world, is a question that doesn't get asked nearly often enough. So why haven't we? He's got no answer. He's frankly too dumb to even think of the question.

For better commentary about the Greenspan book itself, see Tom Tomorrow, "This Modern World: The 'Evil Comedic Genius' of Alan Greenspan," 9/24/07.

"There seem to be an awful lot of realities running around." It's been a week since Blackwater Security mercenaries working for the US government opened fire in Nisoor Square. In that time, the story has changed repeatedly. Now they're saying that Blackwater opened fire when a small car refused to stop when Iraqi police waved it away from their diplomatic convoy, and 11 people died. This is, frankly, hogwash. We're going to find out what the truth is, too, in all likelihood, because it turns out that most of the incident was videotaped from a nearby Iraqi police station. No, it's the earliest account of the shooting where the Blackwater guys speaking anonymously and off the record came the closest to agreeing with what the other witnesses on the scene reported. The problem with that is, if they continued to stick with that story, they'd be in huge trouble.

You see, the earliest news stories quoted anonymous Blackwater sources as saying that they opened fire when their convoy was attacked by a car bomb. Had there been a car bomb, it wouldn't have been outside the rules of engagement to assume that anybody near their vehicles on foot was a potential gunman there to kill any survivors of the car bombing. But when investigators got to the scene, there was no bomb crater, no blown up car, therefore no car bomb. So instead we got this whole new story about them coming under attack by people on foot on the sidewalk. Except that that's something that basically never happens; who, even in an increasingly desperate insurgency, attacks a row of armored cars full of guys with guns while on foot? So the story changed again, and now the mythical compact car that failed to yield has been invented. Because here's what they're desperately trying to obfuscate: there was a car bomb. In the direction that they opened fire, no less. Over a mile away. Iraqi eyewitnesses unanimously say that they heard an explosion in the distance. Then the Blackwater mercenaries started screaming and waving people to move away from the convoy. But after less than a couple of seconds, they panicked at how many unarmed people were still close enough to scare them, so they sprayed down the entire crowd with machine gun fire, killing not 11 unarmed civilians but at least 28. (Including women and children. More ready-made recruiting video for al Qaeda, paid for by your tax dollars.)

Now I readily grant several reasons to doubt this story. For one, it's a war zone, and getting the truth out of a war zone is almost impossible. Rumors spread fast, get inflated with every retelling, and end up bearing no resemblance to what happened. What's more, Iraqi civilians in Baghdad are not exactly neutral witnesses; not a few of them have strongly held personal reasons to lie if need be to make American mercenaries look bad. Nonetheless, I believe the Iraqi eyewitnesses and not Blackwater or the US government, and I'll tell you why: people in New Orleans reported the same thing when they were occupied by Blackwater, too.

After Hurricane Katrina, the few rich people who'd stayed behind during the evacuation called in people from two heavily armed mercenary companies to ferry them around the flooded city; one of those two companies was Blackwater. And multiple groups of witnesses from New Orleans all said the same thing about Blackwater's convoys. If a Blackwater security guard heard a noise, any noise, that scared him then he and his whole convoy would empty their weapons in the direction of the noise, including at least one crowd of refugees camped on an overpass. The noises in question were, upon investigation, always innocuous: debris falling down, gas pressure relief valves popping, whatever. Nonetheless, Blackwater (as I'm sure they'd say) took their responsibility to protect their clients very seriously. What that means, whether they're on the streets of New Orleans or the streets of Baghdad, is not just shoot first, ask questions later. It's shoot first, acquire targets visually later -- if at all. The only reason fewer people died in New Orleans (if, in fact, fewer did die from being shot up by mercenaries, has this ever been adequately investigated?) is that in New Orleans, they were never shooting at such close range, and people being shot at by Blackwater had more things to hide behind.

The relatives of the deceased in Baghdad are demanding justice. Fat chance. If Blackwater didn't face justice for similar shootings on American soil, they're sure as heck not likely to be prosecuted for shooting helpless unarmed Iraqis, no matter what that videotape shows. As Jeremy Scahill, who wrote the book on Blackwater, has been pointing out as he made the rounds of the news shows last week, in all the five years of the occupation not one single mercenary in Iraq has yet been convicted of a crime. Is it, as he jokingly inquires, because they're all Boy Scouts? No, it's because it's official US doctrine that mercenaries working for the US government are neither subject to US law, nor to in-country law, nor to the UCMJ. Get used to the idea of this being the end of the UCMJ for most purposes, and all other rules of warfare. When Congress caves in next month and passes a budget with yet more money for Iraq, where is Bush going to keep finding the troops to pay with that money? Re-enlistment is down, and it's not as if the American public are swarming the recruiting stations to sign up. No, there is only one place they can find the troops to keep up the occupation: more mercenaries, from all over the world if necessary. That's already the under-reported truth of the "surge"; US-hired mercenaries already outnumber uniformed on-duty US soldiers in Iraq.

There may be all kinds of reasons why Blackwater has a reputation, confirmed by people in other mercenary companies working inside Iraq, for being the most "aggressive" (trigger-happy) force in the region. But I can't shake the suspicion that the easiest place to lay the blame is on Blackwater's hiring policy of preferring to hire retired US elite combat veterans. Spraying suppressive fire in the direction of any hostile-sounding noise, any time you're startled, any time you have reasonable grounds to believe there are no friendly units in that direction, is perfectly ordinary doctrine ... on a battlefield. Except that this isn't rural or mountainous Afghanistan. This is a crowded marketplace in one of the largest cities in the middle east. But unfortunately, that's not exactly a scenario that the US trains its combat troops to do their best work in. No, US combat doctrine for cities calls for surrounding the city or neighborhood, evacuating the civilians, and then shooting everything left that moves, as we did in the extremely successful battle of 2nd Fallujah. Not for the first time, I wish we could find some way to persuade the Canadians to take over the reconstruction security in Iraq, and persuade Washington to just pay the bills and let them do it. Not because I don't have any respect for our soldiers as a fighting force; as a fighting force, they're still the best in the world. But American combat troops make lousy peace-keepers, because unlike the Candians, who practically invented the science of military peace-keeping, we just have never taken it seriously. As this president said back when he was running for office, we don't do "nation-building."

Today is, of course, the 6th anniversary of the al Qaeda attack on New York City. The man who funded the attacks, operationally planned them even if he didn't come up with the original idea himself, and gave the final orders is making a big deal out of the 6th anniversary. It seems an odd number to make a big deal out of, but it may just be that this year he has the luxury to do so. Despite all the ignorant talk of bin Laden being supposedly in a cave on the Afghan/Pakistan border, that video was shot in a comfortable looking conference room in a modern looking office. If I had to bet, I'd bet that it was shot in Karachi. Pakistan lies about this, but reporters in place have reported over and over again that Pakistan has given al Qaeda and the Taliban safe conduct throughout most of the country. And the $2,000,000,000 a year that the US is giving Pakistan's military, some of which is going to the Pakistani security services, most of that portion of which is going to the Taliban, and probably at least half of that portion going directly to bin Laden, means that the US taxpayers are, in effect, paying his rent on that office, and probably the Internet access fees and the audio video equipment budget too. Last year he didn't have it quite so good and next year he might not have it so good, so this is probably a good year for him to (almost certainly) hire an American speech writer and make a big deal out of his victories over us so far. Specifically, from the beginning of the first of his two speeches for the 6th anniversary commemoration:

"[D]espite America being the greatest economic power and possessing the most powerful and up-to-date military arsenal as well; and despite it spending on this war and is [sic] army more than the entire world spends on its armies; and despite it being the major state influencing the policies of the world, as if it had a monopoly on the unjust right of veto; despite all of this, 19 young men were able - by the grace of Allah, the Most High - to change the direction of its compass. And in fact, the subject of the Mujahideen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader, and the effects and signs of that are not hidden. ¶ Since the 11th, many of America's policies have come under the influence of the Mujahideen, and that is by the grace of Allah, the Most High. And as a result, the people discovered the truth about it, its reputation worsened, its prestige was broken globally and it was bled dry economically, ...."

Yep. He's not wrong about this part, you know. What he can't quite say without admitting his own mistakes is that bin Laden didn't get everything he wanted out of 9/11, because he was wrong about one thing. He thought the lesson of Somalia was that if you humiliate the American military badly enough, America surrenders and gives you what you want; he's too proud to admit that he failed to anticipate that the effect of hitting us on US soil might be different than the effects of hitting us in Beirut or Mogadishu, places we really don't care about. But despite this strategic error on bin Laden's part, looking back over 6 years he feels pretty smug about the results. That one roughly quarter-million-dollar operation didn't achieve all of his goals overnight, no. But 6 years later, America is still terrorized enough to be doing really stupid things out of fear. If we'd been smarter, we would have limited ourselves to doing nothing more than finding and killing the people involved and anybody actively defending them, rebuilding the buildings, and then gone on with our lives as if nothing important had happened, with only minor tweaks to our aviation security procedures. What he thought we'd be afraid enough to do would be to retreat from the Middle East altogether, even abandoning our allies in the region like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Instead, we struck a middle ground ... but one that he not unreasonably thinks is in his favor.

Bin Laden then goes on to blame the same bogeyman that some of you blamed in the comments to yesterday's journal entry: corporations like Haliburton and Blackwater and the various weapons manufacturers. No, I'm sure that they're delighted that America's reaction to still being terrorized 6 years later has been to give them all blank checks without even token investigations into allegations of war profiteering and fraud. But that's not really what we're doing in Iraq. If that was all they wanted, they could have had that from what we really should have done, namely taken the war in Afghanistan more seriously. No, what the neocons have us in Iraq for is their second (and they hope final) attempt to End History. That's less ominous than it sounds. I'm referring to the neocon "Old Testament," Francis Fukuyama's 1989 early post-Cold-War essay "The End of History?" Everybody else massively oversimplifies Fukuyama, let me join the crowd. Fukuyama argued that all wars were over the question of who will rule the world, first between competing monarchies, then as the idea of hereditary absolute monarchy became discredited, competing governmental systems. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the embrace of capitalism by China, Fukyama was arguing that except for too few malcontents to matter, pretty much everybody, at all social levels, in all of the countries of the world, had reached a consensus position. There are differences between Chinese "communist" capitalism, British-style constitutional monarchy, American style democratic republicanism, and so forth. But unlike, say, the four-way fight between anarchism, fascism, monarchy, and communism that convulsed Europe over and over again in the 20th century, the differences are too minor to fight over.

If for no other reason, the differences are too minor to fight over because a citizen of any one of those countries can travel to any of the others and not feel as if they've gained or given up any major rights, to the point where idiotic local criminals in places like Britain or Japan demand their American-style (and locally non-existent) Miranda Rights and everybody understands what they mean and the cops more or less give them. Businesses transfer capital and manpower between the various countries with the supposedly different systems, with little or no fear that the local differences will make much difference. Everybody takes it for granted that governments will be democratically elected (except for the Chinese and the Vietnamese), that the appellate part of the judiciary will be merit-based, tenured, and independent, that the press will be free to report on official wrong-doing as long as they can prove it, that other than the power to tax governments will leave private property alone and will fairly compensate anybody whose property they need to confiscate for some rare but sufficiently important reason, that corporations will be supported but not supported too much, taxed and regulated but not taxed or regulated too much, and that there will be some branch of government that almost never directly rules that has the power to root out a corrupt or dangerous person who rises to the top, but that must then return control to the usual democratically elected structures in at most a couple of years via another election. Differences remain over what "merit based" means for the judiciary, what purposes for taking private property are sufficient, how much business support and taxation and regulation is the optimum amount, and just exactly where the line is for impeaching or otherwise removing a democratically elected official, but none of those are differences of kind, only of degree; none of them question the basic principles, only the implementation details.

But 9/11 jolted the neocons, and the rest of us, out of our complacency by reminding us that there is one important, populous, and resource-rich part of the world that has not joined that consensus: the many countries of the former Ottoman Empire, of the long-gone Islamic Caliphate. Even before their humiliating loss in World War I, leading thinkers and top military men of the Ottoman Empire had figured out what the rest of Europe figured out over the preceding couple of generations, what the Russians and the Spanish didn't figure out for themselves for another couple of decades: hereditary absolute monarchy absolutely sucks as a form of government, because it offers you absolutely no protection against the possibility of someone corrupt and/or stupid inheriting the throne and wrecking the whole country or even the whole empire. Hence the "Young Turks." They picked a horrible example to replace it with, real Islamic fascism (as opposed to what Bush mistakenly calles Islamofascism, which is not the same thing at all), so their replacement government lasted less than 20 years and resulted in the 3 nominal leaders of the Young Turks being convicted by the Turkish government of crimes against humanity and executed. But with the dissolution of the last of the Islamic Caliphates, followed by European occupation and the breakup of the region into what were mostly originally European colonies, each of those individual countries started down their own path towards asking one question: what, exactly, is Islamic government?

Their great prophet, Mohamed, was perhaps completely unique in world history: a founder of a world-wide religion who was also a successful military commander. By the end of his life, he ruled over the religious life of every Muslim convert and as the emperor over every Muslim local king, or emir, throughout his empire. But he left behind no clear instructions as to how his empire was to be governed after he died. Unsurprisingly, the result was a civil war between the bureaucracy and the various emirs, who wanted a say over the caliphate, and the supporters of the prophet's young son, who assumed that the prophet intended to leave behind what every emperor has always wanted, a hereditary monarchy with his family as the rulers of the whole empire. The family lost, badly, but what came out of that civil war was a system where everybody agreed there would be one Caliph, a king over kings, ruling over the local and regional emirates mostly through those emirs, obligated to respect and honor the supposedly meritocratic clergy who took over the religious duties of the empire, but not necessarily to obey them. As various royal families fell into the hands of the corrupt, the decadent, or the moronic, different families staged various restoration movements establishing new Caliphates, but hardly anybody questioned the idea that somewhere there had to be some Caliph. Not, at least, until the Europeans broke the Caliphate into its component emirates (more or less) and the local government around the last capital city announced the final dissolution of the Caliphate in 1924.

Since 1924, the citizens of the former Caliphate have tried just about every form of government known to man. Saudi Arabia established a sort of weird constitutional monarchy without democracy, by elevating the clergy to co-equal with the King. Iran flirted with socialism, got a military dictatorship imposed on them, and finally came up with their own pseudo-democratic theocracy, where the clergy control the appellate courts and have an absolute veto over the democratically elected parts of the government. Iraq's military, when they took over, invented what they called Baath Socialism, a form of Arab-nationalist state socialism that paid lip service to Islam, and it spread to a couple of other countries. Egypt's military got so tired of intervening in politics that they gave up and instituted permanent military dictatorship. Turkey flirted briefly with ethno-nationalist militaristic fascism, then came up with their own system under the leadership of Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, Kamalist democratic republicanism, which has been successfully copied by several other countries such as Pakistan. These systems are not nearly as compatible with each other as the various forms of government in the rest of the world are; war is not permanently over in that part of the world.

America's neocons also do not recognize any of these forms of government as compatible enough with the rest of our governments to live peacefully among them. (Personally, I think they're wrong about Kamalism, although current Turkish and Pakistani politics go a long way towards legitimizing their opinion.) They're also mortally terrified that bin Laden's personal cult throughout the world may result in an eventual consensus in which something rather like Iranian theocracy, albeit probably with Sunni rather than Shiite clerics being the ones holding the reigns, will be the one that wins and unifies the Islamic world. They predict, probably not unreasonably, that if such a government were to conquer and unify the entirety of the Islamic world, war between that empire and the rest of us would probably be inevitable. Hence: the Iraq War. Their belief was that since all that was stopping us from conquering Iraq legally was an already-breached cease fire agreement, and that since they were being assured by a pro-US would-be leader that he was so popular in Iraq that if we just put him in the palace the Iraqi people would all flock to his banner, that here was the perfect opportunity to introduce the entire Islamic world to yet another possible model for Islamic governance: American-style republican democratic capitalism, only with Islam rather than Christianity as the culturally unifying force. They believed that such a system could be up and running in no time and at basically no cost. They believed that at that point investment from the rest of the free world would flow into Iraq and make it a wealthy, peaceful, and prosperous nation just like the rest of the free world, an Arab Tiger to go with the Asian Tigers and the Celtic Tiger. Once it did so, they believed that everybody in the region would see for their own eyes that not only is there nothing inherently anti-Islamic about such a government, but that the advantages to living under one are so vast that they'd all adopt the same reforms out of jealousy.

That it has all turned out to be much harder than they thought, so hard that it remains in question whether or not we even can succeed, does not change one thing in Bush's and the rest of the neocons' thinking. They continue to believe that if global war is to be prevented, the Islamic world has to adopt a system of government that is somehow minimally compatible with the governments of the rest of the free world. Therefore we have to win in Iraq. We have to somehow find some faction in the Iraq Civil War that is committed to American-style democracy, or that can be twisted at gunpoint into embracing American-style democracy, put them in charge, and keep them in charge until they succeed at making Iraq free, happy, and wealthy, no matter what it takes.

Unfortunately, that "no matter what it takes" is exactly why it can't work, why bin Laden is so confident that he's winning and we're losing. If the whole point of the exercise was to show the Islamic world how much better off they'd be with an Islamic version of American-style democratic republican capitalism, then the whole exercise has failed dramatically for at least another generation no matter who wins the Iraq Civil War. Why? Again, let's go back to bin Laden:

"And among the things which catch the eye of the one who considers the repercussions of the of your unjust war against Iraq is the failure of your democratic system, despite it raising the slogans of justice, liberty, equality, and humanitarianism. It has not only failed to achieve these things, it has actually destroyed these and other concepts with its weapons - especially in Iraq and Afghanistan - in a brazen fashion, to replace them with fear, destruction, killing, hunger, illness, displacement and more than a million orphans in Baghdad alone, not to mention hundreds of thousands of widows. Americans [sic] statistics speak of the killing of more than 650,000 of the people of Iraq as a result of the war and its repercussions. ¶ People of America: the world is following your news in regard to the invasion of Iraq, for people have recently come to know that, after several years of the tragedy of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose, but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning. On the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions of dollars to continue the killing and war there, which has led to the vast majority of you being afflicted with disappointment."

The neocons believe and hope that their war in Iraq will, upon its successful conclusion somehow, cause the people of the Muslim world to associate our system of government with peace, prosperity, and freedom. Instead, the fact that the neocons tried to do it on the cheap, without first getting the enthusiastic backing of the whole American people, and turning vast amounts of it over to private contractors that turned out to be more corrupt than the various Islamic emirs themselves, has caused them to associate the American system of government with endless war, with the PATRIOT Acts' and the Military Commissions Act's suspension of key American freedoms, with Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grahib, with the poverty and misery of New Orleans and of the formerly wealthy city of Baghdad, with Haliburton, with the Orwellian and incompetent thrashing around of the Department of Homeland Security and its Transportation Security Agency, and above all else with the person of George W. Bush. At this point, Osama bin Laden feels absolutely no fear that the Islamic world would want to emulate that. And by scaring us, he got us to do all of that. So he's not entirely wrong to feel awfully smug right now.

Or are we going to continue "supporting the troops" for another couple of thousand of their deaths? That's the question you need to be asking when the so-called "Petraeus Report" comes out this week. Because the American people, as often happens, already have this one right. PollingReport.com just published the following results from a poll funded by ABC News and the Washington Post between September 4th and 7th:

As you may know, the U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, is preparing a progress report on the situation there. Do you think his report will honestly reflect the situation in Iraq, or do you think it will try to make things look better than they really are?
Honestly Reflect the Situation	Make Things Look Better	Unsure
39%	53%	7%

Do you think Bush will use the Petraeus report to adjust U.S. policy in Iraq, or do you think Bush will stick with his Iraq policy no matter what the Petraeus report says?
Adjust His Policy	Stick With His Policy	Unsure
28%	66%	7%

Back in May, Senate majority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) announced "a giant step to begin the end of this war," namely a stern promise that when General Petraeus made his report this month, then there would be a real debate over whether or not to continue spending American lives to prop up the least popular side in the Iraqi Civil War. Never mind that similar "surges" had been tried three times already by that point, they were taking the Republicans at their word that if this last "surge" didn't win the war, even the Republicans would be forced to admit that no plausible US military strategy in Iraq was going to end the Iraqi Civil War for the Iraqis, not while the Iraqis were determined to keep fighting and we only have at most 150,000 combat troops plus some vague unspecified number of mercenaries and a few hundred non-US troops in the fight and the Iraqis have pretty nearly the whole adult male population in the fight. And at the time, what I asked you was, given how obvious the answer to that question is, how many American soldiers' lives was it worth to prove that point to the Republicans? So far, over 95% of you have agreed with me that the answer is "none."

This week, General Petraeus will, we now know, turn his copy of his report over to the White House. They will edit it to say what they want, and give it back to him to read to Congress. It will contain nothing that we didn't know back in May when 86 Democrats in the House and 37 Senate Democrats voted to keep shoveling American soldiers still alive into the flaming belly of Moloch in hopes that, in the absence of any new or meaningful military or diplomatic or political strategy for the US winning the Iraqi Civil War on behalf of our chosen side, perhaps the piety of our human sacrifice will convince some God to give it to us. More cynically, some of them think that the absence of meaningful results and the ongoing slaughter won't be held against the Democrats who voted for it in November of next year, that the voters will somehow overlook that and only hold it against the President's party. And, of course, the vast majority of them are cowards who are afraid that if they end the war and then anything ever goes bad for America ever again, Democrats will be blamed for "losing" Iraq the way that Republicans are constantly blamed for "losing" Somalia by cutting off funding, and therefore causing 9/11. Oh, wait, they're not. *sigh*

Well, okay, they got their way. Had they not voted the way they did, had they simply refused to pass another supplemental Iraq War funding bill, the Pentagon would have been forced to withdraw the troops before the money to do so ran out. According to the Pentagon's estimates during the debate over that bill, that would have been approximately June 30th. From July 1st through yesterday, September 9th, 183 American soldiers have died to prove what we already knew back on May 22nd. Have we murdered enough of our own, wasted enough of their lives, wrecked enough American families, to achieve whichever of those three insane and/or callous goals I mentioned above? Can we stop now?

No, of course not. How foolish of me to ask.

The American people are not going to decide that it's worth swarming the recruiting stations and cutting domestic spending to raise the million man army it would take to actually win this war. But they're also not ready to admit that the thousands who have died died for nothing in a war that we've already lost. The Iraqis aren't going to solve the problem for us by reconciling, not while a generation of Kurds and Shiites are determined to punish the Sunni Arab minority via ethnic cleansing and confiscation of everything they own, leaving the Sunnis with no meaningful alternatives but to either lie down and let their families die or to fight on, and we're not going to let the Shiites and the Kurds actually finish the war by actually killing them all off.

Last week, Keith Olbermann had a very public (and, even I'll say it, inappropriate) emotional meltdown over one line from the Robert Draper book, the one where Bush told Draper that he was playing for time, that his short-term goal is to drag out the debate over Iraq War funding to at least October. Olbermann's meltdown was over the callousness of using the word "playing," but that's not what he meant and Olbermann ought to know it. "Playing for time" is just a standard phrase for "stalling," and that's what Bush is doing. Bush really does believe that it's a matter of American life or death that our side in the Iraq Civil War win; he also knows that the American people won't entrust him with enough money or troops to win it. But if by ordering General Petraeus to go up there and lie for him he can drag this out through the end of October, then Congress will have to pass a budget for the Defense Department for the next fiscal year first. Either that budget will include money for continuing American involvement in the Iraq Civil War, or it won't. If it does, then the war goes on until somebody, Republican or Democrat, wins the election in November 2008. Bush then hopes that whoever it is, Republican or Democrat (he obviously hopes Republican), will have the popular support to raise the necessary forces to surge not a few thousand, but many hundreds of thousand, more Americans in and actually win the thing.

Bush is wrong to think that it's a matter of American life or death that our side in the Iraq Civil War wins. That's why he's also wrong to think that the next President will have no choice but to win it. But it looks like he's not wrong that he can keep fooling the Democrats in Congress into helping him drag the war out until then. And that makes me unbearably angry. Because those 183 soldiers who died weren't just soldiers. They were people. Their lives were worth something. And so are the lives of everybody else who will die when the Democrats chicken out again, sell out again, play callous political calculation again, and vote to continue the Iraq War for another pointless year.

Every poll I've seen since the Democrats caved on the last Iraq War supplemental funding bill has agreed on two things. The first is that Bush's popularity ratings have dropped steadily, to levels not perceptibly above the level at which Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment. The second is that the Democratic Congress is polling a consistent 3% to 4% below Bush. And if you need any more reminders of why, let me say this: I hope that nobody who reads this journal is stupid enough to fall for Harry Reid's Tuesday night pointless and annoying publicity stunt.

Senator Reid says that what he's trying to do is make the Republicans explain why they won't allow an on-the-record vote over whether or not to force troop withdrawals from Iraq next April. This is so condescendingly stupid that it enrages me to even type that sentence, to dignify what he said with additional print space. There is so much obviously wrong with this that I don't even know where to begin. First of all, you don't gain the extra 9 votes he'd need to force a cloture motion by playing parliamentary maneuvers intended not to persuade them, but to insult them. Secondly, even if this insulting stunt were to somehow shame up another 9 votes, it would be on an entirely pointless measure. Bush would simply veto it, and then he'd need not 9 more votes, but another 25 votes. Never going to happen. And if somehow that did happen? Bush would simply take it to the Supreme Court that the Democrats let him pack, which would rule (probably 5 to 4) that Congress's power of the purse doesn't give them specific authority over troop movements. So even if it could possibly work, it couldn't possibly work.

Senator Reid and the other Democratic leadership in Congress claim that they're forced to do this by the fact that the public wants them to end the war, but the Republicans won't let them. That's an even bigger lie, one that I've explained so many times that I hope none of you are falling for it. The fact of the matter is, as we saw in the argument over the last supplemental appropriation, the White House doesn't have one thin dime to spend that wasn't given to them by a majority vote in both houses of Congress. Period. It only takes 40 pro-war senators to stop a law from ending the war, but it takes 51 pro-war senators to spend money on it. If 51 or more senators simply announce that no matter how many motions or bills the Republicans propose they will not vote for any budget for next year that contains money for the Iraq War, then no such budget passes. Worried about Democratic (or faux Democratic) defectors? The same budget has to originate in the House, where the supposedly anti-war Democrats have an even bigger majority.

What happens if Bush keeps vetoing budgets because those budgets don't contain Iraq War funding? We went through this very question not much more than a decade ago, when Clinton said that he would veto any budget that didn't contain certain language he wanted, including "Pay-Go," the budget-balancing amendment that said that nobody in Congress could propose any new spending or any new tax cuts without explaining what other spending would be cut or other taxes would be raised to pay for it. Newt Gingrich called his bluff, and kept sending up Republican budgets for Clinton to veto. When the money ran out, Clinton started shutting down the federal government, starting with the least important employees and agencies, to stretch out the money he had left. This left it up to the public who to blame: Newt Gingrich, or Bill Clinton? But Bill Clinton knew going into it that the voters were on his side, that the voters wanted the same budget language that he was demanding. The Republicans ended up backing down.

Now, you may think that the lesson of this is, "in a budget showdown, the President wins." Bull. The lesson of this is that in a budget showdown, the side that's standing up for what the American public wants wins. And there is no political proposition in the United States less popular with the voters than Bush's claim that we should keep spending money and lives on Iraq until some improbably magical day when the Sunnis and the Shiites and the Kurds lay down their weapons and learn to live peacefully together as one happy country. No, trust me, if George Bush were to start shutting down popular government services rather than give in on the Iraq War, the voters wouldn't be calling Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to demand that they give him more Iraq War money.

I don't know which to believe: that the Democrats in Congress are too stupid to do this math, or that they don't actually want to end the war. I'd personally rather believe in stunning levels of incompetence than believe that they're hoping to pave Senator Clinton's path to the White House with the blood and shattered bodies of another thousand or more American soldiers. Even if I didn't have deeply felt moral scruples about human sacrifice, I'd be far from certain which party's neck those bloody corpses are going to be hung around if the Democrats keep voting to fund it.

About a year ago when V for Vendetta came out, I made the point (in my essay "V for Very Smart 'Mindless Terrorism'") that the brilliance of V's plan to topple the Sutlerite government of Britain is that he announced his target a year in advance. Why? Because the only thing keeping Sutler in power was that the British people were taking his word for it that he was the reason the country hadn't had a major terrorist attack. V demonstrated that Sutler had nothing to do with why Britain hadn't been attacked, by showing the British people that even knowing which building he was going to attack and even giving them a year's advance notice, they couldn't stop him, so why should you believe that they're competent to protect you from any actual secretive terrorists who might attack another random target?

That was, of course, the very first thing I remembered when al Qaeda in Iraq hit the Golden Mosque for a second time, just a few days ago, collapsing both minarets. (See Wikipedia, "Al-Askari Mosque bombing (2007);" see also "Al-Askari Mosque bombing (2006).")

The United States has roughly 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, not counting allies and "private security contractors" (mercenaries). If I remember correctly, all but about 30,000 of them are in Baghdad lately, the same city as the Golden Mosque. They have known since al Qaeda blew the roof off of the Golden Mosque back in February of 2006 that they would hit it again. (If they didn't know that al Qaeda keeps hitting the same highly symbolic target until it falls down, they need some New Yorker to remind them of this. Urgently.) I'm told that Americans are not allowed to patrol the mosque itself for religious reasons, but they do have unlimited free reign of the surrounding city. The mosque has also been closed to the public since the first attack, so anybody other than a few well-known Shiite religious officials moving into the mosque grounds can reasonably be assumed to be an attack suspect. But with 100,000 combat troops in and around Baghdad dedicated to stopping al Qaeda from further terrorist attacks on Shiite targets, knowing that it was just a matter of time before al Qaeda attacked this building again, the US still couldn't stop al Qaeda from sneaking up to two sturdy and highly prominent 10 story buildings and simultaneously detonating enough explosives to bring each of them down.

Is there any airport, border crossing, nuclear power plant, harbor, or national monument in the US that is guarded by 100,000 troops? Is any one such building, even the White House itself, guarded by that many troops? With the possible exception of the Pentagon and the Capitol building, is there any one building in the US that the US knows al Qaeda has attacked before and therefore should be assumed to be determined to strike again? Are any of the troops guarding those buildings as well equipped, physically fit, intensively trained, and competent at counter-terrorism as the 82nd Airborne or the 101st Airborne? I submit to you that the answer is "no." Which means that while we can debate and hypothesize as to why al Qaeda has not attacked us again, one thing is clear and unambiguous: despite all of the "security theater" in the world, including Cointelpro-style entrapment of over a dozen stupid and mildly crazy people or groups in physically impossible so-called "terror plots" that supposedly just coincidentally reached the arrest stage every time since 9/11 the Bush administration was facing a major scandal, it is not because the Bush administration has been keeping us safe.

On my most bitter days, I think we haven't really been attacked again because they don't need to attack us; we're demonstrably still terrorized. But then, the British were famously less impressed with the London subway bombings than we were with 9/11 (and good for them), and al Qaeda hasn't attacked them again, so that can't be it. My gut instinct, for the longest time, was that an attack the size of 9/11 required state sponsorship, that we prevented another 9/11 the day that we captured Kandahar. But now that Pakistan is all but openly conceding them 3 whole territories, and and now that the Pakistani military is providing them cover fire whenever the US catches them crossing the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, there goes that idea; they've got at least as much state sponsorship now from General Musharraf in Pakistan as they had from Mullah Omar's Taliban in Afghanistan. I could suggest that it's because 9/11 proved that attacking us doesn't get you what you want, but as Greg Palast pointed out a while ago, 9/11 did get them one of the things they wanted the most, namely US combat troops out of Saudi Arabia.

That leaves my last guess to be that it's for lack of money on their part. People think of 9/11 as "19 guys with box-cutters." But counting recruiting costs, travel costs, overhead costs back in Kandahar, bribes to money launderers, a year's worth of living expenses in the US for 19 guys, and the actual pilot training for the four pilots, the estimate we got after examining al Qaeda's office computers in Kandahar is that 9/11 cost somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000. For a government, that's a modest sum. But for a terror group, that's a lot of money. And one of the only things that the Bush administration did right in the aftermath of 9/11 was go after the money laundering networks, hard. All of this gives us, perhaps, the real motive for the Golden Mosque bombings. Right now, under substantial US pressure, Saudi Arabia is no longer providing government funding to al Qaeda, and is making at least a half-hearted attempt to stop wealthy Saudis from doing so privately. But Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has already said that there is one circumstance under which that would change, under which the Saudi government would openly and unlimitedly fund even al Qaeda, and that is if the Shiites in Iraq engaged in genocide against Iraqi Sunni Arabs.

Unsurprisingly, that's probably why Iraq's native Sunni population is suddenly eager to help us fight their former resistance allies, al Qaeda in Iraq: because they've figured out that what al Qaeda in Iraq specifically wants to do right now, being mostly from elsewhere and having little to lose, is incite genocide against their native Iraqi co-religionists -- because they need the money. Which, of course, makes the fact that we couldn't prevent them from blowing up yet more of the Golden Mosque even more disappointing, and even more worrisome.

Republicans bullied/bamboozled Congress into believing that if Congress declined to fund any more war in Iraq, if the Pentagon legally had to use the money that they have to evacuate those troops, that this wouldn't be "supporting our troops." Personally, I think that the most important thing that we could do to "support our troops" is to get them out of that hell-hole where they're dying for nothing before another thousand or so of them die. Granted, I am well aware of the fact that not all of our troops agree, even if at least one milblogger estimated that in his unit, the percentage that agree with me is around 95%. It's a moot point, now; thanks to the Democrats' surrender last week, we're not going to support out troops in that way until sometime around next Memorial Day, at the earliest.

Since the Republicans keep insisting that supporting our troops while they're in the field of combat is and should be one of this nation's top priorities, surely they don't want to wait until next Memorial Day to show their support, nor even until September when the next war funding bill will or won't pass. (Probably will, unless the Democrats in Congress miraculously grow a spine in the next 3 months.) And it turns out that there are two things that Republicans could do, one of them that only the Republicans can do, if they really mean what they say about how important it is to support our troops.

(1) ENLIST. In case you failed to notice, our troops are getting sent back to Iraq over and over again, some of them after less than three weeks at home between tours, because the military just plain doesn't have anybody left to send over there. So the next time you see someone who claims to be heterosexual, who appears to be between the ages of 18 and 41 inclusive, and who says that it's important that we support our troops, ask them what in the heck are they doing here instead of Iraq if that's what they think?



Granted, that one anybody with a Chinese-import yellow magnetic ribbon sticker on the back of their car can do. So here's one that's at least as important, and that (unfortunately) only the Republicans can do:

(2) PROSECUTE THOSE WHO STOLE OUR TROOPS' VOTES. BBC investigative journalist Greg Palast says that he has extensive documentation, accidentally sent by Karl Rove and Tim Griffith and Monica Goodling to email addresses at georgewbush.org instead of georgewbush.com, that among the many ways that the Republicans stole the 2004 election was one that very explicitly doesn't support our troops. That is to say, they made the not unreasonable assumption that black servicemen might be more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. So they compiled a list of black navy and army servicemen known to be on active duty in Iraq, arranged to send a registered letter marked "do not forward" to their registered home addresses, and when those letters were returned, used those return letters as evidence that there was no legal voter at that address. What's particularly charmless about this is that in the relevant states, absentee ballots from unregistered voters are discarded without notice, that is to say, those servicemen think that they voted, but their votes were simply not counted, even though they were all legal voters.

I don't know what would be so surprising about this if it turns out to be true. One of the things that was worrying me literally sick, going into the 2004 election, was that if George Bush and his crew really believed what they claimed to believe, if they were telling the truth when they said that they believed that America's very survival depended upon George W. Bush staying in office, then by their own moral standards it would be completely unconscionable of them to allow the election to go forward if they had any doubt. When the election appeared to go off without any more of a hitch than any normal election, I took this as something of a relief, as proof that they were exaggerating the extent to which they believed it a matter of national life and death that they win. If Greg Palast's evidence holds up in a court of law, then it will turn out that I was right to worry, and wrong to stop worrying; they allowed that election to go forward, while the rest of us thought there was still some doubt about the outcome, because they had already arranged everything necessary to steal it ... specifically by not supporting our troops' all important right to vote, along with the voting rights of other law abiding Americans.

I know that there's an argument going on over at DailyKos.com about whether or not Palast is telling the truth, but Palast says that he has thousands of pages of documentation of this crime, and will turn it over to any prosecutor who asks. There's only one small problem with that, though. In all of the relevant jurisdictions, the prosecutors are Republicans. So for anything to be done about this, we are dependent on the same Republicans who have demonstrably politicized the criminal justice system to this one time make an exception and investigate their own party's guys, if that's what it takes to support the troops.

(I'm not holding my breath waiting for large numbers of Republican talking heads and bloggers and campaigners to enlist, and I'm not even vaguely optimistic about the prospect for honest criminal investigations of illegal voter "caging" by, among others, the new US Attorney for Little Rock. So much for "support our troops." Hope you had a better Memorial Day than our troops did.)

The follow "Democrats" in the House voted to give George Bush 4 more months of unlimited authority in Iraq, voted to allow him to shovel at least another 400 or so of our soldiers still alive into the flaming belly of Moloch and to borrow at least another one hundred billion dollars more from our children and grandchildren, for whatever shallow political reasons:

Only care about how the 2008 presidential candidates voted? Republicans: Hagel, McCain and Tancredo voted for at least four more months of the Iraq War; Paul voted against the war; Brownback abstained. Democrats: Clinton, Dodd, Kucinich, and Obama voted against funding four more months of the Iraq War; Biden voted for the war yet again.

Alabama: Bud Cramer (Huntsville). Arkansas: Marion Berry (Gillett), Mike Ross (Prescott), Vic Snyder (Little Rock). Arizona: Gabrielle Giffords (Tucson), Harry Mitchell (Tempe). California: Joe Baca (Rialto), Dennis Cardoza (Atwater), Jim Costa (Fresno), Susan Davis (San Diego). Colorado: John Salazar (Manassa), Mark Udall (El Dorado Springs). Florida: Allen Boyd (Monticello), Tim Mahoney (Venus), Kendrick Meek (Miami), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Weston). Georgia: John Barrow (Savannah), Sanford Bishop (Albany), Jim Marshall (Macon), David Scott (Atlanta). Illinois: Melissa Bean (Barrington), Rahm Emanuel (Chicago), Daniel Lipinski (Western Springs). Indiana: Joe Donnelly (Granger), Brad Ellsworth (Evansville), Baron Hill (Seymour), Peter Visclosky (Merillville). Iowa: Leonard Boswell (Des Moines). Kansas: Nancy Boyda (Topeka), Dennis Moore (Lenexa). Kentucky: Ben Chandler (Versailles). Louisiana: Charlie Melancon (Napoleonville). Maryland: Steny Hoyer (Mechanicsville), Dutch Ruppersberger (Cockeysville). Michigan: John Dingell (Dearborn), Dale Kildee (Flint), Sander Levin (Royal Oak). Minnesota: Collin Peterson (Detroit Lakes), Bart Stupak (Menominee), Timothy Walz (Mankato). Mississippi: Gene Taylor (Bay St Louis), Bennie Thompson (Bolton). Missouri: Ike Skelton (Lexington). Nevada: Shelley Berkley (Las Vegas). New Jersey: Robert Andrews (Haddon Heights). New York: Kirsten Gillibrand (Greenport). North Carolina: G.K. Butterfield (Wilson), Bob Etheridge (Lillington), Mike McIntyre (Lumberton), Heath Shuler (Waynesville). North Dakota: Earl Pomeroy (Valley City). Ohio: Zachary Space (Dover), Charles Wilson (St Clairesville). Oklahoma: Dan Boren (Paden). Pennsylvania: Jason Altmire (McCandless), Christopher Carney (Dimock), Tim Holden (St Clair), Paul Kanjorski (Nanticoke), John Murtha (Johnstown), Allyson Schwartz (Jenkintown), Joe Sestak (Wallingford). South Carolina: James Clyburn (Columbia), Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (Brookings), John Spratt Jr (York). Tennessee: Jim Cooper (Nashville), Lincoln Davis (Pall Mall), Bart Gordon (Murfreesboro), John Tanner (Union City). Texas: Henry Cuellar (Laredo), Chet Edwards (Waco), Charles Gonzalez (San Antonio), Gene Green (Houston), Ruben Hinojosa (Mercedes), Nick Lampson (Stafford), Solomon Ortiz (Corpus Christi), Silvestre Reyes (El Paso), Ciro Rodriguez (San Antonio). Utah: Jim Matheson (Salt Lake City). Virginia: Rich Boucher (Abingdon). Washington: Brian Baird (Vancouver), Norman Dicks (Belfair), Rick Larsen (Everett). West Virginia: Alan Mollohan (Fairmont), Nick Rahall (Beckley). Wisconsin: Steve Kagen (Appleton), Ron Kind (La Crosse).

And of course so did every Republican except John Duncan (Knoxville TN) and Ron Paul (Surfside TX). There were 11 abstentions, 6 of them by Democrats. The final vote count was 280 to 142 in favor of four more months of US involvement in the Iraqi civil war.

The following Democrats voted the same way in the Senate, where the damned thing passed by a nearly unanimous 80 to 14: Daniel Akaka (Hawaii), Max Baucus (Montana), Evan Bayh (Indiana), Joe Biden (Delaware), Jeff Bingaman (New Mexico), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Robert Byrd (West Virginia), Maria Cantwell (Washington), Benjamin Cardin (Maryland), Thomas Carper (Delaware), Bob Casey (Pennsylvania), Kent Conrad (North Dakota), Byron Dorgan (North Dakota), Richard Durbin (Illinois), Diane Feinstein (California), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Daniel Inouye (Hawaii), Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), Herb Kohl (Wisconsin), Mary Landrieu (Louisiana), Frank Lautenberg (New Jersey), Carl Levin (Michigan), Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas), Claire McCaskill (Missouri), Robert Menendez (New Jersey), Barbara Mikulski (Maryland), Patty Murray (Washington), Bill Nelson (Florida), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Mark Pryor (Arkansas), Jack Reed (Rhode Island), Harry Reid (Nevada), John Rockefeller IV (West Virginia), Ken Salazar (Colorado), Debbie Stabenow (Michigan), Jon Tester (Montana), Jim Webb (Virginia). That's right, 37 out of the 60 of Senate Democrats. More than half. I expected a few Democrats to vote for it, but this many? I haven't been this disgusted in ages.

As of course did all but 3 Republicans, not counting abstentions: Richard Burr (North Carolina), Tom Coburn (Oklahoma), and Michael Enzi (Wyoming). And, equally unsurprisingly, Joe Liebermann also voted to support George Bush, no big shock there. There were 6 abstentions, including (interestingly enough) Republican presidential candidate Sam Brownback (Kansas).

So what do we do now?

Look for your home state in the list above, starting with the US House of Representatives. If you live in one of those districts, see if there's a Democratic state representative, state senator, or minor elected statewide official who lives in your district who can be counted on to show some backbone and stand up to the Republicans. If so, encourage that person to run against the incumbent in the next Democratic primary in your district; remind them that MoveOn.org's political action committee has pledged to raise money for primary opponents of anybody who voted for this bill, and that's free money. And quite a few of those who voted for it are freshman or near-freshman representatives, perfectly vulnerable. Of course, I wouldn't expect you to have a lot of success trying to defeat any permanent incumbents like John Dingell or John Murtha or Steny Hoyer in their next primaries, but it is absolutely worth trying. And remember, if you want to have a say in who gets nominated in such races, and want to meet the big donors and the institutional donors and get listened to when you tell them who you think is a viable candidate, the way to do that is to spend one night a month at your local precinct or township Democratic Party club, and to put in an evening a week or so volunteering for the party in the fall of '08.

As for doing something about the senators on that list, good luck. It's nigh impossible to displace a sitting senator in America. That being said, I will say that I'm very disappointed that Claire McCaskill, who I endorsed and who I voted for, is on that list of shame, and I absolutely will be backing almost any primary opponent who runs against her next time. Maybe we can show her what happens in Missouri when a freshman senator won't listen to her own constituents, not even the ones in her own party, not even the ones who campaigned for her. (It's even more disgusting considering that promising to end the war in Iraq was one of her top campaign issues. How does she live with herself after this?) It's absolutely worth trying. If nothing else, next time Jeff Smith won't have a blank resumé. Oh, and from now on when you hear Joe Biden or Diane Feinstein claim to oppose the Iraq war? Keep asking them why they continue funding it, then.

And remember this and never forget: if today's vote had gone differently, the Pentagon by its own admission would have had enough money to operate even at current levels through the end of June. So a refusal to pass a supplemental Iraq War funding bill would have resulted in an American troop withdrawal by that date. So every American soldier who dies over there after that date, while defending the right of Hezbollah and Kurdish terrorists to oppress the Sunni Arab minority in Iraq and to attack Turkey and Israel, who dies defending the right of Ayatollah Sistani to tell the Iraqi government how to vote, that soldier's blood is on the hands of these 123 Democrats who could have saved that soldier but chose not to. And, of course, pretty much the whole Republican Party, but that goes without saying. I mean cripes, a little more blood on the Republicans' hands, who'll notice? With 3400 dead Americans' blood on their hands and the blood of hundreds of thousand Iraqis civilians including women and children, what's a few hundred more dead to them? If they got more blood on their hands, how could you tell?

We know a little more about the terms of the Democrats' surrender. The only meaningful concession they got out of the White House in what Nancy Pelosi dishonestly calls "a giant step to begin the end of this war" is that they're only funding 4 more months of the war, not a whole year at a time. General Petraeus has talked too many Democrats into giving him four more months, saying that in four more months we'll be better able to tell if "the surge" is working or not.

I heard a joke once about a grade school kid who sold another kid a "smart pill" for a quarter. The next day the kid came back and said, "I don't feel any smarter," and the seller said, "Then obviously you need another pill," and sold him another one for a quarter. The same thing happened the next day. The day after that, the kid came back and said, "Not only do I not feel any smarter, but I think these stupid 'smart pills' of yours look just like rabbit turds." And the seller said, "See? You are getting smarter!"

Do I actually have to remind anybody that the Bush administration has been promising us that we would see clear results of their strategy in just another 3 to 4 months, every 3 to 4 months, for the last four years? And the last 16 times or so that they told us this, the results that we saw three to four months later were that the war was an even bigger disaster than it was when they made that announcement. How many rabbit turds do they get to sell the Congress before Congress smartens up and realizes that they're not buying smart pills?

Four months from now, at current rates, we will have had another 400 American soldiers killed and another 3,000 seriously injured. Four months from now, we will have spent another $100,000,000,000, plus or minus. Using the conservative per-month estimate from IraqBodyCount.org, four months from now the war will have killed another roughly 3,000 Iraqi civilians. For what? Four months from now, the Democrats promise us, we will negotiate this all over again. This presumably means that four months from now, we will have more information than we have now. Do you actually believe that? Any of you? What, if anything, will we know in September that we don't know now?

Poll #989923 Till September?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

400 more dead American soldiers, 3000 more crippled American soldiers, 3000 more dead Iraqi civilians, and $100 billion more spent on the war. Worth it?